In a supermarket, as he ordered a thick Reuben sandwich and a container of potato salad at the deli section, he felt that he was being watched. He saw no one suspicious among the other customers.

He also bought a large, cold bottle of Coke and a pint bottle of Absolut. He knew that he wouldn’t sleep without the ministrations of the goddess vodka.

The three-star motor inn was nothing fancy, but it was clean and comfortable. As he carried his luggage into his room and again as he filled a plastic ice bucket in the vending machine alcove, he sensed that he was under observation.

No one else was on the open-air promenade, and the cars in the immediate parking area all appeared unoccupied.

After the interview with Ronny Jessup, he felt filthy, as he always did post-Folsom. He mixed a drink in one of the motel’s plastic glasses and drank half before he took a long, hot shower.

He was toweling off when he thought he heard someone in the other room. He was certain that he had locked the outer door.

He pulled on a pair of briefs and went into the bedroom. The sliding, mirrored closet door stood open, but he had left it that way.

The deadbolt on the exterior door was locked. He believed that he had engaged the security chain, as well, but it hung loose from the jamb plate.

He was exhausted and jumpy. The most logical explanation was that he had forgotten the chain. If anyone had entered with ill intent, the intruder would have come at him when he stepped out of the bathroom, if not before.

He slipped the security-chain slide bolt into the door plate. Anyway, the chain didn’t provide much protection; the deadbolt was the true barrier.

After he pulled on pajamas and finished his first drink, he added ice to the glass and mixed a second vodka and Coke.

As he ate at a small table by the only window, he tried not to think about the horror that awaited him in the foothills of the San Rafael Mountains, under the house where Ronny Jessup had for twenty years ruled his demonic kingdom.

| 69 |

The oblivion that David sought in vodka proved to be imperfect. For years, his sleep had been tortured by vivid dreams that were saturated with horror and guilt, but none had been half as strange as the one in which he became mired in that Santa Barbara motel room.

As never before, he appeared only briefly in his own nightmare, and for the most part watched helplessly from within the mind and body of Emily, on that hateful night of rain and ruin. And unlike other dreams, this one unspooled with eerie and terrible coherence, as if it must be the truth that he would be condemned to relive again and again through eternity.