The Vision (7 page)

“Something awful, unspeakable.”

“A sex act of some sort?”

Wicka-wicka-wicka
 . . .

“Not just sex. More than that,” she said.

“What was it?”

“Dirty. Filthy.”

“In what way?”

“Eyes watching me.”

“Mitchell’s eyes?”

“Not his.”

“Who then?”

“I can’t remember.”

“You can.”

Wicka-wicka
 . . .

“Wings,” she said.

“Rings? You’re speaking too softly again.”

“Wings,” she said. “Wings.”

“What do you mean?”

She was shaking, vibrating. She was afraid her legs would fail her. She returned to the armchair. “Wings. I can hear them flapping. I can
feel
them.”

“You mean Mitchell kept a bird in the house?”

“I don’t know.”

“A parrot perhaps?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Work at remembering it, Mary. Don’t let go of this thought. You’ve never mentioned wings before. It’s important.”

“They were everywhere.”

“The wings?”

“All over me. Little wings.”

“Think. What did he do to you?”

She was silent a long while. The pressure began to ease a bit. The sound of wings faded.

“Mary?”

Finally she said, “That’s all. I can’t recall anything else.”

“There is a way to unlock those memories,” he said.

“Hypnosis,” she replied.

“It works.”

“I’m afraid to remember.”

“You should be afraid
not
to remember.”

“If I remember, I’ll die.”

“That’s ridiculous, and you know it.”

She pushed her hair back from her face. For his benefit, she forced a smile. “I don’t hear the wings now. I can’t feel them. We don’t need to talk about wings anymore.”

“Of course we do.”

“I
won’t
talk about wings, dammit!” She shook her head violently. She was surprised and frightened by her own vehemence. “Not today anyway.”

“All right,” Cauvel said. “I’ll accept that. That’s not the same thing as saying you don’t
need
to talk.” He began to polish his glasses once more. “Let’s go back to what you remember. Berton Mitchell beat you.”

“I suppose he did.”

“You were found in his place?”

“In his living room.”

“And you were badly beaten?”

“Yes.”

“And later you told them he did it.”

“But I can’t remember it happening. I recall the pain, terrible pain. But only for an instant.”

“You could have lost consciousness with the first blow.”

“That’s what everyone said. He must have kept hitting me after I passed out. I couldn’t have stood up to him for long. I was just a little girl.”

“He used a knife, too?”

“I was cut all over.”

“How long were you in the hospital?”

“More than two weeks.”

“How many stitches for the wounds?”

“More than a hundred altogether.”

* * *

The beauty shop
smelled of shampoo, cream rinse, and cologne. He could also smell the woman’s sweat.

The floor was littered with hair. It swirled around them as he moved onto her and into her.

She refused to respond to him. She neither welcomed him nor struggled against him. She lay still. Her eyes were like the eyes of the dead.

He didn’t hate her for that. In the long run he’d never cared for passion in his women. For the first few months a new lover’s aggression and delight in sex was tolerable. He could be tender for a short time. But always, after a few months, he needed to see fear in them. That was what brought him to climax. The more they feared him, the better he liked them.

As he lay on her, he could feel this woman’s heart thumping wildly, accelerated by terror. That excited him, and he began to move faster within her.

* * *

“You took a
number of Mitchell’s blows on your head,” Cauvel said.

“My face was black and blue. My father called me his little patchwork doll.”

“Did you suffer a concussion?”

“I see where all of this is leading,” she said. “But no. No concussion. Absolutely not.”

“When did your visions begin?”

“Later the same year.”

“A few minutes ago you asked me why you’d been singled out to be a clairvoyant. Well, there’s nothing mysterious about it really. As in the case of Peter Hurkos, your psychic talent came after a serious head injury.”

“Not serious enough.”

He stopped polishing his spectacles, put them on, and studied her with huge, magnified eyes. “Is it possible that a severe psychological shock could trigger psychic abilities in the same way that certain head injuries seem to do?”

She shrugged.

“If you didn’t acquire your power as a result of a physical trauma, then maybe you acquired it because of a
psychological
trauma. Do you suppose that’s possible?”

“It could be,” she said.”

“Either way,” he said, thrusting a bony finger at her, as if repeatedly tapping a window between them, “either way, your clairvoyance probably goes back to Berton Mitchell, to what he did to you that you can’t remember.”

“Maybe.”

“And your insomnia goes back to Berton Mitchell. Your periodic depressions go back to him. What he did to you is the underlying cause of your anxiety attacks. I tell you, Mary, the sooner you face up to this, the better. If you ever let me use hypnosis to regress you and guide you through the memories, then you’ll never need my help again.”

“I’ll always need your help.”

He scowled. His deeply tanned face was scored by lines like saber slashes. An ambitious portrait painter would have wanted to catch him with that expression, for it made him look fierce, yet fair and reliable. It was that expression that drew her to him at a party three years ago; and his distant but paternal manner caused her to seek his advice when her dependency on sleeping pills became absolute.

“If you’ll always need my help,” he said, “then I’m not helping you at all. As a psychiatrist, I must make you find all the strength you need inside yourself.”

She went to the bar and picked up the decanter of brandy. “You said I could have another if I kept talking a while.”

“I never break a promise.” He joined her at the bar. “The day’s nearly over. I’ll have another, too.”

As she poured for them, she said, “You’re wrong about Mitchell.”

“In what sense?”

“I don’t think all of my problems date back to him. Some of them started the day my father died.”

“I’ve heard you expound on that theory before.”

“I was in the car with him when he was killed. I was in the backseat and he was driving. I saw him die. His blood sprayed all over me. I was only nine. And the years after he died weren’t easy. In three years my mother lost all the money my father left us. We went from rich to poor between my ninth and twelfth birthdays. I think an experience like that would leave some scars, don’t you?”

“It has,” he said. He picked up his brandy glass. “But it’s not responsible for the
worst
scars.”

“How do you know?”

“You’re able to talk about it.”

“So?”

“But you aren’t able to talk about what happened with Berton Mitchell.”

* * *

When he finished
with the woman, he stood, pulled up his pants, zipped his fly. He hadn’t even taken off his coat.

He stepped back from her, looked at her.

Given the opportunity, she made no effort to cover herself. Her skirt was bunched around her hips. Her blouse was unbuttoned; one plump breast was visible. Her hands were fisted. Her fingernails had gouged her palms, and ribbons of blood were on her hands. Terrorized, reduced to little more than a cowering animal, she represented his ideal woman.

He took the knife out of his coat pocket.

He expected her to scream and scramble away from him, but as he moved in for the kill, she lay as if she were dead already. She was past fear now, past feeling anything.

Kneeling beside her, he placed the point of the blade at her throat. The flesh dimpled around it, but she didn’t blink.

He raised the blade high, held it in her line of sight, over her breasts.

No response.

He was disappointed. When time and circumstance allowed, he preferred to kill slowly. To get any thrill from that game, he required a lively woman for prey.

Angry with her for spoiling the moment, he rammed the knife down.

* * *

Mary Bergen gasped.

The razor edge ripping her skin, opening muscle, opening the reservoir of blood, opening the dark place where pain was stored
 . . .

She leaned into the corner formed by the wall and the side of the antique oak bar. She was only half aware that she knocked over an unopened bottle of Scotch.

“What’s the matter?” Cauvel asked.

“It hurts.”

He touched her shoulder. “Are you sick? Can I help?”

“Not sick. The vision. I feel it.”

The knife again, thrust deep
 . . .

She put both hands to her stomach, trying to contain the eruption of pain. “I won’t faint this time. I won’t!”

“A vision of what?” Cauvel asked worriedly.

“The beauty shop. The same one I saw a few hours ago. Only it’s happening now. The slaughter . . . God almighty . . . happening somewhere, happening right this minute.” She put her hands to her face, but the images would not be shut out. “Oh, God. Sweet God. Help me.”

“What do you see?”

“A dead man on the floor.”

“The floor of the beauty shop?”

“He’s bald . . . mustache . . . purple shirt.”

“What is it you’re feeling?”

The knife
 . . .

She was sweating. Crying.

“Mary?
Mary?
”

“I feel . . . the woman . . . being stabbed.”

“What woman? There’s a woman?”

“Mustn’t black out.”

She started to sag, and he held her by both shoulders.

She saw the knife gouging flesh again, but she felt no pain this time. The woman in the vision was dead; therefore, there was no more pain to share.

“Have to see his face, have to get his name,” she said.

The killer standing up from the body, standing in a cape, no, a long coat, an overcoat
 . . .

“Can’t lose the thread. Mustn’t lose the vision. Have to hold it, have to find where he is, who he is,
what
he is, stop him from doing these awful things.”

The killer standing, standing with the butcher knife in one hand, standing in shadow, his face in shadow but turning now, turning very slowly and deliberately, turning so that she’ll be able to see his face, turning as if he is looking for her
—

“He knows I’m with him,” she said.

“Who knows?”

“He knows I’m watching.”

She didn’t understand how that could be true. Yet the killer knew about her. She was certain of that, and she was scared.

Suddenly half a dozen glass dogs leaped from the display shelves, flew through the air, and smashed with a great deal of force into the wall beside Mary.

She screamed.

Cauvel turned to see who had thrown them. “What the hell?”

As if they had come to life and had acquired wings, a dozen glass dogs swept off the top shelf. They spun, glittering like fragments of an exploded prism, to the high center of the room. They bounced off the ceiling, struck one another with the musical rattle of Chinese wind chimes.

Then they streaked toward Mary.

She raised her arms, covered her face.

The miniatures battered her harder than she had expected. They stung like bees.

“Stop them!” she said, not certain to whom she was speaking.

A hellhound with pointy horns struck the doctor in the forehead between the eyes and drew blood.

Cauvel turned away from the shelves, moved against her, tried to shield her with his body.

Another ten or fifteen dogs bulleted around the room. Two of them smashed through a stained-glass panel in the bar. Others burst to pieces on the wall around Mary, icing her hair with chunks and slivers of colored glass.

“It’s trying to kill me!” She was struggling unsuccessfully to avoid hysteria.

Cauvel pressed her into the corner.

More glass dogs whistled across the room, swooped over the psychiatrist’s desk, scattered a sheaf of onionskin papers. The figurines clattered against the venetian blinds without shattering, rose up again, zigzagged crazily from one end of the chamber to the other, then pelted Cauvel’s shoulders and back, rained fragments over Mary’s bowed head.

Yet another squadron of dogs took flight. They danced in the air, swarmed ominously, fluttered against Mary, flew away, came back with greater determination, struck her with incredible force, stung, bruised, hung over her like locusts.

As suddenly as the macabre assault began, it ended. Almost a hundred glass miniatures remained on the display shelves, but they did not move.

Mary and Cauvel huddled together, not trusting the calm, waiting for another attack.

Silence prevailed.

Eventually he let go of her and stepped back.

She was unable to control the tremors that broke like waves within her.

“Are you all right?” he asked, oblivious to the blood on his own face.

“I wasn’t meant to see him,” she said.

Cauvel was dazed. He stared, uncomprehendingly.

“His face,” she said. “I wasn’t meant to see it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“When I tried to see the killer in the vision,” she said, “I was stopped. What stopped me?”

Cauvel gazed at the shards of glass on all sides of them. He began to pick splinters of glass from the shoulders and sleeves of his suit jacket. “Did you do this? Did you make the dogs fly?”

“Me?”

“Who else?”

“Oh, no. How could I?”

“Someone did.”

“Some
thing
.”

He stared at her.

“It was a . . . spirit,” she said.

“I don’t believe in life after death.”

“I wasn’t sure about that myself. Until now.”

“So we’re haunted?”

“What else?”