Vision by Dean Koontz Page A

didn’t blink.
    He raised the blade high, held it in her line of sight, over her breasts.
    No response.
    He was disappointed. When time and circumstance allowed, he preferred to kill slowly. To get any thrill from that game, he required a lively woman for prey.
    Angry with her for spoiling the moment, he rammed the knife down.
     
 
Mary Bergen gasped.
    The razor edge ripping her skin, opening muscle, opening the reservoir of blood, opening the dark place where pain was stored ...
    She leaned into the corner formed by the wall and the side of the antique oak bar. She was only half aware that she knocked over an unopened bottle of Scotch.
    “What’s the matter?” Cauvel asked.
    “It hurts.”
    He touched her shoulder. “Are you sick? Can I help?”
    “Not sick. The vision. I feel it.”
    The knife again, thrust deep ...
    She put both hands to her stomach, trying to contain the eruption of pain. “I won’t faint this time. I won’t!”
    “A vision of what?” Cauvel asked worriedly.
    “The beauty shop. The same one I saw a few hours ago. Only it’s happening now. The slaughter... God almighty... happening somewhere, happening right this minute.” She put her hands to her face, but the images would not be shut out. “Oh, God. Sweet God. Help me.”
    “What do you see?”
    “A dead man on the floor.”
    “The floor of the beauty shop?”
    “He’s bald... mustache... purple shirt.”
    “What is it you’re feeling?”
    The knife ...
    She was sweating. Crying.
    “Mary? Mary?”
    “I feel... the woman... being stabbed.”
    “What woman? There’s a woman?”
    “Mustn’t black out.”
    She started to sag, and he held her by both shoulders.
    She saw the knife gouging flesh again, but she felt no pain this time. The woman in the vision was dead ; therefore, there was no more pain to share.
    “Have to see his face, have to get his name,” she said.
    The killer standing up from the body, standing in a cape, no, a long coat, an overcoat ...
    “Can’t lose the thread. Mustn’t lose the vision. Have to hold it, have to find where he is, who he is, what he is, stop him from doing these awful things.”
    The killer standing, standing with the butcher knife in one hand, standing in shadow, his face in shadow but turning now, turning very slowly and deliberately, turning so that she’ll be able to see his face, turning as if he is looking for her—
    “He knows I’m with him,” she said.
    “Who knows?”
    “He knows I’m watching.”
    She didn’t understand how that could be true. Yet the killer knew about her. She was certain of that, and she was scared.
    Suddenly half a dozen glass dogs leaped from the display shelves, flew through the air, and smashed with a great deal of force into the wall beside Mary.
    She screamed.
    Cauvel turned to see who had thrown them. “What the hell?”
    As if they had come to life and had acquired wings, a dozen glass dogs swept off the top shelf. They spun, glittering like fragments of an exploded prism, to the high center of the room. They bounced off the ceiling, struck one another with the musical rattle of Chinese wind chimes.
    Then they streaked toward Mary.
    She raised her arms, covered her face.
    The miniatures battered her harder than she had expected. They stung like bees.
    “Stop them!” she said, not certain to whom she was speaking.
    A hellhound with pointy horns struck the doctor in the forehead between the eyes and drew blood.
    Cauvel turned away from the shelves, moved against her, tried to shield her with his body.
    Another ten or fifteen dogs bulleted around the room. Two of them smashed through a stained glass panel in the bar. Others burst to pieces on the wall around Mary, icing her hair with chunks and slivers of colored glass.
    “It’s trying to kill me!” She was struggling unsuccessfully to avoid hysteria.
    Cauvel pressed her into the corner.
    More glass dogs whistled across the room, swooped over the psychiatrist’s desk, scattered a sheaf of