Red Dragon - Страница 31

Lounds thought it must be night. Crawford and Graham were expecting him. Certainly he had been missed by now. A great, hollow sadness pulsed briefly with his fear.

Breathing behind him, a flash of white caught by his rolling eye. A hand, powerful and pale. It held a cup of tea with honey. Lounds sipped it through a straw.

“I’d do a big story,” he said between sips. “Anything you want to say. Describe you any way you want, or no description, no description.”

“Shhhh.” A single finger tapped the top of his head. The lights brightened. The chair began to turn.

“No.I don’t want to see you.”

“Oh, but you must, Mr. Lounds. You’re a reporter. You’re here to report. When I turn you around, open your eyes and look at me. If you won’t open them yourself, I’ll staple your eyelids to your forehead.”

A wet mouth noise, a snapping click and the chair spun. Lounds faced the room, his eyes tight shut. A finger tapped insistently on his chest. A touch on his eyelids. He looked.

To Lounds, seated, he seemed very tall standing in his kimono. A stocking mask was rolled up to his nose. He turned his back to Lounds and dropped the robe. The great back muscles flexed above the brilliant tattoo of the tail that ran down his lower back and wrapped around the leg.

The Dragon turned his head slowly, looked over his shoulder at Lounds and smiled, all jags and stains.

“Oh my dear God Jesus,” Lounds said.

Lounds now in the center of the room where he can see the screen. Dolarhyde, behind him, has put on his robe and put in the teeth that allow him to speak.

“Do you want to know What I Am?”

Lounds tried to nod; the chair jerked his scalp. “More than anything. I was afraid to ask.”

“Look.”

The first slide was Blake’s painting, the great Man-Dragon, wings flared and tail lashing, poised above the Woman Clothed with the Sun.

“Do you see now?”

“I see.”

Rapidly Dolarhyde ran through his other slides. Click. Mrs. Jacobi alive. “Do you see?” “Yes.”

Click. Mrs. Leeds alive. “Do you see?”

“Yes.”

Click. Dolarhyde, the Dragon rampant, muscles flexed and tail tattoo above the Jacobis’ bed. “Do you see?”

“Yes.”

Click. Mrs. Jacobi waiting. “Do you see?”

“Yes.”

Click. Mrs. Jacobi after. “Do you see?”

“Yes.”

Click. The Dragon rampant. “Do you see?”

“Yes.”

Click. Mrs. Leeds waiting, her husband slack beside her. “Do you see?”

“Yes.”

Click. Mrs. Leeds after, harlequined with blood. “Do you see?”

“Yes.”

Click. Freddy Lounds, a copy of a Tattler photograph. “Do you see?”

“Oh God.”

“Do you see?”

“Oh my God.” The words drawn out, as a child speaks crying.

“Do you see?”

“Please no.”

“No what?”

“Not me.”

“No what? You’re a man, Mr. Lounds. Are you a man?”

“Yes.”

“Do you imply that I’m some kind of queer?”

“God no.”

“Are you a queer, Mr. Lounds?”

“No.”

“Are you going to write more lies about me, Mr. Lounds?”

“Oh no, no.”

“Why did you write lies, Mr. Lounds?”

“The police told me. It was what they said.”

“You quote Will Graham.”

“Graham told me the lies. Graham.”

“Will you tell the truth now? About Me. My Work. My Becoming. My Art, Mr. Lounds. Is this Art?”

“Art.”

The fear in Lounds’s face freed Dolarhyde to speak and he could fly on sibilants and fricatives; plosives were his great webbed wings.

“You said that I, who see more than you, am insane. I, who pushed the world so much further than you, am insane. I have dared more than you, I have pressed my unique seal so much deeper in the earth, where it will last longer than your dust. Your life to mine is a slug track on stone. A thin silver mucus track in and out of the letters on my monument.” The words Dolarhyde had written in his journal swarmed in him now.

“I am the Dragon and you call me insane? My movements are followed and recorded as avidly as those of a mighty guest star. Do you know about the guest star in 1054? Of course not. Your readers follow you like a child follows a slug track with his finger, and in the same tired loops of reason. Back to your shallow skull and potato face as a slug follows his own slime back home.

“Before Me you are a slug in the sun. You are privy to a great Becoming and you recognize nothing. You are an ant in the afterbirth.

“It is in your nature to do one thing correctly: before Me you rightly tremble. Fear is not what you owe Me, Lounds, you and the other pismires. You owe Me awe.”

Dolarhyde stood with his head down, his thumb and forefinger against the bridge of his nose. Then he left the room.

He didn’t take off the mask, Lounds thought. He didn’t take off the mask. If he comes back with it off, I’m dead. God, I’m wet all over. He rolled his eyes toward the doorway and waited through the sounds ftom the back of the house.

When Dolarhyde returned, he still wore the mask. He carried a lunch box and two thermoses. “For your trip back home.” He held up a thermos. “Ice, we’ll need that. Before we go, we’ll tape a little while.”

He clipped a microphone to the afghan near Lounds’s face. “Repeat after me.”

They taped for half an hour. Finally, “That’s all, Mr. Lounds. You did very well.”

“You’ll let me go now?”

“I will. There’s one way, though, that I can help you better understand and remember.” Dolarhyde turned away.

“I want to understand, I want you to know I appreciate you turning me loose. I’m really going to be fair from now on, you know that.”

Dolarhyde could not answer. He had changed his teeth.

The tape recorder was running again.

He smiled at Lounds, a brown-stained smile. He placed his hand on Lounds’s heart and, leaning to him intimately as though to kiss him, he bit Lounds’s lips off and spit them on the floor.

CHAPTER 21

Dawn in Chicago, heavy air and the gray sky low.

A security guard came out of the lobby of the Tattler building and stood at the curb smoking a cigarette and rubbing the small of his back. He was alone on the street and in the quiet he could hear the clack of the traffic light changing at the top of the hill, a long block away.

Half a block north of the light, out of the guard’s sight, Francis Dolarhyde squatted beside Lounds in the back of the van. He arranged the blanket in a deep cowl that hid Lounds’s head.

Lounds was in great pain. He appeared stuporous, but his mind was racing. There were things he must remember. The blindfold was tented across his nose and he could see Dolarhyde’s fingers checking the crusted gag.

Dolarhyde put on the white jacket of a medical orderly, laid a thermos in Lounds’s lap and rolled him out of the van. When he locked the wheels of the chair and turned to put the ramp back in the van, Lounds could see the end of the van’s bumper beneath his blindfold.

Turning now, seeing the bumper guard… Yes! The license plate. Only a flash, but Lounds burned it into his mind.

Rolling now. Sidewalk seams. Around a corner and down a curb. Paper crackled under the wheels.

Dolarhyde stopped the wheelchair in a bit of littered shelter between a garbage dumpster and a parked truck. He pulled at the blindfold. Lounds closed his eyes. An ammonia bottle under his nose.

The soft voice close beside him.

“Can you hear me? You’re almost there.” The blindfold off now. “Blink if you can hear me.”

Dolarhyde opened his eye with a thumb and forefinger. Lounds was looking at Dolarhyde’s face.

“I told you one fib.” Dolarhyde tapped the thermos. “I don’t really have your lips on ice.” He whipped off the blanket and opened the thermos.

Lounds strained hard when he smelled the gasoline, separating the skin from under his forearms and making the stout chair groan. The gas was cold all over him, fumes filling his throat and they were rolling toward the center of the street

“Do you like being Graham’s pet, Freeeeedeeeee?”

Lit with a whump and shoved, sent rolling down on the Tattler, eeek, eeek, eeekeeekeeek the wheels.

The guard looked up as a scream blew the burning gag away. He saw the fireball coming, bouncing on the potholes, trailing smoke and sparks and the flames blown back like wings, disjointed reflections leaping along the shop windows.

It veered, struck a parked car and overturned in front of the building, one wheel spinning and flames through the spokes, blazing arms rising in the fighting posture of the burned.

The guard ran back into the lobby. He wondered if it would blow up, if he should get away from the windows. He pulled the fire alarm. What else? He grabbed the fire extinguisher off the wall and looked outside. It hadn’t blown up yet.

The guard approached cautiously through the greasy smoke spreading low over the pavement and, at last, sprayed foam on Freddy Lounds.

CHAPTER 22

The schedule called for Graham to leave the staked-out apartment in Washington at 5:45 A.M., well ahead of the morning rush.

Crawford called while he was shaving.

“Good morning.”

“Not so good,” Crawford said. “The Tooth Fairy got Lounds in Chicago.”

“Oh hell no.”

“He’s not dead yet and he’s asking for you. He can’t wait long.”

“I’ll go.”

“Meet me at the airport. United 245. It leaves in forty minutes. You can be back for the stakeout, if it’s still on.”