Chronic fear

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Roland had the dream again, the one in which he was running through a maze and the jagged metal sides of it were closing in. Something terrible was chasing him, and it wasn’t a creature of bone and blood that might be fought and defeated.

No, this was a texture, a spongy, nameless dread, something that would overwhelm him and consume him in its gray depths.

Even as he fled, he suspected that whatever waited ahead wasn’t so welcoming, either. But he could only flee in one direction, and he was about to turn that last terrible corner Roland awoke in a cold sweat, his heart pounding.

He stared up into the darkness for a moment, acclimating to the physical world and the cool spring night. Gradually, his senses settled and he was aware of the curtains shifting softly by the open window, the dim red glow of the alarm clock, the faint smell of mildew caused by the mountain humidity.

He listened for Wendy’s breathing, still nearly paralyzed from the nightmare, his muscles quivering. The unease had accompanied him on his escape from his sleeping mind, and he half expected that odd spongy texture to drop from the cloaked ceiling and cover his face.

Roland reached out in the darkness to touch Wendy, but her side of the bed was empty. He rolled toward her until he came to the edge of the mattress. “Wendy?” he whispered.

He sat up, feeling for the night table. After retrieving the revolver, he stood with the sheet wrapped around him. They hadn’t made love, so the sheet was dry and cool. But lately love had become something that wasn’t just made, it was jammed together with a frenzied desperation.

“Wendy,” he whispered again.

His mind raced down several avenues, all of them dead ends. She might have gone for a glass of water, but the bathroom was dark, no light showing in the crack beneath the door. No lights were on downstairs, either. If she were in the cabin, he’d easily be able to hear her.

That fucking liar.

He wasn’t sure which liar he meant, Wendy or the agent who called himself “Gundersson.” Roland hadn’t completely bought the agent’s story, but he figured the best approach was to play along while the truth revealed itself.

But the truth was a moving target.

And people could lie to themselves better than they could lie to others. Especially drunks like Roland.

There was another possibility, the one Gundersson had hinted at, of those “powerful elements” who might also be keeping an eye on them. Who might even abduct or kill them.

Unless Wendy is already on their side.

He crept down the dark stairs, the sheet trailing behind him. From below, he probably looked like a mad ghost, Hamlet’s father made restless with betrayal.

The moon was high enough that it cast a blue glow over the couch, table, and refrigerator. Roland tiptoed to the door, ears straining for any sound. A porch board creaked outside.

He pointed the gun to the ceiling in a “ready” position and quietly opened the door. Easing it ajar, he put his face against the jamb to survey the porch.

Wendy stood in her bathrobe, painting by the light of the moon. The canvas he’d damaged earlier was now clotted with dark pocks of acrylic. She stabbed the brush against the canvas, dug the tip into the paint on her palette, and drove more color on with a wet slap.

Roland checked the perimeter of the yard. Moonlight illuminated skeins of silver mist that clung to the mountains. The world looked ancient, a faraway fantasy land where monstrous beasts might roll out of the fog and magic ruled the moment.

“Wendy?” he whispered.

“Shh,” she said. “I almost remember the secret message.”

“What secret message?”

“If I keep painting, I might uncover it.”

Roland stepped onto the porch, wondering if Gundersson was watching from the concealment of the forest. The “powerful elements” might be watching as well. If he turned on the porch light, they would be exposed.

Wendy painted in a trance, dipping and jabbing, dipping and jabbing, a change from her usual broad, measured stroke. It almost looked like calligraphy, the small splashes arranging themselves around the perimeter of the canvas.

“That’s not the monkey,” Roland said, coming up behind her, attracted by her body heat. He hugged his sheet more tightly around his shoulders, keeping the gun concealed beneath his opposite armpit.

“It’s the key to the Monkey House,” she said, voice vacant.

“I thought you didn’t remember the Monkey House.” He checked the woods again for movement. If not for the strong scent of the acrylic paint and Wendy’s body, he might have still been dreaming. Her flesh smelled raw and pungent, like a wild animal’s. She hadn’t smelled like that since…

Since the last time we made love.

“How long have you been out here?” he asked.

“How much of what you told Gundersson was true?” For the first time, she spoke with distinct clarity, as if finally aware of his presence.

“Most of it,” he said.

“And about me and Sebastian Briggs?”

“Who the hell knows? Briggs scrambled our memories. But I’ve been piecing it back together as best I can.”

She turned, her robe falling open. She was moist from more than the mist. Wendy occasionally painted in the nude, claiming that if models could strip for class, so could she. She swayed as if slow-dancing with her palette and brush.

“Briggs told me something,” she said. “It’s all I can remember from that night.”

She hadn’t been with Briggs long in the Monkey House, maybe fifteen minutes in the dark. He might have seduced her-no, Roland thought, assaulted her, not seduced her-in such a short time, but it’s possible their relationship had been deeper eleven years ago, during the first Halcyon trials. She hadn’t talked about it back then, and he was foolish enough and deeply enough in love not to press her on it.

“Briggs was going to kill us,” Roland said. “We did what we had to in order to survive.”

She shook her head. Her eyes were onyx, her pupils glinting amid her oval Asian face. “No, it was something to do with Seethe. He showed me.”

“Showed you?” Roland found himself staring at the inner curves of her exposed breasts, where a discolored spot suggested a bruise. Someone had been playing rough.

Wendy pointed to the canvas. “Letters. Shapes. He arranged them in a diagram.”

Roland strained against the dimness and now saw more of a pattern to her markings. A series of curls and short slashes were clotted against the canvas, covering the original form of the huddled figure, as if she were belatedly tattooing it.

It was difficult to discern the new markings, aside from their damp thickness, because the weak light blended the colors into browns and tans. But he made out what looked like a C and several crooked H marks.

“You’re trying to spell something?” he said, recalling the “CRO” initials of the drug conglomerate that had been Briggs’s financial backer. Those initials had been in the motel room where he’d awoken to find a corpse in the bathroom. He still didn’t know who she was or who had really killed her. And he still wasn’t fully convinced of his innocence.

“No.” Again she shook her head, and the dangling cotton belt of her robe brushed gently against the porch. Besides the insects and the distant tinkle of the creek, the night was still. The mist around them seemed to thicken.

“You suddenly remember something from a year ago, but you don’t remember what it is,” he said, feeling his anger and mistrust rising.

“Something you told Gundersson jarred my memory,” she said. “When you said Sebastian took me to his office.”

He lowered his voice, unconsciously squeezing the barrel of the pistol. “Nothing happened in the office.”

“Sebastian showed me a piece of paper. It had markings on it, letters. He took my hand and guided my fingers over them, again and again.”

Roland didn’t know what angered him more, her referring to him as “Sebastian” as if he were an old friend, or the image of the scientist’s filthy hands on her flesh as he leaned over her. He took a couple of steps closer to the canvas. Now he could see another set of symbols.

“I thought he was…playing nasty…but he was teaching me,” she said.

They were skewed and uneven, but the patterns appeared to be a set of linked hexagons. An F tilted to one side, and an S wound like a sick snake across the center of the painting.

“Did Briggs tell you what these were?” Roland asked.

Wendy stood back and studied the marks as if she had just painted over the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. “It looks like graffiti,” she said.

“But you were painting from memory.” Roland understood how absurd that statement was. “Memory” no longer had any reliable meaning for the Monkey House survivors.

“The key,” Wendy said. “That’s what he kept saying.”

The key.

A fine steam rose from her flesh, heat leaving her body and rising to merge with the mist. He went to her and closed her robe. The gun bumped against her hip.

“Maybe it’s a code of some kind,” Roland said. “All this secret-agent shit, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“But why would he tell me?”

Because you were his little pet, his plaything, his lover.

But he couldn’t think that way, because then he’d start raging, and the Seethe would rise from its slumber and own him. “He couldn’t trust Alexis or Mark. David and Anita were already head cases. And he knew I hated his guts.”

She turned her back to him and studied the painting. He pressed himself behind her, one arm wrapped around her stomach. The back of her neck smelled like the forest, wild and green and filthy with rot.

“The key,” Roland said. “Whatever it is, we can’t let Gundersson find out.”

“I still don’t know what it means.”

That’s when the pattern coalesced into something both familiar and frightening, as Roland recalled his rudimentary high school chemistry. The markings represented a diagram of a molecular structure, and the letters were the elements from the periodic chart.

Briggs had wanted to store the diagram in a safe place, in case he needed to recall it later. Maybe Wendy wasn’t exactly safe, but she was a data storage unit that no one would suspect. Because she was the artist of the bunch, the least interested in nuts and bolts and how things fit together but the one most visually adept. And the only one Briggs could trust.

And now Wendy had unearthed a compound that half a dozen people had died to control. Wendy had drawn a secret chemical formula.

Wendy had drawn Seethe.