Hideaway

shaft as he should have done, but glided in slow motion, as if he were only slightly heavier than air, taking as much as half a minute to reach bottom.
    Perhaps his sense of time had merely been distorted by the profundity of his terror.
    Jeremy saw him coming, shifted the pistol from Lindsey to Hatch, and fired all eight remaining rounds. Hatch was certain that he was hit at least three or four times, though he sustained no wounds. It seemed impossible that the killer could miss so often in such a confined space.
    Perhaps the sloppy marksmanship was attributable to the gunman's panic and to the fact that Hatch was a moving target.
    While he was still floating down like dandelion fluff, he experienced a reconnection of the peculiar bond between him and Nyebern, and for a moment he saw himself descending from the young killer's point of view. What he glimpsed, however, was not only himself but the image of someone—or something—superimposed over him, as if he shared his body with another entity. He thought he saw white wings folded close against his sides. Under his own face was that of a stranger—the visage of a warrior if ever there had been one, yet not a face that frightened him.
    Perhaps by then Nyebern was hallucinating, and what Hatch was receiving from him was not actually what he saw but only what he imagined that he saw. Perhaps.
    Then Hatch was gazing down from his own eyes again, still in that slow glide, and he was sure that he saw something superimposed over Jeremy Nyebern, too, a form and face that were part reptilian and part insectile.
    Perhaps it was a trick of light, the confusion of shadows and conflicting flashlight beams.
    He could not explain away their final exchange, however, and he dwelt upon it often in the days that followed:
    “Who are you?” Nyebern asked as Hatch landed catlike in spite of a thirty-foot descent.
    “Uriel,” Hatch replied, though that was not a name he had heard before.
    “I am Vassago,” Nyebern said.
    “I know,” Hatch said, though he was hearing that name for the first time, as well.
    “Only you can send me back.”
    “And when you get sent back by such as me,” Hatch said, wondering where the words came from, “you don't go back a prince. You'll be a slave below, just like the heartless and stupid boy with whom you hitched a ride.”
    Nyebern was afraid. It was the first time he had shown any capacity for fear. “And I thought I was the spider.”
    With strength, agility, and economy of motion that Hatch had not known he possessed, he grabbed Regina's belt in his left hand, pulled her away from Jeremy Nyebern, set her aside out of harm's way, and brought the crucifix down like a club upon the madman's head. The lens of the attached flashlight shattered, and the casing burst open, spilling batteries. He chopped the crucifix hard against the killer's skull a second time, and with the third blow he sent Nyebern to a grave that had been twice earned.
    The anger Hatch felt was righteous anger. When he dropped the crucifix, when it was all over, he felt no guilt or shame. He was nothing at all like his father.
    He had a strange awareness of a power leaving him, a presence he had not realized was there. He sensed a mission accomplished, balance restored. All things were now in their rightful places.
    Regina was unresponsive when he spoke to her. Physically she seemed unharmed. Hatch was not worried about her, for somehow he knew that none of them would suffer unduly for having been caught up in … whatever they had been caught up in.
    Lindsey was unconscious and bleeding. He examined her wound and felt it was not too serious.
    Voices arose two floors above. They were calling his name. The authorities had arrived. Late as always. Well, not always. Sometimes … one of them was there just when you needed him.

3
    The apocryphal story of the three blind men examining the elephant is widely known. The first blind man feels only the elephant's trunk and thereafter confidently describes the beast as a great snakelike creature, similar to a python. The second blind man feels only the elephant's ears and announces that it is a bird that can soar to great heights. The third blind man examines only the elephant's fringe-tipped, fly-chasing tail and “sees” an animal that is curiously like a bottle brush.
    So it is with any experience that human beings share. Each participant perceives it in a different way and takes from it a different lesson than do his or her