by Dean Koontz
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 abandoned. 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.”
“This is my dominion. You were trespassing.”
“Well, whether or not that’s true—”
“It is true.”
“—whether or not it is, you’re still scummy.”
“Come up the stairs, and talk with me about Norris Hiskott.�
�
FOURTEEN
The truck is equipped with a flat mirror and a convex mirror on each side of the cab, and a spot mirror on each front fender, all automatically adjustable, but the only thing I’m going to need them for is to be sure that the driver is still hiking away from his rig. And he is, clearly not tempted to come running back as soon as he hears me slam the cab door.
The big-bore engine is idling as I settle behind the wheel, but a well-integrated sound-dampening system isolates the engine noise so effectively that I’ve been in cars that are louder. It’s a cozy cab; and if I were going to drive it any distance, I would need yet another NoDoz to keep from being lulled to sleep by the low and comforting sound of the 15-liter engine filtering through the insulation.
I put the pistol between my legs — muzzle forward.
From the face of the overhead storage shelf and the flap door above the citizens-band radio, I remove the family photograph, the picture of the driver and his golden retriever, and the JESUS LOVES ME reminder card. I tuck them in my wallet and return the wallet to my hip pocket.
There’s GPS navigation, but as I am not driving even half a mile, I don’t need to enter an address. I release the brakes, put this big boy in gear, and head south on the county road toward the entrance to Harmony Corner. I haven’t driven one of these often and not for some time, but I don’t need to build up speed and take any chances, because it isn’t my intention to use the eighteen-wheeler as a ram or anything like that. I’m Odd but I’m not nuts.
Between the service station and the diner lies the large graveled area where truckers are directed to park. Last night, when Annamaria and I arrived, three rigs were tucked in there. The space can handle a dozen of these behemoths. At the moment, just before the breakfast rush starts to accelerate, five eighteen-wheelers are lined up like prehistoric beasts at a watering hole.
Passing the service station, I glimpse a couple of guys in there, but I’m too far away to see their faces. If one of them isn’t Donny, I wouldn’t know either of them, anyway. They don’t react as I sail by. To them I’m just another customer of the diner.
I hang a right turn into the parking area, come to a full stop, but leave the rig in gear. Ahead, at the western end of the parking area, a series of sturdy wooden posts, set in concrete and linked by a couple of rows of cables, define the point at which the land drops away into the hills that roll down toward the sea.
The only way that I’m going to have a chance to creep up on the house in which Norris Hiskott lives is to create sufficient chaos to preoccupy all of the Harmonys, chaos that their puppetmaster cannot afford to insist that they ignore.
I press the brake hard, rev the engine, feel the truck strain to be free, let up on the brake and an instant later the accelerator, snatch the pistol from between my legs as the rig begins to roll, and leap from the cab, kicking off from the step below the fuel tank. I stagger, stumble, fall, roll, and scramble to my feet as the vehicle rumbles toward the fence.
Whether or not the rig is moving fast enough won’t be clear until it hits the posts, but the distance is too short for it to lose much momentum in the approach. The combined weight of the rig and load is probably somewhere around eighty thousand pounds. In my book that is an irresistible force, and the fence falls short of being an immovable object.
I keep pace with the truck, sort of escorting it toward the drop-off. I have decidedly mixed feelings — delight, guilt, relief, anxiety — when the posts crack off where they’re sunk in concrete. They splinter, tumble away, trailing steel cables that snap almost like electric arcs jumping from pole to pole, and lash whistles from the air as they flail down and away. Although the rig seems as if it might hang up on the footings and the remnants of one post, it merely hesitates before taking the plunge.
FIFTEEN
So this creepy disembodied voice asks me to come up the dimly lighted stairs that look like they might evaporate behind me and leave me with no way down, and what I think of first is how and why my parents always used to tell me not to take candy from a stranger.
What I think of second, while I’m climbing the stairs, is some of the screwy situations kids get themselves into in fairy tales. Like Red Riding Hood visits Grandma’s house after Grandma has been eaten alive, and she’s suspicious and all about this transvestite wolf in Grandma’s nightgown and bonnet, lying in Grandma’s bed, but the twit doesn’t tumble to his true identity until he actually eats her. If the huntsman hadn’t come along to cut open the wolf’s stomach and let Grandma and Red out of there, they would have been nothing but a couple of bowel movements. Of course, it’s also screwy, the wolf supposedly swallowing them whole. If he’d tried to do that, he would need a badger or a bear or some woodland creature to apply the Heimlich maneuver.
At the top of the stairs, there’s a narrow catwalk of stainless steel. The softly illuminated handrail almost fades away in the gloom to the left and right, and there’s only just enough murky light to see a series of steel doors and big windows that look out on the darkness and the freaky sphere.
The sphere is still silvery and glimmering, kind of pretty for something that puts out such a bad vibe, which reminds me of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, which I recently read. Old Scarlett is super-pretty and vivacious, and you’ve got to admire her in some ways, but you know almost from the start, this babe is six different kinds of messed up. I don’t think I could have lived back then, if you want to know, because I would have been so mad about slavery and all, not to mention no TV.
Up here on the catwalk, about thirty feet above the floor, I see a feature of the sphere that wasn’t visible from below. In the top third of the thing, a single row of windows seems to run all the way around it. Each is maybe two feet long and like one foot high, set flush in the metal surface with no frames. If you consider the size of the sphere, the windows aren’t really big. They don’t look like ordinary glass, either. What they look like are thick slabs of rock crystal or something. Beyond them, inside the sphere, there’s this deep red light and terrible shadows moving through it ceaselessly, shapeless but disturbing shadows flying and leaping and twisting so crazy. I don’t like this thing at all, and I totally mean that.
As I turn away from the sphere, the stair and railing lights go off. Flanking one of the doors along the catwalk, two big windows brighten, though hardly so you’d notice. When I peer through one of them, I can’t see anything inside, just vague shapes, which probably means the glass is heavily tinted and polarized, so it looks clear from inside but not from out here, which is like the windows in the Harmony Corner diner.
An electric lock buzzes and clicks, and the door between those two windows swings inward a couple of inches, as if I’m being invited inside. Which reminds me of Hansel and Gretel. They come upon a house in the woods, it’s made of bread and cakes, and they right away chow down on it, never once realizing it can’t be anything but a lure and a trap. Then the fiendish old witch invites them inside, and they say sure, this is a cool place, and she’s so obviously fattening them up for slaughter with pancakes and apples and all. It’s like the tenth biggest miracle in history how the old hag, instead of the two urchins, ends up baking in the oven.
So I push the door open wider, and I don’t see any old, wrinkled hag anywhere in there, or a wolf, or any living thing. Living things are nearly always what get you, so as I cross the threshold, I don’t feel quite so naive as Hansel and Gretel. Besides, I’m not here just to stuff some cake down my piehole. I’m here because I’m hoping to learn something about Norris Hiskott that will make it possible for me to smash him as flat as I might smash a bug I didn’t like.
The room has two computer workstations, and along two walls are all kinds of mad-doctor equipment that I couldn’t say what any of it is. In front of one of the two big windows is this long console with a lot of switches, buttons, levers, dials, gauges, indicator lights, and monitors, all dark and silent. The computers are dated, and it feels like no one has been here in a
long time. On the other hand, there’s no dust, not a speck of it, as if the place has been airtight since they mothballed the project.
Through the windows, I can see the upper part of the silvery sphere. It looks like the moon come down to Earth.
In the back wall is another steel door, locked. There’s a six-inch-square view window about two-thirds of the way up the door, and when I stand on tiptoe, I can see through it, except the room beyond is dark.
The voice that sounds like that of a Darth Vader wannabe issues from speakers in the ceiling: “Jolie Ann Harmony.”
Turning away from the door, I say, “You again.”
“Tell me about Norris Hiskott.”
“Well, snoop and sneak that you are, you heard everything I said to Harry.”
“That is correct.”
“Then you’ve already heard just about every nasty thing that matters.”
“I would like to hear it again.”
“You should have paid attention the first time. Anyway, what are you, some kind of pervert, you suck on other people’s pain?”
After a silence, he says, with no emotion except curiosity, “You do not seem to like me.”
“There’s that keen insight of yours again.”
“Why do you not like me?”
“Snoop, sneak — heard that anywhere before?”
“I am only doing my job.”
“And what is your job?”
“That is classified information. Tell me again about Norris Hiskott.”
“Why?”
“I want to compare what you said to Harry with what you now will say to me. There may be significant discrepancies. You will tell me about Norris Hiskott again.”
These past five years have given me some bad attitudes, let me tell you, and if there’s one that’s probably going to wreck my whole life once Hiskott is dead and I’m free, it’s that I can’t tolerate being told what to do, even little things. I just can’t put up with it. I really can’t. Even if my mom or dad, when they tell me to do something, just tell me instead of explaining why or asking, I go off. It makes me all nuts, even though Mom and Dad only want what’s best for me. I have to do everything Hiskott tells me to do, what he makes me do, even the thing with Maxy and all. It’s just too freaking much. What I’m saying is, maybe I’ll never be able to hold a job with a boss telling me what to do, because I’ll want to punch him or hit him over the head with a skillet, I don’t know what. Just being told that I will tell this guy about Hiskott again steams me, because I wasn’t born to live on my knees saying “Yes, sir” and “Please, sir” all day long. I just can’t bear it. I really can’t.
