by Dean Koontz
The professor drains his Scotch. The bartender delivers a fresh glass of whisky even as his customer finishes the first.
Thinking about Vince Penn and Rupert Baldwin and Janis Dern, and so many others, Gottfrey says, “But for a conspiracy of clowns to take power and crush all adversaries, they must have something more than an understanding of symbols, rituals, and costumes.”
“Passion!” the professor declares. “They had more passion than those who resisted them. A passion to rule, to tear down society and remake it more to their liking, a passion to silence all dissent and to make a world in which they wouldn’t have to hear an opinion at variance with their own. The passion for destruction always has more appeal to more people than does the passion to preserve and build. It’s an ugly truth of human nature. Passion, sir. The kind of raw passion that breeds ruthlessness.”
Gottfrey nods. “They so believed in the rightness of their cause that they could kill without compunction. If you can kill without remorse, then you can slaughter your way to absolute power.”
“Sad to say, but yes.”
“If you want to be a leader,” Gottfrey continues, “embrace the role. Don’t just go along for the ride. Symbols, costumes, glamour, and passion can make even clowns appear to be godlike. The least likely among us can triumph.”
“How true,” says the professor. “How dismal but how true.”
Although his companion has not finished the second Scotch, Egon Gottfrey says, “I was depressed when I sat down here, but you have so lifted my spirits that I want to buy you a drink, if I may.”
“Sir, I never decline the kindness of strangers. But how peculiar that such a dark subject should lift your spirits.”
“Not at all,” says Egon Gottfrey. “You have helped me with a personal dilemma, and I am in your debt.”
4
WEARING WHITE SNEAKERS, BREEZY-CUT WHITE chinos, and a bright pink-and-blue Hawaiian shirt with a flamingo pattern, eighty-one-year-old Bernie Riggowitz stood five feet seven, weighed at most 140 pounds, and didn’t look like anyone’s image of ideal backup in a crisis. A little over a week earlier, urgently in need of new wheels, Jane had forced Bernie at gunpoint to give her a ride in his Mercedes E350 from Middle of Nowhere, Texas, all the way to Nogales, Arizona. He had proved not only to have the right stuff, but also to be the right stuff—unflappable, quick-witted, and game. Somehow, the kidnapping had turned into an agreeable road trip at the end of which they were mishpokhe.
Now, in the Tiffin Allegro, Bernie sat in a dinette booth with Jane, across the table from Luther Tillman, listening to their story of Techno Arcadians and injectable brain-tropic self-assembling nanoparticle control mechanisms. He exhibited none of the amazement or fear that might be expected. He asked no questions. His face revealed nothing of his thoughts, and although he listened intently, there was a faraway look in his eyes.
Concerned that she couldn’t read his reaction, Jane said, “Bernie, what’s wrong? It sounds too cockamamie or something?”
“Dear, you should excuse the expression, but it sounds so not cockamamie that my kishkes turned to jelly.”
“Listen, if you feel this is more than you bargained for, if you want to back out—”
Putting a hand on her arm, Bernie said, “Darling, stop already. You should live so long that I’d ever back out on you.” To Luther, he said, “I am so sorry about your wife and daughter. The pain…” He grimaced in sympathy and could say no more.
Luther loomed across the table like a version of Thor, and there was a rumble as of distant thunder in his voice. “We’re not going to let the bastards take Travis from Jane.”
“Your lips to God’s ear.” Bernie squeezed Jane’s arm. “I don’t put much stock in the cabala, but I’m told in Sepher Yetzirah it says something about making a golem from clay and using it for vengeance. What these Arcadian momzers are doing is a reverse golem. They take precious human beings and mold them into obedient clay. It’s not possible to back away from this and still have any self-respect. So when do I get a gun?”
“You won’t need one,” Jane said.
“Maybe I will. I know from guns. Back in the day, the wig business was not all bagels and cream cheese.”
To Luther, Jane said, “Bernie and his wife owned a wig company. Elegant Weave. They sold wigs up and down the eastern seaboard.”
“Fourteen states and D.C.,” Bernie said. “It was mostly a city business, so there were the usual wiseguys wanted their cut. Better you should declare bankruptcy the day you open your doors. We didn’t give them bupkis. I had a gun; Miriam, too. We could make hard-boiled like Bogart and Bacall when we had to convince the khazers we were tough.” He turned his hands palms-up. “I’m embarrassed to admit, Sheriff, our guns weren’t legal. But we never did shoot anybody.”
Jane stared at Bernie in silence for a moment. “You think you know someone, then you find out he’s a tough guy.”
“That was a long time ago. I’m eighty-one now. I’m about as tough as a cheese kreplakh.”
Luther said, “God knows what we’re going into. You should have a gun, Mr. Riggowitz. You cool with that, Jane?”
“How long has it been since you fired one?” she asked Bernie.
“About three weeks. Wherever I am, I find a shooting range once a month and do some target practice.”
“You mean you have a gun?”
“An old man who likes to drive mostly at night and through some lonely wide-open spaces, he shouldn’t have a gun? It’s there in my suitcase. I just wanted to feel you out, did you think me having a gun was kosher.”
She said, “The night in Texas I jacked your car, you had a gun then?”
He smiled and nodded. “In a special holder under the driver’s seat, muzzle backward, grip forward, so I could just reach under and snap open the sleeve and have it in hand.”
“Why didn’t you pull it on me?”
He looked aghast. “Pull a pistol on a girl as pretty as you? Enough already!”
“They call me a monster. What if I had been?”
“Bubeleh, I needed about a minute to know your heart is maybe half your body weight. Am I right, Sheriff?”
“Never more so, Mr. Riggowitz. And call me Luther.”
“Mr. Riggowitz was my father. Call me Bernie.”
Luther’s smile was the first that Jane had seen since he’d boarded the motor home. He said, “We have a dream team here.”
She put an arm around Bernie and kissed his cheek and said, “Okay, Eliot Ness. You drive the motor home, sneak Luther and me into Borrego Valley, then be ready to sneak us out. If you need the gun, use it. But if you have to start shooting, it’ll mean we’re over the cliff.”
5
SHE RAGED WITH HER MATE through the house—overturning, tearing, smashing—driven by the rapid rant inside her head, a fierce voice in a language half remembered both by the unknown raver and she who received his tirade, not just words but also hatreds that were not her own but became hers, too, upon receipt. Vivid images were transmitted into her mind’s eye from elsewhere: enormous overhead blades whisking the wind; a savagely bitten, eyeless face; a cleaver raised in a clenched fist; again the huge blades whirling faster, faster, flashing with reflections of silvery sunshine; a human head rolling as if toward an array of tenpins; dolphins leaping on a lampshade; storm-tossed ships hung on a wall; a burst of fragile bones and feathers as a winging bird encounters the bright, spinning blades and disintegrates like a clay target shotgunned from the sky….Those continuing visions thrilled her as she wrenched open the door of a display cabinet with enough force to tear it from its hinges. She flung the cabinet door, and the misshapen discus clattered against a wall with a shattering of glass. Within the cabinet were cups and saucers, plates and bowls. From a shelf, she scooped up gold-rimmed china chargers and threw the stack onto the dining table. She grabbed a
gravy boat in her left hand, a small cream pitcher in her right, and smashed them together as if they were a pair of cymbals; as the porcelain disintegrated, she cut the ball of her thumb. Blood welled, and with something like vampiric need, she put her mouth to the cut, sucked, and drank of herself. Having seen this, her mate relented in his rampage and took her hand and brought it to his mouth and sampled the essence of her. The taste inflamed in them a fierce desire, a rutting frenzy, which the ranting voice in her head encouraged, so that she found herself upon a table from which most of the broken china had been swept away, half their clothes somehow gone, and he upon her. They rocked the table with carnal rhythm, copulation without tenderness or love, so ferocious that it was both thrilling and terrifying. They were incapable of language, their animal voices resounding from the walls of the ravaged room. At the peak of her excitement, an image came into her mind’s eye that was not from the ranting Other, that arose from her own experience, a remnant of her faded memory: a dead woman slouched in a wheelchair, her once-pretty face grossly distorted. With that memory, a dark wave of grief washed through her, and in the throes of coitus she suddenly spoke: “I am…I am…Minette.” But she could not sustain the grief, nor the memory. In the wake of the grief rose a tide of rage that swept away the name forever, and with the name went the last of her memories, all human purpose, all hope, all promise of transcendence. The male finished and rolled off her, off the dining table, stood sweating and swaying and satiated. Among the few shards of broken china still on the table, she gripped a pointed sharp-edged chunk of porcelain ware and, with pleasure greater than that of copulation, used it to attack and kill the male.
6
AS CARTER JERGEN AND RADLEY Dubose cruise the town of Borrego Springs, alert for telltale stains on the fabric of normalcy that might be a clue to the whereabouts of the Hawk boy, many pedestrians do a double take at the sight of the formidable black VelociRaptor. Jergen reads envy in the faces of many of the men, who would no doubt forfeit a year of their stunted desert lives to drive such a thrilling vehicle. He knows how they feel.
A Sphinx in sunglasses, his stony face carved by solemnity, Dubose says, “I don’t like what I’m feeling.”
“Then keep your hand off your crotch,” Jergen replies.
“This is no time for frivolity, my friend. I possess a highly developed intuition, almost a sixth sense, if you will, especially regarding trouble pending. At this very moment, I feel something portentous imminent. Something momentous and ominous. I can feel it in the ether, see it in the slant of sunlight, smell it in the dry desert air.”
In Carter Jergen’s mind, the hills of West Virginia, from which Dubose hails, are populated with rustic soothsayers and grizzled old men who, with a forked stick, can divine what they claim is the best place to drill for water, toothless old women who call themselves haruspices and foretell the future from the entrails of slaughtered animals, bible-thumping prophets of Apocalypse, and other backwoods Cassandras in great variety. Growing up among such occult-oriented hayseeds, Radley Dubose’s mind, such as it is, must be woven through with so many threads of superstition that the dons of Princeton had no chance of instilling in him the secular superstitions that they prefer.
“So will it be a plague of locusts, frogs, flies, boils?” Jergen asks.
After a thoughtful silence, Dubose says, “It’s something about Ramsey Corrigan….”
“The one in ten thousand. Reptile consciousness. What about him?”
“Something…”
“So you said.”
“We overlooked something.”
“Something?”
“Yeah, something.” Dubose pulls to the curb and stops. As still as stone, the beefy lion-bodied man stares through his wraparound shades, through the tinted windshield, gazing at the Anza-Borrego wasteland as if it is an Egyptian desert in which some ancient truth lies buried in a sea of sand.
After a minute, Jergen says, “Okay if I turn on some music?”
Just then, a siren wails. A county sheriff’s patrol car turns the corner ahead, its lightbar flashing, and accelerates, heading south.
Dubose pulls the steering wheel hard to the left, arcs across two lanes, and follows the black-and-white, riding its tail as if it’s a police escort sent specifically for him.
“This is it,” he says.
“This is what?”
“The something.”
“How can you know that?” Jergen asks.
With evident pity, Dubose says, “How can you not know, my friend? How can you not?”
7
THE LOW BARRENS, A WILDERNESS of sand, where in summer there will be no surcease from heat, as there sometimes can be in high deserts, the sun already merciless here on the brink of spring, quivery thermals rising from the blacktop, like spirits liberated from graves beneath the pavement…
Out of Indio, cruising south on State Highway 86, boosted on his doughnut-shaped prostate-friendly foam pillow, Bernie Riggowitz handled the big motor home with confidence. Sitting high above the roadway seemed to empower him. When other motorists displeased him, he expressed his frustration colorfully. “Look at that schmo, going twenty miles over the limit. From the way he drives, a person could think he wears his buttocks for earmuffs.”
In the copilot’s seat beside him, Jane said, “Twenty-seven more miles to Salton City, then west on County Highway 22 for about thirty miles.”
Behind Jane, in the free-standing Euro recliner between her seat and the door, Luther said, “I’m looking at the sofa. You sure it’s the right fit?”
“I wouldn’t want to spend the night there, but maybe it’ll get me through a roadblock if there is one.”
Another speeder, faster than the first, inspired Bernie to say, “That schmo shouldn’t wreck himself and wind up with wheels for legs, but it’ll be a regular miracle if he doesn’t.”
Jane felt safe with Bernie at the wheel and Luther at her back, but the world beyond the windshield seemed more hostile than ever. The Salton Sea came into view on the left, a reminder that the land on this side of the Santa Rosa Mountains was depressed, the water surface more than two hundred feet below sea level. The sun made quicksilver of the salt water, which glimmered less like a mirror than like some toxic lake in a dream peopled by drowning victims who, breathless and salt-blinded, swam forever through the depths, searching for living swimmers to drag down and suffocate.
8
THE TWO-STORY CLAPBOARD HOUSE IS surrounded by a mantle of real grass, shaded by four tall, flourishing phoenix palms. The property must have a deep-drilled well that allows the owners to pretend that they are living in a more hospitable climate than is the case.
A Buick Encore is parked alongside the road, twenty feet short of the driveway and north of the house. The sheriff’s-department Dodge Charger passes the Buick and parks just the other side of the entrance to the property, directly in front of the residence.
Dubose turns boldly between those vehicles, into the driveway, past a mailbox surmounted by a plaque bearing the name ATLEE. As he sets the brake and switches off the engine, he says, “Do you smell the something now, my friend? Do you smell it, see it, feel it in the very air?”
“Smell, see, feel what?”
“Looming crisis,” says Dubose and gets out of the VelociRaptor.
Jergen is relieved to see that the two sheriff’s deputies were among those at the market on Sunday, following the shooting of Gavin and Jessica Washington. They know Jergen and Dubose carry National Security Agency credentials. The locals forfeited jurisdiction on the Washington killings, superseded by federal authorities; and they are likely to relent without argument in this case as well, if that’s what Dubose wants.
“That’s Mrs. Atlee,” one of the deputies says, “Louise Atlee,” as a fortyish woman gets out of the Buick and approaches them. “She called nine-one-one to report a four-sixty.”
“Yes, sir.”
Agitated and distressed, Mrs. Atlee arrives. “Thank the Lord you’re here. Something’s gotta be done. I’m afraid maybe it’s too late, but something’s gotta be done. I turn in the driveway, a living room window shatters, just shatters! And…and…” Her mouth softens, her lips tremble, tears brim in her eyes. “And then my beautiful, beloved Wilkinson longcase is heaved into the yard like garbage to be hauled away. It was horrible, horrible.”
“Who is Wilkinson Longcase?” one of the deputies asks, his right hand resting on the grip of his service revolver now that burglary seems to have escalated to murder.
“It’s not a who,” Dubose informs him. “It’s a what. A George the Third longcase clock, what you might call a grandfather clock, made by Thomas Wilkinson, mid-to-late eighteenth century.”
With mixed emotions, none of them good, Carter Jergen regards his partner, the heretofore unrevealed antique-clock expert. Jergen is glad he wasn’t the one to ask who Wilkinson Longcase was.
Mrs. Atlee says, “My one antique, handed down through five generations, and now…now probably wrecked beyond repair.”
She extends one arm, one trembling finger, and Jergen looks where she points. The longcase lies on a side yard, canted against the bole of a phoenix palm.
“The clock crashes through the window, so I back fast out of the driveway, park along the road, call nine-one-one. I get out of the car, there’s this hellacious noise, just hellacious, inside my pretty little house, like someone smashing everything in my house.” Tears spill down her cheeks. “There’s shouting, too, cursing, two voices, a man and a woman. So I get back in my car, keep the engine running, ready to go. But then you’re here, and now it’s quiet, all quiet in there. Whoever it was, they must’ve escaped out the back.”
