The Crooked Staircase

by Dean Koontz

  Clicking on the light, she hurried through the remainder of the cavern. She ascended a narrow flight of low and uneven steps, across one of which slithered three translucent alabaster insects of a kind she had never seen before, each the size of her thumb, the beam of light revealing their inner organs like miniature voodoo veves in photonegative. She cautioned herself that, although haste was essential, she couldn’t afford to trip and fall. She would never escape this preview of damnation with a broken leg.

  Not halfway across the upper room, Jane heard Hendrickson in the lower chamber, beyond the stepped passage. He shouted to her, boasting like a boy: “I can jump! I don’t need a plank. I can jump that far easy. I can jump!”

  She dared not wait to hear him screaming in pain from the bottom of the fissure. Perhaps he could have jumped across the gap forty years earlier, as a spry and limber boy, but though he might now be regressing into some adolescent mental state, he was nonetheless a man in his late forties, with less athletic ability than in his youth. Praying for his fall, she hurried on and was spurred faster when, instead of a scream of agony, he let loose a cry of triumph at having cleared the wide fissure without any need of a bridge.

  The exit passage from the current cavern angled sharply to the right. She ducked into it. She switched off her light and tucked it under her belt. Dropped the tote. Drew the Heckler. Turned to the room that she’d just left. She would kill him when he came off the steps where the ghostly insects had crossed her path. The muzzle flash of the Heckler would reveal her position, but he would be wounded or dead before he could return fire.

  Jane heard him on those stairs, but there was no jiggling light by which to measure his ascent. He was coming in the dark. Suppose he had regressed to adolescence or childhood. If so, then in his diminished state, perhaps he’d found the fear-etched memory of the architecture of this stone hive, perfected through thousands of hours of blind exploration, and now had no more need of light than did the sightless insects on the stairs.

  Although her heart knocked at a gallop, the pistol felt steady in her two-hand grip, and all she needed to do was listen for the change in his breathing and the difference in his footfalls when he topped the stairs. He would be directly in front of her, thirty feet away. She wouldn’t be able to put every round in the body core, but four shots squeezed off in quick succession would result in at least a couple hits, certainly one of which would wound him badly if not kill him.

  Absolute darkness, without a single point of light, with no varying shades of black to give perspective, was disorienting. She held her stance and didn’t let the gun drift to one side or the other. He needed less than a minute to climb the steps, but time seemed attenuated in this total eclipse. She held her breath, the better to hear when he transitioned from the stairs. Suddenly there was only silence.

  Case after case, in the Bureau and now gone rogue from it, she survived because of training and intuition. If she’d had to choose between one or the other, she would have forgone training to rely on intuition—the still, small voice that speaks out of your bone and blood and muscle.

  It spoke to her now, and she knew that Hendrickson anticipated a trap. He’d come off the stairs with his breath held, careful to make no sound in his final few steps. He would start moving sideways around the chamber that lay between them, out of her blind line of fire. Hoping she had been quick enough to intuit his intent, she didn’t hesitate to squeeze off shots, although just two, not daring to expose herself through twice that many. An extra two seconds might be the difference between life and death. As she juked back into the passageway, he fired a burst at her muzzle flash, maybe six rounds. Stone cracked, bullets ricocheted with thin banshee shrieks, and even through the roar, she heard the distinct and mortal whistle of a round or two passing through the opening where she had stood.

  She had to keep him guessing for ten seconds, fifteen. If she dared the flashlight, he’d follow, hose the passageway, and take her down either with a direct hit or a couple bank shots. She plucked the tote off the floor, left the flash tucked in her waistband, moving into the pitch-black passageway. She knew that in twelve or fifteen feet, it curved to the left, a ramp of flowstone, and she thought it lacked steps all the way to the top, although her memory was but a crude sketch compared to the mental blueprints he could consult.

  16

  They were hours late. Travis didn’t want to believe anything bad had happened to them, but they were very late.

  Although he was supposed to stay away from the windows, he now stood in the living room, staring out at the highway, hoping to see the green car drive up to this little blue house, everyone safe and happy, after all.

  Cars passed now and then, but never the right one.

  The day someone killed his dad, he’d been playing at a friend’s house, staying overnight. He hadn’t heard about his dad until the next day.

  He didn’t want to hear about Uncle Gavin and Aunt Jessie later. He wanted them to come home. He asked God to get them home.

  The dogs were restless. Duke and Queenie roamed the house, not just on patrol, but as if looking for something.

  Looking for Gavin and Jessie, just like Travis was. Gavin and Jessie were supposed to be there. The dogs knew Gavin and Jessie were supposed to be there, just like Travis knew.

  It was time to feed the dogs. There was kibble, brought from home with biscuit treats and collars and leashes and blue poop bags.

  He knew how to measure the kibble. Soon he would have to give them kibble and leash them and take them outside.

  He didn’t want to take them outside. For one thing, he wasn’t supposed to leave the house. Don’t answer the door, don’t go near the windows, don’t leave the house.

  Those were the rules. His mom said the best chance anyone had for a good and happy life was to play by the rules.

  For another thing, he was afraid if he broke the rule about not leaving the house, he would jinx Gavin and Jessie. Then maybe they would never come back.

  Duke came to his side and stood looking out at the palm-tree shadows stretching long, the sunshine, the highway. The dog made a crying sound.

  17

  The curving ramp of flowstone ascended without steps. Although Jane repeatedly misjudged the curve, bumping against the walls, she made it to the top, where she stood for a moment, listening to the hush below. He seemed hesitant to follow closely, as if he, too, feared being hosed in those confines.

  Keep moving. Plan the action and commit. Stalking and being stalked, you’re more likely to die from lack of commitment than from taking action.

  Because she had one more task than she had hands, she holstered the pistol. She carried the tote in her left hand, the flashlight now in her right, two fingers across the lens to damp the beam, so the glow might not be as easily seen around corners or from another room.

  Sideways through a narrow passage, as if she were a fencer, the light her foil. Into a chamber with an open center surrounded by a peristyle of columns formed by stalactites meeting stalagmites; the atmosphere that of a temple, as if some subterranean congregation of mutant form gathered here according to a netherworld calendar, to worship gods unknown. Three passageways led out, and she took the one marked by a white arrow of paint, glancing back frequently.

  She was like Jonah in the belly of the whale, although if this had been a leviathan, it would have lived hundreds of millions of years ago in a sea that had receded, its massive corpus fossilized, its endless bowels turned to stone.

  They had taken half an hour to descend from the stairhead, but ascent would take longer. She hoped that by moving faster than might seem prudent, she would not only put distance between herself and Hendrickson in his blind pursuit, but also make her way to the surface in as little as forty minutes.

  She found herself holding her breath when she didn’t intend to hold it, and her mouth repeatedly filled with saliva, per
haps ruled by a subconscious fear that the sound of swallowing would be enough to bring him down on her.

  In the first room of skulls with their lethal pikes of chert and obsidian, with their fanged and yawning eyes, the deep stillness behind Jane suddenly meant to her not that Hendrickson was creeping cat-quiet, but that he was no longer following in her wake. Not that he was shot and dead. Not that he was incapacitated by injury. Not that he had descended into some madness in which he could not function. He was no longer following her because he was taking another route known only to him and would be waiting for her someplace ahead.

  She halted with hundreds of eyeless sockets gazing at her from their ledges, with hundreds of humorless smiles turned upon her. No. Bite on the fear. She knew what to do. There was death everywhere in this place, yes, but there was death everywhere in the world above, as well. Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act falls the shadow. Even in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, keep moving. Plan the action and commit. Hesitation was lethal.

  18

  On this bright Sunday afternoon, in rural Borrego Valley, the white clapboard church with the white shingled steeple seems luminous in the fierce desert sun, as if it takes the hard light into itself and softens it and gives it back in a form that is easier on the eyes. It reminds Carter Jergen of those carefully detailed, miniature buildings that people use to create precious little villages in Christmas displays through which scale-model electric trains go clickity-clickity-clickity in tedious circles.

  A couple dozen vehicles are parked in front of the place, and newly arrived people are going not into the church, but around the side of it, to join others gathering in a bosk of trees under which stand maybe a dozen long picnic tables.

  Dubose pulls the VelociRaptor to the side of the road and studies the scene for a moment. “What’s all this about?”

  “It’s Sunday,” says Jergen.

  “But it’s not Sunday morning.”

  “Some of the new arrivals are carrying baskets.”

  “Baskets of what?”

  “Maybe food,” Jergen suggests. “Maybe later they’re going to have Sunday supper together.”

  After consideration, Dubose says, “I don’t think I like this.”

  Jergen agrees. “Dull as bingo night at an old folks’ home. But we can show the Honda photo to a lot of people in a few minutes.”

  Dubose glowers in thought. “All right. But let’s get the hell in and out.” He drives into the church lot and parks.

  As they’re walking across the blacktop, Jergen glances back at the VelociRaptor. It looks like some magnificent machine predator, that, when no one is looking, will become animate and eat all the crappy little vehicles surrounding it.

  As they reach the corner of the church, the gleeful squeals of children rise in a raucous chorus, and Dubose halts. “Oh, shit.”

  Kids tend to want to climb in the giant’s lap and pull his ears and make a honking noise when they pinch his nose. He’s like a big shaggy dog to them.

  “Ten minutes,” Jergen promises.

  They follow a brick walkway through a landscape of pebbles and cactuses and silver-dollar plants and various weird succulents, to the cluster of nine big trees that shade the picnic area.

  None of the younger children are in the bosk, where the adults are mingling. A separate rubber-floored playground features a jungle gym, a tube slide, swings, and other attractions that Jergen thought had gone extinct with the invention of the Game Boy. Screaming kids are running, jumping, sliding, swinging, and slashing at one another with foam-rubber swords.

  “Sonofabitch,” Dubose mutters, but he doesn’t bolt.

  Jergen asks a woman in a flowered muumuu if the minister is in attendance, and she points to a man of about thirty who is standing two trees away from them, chatting with parishioners. “Pastor Milo,” she says.

  Pastor Milo has a shaved head and an athletic physique. He wears sneakers, white jeans, a blue Hawaiian shirt, and an earring that is a dangling cross.

  Remembering Reverend Gordon M. Gordon of the Mission of Light Church, Jergen whispers to Dubose, “Try not to shoot this one.”

  19

  The tote slung over her left shoulder, the flashlight in her left hand now, two fingers still over the lens to allow only the minimum of necessary light, the Heckler & Koch in her right hand, no hope of doing this with a two-hand grip…

  All five senses enhanced by adrenaline and fear. Hyperacute. The darkness layered with moving shadows, moving not because something living shared the immediate space, moving because the light she carried briefly enlivened phantoms as she progressed. The whisper of her breathing. Otherwise no sounds except the slow dripping of water at sundry places in the gloom, ticking like clocks that had marked the years in their millions. The scent of wet stone, of her own fear sweat.

  How very like a dream it often was, these minutes before a final accounting, when it came down to kill or be killed, and this time more than ever dreamlike. Caverns flowing for the most part in soft folds, as if the walls continuously melt and re-form around her. The massive tusks and skulls of mastodons materializing like some gene-stored memory of another incarnation many lives before this one. Here again the regiments of skeletal hands in bony gesture, once sheathed in flesh and occupied with work, with play, with making love, with making war. And in every dream, somewhere a beast prowled, human or not, the human kind more terrifying than others. Only the human monster knew beauty and rejected it, knew truth and disdained it, knew peace and did not prefer it, unlike the tiger and the wolf who knew not.

  This time it was a boy, a lost boy in spite of the almost five decades he’d lived and sought his way, now crawling this underworld, more confident in the blinding dark than in the light. If he would kill her because he’d been told to kill her, he might kill her with particular savagery also because in his dementia he confused her with the hated mother who had molded him from boy into beast.

  When Jane reached the end of the display of hands, she paused in a kind of vestibule between caverns. Just before the terminus of this small connecting chamber lay a generous passageway to the right and a narrower one to the left, and directly forward a room awaited without grisly ornamentation. She was only a couple levels below the stairhead.

  Easing forward, she lifted the two shading fingers from the lens, and the light lanced the wide corridor to the right: steps zigzagging down, walls dissolving away into the dark. The narrower passage to the left led straight away, without steps and continuing beyond the reach of the beam.

  She covered the lens again and stood listening. From the cavern directly ahead came not the drip of water but a drizzling sound. She recalled a flue to one side of that room, from which water issued in a thin ribbon. She strove to hear through the drizzle, which was a white noise that might mask a sound more meaningful, but otherwise there was only stillness.

  A ledge of stone overhung the opening between the vestibule and the next cavern. She hesitated beneath it, right arm close to her side, the pistol pointed forward, and again raised her fingers from the lens. The light speared out at full strength, and she swept the room ahead. There was no immediate threat, no irregularities in the walls where a man might press out of sight and wait for her to pass.

  The only tricky spot would be the fissure that bisected the space and had to be crossed on a plank. She could not remember how wide or deep it was. In her ascent, at other bridges, she had been wary, afraid that he might be hidden in a shallow cleft, waiting to shatter her with a barrage from below when she set foot on the plank. As close as she was now to the surface, every crossing of this kind became more dangerous than the one before it.

  She damped the beam again and came out from under the overhang. The motion and the act were one, so that she heard him only in the fraction of a second during which he dropped from the ledge and fell on her, driving her to
the floor. No time to turn and shoot. The Heckler flung from her hand, spinning across the floor. Flashlight rolling away as well. The breath having been driven out of her, for a moment she could not resist, all of his weight atop her, and she felt herself as close to death as ever she had been.

  He could have finished her then, but he relented and forced her onto her back, straddling her and pincering her with his knees, his left hand around her throat, gripping with such ferocity that she could not get a full breath to replenish what had been knocked from her in the fall. In the backwash from the flashlight, his face was a surreal work of light and shadow, so fiercely configured by hatred and rage that he looked little like himself, looked hardly human, as though during his ascent he’d shed layer after layer of identity, until nothing remained but a primordial self, uncivilized and unreasoning, a being of pure and darkest emotions.

  When he spoke, the words came in a tortured shriek, exploding in a spray of spittle. “He’s mine, and he always will be. Is that right? IS THAT RIGHT? He’s mine, and he always will be? You think so? What do you think now, you vicious bitch? Am I yours? Will I always be? No! YOU ARE MINE NOW.” He quoted his mother to Jane as though Jane had spoken those words, and if he knew the difference between her and Anabel, it was a difference that didn’t matter to him. She clawed at his hand on her throat, tearing the skin. A darkness not of the room but within her faded the perimeter of her vision as Hendrickson picked up something with his right hand and raised it high. A large bone. A human femur. Taken from some room she had not seen. At the broken end, wicked splinters encircled the hollow core in which marrow had once produced blood within the living bone. He might have descended into such dementia that he was no longer able to operate a gun, or maybe he hadn’t taken more than a single spare magazine when he’d set out in pursuit of her. But as she gazed up at his diabolic face, into eyes radiant with decadent desire and bloodlust, she knew that he abandoned the gun because it wasn’t personal. He needed this to be a hands-on murder, to smell her terror and feel her quake beneath him, to know intimately the warmth and consistency of her blood. Her vision dimmed further.