Dark Rivers of the Heart

arranged earlier for the psychic reading.
        He had touched nothing else in the room.
        For a few minutes he pulled open drawers and doors in the tool chest, examining the magical contents, until he found an item that seemed appropriate to the circumstances. It was a pentalpha, also called a pentagram, in green on a field of black felt, used in more serious matters-such as attempted communication with the spirits of the dead-than the mere reading of runes, crystals, and Tarot cards.
        Unfolded, it was an eighteen-inch square. He placed it in the center of the table, as a symbol of the life beyond this one.
        He plugged in the small electric reciprocating saw that he had found among the tools in the garage, and he relieved Guinevere of her right hand. Gently, he placed the hand in a rectangular Tupperware container on another soft dish towel that he had arranged as a bed for it. He snapped the lid on the container.
        Although he wanted to take her left hand, too, he felt that it would be selfish to insist on possessing both. 'The right thing was to leave one with the body, so the police and coroner and mortician and everyone else who dealt with (' uinevere's remains would know that she'd possessed the most beautiful hands in the world.
        He lifted chester's arms onto the table. He laced the dead man's right hand over Guinevere's left, on top of the pentalpha, to express his conviction that they were together in the next world.
        Roy wished he had the psychic power or purity or whatever was required to be able to channel the spirits of the dead. He would have channeled Guinevere there and then, to ask if she would really mind if he acquired her left hand as well.
        He sighed, picked up the Tupperware container, and reluctantly left the round room. In the kitchen, he phoned 911 and spoke to the police operator: "The Place Of The Way is just a place now. It's very sad.
        Please come."
        Leaving the telephone off the hook, he snatched another dish towel from a drawer and hurried to the front door. As far as he could recall, when he had first entered the house and followed Chester to the round room, he had touched nothing. Now, he needed only to wipe the doorbell-push and drop the dish towel on the way to his car.
        He drove out of Burbank, over the hills, into the Los Angeles basin, through a seedy section of Hollywood. The bright splashes of graffiti on walls and highway structures, the cars full of young thugs cruising in search of trouble, the pornographic bookstores and movie theaters, the empty shops and the littered gutters and the other evidence of economic and moral collapse, the hatred and envy and greed and lust that thickened the air more effectively than the smog-none of that dismayed him for the time being, because he carried with him an object of such perfect beauty that it proved there was a powerful and wise creative force at work in the universe. He had evidence of God's existence secured in a Tupperware container.
        Out on the vast Mojave, where the night ruled, where the works of humankind were limited to the dark highway and the vehicles upon it, where the radio reception of distant stations was poor, Spencer found his thoughts drawn, against his will, to the deeper darkness and even stranger silence of that night sixteen years in the past. Once captured in that loop of memory, he could not escape until he had purged himself by talking about what he had seen and endured.
        The barren plains and hills provided no convenient taverns to serve as confessionals. The only sympathetic ears were those of the dog. … bare-chested and barefoot, I descend the stairs, shivering, rubbing my arms, wondering why I'm so afraid. Perhaps even at that moment, I dimly rer he able to ascend.
        I'm dragged forward by the t-iy that I heard while leaning out the window to find the o 1. Although it was brief and camejust twice, and then only faintly, it was so piercing and pathetic that the memory of it bewitches me, the way a teen-year-old boy can sometimes be seduced as easily by the prospect of strangeness and terror as by the mysteries of sex.
        Off the stairs. Through rooms where the moonlit windows glow softly, like video screens, and where the museum-quail Stickleyfurniture is visible only a, angular black shadows within the blue-black gloom. Past artworks by Edward Hopper and Thomas Hail Benton and Steven Ackblom,