by Dean Koontz
The thermostat had been set low in the two main floors of the untenanted house. A stubborn chill pooled everywhere, like the icy remnant of a flood tide. It surrendered gradually to the electric heat, which Paul switched on after they ascended from the basement and inspected half the ground floor. In spite of her insulated ski jacket, Heather shivered through the entire tour.
The house had both character and every convenience, and would be even easier to settle into than they’d expected. Eduardo Fernandez’s personal effects and clothing had not been disposed of; so they would need to empty closets to make room for their own things. In the four months since the old man’s sudden death, the place had been closed and unattended; a thin layer of dust coated every surface. However, Eduardo had led a neat and orderly life; there was no great mess with which to deal.
In the final bedroom on the second floor, at the back of the house, coppery late-afternoon sunlight slanted through west-facing windows, and the air glowed like that in front of an open furnace door. It was light without heat, and still Heather shivered.
Toby said, “This is great, this is terrific!”
The room was more than twice the size of the one in which the boy had slept in Los Angeles, but Heather knew he was less excited by the dimensions than by the almost whimsical architecture, which would have sparked the imagination of any child. The twelve-foot-high ceiling was composed of four groin vaults, and the shadows that lay across those concave surfaces were complex and intriguing.
“Neat,” Toby said, staring up at the ceiling. “Like hanging under a parachute.”
In the wall to the left of the hall door was a four-foot-deep, six-foot-long, arched niche into which a custom-built bed had been fitted. Behind the headboard on the left and in the back wall of the niche were recessed bookshelves and deep cabinets for the storage of model spaceships, action figures, games, and the other possessions that a young boy cherished. Curtains were drawn back from both sides of the niche and, when closed, could seal it off like a berth on an old-fashioned railroad sleeping car.
“Can this be my room, can it, please?” Toby asked.
“Looks to me like it was made for you,” Jack said.
“Great!”
Opening one of the two other doors in the room, Paul said, “This walk-in closet is so deep you could almost say it’s a room itself.”
The last door revealed the head of an uncarpeted staircase as tightly curved as that in a lighthouse. The wooden treads squeaked as the four of them descended.
Heather instantly disliked the stairs. Perhaps she was somewhat claustrophobic in that cramped and windowless space, following Paul Youngblood and Toby, with Jack close behind. Perhaps the inadequate lighting—two widely spaced, bare bulbs in the ceiling—made her uneasy. A mustiness and a vague underlying odor of decay didn’t add any charm. Neither did spiderwebs hung with dead moths and beetles. Whatever the reason, her heart began to pound as if they were climbing rather than descending. She was overcome by the bizarre fear—similar to the nameless dread in a nightmare—that something hostile and infinitely strange was waiting for them below.
The last step brought them into a windowless vestibule, where Paul had to use a key to unlock the first of two lower doors.
“Kitchen,” he said.
Nothing fearful waited beyond, merely the room he had indicated.
“We’ll go this way,” he said, turning to the second door, which didn’t require a key from the inside.
When the thumb-turn on the dead-bolt lock proved stiff from lack of use, the few seconds of delay were almost more than Heather could tolerate. Now she was convinced that something was coming down the steps behind them, the murderous phantom of a bad dream. She wanted out of that narrow place immediately, desperately—out.
The door creaked open.
They followed Paul through the second exit onto the back porch. They were twelve feet to the left of the house’s main rear entrance, which led into the kitchen.
Heather took several deep breaths, purging her lungs of the contaminated air from the stairwell. Her fear swiftly abated and her racing heart regained a normal pace. She looked back into the vestibule where the steps curved upward out of sight. Of course no denizen of a nightmare appeared, and her moment of panic seemed more foolish and inexplicable by the second.
Jack, unaware of Heather’s inner turmoil, put one hand on Toby’s head and said, “Well, if that’s going to be your room, I don’t want to catch you sneaking girls up the back steps.”
“Girls?” Toby was astonished. “Yuck. Why would I want to have anything to do with girls?”
“I suspect you’ll figure that one out all on your own, given a little time,” the attorney said, amused.
“And too fast,” Jack said. “Five years from now, we’ll have to fill those stairs with concrete, seal them off forever.”
Heather found the will to turn her back on the door as the attorney closed it. She was baffled by the episode and relieved that no one had been aware of her odd reaction.
Los Angeles jitters. She hadn’t shed the city. She was in rural Montana, where there probably hadn’t been a murder in a decade, where most people left doors unlocked day and night—but psychologically, she remained in the shadow of the Big Orange, living in subconscious anticipation of sudden, senseless violence. Just a delayed case of Los Angeles jitters.
“Better show you the rest of the property,” Paul said. “We don’t have much more than half an hour of daylight left.”
They followed him down the porch steps and up the sloping rear lawn toward a smaller, stone house tucked among the evergreens at the edge of the forest. Heather recognized it from the photographs Paul had sent: the caretaker’s residence.
As twilight stealthily approached, the sky far to the east was a deep sapphire. It faded to a lighter blue in the west, where the sun hastened toward the mountains.
The temperature had slipped out of the fifties. Heather walked with her hands jammed in jacket pockets and her shoulders hunched.
She was pleased to see that Jack took the hill with vigor, not limping at all. Occasionally his left leg ached and he favored it, but not today. She found it hard to believe that only eight months ago, their lives seemed to have been changed for the worse, forever. No wonder she was still jumpy. Such a terrible eight months. But everything was fine now. Really fine.
The rear lawn hadn’t been maintained after Eduardo’s death. The grass had grown six or eight inches before the aridity of late summer and the chill of early autumn had turned it brown and pinched off its growth until spring. It crackled faintly under their feet.
“Ed and Margarite moved out of the caretaker’s house when they inherited the ranch eight years ago,” Paul said as they drew near the stone bungalow. “Sold the contents, nailed plywood over the windows. Don’t think anyone’s been in there since. Unless you plan to have a caretaker yourself, you probably won’t have a use for it, either. But you ought to take a look just the same.”
Pine trees crowded three sides of the smaller house. The forest was so primeval that darkness dwelt in much of it even before the sun had set. The bristling green of heavy boughs, enfolded with purple-black shadows, was a lovely sight—but those wooded realms had an air of mystery that Heather found disturbing, even a little menacing.
For the first time she wondered what animals might from time to time venture out of those wilds into the yard. Wolves? Bears? Mountain lions? Was Toby safe here?
Oh, for God’s sake, Heather.
She was thinking like a city dweller, always wary of danger, perceiving threats everywhere. In fact, wild animals avoided people and ran if approached.
What do you expect? she asked herself sarcastically. That you’ll be barricaded in the house while gangs of bears hammer on the doors and packs of snarling wolves throw themselves through windows like something out of a bad TV movie about ecological disaster?
Instead of a porch, the caretaker’s house had a large flagstone-paved area
in front of the entrance. They stood there while Paul found the right key on the ring he carried.
The north-east-south panorama from the perimeter of the high woods was stunning, better even than from the main house. Like a landscape in a Maxfield Parrish painting, the descending fields and forests receded into a distant violet haze under a darkly luminous sapphire sky.
The fading afternoon was windless, and the silence was so deep she might have thought she’d gone deaf—except for the clinking of the attorney’s keys. After a life in the city, such quiet was eerie.
The door opened with much cracking and scraping, as if an ancient seal had been broken. Paul stepped across the threshold, into the dark living room, and flicked the light switch.
Heather heard it click several times, but the lights didn’t come on.
Stepping outside again, Paul said, “Figures. Ed must’ve shut off all the power at the breaker box. I know where it is. You wait here, I’ll be right back.”
They stood at the front door, staring at the gloom beyond the threshold, while the attorney disappeared around the corner of the house. His departure made Heather apprehensive, though she wasn’t sure why. Perhaps because he had gone alone.
“When I get a dog, can he sleep in my room?” Toby asked.
“Sure,” Jack said, “but not on the bed.”
“Not on the bed? Then where would he sleep?”
“Dogs usually make do with the floor.”
“That’s not fair.”
“You’ll never hear a dog complain.”
“But why not on the bed?”
“Fleas.”
“I’ll take good care of him. He won’t have fleas.”
“Dog hairs in the sheets.”
“That won’t be a problem, Dad.”
“What—you’re going to shave him, have a bald dog?”
“I’ll just brush him every day.”
Listening to her husband and son, Heather watched the corner of the house, increasingly certain that Paul Youngblood was never going to return. Something terrible had happened to him. Something—
He reappeared. “All the breakers were off. We should be in business now.”
What’s wrong with me? Heather wondered. Got to shake this damn L.A. attitude.
Standing inside the front door, Paul flipped the wall switch repeatedly, without success. The dimly visible ceiling fixture in the empty living room remained dark. The carriage lamp outside, next to the door, didn’t come on, either.
“Maybe he had electric service discontinued,” Jack suggested.
The attorney shook his head. “Don’t see how that could be. This is on the same line as the main house and the stable.”
“Bulbs might be dead, sockets corroded after all this time.”
Pushing his cowboy hat back on his head, scratching his brow, frowning, Paul said, “Not like Ed to let things deteriorate. I’d expect him to do routine maintenance, keep the place in good working order in case the next owner had a need for it. That’s just how he was. Good man, Ed. Not much of a socializer, but a good man.”
“Well,” Heather said, “we can investigate the problem in a couple of days, once we’re settled down at the main place.”
Paul retreated from the house, pulled the door shut, and locked it. “You might want to have an electrician out to check the wiring.”
Instead of returning the way they had come, they angled across the sloping yard toward the stable, which stood on more level land to the south of the main house. Toby ran ahead, arms out at his sides, making a brrrrrrrrrrr noise with his lips, pretending to be an airplane.
Heather glanced back at the caretaker’s bungalow a couple of times, and at the woods on both sides of it. She had a peculiar tingly feeling on the back of her neck.
“Pretty cold for the beginning of November,” Jack said.
The attorney laughed. “This isn’t southern California, I’m afraid. Actually, it’s been a mild day. Temperature’s probably going to drop well below freezing tonight.”
“You get much snow up here?”
“Does hell get many sinners?”
“When can we expect the first snow—before Christmas?”
“Way before Christmas, Jack. If we had a big storm tomorrow, nobody’d think it was an early season.”
“That’s why we got the Explorer,” Heather said. “Four-wheel drive. That should get us around all winter, shouldn’t it?”
“Mostly, yeah,” Paul said, pulling down on the brim of his hat, which he had pushed up earlier to scratch his forehead.
Toby had reached the stable. Short legs pumping, he vanished around the side before Heather could call out to him to wait.
Paul said, “But every winter there’s one or two times where you’re going to be snowbound a day or three, drifts half over the house sometimes.”
“Snowbound? Half over the house?” Jack said, sounding a little like a kid himself. “Really?”
“Get one of those blizzards coming down out of the Rockies, it can drop two or three feet of snow in twenty-four hours. Winds like to peel your skin off. County crews can’t keep the roads open all at once. You have chains for that Explorer?”
“A couple of sets,” Jack said.
Heather walked faster toward the stable, hoping the men would pick up their pace to accompany her, which they did.
Toby was still out of sight.
“What you should also get,” Paul told them, “soon as you can, is a good plow for the front of it. Even if county crews get the roads open, you have half a mile of private lane to take care of.”
If the boy was just “flying” around the stable, with his arms spread like wings, he should have reappeared by now.
“Lex Parker’s garage,” Paul continued, “in town, can fit your truck with the armatures, attach the plow, hydraulic arms to raise and lower it, a real fine rig. Just leave it on all winter, remove it in the spring, and you’ll be ready for however much butt kicking Mother Nature has in store for us.”
No sign of Toby.
Heather’s heart was pounding again. The sun was about to set. If Toby…if he got lost or…or something…they would have a harder time finding him at night. She restrained herself from breaking into a run.
“Now, last winter,” Paul continued smoothly, unaware of her trepidation, “was on the dry side, which probably means we’re going to take a shellacking this year.”
As they reached the stable and as Heather was about to cry out for Toby, he reappeared. He was no longer playing airplane. He sprinted to her side through the unmown grass, grinning and excited. “Mom, this place is neat, really neat. Maybe I can really have a pony, huh?”
“Maybe,” Heather said, swallowing hard before she could get the word out. “Don’t go running off like that, okay?”
“Why not?”
“Just don’t.”
“Sure, okay,” Toby said. He was a good boy.
She glanced back toward the caretaker’s house and the wilderness beyond. Perched on the jagged peaks of the mountains, the sun seemed to quiver like a raw egg yolk just before dissolving around the tines of a prodding fork. The highest pinnacles of rock were gray and black and pink in the fiery light of day’s end. Miles of serried forests shelved down to the fieldstone bungalow.
All was still and peaceful.
The stable was a single-story fieldstone building with a slate roof. The long side walls had no exterior stall doors, only small windows high under the eaves. There was a white barn door on the end, which rolled open easily when Paul tried it, and the electric lights came on with the first flip of a switch.
“As you can see,” the attorney said as he led them inside, “it was every inch a gentleman’s ranch, not a spread that had to show a profit in any way.”
Beyond the concrete threshold, which was flush with the ground, the stable floor was composed of soft, tamped earth, as pale as sand. Five empty stalls with half-doors stood to each side of the wide center promenade, more spacious than
ordinary barn stalls. On the twelve-inch wooden posts between stalls were cast-bronze sconces that threw amber light toward both the ceiling and the floor; they were needed because the high-set windows were too small—each about eight inches high by eighteen long—to admit much sunlight even at high noon.
“Stan Quartermass kept this place heated in winter, cooled in the summer,” Paul Youngblood said. He pointed to vent grilles set in the suspended tongue-and-groove ceiling. “Seldom smelled like a stable, either, because he vented it continuously, pumped fresh air in. And all the ductwork is heavily insulated, so the sound of the fans is too low to bother horses.”
On the left, beyond the final stall, was a large tackroom, where saddles, bridles, and other equipment had been kept. It was empty except for a built-in sink as long and deep as a trough.
To the right, opposite the tackroom, were top-access bins where oats, apples, and other feed had been stored, but they were now all empty as well. On the wall near the bins, several tools were racked business end up: a pitchfork, two shovels, and a rake.
“Smoke alarm,” Paul said, pointing to a device attached to the header above the big door that was opposite the one by which they had entered. “Wired into the electrical system. You can’t make the mistake of letting batteries go dead. It sounds in the house, so Stan wouldn’t have to worry about not hearing it.”
“The guy sure loved his horses,” Jack said.
“Oh, he sure did, and he had more Hollywood money than he knew what to do with. After Stan died, Ed took special pains to be sure the people who bought all the animals would treat them well. Stan was a nice man. Seemed only right.”
“I could have ten ponies,” Toby said.
“Wrong,” Heather said. “Whatever business we decide to get into, it won’t be a manure factory.”
“Well, I just mean, there’s room,” the boy said.
“A dog, ten ponies,” Jack said. “You’re turning into a real farm boy. What’s next? Chickens?”
“A cow,” Toby said. “I been thinking what you said about cows, and you talked me into it.”
“Wiseass,” Jack said, taking a playful swipe at the boy.
