“This world isn’t run by miracles. This world is run by free will, and I can’t interfere with yours or the children’s.”
“But you stepped in to give me all this advice.”
“I was a film director, Mr. Thomas. I don’t give advice. I give instructions. And you have the free will to ignore them.”
When he started to rise again, like a Macy’s-parade balloon, I grabbed his arm to hold him down. “Why didn’t you talk to me right from the start, why all the pantomime until now?”
He smiled and shook his head as if to say that I had much to learn regarding the construction of a drama. “One does not reveal such a twist a moment sooner than the end of the second act.” His expression grew serious, and he searched my eyes as if taking the measure of my mettle. “Children, Mr. Thomas. Innocent children.”
“I’ll do my best, sir.”
“Do better than your best.”
His usual droll demeanor gave way to more emotion than he had allowed himself in public, during his days of fame. “This world can be hard on children.”
Later, I would learn that he and his wife, Alma, had had one child, a daughter named Patricia, on whom he doted. There are many charming pictures of portly Mr. Hitchcock and tiny Pat on vacation with Alma in exotic places like Paris and Africa and Switzerland. His smile, though ironic when calculated for publicity, could be sweet, and never sweeter than in photographs with Pat or with her children. At play with the grandchildren, he had been like a child himself, Hitchcockian dignity discarded in favor of participating fully in the game of the moment.
Perhaps his regard for children and their happiness had its roots in his own lonely childhood. At the age of nine, he was sent off to a Catholic boarding school. Until he was fourteen, he was raised by Jesuits who believed most strongly in severe corporal punishment, and before he was fifteen, he quit school and took his first job. He was remembered by others as a sensitive and retiring boy, and he called himself “a particularly unattractive youth,” though rare photos from those days don’t really support such a harsh self-assessment. One of his earliest vivid memories was of waking late on Christmas Eve, when he was only five, to discover his mother sneaking two toys from his Christmas stocking, putting them in the stockings of his older siblings, and replacing them with a couple of oranges.
“This world can be hard on children,” he repeated. “Now, these seventeen think they’re being held for ransom. They don’t know what’s going to be done to them, although a few might suspect something. The cultists want to surprise them, the better to savor their terror as the full horror of their fate dawns on them.”
“I’ll remember everything you told me, sir. I feel better now that you’re on my side. Everything’s sure to be all right now.”
He raised one eyebrow. “Is it sure to be, Mr. Thomas? Are you really certain that you’ve seen my films?”
I thought of the end of Vertigo, and wished I hadn’t.
Again he rose off the floor.
This time I didn’t try to stop him, though I did say, “Please call me Odd, sir.”
Halfway to the ceiling, he said, “That’s very kind of you, Mr. Thomas. Please call me Hitch.”
“Yes, sir. Will I see you again, Mr. Hitchcock?”
“I would count on it, Mr. Thomas, whether or not you survive the next half hour.”
He disappeared through the ceiling.
The time had come to kill or die. Or both.
Twenty-nine
NOT BEING A QUICK-DRAW ARTIST, I WAS RELUCTANT TO leave both pistols in their shoulder rigs, as Mr. Hitchcock had suggested. I understood that I would be more likely to arouse suspicion if I went everywhere with one of the Glocks drawn and ready for action, but I had to work up the nerve to do as he had instructed.
I turned out the lights in that room of paper towels and toilet paper. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I stepped into the basement corridor.
As I moved toward the farther end of the hallway and the back stairs by which I’d come here, a door opened on my right, and a woman came out of the office of the man whom I had killed.
In her twenties, pretty even under enough Goth makeup to supply Alice Cooper through a national nostalgia tour, she wore high-heeled shoes, tight and wonderfully supple black-leather pants, and a sort of half jacket of matching leather that bared her midriff. As most belly dancers have a jewel in their navels, this woman had a carved-bone skull.
She didn’t appear to be alarmed, which surely she would have been if she’d discovered a corpse, unless these people found so many corpses with such regularity that all the shock value had gone out of the experience. She smiled at me, and she had the whitest teeth I’d ever seen, though the upper cuspids seemed to have been filed into sharper points than nature would have given them.