by Dean Koontz
His head still held low, his eyes still fixed on them, he trotted forward, moving faster as he came.
"Call him off!" Richard shouted.
Hobarth only laughed.
Lightning and thunder filled the sky behind the ever-falling rain. The wind whipped against their faces, made their raincoats flap out behind them, and Brutus came on as if it were the wind which drove him inevitably onward.
Jenny screamed.
It did not sound like her own voice, but like the cry of another woman far away in the forest. She was detached, floating above this nightmare rather than a part of it.
The horses stamped, whinnied, danced nervously as death approached with the wind's pace.
Jenny wanted to run, but Richard's arm imprisoned her and would not let her go. He stood his own ground, watching the beast rush at them, as if he were too horror-stricken to move, to run and save himself.
"Let me go!" she shouted.
"Wait!"
"No, no, no!"
He held her more tightly than ever as she tried to kick her way loose of him.
"It'll kill us!" she shouted.
Richard didn't seem to care or believe.
More lightning flashed, bursting across the sky on the bright trail of the previous bolt.
The dog was almost on top of them. She could see his large, sharp, yellow teeth and the saliva foam which flecked his dark lips and gathered in bubbles in the bristled hair that sprouted around his mouth. If Sarah Maryanna Brucker's curse had been effective, this was indeed the sort of creature she would have liked to see haunt her father's estate.
When Brutus was only twelve or fifteen feet away, he leaped at Richard, correctly identifying his most difficult victim. As he came on, his claws caught what little light there was, glinted.
Then a gun fired.
Brutus seemed to stop in mid-flight as if he had rammed against an invisible brick partition. His face never lost the fierce, bared-fang snarl even as he died. He slammed into the earth, rolled like a sack of pelts without life in them. When he came to rest on his side, he kicked at the air for a full minute, gnashing his teeth at the darkness.
And he died.
It had all come as such a surprise to Jenny that she did not comprehend it. For several long seconds, she still prepared herself to be torn apart like a rabbit. Even as the blood rushed out of the killer hound's twisted, open mouth, even as it kicked spasmodically, one last time, and finally lay still, she cringed in expectation of the sharp pain of its teeth and its claws,
Richard had been carrying a pistol in the right hand pocket of his raincoat and had kept his right hand on it all the while Hobarth had been gloating over the success of his escapades. He had known that the last advantage lay with them, and he had given no clue of his knowledge. Now, he directed the barrel at Hobarth and fired a warning shot over the psychiatrist's head.
Hobarth panicked. He might still have won if he had kept his wits about him. He could have returned the fire, aiming to do more damage to them than Richard wished to do him. He was ruthless where Richard was not. But the sight of the dead hound seemed to electrify him, as if he never thought Brutus could be taken out by anyone. He had leaped to his feet when the dog struck the earth mortally wounded, and he had dropped both his handgun and Richard's rifle which he had taken from the stables. When the warning shot whistled over his head, he turned, stumbled, and ran toward Tulip, confused for one of the few times in his life.
"Hobarth!" Richard called.
But Walter Hobarth, the paragon of reason and logic, the man who so carefully planned his every move and who had not lost a single point in this game to date, this cunningly thorough man could not bear to consider that everything had been lost in one, short moment-just when everything had seemed like an unqualified success. He ran, panicked at the sudden intrusion of the unexpected into his well-planned cosmos.
Jenny sympathized with him. It was never pleasant to see your world crashing down around you, lying at your feet in useless splinters. She knew. It had happened to her.
"Hobarth, wait!" Richard called again. He pointed the gun at the doctor, but he could not bring himself to pull the trigger for a direct shot. A warning shot, clearly, would do no good.
Hobarth's fifth running step was his last. It took him over the rounded edge of a large, limestone sinkhole which he could not have easily seen in the darkness. His scream was cut short by a sickening thud and the rattle of breath in a damaged throat...
* * *
19
Gingerly, Richard worked his way down the tiered edge of the sinkhole, from ledge to fragmented ledge, until he found a way to the narrow, smooth shelf where Walter Hobarth lay in a black heap. The rain pelted him and made the limestone slippery. He felt chilled to the bone, whether by the rain or by the events of the evening, he could not say.
Above, Jenny knelt in the mud and the grass by the edge of the pit, staring into the gloom. Richard's flashlight did little to dispel the shadows for its bulb was very weak and the night was exceedingly deep. It served only to make Richard look like some dark spirit moving along the walkways of some nightmarish vision of purgatory.
For the first time in years, Jenny felt utterly at ease and completely self-reliant. She did not fear the night close around her or the arrival of the unexpected, and she did not need artificial havens and shallow "friends" to reassure herself. Before, she had looked to other people to serve as her fixed point in a changing universe. Leona Pitt Brighton, her grandmother, had been such a point after her parents' deaths. Then she had floundered until she found Walter. But now, she had seen the foolishness of her outlook on the world, and she knew that the only stability was what one built for oneself.
She intended to start building tonight.
Richard crept along the stone shelf toward Hobarth's slumped form, hands pressed against the ragged, sloping wall of the pit
The rain seemed to slack, though it was only the wind dropping off. The droplets began striking the earth perpendicularly rather than driven by the mild gale into a viciously angled descent.
Richard reached the doctor and knelt on the thin path beside him.
"Is he all right?" Jenny asked.
Richard looked up and shook his head slowly back and forth. "He's dead," Richard said.
She felt her stomach flop over. She was miserably weary of death. She hoped she would not have to see anyone die or hear about anyone dying for the next twenty years. But, at least, this time when she was faced with death, she did not want to run, and she did not feel an unnaturally strong fear for her own safety. She had come to terms with the world this night.
"How?" she asked. "Are you certain?"
"I'm certain. He broke his neck in the fall."
They looked at the corpse a while, neither of them speaking, the rain providing the only sound.
"What can we do?" she asked at last.
"We'll contact the police. Send some people up for him and the dog."
"But we can't just leave him there, lying in the rain like that," Jenny said.
"We'll have to. I'd kill myself trying to carry him out along these ledges," Richard said. He turned and felt his way back along the wall, looking for the steps by which he had descended. In five minutes, he had found them and had retraced his path to the surface.
"Why were you carrying a pistol?" Jenny asked at last, turning reluctantly but relievedly away from the sinkhole where the body lay in an unnatural position.
"You still mistrust me?" he wanted to know.
"No, no. It's just that-that it was such a shock. It was as if you expected something. Did you know he was the one?"
"No," Richard said. "But I knew someone was doing something that was outside the bounds of legality. And the murder of Lee Symington was only a part of it. So I have been carrying a pistol."
"How did you know? What did I miss that was so obvious?"
"A number of things. But I'm not being fair. I knew a few things that you couldn't know. For
instance, when I had Lee Symington examine Hollycross' corpse, he found some very interesting things. The horse had been put to sleep with a massive injection of sodium pentathol before it had been attacked by the wolf. That was to keep us from hearing Hollycross' outcry. And such a drug is too easily obtainable. It could never be traced to a killer."
Shocked, Jenny said, "That was Symington you were talking to on the telephone that morning, when I overheard you mention drugs and killers!"
"Yes."
"I've been utterly stupid!"
"Not at all, Jenny."
"No. I have been."
He shook his head adamantly. "You've been confused, true enough. That was obvious from the first moment I picked you up at the bus terminal. But I think that, tonight, you've managed to come to terms with your fear of life. Am I right?"
She nodded, somewhat embarrassed.
"But let me continue, Jenny." He wiped rain from his face. "Besides the drug, Symington found that not all of the claw marks on Hollycross had come from some wolf-like animal. Others had been inflicted with what he suspected might be a carefully sharpened, hand-sized garden rake. The gauge of the slashes matched those that such an implement would make- and there were flecks of green paint, microscopic, lodged in a number of these wounds."
The rain was no longer falling as heavily as it had been throughout the night. Overhead, the thick clouds parted for a short moment, let through a spear of white moonlight.
Richard continued. "Apparently, Hobarth couldn't get Brutus to do a thorough enough job on a sleeping horse. The dog probably wanted a live adversary, one that would provide some challenge, that would scream and kick a little. Hobarth anticipated this and brought the hand-sized rake along with which he finished the job on Hollycross."
Jenny shuddered. "How ghastly!"
Richard put his arm about her.
She accepted it, gladly.
"It is especially ghastly," Richard said, "if you consider how pointless Symington's murder was. They knew he had found Brutus' hairs in the stall and that the hairs might lead him to them somehow. But neither Hobarth nor Malmont could be aware how much Symington already knew-how much I knew as well. The hairs would have helped us trace the killer dog sooner, that's all. But without them, knowing what we did, we would eventually have gotten around to the guilty parties."
"When you sneaked to the stables that night-when I saw you from my window-?"
"It occurred to me that whoever was involved might try another bit of terror tactics that night. Cora would probably have snapped if another horse had died like the first. So I went down there to wait. But no one ever showed up."
Neither of them spoke for a time.
The rain had all but stopped.
The clouds were parting more than before.
It was a large moon that shone on them, three-quarters full, its corona lengthened by all the moisture in the night air.
"Do I pass inspection, Miss Jenny?" he asked. That boyish smile had returned after being kept under wraps for so long. "Have I explained myself thoroughly enough?"
She thought a moment, recalling his actions of the past weeks. She said, "No. You haven't."
He looked surprised. "What did I leave out?"
"You've been acting strangely otherwise," she said. She wondered why she had to bring these things up now. She knew that he was not the one she should fear. He was the one who had saved her life, who had saved the Brucker land, Freya, Cora, all of them. Yet there was some small voice that urged her to go on.
"If you mean the way I've acted with Cora, I'll admit it was not proper. But you can see the pressure I was under. I knew someone was so interested in the land that they would go to almost any lengths to obtain it. I never knew for sure what they might do next, to what extremes they were willing to press us." He paused. "I'm not offering this as an excuse, you understand. My behavior was, at times, inexcusable. But I want you to see that I wasn't a complete beast."
"That's not it either."
He looked worried. "What, then?"
"Do you remember when Walter and I were sitting on the lawn, down by the woods, watching the squirrels? And you were standing behind the house, watching us?"
He seemed to blush.
"Yes," he said.
"I wondered why you were looking at us that way. And later that same day, after dinner, you cornered me in the drawing room, when Hobarth went to bed and Cora was in the kitchen. I thought you were starting to confide something in me. But Cora returned, and you didn't have the chance. Anyway, your behavior was quite odd."
There was a moment of awkward silence in which Richard could not bring himself to look directly at her. Then he shook himself and raised his head to stare into her eyes.
"When a man begins to realize that his feelings for a woman go beyond mere friendship-and when he sees that woman is more attracted to someone else than she is to him, he has every right in the world to act strangely, I believe." He smiled at her. "Don't you agree?"
Her head seemed to balloon, and she felt dizzy. "What do you mean?" she asked.
"I thought I'd made it clear."
"Make it clearer," she said.
He laughed. "Well, I suspect that I have either fallen or am falling in love with you, Jenny."
"You don't know which?"
"Wait until we get this incredible mess straightened out. Then I'll be better able to know exactly what is going on inside my head-and inside my heart."
"You're my cousin," she said.
"Not blood cousins. We're only related through my father's second marriage." He stopped speaking abruptly, as if he had just thought of something that he would rather have ignored.
The horses whinnied, though not in terror now.
"What is it?" Jenny asked.
"I just thought-that perhaps I've been standing here making a fool out of myself," Richard said. "But I don't want you to be afraid of hurting my feelings." His gaze became especially intense now. "I shouldn't have told you how I feel until I knew what your own feelings were."
It was only raining lightly now. The wind was only a breeze. The storm clouds were beginning to scatter as the moon and the stars burned their way through.
What do I feel? Jenny wondered. At one time, I thought Richard was dashing and handsome. I thought he was attractive in a scholarly way. He meant so much to me once, when I needed consolation.
But what did she feel now? Did she love him? No. She didn't love anyone, really. She didn't love anyone because she had always been too anxious for security to open herself to deeper emotions. But she could love him, in time. She was sure of that. After all this ugliness had passed and she was able to handle her new relationship to the world, after things were normal again, she knew that she could feel that special affection for him. It wouldn't be a false love, based on a need for security, but a genuine love. She could feel the first stirrings of that now. They had been there a long time.
All the same, she did not want to make a commitment so quickly. She had spent these last few years training to be a teacher and not to be a wife. As Richard Brucker's wife, there would be no time or need to enter a classroom every morning. Whether that would be a relief or a disappointment, she could not yet decide. It would take a while to reconsider a future she had planned in such detail.
"Well?"
"It's too soon," she told him.
"When?"
"Give me the summer."
"That's a long time."
"Until August, at least. Until all of this nightmare has had time to fade from our memories. I need time to think and re-evaluate things, Richard. I can't adjust this quickly."
"August?"
"August," she affirmed.
"Fair enough."
He bent toward her and kissed her on the lips while his arms went lightly around her. It was a nice, brief kiss that said many things. It made her positively exuberant. As the rain pattered over them, she asked him to kiss her once again, just once, in that very same way.
<
br /> He did.
"Now," he said, "we've got to get to the house and wrap up this awful business. Dr. Malmont will be there, and we've got a surprise for him. As nice as it might be, we can't remain here all night, kissing in the rain."
She giggled and felt younger than she had felt since she was fourteen. There might yet be problems in life. Everything wouldn't go smoothly all the time. But she felt that she was ready to face the rough spots. It was time that she collected the happiness in life that God sets aside for everyone.
By the time they reached the great house, the rain had stopped completely. The clouds were scattered thinly across the night sky, and the moon shone through, brilliant and huge. If she still believed in omens, in forewarnings of good and bad luck, she would have known that this sudden clearing of the sky meant that the future could only be a happy one.
* * *
[Version 2.0 by BuddyDk - August 2 2003]
[Completely new scan]
