The Crooked Staircase

by Dean Koontz

  In recent days, she had found herself listening more often to Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in A Major, K. 488, in part because the concerto’s opening movement inspired a soaring optimism that was much needed in her current circumstances.

  Within this exceptional concerto, however, was a melancholy movement so piercing, so expressive of the deepest sorrow, that she couldn’t hear it without thinking about Nick and her mother. And about Nathan Silverman, who had once been her boss at the FBI and whom she had spared from a life of Arcadian slavery by an act of loving violence that would weigh upon her forever. This sequence in K. 488 didn’t depress her, but balanced the optimism of the opening movement and made her feel complete of heart and clear of mind.

  As that movement was nearing an end, Hendrickson violated her instruction to remain silent, but only to say, “It’s so beautiful.”

  “Yes.”

  “What is it?”

  She told him.

  “I was allowed no time for music.”

  She considered that statement for a moment before she said, “You’ll have it now, all the way to Tahoe, one music or another.”

  He said only, “Thank you,” gazing at the highway with the stony expression of a sphinx whose stare was fixed on the rim of eternity.

  When the slow movement of K. 488 passed, Jane was relieved to hear again more thrilling strains of dauntless optimism.

  10

  North on U.S. Highway 395, through the western portion of the Mojave, a vast blackness all around, the clouds of the coast having surrendered the sky to stars, the moon far down…Later, dawn frosting the heavens with light, first a sweet rose-pink at the horizon, a paler pink farther up, and a swath of buttercream before all goes blue for the day…Lonely playas of salt flats and mud flats and sand flats, forbidding dark mountains in the distance…

  There was Mozart again, Eine kleine Nachtmusik, when Jane at last brought up the subject that Hendrickson had not wanted to talk about until he was under her control. He had asked that, after he’d spoken of it, she would order him to forget that he had told her about this thing that apparently mortified him. “ ‘I think to myself, I play to myself, and nobody knows what I say to myself.’ What did you mean by that, Booth?”

  His smile was pained, but at least it counted as a smile. He spoke with a note of nostalgic fondness that didn’t displace his melancholy, staring at the highway but perhaps seeing into the past. “ ‘So—here I am in the dark alone, there’s nobody here to see. I think to myself, I play to myself, and nobody knows what I say to myself.’ It’s from a book. Poems. A little book of poems.”

  “What book?”

  “Now We Are Six by A. A. Milne. But I was just five.”

  After a moment of consideration, Jane said, “The author of Winnie-the-Pooh. What does that mean to you?”

  “The books? They’re everything. They mean everything to me.”

  “You could read at five?”

  “She pushes me to read. She pushes, pushes, pushes.”

  “Your mother.”

  “Lessons all day, every day.” His brow pleated and his eyes narrowed and his voice hardened. “Focus, boy. Focus, if you know what’s good for you, boy. Focus, focus, focus, you lazy little bastard.”

  She waited until his quickened breathing quieted. “So you read the book of poems when you were five.”

  “I’m given the set. All four Milne books. To encourage me.”

  “Encourage you to read.”

  “To read more, faster, better. To understand what’s wrong.”

  “Wrong with what?”

  “With everyone in the story. Like the bear. He’s stupid and lazy. He’s not focused, and he’s kind.”

  “It’s wrong to be kind?”

  “He’s gentle and kind. Kindness is weakness. The strong own the world. The strong use the weak. They piss on the weak. They should piss on them. It’s what the weak deserve.” His face contorted with contempt, and his voice became harsh again. “Is that what you want, boy? Do you want to be used and pissed on all your miserable life?”

  Out in the wasteland, Deadmans Dry Lake and Lost Dry Lake and Owl Dry Lake, the Lava Mountains ahead, Death Valley at a distance in the east…

  Passing through the desert, Jane felt as if something of the desert were passing into her. “But what do those lines of poetry mean to you? Those lines in particular.”

  “Mother says the only worthwhile life is a regimented life. Make a schedule. Stick to it. It’s a very bad boy who can’t stick to it. No day is a good day if it isn’t regimented.”

  Jane waited, but after a silence said, “And so?”

  “And so, fifteen minutes for breakfast. Fifteen for lunch. Half an hour for dinner. To bed at eight. Up at five. Lights out at eight. Out, out, out. Only two lamps in the room. She takes the light bulbs. Takes them with her. Takes them after I’m put to bed.”

  “ ‘So here I am in the dark alone…’ ”

  He nodded. “ ‘There’s nobody here to see.’ The poem is ‘In the Dark.’ So I take a book to the window. Sometimes there’s moonlight. Or landscape lights from outside. I can see the page if I turn it just so. For an hour or two, until I get sleepy, I can think what I want. Play what I want. My time. In all the day, it’s my own time.”

  Jane said, “If she opened your bedroom door and found you not asleep but reading by moonlight—what then?”

  “So then…the deeper darkness.”

  “And what was that?”

  “At first, it’s being made naked. And being spanked. Spanked on my…boy thing. Spanked hard so it hurts to pee. You’re not going to be like your father, boy, not like that worthless piece of shit. So I’m spanked and put in the box to sleep the rest of the night.”

  “ ‘The box’? What box?”

  “A wood box. It has a locking lid. A box the size of the boy. With a folded blanket to lie on. Holes to let air in. But no light. No light ’cause the box is in a closet with no windows.”

  “Dear God,” she said.

  “You don’t need a god if Mother loves you. Mother is all you need. Mother punishes out of love. To teach what’s true and right.”

  In the arid landscape, geologic formations like crude timeworn temples by gods better left unworshipped, giant rocks graven with pictographs by tribes known and by others too ancient to have names other than those that anthropologists have chosen to give them…

  “How often were you locked in a box?”

  “Two nights a week. Or three. So then I start sleeping early and getting up at like two in the morning. After she’s sleeping.”

  “Then you could read by moonlight.”

  “Yes. And not be caught.”

  “You said, at first it was being made naked and spanked and put in the box. And later it was…?”

  “Worse. Later, worse. Later, it’s the crooked staircase.”

  Previously, he told her and Gilberto all about the crooked staircase. Soon they will descend it together.

  11

  In the last of the night, Gavin had stopped one sage-covered hill away from Highway 76. While boy and dogs lay in a slumberous pile on the backseat, while Jessie held a light for Gavin, while unseen canyon wrens, waking early, whistled sweetly in anticipation of the dawn, he took the license plates off the Land Rover and replaced them with plates that Jane had given him weeks earlier.

  She had also provided registration papers and a driver’s license in the name of Orlando Gibbons, as well as a license for Jessica in the name of Elizabeth Haffner, obtained from her source for forgeries in Reseda. Those documents would pass the scrutiny of any cop who ran them through the DMV records.

  They needed to repaint the Rover, make it the blue that was stipulated on the registration. But they were prepared to do that when they reached their destination.

&
nbsp; Likewise, Gavin and Jessie would need to alter some things about their appearance to match the photoshopped pictures used for the forgeries.

  At the moment, however, it was most important to strip the Rover of the original plates—which might already be on the National Crime Information Center website—before traveling on paved roads once more. They couldn’t risk their old plates being automatically scanned by government vehicles, because those scans would soon thereafter be banked in the NSA archives, allowing them to be found and tracked at least to the general vicinity of the one safehold they had prepared for such an emergency as this.

  Using a collapsible spade from a kit of basic tools that they kept in the Rover, Gavin dug a hole and dropped the original license plates into it. He covered them with earth and tamped it down and scuffed the burial place with his boots.

  He examined his work in the beam of Jessie’s flashlight. It looked fine. No one was likely to wander onto precisely this square yard of remote wildland. If searchers chanced by, they would never notice the telltales of this small excavation, and even if they did notice and dug up the plates, their pursuit of Travis would in no way be furthered by that discovery.

  Nevertheless, Gavin tore off a few stems of sage and used the foliage to brush away anything that looked like a boot impression.

  In the backwash of the flashlight, Jessie smiled. “You really love him, don’t you?”

  “Woman, I love you, I love him, I love the dogs, I love me, I love life, and I hate the people who think we’re just part of the great unwashed who need to be taught some manners.”

  “Give me a kiss,” she said.

  “What, here?”

  “If it’s too public for you, I’ll turn out the light.” Which she did.

  He kissed her, and she kissed back, and he said, “I’ve been wondering how Elizabeth Haffner kisses. She’s got the mojo.”

  “Mmmm. So does Orlando Gibbons.”

  As dawn broke, with the boy snoring and the dogs whimpering in their dreams of rabbit chasing, Gavin drove over one last rugged hill and up a slope onto a lonely stretch of Highway 76. He switched on the headlights again and headed southeast toward Lake Henshaw and then Borrego Valley, which was surrounded by Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, there to take refuge with one who called himself “a walking nutbar.”

  12

  And in the vast wasteland were bones, those of wild burros and of coyotes that had strayed too far from hospitable terrain, bleached to the white of salt and pitted by weather. Also the centuries-old bones of men and women in unmarked ancient graves or massed in as yet undiscovered caves where barbaric slaughter had occurred, and as previously in such caves, the bones of children, too, with caved-in skulls…

  Behind the wheel of the Explorer Sport, Jane said, “Something else I remember you saying. ‘Now is it true, or is it not—’ ”

  Hendrickson finished the line: “ ‘—that what is which and which is what.’ ”

  “Is that also Milne?”

  “The first Winnie book. A poem called ‘Lines Written by a Bear of Very Little Brain.’ ”

  “It means something special to you?”

  He stared at the ribbon of highway, which seemed to pull them along with it as it was raveled onto some distant spool.

  After a minute, he said, “ ‘What is which, but which is what. Those are these, but these are those. Who is what, but what is who.’ That’s the way the world is, you weak, ignorant boy. People aren’t ever who they seem to be, and nothing they say means what it seems to mean. Nothing is only what it is. If you want to survive, you pathetic little shit, you damn well better understand, you better learn the need to be strong like me, learn to crush anyone who gets in your way. Don’t be like your worthless dick of a father. Go down the hole and learn, boy. Down the hole you go. Down the hole.”

  He sat trembling, sheathed in sweat.

  To the east, the Naval Weapons Station at China Lake, and to the west, the beginning of the Inyo National Forest and rising ranks of piñon pines…

  High overhead an unusually large flock of common ravens with wingspans over four feet glided without the need to oar the air. Jane was reminded of an Indian legend that told of the ravens that had pulled the first light of the world into the sky with their beaks. It was said that one day they would appear in great numbers long before sunset and pull into the world the final and everlasting darkness. This seemed as if it might be the day for that, but the only blackness in the blue was the flock itself, which winged onward, each member an indecipherable cryptograph sent into flight by a creation that teased with meaning but held tightly its secrets.

  She said, “Booth, when I snap my fingers, you will forget we ever had a conversation about Milne and the Pooh books. You will forget my questions and what you said in answer to them. The most recent thing we spoke about was Mozart. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  She took one hand from the wheel and snapped her fingers.

  Although time would pass before his perspiration dried, his tremors ceased. The anxiety faded from his face. He relaxed in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead, as though his mind traveled the byways of a daydream. Jane couldn’t imagine what phantasms and contrivances his reverie might contain, but she suspected that it was of such a character that the ravens of the everlasting night were a part of it and that in the shadows of its twisting streets, there would be a maternal figure who had programmed him long before the nanomachine control mechanism had been invented.

  13

  The small town of Borrego Springs, in the Borrego Valley, in San Diego County, surrounded by six hundred thousand acres of the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, was not one of the top-twenty tourist attractions in California. Most of those who vacationed there were campers, and even those who stayed in the town’s motels and motor inns were drawn by activities related to the desert.

  A week from now, perhaps sooner, the largest crowd of the year would arrive to witness the spring flowering of the desert, when thousands of acres blazed with intricate configurations of blooming annuals: red poppies, zinnia in many hues, deep-purple gentians, and a rich variety of wildflowers that transformed the stark meadows and spread into the distance like some immense random-pattern Persian carpet woven by artisans in a state of euphoria.

  Gavin and Jessie’s destination wasn’t within the town limits, but farther down-valley, off County Road S22. Two unpaved ruts with a stubble of dead weeds between them served as a driveway to the five-acre property. The single-story pale-blue stucco house, in need of paint, stood in a grove of ragged queen palms, under a white metal roof, surrounded by a yard of pea gravel and specimen cacti. Cement-block steps led to a front porch barren of furniture.

  Cornell Jasperson, owner of the property, didn’t live in the house. No one lived there, though it was fully furnished.

  Cornell’s residence was a hundred yards behind the house, in a subterranean structure with thick steel-reinforced concrete walls and ceiling, which he’d designed and built without obtaining permits—perhaps by greasing a lot of palms; he would not say—and by using his connections to import Philippine workers who’d lived in trailers on-site, never went into town, and spoke only Tagalog.

  The structure was buried under four feet of earth and beyond detection, known only to Cornell, Gavin, and twelve newly rich Philippine workers who had returned home years earlier, telling stories prepared for them, stories regarding what it was like to spend a year working twelve-hour days in Utah, helping to build a mansion for a wealthy eccentric named John Beresford Tipton.

  Of connections, Cornell had many, the least powerful being his cousin, his mother’s sister’s son, Gavin Washington. Born out of wedlock, Cornell had never known his father. His mother, Shamira, had been a drug addict and sometimes prostitute who named him after the man who, by her best judgment, was her co-conceiver. Shamira and her
family disowned each other when she was sixteen; she died of a drug overdose twenty years later, when Cornell was just eighteen. No one in the family even knew of his existence. By the time he was twenty-four, from the proceeds of ten apps of his creation, he had been worth more than three hundred million dollars.

  The rapid accumulation of wealth, in his words, “scared the bejesus” out of him. By his reckoning, something was out of whack when “a walking nutbar like me can go from a net worth of ten bucks to three hundred million in four years.” His success had convinced him that current society was “a mouse of cards,” and that he needed to “bunker down and ride out the coming Apocageddon.”

  Cornell’s description of himself as a nutbar was too harsh by far. He had been diagnosed variously as suffering from Asperger’s disorder and different degrees of autism, among other things, and some people whose education came from movies called him an idiot savant, though his IQ was exceptional. It could be said with certainty only that Cornell was eccentric but most likely harmless.

  Gavin drove around the house, following the ruts that led past the yard of pea gravel and ended in a turnaround in front of a barn standing between the house and the undetectable bunker that was buried under four feet of earth.

  The barn looked as though it might collapse if sneezed on. Sun, wind, and rain had weathered the unpainted wood into a palette of grays. The structure’s north and south walls were concave, and the whole thing canted to the west under a rust-streaked metal roof.

  “Does he have horses?” Travis asked from the backseat.

  “No,” Gavin said. “He wouldn’t know what to do with a horse.”

  “Does he have dogs?”

  “No. He wouldn’t trust himself to take care of one properly.”

  “Does he have chickens?” Jessie asked mischievously, as if likewise possessed by the curiosity of a five-year-old. “Does he have pigs and sheep?”

  Gavin pinched Jessie’s earlobe affectionately and said to Travis, “He lives here all by himself. No animals, no other people.”