Koontz, Dean - Dark Rivers of the Heart

by Dark Rivers Of The Heart(Lit)

  The motor home pulled out of the restaurant parking lot, into the street, and away.

  "Where are we going?" Willa asked.

  "First, out of California," said Mae Lee. “To Las Vegas. Many motor homes crowd the highway between here and Vegas. We're just one more. At that point, I leave you, and you go on with someone else. Your father's picture will be all over the news for a time, and while they're telling their lies about him, you will all be in a safe and quiet place. You will change your looks as much as possible and learn what you will be able to do to help others like yourselves. You will have new names, first and middle and last. New hairstyles. Mr. Descoteaux, you might grow a beard, and you will certainly work with a good voice coach to lose your Caribbean accent, pleasant as it is to the ear. Oh, there will be many changes, and more fun than you imagine there could be now. And meaningful work. The world has not ended, Ondine. It has not ended, Willa. It's only passing through one edge of a dark cloud. There are things to be done to be sure that the cloud does not swallow us entirely. Which, I promise you, it will not. Now, before we begin, may I serve anyone tea, coffee, wine, beer, or a soft drink perhaps?"

  * * *

  . . . bare-chested and barefoot, colder even than I was in the hot July night, I stand in the room of blue light, past the green chair and purple table, before the open door, determined to abandon this strange quest and race back up into the summer night, where a boy might become a boy again, where the truth which I don't know that I know can remain unknown forever.

  Between one blink and another, however, as though transported by the power of a magical incantation, I've left the blue room and have arrived in what must be the basement of an earlier bam that stood on a site adjacent to that which the current barn occupies. While the old bam aboveground was torn down and the land was smoothed over and planted with grass, the cellars were left intact and were connected to the deepest chamber of the new bam.

  I'm again being drawn forward against my will. Or think that I am. But although I shudder in fear of some dark force that draws me, it's my own deeper need to know, my true will, that draws me. I've repressed it since the night my mother died.

  I'm in a curving corridor, six feet wide. A looping electrical cord runs along the center of the rounded ceiling. Low-wattage bulbs, like those on a Christmas tree, are spaced a foot apart. The walls are rough red-black brick, sloppily mortared. The bricks are overlaid in places with patches and veins of stained white plaster as smooth and greasy as the marbling fat in a slab of meat.

  I pause in the curved passage, listening to my rampaging heart, listening to the unseen rooms ahead for a clue as to what might lie in wait for me, listening to the rooms behind for a voice to call me back to the safe world above. But there's no sound ahead or behind, only my heart, and even though I don't want to listen to the things it tells me, I sense that my heart has all the answers. In my heart I know that the truth about my precious mother lies ahead and that what lies behind is a world which will never be the same for me again, a world which changed forever and for the worse when I walked out of it.

  The floor is stone. It might as well be ice beneath my feet. It slopes steeply but in a wide loop that would make it possible to push a wheelbarrow up without becoming exhausted or roll one down without losing control of it.

  Across that icy stone, I walk barefoot and afraid, around the curve and into a room that's thirty feet long and twelve wide. The floor is flat here, the descent complete. A low, flat ceiling. The frosted-white, low-wattage Christmas bulbs on the looping cord continue to provide the only light. This might have been a fruit cellar in the days before electrical service was brought to the ranch, stacked full of August potatoes and September apples, deep enough to be cool in summer and above freezing in winter. There might have been shelves of home-canned fruits and vegetables stored here as well, enough to last three seasons, although the shelves are long gone.

  Whatever the room might once have been, it is something very different now, and I am suddenly frozen to the floor, unable to move. One entire long wall and half the other are occupied by tableaux of life-size human figures carved in white plaster and surrounded by plaster, forming out of a plaster background, as if trying to force their way out of the wall. Grown women but also girls as young as ten or twelve. Twenty, thirty, maybe even forty of them. All naked. Some in their own niches, others in groups of two and three, face beside face, here and there with arms overlapping. He has mockingly arranged a few so they are holding hands for comfort in their terror. Their expressions are unbearable to look upon. Screaming, pleading, agonized, wrenched and suffering, warped by fear beyond measure and by unimaginable pain. Without exception, their bodies are humbled. Often their hands are raised defensively or extended beseechingly or crossed over breasts, over genitals. Here a woman peers between the spread fingers of hands that she's clasped defensively across her face. Imploring, praying, they would be a horror unendurable if they were only what they seem to be at first glance, only sculpture, only the twisted expression of a deranged mind. But they're worse, and even in the cloistering shadows, their blank white stares transfix me, freeze me to the stone floor. The face of the Medusa was so hideous it transformed those who saw it to stone, but these faces aren't like that. These are petrifying because they are all women who might have been mothers like my mother, young girls who might have been my sisters if I'd been fortunate enough to have sisters, all people who were loved by someone and who loved, who had felt the sun on their faces and the coolness of rain, who'd laughed and dreamed of the future and worried and hoped. They turn me to stone because of the common humanity that I share with them, because I can feel their terror and be moved by it. Their tortured expressions are so poignant that their pain is my pain, their deaths my death. And their sense of being abandoned and fearfully alone in their final hours is the abandonment and isolation that I feel now.

  The sight of them is unendurable. Yet I'm compelled to look, because even though I am only fourteen, only fourteen, I know that what they've suffered demands witnessing and pity and anger, these mothers who might have been mine, these sisters who might have been my sisters, these victims like me.

  The medium appears to be molded, sculpted plaster. But the plaster is only the preserving material that records their tormented expressions and beseeching postures—which aren't their true postures and expressions at death but cruel arrangements he made after. Even in the merciful shadows and cold arcs of frosty light, I see places where the plaster has been discolored by unthinkable substances seeping from within: gray and rust and yellowish green, a biological patina by which it's possible to date the figures in the tableaux.

  The smell is indescribable, less because of its vileness than because of its complexity, though it is repulsive enough to make me ill. Later, it became known that he had used a sorcerer's brew of chemicals in an attempt to preserve the bodies within the plaster sarcophaguses. To a considerable extent he had been successful, though some decomposition occurred. The underlying stink is that of the world below cemetery lawns. The ghastliness of caskets long after living people have looked into them and closed the lids. But it is masked by scents as pungent as that of ammonia and as fresh as that of lemons. It is bitter and sour and sweet—and so strange that the cloying stench alone, without the ghostly figures, could make my heart pound and my blood run as icy as January rivers.

  In the unfinished wall, there's a niche already prepared for a new body. He has chiseled out the bricks and stacked them to one side of the hole. He has scooped out a cavity in the earth beyond the wall and has carried that soil away. Lined up near the cavity are fifty-pound bags of dry plaster mix, a long wooden mixing trough lined with steel, two cans of tar-based sealant, both the tools of a mason and those of a sculptor, a stack of wooden pegs, coils of wire, and other items that I can't quite see.

  He is ready. He needs only the woman who will become the next figure in the tableau. But he has her too, of course, for it is she who lost control of he
r bladder in the back of the rainbow van. Her hands have made the flock of bloody birds across the vestibule door.

  Something moves, quick and furtive, out of the new hole in the wall, among the tools and supplies, through shadows and patches of light as pale as snow. It freezes at the sight of me as I have frozen before the martyred women in the walls. It's a rat, but no rat like any other. Its skull is deformed, one eye lower than the other, mouth twisted in a permanent lopsided grin. Another scurries after the first and also goes rigid when it sees me, though not before it rises on hind feet. It too is a creature like no other, encumbered by strange excrescences of bone or cartilage different from anything the first rat exhibits, and with a nose that spreads too wide across its narrow face. These are members of the small family of vermin that survives within the catacombs, tunneling behind the tableaux, nourished in part on that which has been saturated with toxic chemical preservatives. Each year a new generation of their kind produces more mutant forms than was produced the year before. Now they break their paralysis, as I can't yet break mine, and they scurry back into the hole from which they came.

  Sixteen years later, that long chamber was not entirely as it had been on the night of owls and rats. The plaster had been torn down and hauled away. The victims had been removed from the niches in the walls. Between the columns of red-black brick that Spencer's father had left as supports, the dark earth was exposed. Police and forensic pathologists, who labored for weeks within that room, had added vertical four-by-four beams between some brick columns, as if they hadn't trusted solely to the supports that Steven Ackblom had thought sufficient.

  The cool, dry air now smelled faintly of stone and earth, but it was a clean smell. The pungent miasma of chemicals and the stink of biological decay were gone.

  Standing in that low-ceilinged space again, with Ellie and the dog, Spencer vividly recalled the fright that had nearly crippled him when he was fourteen. However, fear was the least of what he felt—which surprised him. Horror and disgust were part of it, but not as great as a diamond-hard anger. Sorrow for the dead. Compassion for those who had loved them. Guilt for having failed to save anyone.

  He knew regret, as well, for the life he might have had but had never known. And now never could.

  Above all, what overcame him was an unexpected reverence, as he might have felt at any place where the innocent had perished: from Calvary to Dachau, to Babi Yar, to the unnamed fields where Stalin buried millions, to rooms where Jeffrey Dahmer dwelt, to the torture chambers of the Inquisition.

  The soil of any killing ground isn't sanctified by the murderers who practice there. Though they often think themselves exalted, they are as the maggots that live in dung, and no maggots can transform one square centimeter of earth into holy ground.

  Sacred, instead, are the victims, for each dies in the place of someone whom fate allows to live. And though many may unwittingly or unwillingly die in the place of others, the sacrifice is no less sacred for the fact that fate chose those who would make it.

  If there had been votive candles in those cleansed catacombs, Spencer would have wanted to light them and gaze into their flames until they blinded him. Had there been an altar, he would have prayed at the foot of it. If by offering his own life he could have brought back the forty-one and his mother, or any one of them, he would not have hesitated to rid himself of this world in hope of waking in another.

  All he could do, however, was quietly honor the dead by never forgetting the details of their final passage through this place. His duty was to be witness. By shunning memory, he would dishonor those who had died here in his place. The price of forgetfulness would be his soul.

  Describing those catacombs as they had been in that long-ago time, coming at last to the woman's cry that had roused him from his paralytic terror, he was suddenly unable to go on. He continued to speak, or thought he did, but then he realized that no more words would come. His mouth worked, but his voice was only a silence that he cast into the silence of the room.

  Finally a thin, high, brief, childlike cry of anguish came from him. It was not unlike the one cry that had jolted him from his bed on that July night or the one that, later, had broken his paralysis. He buried his face in his hands and stood, shaking with grief too intense for tears or sobbing, waiting for the seizure to pass.

  Ellie was aware that no word or touch could console him.

  In glorious canine innocence, Rocky believed any sadness could be relieved by a wagging tail, a cuddle, an affectionate warm lick. He rubbed his flank against his master's legs and swished his tail—and padded away in confusion when none of his tricks worked.

  Spencer found himself speaking again almost as unexpectedly as he had found himself unable to speak a minute or two ago. "I heard the woman's cry again. From down there at the end of the catacombs. Hardly loud enough to be a scream. More a wail to God."

  He started toward the last door, at the end of the catacombs. Ellie and Rocky stayed with him.

  "Even as I moved past the dead women in these walls, I was remembering something from six years before, when I'd been eight years old—another cry. My mother's. That spring night, I woke hungry, got out of bed for a snack. There were fresh chocolate-chip cookies in the kitchen jar. I'd been dreaming about them. Went downstairs. The lights were on in some rooms. I thought I'd find my mom or dad along the way. But I didn't see them."

  Spencer stopped at the painted black door at the end of the catacombs. Catacombs they were and always would be to him, even with the bodies all disinterred and taken away.

  Ellie and Rocky stopped at his side.

  "The kitchen was dark. I was going to take as many cookies as I could carry, more than I would ever be allowed to have at one time. I was opening the jar when I heard a scream. Outside. Behind the house. Went to the window by the table. Parted the curtain. My mom was on the lawn. Running back to the house from the barn. He ... he was behind her. He caught her on the patio. Beside the pool. Swung her around. Hit her. In the face. She screamed again. He hit her. Hit and hit. And again. So fast. My mom. Hitting her with his fist. She fell. He kicked her in the head. He kicked my mom in the head. She was quiet. So fast. All over so fast. He looked toward the house. He couldn't see me in the dark kitchen, at the narrow gap in the curtains. He picked her up. Carried her to the barn. I stood at the window awhile. Then I put the cookies back in the jar. Put the lid on. Went back upstairs. Got into bed. Pulled up the covers."

  "And didn't remember any of it for six years?" Ellie asked.

  Spencer shook his head. "Buried it. That's why I couldn't sleep with the air conditioner running. Deep down where I didn't realize it, I was afraid he would come for me in the night, and I wouldn't hear him because of the air conditioner."

  "And then that night, all those years later, your window open, another cry—"

  "It reached me deeper than I could understand, drew me out of bed, out to the barn, down here. And when I was walking toward this black door, toward the scream . . ."

  Ellie reached to the lever-action knob on the door, to open it, but he stayed her hand.

  "Not yet," he said. "I'm not ready to go in there again yet."

  . . . barefoot on icy stone, I approach the black door, filled with the fear of what I have seen tonight but also with the fear of what I saw on that spring night when I was eight, which has been repressed since then but all at once comes bursting up from within me. I'm in a state beyond mere terror. No word is adequate for what I feel. I'm at the black door, touching the black door, so black, glossy, like a moonless night sky reflected in the blind face of a pond. I'm nearly as confused as I am terrified, for it seems to me that I'm both eight and fourteen, that I'm opening the door to save not merely the woman who made bloody birds on the vestibule door but to save my mother as well. Time past and time present melt together, and all is one, and I enter the slaughterhouse.

  I step into deep space, infinite night around me. The ceiling is ink-black to match the walls, the walls to match
the floor, the floor like a chute to Hell. A naked woman, half conscious, lips split and bleeding, rolling her head in listless denial, is manacled to a burnished-steel slab, which seems to float in blackness because its supports also are black. A single light. Directly over the table. In a black fixture. It floats in the void, pin-spotting the steel, like a celestial object or the cruel beam of a godlike inquisitor. My father's wearing black. Only his face and hands are visible, as if severed but alive in their own right, as if he's an apparition struggling toward completion. He's extracting a gleaming hypodermic syringe from thin air—actually from a drawer beneath the steel slab, a drawer invisible in its blackness-upon-blackness.

  I shout, "No, no, no," as I plunge at him, surprising him, so the syringe drops back into the thin air from which it came, and I drive him backward, backward, past the table, out of the focused light, into blackest infinity, until we crash into the wall at the end of the universe. I'm screaming, punching, but I'm fourteen and slender, and he's in his prime, muscular, powerful. I kick him, but I'm barefoot. He lifts me effortlessly, turns with me, floating in space, slams me back-first into the hard blackness, knocking the wind out of me, slams me again. Pain along my spine. Another blackness rises inside me, deeper than the abyss all around. But the woman cries out again, and her voice helps me resist the inner darkness, even if I can't resist my father's far greater strength.

  Then he presses me to the wall with his body, holding me off the floor with his hands, his face looming before mine, locks of black hair falling across his forehead, eyes so dark that they seem to be holes through which I'm seeing the blackness behind him. "Don't be afraid, don't, don't be afraid, boy. Baby boy, I won't hurt you. You're my blood, my seed, my creation, my baby. I'd never hurt you. Okay? You understand? You hear me, son, sweet boy, my sweet little Mikey, you hear me? I'm glad you're here. It had to happen sooner or later. Sooner the better. Sweet boy, my boy. I know why you're here, I know why you've come."