by Dean Koontz
Death had never held any allure for him. He didn't understand those who reveled in the Goth subculture, their abiding romantic identification with the living dead; he didn't find vampires sexy. With its glorification of murder and its celebration of cruelty to women, gangsta-rap music didn't start his toes tapping, either. He didn't like movies in which evisceration and decapitation were the primary themes; if nothing else, they were certain popcorn spoilers. He supposed that he'd never be hip. His fate was to be as square as a saltine cracker. But the prospect of being eternally square didn't bother him a fraction as much as the prospect of being dead.
Although scared, he remained cautiously hopeful. For one thing, if the unknown assailant had intended to kill him, surely he would already have assumed room temperature. He had been bound and gagged because the attacker had some other use for him.
Torture came to mind. Dylan had never heard about people being tortured to death in the rooms of national-chain motels, at least not with regularity. Homicidal psychopaths tended to feel awkward about conducting their messy business in an establishment that might at the same time be hosting a Rotarian convention. During his years of traveling, his worst complaints involved poor housekeeping, unplaced wake-up calls, and lousy food in the coffee shop. Nevertheless, once torture opened a door and walked into his mind, it pulled up a chair and sat down and wouldn't leave.
Dylan also took some comfort from the fact that the sap-wielding assailant had left Shepherd untapped, untouched, and untaped. Surely this must mean that the evildoer, whoever he might be, recognized the extreme degree of Shep's detachment and realized that the afflicted boy posed no threat.
A genuine sociopath would have disposed of poor Shepherd anyway, either for the fun of it or to polish his homicidal image. Crazed killers were probably convinced, as were most modern Americans, that maintaining high self-esteem was a requirement of good mental health.
Locking each sinuous shape of pasteboard in place with a ritualistic nod and with the pressure of his right thumb, Shepherd continued to solve the puzzle at a prodigious pace, adding perhaps six or seven pieces per minute.
Dylan's blurry vision had cleared, and his urge to vomit had passed. Ordinarily, those developments would be reason to feel cheerful, but good cheer would continue to elude him until he knew who wanted a piece of him – and exactly which piece was wanted.
The internal timpani of his booming heart and the rush of blood circulating through his eardrums, which produced a sound reminiscent of a cymbal softly beaten with a drummer's brush, masked any small noises the intruder might be making. Maybe the guy was eating their takeout dinner – or performing preventive maintenance on a chain saw before firing it up.
Because Dylan sat at an angle to the mirror that hung above the desk, only a narrow wedge of the room behind him was presented in reflection. Watching his brother, the jigsaw juggernaut, he glimpsed movement peripherally in the mirror, but by the time he shifted his focus, the phantom glided out of sight.
When at last the assailant stepped into direct view, he looked no more menacing than any fifty-something choirmaster who took great and genuine pleasure in the sound of well-orchestrated voices raised in joyous hymns. Sloped shoulders. A comfortable paunch. Thinning white hair. Small, delicately sculpted ears. His pink and jowly face looked as benign as a loaf of white bread. His faded-blue eyes were watery, as though with sympathy, and seemed to reveal a soul too meek to harbor a hostile thought.
He appeared to be the antithesis of villainy, and he wore a gentle smile, but he carried a length of highly flexible rubber tubing. Like a snake. Two to three feet long. No inanimate object, whether a spoon or a meticulously stropped razor-edged switchblade, can be called evil; but while a switchblade might be used merely to peel an apple, it was difficult at this perilous moment to envision an equally harmless use for the half-inch-diameter rubber tubing.
The colorful imagination that served Dylan's art now afflicted him with absurd yet vivid images of being force-fed through the nose and of colon examinations most definitely not conducted through the nose.
His alarm didn't abate when he realized that the rubber tubing was a tourniquet. Now he knew why his left arm had been secured with the palm up.
When he protested through the saliva-saturated gag and the electrician's tape, his voice proved no clearer than might have been that of a prematurely buried man calling for help through a coffin lid and six feet of compacted earth.
'Easy, son. Easy now.' The intruder didn't have the hard voice of a snarly thug, but one as soft and sympathetic as that of a country doctor committed to relieving every distress of his patients. 'You'll be just fine.'
He was dressed like a country doctor, too, a relic from the lost age that Norman Rockwell had captured in cover illustrations for The Saturday Evening Post. His cordovan shoes gleamed from the benefit of brush and buffing cloth, and his wheat-brown suit pants depended upon a pair of suspenders. Having removed his coat, having rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, having loosened collar button and necktie, he needed only a dangling stethoscope to be the perfect picture of a comfortably rumpled rural physician nearing the end of a long day of house calls, a kindly healer known to everyone as Doc.
Dylan's short-sleeve shirt facilitated the application of the tourniquet. The rubber tube, when quickly knotted around his left biceps, caused a vein to swell visibly.
Gently tapping a fingertip against the revealed blood vessel, Doc murmured, 'Nice, nice.'
Forced by the gag to inhale and exhale only through his nose, Dylan could hear humiliating proof of his escalating fear as the wheeze and whistle of his breathing grew more urgent.
With a cotton ball soaked in rubbing alcohol, the doctor swabbed the target vein.
Every element of the moment – Shep waving to no one and blitzing through the jigsaw, the smiling intruder prepping his patient for an injection, the foul taste of the rag in Dylan's mouth, the astringent scent of alcohol, the restraining pressure of the electrician's tape – so completely engaged the five senses, it wasn't possible with any seriousness to entertain the thought that this was a dream. More than once, however, Dylan closed his eyes and mentally pinched himself... and upon taking another look, he breathed yet harder when nightmare proved to be reality.
The hypodermic syringe surely couldn't have been as huge as it appeared to be. This instrument looked less suitable for human beings than for elephants or rhinos. He assumed that its dimensions were magnified by his fear.
Right thumb firmly on the thumb rest, knuckles braced against the finger flange, Doc expelled air from the syringe, and a squirt of golden fluid caught the lamplight as it glimmered in an arc to the carpet.
With a muffled cry of protest, Dylan pulled at his restraints, causing the chair to rock from side to side.
'One way or another,' the doctor said affably, 'I'm determined to administer this.'
Dylan adamantly shook his head.
'This stuff won't kill you, son, but a struggle might.'
Stuff. Having at once rebelled at the prospect of being injected with a medication or an illegal drug – or a toxic chemical, a poison, a dose of blood serum contaminated with a hideous disease – Dylan now rebelled even more strenuously at the idea of stuff being squirted into his vein. That lazy word suggested carelessness, an offhanded villainy, as though this dough-faced, round-shouldered, potbellied example of the banality of evil could not be bothered, even after all the trouble he'd taken, to remember what vile substance he intended to administer to his victim. Stuff! In this instance, the word stuff also suggested that the golden fluid in the syringe might be more exotic than a mere drug or a poison, or a dose of disease-corrupted serum, that it must be unique and mysterious and not easily named. If all you knew was that a smiling, pink-cheeked, crazed physician had shot you full of stuff, then the good and concerned and not-crazy doctors in a hospital ER wouldn't know what antidote to apply or what antibiotic to prescribe, because in their pharmacy they didn't stock treatme
nts for a bad case of stuff.
Watching Dylan wrench ineffectually at his bonds, the stuff-peddling maniac clucked his tongue and shook his head disapprovingly. 'If you struggle, I might tear your vein... or accidentally inject an air bubble, resulting in an embolism. An embolism will kill you, or at least leave you a vegetable.' He indicated Shep at the nearby desk. 'Worse than him.'
At the burnt-out end of certain bad black days, overwhelmed by weariness and frustration, Dylan sometimes envied his brother's disconnection from the worries of the world; however, although Shep had no responsibilities, Dylan had plenty of them – including, not least of all, Shep himself – and oblivion, whether by choice or by embolism, could not be embraced.
Focusing on the shining needle, Dylan stopped resisting. A sour sweat lathered his face. Exhaling explosively, inhaling with force, he snorted like a well-run horse. His skull had begun to throb once more, particularly where he'd been struck, and also across the breadth of his forehead. Resistance was futile, debilitating, and just plain stupid. Since he couldn't avoid being injected, he might as well accept the malicious medicine man's claim that the substance in the syringe wasn't lethal, might as well endure the inevitable, remain alert for an advantage (assuming consciousness was an option after the injection), and seek help later.
'That's better, son. Smartest thing is just to get it over with. It won't even sting as much as a flu vaccination. You can trust me.'
You can trust me.
They were so far into surreal territory that Dylan half expected the room's furniture to soften and distort like objects in a painting by Salvador Dali.
Still wearing a dreamy smile, the stranger expertly guided the needle into the vein, at once slipped loose the knot in the rubber tubing, and kept the promise of a painless violation.
The tip of the thumb reddened as it put pressure on the plunger.
Stringing together as unlikely a series of words as Dylan had ever heard, Doc said, 'I'm injecting you with my life's work.'
In the transparent barrel of the syringe, the dark stopper began to move slowly from the top toward the tip, forcing the golden fluid into the needle.
'You probably wonder what this stuff will do to you.'
Stop calling it STUFF! Dylan would have demanded if his mouth hadn't been crammed full of unidentified laundry.
'Impossible to say what it'll do, exactly.'
Although the needle might have been of ordinary size, Dylan realized that at least regarding the dimensions of the syringe barrel, his imagination hadn't been playing tricks with him, after all. It was enormous. Fearsomely huge. On that clear plastic tube, the black scale markings indicated a capacity of 18 cc, a dosage more likely to be prescribed by a zoo veterinarian whose patients topped six hundred pounds.
'The stuff's psychotropic.'
That word was big – exotic, too – but Dylan suspected that if he could think clearly, he would know what it meant. His stretched jaws ached, however, and the soaked ball of cloth in his mouth leaked a sour stream of saliva that threatened to plunge him into fits of choking, and his lips burned under the tape, and greater fear flooded through him as he watched the mysterious fluid draining into his arm, and he was seriously annoyed by Shep's compulsive waving even though he remained aware of it only from the corner of one eye. Under these circumstances, clear thinking was not easily achieved. Ricocheting through his mind, the word psychotropic remained as smooth and shiny and impenetrable as a steel bearing caroming from peg to rail, to bumper, to flipper in the flashing maze of a pinball machine.
'It does something different to everyone.' A sharp but perverse scientific curiosity prickled Doc's voice, as disturbing to Dylan as finding shards of glass in honey. Although this man looked the part of a caring country physician, he had the bedside manner of Victor von Frankenstein. 'The effect is without exception interesting, frequently astonishing, and sometimes positive.'
Interesting, astonishing, sometimes positive: This didn't sound like a life's work equal to that of Jonas Salk. Doc seemed to belong more comfortably in the mad-malevolent-megalomaniacal-Nazi-scientist tradition.
The last cc of fluid disappeared from the barrel of the syringe into the needle, into Dylan.
He expected to feel a burning in the vein, a terrible chemical heat that would spread rapidly throughout his circulatory system, but the fire didn't come. Nor did a chill shiver through him. He expected to experience vivid hallucinations, to be driven mad by a crawling sensation that suggested spiders squirming across the tender surface of his brain, to hear phantom voices echoing inside his skull, to be afflicted by either convulsions or violent muscle spasms, or by painful cramps, or by incontinence, to be overcome by either nausea or giddiness, to grow hair on the palms of his hands, to watch the room reel as his eyes spun like pinwheels, but the injection had no noticeable effect – except perhaps to make his fevered imagination register a few degrees higher on the thermometer of the unlikely.
Doc withdrew the needle.
A single bead of blood appeared at the point of the puncture.
'One of two should pay the debt,' Doc muttered not to Dylan, but to himself, an observation that seemed to make no sense. He moved behind Dylan, out of sight.
The crimson pearl quivered in the crook of Dylan's left arm, as though pulsing in sympathy with the racing heart that had once harried it to the farthest capillary and from which it was now and forever estranged. He wished that he could reabsorb it, suck it back through the needle wound, because he feared that in the coming nasty struggle for survival, he would need every drop of healthy blood that he could muster if he hoped to prevail against whatever threat had been injected.
'But debt payment isn't perfume,' Doc said, reappearing with a Band-Aid from which he stripped the wrapper as he talked. 'It won't mask the stink of treachery, will it? Will anything?'
Although once more speaking directly to Dylan, the man seemed to talk in riddles. His solemn words required somber delivery, yet his tone remained light; the half-whimsical sleepwalker smile continued to play across his features, waxing and waning and waxing again, much as the glow of a candle might flux and flutter under the influence of every subtle current in the air.
'Remorse has gnawed at me so long that my heart's eaten away. I feel empty.'
Functioning remarkably well without a heart, the empty man peeled the two protective papers off the Band-Aid tape and applied the patch to the point of the injection.
'I want to be repentant for what I did. There's no real peace without repentance. Do you understand?'
Although Dylan didn't understand anything this lunatic said, he nodded out of a concern that failure to agree would trigger a psychotic outburst involving not a hypodermic needle but a hatchet.
The man's voice remained soft, but a bleach of anguish at last purged all the color from it, even as – eerily – the smile endured: 'I want to be repentant, to reject entirely the terrible thing I did, and I want to be able to honestly say that I wouldn't do it again if I had my life to live over. But remorse is as far as I'm able to go. I would do it again, given a second chance, do it again and spend another fifteen years racked by guilt.'
The single drop of blood soaked into the gauze, leaving a dark circle visible through the vented covering. This particular Band-Aid, marketed for children, came decorated with a capering and grinning cartoon dog that failed either to lift Dylan's spirits or to distract his attention from his booboo.
'I've got too much pride to be contrite. There's the problem. Oh, I know my flaws, I know them well, but that doesn't mean I can fix them. Too late for that. Too late, too late.'
After dropping the Band-Aid wrappings in the small waste can by the desk, Doc fished in a pants pocket and withdrew a knife.
Although ordinarily Dylan wouldn't have used the word weapon to describe a mere pocketknife, no less menacing noun would be adequate in this instance. You didn't need either a dagger or a machete to cut a throat and sever a carotid artery. A simple pocketknife wou
ld do the job.
Doc changed the subject from unspecified past sins to more urgent matters. 'They want to kill me and destroy all my work.'
With a thumbnail, he pried the stubby blade out of the handle.
The smile finally sank out of sight in the doughy pool of his face, and a frown slowly surfaced. 'A net is closing around me right this minute.'
Dylan figured that with the net would come a significant dose of Thorazine, a straitjacket, and cautious men in white uniforms.
Lamplight glinted off the polished-steel penknife blade.
'There's no way out for me, but damn if I'll let them destroy a life's work. Stealing it is one thing. I could accept that. I've done it myself, after all. But they want to erase everything that I've achieved. As if I never existed.'
Scowling, Doc wrapped his fist around the handle of the little knife and drove the blade into the arm of the chair, a fraction of an inch from his captive's left hand.
This didn't have a beneficial effect on Dylan. The shock of fright that jumped through him was of such high voltage that the resultant muscle spasm lifted at least three legs of the chair off the floor and might even have levitated it entirely for a fraction of a second.
'They'll be here in half an hour, maybe less,' Doc warned. 'I'm going to make a run for it, but there's no point kidding myself. The bastards will probably get me. And when they find even just one empty syringe, they'll seal off this town and test everybody in it, one by one, till they learn who's carrying the stuff. Which is you. You're a carrier.'
He bent down, lowering his face close to Dylan's. His breath smelled of beer and peanuts.
'You better take what I'm telling you to heart, son. If you're in the quarantine zone, they'll find you, all right, and when they find you, they'll kill you. A smart fella like you ought to be able to figure out how to use that pocketknife and get himself loose in ten minutes, which gives you a chance to save yourself and gives me a chance to be long gone before you can get your hands on me.'
Shreds of the red skins from peanuts and pale bits of nut meat mortared the spaces between Doc's teeth, but evidence of his madness could not be found as easily as could proof of his recent snack. His faded-denim eyes brimmed with nothing more identifiable than sorrow.
He stood erect once more, stared at the pocketknife stuck in the arm of the chair, and sighed. 'They really aren't bad people. In their position, I'd kill you, too. There's only one bad man in all this, and that's me. I've no illusions about myself.'
He stepped behind the chair, out of sight. Judging by the sounds he made, Doc was gathering up his mad-scientist gear, shrugging into his suit coat, getting ready to split.
So you're driving to an arts festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where in previous years you've sold enough paintings to pay expenses and to bank a profit, and you stop for the night at a clean and respectable motel, subsequent to which you purchase a bagged dinner of such high caloric content that it will knock you into sleep as effectively as an overdose of Nembutal, because all you want is to spend a quiet evening putting your brain cells at risk watching the usual idiotic TV programs in the company of your puzzle-working brother, and then spend a restful night disturbed by as little cheeseburger-induced flatulence as possible, but the modern world has fallen apart to such an extent that you wind up taped to a chair, gagged, injected with God knows what hideous disease, targeted by unknown assassins... And yet your friends wonder why you're becoming a young curmudgeon.
From behind Dylan, as though he were as telepathic as he was crazy, Doc said, 'You're not infected. Not in the sense you think. No bacteria, no virus. What I've given to you... it can't be passed along to other people. Son, I assure you, if I weren't such a coward, I'd inject myself.'
That qualified assurance didn't improve Dylan's mood.
'I'm ashamed to say cowardice is another of my character flaws. I'm a genius, certainly, but I'm not a fit role model for anyone.'
The man's self-justification through self-deprecation had lost what little fizz it might at first have possessed.
'As I explained, the stuff produces a different effect in each subject. If it doesn't obliterate your personality or totally disrupt your capacity for linear thinking, or reduce your IQ by sixty points, there's a chance it'll do something to greatly enhance your life.'
On further consideration, this guy didn't have the bedside manner of Dr. Frankenstein. He had the bedside manner of Dr. Satan.
'If it enhances your life, then I'll have paid some reparations for what I've done. Hell's got a bed waiting for me, sure enough, but a successful result here would compensate at least a little for the worst crimes I've committed.'
On the motel-room door, the security chain rattled and the dead-bolt lock scraped steel against steel as Doc disengaged them.
'My life's work depends on you. It now is you. So stay alive if you can.'
The door opened. The door closed.
With less violence than on arrival, the maniac had departed.
At the desk, Shep no longer waved. He worked the jigsaw puzzle with both hands. Like a blind man before a Braille book, he seemed to read each piece of pasteboard with his sensitive fingertips, never glancing at any scrap of the picture for longer than a second or two, occasionally not even bothering to use his eyes, and with uncanny speed, he either placed each fragment of the image in the rapidly infilling mosaic or discarded it as not yet being of use.
Foolishly hoping that recognition of the desperate danger would transmit by some miraculous psychic bond between brothers, Dylan tried to shout 'Shepherd.' The soggy gag filtered the cry, soaked up most of the sound, and let through only a stifled bleat that didn't resemble his brother's name. Nevertheless, he shouted again, and a third time, a fourth, a fifth, counting on repetition to gain the kid's attention.
When Shep was in a communicative mood – which was less often than the frequency of sunrise but not as rare as the periodic visitation of Halley's comet – he could be so hyperverbal that you felt as if you were being hosed down with words, and just listening to him could be exhausting. More reliably, Shep would pass most of any day without seeming to be aware of Dylan. Like today. Like here and now. In a puzzle-working passion, all but oblivious of the motel room, living instead in the shadow of the Shinto temple half formed on the desk before him, breathing the freshness of the blossoming cherry trees under a cornflower-blue Japanese sky, he was half a world removed in just ten feet, too far away to hear his brother or to see Dylan's red-faced frustration, his clenched neck muscles, his throbbing temples, his beseeching eyes.
They were here together, but each alone.
The pocketknife waited, point buried in the arm of the chair, posing as formidable a challenge as the magic sword Excalibur locked in its sheath of stone. Unfortunately, King Arthur was not likely to be resurrected and dispatched to Arizona to assist Dylan with this extraction.
Unknown stuff currently circulated through his body, and at any moment sixty points might drop off his IQ, and faceless killers were coming.
His travel clock was digital and therefore silent, but he could hear ticking nonetheless. A treacherous clock, from the sound of it: counting off the precious seconds in double time.
