by Dean Koontz
TWELVE
As the eighteen-wheeler turns onto the county road, I weave off the shoulder and onto the blacktop, trying not to look inebriated, trying instead to appear suddenly afflicted, as with a seizure or a stroke. Most people don’t have sympathy for sloppy drunks who might vomit on them, but they’re likely to rush to the aid of a clean-cut young fellow who seems to have been suddenly dealt a cruel blow by fate. Unfortunately, I am about to contribute to one good Samaritan’s transformation into a cynic.
I make no claim to being an actor. Therefore, as I stagger into the middle of the road, I hold in my mind’s eye the image of Johnny Depp playing Jack Sparrow on the way to the gallows, toning down the flamboyance but not too much. I collapse onto my left side, half in one lane and half in the other, my eyes squinched shut and my face contorted in agony, with the hope that the truck driver doesn’t turn out to be the sloppy drunk that I am striving not to appear to be.
As the air brakes hiss, I’m relieved that I won’t have my head crushed by a massive long-haul tire. The door opens, and there’s a clank that might be a cleated boot landing on the cab step. As he hurries to me, the driver makes a jingling sound. I assume he’s not Santa Claus, that what I’m hearing is a cluster of keys chained to his belt and a lot of coins in his pockets.
When he kneels before me, he does appear to be Saint Nick, though barbered for a summer vacation: his luxuriant holiday mustache and beard still white but considerably trimmed down, his flowing locks cut back. His eyes still twinkle, however, and his dimples are merry, his cheeks like roses, his nose like a cherry. His belly doesn’t shake like a bowl full of jelly, but he would be well advised to forego a truck-stop cheeseburger now and then in favor of a salad.
“Son,” he says, “what’s wrong, what’s happened?”
Before responding, I wince, not with pain and not because I’m getting better at this acting business. There’s such genuine concern in his face and voice, and he puts one hand on my shoulder with such tenderness, that I have no doubt I’ve chosen to hijack the truck of a nice man. I’d feel better about this if the driver were a snake-eyed, stubbled, scar-faced, cruel-mouthed, sneering lout in a T-shirt that said SCREW YOU, with swastikas tattooed on his arms. But I can’t keep lurching into the road and collapsing in front of eighteen-wheelers all morning until I find my ideal victim.
I pretend to have trouble speaking, sputtering out a series of muffled syllables that almost seem to mean something, as if my tongue is half again as thick as it ought to be. This has the desired effect of causing him to lean in closer and to ask me to repeat what I’ve just said, whereupon I draw the pistol from beneath my sweatshirt, poke the barrel into his gut, and snarl in my best tough-guy voice, “You don’t have to die here, that’s up to you,” though to my ear I sound about as tough as Mickey Mouse.
Happily, he’s a sucker for bad acting and not a savvy judge of character. His eyes widen, and all the twinkle in them goes as flat as a glass of 7UP left exposed to the air for a day. His dimples don’t look so merry anymore; they appear to be puckered scars. Once like a bow, his mouth sort of unties itself a little, trembling, as he says, “I’ve got a family.”
Before traffic comes along, I’ve got to get this done. We rise warily to our feet as I continue to press the gun into his belly.
“You want to see your kids again,” I warn him, “come along quiet like to the driver’s door.”
He accompanies me without resistance, putting his hands up until I order him to put them down and act natural, but he isn’t quiet and in fact he babbles. “I don’t have children, wish I did, love kids, it just never was meant to be.”
“But you want to see your wife again, so be cool.”
“Veronica died five years ago.”
“Who?”
“My wife. Cancer. I miss her a lot.”
I’m stealing the truck of a childless widower.
As we arrive at the driver’s door, I remind him that he said he had a family.
“My mom and dad live with me, and my sister Berniece, she never married, and my nephew Timmy, he’s eleven, his folks died in a car wreck two years ago. You shoot me, I’m their sole support, it would be awful, please don’t do that to them.”
I’m stealing the truck of a childless widower who’s devoted to his aging parents, supports a spinster sister, and takes in orphans.
Standing at the open door, I inquire: “You have insurance?”
“A good life policy. Now I see it’s not big enough.”
“I meant truck insurance.”
“Oh, sure, the rig is covered.”
“You an owner-operator?”
“Used to be. Now I’m a company driver for the benefits.”
“That makes me feel better, sir. Unless they’ll fire you.”
“They won’t. Company policy on hijack is let it go, don’t fight back, life comes first.”
“Sounds like a good employer.”
“They’re nice folks.”
“You been hijacked before, sir?”
“This is my first—and I hope last.”
“I hope it’s my last, too.”
A cluster of cars and trucks races by on the coast highway at the top of the slope, and their slipstreams spiral into vortexes that spin down the embankment, causing the tall pale-gold grass to flail like the hair of wildly dancing women. No vehicle appears at the top of the exit ramp.
“Hijackers come in teams,” my victim says. “You being alone sort of disarmed me.”
“I apologize for the deception, sir. Now walk north a couple miles. If you flag down any traffic, then I’ll kill you and them.”
To my ear, I sound about as dangerous as Pooh, but he seems to take me seriously. “All right, whatever you say.”
“I’m sorry about this, sir.”
He shrugs. “Stuff happens, son. You must have your reasons.”
“One more thing. What kind of load are you hauling?”
“Turkeys.”
“There aren’t any people in the trailer?”
He frowns. “Why would there be people?”
“I just need to ask.”
“This rig is a reefer,” he says, pointing to the refrigeration unit on the front of the trailer. “Frozen turkeys.”
“So any people in there would be frozen dead.”
“That’s my point.”
“Okay, start walking north.”
“You won’t shoot me in the back?”
“I’m not that type, sir.”
“No offense, son.”
“Get moving.”
He walks away, looking forlorn, Santa stripped of his sleigh and reindeer. As he passes the end of the trailer, without glancing back, he says, “Won’t be easy to fence frozen turkeys, son.”
“I know just what to do with them,” I assure him.
When he’s about eighty feet past the rig, I climb into the tractor and pull the door shut.
This is really bad. I’m embarrassed to have to write about this. I’ve killed people, sure, but they were vicious people who wanted to kill me. I never before stole anything from an innocent person—or from a wicked person, either, come to think of it, unless you count taking a gun away from a bad guy in order to shoot him with it, which I’d argue is more self-defense than theft or, at the worst, unapproved borrowing.
Taped to the storage ledge above the windshield is a group photo of my victim with an elderly couple who might be his parents, a nice-looking woman of about fifty, who is probably his sister Berniece, and a boy who can be no one but the orphan Timmy. Clipped to the flap door of the storage space above the overhead CB radio is a photo of my victim with a cute golden retriever that he clearly adores, and beside that is clipped a reminder card that in fancy script says JESUS LOVES ME.
I feel like crap. What I’ve done so far is bad, but I’m about to do even worse.
THIRTEEN
Some guy with a cold smooth voice says, “Jolie Ann Harmony,” like he wants to spook me.
>
So here I am in a dimly lighted room with six dead people in hazmat suits or space suits, or something, with their faces melted and collapsed and grinning like psycho clowns, their teeth kind of glowing green behind their faceplates. When I hear my name, I pretty much expect one of the six, maybe all of them, to clamber to their feet and lurch toward me, living-dead hazmat guys, zombie astronauts, but none of them moves, which doesn’t prove they’re harmless because the living dead are always trying to fake you out and then catch you unaware.
Some girls, I guess, would turn back at this point. I don’t know much about other girls. Being a hostage to Hiskott and all that for five years, I haven’t been able to cultivate like eight or ten best friends forever. And even if I had some friends my age, I can’t slip out of the Corner and go on cool sleepovers without him torturing and killing half my family for spite. Even if right now I feel like scurrying back to wait for Harry exactly where he left me, which I’m not saying I do, there’s no reason to think that I’d be safer there. Whatever might kill me here could come there and rip out my eyes to fry them with onions and eggs for breakfast. So it’s just as dumb to go on as to go back, and no less dumb to stay here, and if you don’t have anything but dumb choices, you might as well go with the most interesting one.
“Jolie Ann Harmony,” the guy repeats, and maybe he’s invisible, because his voice seems to come out of nowhere.
“Yeah, what do you want?”
He doesn’t answer me. Maybe he’s disappointed that his cold smooth spooky voice doesn’t seem to scare me. When you’ve had Norris Hiskott in your head making you do all kinds of rotten things, let me tell you, it takes a lot more to frighten you than some stupid feeb doing one version or another of Boo!
“You have something to say to me?” I ask.
“Jolie Ann Harmony.”
“Here. Present. Je suis Jolie.”
“Jolie Ann Harmony.”
“What am I, talking to a parrot or something?”
He gives me the silent treatment again.
If I’ve got to be honest, I’ll admit I’m sort of scared. After all, I’m not an idiot. But I swallow it like a wad of phlegm, which is how fear feels when it comes into your throat from somewhere, and I walk past those six dead people to another one of those ginormous round moongate-type doors. That yellow light I keep following seems to be yet another room away, and maybe it’s like the Pied Piper who lures all the children to their doom because the townsfolk won’t pay him what they promised for leading the rats away to drown in the river. But what am I going to do, you know? All the choices are dumb again, which is beginning to be annoying. So I let the big old gummy amoeba or whatever swallow me and spit me straight into the next chamber. I feel so like, yuck, I should be covered in icky gunk and reek like spoiled milk or something, but I’m dry and I don’t stink.
The yellow light winks out, and I’m blind, which doesn’t bother me as much as you might think it would, because everything bad that’s ever happened to me happened in light, not in the dark, and at least in the dark, if there’s something horrible about to go down, the thing is you don’t have to see it. Then a soft, shimmering, silvery radiance appears in the blackness, very ghosty at first, but it grows a little brighter and brighter. It’s a huge sphere, hard to tell how big in this gloom, because it mostly contains its light and doesn’t brighten anything more than a few feet beyond it.
Well, I can stand here until my knees buckle or move toward it, so I do, being careful not to fall into some pit if there is a pit. The floor is hard rubberlike stuff again, and I go at least forty feet from the weird door before I’m standing next to the sphere. It’s maybe fifty feet in diameter, as high as a five-story building. Unless it’s suspended from the ceiling, the sphere is just floating there like the biggest bubble ever, its silver light reflected dimly on the black floor three feet under it. I can’t tell is it heavy or is it light like a bubble, but my suspicion is it’s so heavy that if it wasn’t levitating, if it was resting on the floor, it would crush the foundation, drop through to the earth underneath, and crumple the entire building into a pit on top of it.
This isn’t the most unique thing I’ve ever seen, because the word unique is an absolute, there can’t be degrees of it. A thing is unique or it isn’t. It’s not very unique or pretty unique or more unique. Just unique. That’s one of the sixty million facts you have to learn when you’re homeschooled by parents who’ve read a library’s worth of books and think about just everything. But this sphere is unique for sure.
The thing is silent, but it gives off this ominous vibe that makes me feel like I would be the world’s biggest idiot if I touched it. Maybe I’ve made myself out to be the Indiana Jones of the seventh grade, but the truth is that I get the phlegm of fear in my throat again, thicker than before, and I have to keep swallowing hard to be able to breathe right. Don’t ask about my heart. It’s just thudding like some pneumatic hammer.
Out of the almost-liquid pooling darkness comes that cold smooth voice again, just as pompous as ever. I want to smack him, I swear I do. “Jolie Ann Harmony does not have project clearance.”
“Who are you?”
“Jolie Ann Harmony does not have project clearance.”
“Where are you?”
He clams up.
Whoever this guy is, I’m sure he’s just as dangerous as any axe murderer and I should pussyfoot around him and be polite, but he really annoys me. He’s judgmental. He’s bossy. He won’t engage in a conversation.
“You’re judgmental,” I tell him, “bossy, and just generally impossible.”
He’s silent so long I don’t expect a reply, but then he says, “Nevertheless, you do not have project clearance.”
“Well, I think I do.”
“No, you do not.”
“Do, too.”
“That is incorrect.”
“What’s the name of your project?”
“That is classified information.”
For a minute, I stand listening to the silence and watching the glowing sphere, which now looks like a giant crystal ball, though I’m pretty sure it’s metallic. Then I give him a little what-for: “If you really want to know, I don’t even think you have a project. The whole thing’s a silly load of cow dung. It’s just something you made up so you’d feel important.”
“Jolie Ann Harmony does not have project clearance.”
“Has anyone ever told you how tedious you are?”
If I’ve wounded him, he’s not going to admit it.
“So if you have a project, where are the workers and all? Projects have workers of one kind or another, you know, guys in overalls or uniforms, or lab jackets, or some other getup. I don’t see anyone. This whole place is deserted.”
He gives me the silent treatment again. I’m supposed to be intimidated, but it doesn’t work.
“In the room before this one, there’s six dead guys wearing airtight suits, look like they’ve been dead for years. All I’ve seen are gross dead people, and you can’t have a project with just dead people.”
Finally Mr. Mystery speaks: “I am authorized to terminate intruders.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am.”
“If you were, you’d already have terminated me.”
He seems to have to brood about that one.
I’m not sure that was the smartest thing I could have said, so I give it another shot: “Anyway, I’m not an intruder. I’m like an explorer. A refugee and an explorer. Where is this stupid place—somewhere on the southern edge of Fort Wyvern? Wyvern’s been closed since before I was born.”
After a hesitation, he says, “Then you must be a child.”
“What a staggering feat of deduction. I’m overwhelmed. I really am. Genius. Here’s the thing—your project was abandoned a long time ago, and you’re just like some watchman who makes sure nobody steals the expensive equipment and sells it for scrap.”
“That is incorrect. The project was never a
bandoned. It was mothballed pending a new approach to the problem, which apparently has taken some time to devise.”
“What problem?”
“That is classified information.”
“You make me want to spit, you really do.”
Embedded in the floor, a series of small yellow path lamps comes on, beginning directly in front of my feet and leading away from the floating sphere. It’s not a very subtle suggestion, in spite of the fact they aren’t very bright lights, they’re like a procession of little luminous sea creatures laboriously making their way along the bottom of a deep, deep ocean trench so far from the sun that the surrounding water is as black as petroleum. At the end of this line of lights, a curving set of metal stairs suddenly appears out of the blackness when tube lighting, also dim, barely brightens the face of each tread and glows wanly under the handrail. In fact, the stairs and all are so softly lighted, they seem almost to be a mirage that might dissolve before my eyes at any moment, like something you’d have to climb in a fairy tale to get to the cloud city where the all the fairies live.
Path lighting, stair lighting, any kind of safety lighting is meant to be bright enough so that you don’t trip and fall. There must be a reason these are stingy with the wattage, so I wonder if maybe the sphere, which is beautiful but creepy, might have to be kept in heavy darkness for some reason.
I follow the path lights, but then I’m not totally convinced the stairs are a swell idea. I’m getting pretty far away from Orc and all that.
Out of the pooled darkness, Mr. Mystery says, “When you were talking to Harry, you mentioned a name that I recognized—Hiskott.”
“What a piece of work you are—eavesdropping, snooping. That’s pretty scummy, you know.”
