Dean Koontz - (1989)

by Midnight(Lit)

  She sighed.

  "Listen, if you're going to help eat this breakfast, you're going to

  help make it, so don't just stand there glowering.

  "

  "All right, okay, what can I do?"

  "First, get on the intercom there and call Harry, make sure he's awake.

  Tell him breakfast in . . . ummmm . . . forty minutes. Pancakes

  and eggs and shaved, fried ham."

  Sam pressed the intercom button and said, "Hello, Harry," and Harry

  answered at once, already awake. He said he'd be down in about half an

  hour.

  "Now what?" Sam asked Tessa.

  "Get the eggs and milk from the refrigerator-but for God's sake don't

  look in the cartons."

  "Why not?"

  She grinned.

  "You'll spoil the eggs and curdle the milk."

  "Very funny."

  I thought so."

  While making pancake mix from scratch, cracking six eggs into glass

  dishes and preparing them so they could be quickly sliPPed into the

  frying pans when she needed them, directing Sam to set the table and

  help her with other small chores, chopping onions, and shaving ham,

  Tessa alternately hummed and sang songs by Patti La Belle and the

  Pointer Sisters. Sam knew whose music it was because she told him,

  announcing each song as if she were a disc jockey or as if she hoped to

  educate him and loosen him up. While she worked and sang, she danced in

  place, shaking her bottom, swiveling her hips, rolling her shoulders,

  sometimes snapping her fingers, really getting into it.

  She was genuinely enjoying herself, but he knew that she was also

  needling him a little and getting a kick out of that too. He tried to

  hold fast to his gloom, and when she smiled at him, he did not return

  her smile, but damn she was cute. Her hair was tousled, and she wasn't

  wearing any makeup, and her clothes were wrinkled from having been slept

  in, but her slightly disheveled look only added to her allure.

  Sometimes she paused in her soft singing and humming to ask him

  questions, but she continued to sing and dance in place even while he

  answered her.

  "You figured what we're going to do yet to get out of this corner we're

  in?"

  " I have an idea."

  "Patti La Belle, 'New Attitude,' " she said, identifying the song she

  was singing.

  "Is this idea of yours a deep, dark secret? No. But I have to go over

  it with Harry, get some information from him, so I'll tell you both at

  breakfast."

  At her direction he was hunched over the low counter, cutting thin

  slices of cheese from a block of Cheddar when she broke into her song

  long enough to ask, "Why did you say life is hard and mean?"

  "Because it is."

  "But it's also full of fun-No. -and beauty-No." 'I-and hope-"

  'Bullshit.

  It is."

  ,It isn't."

  "Yes, it is."

  'It isn't."

  ,Why are you so negative?"

  Because I want to be."

  "But why do you want to be?"

  - 289 "Jesus, You're relentless."

  'Pointer Sisters, 'Neutron Dance."

  " She sang a bit, dancing in place as she put eggshells and other scraps

  down the garbage disposal. Then she interrupted her tune to say, "What

  could've happened to you to make you feel that life's only mean and

  hard?

  " ,You don't want to know."

  ,yes, I do.

  " He finished with the cheese and put down the slicer.

  "You really want to know?"

  " I really do."

  "My mother was killed in a traffic accident when I was just seven. I was

  in the car with her, nearly died, was actually trapped in the wreckage

  with her for more than an hour, face to face, staring into her eyeless

  socket, one whole side of her head bashed in. After that I had to go

  live with my dad, whom she'd divorced, and he was a mean-tempered son of

  a bitch, an alcoholic, and I can't tell you how many times he beat me or

  threatened to beat me or tied me to a chair in the kitchen and left me

  there for hours at a time, until I couldn't hold myself any more and

  peed in my pants, and then he'd finally come to untie me and he'd see

  what I'd done and he'd beat me for that."

  He was surprised by how it all spilled from him, as if the floodgates of

  his subconscious had been opened, pouring forth all the sludge that had

  been pent up through long years of stoic self-control.

  "So as soon as I graduated from high school, I got out of that house,

  worked my way through junior college, living in cheap rented rooms,

  shared my bed with armies of cockroaches every night, then applied to

  the Bureau as soon as I could, because I wanted to see justice in the

  world, be a part of bringing justice to the world, maybe because there'd

  been so little fairness or justice in my life. But I discovered that

  more than half the time justice doesn't triumph. The bad guys get away

  with it, no matter how hard you work to bring them down, because the bad

  guys are often pretty damned clever, and the good guys never allow

  themselves to be as mean as they have to be to get the job done. But at

  the same time, when you're an agent, mainly what you see is the sick

  underbelly of society, you deal with the scum, one kind of scum or

  another, and day by day it makes you mort; cynical, more disgusted with

  people and sick of them."

  He was talking so fast that he was almost breathless. She had stopped

  singing.

  He continued with an uncharacteristic lack of emotional control,

  speaking so fast that his sentences sometimes ran together, "And my wife

  died, Karen, she was wonderful, you'd have liked her, everybody liked

  her, but she got cancer and she died, Painfully, horribly, with a lot of

  suffering, not easy like Ali McGraw in the movies, not with just a sigh

  and a smile and a quiet goodbye, but in agony. And then I lost my son

  too. Oh, he's alive, sixteen, nine when his mother died and sixteen

  now, physically alive and mentally alive, but he's emotionally dead,

  burnt out in his heart, cold inside, so damned cold inside. He likes

  computers and computer games and television, and he listens to black

  metal. You know what black metal is? It's heavy-metal music with a

  twist of satanism, which he likes because it tells him there are no

  moral values, that everything is relative, that his alienation is right,

  that his coldness inside is right, it tells him that whatever feels good

  is good. You know what he said once?"

  She shook her head.

  "He said to me, 'People aren't important. People don't count. Only

  things are important. Money is important, liquor is important, my

  stereo is important, anything that makes me feel good is important, but

  I'm not important." He tells me that nuclear bombs are important because

  they'll blow up all those nice things some day, not because they'll blow

  up people-after all, people are nothing, just polluting animals that

  spoil the world. That's what he says. That's what he tells me he

  believes. He says he can prove it's all true. He says that next time

  you see a bunch of people standing around a Po
rsche, admiring the car,

  look real hard at their faces and you'll see that they care more about

  that car than about each other. They're not admiring the workmanship,

  either, not in the sense that they're thinking about the people who made

  the car. It's as if the Porsche was organic, as if it grew or somehow

  made itself. They admire it for itself, not for what it represents of

  human engineering skills and craftsmanship. The car is more alive than

  they are. They draw energy from the car, from the sleek lines of it,

  from the thrill of imagining 291 its power under their hands, so the car

  becomes more real and important than any of the people admiring it."

  and far more "That's bullshit," Tessa said with conviction.

  "But that's what he tells me, and I know it's crap, and I try to reason

  with him, but he's got all the answers-or thinks he has. And sometimes

  I wonder . . . if I wasn't so soured on life myself, so sick of so

  many people, would I be able to argue with them more persuasively? If I

  wasn't who I am, would I be more able to save my son?

  He stopped.

  He realized he was trembling.

  They were both silent for a moment.

  Then he said, "That's why I say life is hard and mean."

  "I'm sorry, Sam."

  "Not your fault."

  "Not yours either."

  He sealed the Cheddar in a piece of Saran Wrap and returned it to the

  refrigerator while she returned to the pancake mix she was making.

  "But you had Karen," she said.

  "There's been love and beauty in your life."

  "Sure.Well, then-But it doesn't last."

  "Nothing lasts forever."

  "Exactly my point," he said.

  "But that doesn't mean we can't enjoy a blessing while we have it. If

  you're always looking ahead, wondering when this moment of joy is going

  to end, you can never know any real pleasure in life."

  "Exactly my point," he repeated.

  She left the wooden mixing spoon in the big metal bowl and turned to

  face him.

  "But that's wrong. I mean, life is filled with moments of wonder,

  pleasure, joy . . . and if we don't seize the moment, if we don't

  sometimes turn off thoughts of the future and relish the moment, then

  we'll have no memory of joy to carry us through the bad times-and no

  hope."

  He stared at her, admiring her beauty and vitality. But then he began

  to think about how she would age, grow infirm, and die just as

  everything died, and he could no longer bear to look at her. Instead he

  turned his gaze to the rain-washed window above the sink.

  "Well, I'm sorry if I've upset you, but you'll have to admit you asked

  for it. You insisted on knowing how I could be such a Gloomy Gus."

  "Oh, you're no Gloomy Gus," she said.

  "You go way beyond that. You're a regular Dr. Doom."

  He shrugged.

  They returned to their culinary labors.

  After escaping through the gate at the rear of the rectory yard,

  Chrissie stayed on the move for more than an hour while she tried to

  decide what to do next. She had planned to go to school and tell her

  story to Mrs. Tokawa if Father Castelli proved unhelpful. But now she

  was no longer willing to trust even Mrs.

  Tokawa. After her experience with the priests, she realized the aliens

  would probably have taken possession of all the authority figures in

  Moonlight Cove as a first step toward conquest. She already knew the

  priests were possessed. She was certain that the police had been taken

  over as well, so it was logical to assume that teachers also had been

  among the early victims.

  As she moved from neighborhood to neighborhood, she alternately cursed

  the rain and was grateful for it. Her shoes and jeans and flannel shirt

  were sodden again, and she was chilled through and through. But the

  darkish-gray daylight and the rain kept people indoors and provided her

  with some cover. in addition, as the wind subsided, a thin cold fog

  drifted in from the sea, not a fraction as dense as it had been last

  night, just a beardlike mist that clung to the trees, but enough to

  further obscure the passage of one small girl through those unfriendly

  streets.

  Last night's thunder and lightning were gone too. She was no - 293

  longer in danger of being flash-roasted by a sudden bolt, which was at

  least some comfort.

  yoUNG GIRL FRIED TO A CRISP BY LIGHTNING THEN EATEN 13Y ALIENS; SPACE

  CREATURES ENJOY HUMAN POTATO CHIPS; "IF WE CAN MAKE THEM WITH RUFFLES,"

  SAYS ALIEN NEST QUEEN, "THEY'LL BE PERFECT WITH ONION DIP."

  She moved as much as possible through alleyways and backyards, crossing

  streets only when necessary and always quickly, for out there she saw

  too many pairs of somber-faced, sharpeyed men in slow-moving cars,

  obvious patrols. Twice she almost ran into them in alleys, too, and had

  to dive for cover before they spotted her. About a quarter of an hour

  after she fled through the rectory gate, she noticed more patrols in the

  area, a sudden influx of cars and men on foot. Foot patrols scared her

  the most. Pairs of men in rain slickers were better able to conduct a

  search and were more difficult to escape from than men in cars. She was

  terrified of walking into them unexpectedly.

  Actually she spent more time in hiding than on the move. Once she

  huddled for a while behind a cluster of garbage cans in an alley. She

  took refuge under a brewer's spruce, the lower branches of which nearly

  touched the ground, like a skirt, providing a dark and mostly dry

  retreat. TWice she crawled under cars and lay for a while.

  She never stayed in one place for more than five or ten minutes. She was

  afraid that some alien-possessed busybody would see her as she crawled

  into her hiding place and would call the police to report her, and that

  she would be trapped.

  By the time she reached the vacant lot on Juniper Lane, beside Callan's

  Funeral Home, and curled up in the deepest brush-dry grass and bristly

  chaparral-she was beginning to wonder if she would ever think of someone

  to turn to for help. For the first time since her ordeal had begun, she

  was losing hope. and her A huge fir spread its branches across part of

  the lot, clump of brush was within its domain, so she was sheltered from

  the worst of the rain. More important, in the deep grass, curled on her

  side, she could not be seen from the street or from the windows of

  nearby houses.

  Nevertheless, every minute or so, she cautiously raised her head far

  enough to look quickly around, to be sure that no one was creeping up on

  her. During that reconnoitering, looking cast past the alleyway at the

  back of the lot, toward Conquistador, she saw a part of the big

  redwood-and-glass house on the east side of that street. The Talbot

  place. At once she remembered the man in the wheelchair.

  He had come to Thomas Jefferson to speak to the fifth- and sixth-grade

  students last year, during Awareness Days, a week.

  long program of studies that was for the most part wasted time, though

  he had been interesting. He had talked to them about the, difficulties

  and the
amazing abilities of disabled people.

  At first Chrissie had felt so sorry for him, had just pitied him half to

  death, because he'd looked so pathetic, sitting there ill his

  wheelchair, his body half wasted away, able to use only one hand, his

  head slightly twisted and tilted permanently to one side. But then as

  she listened to him she realized that he had a wonderful sense of humor

  and did not feel sorry for himself, so it seemed mo-re and more absurd

  to pity him. 'They had an opportunity to ask him questions, and he had

  been so willing to discuss the intimate details of his life, the sorrows

  and joys of it, that she had finally come to admire him a whole lot.

  And his dog Moose had been terrific.

  Now, looking at the redwood-and-glass house through the tips of the

  rain-shiny stalks of high grass, thinking about Harry Talbot and Moose,

  Chrissie wondered if that was a place she could go for help.

  She dropped back down in the brush and thought about it for a couple of

  minutes.

  Surely a wheelchair-bound cripple was one of the last people the aliens

  would bother to possess-if they wanted him at ai She immediately was

  ashamed of herself for thinking such thing. A wheelchair-bound cripple

  was not a second-class human being. He had just as much to offer the