The Forbidden Door

by Dean Koontz

  “Put down the crowbar,” she repeated.

  He took one step toward her and raised his voice, loud and menacing. “Is you? Is you? Is you whisper sex me, sex me, kill me, kill you, kill you, sex me, kill, kill, whisper inside head?”

  The whispering room.

  He was one of the adjusted people, and something was very damn wrong with his program.

  Maybe because the pry bar looked almost as long as a Taser XREP 12-gauge shotgun, she thought of Ivan Petro on Monday, coming for her from out of the oak trees. She thought of the hammer with which she’d been pounding the burner phone, of how she hadn’t dropped it before drawing her gun but instead had thrown it. Life was raveled through with inexplicable patterns that could never be understood but could be recognized by anyone who acknowledged their existence, so Jane knew what this creature was about to do even before he knew. Insane as he might be, he still wasn’t going to charge into a pistol pointed at him; he would throw the pry bar.

  Whoever this man might have been, he was no longer that person. He was enslaved by a nanoweb, but also coming apart psychologically under the control mechanism’s influence. What she had to do next was an act of mercy, not murder; and if she hesitated to grant him that mercy, he would smash her face, crack her skull.

  He drew back the iron bar. She shot him in the chest. The bullet convulsed him, but he threw the weapon. Half a second after the first round, the second didn’t just tear through his throat. The .45 hollow-point removed his throat, took out the spine, so his head wobbled like one of those bobble-head figures that people put on the dashboards of their cars. His empty body collapsed with so little sound that it seemed as if the greater part of his substance had been the mind and soul no longer contained in the package of flesh and bone. His pitch was feeble. The pry bar went wide of her and bounced along the floor—just as the naked woman erupted from the hallway and slashed hard with the butcher knife to cut deep.

  15

  IMMEDIATELY BEFORE THE CRAZY PERSON came out of nowhere and the waking nightmare started, Bernie Riggowitz was thinking about the three Ls—life, loss, and love.

  Life is finding people you love and then losing them, sometimes after sixty years, sometimes after a few months or even a week, all the loss meant to keep you humble and remind you that your life is likewise stamped with an expiration date, so that you’ll use your days to the best of your ability, in the service of what is good. Bernie understood the grand strategy of life’s design, and he didn’t presume to think that he knew better how it should have been done, but—shit, shit, shit!—he was fed up with all the losing of people.

  Bernie in the Tiffin Allegro cockpit, behind the wheel, was too nervous to do anything other than stare out at the grounds of the RV park, hoping to absorb some of the tranquillity from the sun, the majestic palm trees, the glimmering water in the pool.

  It didn’t work. He anxiously checked his wristwatch every five or six minutes, thinking an hour had gone by.

  Only three times in his life had he come to love someone in mere hours or less. Miriam had always said that she fell in love with him at first sight, and he said he did, too, but the truth was that he needed maybe an hour to fall in love with her, but then he fell all the way and hard. He fell in love with Nasia, his only child, in less than half a minute after his first look at her. What kind of monster didn’t love his own baby with every fiber of his being? He’d needed maybe two hours to fall in love with Jane, who’d called herself Alice at the time. His love for Miriam involved heart and mind and body, but his love for Jane was a heart-and-mind thing. In truth, if he’d been thirty-one instead of eighty-one, and if he’d never met Miriam, this would have been a heart-mind-body thing, but he didn’t have it in him to be a dirty old man.

  If Jane died, Bernie’s life of optimism was going to end as a life of despair. And if she lost her boychik, Bernie was damn well after all going to assume that he knew better how the world and life should have been designed.

  He checked his watch yet again, having expected to hear from Jane by now, certain that two hours had passed, that something had gone wrong. But she and Luther had set out from the RV park only a little more than an hour earlier.

  That was when the crazy person appeared on the deck surrounding the big pool and began to pitch the lounge chairs into the water.

  16

  JANE PIVOTED TOWARD THE THREAT, but the naked woman was too close, coming in as low and fast as a striking snake unraveling from its coils, so damn fast, already past the pistol. The knife slashed right to left across Jane’s abdomen, slicing open her T-shirt as if the fabric were gossamer, making a zipperlike sound as it scored the SafeGuard vest underneath. The body armor featured fine chainmail to protect against edge weapons, plus an underlying Kevlar layer that provided ballistic protection.

  The vest didn’t fail. Would never fail. But it was only a vest, leaving points of vulnerability—face, throat, hands. The attacker had ferocious energy, feral quickness, uncanny strength. Even as the knife sliced across the armor, she body-slammed Jane, driving her back into a wall. A hard shock to the spine. A moment when darkness encroached at the edges of vision. A transient right-side weakness. Jane’s right hand opened involuntarily, and the Heckler fell with a soft thump on the carpet.

  Full-body contact now, hand-to-hand, a death struggle. Jane seized the other’s right wrist in her left hand as the woman raised the knife to stab.

  Her foul breath a thick tide, the stink of sour sweat and urine and blood steaming off her, the woman didn’t cycle through a panoply of tortured expressions, as had the man before her. Her face seemed forged of iron, every bone beneath the skin and every muscle in that rigid countenance fired into hard angles of fury and hate. In her eyes an icy void attested to a mind pitiless and purged of empathy. She growled low in her throat and hissed and spat, but said not a word, not one obscenity or curse, as though in her depravity she wasn’t human any longer, but an animal, a predator at least as vicious as any in nature.

  She clutched Jane’s throat, trying to choke her, but that hand was slick with blood from a wound in the palm, and the woman didn’t have full strength in it.

  Martial arts had their uses, but they seldom worked on the street the way they did in a dojo. When you were pinned against a wall by a zombified psychopath who pressed closer in her frenzy, trying to bite your face, judo and karate were strictly action-movie choreography. You needed to resort to plain techniques, plain old everyday brutality, plain-Jane stuff.

  Caused by the shock of impact, Jane’s brief right-side weakness passed. With her left hand, she continued to stiff-arm the insistent attacker’s raised knife. With her right, she now clutched the wrist of the hand at her throat and used her thumb to apply crippling pressure on the radial nerve, maintaining eye contact because animals could sometimes be intimidated by an unrelenting stare. She planted her right foot flat against the wall, tensed the calf and thigh, and drove her knee hard between her assailant’s spread legs, did it again, and a third time. A woman wouldn’t be incapacitated by such a blow, as a man might be, but the vulva was richly endowed with nerves; the pain should make her relent or even drop the knife.

  Didn’t happen. In her killing fury, the woman was beyond pain, an engine of destruction fueled and armored by epinephrine.

  They were deep in the extreme cage fight of which Jane had warned Bernie, mean and dirty, no rules, no compassion, a contest that allowed only one survivor. As the pinched radial nerve failed the tendons and muscles that it served, the attacker suffered wrist-drop, her grip strength gone. Jane punched her assailant’s throat, hoping to tear the cartilage around the larynx. The woman’s head snapped back. Jane punched again, harder than before. A third punch, aimed higher, broke the nose. She clawed at an eye. Gagging, gasping, the attacker dropped the knife, stumbled backward. Jane stooped and grabbed the pistol from the carpet and rose and fired once point-blank. She would h
ave fired again, but that was when the blast came and the house rocked on its foundation and part of the front wall collapsed into the living room.

  17

  THE TUBULAR-FRAME NYLON-WEBBING LOUNGE CHAIRS floating in the sun-sparkled pool, bobbing and yawing, turning in circles, knocking together, as if invisible sunbathers were frolicking together in some water game…

  On the farther side of the pool from Bernie Riggowitz, the raging person wasn’t only tossing lounge chairs into the swimming pool. He was also overturning tables with their big center-fixed red umbrellas and kicking over the other chairs.

  At first it didn’t occur to Bernie, watching from the cockpit of the motor home, that the man might be homicidal, only that he must have a grudge against the RV park management or maybe a crazy hatred of outdoor furniture. And surely he must be very drunk. At the moment there were no vacationers in the pool or on the deck around it, no one whom the shikker might attack.

  Then Holden Hammersmith, patriarch of the clan that operated Hammersmith Family RV Park, the man who registered Albert Rudolph Neary and took his cash and escorted the Tiffin Allegro to its current campground space, hurried into view from the direction of the park office and convenience store. He was accompanied by his sixteen-year-old son, Sammy, who had assisted Bernie, alias Rudy, with the electrical hookup. Holden was about six feet one, maybe 220 pounds. A neck that could never be encompassed by the collar of an off-the-rack shirt. Shoulders like the Hulk. Popeye forearms. The boy was still growing, a few inches shorter than his dad, forty pounds lighter.

  The elder Hammersmith shouted at the vandal, though Bernie couldn’t hear what he was saying. The shikker, if in fact he was a drunk, at first ignored father and son, moving to the next lounger and pitching it into the pool.

  Holden caught up with the guy and seized him by one shoulder, which was when things took a turn Bernie couldn’t have foreseen.

  The vandal stood about five feet eight, weighed like 150. He was little Paddington Bear to Holden’s full-size grizzly. Even if the guy wanted a fight and was something of a scrapper, he would likely wind up with two broken arms and kishkes scrambled like eggs.

  Except when the guy turned on Holden Hammersmith, he didn’t do anything that a drunken brawler would do. Didn’t throw a wild punch. Didn’t kick or pull a knife. With startling swiftness, as bold as a tiger and as lithe as a monkey, he scrambled up the bigger man as if scampering up a tree. From this distance, Bernie couldn’t be sure, but it looked as though, as Holden staggered backward in surprise, the vandal seized his ears or his hair and bit his face.

  Whatever was happening over there, it seemed too weird to be only a common occurrence in another sunny day in beautiful Borrego Valley. Somehow it had to do with this cabal Jane had squared off against, these shmucks who thought people were just tools that they could use and break and discard.

  From under the driver’s seat, Bernie withdrew a Springfield TRP-Pro chambered for .45 ACP. He threw open the door and got out of the motor home and hurried out from under the palm trees, across the blacktop loop that served the campground, onto the pool decking, and around the long rectangle of water toward the men struggling on the farther side.

  18

  THE HOUSE ROCKED WITH THE blast, which subsumed the crack of the Heckler & Koch, and the naked attacker fell backward with a third eye weeping in her forehead.

  Jane thought, Bomb.

  Window glass cascaded into the room. Wallboard bowed inward and fissured and expelled clouds of plaster dust, followed by shattered wall studs and exterior sheathing and blue stucco and elements of the front porch. Ultimately, in another half second, there followed the bumper, grille, and hydraulic rams of an immense front-loaded garbage truck.

  The huge vehicle exploded into the house, shoving a dry tide of ruins ahead of it, engine howling, blazing headlights burning away shadows, the billowing dust motes glittering like minute droplets in a fog of pesticide. The ceiling sagged. The rotting carpet split, the wood flooring gave way, and the truck lurched to a halt as its front wheels dropped between floor joists and through the ceiling of the basement, stranding it in the living room.

  The wiper blades began to sweep across the windshield, whisking off the dust. Up there in the driver’s seat loomed a macabre figure out of A Clockwork Orange, a man who shrieked with a kind of fierce and wrathful delight—part madhouse laugh, part scream, all threat. His lewd, goatish face was distorted by lust and by hatred of the lusted-after Other, for in a savage and deranged mind, sex and murder were two sides of the same thrill, neither as satisfying as when they were combined in one violent act.

  The sagging ceiling began to collapse. As wallboard buckled and split overhead, Jane turned and sprinted into the kitchen, toward the back door. The floor shuddered and rolled underfoot, staggering her, as though the garbage truck might plunge through the joists and into the basement, pulling with it the entire back half of the small house.

  19

  LUTHER TILLMAN LOADED THE BOY’S luggage, Cornell’s bag, and the two German shepherds into the back of the Suburban. As he closed the tailgate, he heard the first loud noise from the distant residence, maybe like a door being broken down. After a minute or so came the first and second gunshots.

  He stood for a moment, staring at the house, wanting to go to Jane’s side.

  In the world as it had been when he’d grown up, a man went to a woman’s aid, always and without excuse. Rebecca, his wife, lost now to a controlling nanoimplant, had called him chivalrous, and he had always liked to hear her say it.

  But it wasn’t chivalry, not that formal and flowery and self-aware code of knightly behavior from times medieval. It was simpler than that. There was wrong; there was right. You knew in your blood and bones which was which. If you knew what was right but you didn’t try to do what was right regardless of the risk, then you weren’t just a bad man, you weren’t even any kind of man at all.

  The world in which he’d grown up had faded around him as he lived; it was now as ancient in its way as that of the pharaohs buried in the Egyptian pyramids. This darker reality had replaced it. He didn’t want this world. He wanted the one before it, the one of his youth, a mere twenty or twenty-five years ago, but if he could not turn back time, he could at least live by the values of that lost place.

  While the right thing was usually the hardest thing to do, sometimes it seemed the easiest, like now, when the right thing was to avoid abandoning the urgent task at hand, get Travis and Cornell into the Suburban, and only then drive over to the house and pick up Jane. He’d been an officer of the law, four times elected county sheriff, and although he’d been through some hair-raising moments on the job, Jane had undoubtedly fought her way out of more tight spots than he had. If he’d ever known anyone, woman or man, who didn’t need to have a knight ride to the rescue, it was Jane Hawk.

  Travis and Cornell were waiting in the vestibule, and when he called to them, they stepped outside.

  The boy ran to the black Suburban and climbed in through the port side. Travis sat on the floor, not on the backseat, below window level, and Luther closed the door.

  Cornell shambled after Travis, not bothering to make certain that his library for the end of the world was locked behind him. He had said he didn’t expect ever to return: I don’t want to live half dead anymore, please and thank you. All alive or all dead—either way is better. Now he got in the back starboard door.

  Careful not to touch Cornell, Luther slipped doctored zip-ties around his wrists and his ankles, so he might pass for a prisoner.

  As Luther opened the driver’s door, he heard a truck engine on the highway, rapidly accelerating and drawing nearer. He looked out there and saw the behemoth swing off the blacktop, roar across the pea-gravel landscape, shred through specimen cacti, plow through the front porch, and slam into the house.

  20

  HOURS OF LIGHT REMAIN, BUT the thun
derheads allow nothing more than an enduring dusk except when lightning alchemizes the falling rain into torrents of molten silver. The wet highway flickers as if fitfully lit from underneath, and Egon Gottfrey passes vehicles with steamed windows further blurred by streaming rain, the ill-defined figures within like condemned spirits who have elected to forgo a downbound train in favor of taking the road to damnation.

  Outbound from Beaumont in the Rhino GX, he is approaching Houston, in which he has no interest anymore. Beaumont, Houston, Killeen—every one is a false lead, nothing more than the Unknown Playwright’s version of a wild-goose chase. Although Ancel and Clare Hawk borrowed the Longrins’ Mercury Mountaineer, they never drove it as far as Killeen, and they never boarded a bus to anywhere.

  Earlier, Gottfrey had switched on the radio, which happened to be tuned to an NPR program featuring an interview with Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur and hot-tub philosopher invented by the Unknown Playwright to spice this world with humor. Musk says, among other curious things, that there is only a one in a billion chance that this world is base reality; he says it’s almost certainly true that we exist in a computer simulation. If Musk were a real person, as Gottfrey is, instead of a character in this cosmic drama, and if Musk studied radical philosophical nihilism, he’d know, as Gottfrey knows beyond doubt, that there is no computer simulation because the existence of computers, like the existence of everything else, can’t be proved. They are imaginary magical devices.

  It’s no coincidence that Gottfrey was inspired to turn on the radio, that it was tuned to an NPR station, and that the interview with Musk was under way; the U.P. wants to poke a little fun at him and remind him that all his efforts on the computer, which have led to the discovery of Ancel and Clare’s whereabouts, were really the work of the U.P., who will be responsible for his triumph.