Dean Koontz - (1984)

by The Servants Of Twilight(Lit)

  "What do you mean?" Charlie asked.

  "A sign," she said.

  "Sign?

  "A holy sign."

  Charlie stared at her hands.

  "Stigmata," she said.

  Jesus. The woman belonged in an institution.

  A chill worked its way assiduously up Charlie's spine and curled at the base of his neck, flicking its icy tail.

  "The wounds of Christ," she said.

  What have we walked into? Charlie wondered.

  Henry said, "I better call a doctor."

  "No," she said softly but authoritatively ." These wounds ache, yes, but it's a sweet pain, a good pain, a cleansing pain, and they won't become infected; they'll heal well on their own .

  Don't you understand? These are the wounds Christ endured, the holes made by the nails that pinned Him to the cross."

  She's mad, Charlie thought, and he looked uneasily at the door, wondering where the florid-faced woman had gone. To get some other crazies? To organize a death squad? A human sacrifice? They had the nerve to call this Christianity?

  "I know what you're thinking," Grace Spivey said, her voice growing louder, stronger ." You don't think I look like a prophet .

  You don't think God would work through an old, crazy-looking woman like me. But tha t is how He works. Christ walked with the outcasts, befriended the lepers, the prostitutes, the thieves, the deformed, and sent them forth to spread His word. Do you know why? Do you know?"

  She was speaking so loudly now that her voice rebounded from the walls, and Charlie was reminded of a television evangelist who spoke in hypnotic rhythms and with the projection of a well-trained actor.

  "Do you know why God chooses the most unlikely messengers?" she demanded ." It's because He wants to test you. Anyone could bring himself to believe the preachings of a prettyboy minister with Robert Redford's face and Richard Burton's voice! But only the righteous, only those who truly want to believe in the Word . . . only those with enoughfaith will recognize and accept the Word regardless of the messenger!"

  Her blood was dripping on the table. Her voice had risen until it vibrated in the window glass.

  "God is testing you. Can you hear His message regardless of what you think of the messenger? Is your soul pure enough to allow you to hear? Or is there corruption within you that makes you deaf?"

  Both Charlie and Henry were speechless. There was a mesmerizing quality to her tirade that was numbing and demanding of attention.

  "Listen, listen, listen!" she said urgently ." Listen to what I tell you. God visited these stigmata upon me the moment you rang the doorbell. He has given you a sign, and that can mean only one thing: You aren't yet in Satan's thrall, and the Lord is giving you a chance to redeem yourselves. Apparently you don't realize what the woman is, what her child is. If you knew and still protected them, God wouldn't be offering you redemption .

  Do you know what they are? Do you know?"

  Charlie cleared his throat, blinked, freed himself from the fuzziness that had briefly affected his thoughts ." I know what you think they are," Charlie said.

  "It's not what I think. It's what I know. It's what God has told me. The boy is the Antichrist. The mother is the black Madonna ."

  Charlie hadn't expected her to be so direct. He was sure she would deny any interest in Joey, just as she had denied it to the police. He was startled by her forthrightness and didn't know what to make of it.

  "I know you're not recording this conversation," she said .

  "We have instruments that would have detected a recorder. I would have been alerted. So I can speak freely. The boy has come to rule the earth for a thousand years."

  "He's just a six-year-old boy," Charlie said, "like any other six-year-old boy."

  "No," she said, still holding her hands up to reveal the blood seeping from her wounds ." No, he is more, worse. He must die. We must kill him. It is God's wish, God's work."

  "You can't really mean-"

  She interrupted him ." Now that you have been told, now that God has made the truth clear to you, you must cease protecting them ." "They're my clients," Chaflie said ." I-"

  "If you persist in protecting them, you're damned," the old woman said worriedly, begging them to accept redemption.

  "We have an obligation-"

  "Damned, don't you see? You'll rot in Hell. All hope lost .

  Eternity spent in suffering. You must listen. You must learn."

  He looked into her fevered eyes, which challenged him with berserk intensity. His pity for her was mixed with a disgust that left him unable and unwilling to debate with her. He realized it had been pointless to come. The woman was beyond the reach of reason.

  He was now more afraid for Christine and Joey than he had been last night, when one of Grace Spivey's followers had been shooting at them.

  She raised her bleeding palms an inch or two higher ." This sign is for you, for you, to convince you that I am, in fact, a herald bearing a true message. Do you see? Do you believe now? Do you understand?"

  Charlie said, "Mrs. Spivey, you shouldn't have done this. Neitheir of us is a gullible man, so it's all been for nothing."

  Her face darkened. She curled her hands into fists again.

  Charlie said, "If you used a nail that was at all rusty or dirty, I hope you'll go immediately to your doctor and get tetanus ,5hots. This could be very serious."

  "You're lost to me," she said in a voice as flat as the table to which she lowered her bleeding hands.

  "I came here to try to reason with you," Charlie said ." I see that's not possible. So just let me warn you-"

  "You belong to Satan now. You've had your chance-"

  "-if you don't back off-" I 6-and you've thrown your chance away-"

  "-if you don't leave the Scavellos alone-"

  ',-and now you'll pay the terrible price!"

  "-I'll dig into this and hang on. I'll keep at it come Hell or high water, until I've seen you put on trial, until I've seen your church lose its tax exemption, until everyone knows you for what you really are, until your followers lose their faith in you, and until your insane little cult is crushed. I mean it. I can be as relentless as you, as determined. I can finish you. Stop while you have a chance."

  She glared at him.

  Henry said, "Mrs. Spivey, will you put an end to this madness? " She said nothing. She lowered her eyes.

  "Mrs. Spivey?"

  No response.

  Charlie said, "Come on, Henry. Let's get out of here."

  As they approached the door, it opened, and an enormous man entered the room, ducking his head to avoid rapping it on the frame. He had to be almost seven feet tall. He had a face from a nightmare. He didn't seem real; only images from the movies were suitable to describe him, Charlie thought. He was like a Frankenstein monster with the hugely muscled body of Conan the Barbarian, a shambling hulk spawned by a bad script and a low budget. He saw Grace Spivey weeping, and his face knotted with a look of despair and rage that made Charlie's blood turn to icy slush. The giant reached out, grabbed Charlie by the coat, and nearly hauled him off the floor.

  Henry drew his gun, and Charlie said, "Hold it, hold it," because although the situation was bad it wasn't necessarily lethal.

  The big man said, "Whatd you do to her? Whatd you do?"

  "Nothing," Charlie said ." We were-"

  "Let them go," Grace Spivey said ." Let them pass, Kyle."

  The giant hesitated. His eyes, like hard bright sea creatures hiding deep under a suboceanic shelf, regarded Charlie with a pure malignant fury that would have given nightmares to the devil himself. At last he let go of Charlie, lumbered toward the table at which the woman sat. He spotted blood on her hands and wheeled back toward Charlie.

  "She did it to herself," Charlie said, edging toward the door.

  He didn't like the wheedling note in his own voice, but at the moment there didn't seem to be room for pride. To give in to a macho urge would be ironclad proof of feeble-mindedness ." We
didn't touch her ." "Let them go," Grace Spivey repeated.

  In a low, menacing voice, the giant said, "Get out. Fast."

  Charlie and Henry did as they were told.

  The florid-faced woman with the protruding green eyes was waiting at the front of the rectory. As they hurried down the hallway, she opened the door. The instant they stepped onto the porch, she slammed the door behind them and locked it.

  Charlie went out into the rain without putting up his umbrella .

  He turned his face toward the sky. The rain felt fresh and clean, and he let it hammer at him because he felt soiled by the madness in the house.

  "God help us," Henry said shakily.

  They walked out to the street.

  Dirty water was churning to the top of the gutter. It formed a brown lake out toward the intersection, and bits of litter, like a flotilla of tiny boats, sailed on the wind-chopped surface.

  Charlie turned and looked back at the rectory. Now its grime and deterioration seemed like more than ordinary urban decay; the rot was a reflection of the minds of the building's occupants .

  In the dust-filmed windows, in the peeling paint and sagging porch and badly cracked stucco, he saw not merely ruin but the physical world's representation of human madness. He had read a lot of science fiction as a child, still read some now and then, so maybe that was why he thought of the Law of Entropy, which held that the universe and all things within it moved in only one basic direction-toward decay, collapse, dissolution, and chaos .

  The Church of the TWilight seemed to embrace entropy as the ultimate expression of divinity, aggressively promulgating madness, unreason, and chaos, reveling in it.

  He was scared.

  After breakfast, Christine called Val Gardner and a couple of other people, assured them that she and Joey were all right, but didn't tell any of them where she was. Thanks to the Church of the Twilight, she no longer entirely trusted her friends, not even Val, and she resented that sad development.

  By the time she finished making her phone calls, two new bodyguards arrived to relieve Vince and George. One of them, Sandy Breckenstein, was tall and lean, about thirty, with a prominent Adam's apple; he brought to mind Ichabod Crane in the old Disney cartoon version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow .

  Sandy's partner was Max Steck, a bull of a man with bigknuckled hands, a massive chest, a neck almost as thick as his head-and a smile as sweet as any child's.

  Joey took an immediate liking to both Sandy and Max and was soon running back and forth from one end of the small house to the other, trying to keep company with both of them, jabbering away, asking them what it was like to be a bodyguard, telling them his charmingly garbled version of George Swarthout's story about the giraffe who could talk and the princess who didn't have a horse.

  Christine was not as quick as Joey to place her confidence in her new protectors. She was friendly but cautious, watchful.

  She wished she had a weapon of her own. She didn't have her pistol any more. The police had kept it last night until they could verify that it was properly registered. She couldn't very well take a knife from the kitchen drawer and walk around with it in her hand; if either Sandy or Max was a follower of Grace Spivey, the knife might not forestall violence but precipitate it. And if neither of them was a Twilighter, she would only offend and alienate them by such an open display of distrust. Her only weapons were wariness and her wits, which wouldn't be terribly effective if she found herself confronted by a maniac with a .357 Magnum.

  However, when trouble paid a visit, shortly after nine o'clock, it did not come from either Sandy or Max. In fact, it was Sandy, keeping watch from a chair by a living room window, who saw that something was wrong and called their attention to it.

  When Christine came in from the kitchen to ask him if he wanted more coffee, she found him studying the street outside with visible tension. He had risen from the chair, leaned closer to the window, and was holding the binoculars to his eyes.

  "What is it?" she asked ." Who's out there?"

  He watched for a moment longer, then lowered the binoculars .

  "Maybe nobody."

  " But you think there is."

  "Go tell Max to keep a sharp eye at the back," Sandy said, his Adam's apple bobbling ." Tell him the same van has cruised by the house three times."

  Her heartbeat accelerated as if someone had thrown a switch .

  "A white van?"

  "No," he said ." Midnight blue Dodge with a surfing mural on the side. Probably it's nothing. Just somebody who's not familiar with the neighborhood, trying to find an address. But . . .

  uh . . . better tell Max, anyway."

  She hurried into the kitchen, which was at the back of the house, and she tried to deliver the news to Max Steck calmly, but her voice had a tremor in it, and she couldn't control her hands, which made nervous, meaningless, butterfly gestures in the air.

  Max checked the lock on the kitchen door, even though he had tested it himself when he'd first come on duty. He closed the blinds entirely on one window. He closed them halfway on the other.

  Chewbacca had been lying in one corner, dozing. He raised his head and snorted, sensing the new tension in the air.

  Joey was sitting at the table by the garden window, busily using his crayons to fill in a picture in a coloring book. Christine moved him away from the window, took him into the corner, near the humming refrigerator, out of the line of fire.

  With the short attention span and emotional adaptability of a six-year-old, he had pretty much forgotten about the danger that had forced them to hide out in a stranger's house. Now it all

  came back to him, and his eyes grew big ." Is the witch coming?"

  "It's probably nothing to worry about, honey."

  She stooped down, pulled up his jeans, and tucked in his shirt, which had come half out of his waistband. His fear made her heart ache, and she kissed him on the cheek.

  "Probably just a false alarm," she said ." But Charlie's men don't take any chances, you know."

  "They're super," he said.

  "They sure are," she said.

  Now that it looked as if they might actually have to put their lives on the line for her and Joey, she felt guilty about being suspicious of them.

  Max shoved the small table away from the window, so he wouldn't have to lean over it to look out.

  Chewbacca made an interrogatory whining sound in the back of his throat, and began to pad around in a circle, his claws ticking on the kitchen tile.

  Afraid that the dog would get in Max's way at a crucial moment, she called to it, and then so did Joey. The animal couldn't have learned its new name yet, but it responded to tone of voice .

  It came to Joey and sat beside him.

  Max peered through a chink between two of the slats in the blind and said, "This damn fog sure is hanging on this morning ."

  Christine realized that, in the fog and obscuring rain, the garden-with its azaleas, bushy oleander, veronicas, carefully shaped miniature orange trees, lilacs, bougainvillaea-draped arbor, and other shrubbery-would make it easy for someone to creep dangerously close to the house before being spotted.

  In spite of his mother's reassurances, Joey looked up at the ceiling, toward the sound of rain on the roof, which was loud in this one-story house, and he said, "The witch is coming. She's coming ."

  Dr. Denton Boothe, both a psychologist and psychiatrist, was living proof that the heirs of Freud and Jung didn't have all the answers, either. One wall in Boothes office was covered with degrees from the country's finest universities, awards from his colleagues in half a dozen professional organizations, and honorary doctorates from institutions of learning in four countries .

  He had written the most widely adopted and highly praised textbook on general psychology in thirty years, and his position as one of the most knowledgeable experts in the specialty of abnormal psychology was unchallenged. Yet Boothe, for all his knowledge and expertise, wasn't without problems of his own.


  He was fat. Not just pleasantly plump. Fat. Shockingly, grossly overweight. When Charlie encountered Denton Boothe ("Boo" to friends), after not having seen him for a few weeks, he was always startled by the man's immensity; he never seemed to remember him as being that fat. Boothe stood five-eleven, Charlie's height, but he weighed four hundred pounds. His face did a good imitation of the moon. His neck was a post. His fingers were like sausages. Sitting, he overflowed chairs.

  Charlie couldn't understand why Boothe, who could uncover and treat the neuroses even of those patients highly resistant to treatment, could not deal with his own compulsive eating. It was a puzzlement.

  But his unusual size and the psychological problems underlying it did nothing to change the fact that he was a delightful man, kind and amusing and quick to laugh. Although he was fifteen years older than Charlie and infinitely better educated, they had hit it off on first encounter and had been friends for several years, getting together for dinner once or twice a month, exchanging gifts at Christmas, making an effort to keep in touch that, sometimes, surprised both of them.

  Boo welcomed Charlie and Henry into his office, part of a corner suite in a glass high-rise in Costa Mesa, and insisted on

  showing them his latest antique bank. He collected animated banks with clockwork mechanisms that made a little adventure out of the deposit of each coin. There were at least two dozen of them displayed at various points in the office. This one was an elaborate affair the size of a cigar humidor; standing on the lid were hand-painted metal figurines of two bearded gold prospectors flanking a comically detailed donkey. Boo put a quarter in the hand of one prospector and pushed a button on the side of the bank. The prospector's hand came up, holding the coin out to the second prospector, but the donkey's hinged head lowered, and its jaws clamped shut on the quarter, which the prospector relinquished. The donkey raised its head again, and the quarter dropped down its gullet and into the bank underneath, while both prospectors shook their heads in dismay. The name on the donkey's saddlebags was Uncle Sam.

  "It was made in 1903. So far as anyone knows, there are only eight working models in the world," Boo said proudly ." It's titled "The Tax Collector,' but I call it "There Is No Justice in a Jackass Universe." "