‘He controls me too.’

‘So you’re ratting out your father, is that it? You know, if I’d been in your place, I would have targeted your old man. That bastard wouldn’t have lasted six seconds with me.’

‘He is a bastard. I really worry about my stepmother.’

Mallory only stared at him in silence to tell him she knew he was lying again.

‘Okay,’ said the boy. ‘She’s a dweeb.’

‘What was your real mother like?’

‘She was like my second mother, and my second mother was like my third. She was afraid of everyone and everything. My father has a type. Each one is a copy of the last one.’

‘Was your real mother afraid of you, too?’

The boy’s hands dove deeper into the pockets of his parka. She watched the frustration welling up in his eyes, and it was in the hunch of his shoulders and the rabbit teeth pressed down on his lower lip – frustration growing and growing, finally culminating and escaping in a sigh.

The cat padded into the room. It started toward her. She looked at it once to warn it away. Nose stopped a respectful distance from her and sat down beside the boy. Now two pairs of eyes were on her, both needy.

‘Don’t let the cat out when you go,’ she said, and turned her back on both of them, leaving the bedroom to walk down the short hallway to the den where her computer was waiting.

Too bad the cameras hadn’t been running. Maybe she should run a continuous tape against the possibility of another intrusion when she was not home.

The front door closed softly.

‘Charles, let me fix you a drink. No, really. Have one with me.’

Effrim Wilde opened the dark glass doors of a chrome-trimmed cabinet to gleaming glassware and a fully stocked wet bar. ‘Eleanor’s forbidden me to drink alone. She says it leads to alcoholism.’

He turned his back on Charles as though the recipe for whiskey and soda might be worth guarding.

‘Eleanor came back?’

‘Yes,’ said Effrim, rimming each glass with a twist of lemon and a loving smile. ‘She felt guilty about abandoning me to my cigarettes and whiskey and good food. She’s a saint, that woman. This past weekend, I didn’t have a single meal that didn’t taste like low-cal library paste.’

He handed one glass to Charles and carried the other to his own chair, which put three yards of plush carpet and four feet of dark glass desktop between them.

The office had been recently redecorated. The walls were a sickly yellow-green. How did Effrim stand it? Of course, he only spent a few hours of the day in this place. The rest of the time was spent in three-hour lunch seductions of grant committee chairmen and other sources of funding. The lines of the furniture were sharp. Every surface was cold metal and glass. The four wall hangings, all done by the same brutal hand, were abstracts of angry red shapes and a nervous, manic energy of black lines. Not Effrim’s style. This private office said more about Eleanor than Effrim.

‘Does Eleanor know you’re dabbling in bad magic acts?’

‘So you pegged the boy for a fraud?’ Effrim feigned surprise, but not well. ‘I hope the experience hasn’t been entirely worthless.’

‘It’s not entirely done with. I need some data from the research group.’

‘Ask my assistant. He’ll get you whatever you need. I suppose you’re shopping for a little something in the line of flying objects? You were right about the Russian data and the Chinese. Their methodology is a bit lax, isn’t it?’

‘I want the Chinese data on the succubus experiments.’

‘Is the boy branching out?’

‘No, but he’s led me along another line of investigation.’

‘I thought you were put off by the bizarre stuff. Anything in particular?’

Charles’s memory called up a page from a journal and displayed it on the wall by Effrim’s head. He scanned the lines. ‘There’s an experiment with an Asian monk who created a succubus under lab conditions. I want that one. His profile fits the stigmatic. The succubus, in front of witnesses, was seen to bruise the man’s flesh.’

‘Come back to work for me and I’ll get you all the cuckoo material you like.’

‘You still get the lion’s share of funding from sources like Riccalo’s employers? In addition to sitting on grant committees, Mallory tells me his other duties include real estate scams which bilk the elderly.’

‘Ah, but no arrests, indictments or convictions. By New York standards, this makes him a model citizen. Oh, Charles, we just never seem to agree on the Institute’s funding, do we? I’m stealing money from the bastard’s company. I should get a community service medal. But I can be flexible. Come back to work for us, and I’ll track down alternate funding.’

‘Thanks, I think I’ll just take the succubus material and run.’

‘You’re losing your mind out there among the tiny brains. But I’d be willing to trade any four good brains at the Institute for what’s left of yours. Come home, Charles. Come back inside where you belong. I’ll triple your project funding.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘It’s cold out there, Charles.’

By ‘out there’, Effrim included all of real life beyond the isolation of the think tank. Charles surmised that Effrim had daily anticipated his prize freak would return home, beaten by the ordeal of making his way among people who found him eccentric and out of sync with the rest of them – which he was.

‘Will we be able to give a good report to the boy’s father?’

‘The boy’s father could very well be orchestrating this. I don’t trust Riccalo. And I have my doubts about you, too.’

An hour later, Charles was seated in his own front room and closing the file of succubus material. So, it was true; there was a link to the stigmata phenomenon exhibited by fanatics. The mental aberration of the succubus could work its effects on the body as well as the mind.

In the darkening room, a memory from his childhood came back to him in striking detail which included the succulent brown flesh of a roasted fowl. It was a goose, and it held a prominent position on the white lace tablecloth spread with fine china, gleaming silver and candlelight. Malakhai was seated at the dinner table beside the empty chair which beloneed to Louisa. The adults had been drinking wine and laughing with one another, accompanied by a lively recording of Mozart. The small child he had been was staring at Malakhai in the moment when Louisa kissed him. He had seen the imprint of her lips on the man’s face. Charles had rubbed his eyes with small hands, but not rubbed away the kiss which made the depression, the contour of her lips in Malakhai’s flesh.

Well, Amanda Bosch had created no physical phenomena yet. She was merely an image like a holograph. So he had a way to go before he became truly damaged. Amanda was not solid stuff, and he was not yet mad. He’d only made a clever moving picture, an odd extension of his eidetic memory.

Right.

The red light was flashing on the system alert box. So the judge was using his fax. The rewiring diverted the fax to her own machine. It was an application form for a new bank card. She scanned it into her computer and reset the type with a few alterations. After the lines for name and address, she typed in her own questions. Then she copied the letter for Harry Kipling, who also had a fax machine.

Now that she was getting to know them, she could tailor the terror to fit the man. What should she do to the blind man? According to the building super, his computer was rigged for a braille printer, but did he use it? She typed his message into the personal files: I’M RIGHT BEHIND YOU. CAN YOU HEAR ME? CAN YOU SEE ME? CAN YOU SEE?

The purring at her feet annoyed her. She looked down at the cat, her eyes matching threats with the cat’s contented slits. And now a crash came from the kitchen. She felt for her gun, and the cat’s nose went up as it tested the air for what it could not see.