The Crooked Staircase

by Dean Koontz

  Jane had driven out of the storm twenty miles back and had the tire chains removed when she refueled. Now she found a generic motel, paid cash for one night, and moved all her luggage into the room. The titanium-alloy attaché case, which contained $210,000 that had once belonged to Simon Yegg, could not be seen when she slid it under a dresser that stood on four short legs.

  She walked to a nearby supermarket, went to the deli counter, and ordered two roast beef sandwiches with provolone cheese and mustard.

  The heavyset woman who built and wrapped the sandwiches was sensitive to the moods of others. “Been a long day, dear?”

  “I’ve had better.”

  “I’m sure it’s not man trouble.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Girl as pretty as you should give them some trouble.”

  “It’s been known to happen.”

  In the liquor department, she located the Belvedere vodka and added a pint bottle to her purchases.

  Back at the motel, she filled an ice bucket from the ice maker in the vending-machine alcove and bought two cans of Diet Coke.

  In her room, she took off her Elizabeth Bennet wig. She had lost the clip-on nose ring somewhere. It didn’t matter. Anabel had seen her in this look, probably even captured an image of her, which meant she couldn’t be Liz anymore.

  She stripped and examined the wound in her left side. Not bad. A thin crust of blood. She had pulled one of the stitches. It was healing well enough, and she still had plenty of antibiotics.

  She took a hot shower and dressed in underpants and a T-shirt. She mixed vodka and Coke and sat on the bed to eat the sandwiches, one of them entirely, only the meat and cheese from the second.

  There was a TV, but she didn’t want it.

  Bolted to the nightstand to keep it from being stolen, a clock radio offered an alternative. She found a station doing a Mariah Carey retrospective. That sensational voice. “I Don’t Wanna Cry” and “Emotions.” And then “Always Be My Baby” and “Love Takes Time” and “Hero” and more.

  Music could lift you up so high, and music could destroy you, and sometimes it could do both in the same song.

  When she finished eating and felt fully calm, she intended to call the disposable phone that she’d left with Gavin and Jessie.

  She was finishing her second vodka when her own burner rang. She switched off the radio and plucked the phone from the nightstand and took the call. She heard Travis say, “Mommy?”

  Whatever had happened, it was all there in that one word, because since she’d gone on the run with him from their home in Virginia, months earlier, he had called her only Mom, as if he had understood that it had fallen to him to grow up fast. Besides, she knew him so well that she could read him in two syllables. She swung her legs off the bed and sat on the edge of the mattress. “What’s wrong, sweetie?”

  “Uncle Gavin and Aunt Jessie went for groceries, and they never came back.”

  29

  Jane in Placerville, which seemed like a suburb of Hell when Travis was all the way down there in Borrego Valley, the motel room now a cage in which she moved restlessly, without purpose, a pain in her chest as if the dread that cinched her heart was a thorny vine, a demon of anguish feeding on her mind…

  She knew the whole story of Gavin’s cousin Cornell Jasperson, brilliant and highly eccentric, a kind of end-times prepper, but not crazy. She had approved his place as a bolt-hole. But she had not allowed herself to believe such a moment as this would ever come.

  Travis would be safe there for a while. A short while. Two days. Maybe three.

  Unless Gavin and Jessie had been injected. Then they would reveal his whereabouts.

  But they hadn’t been injected. They wouldn’t allow themselves to be captured. They knew what that would mean: nanoweb enslavement.

  They were surely dead. They were as much a part of her heart as were its walls of muscle, and they were dead. There would be some news of their death in the morning, some concocted story containing no truth except for the truth of their murders.

  She couldn’t shake the feeling that, by enlisting them in her war, she was responsible for their deaths. Yes, they’d understood the risks, no doubt about that. They saw this as their fight, too, as everyone’s war, everyone who loved freedom and had sufficient experience to know that evil was real and implacable. If they could speak to her now from that mysterious place of which no human being knew the full truth, they would absolve her of responsibility, but in her grief she was nevertheless also pierced by guilt.

  She dressed and stepped outside and took deep breaths of the crisp night air and stood trembling with a need to act. The sky remained as overcast as it had been when she arrived.

  No volume of vodka existed that would bring her sleep.

  She wanted to be in Borrego Springs now. But the worst thing she could do would be to rush to Travis. She would need the night to get there. They would be expecting her, and she would be exhausted and easy to take down. She had to have a plan to get in and out of that valley undetected. As an agent working cases involving serial killers and mass murderers, and now since she had been branded a murderer herself and a traitor, she stayed alive by staying cool. But this…this was the ultimate test of her fortitude and prudence in the face of extreme threat. Not only her life but that of her son now depended on her not succumbing to hot emotion.

  Nonetheless, she wanted to be closer to Travis, if even just a little closer, and she wanted another thing. She wanted stars.

  She returned to her room and put on the excessive eye makeup and the blue lipstick and the chopped-everywhichway black wig, because that was her quickest option. They knew the look now, but they didn’t know the Elizabeth Bennet name; she could use it one more time.

  She returned her luggage to the car, turned in the room key, and drove west to Sacramento, and then south toward Stockton.

  30

  This exhaustion had the substance of a real presence, a mantled thing resting on her neck, its thick cloaks weighing heavily on her shoulders. There was always a moment when iron will and a determined heart could no longer compensate for the fatigue of mind and muscle. Her vision blurred with weariness until, if she stayed on the road, she was a danger to herself and others.

  At 11:50 P.M., near Stockton, the overcast abated. Still farther south, when the night cast off the last rags of cloud, Jane exited Interstate 5 at the little community of Lathrop, where she would get a room for the night.

  First, however, she stopped along the side of the road on the outskirts of town and got out of the car and walked a few steps into a meadow. The sky was a sea of suns afloat in the eternal dark that only their light relented. The nearest sun of all, which warmed the earth, was hours below the eastern horizon. When it rose, it would reveal a world of wonders, a world on which had been lavished such natural beauty of such astonishing depth and complexity that an honest heart perceived meaning in it and yearned to know. In the night as it was now and in the morning light, there were men and women making music, writing poetry and novels, researching new medicines, fighting wars against malevolent forces, doing hard and honest work, raising families, loving, caring, hoping. A hole in the ground, its galleries shaped into a museum to display works of cruelty and horror—that was not the truth of the world, as Anabel insisted. That “truth” was the delusion of those for whom life was nothing more than a contest for power, who either could not see or refused to see the beauty and the wonder of the world, who wanted to find no meaning beyond themselves, who lived to control, to tell others what to do and think and believe, and who relished crushing those who would not submit. If it was inevitable that evolving technology would provide them with the absolute power they craved, they must still be resisted. When the universe had been brought forth and light had been born within the stars, if even at that first moment all had been shaped toward tyranny and slavery
, she would be damned rather than have such a future for herself or her child. If they forced her to wade through blood and never allowed her to find a welcome shore, she would nevertheless seek it until she died. And if they pursued the hellish transformation of this world, she would give them Hell itself by opening the door for them.

  And now the motel room. A pillow. Weariness and grief and grace and gratitude. Instant sleep. And with the coming of the morning sun, the wonder and the terror of it all.

  Please turn the page for a preview of

  the next Jane Hawk novel

  by #1 New York Times bestselling author

  Dean Koontz

  THE FORBIDDEN DOOR

  1

  At first the breeze was no more than a long sigh, breathing through the Texas high country as though expressing some sadness attendant to Nature herself.

  They were sitting in the fresh air, in the late-afternoon light, because they assumed that the house was bugged, that anything they said within its rooms would be monitored in real time.

  Likewise, they trusted neither the porches nor the barn, nor the horse stables.

  When they had something important to discuss, they retreated to the redwood lawn chairs under the massive oak tree in the backyard, facing a flatness of grassland that rolled on to the distant horizon and, for all that the eye could tell, continued to eternity.

  As Sunday afternoon became evening, Ancel and Clare Hawk sat in those chairs, she with a martini, he with Macallan Scotch over ice, steeling themselves for an upcoming television program they didn’t want to watch but that might change their lives.

  “What bombshell can they be talking about?” Clare wondered.

  “It’s TV news,” Ancel said. “They pitch most every story like it’ll shake the foundations of the world. It’s how they sell soap.”

  Clare watched him as he stared out at the deep, trembling grass and the vastness of sky as if he never tired of them and saw some new meaning in them every time he gave them his attention. A big man with a weathered face and work-scarred hands, he looked as if his heart might be as hard as bone, though she’d never known one more tender.

  After thirty-four years of marriage, they had endured hardships and shared many successes. But now—and perhaps for as long as they yet might have together—their lives were defined by one blessing and one unbearable loss, the birth of their only child Nick and his death at the age of thirty-two, the previous November.

  Clare said, “I’m feeling like it’s more than selling soap, like it’s some vicious damn twist of the knife.”

  He reached out with his left hand, which she held tightly. “We thought it all out, Clare. We have plans. We’re ready for whatever.”

  “I’m not ready to lose Jane, too. I’ll never be ready.”

  “It won’t happen. They’re who they are, she’s who she is, and I’d put my money on her every time.”

  Just when the faded-denim sky began to darkle toward sapphire overhead and took upon itself a glossy sheen, the breeze quickened and set the oak tree to whispering.

  Their daughter-in-law, Jane Hawk, who was as close to them as any real daughter might have been, had recently been indicted for espionage, treason, and seven counts of murder, crimes that she hadn’t committed. She would be the sole subject of this evening’s Sunday Magazine, a one-hour TV program that rarely devoted more than ten minutes to a profile of anyone, either president or pop singer. The most-wanted fugitive in America and a media sensation, Jane was labeled the “beautiful monster” by the tabloids, a cognomen used in promos for the forthcoming special edition of Sunday Magazine.

  Ancel said, “Her indictment by some misled grand jury, now this TV show, all the noise about it…you realize what it must mean?”

  “Nothing good.”

  “Well, but I think she’s got evidence that’ll destroy the sons of bitches, and they know she’s got it. They’re desperate. If she finds a reporter or someone in the Bureau who maybe she can trust—”

  “She tried before. The bigger the story, the fewer people she can trust. And this is as big as a story gets.”

  “They’re desperate,” Ancel insisted. “They’re throwin’ all they got at her, tryin’ to turn the whole country against her, make her a monster no one’ll ever believe.”

  “And what then?” Clare worried. “How does she have any hope if the whole country’s against her?”

  “Because it won’t be.”

  “I don’t know how you can be so sure.”

  “The way they demonize her, this hysteria they ginned up in the media—it’s too much piled on top of too much. People sense it.”

  “Those who know her, but that’s not a world.”

  “People all over, they’re talkin’ about what the real story might be, whether maybe she’s bein’ set up.”

  “What people? All over where?”

  “All over the Internet.”

  “Since when do you spend five minutes on the Internet?”

  “Since this latest with her.”

  The sun appeared to roll below the horizon, although in fact the horizon rolled away from the sun. In the instant when all the remaining light of day was indirect across the red western sky, the breeze quickened again and became a wind aborning, as if all were a clockwork.

  As the looser leaves of the live oak were shaken down, Clare let go of Ancel’s hand and covered her glass, and he shielded his.

  There was no privacy in the house, and they weren’t finished counseling each other in matters of grief and hope, preparing for the affront that would be the TV program. The wind brought the dark, and the dark brought a chill, but the sea of stars was a work of wonder and a source of solace.

  2

  Nine miles from Hawk Ranch, Egon Gottfrey heads the operation to take Ancel and Clare Hawk into custody and ensure their fullest cooperation in the search for their daughter-in-law.

  Well, custody is too formal a word. Each member of Gottfrey’s team carries valid Department of Homeland Security credentials. They also possess valid ID for the NSA and the FBI, though they work at those two agencies only on paper. They receive three salaries and earn three pensions, ostensibly to preserve and defend the United States, while in fact working for the revolution. The leaders of the revolution make sure that their foot soldiers are well rewarded by the very system they are intent on overthrowing.

  Because of Egon Gottfrey’s successful career in Homeland, he was approached to join the Techno Arcadians, the visionaries who conduct the secret revolution. He is now one of them. And why not? He doesn’t believe in the United States anyway.

  The Techno Arcadians will change the world. They will pacify contentious humanity, end poverty, create Utopia through technology.

  Or so the Unknown Playwright would have us believe.

  The Hawks will not be arrested. Gottfrey and his crew will take possession of them. Neither attorneys nor courts will be involved.

  Having arrived in Worstead, Texas, shortly after four o’clock in the afternoon, Egon Gottfrey is bored by the town within half an hour of checking into the Holiday Inn.

  In 1896, when this jerkwater became a center through which the region’s farms and ranches shipped their products to market, it had been called Sheepshear Station, because of the amount of baled wool that passed through on the way to textile mills.

  That’s the story, and there’s no point in questioning it.

  By 1901, when the town was incorporated, the founders felt that the name Sheepshear Station wasn’t sophisticated enough to match their vision of the future. Besides, snarky types routinely called it Sheepshit Station. It was then named Worstead, after Worstede, the parish in Norfolk, England, where worsted wool was first made.

  Anyway, that’s what Gottfrey is supposed to believe.

  More than fourteen thousand rustic citizens now c
all it home.

  Whatever they call it, Egon Gottfrey finds it to be a thin vision of a place, incomplete in its detail, much like an artist’s pencil study done before proceeding to oil paints. But every place feels like that to him.

  The streets aren’t shaded. The only trees are in the park in the town square, as if there is a limited budget for stage dressing.

  Near sunset, he walks the downtown area, where the buildings mostly have flat roofs with parapets, the kind behind which villains and sheriffs alike crouch to fire on each other in a thousand old movies. Many structures are of locally quarried limestone or rust-colored sand-struck brick. The sameness and plainness don’t allow the chamber of commerce to call the architecture quaint.

  At Julio’s Steakhouse, where the bar extends onto an elevated and roofed patio overlooking the street, Paloma Sutherland and Sally Jones, two of the agents under Gottfrey’s command, having come in from Dallas, are precisely where they are supposed to be, enjoying a drink at a streetside table. They make eye contact as he passes.

  And in the park, on a bench, Rupert Baldwin is studying a newspaper. Wearing Hush Puppies and a roomy corduroy suit and a beige shirt and a bolo tie with an ornamental turquoise clasp, he looks like some nerdy high-school biology teacher, but he is tough and ruthless.

  As Gottfrey walks past, Rupert only clears his throat.

  On another bench sits Vince Penn, half as wide as he is tall, with a flat face and the big hands of a natural-born strangler.

  Vince holds a handful of pebbles. Now and then, he throws one of the stones with wicked accuracy, targeting the unwary squirrels that have been conditioned by Worstead locals to trust people.

  South of the park stands a two-star mom-and-pop motel, Purple Sage Inn, as unconvincing as any location in town.