by Dean Koontz
“It’s inflated with helium, isn’t it?” Corky asked, indicating three discarded cylinders of compressed gas, each the size of a hospital oxygen tank. “The Hindenburg was hydrogen. I thought helium didn’t explode.”
“I’m not worried about an explosion. I’m worried about being struck by lightning! Even if lightning doesn’t rupture the bag and set it afire, it could fry us in the gondola.”
“The storm’s winding down. No lightning,” Corky observed.
“There was lightning earlier today.”
“Only a little. I told you, Trotter, we in government control the storm. When we want lightning, it strikes where we need it, and when we don’t want lightning, not one bolt leaves the quiver.”
In addition to being inflated with nonflammable helium instead of hydrogen, the blimp was different from a zeppelin in that it had no rigid internal structure. The skin of the Hindenburg—a vessel as long as the Eiffel Tower is tall, nearly as long as four Boeing 747s standing nose to tail—had been stretched around an elaborate steel frame that contained sixteen giant gas cells, great cotton sacks made airtight by a coating of plastic, as well as an entire luxury hotel. Trotter’s blimp, any blimp, was just a flat bag when deflated.
With no missing strawberries to obsess about and with no roller bearings to manipulate obsessively in one hand, a la Bogart in The Caine Mutiny, Captain Queeg von Hindenburg studied the slowly seething fog overhead, squinting to catch a glimpse of the clouds above the fog. He looked worried. He looked angry. With his orange hair pasted to his head by rain, his protuberant eyes, and his walrus mustache, he looked like a cartoon. “I don’t like this at all,” he muttered.
CHAPTER 84
ON THE THIRD FLOOR, AT THE NORTH END OF the west wing, across the hall from the thirty-five-hundred-square-foot suite that included the Face’s bedroom, Ethan arrived at the blue door. No other door in the house resembled it.
Ming du Lac had seen the appropriate shade of blue in a dream. According to Mrs. McBee, the interior decorator had then gone through forty-six custom blends of paint until the spiritual adviser had been satisfied that reality had been matched to dream.
As it turned out, the necessary blue was precisely the same as that on any box of Ronzoni pasta.
Merely dedicating a telephone line to calls from the dead and hooking up an answering machine to service it was not sufficient to satisfy Ming’s and Manheim’s vision of a serious investigation of the phenomenon. A space apart had been required for the equipment, which grew in complexity from a simple answering machine. And they decreed that the ambience of this chamber must be serene, beginning with the color of the door.
A sacred place, Ming called it. Sacrosanct, Channing Manheim had instructed.
The simple lockset—no deadbolt—featured a keyhole in the knob. If he wasn’t able to loid the latch, he’d kick his way into the room.
A credit card, slipped between door and jamb, forced the spring latch out of the striker plate, and the blue barrier opened to reveal a sixteen-by-fourteen-foot room in which the windows had been covered with wallboard. The ceiling and the walls had been padded and then upholstered in white silk. The carpet was white, as well. The inside of the door was not blue but white.
In the center of this space stood two white chairs and a long white table. On the table and under part of it was what Fric might have called a shitload of high-tech equipment supporting a computer with tremendous processing capacity. All the equipment had white molded-plastic casings; the logos had been painted over with white nail polish. Even the connecting cables were white.
You could go snowblind in this room if the lights were turned too bright. The concealed cold-cathode tubes in the coves near the ceiling came on automatically when someone entered, and they were set at a comfortable level that caused the silk walls to shimmer radiantly like fields of snow on a winter twilight.
Ethan had been in this room once previously, during his first day of orientation, when he’d been new to the job.
The computer and supporting equipment operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Ethan sat in one of the white chairs.
On the white answering machine, the indicator light had gone dark. Line 24 was no longer in use.
The blue screen, a different shade from the door, provided the only vibrant color in the room. The icons were white.
He had never used this computer before. The software that organized the incoming calls was, however, the same used for the rest of the mansion’s telephone system.
Fortunately, the letters, numbers, and symbols on the keyboard had not been painted white and thus obliterated. Even the gray-shaded keys were in the state intended by the manufacturer. By comparison to the surroundings, the keyboard was a riot of color.
Ethan called forth data exactly as he would have done for Lines 1 through 23, using the computer in his study. He wanted to know how many calls Line 24 had received in the past forty-eight hours.
He had been told that five or six messages were received each week on Line 24. Most were wrong numbers or cold-call sales pitches.
The list of Monday and Tuesday calls appeared with the latest count at the head of the column: fifty-six. Ten weeks’ worth had been received in two days.
He’d been aware that Line 24 was carrying higher than usual traffic, but he hadn’t realized that it was being hit more than once per hour, on average.
The temperature in this talk-to-the-dead zone was with great effort maintained always at sixty-eight degrees, a figure from Ming’s original dream. This evening, the air felt colder than sixty-eight.
Scrolling through the phone log, Ethan saw that every one of the fifty-six entries lacked an incoming-caller number. This meant that none of them were from sales operations, which were now required by law to forego Caller ID blocking.
Maybe some were wrong-number calls made by people who did have Caller ID blocking. Maybe. But he would have bet everything he owned against that proposition. These calls had come from a place where the phone company couldn’t offer service.
At the bottom of the log, he highlighted the most recent entry, the call received while he had been downstairs in his study, trying to make sense of ladybugs, snails, and foreskins.
Boxed options appeared in the upper right corner of the screen. He could receive a printout of the call transcript; he could read the transcript on the screen; or he could listen to the call.
He chose to listen.
If the call was like the one to which he’d bent his ear for nearly thirty minutes the previous night, an open line full of hiss and pop woven through with a faint voice half-imagined and not at all understood, he would hear something better from this equipment. The computerized audio analyzer filtered out static, identified patterned sounds that fit the profile of speech, clarified and enhanced that speech, and finally eliminated gaps in order to condense the call to its essence before storing it.
Caller 56 still sounded as though she cried out from a great distance, across an abyss. Her fragile voice made him lean forward in his chair, afraid that he would lose it. Nevertheless, because of the computer enhancement, he could hear every word spoken, though the message puzzled him.
The voice was Hannah’s.
CHAPTER 85
IN HIS MIND’S EAR, CORKY LAPUTA LISTENED TO Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre, particularly to the music meant to portray the flight of the Valkyries.
Through the drizzle and fog, through the windless Bel Air, the mad Queeg’s miniblimp sailed as smoothly as one dream melting into another.
The swish and sizzle of the rain entirely masked what noise the battery-powered propellers made, so that it seemed as though Corky and his sour-faced pilot journeyed in utter silence, without sough or bated billow. Neither the sun nor the moon could claim a quieter ascent and transit of the sky.
Suspended under the airship, the open gondola was similar to a rowboat, but with rounded stern and prow. The two bench-style seats were capable of accommodating four.
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Facing forward, Trotter sat at the yoke on the bench nearer the stern. He was immediately in front of the engine, the helium feed, and the other controls.
At first Corky faced Trotter, looking back the way they had come. Then he turned to look forward, frequently leaning out to one side or the other to spot landmarks through the misty murk.
Treetops slid by only a few feet below them. Casting no faintest shadow in the absence of the moon and stars, they progressed with such stealth and with such minimal disturbance to the air that birds in the highest branches, sheltering from the rain, were not once frightened into flight.
This wealthy community had been built in a forest of oak and ficus and evergreen, of metrosideros and podocarpus and California pepper. More accurately, a forest had been imported to dress these hills, glens, and canyons, which long ago had been only semiarid pastures of wild grass and bleak ravines cluttered with scrub.
To pass all but invisibly above unsuspecting Bel Air, they were required to stay at the lowest prudent altitude. In these hills, most streets were serpentine and quite narrow, flanked and often overhung by huge trees, providing motorists with tightly circumscribed views of the sky. As long as the blimp seldom crossed above streets and thereby took full advantage of the forests that would screen it from all eyes except those directly below, it might slip all the way to Palazzo Rospo and back again without being noticed, for few if any residents would be afoot on their properties—and in a position to look up—in this weather.
A direct route as the blimp flies, from the ruined chateau on the knoll to Palazzo Rospo, downslope, measured less than half a mile. In windless conditions like these, running on batteries, the airship could make a top speed of fifteen miles per hour. To disturb the fog as little as possible and thus shroud themselves in its welcome veils, they were making just ten miles per hour, which would get them from door to door in approximately three minutes.
Through the Internet, Corky had accessed not only maps and city-planning charts but also a trove of aerial photography produced by the state of California, offering a bird’s view of these exclusive and secluded enclaves. A majority of the homes in this community were true estates, particularly in that portion over which they now flew; and Corky had memorized the roof lines and the salient features of each palatial structure that lay along their route.
Trotter had done his homework, too. He consulted landmarks less often than Corky, however, for he relied more on compass readings.
The only light associated with the airship was the soft glow of the compass, the altimeter, and the few other gauges on the control panel. They were swivel-mounted on a stanchion, allowing Trotter to position them as needed. The combined radiance of these instruments was insufficient to paint the faintest glimmer on the curve of the helium bag immediately overhead.
Indeed, more light rose from the great houses over which they glided than from the craft controls. Gold and silver reflections of this rising incandescence glimmered briefly across the belly of the blimp, as if luminous lichen encrusted it.
Past chimneys they sailed, skimming wet rooftops with but a few feet to spare. They were close enough for Corky to discern individual roofing tiles and shingles even in the night and fog.
Some impatient child at a bedroom window, eager for Christmas, sky gazing, dreaming of a reindeer-drawn sleigh, might see Trotter’s folly sailing through the rain and think that Santa Claus had come two nights early and by unconventional transport.
And here, now, after so much planning: the Manheim estate.
Undetected, they crossed approximately forty feet above the monitored wall.
They crossed over the motion detectors that were alert for intruders at ground level.
They crossed scores of sentinel cameras, not one of which was aimed at the sky.
Corky did not wish to be deposited at the house. Instead, he must lower himself with great care from the gondola to the roof of the groundskeeper’s building at the back of the property.
To this point, Trotter had not done a great deal of piloting, for the line of travel had been straight and true. Now he needed to maneuver the airship to the target building, align it just-so with a particular portion of the roof, and hover with as little lateral and stern-to-bow drift as possible.
The four fins at the back of the blimp each featured a rudder. These were operated by electrical switches that were signaled through low-voltage cable, by controls on the yoke.
Trotter could lose altitude by bleeding helium from the vessel. If he needed to gain altitude, he would do so by feeding more helium into the gas bag overhead or, more quickly, by dumping water from the ballast tanks along both sides of the gondola.
Gracefully, almost majestically, the airship adjusted course for the groundskeeper’s building and arrived there as soundlessly as the stars turn through the sky from dusk to dawn. With a grace equal to a series of perfectly executed ballet steps, with a delicate touch equal to that required to construct a house of cards, Jack Trotter brought the blimp lower and positioned it as required.
According to the wristwatch favored by discerning anarchists—a reliable Rolex—transit time had been three minutes, twenty seconds.
8:33. Service to all Manheim phones, hard-wired and cellular, had been discontinued three minutes ago.
CHAPTER 86
FRIC WAS BORN…ON A WEDNESDAY.”
In the white room behind the blue door, Ethan sat enraptured by the voice of his dead wife.
“Fric was born…on a Wednesday.”
This was exquisite music to him, pure and thrilling. The effect of a much-loved hymn on a religious heart or of a national anthem on one deeply patriotic could not have elicited a fraction of the strong emotion that this voice wrenched from Ethan.
“Hannah?” he whispered, though a recording could not reply to him. “Hannah?”
The tears that blurred his vision were largely tears of joy, pressed from him not because he had missed her so desperately these past five years but because this curious message delivered in her voice meant that somewhere the essence of Hannah survived, that the hateful cancer had won a battle but not a war. His loss was no less crushing than ever it had been, but now he knew that it was not a loss eternal.
She had repeated the same six words twice. He played Call 56 three times before he could shift the focus of his attention from the miraculous sound of her voice to the content of the message.
“Fric was born…on a Wednesday.”
Although Hannah clearly judged this information to be important, Ethan couldn’t see why the day of Fric’s birth had relevance to the current situation.
Working from bottom to top of the log, he accessed Call 55. As before, he chose the audio option over a printout of the transcript.
Hannah again. This time she spoke but one word, twenty or thirty times. His name. “Ethan…Ethan…Ethan…”
The poignant yearning in her voice matched that in Ethan’s heart. Listening, he could barely hold fast to what little of his composure he had not already lost.
By phone, by elevator speaker, perhaps by other means, she had struggled to reach him, but she had not been able to make herself heard. Ironically, behind that Ronzoni door, in this ridiculous white room, with the aid of all this elaborate equipment, she had broken through.
God worked in strange ways, indeed, when He worked through the likes of Ming du Lac.
Ethan had come here with a sense of urgency that had briefly abated but that now overtook him once more.
Backward to Call 54. Hannah yet again.
“Monday’s child is fair of face….”
Ethan’s breath caught in his throat. He slid to the edge of the chair.
“Tuesday’s child is full of grace….”
He knew this. A children’s rhyme. He mouthed the words of the third line along with her.
“Wednesday’s child is full of woe…”
The Cookie Kitten was filled with Scrabble tiles that spelled WOE ninety times.
Why ninety? Maybe it didn’t matter. Ninety of each letter, two hundred and seventy tiles in total, were the number needed to fill the jar. Wednesday’s child is full of woe.
Call 53. Hannah.
Even with the static filtered out and the speech enhanced, her message could not be understood, as if on this occasion, the river between life and death had widened until the far shore lay at the other side of an ocean.
Call 52. Also unclear.
Call 51. Hannah with another nursery rhyme.
“Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home….”
As he shot to his feet, Ethan knocked over his chair.
“Your house is on fire, and your children will burn.”
Channing Manheim would not arrive home until the afternoon of December 24. The operative theory had been that the Face wouldn’t be in danger until that time, at the earliest.
Maybe the Face himself had never been in danger. Maybe the target had always been Fric.
Twenty-two ladybugs in a small glass jar. Why not twenty-three or twenty-four? Unlike the cookie jar, the beetle container had been less than half full. So why not fifty ladybugs packed to the lid?
This was Tuesday, December 22.
CHAPTER 87
AS CORKY SLID FROM THE CENTER OF HIS BENCH toward the port side of the gondola, Trotter said, “Easy, easy.”
The sudden shift of Corky’s 170 pounds could cause the miniblimp to wallow, perhaps even bobble, which was a risk they couldn’t take this close to the roof.
While Corky moved slowly, balancing breast-down on the gunwale, one leg in and one leg out of the gondola, Trotter employed his own body as a counterweight, shifting starboard on his bench, and he used the controls to fine-tune the attitude of the vessel.
The blimp wallowed but not dangerously.
At a signal from Trotter, Corky slid the rest of the way out of the gondola, though he did not at once drop free of it. First he hung by both hands from the gunwale, while the pilot compensated for this further shift of weight.
