Hideaway

He could not see it clearly, but something on the page was the cause of his anger. He squinted as if narrowing his eyes would help him see the words.
    The vision passed, but the anger remained. He nurtured it the way a happy man might consciously force a laugh beyond its natural span just because the sound of laughter buoyed him. Words blurted from him, “Of all the fucking nerve!”
    He had no idea where the exclamation had come from, just as he had no idea why he had said the name “Lindsey” out loud in that lounge in Newport Beach, several weeks ago, when these weird experiences had begun.
    He was so abruptly energized by anger that he turned away from his collection and stalked across the enormous chamber, up the ramp down which the gargoyle gondolas had once plunged, and out into the night, where the moon forced him to put on his sunglasses again. He could not stand still. He had to move, move. He walked the abandoned midway, not sure who or what he was looking for, curious about what would happen next.
    Disjointed images flashed through his mind, none remaining long enough to allow contemplation: the newspaper, a book-lined den, a filing cabinet, a hand-written letter, a telephone. … He walked faster and faster, pivoting suddenly onto new avenues or into narrower passageways between the decaying buildings, in a fruitless search for a connection that would link him more clearly with the source of the pictures that appeared and swiftly faded from his mind.
    As he passed the roller coaster, cold moonlight fell through the maze of supporting crossbeams and glinted off the track in such a way as to make those twin ribbons of steel look like rails of ice. When he lifted his gaze to stare at the monolithic—and suddenly mysterious—structure, an angry exclamation burst from him: “Pitch him into that freezing river!”
    A woman said, Honey, lower your voice.
    Though he knew that her voice had arisen from within him, as an auditory adjunct to the fragmentary visions, Vassago turned in search of her anyway. She was there. In a bathrobe. Standing just this side of a doorway that had no right to be where it was, with no walls surrounding it. To the left of the doorway, to the right of it, and above it, there was only the night. The silent amusement park. But beyond the doorway, past the woman who stood in it, was what appeared to be the entrance foyer of a house, a small table with a vase of flowers, a staircase curving up to a second floor.
    She was the woman he had thus far seen only in his dreams, first in a wheelchair and most recently in a red automobile on a sun-splashed highway. As he took a step toward her, she said, You'll wake Regina.
    He halted, not because he was afraid of waking Regina, whoever the hell she was, and not because he still didn't want to get his hands on the woman, which he did—she was so vital —but because he became aware of a full-length mirror to the left of the Twilight-Zone door, a mirror floating impossibly in the night air. It was filled with his reflection, except that it was not him but a man he had never seen before, his size but maybe twice his age, lean and fit, his face contorted in rage.
    The look of rage gave way to one of shock and disgust, and both Vassago and the man in the vision turned from the mirror to the woman in the doorway. “Lindsey, I'm sorry,” Vassago said.
    Lindsey. The name he had spoken three times at that lounge in Newport Beach.
    Until now, he had not linked it to this woman who, nameless, had appeared so often in his recent dreams.
    “Lindsey,” Vassago repeated.
    He was speaking of his own volition this time, not repeating what the man in the mirror was saying, and that seemed to shatter the vision.The mirror and the reflection in it flew apart in a billion shards, as did the doorway and the dark-eyed woman.
    As the hushed and moon-washed park reclaimed the night, Vassago reached out with one hand toward the spot where the woman had stood. “Lindsey.” He longed to touch her. So alive, she was. “Lindsey.” He wanted to cut her open and enfold her beating heart in both hands, until its metronomic pumping slowed … slowed … slowed to a full stop. He wanted to be holding her heart when life retreated from it and death took possession.
     
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    As swiftly as the flood of rage had poured into Hatch, it drained out of him. He balled up the pages of the newspaper and threw them in the waste can beside the desk, without glancing again