by Dean Koontz
He should have known them for mirages, should have boldly run them down, but never had he seen the like of this, nor dreamed that such a thing was possible. They were not transparent but appeared to be as solid as a fireplace poker or a bronze-and-marble lamp.
Tramping the brake pedal, he jammed too hard, and perhaps pulled the wheel without intention. The Buick whipped around so sharply that the pistol on his lap was flung to the floor at his feet and his head rapped the side window hard enough to crack it.
At the end of the 360-degree pivot, his four victims had not vanished during the rotation, but loomed right there, and all flung themselves at the car, shocking from Corky a scream that sounded too girlish for Robin Goodfellow. One, two, three, four, the angry dead burst against the windshield, against the cracked side window, eager to be at him, but burst, not real after all, merely figures of rain and shadow, plumes of cast-up water that splashed into shapeless sprays, flowed away, were gone.
A full turn didn’t drain the Buick’s momentum, and they spun another ninety degrees, colliding with one of the trees that lined the driveway, thereby brought to an abrupt stop as the passenger’s door sprung open and the windshield dissolved.
Laughing in the face of chaos, Corky reached down past the steering wheel, feeling for the Glock on the floor between his feet. He touched the handgrip of the gun, grasped it, brought the weapon up to shoot the boy.
The driver’s door opened with a shrill protest of buckled metal, and Ethan Truman reached in for Corky, so instead of shooting the boy, he shot the man.
Arriving at the Buick in the moment that it crashed to a stop, Ethan slammed his pistol down on the roof and left it there because he didn’t want to shoot into the car, not with Fric in the line of fire. Heedless of the risk, he yanked open the tweaked door and reached inside. The driver thrust a handgun at him—thhhup—and he not only saw the muzzle flash but also smelled it.
He felt no consequence in the instant of the shot, too focused on the struggle for the gun to be able to assess whether he’d been hit or not. He swore he felt the second shot part his hair, and then he had the pistol.
At once flinging the weapon away into the dark, he would have dragged the driver out of the Buick, but the bastard came without coaxing, barreling into him. They both went down harder than gravity required, Ethan on the bottom, rapping the back of his head against the quartzite cobblestones.
On impact, when the door flew open, Fric found himself sliding off the seat, out of the Buick, onto the puddled pavement. Flat on his back, the worst of all positions when he couldn’t breathe.
Rain falling in his eyes blurred his vision, but he worried less about the blurring than about a crimson tint that seeped across the night, making rubies of the raindrops.
His thoughts clouded to match his vision—too little oxygen to the brain—but he was clearheaded enough to realize that the effect of the crap he had inhaled might be wearing off. He tried to move, and could, but not with any grace or control, rather like a hooked fish flopping on a shore.
On his side, he had more ability to clench and relax his neck, chest, and abdominal muscles, which he must do in order to force out the stale air condensed like syrup in his lungs. More ability, but not enough. If paper were a sound, it would not be as thin as his wheeze had become, nor a human hair as thin, nor a film of dust.
He needed to sit up. He couldn’t.
He needed his inhaler. Gone.
Although the world was crimson to him, he knew that he must look blue to the world, for this was one of the really bad attacks, worse than any he’d known before, an occasion for the emergency room, for the doctors and nurses with their talk of Manheim movies.
No breath. No breath. Thirty-five thousand dollars to refurnish his rooms, but no breath.
Funny thoughts crowded his head. Not funny ha-ha. Funny scary. Red thoughts. So dark red at the edges that the red was really black.
Currently not in a mood to teach the deconstructionist theory of literature, but in a mood to deconstruct anything in his way, with a wolfish fury howling in his skull, Corky needed to gouge eyes, to chew at the face below him, to tear with teeth, to claw and rip.
Cracking his jaws for the first bite, he realized that Truman had been stunned when he rapped his head on the pavement, that his resistance was not as strong as expected. In his savage frenzy, Corky dimly realized, too, that if he succumbed to the animalistic urge to finish this by tooth and nail, something would snap in him, some last organizing restraint, and he would be found hours hence, still bent to the savaged body of his victim, his snout and jowls in the fleshy ruins, searching for grisly morsels as a pig for truffles.
As Robin Goodfellow, who had not actually received training to be a lethal weapon but who had read his share of spy novels, he knew that a sharp blow with the heel of his hand to an enemy’s nose would shatter nasal bones and drive the wicked splinters into the brain, bringing instant death, and so he did this, and cried with delight as Truman’s blood answered the blow with a bright spray.
He rolled off the useless cop, rose, turned toward the Buick, and went looking for the boy. Corky leaned down at the driver’s door to peer inside, but Fric had apparently gotten out through the sprung door on the passenger’s side.
The semiparalytic inhalant would not yet have worn off entirely. The brat couldn’t have crawled far.
Straightening up from the driver’s door, Corky saw a handgun on the roof of the Buick, in front of his eyes.
Rain gleaming like diamond inlays on the checking of the grip.
Truman’s weapon.
Find the boy. Shoot him but only in the leg. To keep him from going anywhere. Then hustle back to the garage for another set of keys, another getaway car.
Corky could still salvage the plan, for he was the son of chaos as surely as Fric was the son of the biggest movie star in the world, and chaos would not fail its child as the actor had failed his.
He rounded the car and saw the boy on his side, kicking at the sodden ground, hitching forward like a crippled crab.
Corky went after him.
Although Fric proceeded by the strangest form of locomotion that Corky had ever seen, making a thin whistling sound that suggested the stripped-gear-popped-spring protest of a broken windup toy, the kid had gotten off the driveway, onto the grass. He seemed to be trying to reach a stone garden bench that appeared to be an antique.
Approaching, Corky raised the pistol.
William Yorn, diligent groundskeeper, monitored every tree and shrub for disease and treated his green wards at the first sign of mold or blight, or pestilence. Occasionally, however, a plant could not be saved, and a replacement was then ordered from a tree broker.
Large trees were replaced with the same specimen in the largest available box size. The new beauty was either delivered by truck and then swung into place by a rented crane or flown to the site by a big logging-industry helicopter with dual sets of rotors and positioned from the air.
Smaller specimens were planted with strategies and tactics less military in nature, and in the case of the smallest of the new trees, a lot of hand labor proved sufficient to get the job done. In some instances, a tree would be small enough to require staking to guide its growth for a year or two and to give it resistance to the wind.
While some in positions equivalent to his still used tall wooden stakes to prop these slender new trees, Mr. Yorn preferred one-inch and two-inch steel poles, in eight-and ten-foot lengths, for they would not rot, provided sturdier support, and could be reused.
After wrenching an eight-foot pole from the ground and tearing the stretchy plastic ties securing it to the tree, Ethan staggered after the crazy son of a bitch in the storm suit, swung the steel at his head as hard as he knew how, and clubbed him to the ground.
Toppling, the kidnapper reflexively fired the pistol. The bullet ricocheted off the granite garden bench and shrieked into the rain and darkness.
The thug collapsed, rolled onto his bac
k. He should have been dead or unconscious, but he looked only dazed, confused. He still held the gun.
Ethan dropped on his assailant with both knees, driving the breath out of him, with luck breaking a few of his ribs and crushing his spleen to paste. He clawed at the gloved hand that held the gun, seized possession of the weapon, fumbled it, and with dismay saw it clatter out of easy reach.
Although his skull must be ringing like the bells of Notre Dame, the creep flailed at Ethan and snared a fistful of his hair, twisted it painfully, tried to pull his face down toward bared and snapping teeth.
Fearing the teeth, Ethan nevertheless clamped his right hand on the man’s throat to pin him, and then punched, left knuckles to right eye, and punched again, but still his hair was twined in those iron fingers and being drawn out by the roots. He felt a thick jewelry chain around the maniac’s throat and thought to twist it, twisted and punched, twisted and punched, until his left hand ached and the taut chain, having scored the fingers of his right hand, finally broke like cheap string.
The teeth stopped snapping. The eyes fixed on something beyond Ethan, beyond the night itself. Limp fingers released twisted locks of hair.
Gasping, rising from the dead man, Ethan looked at the chain in his hand. A locket. A glass sphere in which floated a watchful eye.
Moloch seemed to be dead, but he had seemed to be dead before. Fric watched the fight from an art-film angle and through a crimson haze, wondering why the director of photography had chosen to shoot an action scene with a distorting lens and a red filter.
All this he wondered and worried about not with full attention but dreamily, as if he were asleep and having two nightmares at the same time, one involving two men in mortal combat and the other about suffocation. He was back in the old suffacatorium, wheezing like a geezer of a coal miner with black-lung disease, like in that movie Ghost Dad had been wise to turn down, and the mother of the original owner of Palazzo Rospo was trying to smother him with a fur coat.
Mr. Truman lifted him and carried him to the garden bench. Mr. Truman understood that during an attack Fric needed to be sitting up to better use his neck, chest, and abdominal muscles to force air out of his lungs. Mr. Truman knew the drill.
Mr. Truman propped him on the bench. Held him upright. Checked Fric’s belt for the medicinal inhaler.
Mr. Truman spewed out a string of vulgar and obscene words, all of which Fric had heard before in his years among the entertainment world’s elite, but he’d never heard them from Mr. Truman until now.
More red everywhere and more of it darkening to black, and so little air getting through the mink, the sable, the fox, whatever fur it might be.
Breathing through his mouth because his nose had clogged with wacked cartilage and clotting blood, Ethan didn’t know if he had enough wind left to carry the boy back to the house at a run, all the way to Mrs. McBee’s office where spare inhalers were stored.
A bullet had nicked his left ear, too, and though the wound was superficial, blood followed the folds of the ear, into the resonant depths, half deafening him but also oozing down his eustachian tube and into his throat, causing him to cough in fits.
After a hesitation, realizing that Fric was experiencing worse than an asthma attack, that this was something life-threatening, he scooped the boy off the bench, into his arms, turned toward the house—and confronted Dunny.
“Sit down with him,” Dunny said.
“Get out of my way, for God’s sake!”
“It’ll be all right. Just sit down, Ethan.”
“He’s bad, I’ve never seen him this bad.” Ethan heard in the hoarseness of his voice an emotion deeper and better than fear and anger: the raw and wrenching love for another human being that he’d not been sure he still had the capacity to feel. “There’s no strength in him to fight this time, he’s so weak.”
“That’s the paralytic spray, but the effect is wearing off.”
“Spray? What’re you talking about?”
With one hand and with a gentle force greater than mere mortal strength, Dunny Whistler pressed Ethan backward with the boy in his arms, and guided him down onto the wet garden bench.
Standing over them, a pale and somewhat haggard man in a fine suit, Dunny appeared to be nothing special, yet he walked through mirrors, transformed himself into parrots that flew themselves into doves, vanished into the ornaments of a Christmas tree.
Ethan realized that his old friend’s suit remained dry in the rain, as did Dunny himself. The drizzle appeared to strike him but with no effect. No matter how intently Ethan stared, he could not see what happened to any drop that met Dunny’s suit and face, could not puzzle out the secret to the trick.
When Dunny placed one hand on Fric’s head, the trapped breath exploded from the suffering boy’s lungs. Fric shuddered in Ethan’s arms, tipped his head back, and breathed, sucked cold air without inhibition, exhaled a pale plume of air with no asthmatic wheeze.
Gazing up at Dunny—coma-thinned, waxy-looking Dunny—Ethan felt no less bewilderment than when, after being killed in traffic, he had found himself alive outside the door of Forever Roses. “What? How?”
“Do you believe in angels, Ethan?”
“Angels?”
“The last night of my life,” Dunny said, “as I lay dying in the coma, I received a visitation. This spirit who calls himself Typhon.”
Ethan thought of Dr. O’Brien at Our Lady of Angels, earlier this same day. The DVD recording of Dunny’s brain waves. The inexplicable beta waves of a conscious, alert, and agitated person spiking across the screen when Dunny had been in a deep coma.
“In the hours before my death,” Dunny continued, “Typhon came to me to reveal the fate of my best friend. That’s you, Ethan. In spite of the lost years between us and all the ways I went wrong, that’s still you. My friend…and Hannah’s husband. Typhon showed me when and where and how you would be murdered by Rolf Reynerd, in that black-and-white room with all the birds, and I was so afraid for you…and grieved for you.”
At several points, the EEG had recorded a wildly spiking beta tracery that according to Dr. O’Brien represented the brain waves of a terrified individual. Subsets of beta had indicated conversation.
Dunny said, “I was made an offer…was given the chance to…to be the guardian you needed these past two days. With the power granted to me for this short mission, I could among other things fold back time.”
When a guy stands before you, saying he can turn back time, and you at once believe him, and you also accept with rapidly diminishing amazement that he remains dry in the rain, you have changed forever—and probably for the better, even though you feel as if the earth itself has been pulled out from under you, as if you have fallen into a rabbit hole deeper and stranger than Alice ever dreamed.
“I decided to let you experience your death in Reynerd’s apartment, your scheduled destiny, then take you back to the moment before it happened. I figured to scare the shit out of you and give you the extra edge you were going to need to get through the rest of what was coming—and to get this boy through it.”
Dunny smiled at Fric, and arched an eyebrow as though to suggest that he knew there was something the boy would want to say.
Still weak of body but once more quick of mind, Fric said to Ethan, “You’re probably surprised angels can say ‘shit.’ I was, too. But then, you know, it’s in the dictionary.”
Ethan remembered a moment in the library with Fric, earlier this evening, when he had told the troubled boy that everyone liked him. Disbelieving, disconcerted, Fric in his enduring humility had been at a loss for words.
On the library Christmas tree behind Fric, the angel ornaments had turned, nodded, and danced in the absence of a draft. A strange expectation had overcome Ethan, a sense that a door of understanding might be about to open in his heart. It had not opened then, but now it had been flung wide.
Dunny sees his friend holding the boy in his lap, in his arms, and he sees the boy holding as t
ightly as he is able to Ethan, but he sees far more than their wonder at his supernatural presence and more than their relief to be alive. He sees a surrogate father and the son whom he will unofficially adopt, sees two lives raised from despair by the complete commitment of each to the other, sees the years ahead of them, filled with the joy that is born of selfless love but marked also by the anguishes of life that in the end only love can heal. And Dunny knows that what he has done here is the best and cleanest thing that he has ever done or, ironically, ever will.
“The PT Cruiser, the truck,” Ethan wonders.
“You died a second time,” Dunny says, “because destiny struggles to reassert the pattern that was meant to be. Your death in Reynerd’s apartment came by your own free will, because of choices you made. In setting time back, I thwarted your self-made destiny. You don’t need to fully understand. You can’t. Just know that now…destiny won’t reassert that pattern. By your choices and by your acts, you’ve now made another destiny for yourself.”
“The bells from the ambulance,” Ethan asks, “all the games with them…?”
Dunny smiles at Fric. “What are the rules? How must we angels work?”
“By indirection,” the boy says. “Encourage, inspire, terrify, cajole, advise. You influence events by every means that is sly, slippery, and seductive.”
“See, there’s a thing you now know that most other people don’t,” Dunny says. “More important perhaps than knowing that civet is squeezed from the anal glands of cats into perfume bottles.”
The boy has a smile to make his model mother’s fade from memory, and he has an inner light that shines without the help of spiritual advisers.
“Those people that…that rose up out of the driveway and threw themselves at the car,” Ethan says with lingering bewilderment.
