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It must have been the roast pork. Combined with the extra-long workday, and the added stress of having Robert follow me around all week, the roast pork had simply worn me out. In any case, I fell asleep. But I did not fall into the timeless, dreamless darkness that usually rewards me when I close my eyes at night. Instead, the visions continued: I stand there above the still-living body and look down at what I have done, and I feel such a sweet rising pitch of bliss and fulfillment and I kneel beside the body and grab a fistful of beautiful golden hair and yank the head around so it must look at me. And the face turns slowly to me and I hold my breath as the features become clear and it is a perfect face, unmarked and filled with longing for me, for what I am going to do, and as I look down into the bottomless violet eyes I realize that this is Jackie Forrest, and what I am going to do suddenly begins to change.
And I put down my knife and look at her, look at the perfect curve of her lips and the spray of freckles across her nose and those deep improbable eyes and somehow her clothes are gone and I lean closer to her face and it leans up toward me and there is an endless moment of almost touching, almost completing s
omething that is just barely out of reach—
I opened my eyes. I was still on the couch, and the house had grown dark and quiet around me, but the image of Jackie Forrest’s face was still with me.
Why had I thought of her? I’d been having a very nice daydream about perfectly normal vivisection, and she had shouldered her way in and ruined it with her demands that I put down the knife and try something more human. I didn’t want to have her kind of fantasy; this was not me, not Dexter the Destroyer. She was forcing me to become some new and freakish being, a creature that rushed into passionate seduction and reveled in actual human feelings and a longing for something that was as far beyond the reach of the real me as if it was on Mars.
I know it was totally illogical, but I found myself vastly annoyed with Jackie, as if she had butted in on purpose. But to my much greater surprise, I found that I was still aroused in reality, and not just in my imagination. Was it from thinking of the victim—or from thinking about Jackie Forrest? I didn’t know, and that was even more annoying.
There was just something about her that I found intriguing, even compelling. It was not that she was a famous actress—I’d had no idea who she was, had to be told that she was, in fact, a star. Celebrity had never interested me before, and I was quite sure it didn’t now. And I was certainly far too set in my wicked ways to be interested in any kind of dalliance that was merely sexual. When Dexter has a fling, his partner’s afterglow lasts forever.
And yet there was Jackie, crowding the screen in my private internal television, tossing her mane of perfect hair and smiling just for me with a gleam of intelligent amusement in her eyes, and for some maddening reason I liked it and I wanted to—
Wanted to what? Touch her, kiss her, whisper sweet nothings in her perfect shell-like ear? It was absurd, a cartoon picture, Dexter in Lust. Such things did not happen to our Dreadful Dark Scout. I was beyond the reach of mere mortal desire. I did not feel it, couldn’t feel it; I never had, didn’t want to—and whatever the thought of Jackie Forrest might be doing to me, I never would. This was no more than a Method-actor moment, a fleeting identification with the killer, a confusion of roles, almost certainly brought on because the process of digesting pork had taken all the blood away from my brain.
Whatever it really was, it didn’t matter. I was tired, and my poor undernourished brain was running away from me, down a path I didn’t like and could never walk. I could sit here grinding my teeth and worrying about it, or I could go to bed and hope that a good night’s sleep would send these disturbing, absurd thoughts back into the dark jungle where they belonged. Tomorrow was another day, and it was Saturday, a day for doing nothing, which was known to be a sovereign cure for what ails you.
I stood up and went to bed.
FIVE
I WOKE THE NEXT MORNING TO THE CLATTER OF PANS, AND THE smell of coffee and bacon floating down the hall from the kitchen. I started to lurch up out of bed, and then I remembered that it was Saturday, so I took a few extra lazy moments to loll in bed and enjoy the thought that I had nowhere to go and nothing to do and Rita was making me a wonderful breakfast anyway. I could just lie here snug and smug, secure in the knowledge that all was right with the world and this morning there were no dragons to slay. I had an entire day to devote to doing nothing—and even better, doing it without anyone following me around and taking notes on how I did it.
I lay in a partial doze, drifting on the pleasant stream of breakfast aromas and letting my mind wander willy-nilly, which was fine until it wandered back to the brief dream I’d had last night on the couch, and as the memory of Jackie Forrest’s face barged in again I jerked upright in bed, irritated. Why couldn’t she leave me alone?
All peace was gone; I got up, trudged into the bathroom, showered, dressed, and went to the kitchen table, hoping that breakfast would set me right again. Lily Anne was in her high chair, attacking some applesauce, and as I came in she kicked her feet and yelled out, “Dadoo!” which was her new name for me.
I stood beside her chair and tickled under her chin. “Lily-Willy,” I said, and she gurgled. I wiped the applesauce from my finger and sat at the table.
Rita turned around at the stove and smiled. “Dexter,” she said. “There’s coffee. Would you like some breakfast?”
“More than life itself,” I said, and seconds later I was staring down at a steaming mug of coffee and a stack of Rita’s French toast. I don’t know what she puts into it, but it tastes better than any other I’ve ever had, and after four pieces of the French toast, a slice of perfect, ripe cantaloupe, and three crisp strips of bacon, I pushed back from the table and poured a second cup of coffee, feeling like there might be some point to this short and painful existence after all.
I was halfway through my third cup before Cody and Astor made their appearance. They came in together, both of them grumpy and tousled from sleep. Cody wore Transformers pajamas, and Astor had on an overlarge T-shirt bearing a picture of what appeared to be a platypus, and they collapsed onto their chairs as if somebody had stolen all their bones. Cody tore into the French toast without a word, apparently still half asleep, but Astor stared at her plate as if it was loaded with grub worms.
“I’ll get fat if I eat this stuff,” she said.
“Then don’t eat it,” Rita said cheerfully.
“But I’m hungry,” Astor whined.
“Would you like a yogurt instead?” Rita said.
Astor hissed. “I hate yogurt.”
“Then eat your French toast,” Rita told her. “Or go hungry. Whatever you want. But stop whining, all right?”
“I’m not whining,” Astor whined, but Rita ignored her and turned back to the stove. Astor stared at her back with a look of venomous contempt. “This family is so lame,” she muttered, but she began to pick at her food, and as I sipped the last of my coffee she somehow forced herself to eat all of it and take seconds.
I had almost slid back into a more alert version of the contented state I’d been in when I woke up, when Rita jolted me out of my reverie. “Finish up, everybody,” she said happily. “We have an awful lot to do today.”
It seemed like an ominous pronouncement. A lot to do? Like what? I tried to recall whether I had seen a lengthy list of tasks to perform—tasks so urgent that they could invade and conquer a Saturday I had hoped to dedicate to loafing. Nothing came to mind, and no list appeared. Rita was clearly so focused on whatever the jobs might be that she assumed we could all get our instructions from her telepathically. Perhaps my psychic antenna had blown down, but I had no idea at all what I was supposed to prepare for, and it seemed a little bit churlish to ask.
Luckily, Astor was not quite so shy. “I wanna go to the mall,” she said. “Why do I have to do stupid chores with you guys?”
“You’re too young to go to the mall,” Rita said. “And anyway—”
