The Vision (12 page)

“Because her subconscious knows it will be harmful for her to pursue this man.”

“That’s right.”

An icy tremor passed through Lou Pasternak. “What could she have foreseen?”

“Maybe this psychopath will kill her,” Max said.

The thought of Mary dead hit Lou with surprising force. He had known her for more than a decade, had liked her from the moment he met her, and had grown to like her more each year. Liked her? Only that? No. He loved her, too. In a fatherly way. She was so gentle, good-natured. So vulnerable. But until this moment he had not realized how deeply he had come to love her. Mary dead and gone? He felt sick, feverish.

Max watched him with steady gray eyes that revealed nothing of his own emotions. He appeared unaffected, unmoved by the prospect of his wife’s death.

He’s had more time to consider it than I have, Lou thought. He’s had time to become accustomed to the idea of Mary dead. He cares as much as I do, but his feelings have settled from the surface into darker, more affecting regions.

“Or maybe the psychopath will kill me,” Max said.

“The two of you should give up on this one,” Lou said. “Go home right now. Stay out of it.”

“But if she
did
foresee something of that sort,” Max said, “won’t it happen regardless of what we do to avoid it?”

“I don’t believe in predestination.”

“Neither do I. Yet . . . what she foresees always seems to happen. So if we don’t go after this killer, will he come after us?”

“Damn you,” Lou said. “You’ve made me stone cold sober.” He drank his wine, poured more.

“There’s something else,” Max said. “When she was six years old, a man apparently sexually molested her.”

“Berton Mitchell,” Lou said.

“How much has she told you about that?”

“Not much. The general outlines of it. I gather she can’t remember most of it.”

“Did she tell you what happened to Mitchell?”

“He was found guilty,” Lou said. “He hung himself in his prison cell, didn’t he?”

“Do you know that for a fact?”

“She told me.”

“But do you know it for a fact?”

Lou was puzzled. “Why would she lie?”

“I’m not saying she lied. But what if no one ever told her the truth?”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Suppose,” Max said, “that Berton Mitchell was never sentenced to a prison term. Suppose he had a good attorney who got him off scot-free even though he was guilty. It happens. If you were the father of a six-year-old girl who’d been molested and horribly traumatized, would you want to tell her that her assailant had walked away unpunished? Wouldn’t you worry that she might suffer even more serious psychological damage if she knew that the monster who had abused her was on the streets, free to try for her again? If Berton Mitchell was acquitted, Mary’s father might have decided the best thing was for her to believe that Mitchell was dead.”

“Surely she would have discovered the truth when she got older,” Lou said.

“Not necessarily. Not if she didn’t want to discover it.”

“Alan would have told her.”

“Maybe Alan never knew the truth either,” Max said. “He was only nine at the time. Their father would have lied to both of them. And if—”

Lou held up one hand for silence. “Let’s say you’re right. Let’s say Berton Mitchell was acquitted. What’s that have to do with this case?”

Max picked up his fork and poked at the rumpled pile of potato skin on his plate. “I told you I think Mary’s foreseen something that terrifies her.”

“That she’ll be killed. Or you will.”

“Perhaps that’s it. But maybe she’s also seen that the killer we’re after is . . . Berton Mitchell.”

“He’d be sixty years old if he was alive!”

“Is there some law that says all psychopathic killers have to be young?” Max asked.

* * *

In the bathroom
Mary washed her hands, picked up the towel, looked in the mirror above the washbasin—and did not see her own face. Instead, she saw the face of a total stranger—a young woman with pale yellow hair and even paler skin and wide-set blue eyes, her features distorted by terror.

The mirror had become a window on another dimension, for it did not reflect anything in the bathroom. The blonde woman’s face was disembodied, floating in misty shadows. Above and to the right of her, the only other object in the void beyond the mirror was a golden crucifix.

Mary dropped the towel, backed away from the sink until she bumped into the wall.

In the mirror a man’s hand, also disembodied, appeared in the foreground of the surrealistic collage of psychic images. It was gripping a butcher knife.

Mary had never received a clairvoyant vision in this fashion. For a moment she didn’t know what to expect. She didn’t know what she should do; she was afraid both to move and to stay still.

The disembodied hand raised the knife. The blonde’s face receded like a ball flying away, whirling and spinning and tumbling through endless space. The hand and the butcher knife receded, too, in pursuit of her.

Concentrate, Mary told herself. For God’s sake, don’t let the vision get away from you. Hold on to it at all costs. Hold it and expand upon it. Develop it until it provides the name of the man whose hand holds the knife.

The crucifix swelled until it filled the mirror. Then, in perfect, eerie silence, the icon exploded into a dozen jagged pieces and was gone.

Concentrate . . .

The woman’s face reappeared. And the knife loomed large in the mirror. The blade gave off a fierce light of its own, as if it were made of neon tubing.

“Who are you?” Mary asked aloud. “You with the knife. Who in the hell are you?”

Suddenly the hand was no longer disembodied. The woman’s face vanished, and the shoulder and the back of a man’s head entered the scene, cloaked in shadow. The killer started to turn slowly, turned through laces of wan light and shifting shadows, turned so he would be facing out from the mirror, turned as if he knew Mary was now behind him, turned slowly and silently, turned as if in response to her request for his name . . .

Worried that she might lose the vision an instant before she had her answer, as had happened to her in Dr. Cauvel’s office the day before, Mary said, “Who? Who are you? I demand to know!”

To her right, six feet away, the latch on the bathroom window opened with a sharp
click!

Startled, Mary looked away from the image in the mirror.

The window slid up.

The wind threw aside the flimsy brown and black curtains and rushed into the room, making banshee noises as it came.

The night beyond the window was dark, far darker than she had ever seen.

Over the howling of the wind came another sound:
Wicka-wicka-wicka!

Wings. Leathery wings. Just beyond the window.

Wicka-wicka-wicka!

Perhaps it was a coincidental sound. The curtain rod vibrating in its fixtures? A branch or shrub rustling rhythmically against the side of the house?

Whatever the cause of it, she was certain she was not merely imagining the sound this time; nor was she receiving it as part of her psychic impressions. Some creature was actually close at hand, beyond that open window, some unimaginably bizarre creature with wings.

No. Insanity.

Well, go look, she told herself. Go see what it is that has these wings. See if it’s anything at all. End this forever.

She couldn’t move.

Wicka-wicka-wicka!

Max, help me, she said. But the words formed without sound.

To her left, beside the sink, the door of the medicine cabinet was wrenched open by invisible hands. Thrown shut. Wrenched open. Thrown shut. The next time it came open, it stayed that way. All of the contents of the cabinet—bottles of Anacin, aspirin, cold tablets, iodine, cough syrup, laxatives; tubes of toothpaste, skin cream, shampoo; boxes of throat lozenges, Band-Aids, gauze pads—leaped from the shelves to the floor.

The shower curtain was flung back by an invisible hand, and the shower rod sagged and bent as if someone quite heavy was hanging from it. The rod tore out of the wall and fell into the tub.

The commode seat began to bash itself up and down, faster and faster, making an incredible din.

She took one step toward the bathroom door.

It swung open as if urging her to leave—then a second later went shut with a crash like a thunderclap. It opened and closed itself repeatedly, almost in time with the clatter of the commode seat.

She put her back to the wall once more, afraid to move.

“Mary!”

Max and Lou were on the other side of the door, briefly visible as it swung open. They were staring, amazed.

The door closed with even greater power than it had before, flew open, shut, open, shut.

Max tried to come in as the door opened again, but it slammed in his face. The next time it opened he grabbed the doorknob and forced his way inside.

The door stopped moving.

The wind at the window decreased to a slight draft.

There were no wings beating now.

Stillness.

Silence.

Mary looked at the mirror above the washbasin and saw that, while the images in it had changed, it was still not an ordinary mirror and did not reflect the room in front of it. The pale blonde, the crucifix, and the man with the butcher knife were gone. The mirror was black—except for the very bottom of it, where blood appeared to seep through the glass and over the frame, where it dripped into the room, as if the world on the other side was nothing but a lake of gore with a surface that reached slightly above the lower edge of the mirror. The blood splashed on the faucets that were directly below the mirror, spattered the white porcelain sink.

Confused, Max said, “What the devil is this? What’s happening here?” He looked from the mirror to Mary. “Are you hurt? Have you cut yourself?”

“No,” she said. And only then did she realize that
he
saw the blood, too.

Max touched the rim of the mirror. Impossibly, incredibly, the blood came off on his fingers.

Lou squeezed into the small bathroom to have a better look.

Gradually the blood—on the mirror, faucets, porcelain, and on Max’s finger—became less vivid, less brilliantly red, less substantial, faded until it was gone, as if it had never been.

* * *

Mary sat on
the living room sofa and accepted a glass of brandy from Lou. When she brushed her hair back from her forehead, it felt greasy and cold. There was no color in her face. Her hands were clammy. The brandy burned her throat and brought a welcome warmth.

Standing in front of her, Max said, “What you saw in that mirror before we came after you—does that mean someone will die tonight?”

“Yes,” Mary said. “The girl I saw. She’ll die. She’ll be stabbed before morning.”

“What’s her name?”

“I didn’t see it.”

“Where does she live?”

“Here in King’s Point. But I didn’t sense any address for her.”

“Does she live on the hills, in the flats, or around the harbor?”

“It could be anyplace,” Mary said.

“What does she look like?”

“She’s got very light yellow hair, almost white. Kinky hair, worn long. Pale skin. Big blue eyes. She’s young, in her twenties, very cute. Delicate. No, a better word . . . ethereal.”

Max turned to Lou as the newspaperman finished a double shot of Wild Turkey. The way he tossed it back, he might as well have been drinking milk or cyanide. “This is your town, Lou. Do you know anyone who fits that description?”

“We’ve got ten thousand permanent residents,” Lou said. “I don’t know all of them. I don’t
want
to know all of them. Nine tenths of them are hopeless jackasses, dullards, and bores. Besides, a lot of pretty young blondes are drawn to the Southern California beach life. Sun, sand, sea, sensitivity sessions, sex, and syphilis. In this town there must be at least two hundred tender, achingly ethereal blondes who could be the one Mary saw.”

Unconsciously Max had picked up a copy of the
Nation
and had rolled it into a tight tube. He slapped it into the palm of his left hand. “If we don’t locate the girl, she’ll be killed tonight.”

Mary’s fear had metamorphosed into a depression like an endless plain of ashes; but beneath the ashes were scattered glowing coals of anger. She was not angry with Max or Lou or with herself, but with fate. Even as the anger built, she knew it was a luxury, that it had no effect or meaning; for the only weapon anyone had against fate was resignation.

“You forget what it means when I foresee something,” she told Max. “It doesn’t matter if we find this girl and warn her. Nothing matters. She’ll die anyway.
I’ve seen it!
I can’t see the names of the winning horses in tomorrow’s races. I can’t see what stocks will rise in price and which will fall next week. All I can see is people dying.” She stood up. “Jesus, but I’m sick of the way I have to live. I’m sick of seeing violence and being unable to prevent it. I’m sick of seeing innocent people in trouble and being unable to help them. I’m tired of a life filled with corpses and violated women and battered children and blood and knives and guns.”

“I know,” Max said gently. “I know.”

She went to the bar and jerked the stopper from the bottle of brandy. “I don’t want to be a funnel for other people’s misery! I want to be a mechanism for the destruction of that misery, for the amelioration of that misery, for the prevention of it.” She poured herself a brandy. “If I’m going to have the all-seeing eye of a god, then dammit, I should have the power of a god, too. I should be able to reach out with that power right this minute and find the man we’re after. I should be able to squeeze his heart in a vise of power until it bursts. But I’m not a god. I’m not even a complete mechanism. I’m like half a radio set. I can receive, but I can’t transmit. I can be affected, but I can’t cause an effect.” She drank the brandy as quickly and smoothly as Lou might have done. “I hate it. Hate it. Why do
I
have to have this power? Why
me?”

* * *

Later, at the
front door, Lou said, “I wish you’d stay here tonight.”