The Vision

by Dean Koontz

  Alan nodded, smiled, as if she’d merely told him that he was wearing a pretty shirt.

  “I caused him to commit suicide,” she said.

  “Wish I could have seen him swinging.”

  “I disgraced his family.”

  Alan laughed.

  “Why would I do that?” she asked. “Why would I tell them that he attacked me when it was actually you?”

  Alan said, “You were in the intensive care unit at the hospital for four days. When the crisis passed and you no longer needed the support machines, they transferred you to a private room.”

  “I remember.”

  “Father and I virtually lived there for two weeks.

  Even Mother crawled out of her bottle to visit every couple days. I played the concerned big brother, oh-so-attentive for a nine-year-old boy.”

  “The nurses thought you were cute,” she said.

  “There were lots of times when I was alone with you in that hospital room. Sometimes just for minutes, sometimes for as much as an hour.”

  Another bat flew in from the storm and settled in the rafters overhead.

  Alan said, “Your lips and gums were so badly swollen and full of stitches that you couldn’t talk for eight days—but you could listen. You were conscious most of the time. And when I was alone with you, I told you over and over again what I would do to you if you dared to expose me. I told you I’d come after you with the bats again ... let them tear you apart.” He was leering at her. “I told you I’d force you to eat the bats alive, that I’d make you bite off their heads and swallow if you told on me. I warned you that you’d better put all the blame on Berton Mitchell—or else.”

  She was shaking. She had to get control of herself, had to be prepared to move fast if she was given an opportunity to escape. However, the tremors continued, no matter how hard she tried to still them.

  Alan said, “Then a funny thing happened. You told them it was Mitchell who did it to you—but you believed it. I’d achieved more than I thought. I’d gotten way down in you, way down where it counts, and I’d worked a little magic. You actually came to believe it was Berton Mitchell. You couldn’t accept the truth, couldn’t tolerate living in the same house with me after what I’d done to you, so you convinced yourself that I hadn’t done anything at all, that I was your friend and that the bogeyman was someone else.”

  “Why?” she asked weakly. “Why did you hurt me?”

  “I meant to kill you. I thought you were dead when I left the cottage.”

  “Why did you want to kill me?”

  “It was fun.”

  “That’s all? Just because it was ‘fun’?”

  “I hated you,” he said.

  “What had I done?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then why did you hate me?”

  “I hate everyone.”

  Lightning.

  A gust of wind.

  “You killed Mitchell’s family.”

  “Seemed like a good idea, wiping out an entire family.”

  “Why? Was that ‘fun,’ too?”

  “You should have seen the house burn.”

  “God Almighty, you were only fourteen then.”

  “That’s old enough to kill,” he said. “Don’t forget, I tried to kill you five years before that. And when I thought you were dead ... when I pulled the knife out of you for the last time ... oh, Mary, you can’t know how that felt! So natural. Like it wasn’t my first kill at all. Like I’d stabbed people to death a thousand times before. And I was only nine!”

  He stepped closer.

  His shoes squished on the wet floor.

  Desperately she said, “You killed Patty Spooner, too. Didn’t you, Alan?”

  “She was a bitch.”

  “No. She was sweet.”

  “A rotten bitch.”

  “Why did you defile the altar?”

  The question clearly intrigued him. “Killing Patty in that church... was so different ... so special. I knew that night that I truly was a demon and a vampire. I realized I was meant to destroy anything holy, anything good.”

  “You killed Marie Sanzini.”

  “And her three roommates.”

  “At one time, you loved Marie.”

  “No. I only dated her.”

  “Why would you want to kill her?”

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “You murdered Rochelle Drake.”

  “Don’t tell me I loved her, too.”

  “You once said you did.”

  “I lied. I love no one.”

  “Why did you kill the beautician and his wife?”

  “They were in my way.”

  A ship’s horn blared across the water.

  “You murdered Erika Larsson ... and now you’re going to kill the queen of the Christmas boat parade.”

  He glanced at the lighted vessels cruising slowly through the winter rain. “The storm will have driven her off the deck. I’ll have to take her some other time.”

  “But what is she to you?”

  “Don’t you know who’s queen? Jenny Canning.”

  “Ah, not her. She’s good. So gentle. She mustn’t die.”

  “She’s just the most recent of my bitches. She’s game like all the others.” He was getting weary; he looked at the blade in his hand and licked his lips.

  “Your women always leave you,” Mary said.

  “Or I leave them.”

  “Why can’t you hold one?”

  “Sex,” he said. “Tenderness is a bore. They all want me to be tender. I can only manage it for a few weeks or months.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I like sex rough,” he said, his voice almost a growl. “The rougher the better. After a while, when the novelty of a new body ... a new girl ... wears off, then the only way I can come is when I hurt them. And that turns them off ... that and the other thing.”

  “What other thing?” she asked.

  “They won’t let me drink their blood.”

  She stared, shocked.

  He said, “Now and then I like to have sex ... and drink their blood.”

  “You cut them?”

  “No, no. Menstrual blood.”

  Shocked, she closed her eyes.

  Heard him move.

  Opened her eyes!

  He took two quick steps and was less than the length of the knife from her.

  Max rolled from the yard-high windowsill onto the boardwalk, and the short fall seemed like twenty miles. In his mind, at least, he tumbled over and over. For a long moment after he fell, floating in a sea of pain, he considered the appealing, beckoning emptiness that welled up inside of him. Then he thought about Mary and about transforming love into physical strength. Somehow he smothered the pain and clambered to his feet.

  The pistol was still in his left hand. It felt impossibly heavy. He tried to drop it, but he wasn’t able to let go. His paralytic fingers were hooked tightly, immovably around the butt.

  He swayed and looked at the line of decorated boats gliding through the rain and thought how pretty they were—and suddenly realized that he wasn’t here to watch the parade. Silently cursing himself, he lumbered along the boardwalk. Each shaky step he took was an adventure ten times greater than the one before it; and each yard of ground he covered was a triumph.

  On all sides of him, the night pumped in and out, in and out like the muscles of a heart.

  He turned the corner of the pavilion and saw that no more than a hundred feet away two men were coming behind flashlights.

  Lou and who else?

  He tried to shout.

  He had no voice.

  Alan’s eyes seemed to have light behind them. They were blue eyes like hers, but a peculiar and piercing blue. Eyes like the blade of the knife in his hand—sharp, cold, deadly.

  “How many people have you killed?”

  He didn’t answer.

  He raised his left hand. He put his icy fingertips against her temple, felt the pulse thu
mping there. He slid his fingers down, traced the delicate line of her jaw, then raised them and touched her lips.

  Trembling, she said, “You’ve killed more than thirty-five, haven’t you?”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “If you killed so many over the years,” she said, “why didn’t I go after you before this?”

  “You were asked to work on some of the murders I committed,” Alan said, “but you refused. I advised you to turn down all of those cases, and you listened to me. I think you suspected the truth, but you hid it from yourself.”

  “You tried to murder me when I was six years old. So why have you waited twenty-four years to try again?”

  “Oh, I originally intended to get you a few months after you were released from the hospital. I figured I’d have to wait that long to allay suspicions. But then I was going to knock you off in a carefully planned accident.”

  His fingertips gently stroked her brows.

  He said, “I thought of throwing you down a long flight of stairs and then saying you tripped and fell. But I finally settled on drowning you in the swimming pool.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “By the time I could safely go after you again, you’d begun to exhibit psychic powers. You fascinated me. I wanted to see what would happen to you next.”

  She said, “If Max is dead, I’ll need your help again. I’ll need you to guide me through the visions.”

  He laughed. “Darling, I’m not naïve.”

  “Do you think I’d turn you in to the police? I haven’t told them about you for twenty-four years. Why would I now?”

  “Then, you didn’t know,” he said. “But now you do.”

  He put his hand on her breast.

  She flinched.

  “My lovely little sister,” he said.

  “Don’t.”

  Carrying a flashlight in his left hand and a revolver in his right, his shoulders drawn up in an unsuccessful attempt to keep the cold rain off the back of his neck, Rudy Holtzman accompanied the chief along the side of the pavilion.

  Patmore stopped suddenly.

  “What’s the matter?” Holtzman asked nervously. He was very keyed up.

  “There’s a man ahead.”

  Holtzman raised his flashlight.

  A man was approaching them, no more than fifty feet away.

  “It’s Bergen,” Patmore said.

  Bergen was staggering like a drunk.

  “He’s got a gun!” Patmore said.

  Remembering Erika Larsson’s viciously mutilated body, remembering the blood splashed everywhere inside her house, remembering Lou Pasternak on the macadam parking lot, Holtzman raised his service revolver and fired.

  Max Bergen was flung backward by the impact of the bullet.

  Alan pressed against her. He put his left hand around her throat.

  She told herself to resist, to fight back. She was strong, not weak. A weak person would have sought escape in madness twenty-four years ago. But she was strong; she had hung on to her sanity and had developed psychic abilities as a way to keep herself alive. She should be able to find the will to fight him now.

  He held the blade to her cheek as if branding her, the point below her right eye.

  “I wonder,” he said, “if you were blind, could you still see your clairvoyant visions?”

  She snapped. Abruptly, violently, her fear vanished in an explosion of anger and hatred far more intense than any emotion she’d ever known. Twenty-four years of hidden, festering hatred went off like a bomb in her subconscious. She despised him. Loathed him. He wasn’t fit to live. Never had been. Never would be. All she wanted was a chance to hurt him as badly as he had hurt her. She didn’t even care any longer whether she lived or died. She wanted only to get him down, tie him down, torture him, hurt him, cut him, choke him, beat him, see him cry. She wanted most of all to put the bats on him, to rub them in his face, make them claw and bite, force them into his mouth while they were squirming and still alive—

  Overhead two dozen bats began to scream in the darkness: a shrill chorus of tiny voices.

  Startled, Alan looked up.

  A single bat swept down, hooked its claws into Alan’s coat collar. It fluttered wildly at his neck.

  She couldn’t believe what she had done.

  Alan let go of her, reached behind him, grabbed the animal. He struggled with it, finally tore it loose and pitched it away from him.

  His hand was bleeding.

  In the past few days, every time she’d had a vision in which the killer’s face began to be revealed as Alan’s, she had chased away the truth by distracting herself with poltergeists. She had been responsible for the glass dogs careening around Dr. Cauvel’s office; the pistol floating in air; the sea gulls at The Laughing Dolphin Restaurant; inanimate objects flying this way and that in Lou’s bathroom. Max had been right.

  Now she would use the bats.

  Another one flew down and clung to Alan’s face.

  He screamed. Ripped it away. Dropped the knife.

  Blood streamed from his forehead into his eyes.

  Chittering, beating the air furiously with their wings, three more bats attacked him. One tangled in his hair. The other two fixed themselves to his throat.

  “Kill him,” she said.

  Flailing at himself, Alan turned away from her. He weaved across the platform toward the stairs.

  Every bat in the rafters descended upon him. They tore at his head and face and neck, clawed his hands, bit his fingers and hung on and wouldn’t be shaken loose. When he screamed, one of them got into his mouth.

  He stumbled down the tower stairs, bouncing from wall to wall.

  She picked up the flashlight and followed him.

  The bats stayed with Alan. If anything, their cries grew louder, angrier.

  Five steps down he fell, rolled to the next landing, got up, went on, plucked a bat from his nose, tried to shield his eyes with one arm, fell again, couldn’t keep from screaming, had to bite another bat that crawled from his chin into his mouth, had to spit out part of it, gagged, choked, stumbled, leaped from the final flight of stairs into the dark arcade and collapsed.

  She walked out of the archway and stood over him.

  He was very still.

  One by one the bats rose from the body, circled, and flew back up the stairwell to the belfry.

  After...

  AT NOON THE December sun fell straight down on the cemetery, leaving virtually no shadows on the grass. There was a chill in the air that didn’t come from the sea wind; it radiated from the tomb-stones and the silent mourners and, most of all, from the plain dark casket suspended above the open grave.

  As the winch motor began to purr and the coffin lowered out of sight, Mary turned away. She walked between the small granite and marble monuments toward the open wrought-iron gate, walked by herself, unassisted, alone, because that was what she wanted.

  She sat for a while behind the wheel of the Mercedes and stared down the hills to the sea. She was waiting for her hands to stop shaking.

  Yesterday, she had buried Alan; and in spite of what he had been and done, she had grieved for him. But this final ceremony was far sadder than yesterday’s. She felt as if a piece of her own flesh had been torn from her.

  She needed to cry and wash some of the pain from her system, but she choked the sobs before they could start and squeezed back the tears. She had one more duty to perform before she could allow herself to break down.

  She started the Mercedes and drove away from the cemetery.

  Sunlight streamed through the venetian blinds and banded the private hospital room with shadow and light.

  Max was sitting up in bed, one shoulder heavily bandaged, one arm in a sling. He was drawn, sallow, sunken-eyed; but he had a gentle smile for Mary when she came through the door.

  She kissed him and sat in the chair beside his bed. They held hands in silence for perhaps a minute; then she began to tell him about Lou’s funeral.
When she had nothing more to say, she leaned away from her chair, rested her forehead on the edge of the mattress and finally began to weep. He murmured soothingly, massaged her neck, stroked her hair. She broke down completely. She cried out loud for Lou, but for herself as well; his death left a hole in her life. However, her despair couldn’t last forever; eventually, gradually, her sobbing subsided.

  For a while they listened to classical music on the radio, neither of them able to speak.

  Later, over dinner in the hospital room, her eyes grew heavy, and she couldn’t stifle her yawns. “Sorry. I didn’t get much sleep.”

  “Nightmares?” Max asked, concerned.

  “No. In fact, I had lovely dreams—the first pleasant dreams I’ve ever had in my life. I woke up about four-thirty in the morning, exhilarated, full of energy. I even went for a nice long walk.”

  “You? A walk? Alone at night?”

  She smiled. “I don’t mind being alone as much as I used to,” she said. “And I’m not afraid of the dark anymore.”