Dean Koontz - (1984)

by The Servants Of Twilight(Lit)

  "You mean . . . like sick with the flu?"

  "No, honey. I mean . . . mentally ill . . . disturbed.

  "She was a real Looney bin, huh?"

  He had gotten that expression from Val Gardner, Christine's business partner. This was the first time she'd heard him speak it, and she wondered what other, less socially acceptable words he might have picked up from the same source.

  "Was she a real Looney Tone, Mom? Was she crazy?""Mentally disturbed, yes."

  He frowned.

  She said, "That doesn't make it any easier to understand, huh? "

  "Nope. 'Cause what does crazy really mean, anyway, if it doesn't mean being locked up in a rubber room? And even if

  she was a crazy old lady, why was she so mad at me? Huh? I never even saw her before."

  "Well . . ."

  How do you explain psychotic behavior to a six-year-old? She could think of no way to do it without being ridiculously simplistic; however, in this case, a simplistic answer was better than none.

  "Maybe she once had a little boy of her own, a little boy she loved very much, but maybe he wasn't a good little boy like you. Maybe he grew up to be very bad and did a lot of terrible things that broke his mother's heart. Something like that could . . . unbalance her a little."

  "So now maybe she hates all little boys, whether she knows them or not," he said.

  "Yes, perhaps."

  "Because they remind her of her own little boy? is that it'?"

  "That's right."

  He thought about it for a moment, then nodded ." Yeah. I can sorta see how that could be."

  She smiled at him and mussed his hair ." Hey, I'll tell you what-let's stop at Baskin-Robbins and get an ice cream cone. I think their flavor of the month is peanut butter and chocolate .

  That's one of your favorites, isn't it?"

  He was obviously surprised. She didn't approve of too much fat in his diet, and she planned his meals carefully. Ice cream wasn't a frequent indulgence. He seized the moment and said, "Could I have one scoop of that and one scoop of lemon custard? "

  "Two scoops?"

  "It's Sunday," he said.

  "Last time I looked, Sunday wasn't so all-fired special .

  There's one of them every week. Or has that changed while I wasn't paying attention?"

  "Well . . . but . . . see, I've just had He screwed up his face, thinking hard. He worked his mouth as if chewing on a piece of taffy, then said, "I've just had a . . . a traumamatatic experience ."

  "Traumatic experience?"

  "Yeah. That's it."

  She blinked at him ." Where'd you get a big word like that?

  Oh. Of course. Never mind. Val."

  According to Valerie Gardner, who was given to theatrics, just getting up in the morning was a traumatic experience. Val had about half a dozen traumatic experiences every day-and thrived on them.

  "So it's Sunday, and I had this traumatic experience," Joey said, "and I think maybe what I better do is, I better have two scoops of ice cream to make up for it. You know?"

  "I know I'd better not hear about another traumatic experience for at least ten years."

  "What about the ice cream?"

  She looked at his torn shirt ." Two scoops," she agreed.

  "Wow! This is some terrific day, isn't it? A real Looney Tune and a double-dip ice cream!"

  Christine never ceased to be amazed by the resiliency of children, especially the resiliency of this child. Already, in his mind, he had transmuted the encounter with the old woman, had changed it from a moment of terror to an adventure that was not quite-but almost-as good as a visit to an ice cream parlor.

  "You're some kid," she said.

  "You're some mom."

  He turned on the radio and hummed along happily with the music, all the way to Baskin-Robbins.

  Christine kept checking the rearview mirror. No one was following them. She was sure of that. But she kept checking anyway.

  After a light dinner at the kitchen table with Joey, Christine went to her desk in the den to catch up on paperwork. She and Val Gardner owned a gourmet shop called Wine & Dine in Newport Beach, where they sold fine wines, specialty foods from all over the world, high quality cooking utensils, and slightly exotic appliances like pasta-makers and expresso machines The store

  was in its sixth year of operation and was solidly established; in fact, it was returning considerably more profit than either Christine or Val had ever dared hope when they'd first opened their doors for business. Now, they were planning to open a second outlet this summer, then a third store in West Los Angeles sometime next year. Their success was exciting and gratifying, but the business demanded an ever-increasing amount of their time .

  This wasn't the first weekend evening that she had spent catching up on paperwork.

  She wasn't complaining. Before Wine & Dine, she had worked as a waitress, six days a week, holding down two jobs at the same time: a four-hour lunch shift in a diner and a six-hour dinner shift at a moderately expensive French restaurant, Chez Lavelle. Because she was a polite and attentive waitress who hustled her butt off, the tips had been good at the diner and excellent at Chez Lavelle, but after a few years the work numbed and aged her: the sixty-hour weeks; the busboys who often came to work so high on drugs that she had to cover for them and do two jobs instead of one; the lecherous guys who ate lunch at the diner and who could be gross and obnoxious and frighteningly persistent, but who had to be turned down with coquettish good humor for the sake of business. She spent so many hours on her feet that, on her day off, she did nothing but sit with her aching legs raised on an ottoman while she read the Sunday papers with special attention to the financial section, dreaming of one day owning her own business.

  But because of the tips and because she lived frugally-even doing without a car for two years-she had eventually managed to put enough aside to pay for a one-week cruise to Mexico aboard a luxury liner, the Aztec Princess, and had accumulated a nest egg large enough to provide half the cash with which she and Val had launched their gourmet shop. Both the cruise and the shop had radically changed her life.

  And if spending too many evenings doing paperwork was better than working as a waitress, it was immeasurably better than the two years of her life that had preceded her jobs at the diner and Chez Lavelle. The Lost Years. That was how she thought of that time, now far in the past: the bleak, miserable, sad and stupid Lost Years.

  Compared to that period of her life, paperwork was a pleasure, a delight, a veritable carnival of fun ...

  She had been at her desk more than an hour when she realized that Joey had been exceptionally quiet ever since she'd come into the den. Of course, he was never a noisy child. Often he played by himself for hours, hardly making a sound. But after the unnerving encounter with the old woman this afternoon, Christine was still a little jumpy, and even this perfectly ordinary silence suddenly seemed strange and threatening. She wasn't exactly frightened. Just anxious. If anything happened to Joey . . .

  She put down her pen and switched off the softly humming adding machine. She listened.

  Nothing.

  In an echo chamber of memory, she could hear the old woman's voice: He's got to die, he's got to die . . .

  She rose, left the den, quickly crossed the living room, went down the hall to the boy's bedroom.

  The door was open, the light on, and he was there, safe, playing on the floor with their dog, Brandy, a sweet-faced and infinitely patient golden retriever.

  "Hey, Mom, wanna play Star Wars with us? I'm Han Solo, and Brandy's my buddy, Chewbacca the Wookie. You could be the princess if you want."

  Brandy was sitting in the middle of the floor, between the bed and the sliding closet doors. He was wearing a baseball cup emblazoned with the words RETURN OF THE JEDI, and his long furry ears hung out from the sides of it. Joey had also strapped a bandoleer of plastic bullets around the pooch, plus a holster containing a futuristic-looking plastic gun. Panting, eyes bright, Brandy was
taking it all in stride; he even seemed to be smiling.

  "He makes a great Wookie," Christine said.

  "Wanna play?"

  "Sorry, Skipper, but I've got an awful lot of work to do. I just stopped by to see if . . . if you were okay."

  "Well, what happened is that we almost got vaporized by an empire battle cruiser," Joey said ." But we're okay now."

  Brandy snuffled in agreement.

  She smiled at Joey ." Watch out for Darth Vader."

  "Oh, yeah, sure, always. We're being super careful cause we know he's in this part of the galaxy somewhere."

  "See you in a little while."

  She took only one step toward the door before Joey said, "Mom? Are you afraid that crazy old lady's going to show up again?

  Christine turned to him ." No, no, she said, although that was precisely what had been in her mind ." She can't possibly know who we are or where we live."

  Joey's eyes were even a more brilliant shade of blue than usual; they met her own eyes unwaveringly, and there was disquiet in them ." I told her my name, Mom. Remember? She asked me, and so I told her my name."

  "Only your first name."

  He frowned ." Did I?"

  "You just said, 'Joey."

  'Yeah. That's right."

  "Don't worry, honey. You'll never see her again. That's all over and done with. She was just a sad old woman who-"

  "What about our license plate?"

  " What about it?"

  "Well, see, if she got the number, maybe there's some way she can use it. To find out who we are. Like they sometimes do on those detective shows on TV."

  That possibility disconcerted her, but she said, "I doubt it. I think only policemen can track down a car's owner from the license number ."

  " But just maybe," the boy said worriedly.

  "We pulled away from her so fast she didn't have time to memorize the number. Besides, she was hysterical. She wasn't thinking clearly enough to study the license plate. Like I told you, it's all over and done with. Really. Okay?"

  He hesitated a moment, then said, "Okay. But, Mom, I been thinking . .

  ."

  "What?"

  "That crazy old lady . . . could she've been . . . a witch?"

  Christine almost laughed, but she saw that he was seriout She suppressed all evidence of her amusement, put on a sober

  expression that matched the grave look on his face, and said, "Oh, I'm sure she wasn't a witch."

  "I don't mean like Broom Hilda. I mean a real witch. A real witch wouldn't need our license number, you know? She wouldn't need anything. She'd sniff us out. There's no place in the whole universe where you can hide when there's a witch after you. Witches have magic powers."

  He was either already certain that the old woman was a witch or was rapidly convincing himself of it. Either way, he was scaring himself unnecessarily because, after all, they really never would see her again.

  Christine remembered the way that strange woman had clung to the car, jerking at the handle of the locked door, keeping pace with them as they pulled away, screeching crazy accusations at them. Her eyes and face had radiated both fury and a disturbing power that made it seem as if she might really be able to stop the Firebird with her bare hands. A witch? That a child might think she had supernatural powers was certainly understandable.

  " A rea l witch," Joey repeated, a tremor in his voice.

  Christine was aware that she had to snip this line of thought right away, before he became obsessed with witches. Last year, for almost two months, he had been certain that a magical white snake-like one he'd seen in a movie-was hiding in his room, waiting for him to go to sleep, so that it could slither out and bite him. She'd had to sit with him each evening until he'd fallen asleep. Frequently, when he awakened in the middle of the night, she had to take him into her own bed in order to settle him down .

  He'd gotten over the snake thing the same day that she'd made up her mind to take him to a child psychologist; later, she'd cancelled the appointment. After a few weeks had passed, when she'd been sure that mentioning the snake wouldn't get him started on it again, she asked what had happened to it. He looked embarrassed and said, "It was only imagination, Mom. I sure was acting like a dumb little kid, huh?" He'd never mentioned the white snake again. He possessed a healthy, rampaging imagination, and it was up to her to rein it in when it got out of control. Like now.

  Although she had to put an end to this witch stuff, she couldn't just tell him there was no such thing. If she tried that approach,

  he would think she was just babying him. She would have to go along with his assumption that witches were real, then use the logic of a child to make him see that the old woman in the parking lot couldn't possibly have been a witch.

  She said, "Well, I can understand how you might wonder about her being a witch. Whew! I mean, she did look a little bit like a witch is supposed to look, didn't she?"

  "More than a little bit."

  "No, no, just a little bit. Let's be fair to the poor old lady."

  "She looked exactly like a mean witch," he said ." Exactly.

  Didn't she, Brandy?"

  The dog snorted as if he understood the question and was in full agreement with his young master.

  Christine squatted, scratched the dog behind the ears, and said, "What do you know about it, fur-face? You weren't even there ."

  Brandy yawned.

  To Joey, Christine said, "If you really think about it, she didn't look all that much like a witch."

  "Her eyes were creepy," the boy insisted, "bugging out of her head like they did. You saw them, sort of wild, Jeez, and her frizzy hair just like a witch's hair."

  "But she didn't have a big crooked nose with a wart on the tip of it, did she? "

  "No," Joey admitted.

  "And she wasn't dressed in black, was she?"

  "No. But all in green," Joey said, and from his tone of voice it was clear that the old woman's outfit had seemed as odd to him as it had to Christine.

  "Witches don't wear green. She wasn't wearing a tall, pointed black hat, either.

  He shrugged.

  "And she didn't have a cat with her," Christine said.

  "So?"

  "A witch never goes anywhere without her cat."

  "She doesn't?"

  "No. It's her familiar."

  "What's that mean?"

  "The witch's familiar is her contact with the devil. It's through

  the familiar, through the cat, that the devil gives her magic powers. Without the cat, she's just an ugly old woman."

  "You mean like the cat watches her and makes sure she doesn't do something the devil wouldn't like?"

  "That's right."

  "I didn't see any cat," Joey said, frowning.

  "There wasn't a cat because she wasn't a witch. You've got nothing to worry about, honey."

  His face brightened ." Boy, that's a relief! If she'd been a witch, she mightve turned me into a toad or something."

  "Well, life as a toad might not be so bad," she teased ." You'd get to sit on a lily pad all day, just taking it easy."

  "Toads eat flies," he said, grimacing, "and I can't even stand to eat veal ."

  She laughed, leaned forward, and kissed his cheek.

  "Even if she was a witch," he said, "I'd probably be okay because I've got Brandy, and Brandy wouldn't let any old cat get anywhere near."

  "You can rely on Brandy," Christine agreed. She looked at the clown-faced dog and said, "You're the nemesis of all cats and witches, aren't you, fur-face?"

  To her surprise, Brandy thrust his muzzle forward and licked her under the chin.

  "Yuck," she said ." No offense, fur-face, but I'm not sure whether kissing you is any better than eating flies."

  Joey giggled and hugged the dog.

  Christine returned to the den. The mound of paperwork seemed to have grown taller while she was gone.

  She had no sooner settled into the chair behind the desk than the teleph
one rang. She picked it up.

  "Hello? "

  No one answered.

  "Hello?" she said again.

  "Wrong number," a woman said softly and hung up.

  Christine put the receiver down and went back to work. She didn't give the call a second thought.

  She was awakened by Brandy's barking, which was unusual because Brandy hardly ever barked. Then she heard Joey's voice .

  "Mom! Come quick! Mommy!"

  He wasn't merely calling her; he was screaming for her.

  As she threw back the covers and got out of bed, she saw the glowing red numbers on the digital alarm clock. It was 1:20

  A.M.

  She plunged across the room, through the open door, into the hail, headed toward Joey's room, flipping up light switches as she went.

  Joey was sitting in bed, pressing back against the headboard as if he were trying to pass through it and slip magically into the wall behind it, where he could hide. His hands were filled with twisted lumps of sheet and blanket. His face was pale.

  Brandy was at the window, forepaws up on the sill. He was barking at something in the night beyond the glass. When Christine entered the room, the dog stopped barking, padded to the bed, and looked inquiringly at Joey, as if seeking guidance.

  "Someone was out there," the boy said ." Looking in. It was that crazy old lady."

  Christine went to the window. There wasn't much light. The yellowish glow of the streetlamp at the corner didn't reach quite this far. Although a moon ornamented the sky, it wasn't a full moon, and it cast only a weak, milky light that frosted the sidewalks, silvered the cars parked along the street, but revealed few of the night's secrets. For the most part, the lawn and shrubbery lay in deep darkness.

  "Is she still out there?" Joey asked.

  "No," Christine said.

  She turned away from the window, went to him, sat on the edge of his bed.

  He was still pale. Shaking.

  She said, "Honey, are you sure-"

  "She was there!"

  "Exactly what did you see?"

  "Her face."

  "The old woman?"

  "Yeah."

  "You're sure it was her, not somebody else?"

  He nodded ." Her."

  "It's so dark out there. How could you see well enough to-',

  "I saw somebody at the window, just sort of a shadow in the moonlight, and then what I did was I turned on the light, and it was her. I could see. It was her."