Hideaway

car and handled well on the twisting roads as he drove down the canyon from Honell's place, heading for more populated areas of Orange County.
    As he rounded a particularly sharp curve, a patrol car from the sheriff's department swept past him, heading up the canyon. Its siren was not blaring, but its emergency beacons splashed red and blue light on the shale banks and on the gnarled branches of the overhanging trees.
    He divided his attention between the winding road ahead and the dwindling taillights of the patrol car in his rearview mirror, until it rounded another bend upslope and vanished. He was sure the cop was speeding to Honell's. The unanswered, interminably ringing telephone, which had interrupted his interrogation of the author, was the trigger that had set the sheriffs department in motion, but he could not figure how or why.
    Vassago did not drive faster. At the end of Silverado Canyon, he turned south on Santiago Canyon Road and maintained the legal speed limit as any good citizen was expected to do.

8
    In bed in the dark, Hatch felt his world crumbling around him. He was going to be left with dust.
    Happiness with Lindsey and Regina was within his grasp. Or was that an illusion? Were they infinitely beyond his reach?
    He wished for an insight that would give him a new perspective on these apparently supernatural events. Until he could understand the nature of the evil that had entered his life, he could not fight it.
    Dr. Nyebern's voice spoke softly in his mind: I believe evil is a very real force, an energy quite apart from us, a presence in the world.
    He thought he could smell a lingering trace of smoke from the heat-browned pages of Arts American. He had put the magazine in the desk in the den downstairs, in the drawer with a lock. He had added the small key to the ring he carried.
    He had never locked anything in the desk before. He was not sure why he had done so this time. Protecting evidence, he'd told himself. But evidence of what? The singed pages of the magazine proved nothing to anyone about anything.
    No. That was not precisely true. The existence of the magazine proved, to him if to no one else, that he wasn't merely imagining and hallucinating everything that was happening to him. What he had locked away, for his own peace of mind, was indeed evidence. Evidence of his sanity.
    Beside him, Lindsey was also awake, either uninterested in sleep or unable to find a way into it. She said, “What if this killer …”
    Hatch waited. He didn't need to ask her to finish the thought, for he knew what she was going to say. After a moment she said just what he expected:
    “What if this killer is aware of you as much as you're aware of him? What if he comes after you … us … Regina?”
    “Tomorrow we're going to start taking precautions.”
    “What precautions?”
    “Guns, for one thing.”
    “Maybe this isn't something we can handle ourselves.”
    “We don't have any choice.”
    “Maybe we need police protection.”
    “Somehow I don't think they'll commit a lot of manpower to protect a guy just because he claims to have a supernatural bond with a psychotic killer.”
    The wind that had harried laurel leaves across the shopping-center parking lot now found a loose brace on a section of rain gutter and worried it. Metal creaked softly against metal.
    Hatch said, “I went somewhere when I died, right?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Purgatory, Heaven, Hell—those are the basic possibilities for a Catholic, if what we say we believe turns out to be true.”
    “Well … you've always said you had no near-death experience.”
    “I didn't. I can't remember anything from … the Other Side. But that doesn't mean I wasn't there.”
    “What's your point?”
    “Maybe this killer isn't an ordinary man.”
    “You're losing me, Hatch.”
    “Maybe I brought something back with me.”
    “Back with you?”
    “From wherever I was while I was dead.”
    “Something?”
    Darkness had its advantages. The superstitious primitive within could speak of things that would seem too foolish to voice in a well-lighted place.
    He said, “A spirit. An entity.”
    She said nothing.
    “My passage in and out of death might have opened a door somehow,” he said, “and let something through.”
    “Something,” she said again, but with no note of inquiry in her voice, as there had been before. He sensed that she knew what he meant—and did not like the theory.
    “And now it's loose in the world. Which