Because the Night Read Free Page A

come to realize that they are what you like most about being in my tutelage. What do you do?”
    The Bookworm pondered the question, shifting his gaze back and forth from the mirror to the Doctor. Goff grinned when he realized that Havilland had given the lonelies a Pentothal jolt.
    Finally, Robert whispered, “It would never happen to you. It just couldn’t.”
    Havilland put his hands on Robert’s shoulders and gave them a gentle squeeze. “The perfect answer. Monte would have intellectualized it, but your response was pure candor and pure heart. And of course you were right. I want you to both chant your mantras now. Hold eye contact with yourself, but think of me. ”
    When Havilland started for the door, Goff padded downstairs and back to the speaker room. He rewound the efficacy training tape and placed the spool in a large manila envelope, then plugged his headphones into the middle speaker just in time to hear male/female sexual grunting move into strangled sighs and girlish giggles. The giggle became a high-pitched smoker’s cough, and Goff himself laughed. It was the tight little redhead he had picked up at the Lingerie Club, the one who had devastated him with her Kundalini yoga positions. He had been lucky to get out of her Bunker Hill Towers condo alive.
    The Doctor was the first to speak. “Bravo. Bravo.” His monotone sent the woman into new gales of laughter. The man she had coupled with was still trying to catch his breath. Goff imagined him lying on the bed on the verge of a coronary.
    The Doctor spoke again. “Later, Helen. I want to check the victim’s pulse. You may have gone too far this time.”
    â€œBeyond the beyond,” Helen said. “Isn’t that our motto, Doctor?”
    â€œTouché,” the Doctor said. “I’ll call you Thursday.”
    When a full five minutes of silence followed the sound of little Helen skipping gaily out the bedroom door, Goff’s gut clenched. He knew that the male lover was the real psycho and that the Night Tripper was taking him a major step closer to his brink. Thus the shattering of glass and the obscenities that came in the wake of the stillness were expected, as were the expressions of concern from the Doctor. “It’s all right, Richard, it really is. Sometimes ‘beyond the beyond’ means hating. First you have to accept that reality, then you have to work through it. You can’t hate yourself for being what you are. You are basically good and powerful, or you wouldn’t be with me now. You just happen to have an exceptionally high violence threshold to overcome in order to achieve your selfhood.”
    Thomas Goff shifted into memories of Richard Oldfield’s recruitment, beginning with the crippled whore with the three-hundred-dollar-a-day smack habit he had met at Plato’s Retreat West. She had told him of the stockbroker/bodybuilder/remittance man who paid five C-notes a pop to work her over because of her resemblance to the governess who had tortured him as a child. The approach at the health club had had the thrust of a nightmare; Oldfield looked enough like Goff to be taken for his fraternal twin, and he was dead-lifting four hundred pounds. But the bodybuilder had capitulated to the Doctor’s machinations like a baby going for its mother’s tit.
    More breaking glass. Oldfield weeping. Havilland alternately whistling a tune and murmuring, “There, there.” Goff knew that the reversal was coming.
    It arrived in the form of a slap in the face that filled the speaker with static. “You weakling,” Dr. John Havilland hissed. “You picayune poseur. You sycophantic whoremonger. I give you the best fuck in our program, promise to take you where your chickenshit conscience would never permit you to stray, and you respond by smashing windows and bawling.”
    â€œDoctor, please,” Richard Oldfield whimpered.
    â€œPlease what,