I broke off a spray and brought it with me. "When is Sasha supposed to be back?"

"Depends on whether they could do her test quickly. Probably a few hours."

Opening the door, I dropped the flowers on the dashboard. "Tell me about these tests."

He gunned the car and started away from the curb. "They take things out of you and shoot things in. They look at your guts like they're a video game but never tell you who's winning when they're finished. You drink things so your guts light up like Las Vegas, and then they say you can go to the bathroom now and flush Vegas down the toilet. It's humiliating and frightening and the worst part is, when they actually do show you pictures or graphs or whatever, they don't look like anything. You feel like a big fucking fool because it's your body in that readout, but you can't understand it. You've got to rely on all these patronizing technicians to tell you what's actually happening inside your own poor fucked-up body. You want to understand so badly that when they start to talk, you concentrate as hard as possible, but it still doesn't make sense. They say 'hemoglobins' and 'white cell counts' and so much more that your brain closes down and you can't understand any of it.

"But they even know that'll happen, so they stop using medical terms and start talking to you like you're retarded. One doctor I consulted had this glitzy computer game where you had to fight off the cancer cells entering your body. If you did it successfully, you won – lived. The thing made little blips: bleep, bleep, bleep. I played that damned game and won once. It felt so good. Here I was playing this absurd computer game, pretending the little blips were the good guys in my body."

He pulled up to a stop sign and looked at me.

"The tests are shit, Weber. The kind they're probably giving Sasha today are the second-line ones. They give you those when they know you've got it bad but want to find out just how bad before they start recommending any kind of therapy."

"What did you do the first time you heard you had it?"

"Went out and bought a pastrami sandwich. Nothing ever tasted so good in my whole life. Bought a pastrami sandwich and a pack of Marlboros. Hadn't smoked in – years, but what the hell, huh?"

On the long drive to Artus's place, we spoke about all the "something wrongs" of the last days.

"You know what else is wrong? His killing Flea. There's no way in the world Strayhorn would've killed that dog."

"Even if he was crazy?"

"Even so. I lived with him too long. He wasn't that kind of man. He used to catch mosquitoes and free them outside the window. That dog was pure love for him. He liked everything about it. Why kill it?"

"Because he'd gone mad."

We talked on and on. One of us would throw out an idea or a theory and it would be dissected or replaced or banked off the walls of possibility like a billiard ball.

Wyatt dropped his big one shortly before we arrived. "I bet . . ."

"What?"

"I was going to say something weird, but it makes complete sense. Everything that's happened, and everything we've been talking about . . . it's all Dr. Faustus." He continued looking at the road with an expressionless driver's face. In my deepest heart, perhaps my deepest fear, I had thought about this possibility too.

"Tell me."

"What you're asking, Weber, is to tell you I believe that still happens. But you know I do."

"Tell me how you came up with it."

He rolled his head around on his neck as if he'd suddenly gotten a bad driver's cramp. "We all read Dr. Faustus in college. A smart guy's unhappy with his life. Nothing's worked out the way he wanted. What can he do about it? Talk to God. But God's not answering, so the guy goes downstairs.

"Lucifer says sure, I'll help. I'll make things better, but your soul's mine after you die.

"Faustus agrees and signs on the dotted line. We know what happens next – he gets the power he wants, but he uses it for all the wrong reasons. Has all the power in the natural world but uses it to make Helen of Troy appear so he can screw her.

"Is this starting to sound familiar?"

"Phil. He was so depressed back then, he would've done anything."

"He did – he wrote Midnight! But he was also smart, Weber. Don't forget that. Here's why he made his deal. It's only my theory. He signed something important over, sure, but only because he thought he could do without it. He was wrong."

"What'd he give up?"

Wyatt turned and gave me a cold look. "His moral balance. Phil made the best horror films in the world, the greatest horror films ever. But they're too great – too horrible.

"His fame came from making contemptible, ugly nightmares. At first it was kind of a cynical lark, but then it had him by the balls and wouldn't let go. Look at how he was always trying to get involved in other projects. But somehow, every time, he was pulled back down into that Midnight shit.

"Only once did it look like he was really going to get out of it. But then – things happened: An angel appeared, and let's assume for a minute it really was an angel and not just some strange little girl. She told him not to shoot the scene. But he did. Result? Two of his best friends were killed in an accident so bizarre no one can believe it.

"You don't think there're links there? You don't see cause and effect? In the end, the Other Guy won everything: brilliant movies that made Bloodstone a cult figure. Evil is okay so long as it's original. That's good publicity. Then Strayhorn's so eaten up with guilt he shoots himself. Finally, as a little extra perk, Crazy Phil not only kills himself but one of the few things he really loved – a completely innocent and loving dog."

"Don't forget what happened to Sasha."

"That too."

"Say you're right, Wyatt. What about the videotapes to Sasha and me? What's their point? How come he gets to send messages from hell?"

"I haven't figured that out yet. Maybe he's telling the truth; maybe he has been given one last shot at redemption through someone he loved.

"But I wouldn't trust anything now. The part of Dr. Faustus I liked most was watching how cleverly the Devil lured the man. He didn't grab him by the foot and drag him away. They had these fascinating conversations where he told Faustus not to sell his soul because Hell's a terrible place. Faustus almost had to convince him to take it. You think that wasn't planned? You think evil comes looking for us? Just the opposite. We run after evil until it catches us. There's no question of that."

Before I tell you what happened when we got to his house, I must tell you about Rainer Artus.

Although he had the reputation for being one of the best sound men in Hollywood, he had great difficulty getting work because he was so exacting and persnickety. He didn't check things twice, he checked them five times. He didn't want the best equipment, he wanted two of the best in case something wasn't just so with the original. He liked to tell the story of the pianist Keith Jarrett, who apparently demands two special pianos be made available when he's doing concerts – just in case.

Hollywood will put up all day with the bullshit demands of star actors, but it has little patience for the whims of technicians. When a Rainer Artus demands two Nagra tape recorders – just in case – you can be sure several important people are going to yell. So the man worked, but not as often as he should have.

But Phil used him for all the Midnight films, because he knew how good Artus was and because sound is one of the most important elements in a horror film. The two of them were comfortable with each other.

I'd worked with Rainer on one film but found him too aloof, too authoritarian, and always secretly wondered if he had been a Nazi in his time. Phil said no, but I wasn't so sure. I did know that Artus had had a very difficult childhood in Germany with a mother straight out of some Freudian study. She was so anal retentive she put two kinds of towels in the family bathroom – one to dry the "up" side of the body, one to dry the "down." If the kids were ever caught using one towel for both areas, she gave them a beating. It wasn't hard to see where her son got his finicky neatness. Rainer's world was all order and no dust. His car was one long shine and nothing in the ashtrays, although he smoked heavily. His house was the same. Phil said the man meditated by vacuuming the living room. That was one of the things I remembered about visiting him years before: In a closet was one of the most remarkable vacuum cleaners I'd ever seen. Yes, I peeked. The machine was immense, so enchased with buttons and switches that if someone had told me it was a Russian space probe I'd have believed it.