The Forbidden Door

by Dean Koontz

  “Yeah. I see it.”

  “Sometimes at night if I wake up and I’m scared, I play music that makes me feel better. Is that okay? I’ll play it low.”

  “It won’t bother me. My mom’s a musician. She plays the piano. She’s really good.”

  “I’m looking forward to meeting your mother.”

  “You’ll like her. Everyone likes her. Except all the bad guys she puts in prison. She’s the best.”

  Cornell says, “She’ll be here soon.”

  “She promised,” the boy said. “She always keeps promises.”

  Both dogs yawned extravagantly, as if the conversation bored them. Cornell didn’t want to offend the dogs, so he said no more.

  Soon the boy was softly snoring.

  Cornell lay watching the boy and the big dogs, amazed that they were here, that his guest had liked the lunch sandwiches, also the different sandwiches for dinner. He was amazed that he had read most of the Bradbury novel aloud to the boy.

  Always before, Cornell had liked everything to be just the same today as it had been yesterday, and he had hoped tomorrow would be the same as today.

  Now everything was different, and he wanted tomorrow to be the same kind of different as today.

  On the other hand, if things could get so different from one day to the next, they could get different all over again and maybe the next time in not such a nice way.

  1

  LAURIE LONGRIN WAS A STRONG and happy girl because her family was strong and happy. She had figured that out long ago.

  If your family was a mess, your dad a sex-crazed tail chaser and your mom one of those who floated her breakfast cornflakes in booze, well, then your chances of being strong and happy weren’t promising. But if your dad and mom loved each other and worked hard—especially when their work brought beautiful horses into your life every day—you were more than halfway to being strong and happy. The rest was up to you.

  Of course Laurie could still screw up, like when she zoned out or even fell asleep during nearly every Sunday sermon. Or like when she used the word horseshit more often than the average almost-thirteen-year-old girl.

  If you were strong and happy, you were able to recognize those qualities in others. And if you could admit to your own evils, like the overuse of the word horseshit or a tendency to get snarky with ignorant people, just to name two, then you were better able to see evil in others and know them for what they were.

  For instance, Agent Janis Dern, who was an FBI bad apple if she was FBI at all, who wasn’t just psycho-sick but also as pure evil as Cruella De Vil. Except if given the chance, Janis Dern wouldn’t make a fancy coat from Dalmatian-puppy skins but instead from little-girl skins.

  When she stepped out of the room to talk with the guy named Chris, Janis closed the door, but they didn’t lower their voices. Laurie could still hear them. She was pretty sure Janis wanted her to hear them. When Janis had first talked about the injections that would make Laurie a zombie, it had sounded half true and half like, well, horseshit. But she and Chris talked about six more of their kind coming here as backup, talked about injecting Daddy and maybe Mom and maybe Laurie herself, and the more they talked, the more real it sounded, too real by the time they were talking about sex and doing each other.

  Laurie wasn’t just sitting there, zip-tied to her desk chair, hysterical about the danger she was in, hoping Ethan Stackpool would miraculously appear and rescue her from death and worse than death. Ethan Stackpool was amazing to look at, sweet, smart, strong for his age, but he was in the seventh grade, like Laurie, so he was still a few years away from being an action hero able to knock the plumbing out of a dozen bad guys. Although she couldn’t help thinking about Ethan Stackpool at times like this—and lots of other times—Laurie was busy saving herself the minute Janis stepped into the upstairs hallway and closed the door behind her.

  Evil is stupid. Doing evil might get you what you wanted in the short term, but it never worked in the long term. Laurie had learned this from books, from some movies, and just from general observation of life.

  For instance, in the general-observation category, Janis Dern was evil and stupid. She’d bound each of Laurie’s ankles to the front stretcher bar of the desk chair and her left hand to the left arm of the chair, but let the right hand remain free so she could make that idiotic nasty crack about nose picking and booger eating. Janis probably also didn’t cuff that hand because, when the two of them were face-to-face and she was ragging Laurie, she wanted to be given the finger and really would have used the butt of her pistol like a hammer, as she had promised, to shatter all three knuckles in the offending digit. But Janis Dern, agent of the FBEI, Federal Bureau of Evil Idiots, had apparently given no thought to what might be in the drawers of a schoolgirl’s desk besides bubblegum and barrettes. Among other things, Laurie’s desk contained a pair of scissors.

  The moment the door closed, while Laurie listened to the crazy-sick talk of the two agents and thought about Ethan Stackpool, she opened the pencil drawer in the desk and took out the scissors. She cut through the thick plastic tie that restrained her left hand. She bent forward in the chair and cut the tie on her left ankle, then the tie on her right.

  With her left hand, she presented the middle finger to the hallway door, and she kept the scissors in her right hand because they were the only weapon she had.

  Only a day earlier, she would not have thought she could stab anyone, not in a million years. But now that the choice was between stabbing someone or being turned into a zombie slave, she could be a stabbing machine if it came to that.

  Waiting for Janis to return and trying to surprise her was a bad idea. Janis was strong, crazy, and evil.

  Better to raise the bottom sash of the double-hung windows, raise the bug screen, and slip out onto the roof of the veranda that encircled the house.

  She was on the north side of the house, where she couldn’t be seen from the stables, though she was looking down on the Cadillac Escalade that blocked the private lane leading in from the state route. The Cadillac stood under a lamppost. A woman leaned against the farther side of the big SUV, smoking a cigarette, her back to Laurie.

  Because the veranda wrapped the entire residence, Laurie was able to move along the shingled roof, around the corner to the back, the west side, where she was not visible from either the driveway or any of the stables.

  To the west lay a fenced meadow, beyond that open grassland and a lot of darkness. Lights at two other spreads—one to the north, one to the south—were so far away they looked not like ranches but like distant ships on a vast, dark sea.

  She could jump down to the backyard and try to make her way to Stable 5, far from where they were holding the employees in Stable 2. She could find a suitable mare and ride out for help.

  But in a minute or two, Janis would discover her prisoner had escaped, and in three minutes every FBEI agent on the property would be hunting her. There wouldn’t be time to saddle the mare. Laurie would have to ride bareback, which she could do, though there might not even be time for that.

  Besides, these people were big-time bad hats, rotten enough to kill people, so they might shoot a horse out from under her if given the chance. She couldn’t live with herself if she was responsible for the death of a horse.

  The other alternative was to enter the house by a window of a different room and then go to a place that these invaders might not know about, where there was a phone that she could use. Her parents’ bedroom was here at the back of the house. At this time of year, the upstairs windows were never locked because they were often opened for fresh air.

  The bedroom was dark beyond the glass. She quietly slid up a bug screen and then the lower sash of a window.

  2

  SEVERAL MILES SOUTH OF THE town of Borrego Springs, the Anza-Borrego Desert, Monday fading into Tuesday, the temperature still at seventy-n
ine degrees almost six hours after nightfall…

  The valley floor in this area stubbled with mesquite and sage and nameless brush, but nonetheless ashen under a paling moon, as eerie as some dreamscape where alien terrors wait below to ascend through sandy soil as easily as sharks through water…

  Along this lonely stretch of Borrego Springs Road, the sign stands where it was erected Monday afternoon: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR / DESERT FLORA STUDY GROUP / TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

  There is no desert-flora study group. Trespassers will, however, be prosecuted, though prosecution might be the least that will be done to them.

  Beyond the sign is a tent forty feet on a side and ten feet high, with seven or eight people busy therein. The tent contains a communications hub through which a task force of eighty agents—already in the valley—is being organized, instructed, and tracked in the search for young Travis Hawk and his mother. Four computer workstations, manned around the clock, enable field operatives to call in the names of locals whom they determine suspicious, license-plate numbers, and other inquiries that can then be expeditiously researched through the numerous law-enforcement and government-intelligence-agency data troves to which Arcadians have access. A freezer full of pizzas and sandwiches, two microwave ovens, and a refrigerator containing bottled water and sodas provide minimum amenities, though most agents in the search party will get their meals from fast-food outlets in Borrego Springs.

  Behind the tent are three large trucks. One contains tanks of propane and the generator that powers this temporary installation; on its roof, a satellite dish is canted toward the stars. The second truck provides six spacious portable toilets with sinks and running water. The third is fitted out as a dormitory offering beds for ten, though most of the agents will sleep in their vehicles as the need for rest overcomes them.

  The most reasonable projection of the task-force commander and his advisers is that the boy will be found and his mother captured or killed within the next twenty-four hours.

  Carter Jergen stands just outside the open zippered-flap door of the tent, in the outfall of light, staring across the highway at more pale wasteland and then dark mountains rising like a wall that make him feel as if he’s in an ancient crater where a frightful mass impacted millennia ago. When he looks at the sky, the stars and moon seem menacing, as though the universe is a mechanism with a million-year cycle that, in its current repetition, is shortly to arrive at the fateful moment when an asteroid slams into this same ground, instantly pulverizing him so that no scrap of flesh or bit of bone will remain to prove he ever existed.

  Of course it’s not an incoming asteroid he fears. Irrationally, it’s a human being, a mere hundred-twenty-five-pound woman with the looks of a supermodel.

  She has proved so difficult to kill that it seems as though, while still an infant, she must have been dipped in the water of immortality, like the Trojan War hero Achilles, except that even the entire foot by which she’d been held had been submerged, leaving her without a vulnerable Achilles’ heel.

  After the shootout in the market, where they killed Gavin and Jessica Washington on Sunday afternoon, Carter Jergen and Radley Dubose, acting as agents of the National Security Agency but in fact serving the Techno Arcadian agenda, had called in backup to assist in the search for Travis Hawk and to prepare for what seems to be an inevitable attempt by his mother to get to her son first and spirit him out of the area to a new safe haven.

  Jergen wishes they had taken the two guardians of the boy by surprise, so they could either have tortured them or injected them with control mechanisms to learn the child’s whereabouts. If they have the boy, they’ll have Jane. Better yet…kill him and thereby break her spirit beyond recovery.

  Homeland has run a psychological profile of Jane Hawk. They predict a 90 percent chance that, if they catch and kill the boy, she will be so shattered by her failure to protect him, she’ll kill herself, sparing them from having to face off against her.

  Jergen might take more solace from the conclusions of that report if Homeland’s profiles of potential foreign and domestic terrorists had not usually been woefully poor predictors of those individuals’ true intentions, behavior, and prospects.

  The outfall of light in which Jergen stands now abruptly diminishes to such an extent that he can be pretty sure Radley Dubose has followed him out of the tent. Dubose, the pride of Crap County, West Virginia, had been accepted into Princeton, perhaps by a chronically intoxicated dean of admissions, and had graduated no doubt by delivering, in person, a threat to disembowel the president of the university if denied a diploma. He stands about six feet five and weighs around 230 pounds, and Jergen thinks it’s a sure bet that Dubose’s DNA traces back to 40,000 B.C., to an early Cro-Magnon generation and an ancestor who was the first hired thug in service to the first petty dictator in human history.

  Although he fills a doorway with his physical bulk and can paralyze a rabid wolf with his glower, Dubose moves with the grace of a dancer and perfect stealth. Only the occlusion of light from within the tent is a clue to his presence. Jergen can’t even hear his partner breathing.

  Still staring at the sky, Jergen says, “I know the valley isn’t a crater, but it feels like one. Do you ever wonder if something big and fast is coming out of all those stars, some asteroid that’ll make us as extinct as the dinosaurs?”

  Dubose says, “The only asteroid coming down right now is me, and the only shit I’m going to make extinct is that tight-ass Hawk bitch and the little brat that popped out of her twat five years ago.”

  Jergen sighs. “Princeton certainly imparts to its graduates a flair for colorful expression.”

  “What is it with your fixation on where we went to school? You’re thirty-seven. I’m thirty-five. Princeton was just a stupid thing I had to get through to go where I wanted. Do you have some kind of weird sentimental attachment to Harvard?”

  As Dubose looms at his side, Jergen says, “Generations of my family’s men have graduated from Harvard. It’s a matter of family pride, achievement, tradition.”

  “There it is again, that freaky Boston Brahmin way of looking at the world. Going to classes, playing lacrosse, pledging a fraternity—none of that involves risk. And the only reward is the status you have in the eyes of the ever-fewer number of people who think Harvard is special. That’s not an achievement.”

  “I suppose you’ll tell me what is.”

  “Generations of my family have distilled whiskey, grown pot, sold capsules of speed and ecstasy, and never got caught. Now there you have a truly awesome tradition and achievement.”

  “Selling drugs to children might be a tradition, but it’s not an achievement.”

  “My old man and uncle never sold younger than middle school. A fourteen-year-old isn’t a child. Hell, that’s the age of consent.”

  “It isn’t the age of consent, not even in the darkest hollers of West Virginia.”

  “It used to be,” Dubose says.

  “Yeah, and if you go back a century or two, most places didn’t even bother having an age of consent.”

  Dubose puts an arm around Jergen’s shoulders in a gesture of unwelcome camaraderie. “Those were the days, huh? Too bad we don’t have a time machine.” He pats Jergen’s shoulder. “We’ve had four hours of sleep, some terrific pizza, and enough caffeine to make a sloth hyperactive. Let’s get on the hunt.”

  Like the fearsome, rough beast in Yeats’s poem that slouches toward Bethlehem to be born, Dubose moves toward a row of vehicles parked in darkness on the south side of the tent.

  Jergen follows. “It wasn’t terrific pizza. It sucked.”

  “Because you had that pizza for pussies, nothing on the cheese but black olives, mushrooms, some kind of fairy grass.”

  “It was cilantro.”

  “If you’d had the five-meat pizza, you’d feel fortified.”

&n
bsp; Carter Jergen winces at the memory of the gross slabs of meat and cheese Dubose consumed. In time, that festival of flesh is going to inspire a butt-horn serenade, and Jergen lacks a gas mask.

  Because the masters of this revolution believe in granting perks to the agents who carry out their orders, especially as the cost of doing so is borne by taxpayers, they provide cool wheels. The pure-jazz vehicle recently assigned to Jergen and Dubose is a Hennessey VelociRaptor 6 × 6, an 800-horsepower bespoke version of the four-door Ford F-150 Raptor with new axles, two additional wheels, kick-ass off-road tires, and a long list of other upgrades. It is big, black, glossy, and fabulous.

  Dubose is in possession of the keys, as he has been since they received the VelociRaptor the previous Friday evening.

  “I’ll take the wheel this time,” says Jergen.

  “What wheel is that?” Dubose wonders as he climbs into the driver’s seat and pulls the door shut.

  Jergen rides shotgun.

  3

  LAURIE LONGRIN IN THE MYSTERY of her parents’ bedroom, the faintest thread of light under the door to the hallway, draperies closed at one of the three windows, the other two offering only swaths of the black Texas-prairie night, the stars too far away to aid her vision…

  She helped with housework and sometimes cleaned here, so she knew the layout well enough to feel along the bed, past the bench at the foot of it, on which the quilted spread was folded at day’s end, and across an open area to a dresser.

  Magically, the oval mirror in the dresser seemed to gather what feeble light the room contained, presenting less like a mirror than like a window into a deeply shadowed room in a parallel world, where everything had a subtle gloss and where a figure that might have been a girl or the ghost of a girl stood featureless and fearful.

  What Laurie feared was failing to get out of there and up to safety before Janis Dern and Chris Whoever stopped talking about sex and death in the upstairs hall. When the vicious Dern beast returned to Laurie’s bedroom, that horrible creature would realize she had stupidly allowed her captive to escape, and she’d sound an alarm. A search of the house might begin simultaneously with a search of the immediate grounds.