supposedly unconnected worlds of sleep and waking made telling them apart impossible, as if anything that could show up in my sleep and then appear on my screen at work was too powerful to resist and I had no chance of fighting it, had simply to watch as it dragged me down and under into the flames.
There was no black, mighty voice inside me to turn me into steel and fling me like a spear at whatever this was. I was alone, afraid, helpless, and clueless; Dexter in the dark, with the bogeyman and all his unknown minions hiding under the bed and getting ready to pull me out of this world and into the burning land of shrieking, terror-filled pain.
With a motion that was far from graceful I lunged across my desk and yanked the computer’s power cord from the wall and, breathing rapidly and looking like someone had attached elec-trodes to my muscles, I jerked backward into my chair again, so quick and clumsy that the plug on the end of the cord whipped back and snapped me on the forehead just above the left eyebrow.
For several minutes I did nothing but breathe and watch as the sweat rolled off my face and plopped onto my desk. I had no idea why I had leaped off my chair like a gaffed barracuda and yanked the cord out of the wall, beyond the fact that for some reason it had felt like I had to do it or die, and I couldn’t understand where that notion came from, either, but come it had, barreling out of the new darkness between my ears and crushing me with its urgency.
And so I sat in my quiet office and gaped at a dead screen, wondering who I was and what had just happened.
I was never afraid. Fear was an emotion and Dexter did not have them. To be afraid of a Web site was so far beyond stupid and pointless that there were no adjectives for it. And I did not act irrationally, except when imitating human beings.
So why had I pulled the plug, and why were my hands trembling, all from a cheerful little tune and a cartoon cow?
There were no answers, and I was no longer sure I wanted to find them.
I drove home, convinced that I was being followed, even though the rearview mirror stayed empty the whole way.
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The other really was quite special, resilient in a way that the Watcher had not seen in quite some time. This was proving to be far more interesting than some of the ones in the past. He began to feel something that might even be called kinship with the other. Sad, really. If only things had worked out differently. But there was a kind of beauty to the inevitable fate of the other, and that was good, too.
Even this far behind the other’s car, he could see the signs of nerves starting to fray: speeding up and slowing down, fiddling with the mirrors. Good. Uneasy was just the beginning. He needed to move the other far beyond uneasy, and he would. But first it was essential to make sure the other knew what was coming. And so far, in spite of the clues, he did not seem to have figured it out.
Very well, then. The Watcher would simply repeat the pattern until the other recognized just what sort of power was after him. After that, the other would have no choice. He would come like a happy lamb to the slaughter.
Until then, even the watching had purpose. Let him know he was watched. It would do him no good, even if he saw the face watching him.
Faces can change. But the watching would not.
T W E N T Y
Of course there was no sleep for me that night. The next day, Sunday, passed in a haze of fatigue and anxiety. I took Cody and Astor to a nearby park and sat on a bench while I tried to make sense of the pile of uncooperative information and conjecture I had come up with so far. The pieces refused to come together into any kind of picture that made sense. Even if I hammered them into a semi-coherent theory, it told me nothing that would help me understand how to find my Passenger.
The best I could come up with was a sort of half-formed notion that the Dark Passenger and others like it had been hanging around for at least three thousand years. But why mine should flee from any other was impossible to say—especially since I had encountered others before with no more reaction than raised hackles. My notion of the new daddy lion seemed particularly far-fetched in the pleasant sunlight of the park, against the background of the children twittering threats at one another. Statistically speaking, about half of them had new daddies, based on the divorce rate, and they seemed to be thriving.
I let despair wash over me, a feeling that seemed slightly absurd DEXTER IN THE DARK
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in the lovely Miami afternoon. The Passenger was gone, I was alone, and the only solution I could come up with was to take lessons in Aramaic. I could only hope that a chunk of frozen waste-water from a passing airplane would fall on my head and put me out of my misery. I looked up hopefully, but there, too, I was out of luck.
Another semi-sleepless night, broken only by a recurrence of the strange music that came into my sleep and woke me as I sat up in bed to go to it. I had no idea why it seemed like such a good idea to follow the music, and even less idea where it wanted to take me, but apparently I was going anyway. Clearly I was falling apart, sliding rapidly downhill into gray, empty madness.
Monday morning a dazed and battered Dexter staggered into the kitchen, where I was immediately and violently assaulted by Hurricane Rita, who charged at me waving a huge stack of papers and CDs. “I need to know what you think,” she said, and it struck me that this was something she definitely did not need to know, considering the deep bleakness of my thoughts. But before I could summon even a mild objection she had hurled me into a kitchen chair and began flinging the documents around.
“These are the flower arrangements that Hans wants to use,”
she started, showing me a series of pictures that were, in fact, floral in nature. “This is for the altar. And it’s maybe a little too, oh, I don’t know,” she said desperately. “Is anybody going to make jokes about too much white?”
Although I am known for a finely tuned sense of humor, very few jokes based on the color white sprang to mind, but before I could reassure her on the subject, Rita was already flipping the pages.
“Anyway,” she said, “this is the individual table setting. Which hopefully goes with what Manny Borque is doing. Maybe we should get Vince to check it with him?”
“Well,” I said.
“Oh good lord, look at the time,” she said, and before I could speak even one more syllable she had dropped a pile of CDs in my lap. “I’ve narrowed it down to six bands,” she said. “Can you listen 154