by Dean Koontz
I risked using the flashlight. Hooding it with one hand, I flicked it on for only a second or two, which was long enough for me to figure out what had happened here.
Although the breach in the fence apparently had been made well ahead of time, in preparation for the crime, the kidnapper had not left a gaping hole. He’d created a less obvious pass-through, and tonight he had needed only to pull the loosely hanging flap of chain-link out of his way. To free both hands for this task, he had put down his captive, ensuring against an escape attempt either by paralyzing Jimmy with vicious threats or by tethering the boy.
The second set of tracks was considerably smaller than the first. And shoeless. These were the prints of a child who had been snatched barefoot from his bed.
In my mind’s eye, I saw Lilly’s anguished face. Her husband, Benjamin Wing, a power-company lineman, had been electrocuted almost three years ago in a work-related accident. He’d been a big, merry-eyed guy, half Cherokee, so full of life that it had seemed as if he would never run short of it, and his death had stunned everyone. As strong as Lilly was, she might be broken if she had to suffer this second and even more terrible loss so soon after the first.
Although she and I had long ago ceased to be lovers, I still loved her as a friend. I prayed that I’d be able to bring her son back to her, smiling and unharmed, and see the anguish vanish from her face.
Orson’s whine was filled with worry. He was quivering, eager to give pursuit.
After tucking the small flashlight under my belt once more, I peeled up the flap of fence. A soft twang of protest sang through the steel links.
I promised, “Frankfurters for the brave of heart,” and Orson shot through the gap.
3
As I followed the dog into the forbidden zone, the ragged edge of one of the cut fence links snared my cap and pulled it from my head. I snatched it off the ground, dusted it against my jeans, and put it on again.
This navy-blue, billed cap has been in my possession about eight months. I found it in a strange concrete chamber, three stories underground, deep in the abandoned warrens of Fort Wyvern.
Above the visor, embroidered in red, were the words Mystery Train. I had no idea to whom the cap once belonged, and I didn’t know the meaning of the ruby-red needlework.
This simple headgear had little intrinsic value, but of all my material possessions, it was in some ways the most precious. I had no proof that it was related to my mother’s work as a scientist, to any project of which she was a part—at Fort Wyvern or elsewhere—but I remained convinced that it was. Though I already knew some of Wyvern’s terrible secrets, I also believed that if I were able to discover the meaning of the embroidered words, more astonishing truths would be revealed. I had vested a lot of faith in this cap. When I wasn’t wearing it, I kept it close, because it reminded me of my mother and, therefore, comforted me.
Except for the cleared area immediately beyond the breach in the chain-link, driftwood and tumbleweed and trash were piled against the sifting fence. Otherwise, the bed of the Santa Rosita was as well made on the Wyvern side as it was on the other.
Again the only footprints were those of the kidnapper. He had resumed carrying the boy from this point.
Orson raced along the trail, and I ran close behind him. Soon we came to another access road that sloped up the north wall of the river, and Orson ascended without hesitation.
I was breathing harder than the dog when I reached the top of the levee, even though, in canine years, fur face was pretty much my age.
How fortunate I’ve been to live long enough to recognize the subtle but undeniable fading of my youthful stamina and spryness. To hell with those poets who celebrate the beauty and the purity of dying young, all powers intact. In spite of xeroderma pigmentosum, I’d be grateful to survive to relish the sweet decrepitude of my eightieth year, or even the delicious weakness of one whose birthday cake is ablaze with a hundred dangerous candles. We are the most alive and the closest to the meaning of our existence when we are most vulnerable, when experience has humbled us and has cured the arrogance which, like a form of deafness, prevents us from hearing the lessons that this world teaches.
As the moon hid its face behind a veil of clouds, I looked both directions along the north bank of the Santa Rosita. Jimmy and his abductor were not in sight.
Nor did I see a hunched gargoyle moving on the riverbed below or along either side of the channel. Whatever it had been, the figure from the highway embankment was not interested in me.
Without hesitation, Orson trotted toward a group of massive warehouses fifty yards from the levee. These dark structures appeared mysterious in spite of their mundane purpose and in spite of the fact that I was somewhat familiar with them.
Although enormous, these are not the only warehouses on the base, and although they would cover a few square blocks in any city, they represent an insignificant percentage of the buildings within these fenced grounds. At its peak of activity, Fort Wyvern was staffed by 36,400 active-duty personnel. Nearly thirteen thousand dependents and more than four thousand civilian personnel were also associated with the facility. On-base housing alone consisted of three thousand single-family cottages and bungalows, all of which remain standing, though in disrepair.
In a moment we were among the warehouses, and Orson’s nose guided him swiftly through a maze of serviceways to the largest structure in the cluster. Like most of the surrounding buildings, this one was rectangular, with thirty-foot-high corrugated-steel walls rising from a concrete foundation to a curved metal roof. At one end was a roll-up door big enough to admit cargo-laden trucks; it was closed, but beside it, a man-size door stood wide open.
Previously bold, Orson became hesitant as he approached this entrance. The room past the threshold was even darker than the serviceway around us, which itself was illuminated only by starlight. The dog seemed not entirely to trust his nose to detect a threat in the warehouse, as if the scents on which he relied were filtered beyond detection by the very thickness of the murk inside the place.
Keeping my back to the wall, I sidled along the building to the doorway. I stopped just short of the jamb, with my pistol raised and the muzzle pointed at the sky.
I listened, holding my breath, nearly as silent as the dead—except for the faint gurgle of my stomach, which continued to work on a pre-midnight snack of jack cheese, onion bread, and jalapeño peppers. If anyone waited to ambush me just inside the entrance, he must actually have been dead, because he was even quieter than I was. Whether he was dead or not, his breath was no doubt sweeter than mine.
Though Orson was as difficult to see as a flow of ink across wet black silk, I watched as he stopped short of the entrance. After a hesitation that struck me as being full of puzzlement, he turned away from the door and ventured a few steps across the serviceway toward the next building.
He, too, was silent—no tick of claws on paving, no panting, not even any digestive noises—as though he were only the ghost of a dog. He peered intently back the way we’d come, his eyes dimly revealed by a reflection of starshine; the faint white points of his bared teeth were like the unsettling phosphorescent grin of an apparition.
I didn’t feel that his hesitancy was caused by fear of what lay ahead of us. Instead, he no longer seemed to be certain where the trail led.
I consulted my wristwatch. Each faintly blinking second marked not only the passage of time but the fading of Jimmy Wing’s life force. Almost certainly not taken for ransom, he had been seized to satisfy dark needs, perhaps including savageries that didn’t bear consideration.
I waited, struggling to suppress my vivid imagination, but when Orson finally turned again to the open door of the warehouse without indicating any greater confidence that our quarry was inside, I decided to act. Fortune favors the bold. Of course, so does Death.
With my left hand, I reached for the flashlight tucked against the small of my back. Crouching, I entered the doorway, crossed the threshold, and scuttl
ed quickly to the left. Even as I switched on the flash, I rolled it across the floor, a simple and perhaps foolish ruse to draw gunfire away from me.
No gunfire erupted, and when the flashlight rolled to a stop, the stillness in the warehouse was as deep as the silence of a dead planet with no atmosphere. Somewhat to my surprise, when I tried to breathe, I could.
I retrieved the flashlight. Most of the warehouse was given over to a single room of such length that the beam didn’t penetrate from one end to the other; it even failed to reach halfway across the much narrower width of the building to illuminate either side wall.
As I scythed away the shadows, they regrew immediately after the beam passed, lusher and blacker than ever. At least no looming adversary was revealed.
Looking more doubtful than suspicious, Orson padded into the light and, after a hesitation, seemed to dismiss the warehouse with a sneeze. He headed toward the door.
A muffled clang broke the silence elsewhere in the building. The cold acoustics caused the sound to resonate along the walls of this cavernous chamber, lingering until the initial hard metallic quality softened into an eerie, whispery ringing like the voices of summer insects.
I switched off the flashlight.
In the blinding dark, I felt Orson return to my side, his flank brushing against my leg.
I wanted to move.
I didn’t know where to move.
Jimmy must be near—and still alive, because the kidnapper hadn’t yet reached the dark altar where he would play his ritualistic games and sacrifice the lamb. Jimmy, who was small and frightened and alone. Whose dad was dead like mine. Whose mother would be forever withered by grief if I failed her.
Patience. That is one of the great virtues God tries to teach us by refusing to show Himself in this world. Patience.
Orson and I stood still and vigilant until well after the final echo of the noise faded. Just as the subsequent silence grew long enough to make me wonder if what we’d heard had any significance, a voice arose, deep-toned and angry, as muffled as the clang had been. One voice. Not a conversation. A monologue. Someone talking to himself—or to a small, frightened captive who dared not reply. I couldn’t make out the meaning, but the voice was as hollow and grumbly as that of a troll in a fairy tale.
The speaker was neither approaching nor retreating, and clearly he was not in this chamber with Orson and me. Before I was able to determine the direction from which the growled words came, the troll fell silent.
Fort Wyvern has been closed only nineteen months, so I haven’t had time to learn each niche of it as thoroughly as I’ve acquainted myself with every cranny of Moonlight Bay. Thus far, I’ve confined most of my explorations to the more mysterious precincts of the base, where I’m most likely to encounter strange and intriguing sights. Of this warehouse, I knew only that it was like the others in this cluster: three stories high, with an open-beam ceiling, and composed of four spaces—the main room, in which we stood, one office in the far right corner, a matching room in the far left corner, and an open loft above those offices. I was sure that neither the sudden noise nor the voice had come from any of those places.
I turned in a circle, frustrated by the impenetrable darkness. It was as pitiless and unremitting as the black pall that will fall over me if, one day, cumulative light damage plants the seeds of tumors in my eyes.
A louder noise than the first, a resounding crash of metal against metal, boomed through the building, giving rise to echoes that rolled like a distant cannonade. This time I felt vibrations in the concrete floor, suggesting that the source of the disturbance might be below the main level of the warehouse.
Under certain buildings on the base lie secret realms that were apparently unknown to the vast majority of the soldiers who conducted the ordinary, reputable army business of Wyvern. Doors, once cunningly disguised, led from basements down to subbasements, to deeper cellars, to vaults far below the cellars. Many of these subterranean structures are linked to others throughout the base by staircases, elevators, and tunnels that would have been far less easy to detect before the facility, prior to abandonment, was stripped of all supplies and equipment.
Indeed, even with some of Wyvern’s secrets left exposed by its departing stewards, my best discoveries would not have been possible without the aid of my clever canine companion. His ability to detect even the faintest fragrant drafts wafting through cracks from hidden rooms is as impressive as his talent for riding a surfboard, though perhaps not as impressive as his knack for occasionally wheedling a second beer from his friends, like me, who know full well that he is incapable of handling more than one.
Without question, this sprawling base harbors more installations that remain well hidden, waiting to be revealed; nevertheless, as interesting as my explorations have been, I’ve periodically refrained from them. When I spend too much time in the shadowland under Fort Wyvern, its disturbing atmosphere grows oppressive. I have seen enough to know that this netherworld was the site of wide-ranging clandestine operations of dubious wisdom, that numerous and diverse “black-budget” research projects were surely conducted here, and that some of those projects were so ambitious and exotic as to defy understanding based on the few enigmatic clues that were left behind.
This knowledge alone, however, isn’t what makes me uncomfortable in Wyvern’s underworld. More distressing is a perception—little more than an intuition but nonetheless powerful—that some of what happened here was not merely well-intentioned foolishness of a high order, not merely science in the service of mad politics, but pure wickedness. When I spend more than a couple of nights in a row under Wyvern, I’m overcome by the conviction that unknown evils were loosed in its buried warrens and that some still roam those byways, waiting to be encountered. Then it isn’t fear that drives me to the surface. Rather, it’s a sense of moral and spiritual suffocation—as though, by remaining too long in those realms, I will acquire an ineradicable stain on my soul.
I hadn’t expected these ordinary warehouses to be so directly linked to the hobgoblin neighborhoods below ground. In Fort Wyvern, however, nothing is as simple as it first appears to be.
Now I switched on the flashlight, reasonably confident that the kidnapper—if that’s who I was following—was not on this level of the building.
It seemed odd that a psychopath would bring his small victim here rather than to a more personal and private place, where he would be entirely comfortable while he fulfilled whatever perverse needs motivated him. On the other hand, Wyvern had a mysterious allure akin to that of Stonehenge, to that of the great pyramid at Giza, to that of the Mayan ruins at Chichén Itzá. Its malevolent magnetism would surely appeal to a deranged man who, as was frequently true in these cases, got his purest thrill not from molesting the innocent but from torturing and then brutally murdering them. These strange grounds would draw him as surely as would a deconsecrated church or a crumbling old house on the outskirts of town where, fifty years ago, a madman had chopped up his family with an ax.
Of course, there was always the possibility that this kidnapper was not insane at all, not a pervert, but a man working in a bizarre but nonetheless official capacity in regions of Wyvern that perhaps remained secretly active. This base, even shuttered, is a breeding ground of paranoia.
With Orson remaining close at my side, I hurried toward the offices at the far end of the main room.
The first of them proved to be what I expected. A barren space. Four plain walls. A hole in the ceiling where the fluorescent lighting fixture had once been mounted.
In the second, the infamous Darth Vader lay on the floor: a molded-plastic action figure about three inches tall, black and silver.
I recalled the collection of similar Star Wars toys that I’d glimpsed on the bookshelves in Jimmy’s bedroom.
Orson sniffed at Vader.
“Come to the Dark Side, Luke,” I murmured.
A large rectangular opening gaped in the back wall, from which a pair of elevator doors h
ad been stripped by an army salvage crew. As a half-baked safety measure, a single two-by-six was bolted across the gap at waist height. Several elaborate steel fittings, still dangling from the wall, suggested that in the days when Fort Wyvern had served the national defense, the elevator had been concealed behind something—perhaps a slide-aside or swing-away bookcase or cabinet.
The elevator cab and lift mechanism were gone, too, and a quick use of the flashlight revealed a three-story drop. Sole access was by a maintenance ladder fixed to the shaft wall.
My quarry was probably too busy elsewhere to see the ghostly glow in the shaft. The beam soaked into the gray concrete until it was barely brighter than a séance-summoned cloud of spirit matter hovering above a knocking table.
Nevertheless, I switched off the light and jammed the flashlight under my belt once more. Reluctantly, I returned the Glock to the holster under my coat.
Dropping to one knee, I reached tentatively into the inkiness that surrounded me, which seemed as though it could be either the dimensions of the warehouse office or billions of light-years deep, a black hole linking our odd universe to one even stranger. For a moment my heart rattled against my ribs, but then my hand found good Orson, and by smoothing his fur, I was calmed.
He put his blocky head on my raised knee, encouraging me to stroke him and to scratch his ears, one of which was pricked, the other limp.
We have been through a lot together. We have lost too many people we loved. With equal emotion, we dread being left to face life alone. We have our friends—Bobby Halloway, Sasha Goodall, a few others—and we cherish them, but the two of us share something beyond the deepest friendship, a unique relationship without which neither of us would be quite whole.
“Bro,” I whispered.
He licked my hand.
“Gotta go,” I whispered, and I didn’t need to say that where I had to go was down.
Neither did I have to note that Orson’s myriad abilities didn’t include the extraordinary balance required to descend a perfectly vertical ladder, paw over paw. He has a talent for tracking, a great good heart, unlimited courage, loyalty as reliable as the departure of the sun at dusk, a bottomless capacity for love, a cold nose, a tail that can wag energetically enough to produce more electricity than a small nuclear reactor—but like every one of us, he has his limitations.
