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A vision of a newspaper flashed through his e was the cause of his anger He squinted as if narrowing his eyes would help hier reht consciously force a laugh beyond its natural span just because the sound of laughter buoyed hi nerve!"

He had no idea where the exclamation had come from, just as he had no idea why he had said the nae in Newport Beach, several weeks ago, when these weird experiences had begun

He was so abruptly energized by anger that he turned away from his collection and stalked across the enorondolas had once plunged, and out into the night, where the ain He could not stand still He had to move, move He walked the abandonedfor, curious about ould happen next

Disjointed ih to allow conte cabinet, a hand-written letter, a telephone … He walked faster and faster, pivoting suddenly onto new avenues or into narrower passageways between the decaying buildings, in a fruitless search for a connection that would link him more clearly with the source of the pictures that appeared and swiftly faded froht fell through the linted off the track in such a way as to make those twin ribbons of steel look like rails of ice When he lifted his gaze to stare at the ry excla river!"

A woh he knew that her voice had arisen froo turned in search of her anyway She was there In a bathrobe Standing just this side of a doorway that had no right to be where it ith no walls surrounding it To the left of the doorway, to the right of it, and above it, there was only the night The silent amusement park But beyond the doorway, past the woman who stood in it, hat appeared to be the entrance foyer of a house, a s up to a second floor

She was the woman he had thus far seen only in his dreams, first in a wheelchair and hway As he took a step toward her, she said, You’ll wake Regina

He halted, not because he was afraid of waking Regina, whoever the hell she was, and not because he still didn’t want to get his hands on the woman, which he did--she was so vital--but because he becaht-Zone door, a ht air It was filled with his reflection, except that it was not him but a e, lean and fit, his face contorted in rage

The look of rage gave way to one of shock and disgust, and both Vassago and the man in the vision turned from the mirror to the woo said

Lindsey The nae in Newport Beach

Until now, he had not linked it to this woman who, nameless, had appeared so often in his recent drea of his own volition this ti, and that seemed to shatter the visionThe mirror and the reflection in it flew apart in a billion shards, as did the doorway and the dark-eyed woht, Vassago reached out with one hand toward the spot where the woed to touch her So alive, she was "Lindsey" He wanted to cut her open and enfold her beating heart in both hands, until itsslowed … slowed … slowed to a full stop He wanted to be holding her heart when life retreated from it and death took possession

As swiftly as the flood of rage had poured into Hatch, it drained out of hies of the newspaper and threw theain at the story about the truck driver Cooper was pathetic, a self-destructive loser ould bring his own punishment down upon hi that Hatch would have done to hiathered the letters that were scattered on the floor in front of the filing cabinet She returned them to the file folder labeled MISCELLANEOUS BUSINESS

The letter from Cooper was on the desk beside the telephone When Hatch picked it up, he looked at the hand-written address at the top, above the telephone nuer returned But it was a pale spirit of the real thing, and in a moment it vanished like a revenant He took the letter to Lindsey and put it in the file folder, which she reinserted into the cabinet

Standing in ht breeze, in the shadow of the roller coaster, Vassago waited for additional visions

He was intrigued by what had transpired, though not surprised He had traveled Beyond He knew another world existed, separated from this one by the flimsiest of curtains Therefore, events of a supernatural nature did not astonish himatic episode had reached a conclusion, one e of a hand-written letter White, lined paper Blue ink At the top was a name William X Cooper And an address in the city of Tustin

"Pitch hio muttered, and knew soer that had overcome him when he ith his collection in the funhouse, and which later seemed to link hier he had embraced and aer it was and why he could feel it, but also because anger was the yeast in the bread of violence, and violence was the staple of his diet

Froarage Two cars waited there

Morton Redlow’s Pontiac was parked in the farthest corner, in the deepest shadows Vassago had not used it since last Thursday night, when he had killed Redlow and later the blonde Though he believed the fog had provided adequate cover, he was concerned that the Pontiac limpsed by witnesses who had seen the woed to return to the land of endless night and eternal da his own kind, but he did not want to be gunned down by police until his collection was finished If his offering was incomplete when he died, he believed that he would be deemed as yet unfit for Hell and would be pulled back into the world of the living to start another collection

The second car was a pearl-gray Honda that had belonged to a woman named Renata Desseux, who-hts after the fiasco with the blonde She, instead of the neo-punker named Lisa, had become the latest addition to his collection

He had removed the license plates from the Honda, tossed them in the trunk, and later replaced them with plates stolen off an old Ford on the outskirts of Santa Ana Besides, Hondas were so ubiquitous that he felt safe and anonyrounds and out of the county’s largely unpopulated eastern hills toward the panoraht that filled the lowlands as far south and as far north as he could see, from the hills to the ocean

Urban sprawl

Civilization