'Who pays your rent?' he asked.

'There is no rent.'

'Who owns the house?'

'A company.'

'What company?'

'What can I do for you?'

'What company?'

'Let me do something for you.'

'What company?' he persisted.

'John Wilkes Enterprises.'

'Who's John Wilkes?'

'I don't know.'

'You've never had a man here named John?'

'No.'

'How do you know about this John Wilkes Enterprises?'

'I get a check from them every month. A very nice check.'

Shakily, Dan got to his feet.

Regine was visibly disappointed.

He looked around, spotted the suitcases by the door, which he had noticed when he'd first come in. 'Going away?'

'For a few days.'

'Where?'

'Las Vegas.'

'Are you running, Regine?'

'What would I be running from?'

'People are getting killed because of what happened in that gray room.'

'But I don't know what happened in the gray room, and I don't care,' she said. 'So I'm safe.'

Staring down at her, Dan realized that Regine Savannah Hoffritz had a gray room all of her own. She carried it with her wherever she went, for her gray room was where the real Regine was locked away, trapped, imprisoned.

He said, 'Regine, you need help.'

'I need to be what you want.'

'No. You need—'

'I'm fine.'

'You need counseling.'

'I'm free. Willy taught me how to be free.'

'Free from what?'

'Responsibility. Fear. Hope. Free from everything.'

'Willy didn't free you. He enslaved you.'

'You don't understand.'

'He was a sadist.'

'There's nothing wrong with that.'

'He got inside your mind, twisted you. We're not talking about some half-baked psychology professor, Regine. This lunatic was a heavyweight. This was a guy who worked for the Pentagon, researching behavior modification, developing new methods of brainwashing. Ego-repressing drugs, Regine. Subliminal persuasion. Willy was to Big Brother what Merlin was to King Arthur. Except Willy did bad magic, Regine. He transformed you into ... into this ... into a masochist, for his amusement.'

'And that's how he freed me,' she said serenely. 'You see, when you no longer fear pain, when you learn to love pain, then you can't be afraid of anything anymore. That's why I'm free.'

Dan wanted to shake her, but he knew that shaking her would do no good. Quite the opposite. She would only beg for more.

He wanted to get her in front of a sympathetic judge and have her committed without her consent, so she could receive psychiatric treatment. But he wasn't related to her; he was virtually a stranger to her; no judge would play along with him; it just wasn't done that way. There seemed to be nothing he could do for her.

She said, 'You know something interesting? I think maybe Willy's not really dead.'

'Oh, he's dead, all right.'

'Maybe not.'

'I saw the body. We got a positive ID match from dental records and fingerprints.'

'Maybe,' she said. 'But ... well, I get the feeling he's still alive. Sometimes I sense him out there ... I feel him. It's strange. I can't explain it. But that's why I'm not as broken up as I might have been. Because I'm not convinced he's dead. Somehow, he's still ... out there.'

Her self-image and her primary reasons for continuing to live were so dependent upon Willy Hoffritz, upon the prospect of receiving his praise and his approval or at least upon hearing his voice on the telephone every once in a while, that she was never going to be able to accept his death. Dan suspected that he could take her to the morgue, confront her with the bloody corpse, force her to place her hands upon the cold dead flesh, make her stare into the grotesquely battered countenance, shove the coroner's report in front of her—and nevertheless fail to convince her that Hoffritz had been killed. Hoffritz had gotten inside her, had shattered her psyche, then had rejoined the pieces in a pattern that was more pleasing to himself, with himself as the bonding agent holding her together. If Regine accepted the reality of his death, there would be no glue binding her anymore, and she might collapse into insanity. Her only hope—or so it must seem to her—was to believe that Willy was still alive.

'Yes, he's out there,' she said again. 'I feel it. Somehow, somewhere, he's out there.'

Feeling utterly ineffectual, loathing his powerlessness, Dan headed toward the door.

Behind him, Regine rose quickly from the sofa and said, 'Please. Wait.'

He glanced back at her.

She said, 'You could ... have me.'

'No, Regine.'

'Do anything to me.'

'No.'

'I'll be your animal.'

He continued to the door.

She said, 'Your little animal.'

He resisted the urge to run.

She caught up with him as he opened the door. Her perfume was subtle but effective. She put one hand on his shoulder and said, 'I like you.'

'Where are your folks, Regine?'

'You make me hot.'

'Your mother and father? Where do they live?'

She put her slender fingers to his lips. They were warm.

She traced the outline of his mouth.

He pushed her hand away.

She said, 'I really, really like you.'

'Maybe your folks could help you through this.'

'I like you.'

'Regine—'

'Hurt me. Hurt me very badly.'

He pushed her away from him as a compassionate hypochondriac might push away a grasping leper: firmly, with distaste, with fear of contagion, but with a regard for the delicacy of her condition.

She said, 'When Willy put me in the hospital, he came to visit me every day. He arranged a private room for me and always closed the door when he came, so we'd be alone. When we were alone, he kissed my bruises. Every day he came and kissed my bruises. You can't know how good his lips felt on my bruises, Lieutenant. One kiss, and each spot of soreness—each little tender contusion—was transformed. Instead of pain, each bruise was filled with pleasure. It was as if ... as if a clitoris sprang up in the place of every bruise, and when he kissed me I cl**axed, again and again.

Dan got the hell out of there and slammed the door behind him.

26

With a cold and gusty wind blowing scraps of litter along the night streets, and with the portent of rain heavy in the air, Earl Benton took Laura and Melanie to an apartment on the first floor of a rambling three-story complex in Westwood, south of Wilshire Boulevard. It had a living room, a dining alcove, a kitchen, one bedroom, and one bath. The place didn't seem quite as small as it actually was, because big windows looked out on a lushly landscaped courtyard which, at that time of night, was illuminated by blue- and green-filtered spotlights concealed throughout the shrubbery.

The apartment was owned by California Paladin and was used as a 'safe house.' The agency was occasionally hired to retrieve teenagers and college-age kids from fanatical religious cults with which they had become entangled; immediately upon being freed, they were brought to that apartment, where they underwent several days of deprogramming before returning to their parents. The safe house also had been used as a secure way station for wives who were threatened by estranged husbands, and on several occasions high corporate executives in a variety of industries had met there for days at a time to plan secret and hostile take-over bids of other companies because they could be free of worry about electronic eavesdropping and corporate espionage. California Paladin had also once stashed a Baptist minister in those rooms after a youth gang in south-central L.A. had put out a contract on his life to repay him for testimony against one of their brothers. A rock-music star had passed through while dodging a particularly onerous subpoena in an expensive civil suit. And a big-name actress had needed just this degree of total privacy in just such an unlikely location as this, in order to recuperate from secret cancer surgery that, if revealed, would have cost her roles in upcoming pictures; producers were reluctant to hire stars who would be ineligible for completion bonds and who might get sick or even die halfway through filming.

Melanie and Laura would make use of those quiet, modest rooms, at least for the night. Laura hoped that the hideaway would be as safe from the strange force pursuing them as it was from youth gangs and process servers.

Earl turned on the heat and went into the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee.

Laura tried to interest Melanie in some hot chocolate, but the girl wanted none. Melanie moved like a sleepwalker to the largest chair in the living room, climbed onto it, curled her legs beneath her, and sat staring down at her hands, which lethargically pulled and rubbed and scratched and massaged each other. Her fingers interlaced and knotted and then untied themselves and then knotted together again. She stared at her hands so raptly that it almost began to seem as if she didn't realize that they were a part of her but thought, instead, that they were two small, busy animals at play in her lap.

The coffee countered the chill they had gotten while coming from the windswept parking lot to the apartment, but it could not relieve that other chill—the one caused not by physical stimuli but by their unexpected and unwanted encounter with the unknown.

While Earl called his office to report their move from the house in Sherman Oaks, Laura stood at the living-room window, holding the coffee mug in both hands, breathing in the fragrant vapors. As she stared out at the lakes of shadow, at the sprays and pools of green and blue light, the first fat droplets of rain began to snap against the palm fronds.

Somewhere in the night, something was stalking Melanie, something beyond human understanding, an invulnerable creature that left its victims looking as if they had gone through half the cycle in a trash compactor before someone had pushed the emergency-stop button. Laura's university degrees, her doctorate in psychology, might make it possible for her to eventually bring Melanie out of quasi-autistic withdrawal, but nothing taught and nothing learned in any university could help her deal with It. Was it demon, spirit, psychic force? Those things did not exist. Right? Did not exist. Yet ... what had Dylan and Hoffritz unleashed? And why?

Dylan had believed in the supernatural. Periodically, he had been obsessed with one aspect of the occult or another, and during those periods he had been more intense and nervous and argumentative than usual. In fact, when thus obsessed, he reminded Laura of her mother because his adamant belief in—and constant preaching about—the reality of the occult was akin to the religious fanaticism and superstitious mania that had made Beatrice such a terror; it was this, as much as anything, that had driven Laura to divorce, for she could not abide anything that reminded her of her fear-ridden childhood.

Now, she tried to remember specific enthusiasms that had gripped Dylan, theories that had obsessed him. She strove to recall something that might explain what was happening now, but she could not remember anything important, because she had always refused to listen to him when he had spoken of those things that had seemed, to her, like the sheerest flights of fancy—or madness.

In reaction to her mother's irrationality and gullibility, Laura had built a life strictly on logic and reason, trusting in only those things that she could see, hear, touch, smell, and feel. She did not believe that a cracked mirror meant seven years of bad luck, and she did not throw spilled salt over her shoulder. Given the choice, she would always walk under a ladder rather than around it, merely to prove that there was nothing of her mother in her. She didn't believe in devils, demons, possession, and exorcism. In her heart, she felt there was a God, but she didn't attend church or identify with any particular religion. She didn't read ghost stories, had no interest in movies about vampires and werewolves. She didn't believe in psychics, premonitions, clairvoyant visions.

She was profoundly unprepared for the events of the past twenty-four hours.

While logic and reason made the most solid foundation on which to construct a life, she realized that the mortar ought to be mixed with a sense of wonder, with a respect for the unknown, or at least leavened with open-mindedness. Otherwise, it would be brittle mortar that would dry, crack, and flake away. Her mother's extreme reliance on religion and superstition was undoubtedly sick. But perhaps it wasn't wise to have rushed to the other extreme of the philosophical spectrum. The universe seemed considerably more complicated than it had been before.

Something was out there.

Something she couldn't understand.

And it wanted Melanie.

But even as she stood by the window and studied the rainy night with a new respect for things mysterious and uncanny, her mind sought more rational explanations, tangible villains of flesh and blood. She heard Earl talking on the telephone with someone at his office, and suddenly it occurred to her that no one except California Paladin knew where she and her daughter were. For a terrible moment, she felt that she had done something very wrong, very stupid, in allowing herself to be spirited away from the watchful eyes of the FBI, from contact with friends and neighbors and the police. Melanie had not been targeted solely by the unseen It of which they had been warned, but by real people too, people like that hired killer who had been found in the hospital parking lot. And what if those people had contacts inside California Paladin? What if Earl himself was the executioner?

Stop!

She took a deep breath. Another.

She was standing on a slope of slippery emotions, sliding toward hysteria. For Melanie's sake, if not her own, she had to maintain control of herself.

27

Dan stepped out of Regine's house and slammed the door behind him, but he didn't head down the walk. He waited, listening at the door, and his suspicion was confirmed when he heard a man's voice: She hadn't been alone.

The man was furious. He shouted, and she called him Eddie and responded in a meek and wheedling voice. The flat, hard, unmistakable sound of a slap was followed by her cry—a bleat composed partly of pain, partly of fear, but also partly of pleasure and excitement.

Around Dan, the wind huffed noisily and the branches of the trees were scraped against one another, and it wasn't possible to hear exactly what was being said in the house. He picked up enough words to know that Eddie was angry because Regine had revealed too much. In a miserable, servile voice, Regine tried to explain that she'd had no choice but to tell Dan what she knew; Dan hadn't asked for answers, he had demanded answers—and, more important, he had demanded in a way that pushed all her buttons. She was an obedient creature who found meaning, purpose, and joy only in doing what she was told to do. Eddie and his friends liked her that way, she said, wanted her that way, she said, and it wasn't possible for her to be that way with them and not that way with other people. 'Don't you understand, Eddie? Don't you understand?' He might have understood, but her explanation did nothing to ameliorate his fury. He slapped her again, again, and her tortured but dismayingly eager cry did not bear contemplation.