by Dean Koontz
All the way back in the kitchen of the house on the lonely coast well north of Santa Barbara, when peering into the refrigerator, Shep might not have been expressing a desire for a cold drink, but might have had a prescient awareness of their final encounter with Lincoln Proctor. In fact, Jilly remembered now that Shepherd didn't like ice in his soft drinks.
Where's all the ice? he'd asked, trying to identify a landscape of which he'd had a foretelling glimpse.
North Pole has a lot of ice, Jilly had told him.
And it sure did.
Under a lowering sky that appeared to be as hard as the lid of an iron kettle, from horizon to horizon, somber white plains receded into a semitwilight and a gray haze. The only points of elevation were the jagged pressure ridges, and the slabs of ice – some as large as caskets, some bigger than entire funeral homes – that had cracked out of the icecap and stood on end like grave markers in some strange alien cemetery.
Cold, Shepherd had said.
And it sure was.
They weren't dressed for the top of the world, and even though the infamous polar winds had gone to bed, the air bit with wolfish teeth. The shock of the abrupt temperature change tripped Jilly's heart into painful stutters and nearly dropped her to her knees.
Clearly stunned to find himself out of Lake Tahoe and in this hostile realm of grim adventure stories and Christmas legends, Parish Lantern nevertheless adjusted with remarkable aplomb. 'Impressive.'
Only Proctor reeled in panic, staggering in a circle, flailing his arms as though this panorama of ice were an illusion that he could tear away to reveal Tahoe in its warm green summer. He might have been trying to scream, but the leeching cold stole most of his voice and left him with only a shrill wheeze.
'Shepherd,' Jilly said, discovering that the cold air burned in her throat and made her lungs ache, 'why here?'
'Cake,' said Shepherd.
As the biting cold steadily chewed Proctor's panic into numb bewilderment, Parish Lantern pulled Dylan and Jilly into a tight huddle with Shep, sharing body heat, their heads touching, their faces bathed in one another's warm exhalations. 'This is killing cold. We can't take much of it.'
'Why here?' Dylan asked Shep.
'Cake.'
'I think the lad means we leave the bastard here, then go have our cake.'
'Can't,' Dylan said.
'Can,' said Shep.
'No,' Jilly said. 'It's not the right thing to do.'
Lantern expressed no surprise to hear her say such a thing, and she knew he must share their nanomachine-engineered compulsion to do what was right. His usually commanding voice quaked from the cold: 'But if we did it, a lot of problems would be solved. There'd be no body for the police to find.'
'No risk of him leading his business partners to us,' Jilly said.
'No chance of him getting his hands on a syringe for himself,' Dylan added.
'He wouldn't suffer long,' Lantern argued. 'In ten minutes, he'd be too numb to feel pain. It's almost merciful.'
Alarmed when, with her tongue, she felt a skin of ice on her teeth, Jilly said, 'But if we did it, we'd be torn up by it for a long time to come, 'cause it's not the right thing.'
'Is,' Shep said.
'Not.'
'Is.'
'Buddy,' Dylan said, 'it's really not.'
'Cold.'
'Let's take Proctor back with us, buddy.'
'Cold.'
'Take us all back to Tahoe.'
'Cake.'
Procter snared a fistful of Jilly's hair, jerked her head back, pulled her out of the huddle, and locked one arm around her neck.
She grabbed his arm, clawed his hand, realized he was going to tighten his chokehold until she couldn't breathe, until she blacked out. She had to get away from Proctor, get away fast, which meant folding.
Her screw-ups at the church were fresh in her mind. If the government had issued learners' permits for folding, she would have been required to have one. She didn't want to fold herself out of the choke-hold and discover that she'd left her head behind, but as her vision clouded, as darkness flooded in at the corners of her eyes, she went herethere, there being a few feet behind Proctor's back.
Arriving with her head on her shoulders where it belonged, she found herself in a perfect position to boot Proctor in the ass, which she'd wanted to do since she'd been in a chloroform haze the previous evening, in the motel.
Before Jilly could wind up to deliver a solid kick, Dylan body-checked the scientist. Proctor slipped, went down hard, and rapped his head on the ice. Curling into a fetal ball, shuddering with cold, he sought their mercy through his usual rap, wheezily declaring himself to be a weak man, a bad man, a wicked man.
Although her vision cleared, the arctic cold stung Jilly's eyes, drew a flood of tears, froze the tears on her lashes. 'Sweetie,' she said to Shepherd, 'we have to get out of here. Take us all back to Tahoe.'
Shep shuffled to Proctor, crouched at his side – and the two of them folded away.
'Buddy!' Dylan shouted, as if he could call his brother back.
The shout didn't echo across the vast iciness, but fell away into it as if into a muffling pillow.
'Now this worries me,' said Parish Lantern, stamping his feet to encourage circulation, hugging himself, surveying the icecap as though it held more terrors than any alternate reality inhabited by brain leeches.
The subzero air caused Dylan's sinuses to run, and a miniature icicle of nasal drippings formed from the rim of his left nostril.
Mere seconds after folding elsewhere, Shep returned, sans the scientist. 'Cake.'
'Where'd you take him, sweetie?'
'Cake.'
'Somewhere else out here on the ice?'
'Cake.'
Dylan said, 'He'll freeze to death, buddy.'
'Cake.'
Jilly said, 'We've got to do the right thing, sweetie.'
'Not Shep,' said Shepherd.
'You too, sweetie. The right thing.'
Shepherd shook his head and said, 'Shep can be a little bad.'
'No, I don't think you can be, buddy. Not without a lot of torment later.'
'No cake?' Shep asked.
'It's not an issue of cake, sweetie.'
'Shep can be just a little bad.'
Jilly exchanged a look with Dylan. To Shep, she said, 'Can you be bad, sweetie?'
'Just a little.'
'Just a little?'
'Just a little.'
Lantern's eyelashes were crusted with frozen tears. His eyes streamed, but nevertheless Jilly could read the guilt in them when he said, 'A little would be useful. In fact sometimes, when the evil is big enough, the right thing to do is act decisively to end it.'
'Okay,' said Shep.
They shared a silence.
'Okay?' Shep asked.
'Thinking,' Dylan said.
Out of the still sky sifted snow. This was like no snow Jilly had ever seen before. Not fluffy flakes. Needle-sharp white granules, flecks of ice.
'Too much,' Shep said.
'Too much what, sweetie?'
'Too much.'
'Too much what?'
'Thinking,' Shepherd said. Then he declared, 'Cold,' and folded them back to Tahoe, without Proctor.
49
Chocolate-cherry cake with dark chocolate icing, eaten while everyone stood around the island in the center of Parish Lantern's kitchen, was solace and reward, but to Jilly it also seemed to be the bread of a strange communion. They ate in silence, staring at their plates, all conforming to the table etiquette of Shepherd O'Conner.
This, she supposed, was as it should be.
The house proved to be even larger than it had appeared from the outside. When Parish escorted them into the expansive guest wing, to the two bedrooms that he had prepared for their use, she thought that he might have been able to accommodate a score of visitors on a moment's notice.
Although Jilly had been exhausted on returning from the North Pole and had expected to n
ap away the remaining afternoon and early evening, she felt awake, alert, and energetic after the cake. She wondered if the changes that she was going through might ultimately leave her with less of a need to sleep.
Each bedroom featured a large and sumptuously appointed bath with marble floors and walls and counters, gold-plated fixtures, both a shower and a large tub designed for leisurely soaking, plus heated racks to ensure the small but welcome comfort of warm towels. She took a long, luxurious shower, and with the lazy self-absorption of a cat, she found bliss in grooming and prettifying herself.
Parish had tried to foresee her preferences in everything from shampoo and bar soap to makeup and eyeliner. Sometimes he'd made the right choice, sometimes not, but he'd hit the mark more often than he missed. His consideration charmed her.
Refreshed and remade, in clean clothes, she found her way from the guest wing to the living room. During this ramble, she was more than ever convinced that the warm style and the coziness of the house distracted most visitors from clearly perceiving its true immensity. Beneath its softened and romanticized Wrightian lines, in spite of its open embrace of nature with windows and courtyards, the structure was deeply mysterious, cloistered when it appeared not to be, keeping secrets precisely when it seemed most to expose itself.
This, too, was as it should be.
From the living room, she stepped out onto the cantilevered deck that the architect had magically suspended high among the fragrant pine trees to provide a breathtaking view of the fabled lake.
Within moments, Dylan joined her at the railing. They stood in silence together, enchanted by the panorama, which had the luminous vibrancy of a Maxfield Parrish painting in this late-afternoon light. The time for talking had both passed and not yet arrived.
Parish had apologized in advance for not being able to provide them with the usual level of service that he offered to his guests. When he'd first realized that the injection of nanomachines would change him profoundly, he had given four members of his household staff a week's vacation so that he could endure the metamorphosis in private.
Only Ling, the majordomo, remained. Dylan had been at the deck railing with Jilly no more than two minutes when this man arrived. He brought cocktails on a small black-lacquered serving tray featuring a lily-pad design formed by inlaid mother-of-pearl. A pair of perfect dry martinis – stirred, not shaken.
Slender but well conditioned, moving with the grace of a maitre de ballet and with the quiet self-assurance of one who most likely had earned a black belt in tae kwon do, Ling might have been thirty-five years old, but in his ebony-black eyes could be glimpsed the wisdom of the ancients well distilled. As Jilly took her martini from the lily-pad tray, and again as Dylan accepted his, Ling bowed his head slightly and with a kind smile spoke one word of Chinese to each of them, the same word twice, which Jilly somehow knew was both a welcome and a wish for their good fortune. Then Ling departed almost as discreetly as a ghost dematerializing; had this been winter and had the deck been dusted with snow, he might have left no footprints either coming or going.
This, too, was uncannily as it should be.
While Jilly and Dylan enjoyed the perfect martinis and the view, Shepherd remained in the living room behind them. He'd found a corner to his liking, where he might stand for an hour or two, sensory input limited to the contemplation of wall meeting wall.
The French have a saying – Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose – which means 'The more things change, the more they remain the same.' Shepherd, as he stood now in the corner, embodied the comedy and the tragedy of that truth. He represented both the frustration and the graceful acceptance that it suggested, but defined as well the melancholy beauty in those words.
Considering that Parish's nationally syndicated radio program was heard on over five hundred stations six nights a week, Monday through Saturday, he would ordinarily have been at work as twilight cast its purple veils across the lake. In a state-of-the-art studio in the basement of the house, he could take calls from some of his ten million listeners and from his interview subjects, and with the assistance of Ling and an engineer, he could conduct his show. The actual production facility remained in San Francisco, where call-ins were screened and patched through to him, and where the combined audio feeds were filtered and enhanced for all-but-instantaneous rebroadcast.
This Saturday night, however, as on the first night following injection with Proctor's stuff, Parish would forego the usual live broadcast and run instead a best-of program from his archives.
Shortly before they were expected to join their host for dinner, Jilly said to Dylan, 'I'm going to call my mom. I'll be right back.'
Leaving her empty martini glass on the deck railing, she folded to a shadowy corner of the gardens at the back of the Peninsula hotel in Beverly Hills. Her arrival went unnoticed.
She could have folded anywhere to make the call, but she liked the Peninsula. This hotel was the five-star quality she had hoped one day to be able to afford if her career as a comedian had taken off.
At a pay phone inside, she fed change to the slot and keyed in the familiar number.
Her mother answered on the third ring. Recognizing Jilly's voice, she blurted: 'Are you all right, baby girl, are you hurt, what's happened to you, sugar – Sweet Jesus keep you safe – where are you?'
'Relax, Mom. I'm fine. I wanted to let you know that I'm not going to be able to see you for a week or two, but I'll figure out a way for us to get together soon.'
'Jilly girl, since the church, people been here from the TV, from the newspapers, all of them as rude as any welfare bureaucrat on a dry-cracker diet. Fact is, they're out in the street right now, with all their noise and satellite trucks, littering with their filthy cigarettes and their granola-bar wrappers. Rude, rude, rude.'
'Don't talk to any of them, Mom. As far as you know, I'm dead.'
'Don't you say such a terrible thing!'
'Just don't tell anyone you've heard from me. I'll explain all this later. Listen, Mom, some big, tough-looking dudes are going to come around soon. They'll say they're with the FBI or somesuch, but they'll be lying. You just play dumb. Be nice as pie with them, pretend to be worried sick about me, but don't give them a clue.'
'Well, I'm just a one-eyed, two-cane, poor-as-dirt, ignorant, big-assed simpleton, after all. Who could expect me to know anything about anything?'
'Love you to pieces, Mom. One more thing. I'm sure your phone isn't tapped already, but eventually they might find a way. So when I come to see you, I won't call first.'
'Baby girl, I'm scared like I haven't had to be scared since your hateful father was good enough to get himself shot dead.'
'Don't be scared, Mom. I'll be all right. And so will you. You're in for some surprises.'
'Father Francorelli is here with me. He wants to talk to you. He's all excited about what happened at the wedding. Jilly girl, what happened at the wedding? I mean, I know, sure, I been told, but none of it makes a lick of sense.'
'I don't want to talk to Father Francorelli, Mom. Just tell him I'm so sorry I ruined the ceremony.'
'Ruined? You saved them. You saved them all.'
'Well, I could have been more discreet about it. Hey, Mom, when we get together in a couple weeks, would you like to have dinner in Paris?'
'Paris, France? What in the world would I eat in Paris?'
'Or maybe Rome? Or Venice? Or Hong Kong?'
'Baby girl, I know you wouldn't do drugs in a million years, but you got me worried now.'
Jilly laughed. 'How about Venice? Some five-star restaurant. I know you like Italian food.'
'I do have a passion for lasagne. How are you going to afford five stars, let alone in Venice, Italy?'
'You just wait and see. And Mom...'
'What is it, child?'
'I wouldn't have been able to save my own ass, not to mention all those people, if I hadn't grown up with you to show me how not to let the fear eat me alive.'
'God bles
s you, baby girl. I love you so much.'
When Jilly hung up, she took a moment to recover her composure. Then she used a ransom of quarters to place a long-distance call to a number that Dylan had given her. A woman answered the first ring, and Jilly said, 'I'd like to speak to Vonetta Beesley, please.'
'You're speakin' to her. What can I do you for?'
'Dylan O'Conner asked me to call and make sure you're okay.'
'What could anyone do to me that Nature won't eventually do worse? You tell Dylan I'm fine. And it's good to know he's alive. He's not hurt?'
'Not a scratch.'
'And little Shep?'
'He's standing in a corner right now, but he had a nice piece of cake earlier, and he'll be fine by dinner.'
'He's a love.'
'That he is,' Jilly said. 'And Dylan wanted me to tell you they won't be needing a housekeeper anymore.'
'From what I hear happened up at their place, you couldn't clean it up with anything less than a bulldozer, anyway. Tell me something, doll. You think you can take good care of them?'
'I think so,' Jilly said.
'They deserve good care.'
'They do,' she agreed.
Finished with the second call, she would have liked to erupt from the phone booth in cape and tights, leaping into flight with great drama. She didn't have a cape and tights, of course, and she couldn't actually fly. Instead, she looked both ways to be sure the pay-phone hallway was deserted, and then without trumpets, without flourishes, she folded herself to the deck overlooking the lake, where Dylan waited in the last of the Tahoe twilight.
The moon had risen long before the late summer sunset. In the west, the night kissed the last rouge off the cheek of the day, and in the east the full moon hung high, the lamp of romance.
Precisely at nightfall, Ling reappeared to lead them, and Shep, down through previously unseen passages and chambers, and finally out of the house to the dock. The ordinary dock lights had been turned off. The path was charmingly illuminated by a series of tapered candles floating in midair, eight feet above the planking.
Apparently, Parish enjoyed finding other uses for the power with which he had deflected and then redirected speeding bullets.
The great house stood on ten wooded acres, fenced against the uninvited, and the trees guaranteed seclusion. Even from far across the lake, with binoculars trained on the candles, no curious soul would quite know what he was seeing. The
