The Eyes of Darkness (7 page)

By the time they got backstage, the opening-night party was in full swing. The sets and props had been moved from the main floor of the stage, and eight folding tables had been set up. The tables were draped with white cloths and burdened with food: five hot hors d’oeuvres, lobster salad, crab salad, pasta salad, filet mignon, chicken breasts in tarragon sauce, roasted potatoes, cakes, pies, tarts, fresh fruits, berries, and cheeses. Hotel management personnel, showgirls, dancers, magicians, crewmen, and musicians crowded around the tables, sampling the offerings while Phillippe Chevalier, the hotel’s executive chef, personally watched over the affair. Knowing this feast had been laid on for the party, few of those present had eaten dinner, and most of the dancers had eaten nothing since a light lunch. They exclaimed over the food and clustered around the portable bar. With the memory of the applause still fresh in everyone’s mind, the party was soon jumping.

Tina mingled, moving back and forth, upstage and downstage, through the crowd, thanking everyone for his contribution to the show’s success, complimenting each member of the cast and crew on his dedication and professionalism. Several times she encountered Elliot Stryker, and he seemed genuinely interested in learning how the splashy stage effects had been achieved. Each time that Tina moved on to talk to someone else, she regretted leaving Elliot, and each time that she found him again, she stayed with him longer than she had before. After their fourth encounter, she lost track of how long they were together. Finally she forgot all about circulating.

Standing near the left proscenium pillar, out of the main flow of the party, they nibbled at pieces of cake, talking about
Magyck!
and then about the law, Charlie and Helen Mainway, Las Vegas real estate—and, by some circuitous route, superhero movies.

He said, “How can Batman wear an armored rubber suit all the time and not have a chronic rash?”

“Yeah, but there are advantages to a rubber suit.”

“Such as?”

“You can go straight from office work to scuba diving without changing clothes.”

“Eat takeout food at two hundred miles an hour in the Batmobile, and no matter how messy it gets—just hose off later.”

“Exactly. After a hard day of crime-fighting, you can get stinking drunk and throw up on yourself, and it doesn’t matter. No dry-cleaning bills.”

“In basic black he’s dressed for any occasion—”

“—from an audience with the Pope to a Marquis de Sade memorial sock hop.”

Elliot smiled. He finished his cake. “I guess you’ll have to be here most nights for a long time to come.”

“No. There’s really no need for me to be.”

“I thought a director—”

“Most of the director’s job is finished. I just have to check on the show once every couple of weeks to make sure the tone of it isn’t drifting away from my original intention.”

“But you’re also the co-producer.”

“Well, now that the show’s opened successfully, most of my share of the producer’s chores are public relations and promotional stuff. And a little logistics to keep the production rolling along smoothly. But nearly all of that can be handled out of my office. I won’t have to hang around the stage. In fact, Joel says it isn’t healthy for a producer to be backstage every night . . . or even most nights. He says I’d just make the performers nervous and cause the technicians to look over their shoulders for the boss when they should have their eyes on their work.”

“But will you be able to resist?”

“It won’t be easy staying away. But there’s a lot of sense in what Joel says, so I’m going to try to play it cool.”

“Still, I guess you’ll be here every night for the first week or so.”

“No,” she said. “If Joel’s right—and I’m sure he is—then it’s best to get in the habit of staying away right from the start.”

“Tomorrow night?”

“Oh, I’ll probably pop in and out a few times.”

“I guess you’ll be going to a New Year’s Eve party.”

“I hate New Year’s Eve parties. Everyone’s drunk and boring.”

“Well, then . . . in between all that popping in and out of
Magyck!
, do you think you’d have time for dinner?”

“Are you asking me for a date?”

“I’ll try not to slurp my soup.”

“You
are
asking me for a date,” she said, pleased.

“Yes. And it’s been a long time since I’ve been this awkward about it.”

“Why is that?”

“You, I guess.”

“I make you feel awkward?”

“You make me feel young. And when I was young, I was very awkward.”

“That’s sweet.”

“I’m trying to charm you.”

“And succeeding,” she said.

He had such a warm smile. “Suddenly I don’t feel so awkward anymore.”

She said, “You want to start over?”

“Will you have dinner with me tomorrow night?”

“Sure. How about seven-thirty?”

“Fine. You prefer dressy or casual?”

“Blue jeans.”

He fingered his starched collar and the satin lapel of his tuxedo jacket. “I’m so glad you said that.”

“I’ll give you my address.” She searched her purse for a pen.

“We can stop in here and watch the first few numbers in
Magyck!
and then go to the restaurant.”

“Why don’t we just go straight to the restaurant?”

“You don’t want to pop in here?”

“I’ve decided to go cold turkey.”

“Joel will be proud of you.”

“If I can actually do it,
I’ll
be proud of me.”

“You’ll do it. You’ve got true grit.”

“In the middle of dinner, I might be seized by a desperate need to dash over here and act like a producer.”

“I’ll park the car in front of the restaurant door, and I’ll leave the engine running just in case.”

Tina gave her address to him, and then somehow they were talking about jazz and Benny Goodman, and then about the miserable service provided by the Las Vegas phone company, just chatting away as if they were old friends. He had a variety of interests; among other things he was a skier and a pilot, and he was full of funny stories about learning to ski and fly. He made her feel comfortable, yet at the same time he intrigued her. He projected an interesting image: a blend of male power and gentleness, aggressive sexuality and kindness.

A hit show . . . lots of royalty checks to look forward to . . . an infinity of new opportunities made available to her because of this first smashing success . . . and now the prospect of a new and exciting lover . . .

As she listed her blessings, Tina was astonished at how much difference one year could make in a life. From bitterness, pain, tragedy, and unrelenting sorrow, she had turned around to face a horizon lit by rising promise. At last the future looked worth living. Indeed, she couldn’t see how anything could go wrong.

The skirts of the night were gathered around the Evans house, rustling in a dry desert wind.

A neighbor’s white cat crept across the lawn, stalking a wind-tossed scrap of paper. The cat pounced, missed its prey, stumbled, scared itself, and flashed lightning-quick into another yard.

Inside, the house was mostly silent. Now and then the refrigerator switched on, purring to itself. A loose windowpane in the living room rattled slightly whenever a strong gust of wind struck it. The heating system rumbled to life, and for a couple of minutes at a time, the blower whispered wordlessly as hot air pushed through the vents.

Shortly before midnight, Danny’s room began to grow cold. On the doorknob, on the radio casing, and on other metal objects, moisture began to condense out of the air. The temperature plunged rapidly, and the beads of water froze. Frost formed on the window.

The radio clicked on.

For a few seconds the silence was split by an electronic squeal as sharp as an ax blade. Then the shrill noise abruptly stopped, and the digital display flashed with rapidly changing numbers. Snippets of music and shards of voices crackled in an eerie audio-montage that echoed and re-echoed off the walls of the frigid room.

No one was in the house to hear it.

The closet door opened, closed, opened. . . .

Inside the closet, shirts and jeans began to swing wildly on the pole from which they hung, and some clothes fell to the floor.

The bed shook.

The display case that held nine model airplanes rocked, banging repeatedly against the wall. One of the models was flung from its shelf, then two more, then three more, then another, until all nine lay in a pile on the floor.

On the wall to the left of the bed, a poster of the creature from the
Alien
movies tore down the middle.

The radio ceased scanning, stopping on an open frequency that hissed and popped with distant static. Then a voice blared from the speakers. It was a child’s voice. A boy. There were no words. Just a long, agonized scream.

The voice faded after a minute, but the bed began to bang up and down.

The closet door slammed open and shut with substantially more force than it had earlier.

Other things began to move too. For almost five minutes the room seemed to have come alive.

And then it died.

Silence returned.

The air grew warm again.

The frost left the window, and outside the white cat still chased the scrap of paper.

Tina didn’t get home from the opening-night party until shortly before two o’clock Wednesday morning. Exhausted, slightly tipsy, she went directly to bed and fell into a sound sleep.

Later, after no more than two dreamless hours, she suffered another nightmare about Danny. He was trapped at the bottom of a deep hole. She heard his frightened voice calling to her, and she peered over the edge of the pit, and he was so far below her that his face was only a tiny, pale smudge. He was desperate to get out, and she was frantic to rescue him; but he was chained, unable to climb, and the sides of the pit were sheer and smooth, so she had no way to reach him. Then a man dressed entirely in black from head to foot, his face hidden by shadows, appeared at the far side of the pit and began to shovel dirt into it. Danny’s cry escalated into a scream of terror; he was being buried alive. Tina shouted at the man in black, but he ignored her and kept shoveling dirt on top of Danny. She edged around the pit, determined to make the hateful bastard stop what he was doing, but he took a step away from her for every step that she took toward him, and he always stayed directly across the hole from her. She couldn’t reach him, and she couldn’t reach Danny, and the dirt was up to the boy’s knees, and now up to his hips, and now over his shoulders. Danny wailed and shrieked, and now the earth was even with his chin, but the man in black wouldn’t stop filling in the hole. She wanted to kill the bastard, club him to death with his own shovel. When she thought of clubbing him, he looked at her, and she saw his face: a fleshless skull with rotting skin stretched over the bones, burning red eyes, a yellow-toothed grin. A disgusting cluster of maggots clung to the man’s left cheek and to the corner of his eye, feeding off him. Tina’s terror over Danny’s impending entombment was suddenly mixed with fear for her own life. Though Danny’s screams were increasingly muffled, they were even more urgent than before, because the dirt began to cover his face and pour into his mouth. She had to get down to him and push the earth away from his face before he suffocated, so in blind panic she threw herself over the edge of the pit, into the terrible abyss, falling and falling—

Gasping, shuddering, she wrenched herself out of sleep.

She was convinced that the man in black was in her bedroom, standing silently in the darkness, grinning. Heart pounding, she fumbled with the bedside lamp. She blinked in the sudden light and saw that she was alone.

“Jesus,” she said weakly.

She wiped one hand across her face, sloughing off a film of perspiration. She dried her hand on the sheets.

She did some deep-breathing exercises, trying to calm herself.

She couldn’t stop shaking.

In the bathroom, she washed her face. The mirror revealed a person whom she hardly recognized: a haggard, bloodless, sunken-eyed fright.

Her mouth was dry and sour. She drank a glass of cold water.

Back in bed, she didn’t want to turn off the light. Her fear made her angry with herself, and at last she twisted the switch.

The returning darkness was threatening.

She wasn’t sure she would be able to get any more sleep, but she had to try. It wasn’t even five o’clock. She’d been asleep less than three hours.

In the morning, she would clean out Danny’s room. Then the dreams would stop. She was pretty much convinced of that.

She remembered the two words that she had twice erased from Danny’s chalkboard—NOT DEAD—and she realized that she’d forgotten to call Michael. She had to confront him with her suspicions. She had to know if he’d been in the house, in Danny’s room, without her knowledge or permission.

It
had
to be Michael.

She could turn on the light and call him now. He would be sleeping, but she wouldn’t feel guilty if she woke him, not after all the sleepless nights that he had given her. Right now, however, she didn’t feel up to the battle. Her wits were dulled by wine and exhaustion. And if Michael
had
slipped into the house like a little boy playing a cruel prank, if he
had
written that message on the chalkboard, then his hatred of her was far greater than she had thought. He might even be a desperately sick man. If he became verbally violent and abusive, if he were irrational, she would need to have a clear head to deal with him. She would call him in the morning when she had regained some of her strength.

She yawned and turned over and drifted off to sleep. She didn’t dream anymore, and when she woke at ten o’clock, she was refreshed and newly excited by the previous night’s success.