Free The Stalker by Bill Pronzini

of it is inconceivable.”
    Conradin gave a slow, tremulous sigh. “Is it?” he asked. “Is it really, Steve? Or are we too afraid to admit the chance of it to ourselves, like Drexel said? Are we too afraid that we wouldn’t be able to cope with it if it were somehow true?”
    “No,” Kilduff said emphatically.
    Conradin picked up one of the white cards from the coffee table and put it into the pocket of his sheepskin jacket. “I’d better be going now.”
    “What are you planning to do?”
    “Nothing,” Conradin answered. He started toward the door, and Kilduff stood and followed him there. “Except maybe say a prayer that Drexel is wrong and you’re right.”
    “I’m right,” Kilduff said.
    “I hope to God you are.”
    “We don’t have anything to worry about.”
    “Don’t we?” Conradin asked, opening the door.
    “No, nothing.”
    “Except maybe ourselves,” Conradin said. “Good night, Steve.” And he was gone.
    Except maybe ourselves.
    Kilduff shut the door and returned to the living room and sat in the chair again, he seemed to be doing a lot of sitting in that chair. He sat there and stared at nothing and thought about Drexel and what he had said, and Conradin and what he had said, and about Cavalacci and Wykopf and Beauchamp lying in cold dark boxes beneath the cold dark earth; he thought about them for a long, long time ...

    ... And Andrea came to him in the darkness of the tiny cottage bedroom, nude and unashamed, an alabaster naiad haloed in sweet innocence, diminutive and Elysian and proud in the so very pale honeymoon-shine drifting in through the minute apertures in the bamboo blinds. She came to him with her arms held wide and her mouth scrubbed free of rouge, her eyes lidded with unaffected, loving sensuality, her breasts small-white and tense, the nipples and aureoles fine exquisite black diamonds, the melanoid triangle of her pubic hair a swath of the softest velvet demurely hiding the pure still waters beneath. She came to him with his name on her lips and lay beside him on the conjugal bed, breathing warm honey against his neck, warm honey, and there was the taste of her, feel of her, an aching of acute pleasure in his genitals. He was moving within her now—strange, there seemed to have been no virginal obstruction, no innocence, strange. And then he was saying her name over and over, “Andreal Andrea! Andrea!” moving faster and faster and faster but she began to dissolve beside him, no no no, began to fade into a nebulous shadow, no no, and then she was gone, no, gone, and he was alone again, alone not in the tiny cottage bedroom with its honeymoon-shine but alone in a dank, fetid cave, so very dark, and the smell of millenniums of decay was in his nostrils. He shrank into a corner and felt the viscid slime of subterranean stone against his nude body, and then from across that malefic cavern there came a movement, a slithering of something unimaginable, a foul sucking, crawling sound, and he shrank deeper into the corner, terrified, seeing a fulvous pinpoint of light appear before him, gradually expanding, illuminating a shape within the hazy glow, a shape which became a faceless, monstrous thing of such unspeakable horror that he opened his mouth and began to scream with his very soul, for the nameless faceless thing was coming nearer, coming closer, reaching for him with an extremity that dripped putrefaction . . .

    Kilduff came up out of the chair in a single convulsive leap, standing with his heart plunging impossibly in his chest and the length of his body encased in a thick mucilaginous sweat. At first he was still in that cave, still cowering just beyond the reach of the horror in his dream; but then his mind began to clear and the trembling of his body ceased and he realized it had been only that: a dream. His eyes moved upward to the sunburst clock on the wall: twelve-fifteen. He had mesmerized himself, sitting in the chair, into the nether world of the