by Dean Koontz
Mr. Lorenzo had been dead only a couple of months, but already Mrs. Lorenzo was gaining weight. She wasn’t yet fat, however, only a little plump, and I didn’t like to hear her dissing herself.
“Mrs. Lorenzo, has anybody ever told you how you look like Anna Maria Alberghetti?”
“You’re sweet, Jonah, but that’s all behind me now.” With one hand, she patted her backside and laughed softly. “All behind me.”
Somehow I knew she didn’t mean the new pounds, which were distributed evenly over her, and so I said, “Behind you? What is?”
“Caring about how I look. Men. Marriage. Tony was the best of men. Trying to have all that again will only lead to disappointment … or worse.”
Her resignation made me sad. I couldn’t think of any words that might change her mind about the future. The longer I was silent, the more awkward I felt, until I had to escape the kitchen for a few minutes. Maybe when I came back, we’d be able to talk about a new subject as if what had just been said had never been said.
I lied: “I’m going to turn down my bed so I won’t have to do it later, open a window and get some fresh air in there.”
When I went to my bedroom, the window was up, as I had left it, and the bed was turned down, also as I had left it, but on the smooth cotton blanket, as if keeping watch on the doorway, lay the fabric eyeball with its blue-plastic iris.
In memory, I saw the purple stare and heard the dangerous woman say: Juju eye? You’re a real little freak in the making, aren’t you?
I went to the window. Closed it. Locked it.
When I tore open my closet door, she wasn’t hiding in there. She wasn’t in my mother’s bedroom or closet, either. Or the hall closet. Or the bathroom.
In the living room, I found the front door locked, as I’d left it after Mrs. Lorenzo arrived.
I returned to my bedroom and met the Cyclopean gaze. I plucked the eye off the bed. I retrieved the La Florentine candy tin from my nightstand, opened it, and confirmed that nothing else had been taken from—or added to—my collection. I put the eye in the tin and the tin in the nightstand drawer.
The eye hadn’t been there when I came home and turned down the bedclothes. While Mrs. Lorenzo and I were busy in the kitchen, Eve Adams—Fiona Cassidy, whoever, whatever—had come here to get the creepy thing and position it to gaze at the door.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, I had no difficulty translating the message. The woman must have known that Mr. Yoshioka had come to tell me about the stink like dry-cleaning fluid and about the cut-up Polaroid of the tiger screen. She was warning me not to conspire against her, to stay away from Mr. Yoshioka, to remember that she liked to cut. She was saying, You think the fabric eye is juju, boy, but the only thing that’s juju around here is me.
When my tremors subsided, I returned to the kitchen, where Mrs. Lorenzo had finished preparing the side dishes. She was frying the tightly rolled saltimbocca in a mixture of butter and olive oil, and the air was fragrant with the aromas of prosciutto, veal, sage, and pepper.
She wanted water to drink with dinner. For myself, I poured cherry Kool-Aid from a pitcherful that Mom had mixed that morning.
When I sat at the table, I had no appetite. I started picking at the food, certain that my suddenly sour stomach would throw it right back at me if I dared to eat. But it was a testimony to Mrs. Lorenzo’s cooking that before long I’d finished what she served to me and was asking for seconds.
The special secret dessert proved to be ricotta cream cake sprinkled with icing sugar and shaved chocolate. It wasn’t just special; it was a piece of Heaven.
After dinner, when the dishes were done, we played 500 rummy at the kitchen table. Mrs. Lorenzo wanted to turn on the radio and find some good music, but I pretended that, being an obsessive musician, I couldn’t concentrate on cards with music playing. What actually concerned me was that music might mask the sound of Eve Adams coming back with bad intentions.
I went to bed at 9:30, like I was supposed to, though I couldn’t sleep. Mrs. Lorenzo was watching TV in the living room, but the sound was low. It wasn’t the TV that kept me awake; it was the witch from 6-C, if she was a witch. I got to thinking that maybe I should hope she was just a witch; there were worse things, after all.
At 10:20, I got out of bed and went into the living room to see if Mrs. Lorenzo was all right. During less than an hour of insomnia, I’d thought of several ways Eve Adams might have killed her suddenly, quietly, with that switchblade. I found Mrs. Lorenzo lying on the sofa. She wasn’t watching TV, but she wasn’t dead, either. Sound asleep, she snored softly.
I went back to bed and assured myself that I was a big baby. Whoever the mystery woman might be, she wasn’t a witch any more than she was a vampire or a space alien hatched out of a giant seed pod. She was up to no good in 6-C, and she didn’t want any interference. A nine-year-old kid was easy to intimidate. A shy tailor living in the shadow of some tragedy or other was easy to intimidate. All that she wanted was for us to fear her and stay away from her, and in a couple of months she would be gone.
Nevertheless, at 11:00, I crept along the hallway to the living room again, to see if Mrs. Lorenzo was still sleeping or maybe, this time, slashed and dead. She was neither. Sitting on the sofa, bent forward with her face in her hands, ghostlike in the pale flickery light of the TV, she wept quietly but with such grief that her body shook. Nothing on television had made her cry. She didn’t need a sad movie or the horror of the news to bring her to tears.
No matter how crazy the occupant of 6-C might prove to be, I was embarrassed to have all but forgotten how recently Donata Lorenzo’s world had turned upside down. Although the dream of Fiona Cassidy strangled with a necktie had disconcerted me when later I saw her alive on the stairs, I was nonetheless responsible for whatever woe I brought down on myself; I was reckless when I followed her and inexcusably bold when I entered her apartment and prowled its rooms uninvited. Mrs. Lorenzo, on the other hand, had done nothing to deserve her widowhood; she’d been an innocent whom Fate had struck with great cruelty.
Before she might look up and discover me watching her from the threshold of the hallway, I returned quietly to my room. My shame dampened my fear, and though I doubted that I would sleep that night, I slept.
28
The next morning, because it was Grandma Anita’s birthday, she and Grandpa Teddy picked up Mom and me in their Cadillac Club Coupe, and we went to 10:00 Mass, and after that we stopped for brunch in a big hotel where I went around and around through the revolving doors three times and would have completed a fourth revolution if Mom hadn’t given me the Look, which always brought me immediately to my senses.
I had never been to a brunch before, and this was an all-you-can-eat buffet, which amazed me. I was also astonished by the fresh flowers on every table and the ice sculpture of a swan and the white uniforms and tall white chef’s hats worn by the men who carved the roast beef and the turkey.
The posh surroundings and the spectacle seemed to sharpen my appetite. After finishing my first plate, when I wanted to go back for a second, Mom warned me to take only what I was certain I could finish. “All you can eat doesn’t mean waste as much as you want.”
When I came back with a full plate, they looked dubious. But I finished every bit of it.
Grandpa Teddy said, “Anita, I suspect this grandson of ours is from another planet. He’s really as big as a horse with a crocodile’s mouth, but he’s able to hypnotize us into seeing him as a young boy who might be blown away in a strong wind.”
Later we went to a movie starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. It was pretty funny, though not as funny as the cartoon we saw first.
That whole day was perfect; and it is the nature of the nine-year-old mind to believe that each extreme experience signifies a lasting change in the quality of life henceforth. A bad day raises the expectation of a long chain of grim days through dismal decades, and a day of joy inspires an almost giddy certainty that the years therea
fter will be marked by endless blessings. In fact, time teaches us that the musical score of life oscillates between that of Psycho and that of The Sound of Music, with by far the greatest number of our days lived to the strains of an innocuous and modestly budgeted picture, sometimes a romance, sometimes a light comedy, sometimes a little art film of puzzling purpose and elusive meaning. Yet I’ve known adults who live forever in that odd conviction of nine-year-olds. Because I am an optimist and always have been, the expectation of continued joy comes more easily to me than pessimism, which was especially true during that period of my childhood.
When we came home on the evening of Grandma Anita’s birthday celebration, I gave little or no thought to the woman in Apartment 6-C. Such a day of unalloyed delight must mean that my world had begun to rotate around a warmer sun than before, that the mystery woman and the evil she represented were surely now on a different world from mine, in some far arm of the galaxy, and our orbits would never again intersect. I slept deeply and without dreaming.
On Monday morning, Labor Day, I woke and yawned and stretched and sat up in bed—and saw a Polaroid photo propped against the lamp on my nightstand. It was a picture of me sleeping.
29
Sitting there in bed, this is how I interpreted the meaning of the Polaroid: I can get at you anytime I want, snoop. I can put a shiv through your heart while you’re sleeping, boy, and you’ll be dead before you can wake up and see me.
That wasn’t the worst that she promised. As the glossy photo rattled softly in my trembling hand, I remembered what she had said when she paid a visit to me in this very room, shortly after I had toured 6-C.
You don’t want to be talking about me to anyone, not to anyone. You never saw me. We didn’t have this little chat. You get my point, snoop? She had threatened to use the knife on my mother. If you love your mama, then you think about what I said.
Instead of running to my mother and spilling the whole story, I sat on the edge of my bed and took the La Florentine candy tin from my nightstand. I opened the lid and found the fabric eye staring up at me.
When you keep a secret from those closest to you, even with the best of motives, there is a danger that you will create a smaller life within your main life. The first secret will spin off other secrets that also must be kept, complicated webs of evasion that grow into elaborate architectures of repressed truths and subterfuge, until you discover that you must live two narratives at once. Because deception requires both bold lies and lies of omission, it stains the soul, muddies the conscience, blurs the vision, and puts you at risk of headlong descent into greater darkness.
As a boy, I could not have put any of that into words, but I sensed it all and, even if I sensed it vaguely, was distressed by every step I took further into secrecy. If I showed the Polaroid to my mother, I would have to tell her about the woman in 6-C. Mom would want to know why I’d been so bold and rude as to venture uninvited into the apartment of a stranger. I doubted that I could convince her—or anyone—that previously I had seen the mystery woman in a dream, strangled and dead; therefore, I would be suspected of compounding my error with an outrageous lie. I would raise in her mind the prospect that I might be more like my father than she could bear.
And so I put the Polaroid snapshot in the candy tin with the fabric eye and other items, and I told myself that if I stayed well away from the sixth floor and from its temporary tenant, there would be no more threats. First, however, I turned the hateful eye upside down, so that it was looking at the bottom of the tin instead of at me.
Mom had been up long before me. She’d showered, dressed, and set the dinette table. No sooner had I put away the tin box of treasures—and curses—than she rapped on my door. “Rise and shine. Breakfast in five, sleepyhead.”
“Okay. I’m awake. Be right there.”
In a solemn mood, not the usual chatterbox, I went to the table in pajamas and slippers. I got through breakfast without arousing her suspicion, largely by pretending to be only half awake, still worn around the edges from all the activity of Grandma Anita’s birthday.
I was lucky. Because Sunday had been so busy, my mother hadn’t read that newspaper, which must have weighed four pounds. She gave her attention to it as she ate eggs, bacon, and fried potatoes. I borrowed the funnies, which gave me an excuse to keep my head down.
Slinky’s didn’t feature live music on Mondays, except on certain holidays that ensured a good crowd. Like Labor Day. My mother and Virgil Tibbins, the club’s other contracted singer, were to perform that evening. She was the star of the early show, six o’clock until nine, and there was a rehearsal, which meant she would be leaving the apartment by three o’clock.
After I showered and dressed, I hugged Mom and said, “Knock ’em dead tonight.”
“I’ll be happy just to knock ’em speechless, so there won’t be any heckling.”
Shocked, I said, “Do they heckle you at Slinky’s?”
“Wherever there’s enough liquor for enough time, everyone gets heckled, sweetie. But whatever there is tonight, it’ll be saved for poor Virgil, since he’s the second show.”
I reminded her that although the community center was sponsoring a couple of holiday events, the Abigail Louise Thomas Room remained open for me to practice the piano.
“If I’m gone when you get home,” she said, “go down to Donata’s. She’s expecting you.”
When I returned at 3:15, I didn’t proceed directly to Mrs. Lorenzo’s. I didn’t feel guilty about going to our apartment instead, because I was trying to figure out how to ensure our safety, which was the primary job of the man of the house, after all. As strange as it might sound, however, I did feel terribly guilty about not feeling guilty.
In the kitchen, I opened the drawer nearest the wall phone and took out the directory and looked for a listing for my new friend on the fifth floor. I found one at our street address for YOSHIOKA, GEORGE. The mailboxes in the lobby featured only last names. I don’t know why I expected him to have a Japanese first name when presumably he had been born in the United States, but I stared at the listing for maybe a minute, wondering if, unknown to me, there could be a second Yoshioka in the building.
As I was finally about to dial the number, the phone rang, startling me. I stared at it, certain that the caller must be the witch—She knows I’ve come home!—but then embarrassed by my fearful reaction, I snatched up the handset. “Hello?”
“Good afternoon, Jonah Kirk,” said Mr. Yoshioka.
“Oh. Hi. I didn’t think it was you.”
“Who did you think I was?”
“Eve Adams.”
“I assure you that I am not her.”
“No, sir. I can tell you’re not.”
“I must first inform you that I most happily consumed the last of your mother’s cookies, and it was as entirely delicious as the first. Thank you for them.”
“I could bring up some more, if you want.”
With evident mortification, he said, “No, no. I am so sorry. I did not phone you to request cookies. If I did so, you would think me unspeakably rude.”
“No, sir. I would think you know a good cookie when you taste one, that’s all.”
My reply seemed to confuse him. He was silent for a moment before he asked, “Are you entirely alone, Jonah Kirk?”
“Yes, sir. Mom’s gone to Slinky’s and I’m supposed to go down to Mrs. Lorenzo’s instead of her coming up here.”
“I have something important for you, Jonah Kirk. Very important. May I bring it down momentarily?”
“Sure.”
“There are unwholesome forces at work in this building. We must at all times be most discreet. I will not ring your bell. I will not knock. You will be waiting for me. Yes?”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“If I encounter wickedness on my way to you, I will retreat to my rooms and phone you to discuss another time to meet.”
“Wickedness?” I said.
“Wickedness, Jonah Kirk. Great wick
edness.”
30
I waited at the front door of the apartment, which I’d unlocked and opened just a crack. Peering through the gap, waiting for my co-conspirator, I was taken by surprise when suddenly he appeared from my left, having come down the back stairs instead of the front, as quiet as a cat.
Mr. Yoshioka smiled at me through the gap, and I let him into the apartment. He was carrying a brown-paper shopping bag with cord handles, which he put down next to the door as I closed it.
“How are you this afternoon, Jonah Kirk?”
“Kind of scared, I guess.”
“Scared? Frightened? Of what?”
“Whatever great wickedness you’re going to tell me about.”
“You already know the great wickedness. It is Miss Eve Adams.”
Something about the tailor was different. Although this was a holiday, he still wore a suit and tie, but in spite of all his talk of wickedness, he seemed more relaxed than usual.
“You also said there were ‘unwholesome forces at work in this building.’ ”
“That again is a reference to Miss Eve Adams and to those who are in league with her.”
“Who’s in league with her?”
“Different people come and go. I hear their footsteps overhead, muffled voices, but I never see them.”
“Has she been in your apartment again?”
He looked as solemn as if he were at a funeral. “Yes. She left another photograph.”
“Of the second tiger screen, of the court lady carved in ivory?”
“It is not a Polaroid. It is instead a page torn from a book, a photograph of Manzanar.”
I remembered from our conversation over tea. “One of the places you lived in California.”
“A photograph of the gates to the place where I lived.”
