When at last Stevenson raised his head, his eyes were servings of bitter brew in cups of bone. As his gaze flowed to me, I was again chilled by an impression of inhuman malevolence, as I had been when he’d first stepped out of the gloom beside the marina office, but this time I knew why my harp-string nerves thrummed with fear. Briefly, at a certain angle, his liquid stare rippled with a yellow luminance similar to the eyeshine that many animals exhibit at night, a cold and mysterious inner light like nothing I had ever seen before in the eyes of man or woman.

25

The electric and electrifying radiance passed through Chief Stevenson’s eyes so fleetingly, as he turned to face me, that on any night before this one, I might have dismissed the phenomenon as merely a queer reflection of the instrument-panel lights. But since sundown, I had seen monkeys that were not merely monkeys, a cat that was somehow more than a cat, and I had waded through mysteries that flowed like rivers along the streets of Moonlight Bay, and I had learned to expect significance in the seemingly insignificant.

His eyes were inky again, glimmerless. The anger in his voice was now an undertow, while the surface current was gray despair and grief. “It’s all changed now, all changed, and no going back.”

“What’s changed?”

“I’m not who I used to be. I can hardly remember what I used to be like, the kind of man I was. It’s lost.”

I felt he was talking as much to himself as to me, grieving aloud for this loss of self that he imagined.

“I don’t have anything to lose. Everything that matters has been taken from me. I’m a dead man walking, Snow. That’s all I am. Can you imagine how that feels?”

“No.”

“Because even you, with your shitty life, hiding from the day, coming out only at night like some slug crawling out from under a rock—even you have reasons to live.”

Although the chief of police was an elected official in our town, Lewis Stevenson didn’t seem to be concerned about winning my vote.

I wanted to tell him to go copulate with himself. But there is a difference between showing no fear and begging for a bullet in the head.

As he turned his face away from me to gaze at the white sludge of fog sliding thickly across the windshield, that cold fire throbbed in his eyes again, a briefer and fainter flicker than before yet more disturbing because it could no longer be dismissed as imaginary.

Lowering his voice as though afraid of being overheard, he said, “I have terrible nightmares, terrible, full of sex and blood.”

I had not known exactly what to expect from this conversation; but revelations of personal torment would not have been high on my list of probable subjects.

“They started well over a year ago,” he continued. “At first they came only once a week, but then with increasing frequency. And at the start, for a while, the women in the nightmares were no one I’d ever seen in life, just pure fantasy figures. They were like those dreams you have during puberty, silken girls so ripe and eager to surrender…except that in these dreams, I didn’t just have sex with them….”

His thoughts seemed to drift with the bilious fog into darker territory.

Only his profile was presented to me, dimly lit and glistening with sour sweat, yet I glimpsed a savagery that made me hope that he would not favor me with a full-face view.

Lowering his voice further still, he said, “In these dreams, I beat them, too, punch them in the face, punch and punch and punch them until there’s nothing left of their faces, choke them until their tongues swell out of their mouths….”

As he had begun to describe his nightmares, his voice had been marked by dread. Now, in addition to this fear, an unmistakable perverse excitement rose in him, evident not only in his husky voice but also in the new tension that gripped his body.

“…and when they cry out in pain, I love their screams, the agony on their faces, the sight of their blood. So delicious. So exciting. I wake shivering with pleasure, swollen with need. And sometimes…though I’m fifty-two, for God’s sake, I cl**ax in my sleep or just as I’m waking.”

Orson dropped away from the security grille and retreated to the backseat.

I wished that I, too, could put more distance between myself and Lewis Stevenson. The cramped patrol car seemed to close around us, as though it were being squashed in one of those salvage-yard hydraulic crushers.

“Then Louisa, my wife, began to appear in the dreams…and my two…my two daughters. Janine. Kyra. They’re afraid of me in these dreams, and I give them every reason to be, because their terror excites me. I’m disgusted but…but also thrilled at what I’m doing with them, to them….”

The anger, the despair, and the perverse excitement were still to be detected in his voice, in his slow heavy breathing, in the hunch of his shoulders—and in the subtle but ghastly reconstruction of his face, obvious even in profile. But among those powerfully conflicted desires that were at war for control of his mind, there was also a desperate hope that he could avoid plunging into the abyss of madness and savagery on the brink of which he appeared to be so precariously balanced, and this hope was clearly expressed in the anguish that now became as evident in his voice and demeanor as were his anger, despair, and depraved need.

“The nightmares got so bad, the things I did in them so sick and filthy, so repulsive, that I was afraid to go to sleep. I’d stay awake until I was exhausted, until no amount of caffeine could keep me on my feet, until even an ice cube held against the back of my neck couldn’t stop my burning eyes from slipping shut. Then when I finally slept, my dreams would be more intense than ever, as though exhaustion drove me into sounder sleep, into a deeper darkness inside me where worse monsters lived. Rutting and slaughter, ceaseless and vivid, the first dreams I ever had in color, such intense colors, and sounds as well, their pleading voices and my pitiless replies, their screams and weeping, their convulsions and death rattles when I tore their throats out with my teeth even as I thrust into them.”

Lewis Stevenson seemed to see these hideous images where I could see only the lazily churning fog, as if the windshield before him were a screen on which his demented fantasies were projected.

“And after a while…I no longer fought sleep. For a time, I just endured it. Then somewhere along the way—I can’t remember the precise night—the dreams ceased to hold any terror for me and became purely enjoyable, when previously they inspired far more guilt than pleasure. Although at first I couldn’t admit it to myself, I began to look forward to bedtime. These women were so precious to me when I was awake, but when I slept…then…then I thrilled at the chance to debase them, humiliate them, torture them in the most imaginative ways. I no longer woke in fear from these nightmares…but in a strange bliss. And I’d lie in the dark, wondering how much better it might feel to commit these atrocities for real than just to dream of them. Merely thinking about acting out my dreams, I became aware of this awesome power flowing into me, and I felt so free, utterly free, as never before. In fact, it seemed as if I’d lived my life in huge iron manacles, wrapped in chains, weighted down by blocks of stone. It seemed that giving in to these desires wouldn’t be criminal, would have no moral dimension whatsoever. Neither right nor wrong. Neither good nor bad. But tremendously liberating.”

Either the air in the patrol car was growing increasingly stale or I was sickened by the thought of inhaling the same vapors that the chief exhaled: I’m not sure which. My mouth filled with a metallic taste, as if I had been sucking on a penny, my stomach cramped around a lump of something as cold as arctic rock, and my heart was sheathed in ice.

I couldn’t understand why Stevenson would lay bare his troubled soul to me, but I had a premonition that these confessions were only a prelude to a hateful revelation that I would wish I’d never heard. I wanted to silence him before he sprang that ultimate secret on me, but I could see he was powerfully compelled to relate these horrific fantasies—perhaps because I was the first to whom he had dared to unburden himself. There was no way to shut him up short of killing him.

“Lately,” he continued in a hungry whisper that would haunt my sleep for the rest of my life, “these dreams all focus on my granddaughter. Brandy. She’s ten. A pretty girl. A very pretty girl. So slim and pretty. The things I do to her in dreams. Ah, the things I do. You can’t imagine such merciless brutality. Such exquisitely vicious inventiveness. And when I wake up, I’m beyond exhilaration. Transcendent. In a rapture. I lie in bed, beside my wife, who sleeps on without guessing what strange thoughts obsess me, who can’t possibly ever know, and I thrum with power, with the awareness that absolute freedom is available to me any time I want to seize it. Any time. Next week. Tomorrow. Now.”

Overhead, the silent laurel spoke as, in quick succession, at least a double score of its pointed green tongues trembled with too great a weight of condensed fog. Each loosed its single watery note, and I twitched at the sudden rataplan of fat droplets beating on the car, half surprised that what streamed down the windshield and across the hood was not blood.

In my jacket pocket, I closed my right hand more tightly around the Glock. After what Stevenson had told me, I couldn’t imagine any circumstances in which he could allow me to leave this car alive. I shifted slightly in my seat, the first of several small moves that shouldn’t make him suspicious but would put me in a position to shoot him through my jacket, without having to draw the pistol from the pocket.

“Last week,” the chief whispered, “Kyra and Brandy came over for dinner with us, and I had trouble taking my eyes off the girl. When I looked at her, in my mind’s eye she was naked, as she is in the dreams. So slim. So fragile. Vulnerable. I became aroused by her vulnerability, by her tenderness, her weakness, and had to hide my condition from Kyra and Brandy. From Louisa. I wanted…wanted to…needed to…”

His sudden sobbing startled me: Waves of grief and despair swept through him once more, as they had washed through him when first he had begun to speak. His eerie needfulness, his obscene hunger, was drowned in this tide of misery and self-hatred.

“A part of me wants to kill myself,” Stevenson said, “but only the smaller part, the smaller and weaker part, the fragment that’s left of the man I used to be. This predator I’ve become will never kill himself. Never. He’s too alive.”

His left hand, clutched into a fist, rose to his open mouth, and he crammed it between his teeth, biting so fiercely on his clenched fingers that I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had drawn his own blood; he was biting and choking back the most wretched sobs that I’d ever heard.

In this new person that Lewis Stevenson seemed to have become, there was none of the calm and steady bearing that had always made him such a credible figure of authority and justice. At least not tonight, not in this bleak mood that plagued him. Raw emotion appeared always to be flowing through him, one current or another, without any intervals of tranquil water, the tide always running, battering.

My fear of him subsided to make room for pity. I almost reached out to put a comforting hand on his shoulder, but I restrained myself because I sensed that the monster I’d been listening to a moment ago had not been vanquished or even chained.

Lowering his fist from his mouth, turning his head toward me, Stevenson revealed a face wrenched by such abysmal torment, by such agony of the heart and mind, that I had to look away.

He looked away, too, facing the windshield again, and as the laurel shed the scattershot distillate of fog, his sobs faded until he could speak. “Since last week, I’ve been making excuses to visit Kyra, to be around Brandy.” A tremor distorted his words at first, but it quickly faded, replaced by the hungry voice of the soulless troll. “And sometimes, late at night, when this damn mood hits me, when I get to feeling so cold and hollow inside that I want to scream and never stop screaming, I think the way to fill the emptiness, the only way to stop this awful gnawing in my gut…is to do what makes me happy in the dreams. And I’m going to do it, too. Sooner or later, I’m going to do it. Sooner than later.” The tide of emotion had now turned entirely from guilt and anguish to a quiet but demonic glee. “I’m going to do it and do it. I’ve been looking for girls Brandy’s age, just nine or ten years old, as slim as she is, as pretty as she is. It’ll be safer to start with someone who has no connection to me. Safer but no less satisfying. It’s going to feel good. It’s going to feel so good, the power, the destruction, throwing off all the shackles they make you live with, tearing down the walls, being totally free, totally free at last. I’m going to bite her, this girl, when I get her alone, I’m going to bite her and bite her. In the dreams I lick their skin, and it’s got a salty taste, and then I bite them, and I can feel their screams vibrating in my teeth.”

Even in the dim light, I could see the manic pulse throbbing in his temples. His jaw muscles bulged, and the corner of his mouth twitched with excitement. He seemed to be more animal than human—or something less than both.

My hand clutched the Glock so ferociously that my arm ached all the way to my shoulder. Abruptly I realized that my finger had tightened on the trigger and that I was in danger of unintentionally squeezing off a shot, though I had not yet fully adjusted my position to bring the muzzle toward Stevenson. With considerable effort, I managed to ease off the trigger.

“What made you like this?” I asked.

As he turned his head to me, the transient luminosity shimmered through his eyes again. His gaze, when the eyeshine passed, was dark and murderous. “A little delivery boy,” he said cryptically. “Just a little delivery boy that wouldn’t die.”

“Why tell me about these dreams, about what you’re going to do to some girl?”

“Because, you damn freak, I’ve got to give you an ultimatum, and I want you to understand how serious it is, how dangerous I am, how little I have to lose and how much I’ll enjoy gutting you if it comes to that. There’s others who won’t touch you—”

“Because of who my mother was.”

“So you know that much already?”

“But I don’t know what it means. Who was my mother in all this?”

Instead of answering, Stevenson said, “There’s others who won’t touch you and who don’t want me to touch you, either. But if I have to, I will. You keep pushing your nose into this, and I’ll smash your skull open, scoop your brain out, and toss it in the bay for fish food. Think I won’t?”