The Forbidden Door

by Dean Koontz

  “What’s with the ‘Cubby’?”

  “It’s a little private nickname I have for you.”

  “Yeah, well, keep it private. I don’t like it.”

  “You will,” Dubose assures him. “What I wish for you, Cubby, is that one day you’ll get past your uptight Boston Brahmin background and finally start to live, really live unchained.”

  “I already live unchained,” Jergen says.

  “The sad thing is that you think you do. But you’re knotted up with inhibitions. You’re a thousand Gordian knots of inhibitions. Repressed, suppressed, yearning after forbidden fruit, taboo-ridden, your emotions embargoed, your desires proscribed.”

  After a swig of Red Bull, Jergen says, “I’ve committed every felony known to man. I’ve murdered people, all kinds of people, women as well as men. If I could get my hands on this Hawk brat, this Travis kid, I’d kill him, too.”

  “Yes,” Dubose acknowledges, “but not with verve, Cubby. Not with the pure delight and the conviction of righteousness that comes with the total inner freedom of a true revolutionary. That’s what I wish for you. Total inner freedom.”

  In spite of himself, Jergen is moved by his partner’s concern, though he’s not prepared to admit it. “That’s you, is it?” he asks. “Total inner freedom.”

  “Total.”

  “How long did it take you to get this total inner freedom?”

  “I think I was seven years old,” Radley Dubose says. “Though maybe six.”

  18

  THE VOICES FELL SILENT. JANE heard the distinctive sound of the vehicle’s front door slamming shut. After a moment, the motor home began to move again, slowly at first, but then accelerating.

  She pressed the interior latch release and slid open the seat of the sofa, admitting light to her hiding place.

  As she rose into a crouch, Bernie called back to her from the driver’s seat. “I’m so smooth at this, I could make a fool of a lie detector—kayn ayn hore.”

  From her previous road trip with him, she knew that kayn ayn hore was sort of like “knock wood,” words meant to ward off the evil eye.

  She stepped over the slab of particleboard to which the sofa cushions were glued, and she stood considering the cockroach. It had crawled under the sleeve of her sport coat, up her bare arm, under the sleeve of her T-shirt, into her armpit, between her breasts.

  Sliding a hand into the left cup of her bra, she captured the bug and withdrew it. The creature twitched and quivered against the palm of her closed hand.

  Although she could easily have crushed it, she did not.

  She thought of Ivan Petro, the man she had killed two days ago in self-defense, in an oak grove north of Los Angeles, and thinking of him brought back to her the faces of others.

  The cockroach was a pest, a feeder on filth and a carrier of disease, but it wasn’t a mortal threat to her.

  If she respected this humble creature, perhaps she would be able to reach Travis and convey him to a safe place—kayn ayn hore.

  She opened her hand and dropped the insect into the hollow under the sofa, watched it scurry into a corner of that space, and slid shut the trick seat.

  As Jane crossed to the kitchen sink to wash her hands, Luther Tillman stepped out of the door to the master bedroom at the back of the motor home. “So we’re in,” he said as he moved forward, swaying slightly with the motion of the moving vehicle.

  “We’re in,” she said. “Next stop, the RV park.”

  19

  HOT LIGHT FALLING GOOD ON your skin. Soft earth warm underfoot.

  Running, running. Don’t know where, don’t know why. Just free and running, running, running.

  Trees. Shade. Stop in shade. Drop to your knees. Kneel panting in shade. Sweating and panting.

  Wound in your hand not bleeding much. Lick carefully.

  Warmth between your legs reminds you of male. Shiver with thrill of his agony, how he broke, how he bled.

  Thirst. Mouth dry. Throat raw. No smell of water here.

  Find water. Food. But where?

  Overhead, things unseen flutter in trees, alive and fluttering, sheltering from heat.

  Your thirst and hunger breed fear. Fear makes thirst greater, hunger sharper. Fear feeds fear. Fluttering in trees suddenly seems sinister.

  No more voice in your head. But something crawling inside your head. Crawling, crawling. Flickers of lightning inside your head, bright lines of tattered webbing.

  Fear of things unseen, fear of aloneness, fear of being alone with things unseen.

  Running again. Urgently, urgently. Out of trees. Harder earth. Grass whipping your legs, pricking, stinging.

  Hot light falling burns now. Burns the skin, stings the eyes. Earth hurts underfoot. Pain. Pain sharpens fear, breeds desperation.

  Shapes ahead. Shapes blue like the blue above where light falls from. Different trees, shade but less shade from different trees. A blue place in the shade.

  Alone. Thirst. Hunger. Confusion. Who am I, what am I, where am I, why? Danger, danger, danger. Alone. Hide.

  In the big blue shape, a tall white shape with clear shapes. Words come and go, familiar but only half understood—door and windows. You look through.

  A place beyond. Shaded place out of falling, burning light.

  Water place? Food place? Safe place for hiding? Something there that needs killing?

  Crawling inside your head. Crawling things seeking one another.

  Stone. Means what? Stone. Means nothing, nothing.

  Again into hot falling light. Urgent, urgent. Looking for something. What? Rock. Yes, this. This rock.

  Clear-shape window breaks. Reach through. Find thing that turns. Door thing opens, closes.

  Hot inside but shade everywhere.

  Listen, listen. Any sound a threat. Silence a threat. Sound and silence both feed fear. Fear fuels more fear.

  Smell water. A drop falls from shiny curve, falls into white hollow space. Another drop. Another.

  Fumble with shiny things. One turns. Water comes. You drink. Cool, wet, good. Make water stop.

  Moving through shaded spaces, threat at every turn, unbearable threat, unbearable.

  Sit in a corner, back to the corner, shaded spaces in front, listening, wondering, fearing. Threatened and alone.

  Fear breeds fear, breeds anger, breeds rage.

  Bright broken web threads glimmering inside your head.

  Crawling things seeking inside your head. Crawling and faintly whispering far away. Many threatening whispers far away.

  Icy fear, blistering rage. You shake with both. No cure for fear except rage, and rage seething into fury.

  Threatening whispers beget enraged whispering of your own. You whisper a challenge, an invitation to come here, come find you, come be killed, kill or be killed, come to the different trees, the blue place. Kill, kill, kill.

  20

  CORNELL JASPERSON KNOWS MORE ABOUT dogs now than he did a few days earlier, and one thing he knows is that they don’t necessarily pee a lot, but they pee to a pretty rigid schedule.

  The last time Cornell took Duke and Queenie out to pee, first thing that morning, the sound of a low-flying twin-engine airplane in this usually quiet valley had for some reason triggered an intense anxiety attack from which he had needed hours to fully recover.

  He didn’t want to take the dogs out again, because maybe the plane was still up there. If he had another anxiety attack, it might be even worse than the first one. Maybe he would collapse outside and be unable to get back into his library, leaving the boy alone and frightened. When he collapsed, maybe he would lose control of the dogs and never see them again and have to tell the heartbroken boy that the dogs had run away, and the boy would hate him and would never eat sandwiches with him again and would never ask him to read aloud again, so t
hen Cornell would have to live alone like before, which was what he had always thought he preferred until recently.

  Although he didn’t want to risk walking the dogs, the dogs insisted on being walked. There was no getting out of it.

  He wouldn’t take them without leashes, as he had done before, just in case the unusual airplane was passing inexplicably low and the imaginary ants started crawling all over him and he had to get inside quickly.

  The boy clipped the leashes to their collars, so that Cornell wouldn’t have to chance the dogs touching his bare skin.

  “I could take them out,” the boy said.

  “No. You’re a lot safer here. I’ll be back soon. I’ll make a new kind of sandwich. Little bags of potato chips. Good muffins for dessert.”

  “Sandwiches with sweet pickles on the side?” the boy asked.

  “Yes. Precisely. And cola ‘canned under the authority of the Coca-Cola Company, Atlanta, Georgia, 30313, by a member of the Coca-Cola Bottlers Association, Atlanta, George, 30327.’ ”

  The boy laughed softly. “I like you.”

  “I like me, too, though I’m a walking nutbar. Umm. Umm. And I like you, Travis Hawk.”

  Cornell let the dogs take him outside, and he held the leashes tightly while they smelled the ground and the weeds and each other and then more ground and weeds before taking turns peeing.

  The day was too hot and too bright, everything flat in the hard light. Quiet. At the moment no airplane was growling through the sky immediately overhead.

  But then the scream shrilled through the day. He had never heard anything like it. Maybe the dogs hadn’t heard anything like it, either, because they raised their heads and pricked their ears and stood very still.

  The scream came again, a little muffled, half like a person screaming and half like an animal. The first time, the screamer had sounded miserable and frightened. But the second time there was rage in the cry, too, a scary ferocity.

  It seemed to come from the little blue house in which Cornell had lived while building his library for the end of the world.

  The dogs were focused on the house, and they started to pull Cornell toward it. He struggled to hold them back. When the third scream cleaved the day, it was so chilling that the dogs changed their minds about wanting to investigate the source.

  Cornell wasn’t seized by anxiety. He cautioned himself not to be his worst self, to be his better and calmer self. Not that he always listened to himself at times like this, though sometimes he did. He turned the dogs away from the house and walked them back to the barn that wasn’t a barn.

  No further screams issued from the little blue house during the time that Cornell took to get into his library and out of the too-hot too-bright day, which had suddenly become also too strange.

  Cornell had been expecting the boy’s mother to come today, and he had been hoping she would not get here until late, until after lunch and reading-aloud time, maybe not until after dinner. But now he wished she were here already.

  21

  TORRENTIAL WIND-DRIVEN RAIN RUSHES IN from the Gulf of Mexico as if that entire body of water will be drawn into the thunderheads and purified of its salt and thrown down onto the lowlands of Texas in some dire judgment that will require an enormous ark and animals boarded two by two.

  Egon Gottfrey in the Rhino GX, westbound from Beaumont to Houston, powers through flooded swales in the pavement, the tires casting up dark wings of dirty water. The wipers can’t always cope with the downpour. Frequently the windshield presents the world as cataracted eyes might see it: misty, bleary, the buildings distorted into the grotesque structures of some alternate universe.

  Nevertheless, Gottfrey drives fast, exceeding the posted limits, not in the least concerned about a collision, considering that the traffic with which he shares the road is as much an illusion as is the highway itself. Anyway, he can see clearly what he most needs to see: the truth of the conspiracy that misled him, who helped Ancel and Clare Hawk, and where Jane’s in-laws have taken refuge.

  He has a long drive ahead of him, especially in this weather, but triumph awaits him at the end. Maybe he will get to Ancel and Clare too late to wrench from them young Travis’s location while it still matters, but it will never be too late to inject and enslave them.

  1

  MOST OF THE LONG-EXISTING CAMPGROUNDS in Borrego Valley were open in season only, and not all were motor-home friendly. A new facility, Hammersmith Family RV Park, had booked the Tiffin Allegro by phone, with the promise of a three-day cash deposit on arrival.

  The white Chevy Suburban, which the motor home was towing, had to be unhitched and left in a lot immediately outside the campground prior to check-in, because the spaces allotted to RVs weren’t large enough to accommodate additional vehicles. In that blacktop parking lot, where thermals rising off the pavement smelled faintly of tar, Jane and Luther transferred their weapons and other gear from the Tiffin Allegro to the Suburban.

  Bernie hadn’t slept well since getting Jane’s call on Monday, not because he feared for himself, and not just because he feared that she would be killed. He also dreaded that he might even see her being killed, whereupon he would be so emptied of all hope for this world that he might curse Adonai, the sacred name of God, which was never a good idea. He said, “The longer I don’t get a call from you, the more I’m going meshugge.”

  “You’ll be fine,” she said. “You always are.”

  “You take care of each other.”

  “That’s the plan,” Luther said, as he climbed in the driver’s seat of the Suburban. He pulled the door shut, started the engine.

  Jane said, “Did you put it on? You don’t look like you did.”

  “It’s silly. I’m not in the action, but I’ll put it on.”

  “There’s nothing silly about it. These bastards have quietly locked down this valley. Before we’re out of here, it might be something worse than a street fight. It might be even more intimate than that, the equivalent of a cage fight.”

  “I’ll wear it already. But it’s heavy.”

  “It’s not heavy. It’s level two, not level four, not hard plates of Dyneema polyethylene or ceramic like on a battlefield. It’s fine-weave chainmail and Kevlar, very light, light enough. Under a roomy Hawaiian shirt, nobody knows. And you promised me.”

  “So I’ll wear it! Now make like a real granddaughter and give me a hug.”

  Hugging him, she said, “You better wear it.”

  “You’re such a noodge. A promise is a promise with me.”

  “If I don’t call in two hours, be ready to split. If I don’t call in two and a half, get the hell out of here.”

  Bernie felt a tightness in his chest, as if he might have a cardiac episode, which he wouldn’t because he had no heart problems and because this wasn’t the time or place for a responsible person to drop dead. “It’s not like I spent my life abandoning people, so why should you think it’ll be easy for me?”

  “You won’t be abandoning anyone,” she assured him. “If I don’t call, we’ll be dead.”

  “It won’t turn out that way. You’ll get your boy.”

  She didn’t smile when she said, “Your lips to God’s ear.”

  As she got into the Suburban, Bernie said, “Don’t forget.” She looked back at him. “Always and forever—mishpokhe.”

  “Mishpokhe,” she said, letting the kh rattle against the roof of her mouth just right. She pulled the door shut, and Luther drove the Suburban out of the parking lot.

  Bernie Riggowitz, being Albert Rudolph Neary, checked into the Hammersmith Family RV Park.

  They assigned him to a nice, quiet space near the back of the campground. He hooked up only to their electric service.

  With the air-conditioning full blast, he sat in the copilot’s chair and sipped from a cold can of 7-Up and took an acid-reducing
pill and stared through the windshield.

  There were palm trees so recently planted and fresh that they didn’t look the least bit sun withered. There was a big swimming pool with a wide deck around it. There were lounge chairs on the deck for people who wanted to tan. There were big red umbrellas shielding tables where you could play cards or whatever. The water in the pool was pale blue with a reflection of the sky and rippled with silver reflections of the sun. Everything was very pretty.

  The scene turned his stomach, as if he’d eaten a pound or two of the sweetest prune-jam homantash anyone had ever baked. He knew he shouldn’t take a second acid-reducing pill. He chewed a pair of Tums instead.

  He didn’t know why all this prettiness should sicken him.

  Okay, not true. He knew why, all right. Much as he tried not to be negative, he couldn’t help but think that the afternoon might not turn out pretty in the end.

  2

  HENRY LORIMAR AND HIS PARTNER, Nelson Luft, neighbors of Robert and Minette Butterworth, had been helping authorities in the search for the kidnapped little boy when the obscene ranting had begun. For a moment, Henry thought it came from the sound system of their Lexus SUV, which he was driving; but then somehow he understood that it issued instead from deep inside his head. He was briefly frightened by this realization, until a still, small voice assured him this was the new normal, that all was well, that he should accept and move on with his work. This was nothing more than the whispering room, a high-tech communications system that linked the civilian volunteers who were searching for the missing child. Yes, whoever the ranting person might be, he was misusing the technology, but this was just the whispering room, one of the many advantages of the new normal.

  Evidently, Nelson received the ferocious rant at greater volume or on a more penetrating wavelength than did Henry. While the rapid gush of vicious obscenities was offensive and distracting to Henry, it proved at once painful to Nelson, and soon became excruciating. Within the safety harness that secured him to the front passenger seat, Nelson writhed in torment, his hands alternately clamped to his head or pounding on the door, on the window, as though he was desperate to escape but had forgotten how to get out of the vehicle.