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bloodless sections.Lovely, almost human of me. Now that was settled: What
next? I could callRita, perhaps take in a movie, or a walk in the park. Or,
let's see maybe, I don't know . . . save Deborah? Yes, that sounded like fun.
But
How?
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I had a few clues, of course. I knew the way he thought after all, I had been
thinking that way myself. And he wanted me to find him. He had been sending
that message loud and clear. If I could put all the distracting stupidity out
of my head all the dreams and New Age fairy-chasing and everything else then I
was certain that I could arrive at the logical and correct location. He would
not have taken Deb unless he thought he had given me everything a clever
monster would need to know in order to find him.
All right then, clever Dexter findhim. Track down the Deb-napper. Let your
relentless logic slash across the back trail like an icy wolf pack. Kick the
giant brain into high gear; let the wind race across the rocketing synapses of
your powerful mind as it speeds to its beautiful, inevitable conclusion. Go,
Dexter, go!
Dexter?
Hello? Is anybody in there?
Apparently not.I heard no wind from rocketing synapses. I was as empty as if
I had never been. There was no swirl of debilitating emotions, of course,
since I didn't have any emotions to swirl. But the result was just as
daunting. I was as numb and drained as if I really could feel something.
Deborah was gone. She was in terrible danger of becoming a fascinating work of
performance art. And her only hope of maintaining any kind of existence beyond
a series of still pictures tacked up on a police lab board was her battered,
brain-dead brother.Poor dog-dumb Dexter, sitting in a chair with his brain
running in circles, chasing its tail, howling at the moon.
I took a deep breath. Of all the times I had ever needed to be me, this was
one of the foremost. I concentrated very hard and steadied me, and as a small
amount of Dexter returned to fill the echo in my brain cavity, I realized just
how human and stupid I had become. There was really no great mystery here. In
fact, it was patently obvious. My friend had done everything but send a formal
invitation reading,  The honor of your presence is requested at the
vivisection of your sister.Black heart optional. But even this small blob of
logic was wiped out of my throbbing skull by a new thought that wormed its way
in, oozing rotten logic.
I had been asleep when Deb disappeared.
Could that mean that once again I had done it without knowing it? What if I
had already taken Deb apart somewhere, stacked the pieces in some small, cold
storage room and
Storage room?Where had that come from?
The closed-in feeling . . . the rightness of the closet at the hockey rink .
. . the cool air blowing across my spine. . . Why did that matter?Why did I
keep coming back to that? Because no matter what else happened, I did; I
returned to those same illogical sense memories, and there was no reason for
them that I could see. What did it mean? And why did I actually give a single
hummingbird's fart what it meant? Because whether it meant something or not,
it was all I had to go on. I had to find a place that matched that sense of
cool and pressing rightness. There was simply no other way to go: find the
box. And there I would find Deb, too, and find either myself or my not-self.
Wasn't that simple?
No. It wasn't simple at all, just simpleminded. It made absolutely no sense
to pay any attention to the ghostly secret messages floating up at me from my
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dreams. Dreams had no existence in reality, left no Freddy Krueger crossover
claw marks on our wake-up world. I couldn't very well dash out of the house
and drive aimlessly around in a psychic funk. I was a cool and logical being.
And so it was in a cool and logical manner that I locked my apartment door and
strolled to the car. I still had no idea where I was going, but the need to
get there quickly had grabbed the reins and whipped me down to the building's
parking area, where I kept my car. But twenty feet away from my trusty vehicle
I slammed to a stop as though I had run into an invisible wall.
The dome light was on.
I had certainly not left it on it had been daylight when I parked, and I
could see that the doors were closed tightly. A casual thief would have left
the door ajar to avoid the noise from closing it.
I approached slowly, not at all sure what I expected to see or whether I
really wanted to see it. From five feet away I could see something in the
passenger seat. I circled the car carefully and peered down at it, my nerves
tingling, and peeked in. And there it was.
Barbie again.I was getting quite a collection. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]