by Dean Koontz
Although I’d never known this man, listening to him in such violent throes of misery was disturbing. Fortunately, it didn’t last long, because he switched off the recorder.
With another soft click, the recording began again, and though Delacroix’s self-control was tenuous, he managed to speak. His voice was so thick with emotion that sometimes his speech slurred, and when he seemed in danger of breaking down completely, he paused either to take deep breaths or to drink something, presumably whiskey.
“This is a warning. A testament. My testament. A warning to the world. I don’t know where to begin. Begin with the worst. They’re dead, and I killed them. But it was the only way to save them. The only way to save them. You have to understand…I killed them because I loved them. God help me. I couldn’t let them suffer, be used. Be used. God, I couldn’t let them be used that way. There was nothing else I could do….”
I remembered the snapshots arranged beside Delacroix’s corpse. The elfin, gap-toothed little girl. The boy in the blue suit and red bow tie. The pretty blonde with the appealing smile. I suspected that these were the people who, to be saved, were killed.
“We all developed these symptoms, just this afternoon, Sunday afternoon, and we were going to go to the doctor tomorrow, but we didn’t make it that far. Mild fever. Chills. And every once in a while this…fluttering…this odd fluttering in the chest…or sometimes the stomach, in the abdomen, but then the next time in the neck, along the spine…this fluttering like maybe a twitching nerve or maybe heart palpitations or…no, nothing like that. God, no, nothing I can explain…not severe…subtle…a subtle fluttering but so…disturbing…nausea…couldn’t eat much….”
Delacroix paused again. Got control of his breathing. Took a swallow of whatever he was drinking.
“Truth. Got to tell the truth. Wouldn’t have gone to the doctor tomorrow. Would’ve had to call Project Control. Let them know it isn’t over. Even more than two years later, it isn’t over. I knew. I knew somehow it wasn’t over. All of us feeling the same way, and not like anything we’d felt before. Jesus, I knew. I was too scared to face it, but I knew. I didn’t know what, but I knew something, knew it was Wyvern coming back to me somehow, some way, Jesus, Wyvern coming back to get me after all this time. Maureen was putting Lizzie to bed, tucking her in bed…and suddenly Lizzie started…she was…she started screaming….”
Delacroix swallowed more of his drink. He banged the glass down as though it was empty.
“I was in the kitchen, and I heard my Lizzie…my little Lizzie so scared, so…screaming. I ran…ran in there, into the bedroom. And she was…she…convulsions…thrashing…thrashing and kicking…flailing with her little fists. Maureen couldn’t control her. I thought…convulsions…afraid she was biting her tongue. I held her…held her down. While I got her mouth open, Maureen folded a sock…going to use it…a pad to keep Lizzie from biting herself. But there was something…something in her mouth…not her tongue, something in her throat…this thing coming up her throat, something alive in her throat. And…and then…then she had her eyes tight shut…but then…but she opened them…and her left eye was bright red…bloodshot…and something was alive in her eye, too, some damn wriggling thing in her eye….”
Sobbing, Delacroix switched off the recorder. God knows how long the poor man required to get control of himself. Of course, there was no lengthy blank section of tape, just another soft click as Delacroix hit the record button and continued:
“I run to our bedroom, to get…get my revolver…and coming back, passing Freddie’s room, I see him…he’s standing by his bed. Freddie…eyes wide…afraid. So I tell him…tell him, get in bed and wait for me. In Lizzie’s room…Maureen has her back against the wall, hands pressed to her temples. Lizzie…she’s still…oh, she’s thrashing…her face…her face all swollen…twisted…the whole bone structure…not even Lizzie anymore…. There’s no hope now. This was that damn place, the other side, coming through, like Lizzie was a doorway. Coming through. Oh, Jesus, I hate myself. I hate myself. I was part of it, I opened the door, opened the door between here and that place, helped make it possible. I opened the door. And now here is Lizzie…so I have to…so I…I shot…shot her…shot her twice. And she’s dead, and so still on the bed, so small and still…but I don’t know if something is alive in her, alive in her though she isn’t anymore. And Maureen, she has…she has both hands to her head…and she says, ‘The fluttering,’ and I know she means it’s inside her head now, because I feel it, too, a fluttering along my spine…fluttering in sympathy with…with whatever was in Lizzie, is in Lizzie. And Maureen says…the most amazing…she says the most amazing thing…she says, ‘I love you,’ because she knows what’s happening, I’ve told her about the other side, the mission, and now she knows somehow I’ve been infected all along, everything dormant for more than two years, but I’m infected, and now them, too, I’ve ruined us all, damned us all, and she knows. She knows what I…what I’ve done to them…and now what I have to do…so she says, ‘I love you,’ which is giving me permission, and I tell her I love her, too, so much, love her so much, and I’m sorry, and she’s crying, and then I shoot her once…once, quick, my sweet Maureen, don’t let her suffer. Then I…oh, I go…I go back down the hall…I go to Freddie’s room. He’s on his back in bed, sweating, hair soaked with sweat, and holding his belly with both hands. I know he feels the fluttering…fluttering in his tummy…because I feel it now in my chest and in my left biceps, like in a vein, and of all places in my testicles, and now along my spine again. I tell him I love him, and I tell him to close his eyes…close his…close his eyes…so I can make him feel better…and then I don’t think I can do it, but I do it. My son. My boy. Brave boy. I make him feel better, and when I fire the shot, all the fluttering in me stops, just stops completely. But I know it’s not over. I’m not alone…not alone in my body. I feel…passengers…something…a heaviness in me…a presence. Quiet. It’s quiet but not for long. Not for long. I’ve reloaded the revolver.”
Delacroix switched off the recorder, pausing to get a grip on his emotions.
With the remote control, I stopped the tape. The late Leland Delacroix wasn’t the only one who needed to compose himself.
Without comment, Bobby got up from the cellist’s stool and went into the kitchen.
After a moment, I followed him.
He was emptying his unfinished bottle of Mountain Dew into the sink, flushing it away with cold water.
“Don’t turn it off,” I said.
While Bobby threw the empty soda bottle in the trash can and opened the refrigerator, I went to the sink. I cupped my hands under the faucet, and for at least a minute, I splashed cold water on my face.
After I dried my face on a couple of paper towels, Bobby handed a bottle of beer to me. He had one, too.
I wanted to have a clear head when we returned to Wyvern. But after what I’d heard on the tape, and considering what else remained to be heard, I could probably have downed a six-pack without effect.
“‘That damn place, the other side,’” Bobby said, quoting Leland Delacroix.
“It’s wherever Hodgson went in his spacesuit.”
“And wherever he came back from when we saw him.”
“Did Delacroix just go nuts, hallucinate everything, kill his family for no reason?”
“No.”
“You think the thing he saw in his daughter’s throat, in her eye—that was real?”
“Totally.”
“Me too. Things we saw in Hodgson’s suit…could that be what the fluttering is about?”
“Maybe that. Maybe something worse.”
“Worse,” I said, trying not to imagine it.
“I got the feeling—wherever the other side is, it’s a real zoo over there.”
We returned to the dining room. Bobby to the stool. Me to the chair by the composition table. After a moment of reluctance, I started the tape.
By the time Delacroix had begun to record again, his de
meanor had changed. He wasn’t as emotional as he had been. His voice broke now and then, and he needed to pause to collect himself from time to time, but for the most part, he was striving to soldier through what needed to be said.
“In the garage I keep gardening supplies, including a gallon of Spectracide. Bug killer. I got the can and emptied it on the three bodies. I don’t know if that makes sense. Nothing was…moving in them. In the bodies, I mean. Besides, these aren’t insects. Not like we think of insects. We don’t even know what they are. Nobody knows. Lots of big theories. Maybe they’re something…metaphysical. Do you think? I siphoned some gasoline out of the car. I have a couple gallons here in another can. I’ll use the gasoline to start the fire before…before I finish myself. I’m not going to leave the four of us for overeducated janitors at Project Control. They’ll just do something stupid. Like bag us and do autopsies. And spread this damn thing. I’ll call the Control number after I go down to the corner and mail this tape to you, before I set the fire and…kill myself. I’m all quiet inside right now. Very quiet inside. For now. How long? I want to believe that—”
Delacroix halted in mid-sentence, held his breath as though he were listening for something, and then shut off the recorder.
I stopped the tape. “He didn’t mail the cassette to anyone.”
“Changed his mind. What does he mean—something metaphysical?”
“That was my next question,” I said.
When Delacroix returned to the recorder, his voice was heavier, slower, leaden, as though he had fallen past fear, dropped below grief, and was speaking from a pit of despair.
“Thought I heard something in one of the bedrooms. Imagination. The bodies are…where I left them. Very still. Very still. Just my imagination. And now I realize you don’t even know what this is about. I started this all wrong. There’s so much to tell you, if you’re going to be able to blow this wide open, but there’s so little time. Okay. What you’ve got to know, the bones of it, is that there was a secret project at Fort Wyvern. The code name was Mystery Train. Because they thought they were making a magical mystery tour. Morons. Megalomaniacs. Me among them. Nightmare Train would have been a better name for it. Hellbound Train—that would’ve been better yet. And me happy to climb on board with the rest of’em. I don’t deserve any praise, big brother. Not me. So…here are the key personnel. Not everyone. Just the ones I knew, or as many as I remember right now. Several are dead. Many are alive. Maybe one of the living will talk, one of the upper-tier bastards who would know a lot more than I do. They all must be scared, and some of them must have guilty consciences. You’re good at finding the whistle-blowers.”
Delacroix proceeded to list over thirty people, identifying each man or woman as either a civilian scientist or a military officer: Dr. Randolph Josephson, Dr. Sarabjit Sanathra, Dr. Miles Bennell, General Deke Kettleman….
My mother was not among them.
I recognized only two names. The first was William Hodgson, who was no doubt the poor devil we encountered in the bizarre episode in the egg room. The second was Dr. Roger Stanwyk, who lived with his wife, Marie, on my street, just seven houses east of mine. Dr. Stanwyk, a biochemist, had been one of my mother’s many colleagues, associated with the genetic experiments at Wyvern. If the Mystery Train wasn’t the project that grew from my mother’s work, then Dr. Stanwyk had been collecting more than one paycheck and had done more than his fair share to destroy the world.
Delacroix’s voice grew softer and his speech slower during recitation of the last six or eight names, and the final name almost seemed as though it would stick to his tongue and remain unrevealed. I wasn’t sure if he had reached the end of his list or had stopped without finishing it.
He was silent for half a minute. Then, with his voice abruptly energized, he rattled out what seemed to be a few sentences in a foreign language before switching off the recorder.
I stopped the tape and looked at Bobby. “What was that?”
“Wasn’t pig Latin.”
I reversed the tape, and we listened again.
This wasn’t any language I could identify, and though, for all I knew, Delacroix might have been spewing gibberish, I was convinced that it had meaning. It had the cadence of speech, and although no word was recognizable, I found it curiously familiar.
After the thick, slow, depressed voice in which Delacroix had recited the names of people involved in the Mystery Train project, he imbued these sentences with evident emotion, perhaps even passion, which seemed a further indication that he was speaking with purpose and meaning. On the other hand, those in seizures of religious joy, who speak in tongues, also exhibit great emotion, but there is no evident meaning in the tongues they speak.
When Leland Delacroix began to record again, his voice revealed a numbing and dangerous depression: so flat as to be virtually devoid of inflection, so soft that it was barely more than a whisper, the essence of hopelessness.
“There’s no point in making this tape. You can’t do anything to change what’s happened. There’s no going back. Everything’s out of balance now. Veils ripped. Realities intersecting.”
Delacroix fell silent, and there was only the faint background hiss and pop of the tape.
Veils ripped. Realities intersecting.
I glanced at Bobby. He seemed as clueless as I was.
“Temporal relocator. That’s what they called it.”
I looked at Bobby again, and he said, with grim satisfaction, “Time machine.”
“We sent test modules through, instrument packages. Some came back. Some didn’t. Intriguing but mysterious data. Data so strange the argument was for a far future terminus, a lot farther than anyone expected. How far forward these packages went, no one could say or wanted to guess. Videocams were included in later tests, but when they came back, the tape counters were still at zero. Maybe they taped…then, coming back, they rewound, erased. But finally we got visuals. The instrument package was supposed to be mobile. Like the Mars rovers. This one must’ve been hung up on something. The package itself didn’t move, but the videocam panned back and forth across the same narrow wedge of sky, framed by overhanging trees. There were eight hours of tape, back and forth, eight hours and not one cloud. The sky was red. Not streaky red like a sky at sunset. An even shade of red, as the sky we know is an even shade of blue, but with no increase or diminishment of light, none at all, over eight hours.”
Delacroix’s low, leaden voice faded to silence, but he didn’t turn off the recorder.
After a long pause, there was the sound of chair legs scraping-stuttering across a tile floor, probably a kitchen floor, followed by heavy footsteps fading as Delacroix left the room. He dragged his feet slightly, physically weighed down by his extreme depression.
“Red sky,” Bobby said thoughtfully.
A still and awful red, I thought uneasily, remembering the line from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a favorite poem of mine when I was a young boy of nine or ten, in love with terror and with the idea of remorseless fate. These days, it held no special appeal—for the very reasons that I had liked it so much then.
We listened to the silence on the tape for a while, and then we could hear Delacroix’s voice in the distance, evidently coming from another room.
I cranked up the volume, but I still couldn’t make out what the man was saying.
“Who’s he talking to?” Bobby wondered.
“Himself, maybe.”
“Maybe to his family.”
His dead family.
Delacroix must have been roaming, because his voice rose and fell independent of my use of the volume control.
At one point he cruised past or through the kitchen, and we could hear him clearly enough to determine that he was speaking in that strange language again. He was ranting with considerable emotion, not in the flat dead voice he had last used when sitting at the recorder.
Eventually he fell silent, and a short while later, he came back to the recor
der. He switched it off, and I suspected that he rewound it to see where he had interrupted himself. When he began to record again, his voice was low, sluggish, once more crushed flat by depression.
“Computer analysis revealed that the red sky was an accurate color. Not an error in the video system. And the trees that framed the view of the sky…they were gray and black. Not in shadow. That was the true color. Of the bark. The leaves. Mostly black mottled with gray. We called them trees not because they looked like trees as we know them, but because they were more analogous to trees than to anything else. They were sleek…succulent…less like vegetation than like flesh. Maybe some form of fungus. I don’t know. Nobody knew. Eight hours of unchanging red sky and the same black trees—and then something in the sky. Flying. This thing. Flying low. So fast. Only a few frames of it, the image blurred because of its speed. Enhanced it, of course. With the computers. It still wasn’t entirely clear. Clear enough. There were lots of opinions. Lots of interpretations. Arguments. Debates. I knew what it was. I think most of us knew, on some deep level, the moment we saw it enhanced. We just couldn’t accept it. Psychological block. We argued our way right through the truth, until the truth was behind us and we didn’t have to see it anymore. I deluded myself, like all the rest, but I don’t delude myself anymore.”
He settled into silence. A gurgle and splash indicated that he was pouring something out of a bottle into a glass. He took a drink of it.
In silence, Bobby and I sucked at our beers.
I wondered if you could get beer in this world of the red sky and the fleshy black trees. Although I like a beer occasionally, I would have no difficulty living without it. Now, however, this bottle of Corona in my hand was the avatar of all the countless humble pleasures of daily life, of all that could be lost through human arrogance, and I held fast to it as though it were more precious than diamonds, which in one sense it was.
Delacroix began to speak in that incomprehensible tongue again, and this time he murmured the same few words over and over, as though chanting in a whisper. As before, though I couldn’t understand one word, there was a familiarity in these syllables and in the cadence of his speech that sent a corkscrew chill through the hollows of my spine.
