by Dean Koontz
I pointed right, and Mrs. Fischer wheeled the limo in that direction.
If someone says that she’s having a moment of enlightenment, you don’t blow dust in her eyes.
I said only this and only the truth: “I’m nothing more than a talented fry-cook, ma’am, but that’s a worthy enough occupation in a world where so many things are fried so badly.”
A mile later, on the edge of town, we came to a tract of land around which an industrial fence had been engaged in a decades-long slow-motion collapse that was half finished. Piles of tumble-weeds pressed here and there against the chain-link, revealing the predominant pathways favored by the local winds, which were at the moment still.
The entry gates hung open, and we drove between them.
The blacktop parking lot was fissured and potholed and pierced in places by weeds. On the graveled storage yard to one side of the hulking building, a mammoth stack of a couple hundred wooden pallets had partially collapsed in upon itself, weakened by rot and termites, bleached pale gray by the Mojave sun, so that the remains looked like the ashen ruins of a giant wicker man burned at the conclusion of a pagan festival. I would not have been entirely surprised if under the rubble were the charred bones of a human sacrifice.
The building itself appeared to be nearly as large as a football field, a corrugated-metal structure anchored by a four-foot-high concrete base. The three big roll-up doors and associated tracks and motors evidently had been salvaged, leaving the abandoned factory open to the elements. Above those doors and a couple of man-size entrances, a badly weathered sign identified the former home of BLACK & BUCKLE MANUFACTURING.
Mrs. Fischer mentioned the flashlight in the glove box, and I thanked her for it.
We got out of the limousine, and she said, “I won’t let you go alone this time. But I’m afraid of what we might find.”
“I’m pretty sure the children aren’t here, ma’am. Not them and not … their bodies. They’re still alive. But I think they might have been held here for a while. And he was here. The cowboy.”
“He was here but never at their house?”
“That’s how it feels to me. I don’t know what it means.”
Without my seeing from where she’d taken it, Mrs. Fischer had one of the other guns she had mentioned, a smaller pistol than mine, but deadly enough.
Although she looked nothing like my grandmother — Pearl Sugars, who had been a professional poker player — Mrs. Edie Fischer sort of reminded me of Granny. Pearl Sugars was the kind of lady you’d want to have your back in a tight spot, and I felt the same about Mrs. Fischer. If an eighty-six-year-old woman has been clear-seeing from a young age, she will have gone through a lot of life developing an eye for snares and pitfalls, an ear for deceit, and a good nose for knavery. And by such an age, a smart woman with no illusions is one to whom courage comes far more readily than it does to those young people who don’t yet know the world for what it is.
In the cavernous building, the only daylight came through the missing roll-up doors and from rows of high windows just under the ceiling, nearly thirty feet above the floor. Although we had outrun the storm, the sky remained mantled, and the waning afternoon could illumine little. The factory was a storehouse of rust-scented air, stillness, and darkness.
The flashlight beam couldn’t reach as far as any wall, but we were able to determine that nothing of value remained from the days when industry occurred here, nor anything that might provide a clue as to what Black & Buckle had manufactured. The concrete floor was irregularly carpeted in thick dust, drifts of dead leaves, scraps of cardboard, crumpled papers, and other trash that had blown in through the missing doors.
Suddenly a prolonged rustling suggested that in the shadows someone moved through the brittle debris. The concrete-and-metal structure reflected the noise in confusing ways, so that it seemed to come from our left, then from the right, from directly ahead of us, but then from the right again, now very near, now more distant. This auditory distortion perplexed the ear much as a maze of fun-house mirrors might bewilder the eye.
I probed every which way with the flashlight, yet I couldn’t find the source of the sound. Perhaps a draft slithered along the floor, disturbing what it touched. But the day outside was in the thrall of the eerie tranquility that sometimes settles upon the land in anticipation of an approaching thunderstorm, and the air within this place was as leaden as the air outside.
The rustling ceased, but the ensuing silence was of a kind in which something crouched and waited. That quality of menace didn’t diminish as the quiet lengthened.
“Nothing,” Mrs. Fischer said, and the word cycled and recycled through the rafters far overhead, though the echo seemed to be in a voice different from hers.
With the flashlight, I found recent tire tracks leading through the dust; and in those tread patterns, dry leaves had been crushed by the weight of the vehicle. We followed the trail toward the back of the building.
In the last ten yards of the structure, across the width of it, side-by-side offices featured windows looking onto the factory floor. The painted hollow-core doors were scarred and stained, and most of the fiberboard panels were buckled, having pulled partway loose of the frames.
In the southwest corner, a pair of sturdy metal doors drew our attention because beside them were two dilapidated aluminum lawn chairs with green-vinyl webbing, between which stood a Styrofoam picnic cooler and a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Cigarette butts and nine dust-free half-crumpled Heineken cans littered the floor around the chairs.
The faint scent of beer arose from the residue that had not yet evaporated from those containers.
“They must have kept the kids behind these doors,” I said. “Some guys sat here to guard them.”
My voice ricocheted around the abandoned factory: “ … kids, kids, kids … doors, doors, doors … them, them, them …”
The fading echoes were followed by that creepy rustling noise again, louder than before. I slashed the air with the flashlight beam, as though fencing with an invisible foe, but as before I discovered no one.
After the rustling subsided into silence, I tried one of the heavy double doors. With some creaking, it opened onto a generous landing. Unusually wide stairs led down into a grave-dark lower room.
Standing with her back against the other door, Mrs. Fischer whispered so low that her words could not rise far enough to inspire an echo in the rafters: “Can’t both go down there and risk being locked in. I mean, if someone’s here to lock us.”
“Can’t leave you here alone in the dark,” I said.
Indicating the three big squares of gray light at the farther end of the vast room, where the roll-up doors had once been, she said, “Those will silhouette him, if anyone’s here. And probably no one is.”
I said, “I don’t need to go down there. The children have been taken somewhere else.”
“You owe it to them to be sure. Go now. Get it over with.”
She was quietly adamant, but she was also right. I left her alone in the gloom.
I didn’t have to prop open the door. Its hinges were corroded enough to prevent it from swinging shut on its own.
As I made my way down the first flight of stairs to a landing, I knew that the children had indeed been held here, because their three faces, as they had appeared in the vision in the supermarket parking lot, rose now in my memory, more vivid step by step.
Descending the second flight, picking out the treads with the flashlight, pistol at the ready, I noticed first that the air was cooler here than on the ground floor and, second, that it smelled of blood.
Blood has an odor faint but distinct, of conceit and modesty, of courage and cowardice, of charity and greed, of faith and doubt, in short the fragrance of what we might have been and the smell of what we are, vaguely suggestive of hot copper, having carried life along the arteries like current through a wire. Because the scent is subtle, however, a room can smell of it only if the quantity spilled is
significant.
With dread, I continued to the bottom, into a basement that extended under about a quarter of the building. Perhaps this space had once contained a heating system, boilers, and other machines that were stripped out and sold in the distant past. Now it housed the dead.
Eighteen
The dead eyes appeared to roll toward me in the crusted sockets, but in fact only the reflection of the flashlight beam moved across those glassy curves from which tears would never spill again.
Even two bad men who earn a bad end deserve a measure of discretion from such as me when I write about them, at least as regards the horror of their suffering. Besides, if I detailed their many wounds, you might be persuaded to pity them, and I doubt they were worthy of much tender sympathy. Suffice it to say that the coup de grace in each case was a bullet fired point-blank, just above the bridge of the nose. Before that, they had been tortured extensively with razors or stilettos.
The two were naked, stripped before they were murdered. Later their clothing had been removed from the scene, along with any watches or jewelry they might have been wearing, perhaps to ensure that they would be more difficult to identify if they were ever found.
Their wrists were cuffed behind them, and their hands were sheathed in blood-soaked gray cotton gloves. The latter detail at first baffled me until I realized that these must be the two men who had sat in the lawn chairs upstairs, smoking and drinking while they guarded their hostages. They had worn the gloves to ensure that they left no incriminating fingerprints.
Supposing these were the kidnappers, they must have been part of a larger conspiracy. Evidently the plan called for the children to be stashed here for a while, on the outskirts of town, whereafter others — including the rhinestone cowboy — would arrive to take custody of them and move them elsewhere.
If these two dead men had been discovered drunk and asleep in the lawn chairs, or merely drunk, other members of the conspiracy might have decided to execute them rather than to trust them further.
Although that might be the most likely explanation, the torture seemed illogical, especially the extent and cruelty of it. With three hostages to manage and with the need to spirit them out of the area while local and perhaps federal authorities were searching for them, the killers should have opted for quick mob-style executions. Taking time to carve their victims extensively, slowly bleeding them almost to death before administering the killing shot, seemed as reckless as it was savage.
From their perspective, however, torture might make a sort of cockeyed sense if it was ritualistic, part of a ceremony that this fraternity of the demented required of themselves when they murdered one of their own. I didn’t want to believe that was true, because it made them crazier, more vicious, and more dangerous than I previously assumed that they were. The quickest review of the bodies suggested there were similar, patterned wounds on each, but I didn’t have the stomach to conduct a thorough analytic review of them.
Most of the blood had soaked into the concrete floor, but one pool remained on which a thin film had formed, suggesting that the victims might have been murdered within the past couple of hours. I stooped to touch the shoulder of the nearest corpse, and though the flesh was cool, it still held some body heat.
Two dead men … but not one soul beseeching me for justice. I have observed before that lingering spirits are nearly always those of people who led largely good and admirable lives. Rare is the deeply wicked soul that does not cross over after death. I suspect that for their kind, a debt collector — one with a legendary name and no patience for tardy debtors — insists on payment immediately after the heart has struck its last beat and even as the final exhalation withers in the throat.
I climbed the steps two at a time, and as I drew near the top, I called out, “It’s only me.”
Mrs. Fischer said, “Only you is exactly what I hoped for, dear.”
As we made our way through the building toward the daylight at the roll-up doors, I told her what I had found, though I left out the most disturbing details.
Whoever Mrs. Edie Fischer might be and whatever secrets she might be keeping, I could tell by her calm reaction that she had not led a sheltered life defined only by home, hearth, family, church, and bingo on Saturday night.
Halfway toward the doors, we heard the rustling again, but this time I found the source almost at once. Curved dead leaves like an infestation of hard-shelled brown beetles skittering this way and that, twists of foil and scraps of cellophane spraying up as bright as hot sparks in the reflected flashlight, brittle sheets of crumpled notepad paper crackling, rusted bottle caps clicking-clinking: All were lashed into action by the scrabbling feet and the scaly whipping tails of a flurry of rats. There might have been eight, ten, twelve of the foot-long specimens with coarse brown coats and bristling whiskers and long pale toes. Their eyes were black beads that flared red when the white light caught them at a certain angle, and though the pack curved past us, I felt that I was the primary object of their attention, every ratty stare meeting mine before they swarmed away toward the back of the building, perhaps enticed here by the scent of blood, confused about the source until the metal door had stood open long enough to allow the odor of carnage to rise from the basement.
The moment wasn’t melodramatic. I didn’t expect them to attack. They were rats, not wolves. But the sight of them oppressed me. Death was always terrible, even when the dead were people who had served as agents of pain and ruin all their lives, but death was made worse by the consideration of these omnivores descending upon the murdered pair. Bodies are in a sense sacred, having been the vessels that carried souls through the world, and that they should ever become mere carrion sickens me.
Mrs. Fischer and I hurried out of the abandoned building, into the late-afternoon light, which was too cool to melt away the chill that prickled through me.
She said she’d drive, and that was all right with me because I felt that we weren’t yet done in Barstow. I sensed that the cowboy had been somewhere else in town, no doubt before he came here to collect the children. I was hoping psychic magnetism could lead me not yet to where my quarry was this moment, but first to where he had been earlier, which required a concentration that wouldn’t be possible if I were driving.
In the limousine once more, I considered using the disposable cell phone to call the police and report the bodies in the factory basement. I hoped to foil the rats before they feasted.
But during the past few years, the government had spent many billions to develop systems that could capture from the ether every one of the hundreds of millions of daily phone calls and e-mails sent in this country, store them, and conduct high-speed analysis of that data with enormous arrays of supercomputers. In addition, every smartphone was now a GPS by which they could track you if they wanted to, even when the phone was switched off.
My phone was far from smart, but I suspected that if I called the police, they would at once have my position. And maybe they could electronically tag even this dumb phone, so that they would know everywhere I went from this point forward.
I didn’t dare reveal myself to the police if I were to be free to find the children and rescue them. Although I had not always saved everyone whom I tried to help, I nevertheless felt certain that, even as flawed as I was, I would be more likely to pull those three kids from the pending fire alone than with even well-meaning policemen kibitzing my every move. Besides, they were certain to regard my claims of paranormal talents as delusional. I might be committed to a psychiatric ward on a temporary hold, and the children would be torched days before I was released.
Mrs. Fischer drove, Hoke to my Miss Daisy. Although I needed to concentrate harder than ever to sense out the cowboy’s fading trail through Barstow, distractions plucked at me, each of them arousing in me the thought that I was missing something, failing to see something that I must see if I were to survive: thoughts of the swarming rats in the factory and of the rats descending the palm tree, a pack of rangy ye
llow-eyed coyotes that had behaved strangely when they had stalked me and Annamaria through a fogbound night in Magic Beach more than a month previously, rats and coyotes that were different creatures and yet somehow one and the same, the head of the Kewpie doll wallowing in the storm run-off and trading its face for mine as it was yanked through the bars of the iron grating, the premonition of a demonic mob slaughtering stalled motorists on the traffic-choked freeway, all of that connected in some way that I could feel but could not define, pointing to some inevitable confrontation, and then three lines from T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” remembered for no apparent reason—Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past—and now the carnival-bright ProStar+ with the yellow symbols painted throughout the black interior of the trailer, the gate of symbols made of steel, the wasteland with the lakes of fire and the Other Odd who had come out of that ultimate darkness, Mr. Hitchcock giving me two thumbs up when I woke in Shower 5 after being shot in the throat by the cowboy, a gesture that now seemed peculiar to me or perhaps more meaningful than I’d taken it to be at the time, Mr. Hitchcock raising one eyebrow as if amused when I suggested that he must be suffering some guilt and remorse that kept him from crossing over to the Other Side, the lightning-bolt grate and the eerie light in the storm drain, Mr. Hitchcock leading me into the basement of Star Truck and cupping a hand around one ear to suggest that I listen for what soon proved to be the voice of the rhinestone cowboy in a different version of the basement, a version in Elsewhere….
I managed occasionally to give Mrs. Fischer a direction, though I was barely aware of Barstow beyond the windshield, preoccupied with the swift flow of thoughts and memories, the river of puzzling associations that seemed to have two currents, one enticing me into the past, the other sweeping me toward some terrible cataract in the near future.
When I shuddered violently and said, “Here, this place, right now,” Mrs. Fischer pulled off the street, into a parking lot, and braked to a stop.
