The Forbidden Door
Page 38
Ahead repeated lightning shapes the city out of the gloom, the buildings shivering in the storm flares, light running liquidly along the superstructure of a bridge. An ominous red beacon swivels high atop what might be a radio-station transmission tower, like some lighthouse marking the place where the world finally will end.
The Unknown Playwright is investing the scene with so much dramatic weather that Gottfrey is certain that the climax of this episode will occur soon.
In Houston, he turns north on Interstate 45, the midafternoon traffic crawling through the drumming downpour, so thick that he can no longer exceed the speed limit. He is not troubled by the delay.
Conroe is only forty miles away, a thriving city of a little over eighty thousand, on the southern edge of Sam Houston National Forest. In Conroe, Jane Hawk’s in-laws have taken refuge, certain that their sanctuary cannot be discovered.
1
THE LITTLE HOUSE GROANED IN distress, as if awakening from a long sleep and realizing how very old it was, how arthritic its joints, how brittle its bones. When Jane tried to leave, the back door stuck as though swollen and warped, but the problem was that the entire rear wall of the structure had tweaked. In the now misaligned frame, the encased door was wedged tight.
She holstered her pistol and gripped the knob with both hands and put everything she had into a hard sustained pull, but the door wouldn’t budge.
The four-pane window in the top half wasn’t big enough to get through, even if she broke out the muntins along with the remaining glass.
The bigger window above the sink was painted shut, with thicker muntins. She would need too long to clear it and clamber out.
She tried the door again, wrenching it from side to side even as she pulled on it.
Although the living room ceiling had collapsed onto the truck, the driver remained in control. Insanely, he pumped the accelerator, as if he foolishly believed that the front wheels could be forced out of the spaces between the floor joists into which they had crashed. The powerful engine screamed. The floor of the house shuddered, creaked, and cracked as the wheels strove to force the vehicle forward.
With the sleeve of her sport coat, Jane wiped sweat off her brow, out of her salt-stung eyes. She was trained, conditioned, born to deal with lethal threats, to outthink and outmaneuver whatever villainous sonofabitch—or bitch—wanted to take her down. But this was chaos, bedlam wrought by a self-destructive, unpredictable lunatic. Reason and wit wouldn’t necessarily carry the day. Anyway, the immediate enemy was the house; guns and hand-to-hand combat skills were of no use against an inanimate adversary.
She considered returning to the living room, trying to pop the driver through the windshield. However, the ceiling and the attic structure had crashed down on him, burying the truck, and she wasn’t likely to have a clear shot. Besides, things were continuing to come apart, especially toward the front of the house, and returning there might be the death of her.
The garage. There would be no electric power, because surely the circuit breakers had all been tripped when the truck rammed into the residence. But the big tilt-up garage door could be manually operated.
As Jane turned toward the connecting door where her telltale shard of glass was undisturbed, the maniacal driver tramped the accelerator all the way down and didn’t let up this time. The truck’s voice escalated until it sounded less like a machine and more like some denizen of a Jurassic swamp, expressing its mindless fury in a world where intelligence and reason counted for nothing, where the only guarantors of life were brute strength and ferocity. A reeking pale-blue cloud of exhaust fumes flooded out of the living room, into the kitchen. Under Jane’s feet, under the vinyl tiles, slabs of plywood began to shift and stress against one another like those tectonic plates in the earth that could crack open the faults in continents and shove mountain ranges from the bowels of the planet, creating towering alps where once there were flat plains.
She moved toward the door between kitchen and garage, and a more profound shudder passed through the house, a thunderous quaking, followed by tortured sounds of structure deconstructing. She thought the immense truck was about to plunge entirely into the basement, but instead the garage broke loose of the residence and collapsed. The connecting door burst inward, debris—including a large rafter—erupting toward Jane. She leaped sideways and jumped back, and the four-by-six came to a stop where she had been standing, gouging a wide ribbon of vinyl skin off the subflooring. The door to the garage was blocked now by lumber and sharp-edged sheets of corrugated-metal roofing and masses of pink fiberglass insulation acrawl with highly agitated silverfish.
The house tweaked again. Windows shattered. The valve stem in the ancient sink faucet must have failed; the handle and spindle and packing nut and faucet guts blew loose, and a high-pressure stream of water shot into the air. The truck screamed. The air thickened with fumes. Frosted-plastic panels buckled and cracked and fell out of the ceiling light box, the floor sagged, and the back door rattled violently in its frame.
If it’s still wedged tight, it wouldn’t rattle. Rattling means loose.
She stepped across the intruding garage rafter and yanked on the door, yanked again, and it opened. Rushing onto the back porch, down the steps, onto the pea gravel, she exhaled the bitter exhaust fumes and sucked in fresh air and heard herself saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
Wheeling along the weedy ruts that served as the driveway, the Chevy Suburban approached from the barn.
As Jane hurried to the vehicle, a black helicopter clattered past at an altitude of no more than two hundred feet. She looked up, visoring her eyes with one hand, and watched it turn east and then circle west.
Luther braked to a stop.
Jane opened the passenger door but didn’t get aboard. She stood watching the helo as it executed a 180.
An Airbus H120. Manufactured in Canada. Seating for the pilot and four passengers. Used by various agencies of the United States government.
The Airbus was coming back for another look.
“Luther, get out of the car,” she said urgently.
“What’s happening?”
“Get out, hurry! Just Luther. Not you, Cornell, not Travis.”
Inside the house, the garbage truck shrieked, and the building continued to come apart.
The helicopter had almost executed its turn. It was perhaps a quarter mile directly south of their position.
Luther opened his door and got out of the Suburban and regarded Jane across the roof. “What’re we doing?”
The helicopter had completed its turn. Heading for them now.
“Wave,” she said.
Luther looked toward the approaching aircraft.
“Wave at them. Remember the white FBI on our roof. We aren’t leaving here. Just arrived. We have this covered, checking it out.”
2
BERNIE ROUNDED THE END OF the pool, which blazed with reflected sunshine. The bobbling lounge chairs looked as if they were being smelted down so that their aluminum could be recycled.
In spite of the fact that the monkey-quick maniac was smaller than his victim, he had dragged Holden Hammersmith down. He now straddled his prey’s chest like the conjured demon out of that fearsome painting The Nightmare, by Henry Fuseli, which had haunted Miriam after they had seen it in a museum. Hammersmith couldn’t seem to throw the guy off. The attacker endured the bigger man’s blows as if he no longer had the capacity to feel pain, and he struck blows of his own. Like a vulture pecking at carrion, he darted his head between the flying fists to bite Holden’s face.
The boy, Sammy, hovered close, shouting, in great distress, but he’d suffered bites on a hand and forearm, and he was too terrified to throw himself on the assailant and try to drag him off.
Bernie realized at once that this wasn’t a cease-and-desist stop-or-I’ll-shoot situation, like
he hoped it might be. Whether the crazed man might be one of the misfortunates who had been injected with a nanomachine brain implant or was something else altogether, he was for sure a meshugener—insane, obsessed, bizarre. He wasn’t going to respond to either reason or threat.
Back in the day when Bernie pretended to be a hard-boiled hard-ass to prevent the mob pigs from taking a slice of his business, he had never needed to shoot anyone, baruch ha-Shem. He didn’t want to shoot anyone now. But he couldn’t stand by and watch Hammersmith be murdered.
When Sammy dared to grab at the would-be killer, Bernie said, “No, stay back,” and he quickly acted in the boy’s stead. He could not hope to inflict just an arm or leg wound, because he was likely to shoot the struggling victim as well as the attacker. With his left hand, he seized a fistful of the crazed person’s thick dark hair. Twisted. Pulled hard. Forced the madman’s head up, back, away from Hammersmith. “Enough already, enough.” Entreaty proved useless. The demon glared, its twisted mouth wet with blood, its blue eyes as empty of humanity as the eyes of those who long ago operated gas chambers in which millions died and furnaces in which others were burned alive. The thing snapped at him, teeth like chisels. Bernie jammed the muzzle of the Springfield TRP-Pro against the side of its head—“Sholem aleichem, peace unto you”—and with horror but without remorse, he squeezed the trigger. The hollow-point .45 round went clear through the head and struck the thick bole of a palm tree, from which it tore a chunk the size of a fist.
3
HAVING DESCENDED TO ABOUT A hundred feet, the helicopter approached for a second look. Both front seats were occupied behind the cockpit glass.
“Walk with me, Luther. We’re checking the place out, doing our job, just two Bureau grunts.”
“We’re not dressed FBI, especially me.”
As they hurried toward the house, Jane said, “Yeah, but they know this shit going down today isn’t a legit Bureau operation. It’s an occasion to dress street.”
Inside the house, the truck still screamed like some behemoth floundering in quicksand and raging at its inevitable descent.
As the helo passed over, its fleet shadow shading them for an instant, the back porch collapsed. Sheets of metal roofing sprang loose and were caught in the chopper’s downblast, twanging as they flexed like the great wings of a flock borne out of a dream about bodiless robot birds.
Still the truck engine raced.
Arriving at the front of the house, as the helo arced back to follow them, Jane and Luther surveyed the scene as if they were first responders. She drew her pistol so this might look real. Luther did the same. Together they stepped tentatively into the ruins of the porch, which was still overhung by a damaged roof.
When the front wheels had broken through the living room floorboards, the joists blocked the axle, at least temporarily stopping the truck from diving into the basement. But the vehicle had tipped forward, and the rear wheels, which remained this side of the breech in the wall, had lifted off the rubble; they spun without effect.
Luther raised his voice over the engine roar and the clatter of the hovering Airbus. “What if they put down?”
“They’re not backup,” Jane said. “Just chopper jockeys, search and surveillance.”
They had flown over the house twice, so they must have seen something of the truck through the hole where part of the main roof had fallen in on it. However, because a couple of strategic posts still supported the torn and sagging front-porch roof, the men in the helo were not at an angle to be able to see the rear wheels spinning uselessly. The noise made by the Airbus would, for those aboard it, mask the noise of the truck, and they might also be wearing headphones. If Jane and Luther acted as though whatever crazy thing had happened here was over except for the cleanup, the helo boys would have every reason to believe it.
“Better get out there,” Luther said, “before they decide to call backup for us.”
“Let them see you put away the gun.”
Jane kicked through the ruins and back to the pea-gravel lawn. She holstered her pistol and gave the Airbus guys two thumbs up.
Luther thumbed them, too, and waved them off.
The chopper hovered for a moment, but then it turned in place and faced north and buzzed away.
They watched it until it was no bigger than a fat housefly. Then they sprinted for the Suburban.
4
WITH ONE HAND, THE FATHER held his bitten chin together. That was the worst of it. Lesser bites in his left trapezius muscle, left cheek, left brow at the arc of the eye socket, right thumb, right forearm. None of the wounds was mortal. Only the reconstruction of the chin might leave him disfigured. But the pain must have been severe.
Holden was beefy, self-confident, unaccustomed to being afraid, but he was scared now, and angry. On his feet, swaying, he muttered curses at his attacker, even though the man lay dead on the pool deck, his bullet-deformed head half empty.
The son kept trying to call 911 with an iPhone. “They don’t answer.” He was shaken, shaking, frightened by the very fact that his father was afraid. “There’s nobody there. We need an ambulance. Why isn’t anyone there?”
Bernie took the phone from the teenager and wiped the blood-spotted screen on his shirt and entered the three digits. Two rings. An automatic pickup was followed not by a 911 operator’s voice or any version of please hold, but by an electronic twitter and a series of clicks. And then silence.
“Is there someone who can drive you?” Bernie asked the boy.
“My mom.”
The mother was already running toward them from the office.
To the father, Bernie said, “Hold the chin, apply pressure, but with an ice pack if you have one. You want to minimize the bleeding and the swelling. You understand?”
“Yes.”
The boy shouted at his mother to bring the car. “The hospital! We gotta get Dad to the hospital!”
Bernie realized that he didn’t have the burner phone on which Jane would call him. He’d left it in the motor home. He turned away from the Hammersmiths and shoved the pistol under his waistband and concealed it with his Hawaiian shirt and hurried along the pool decking.
He was almost to the end of the pool when the full importance of what had happened abruptly settled upon him, and his heart began to pound. He had intervened in a violent assault and shot a man—a thing, something like a golem but not made of mud, a golem without a soul that had once been a man with a soul. He had shot him to death. Yet somehow he’d remained calm throughout the confrontation. He had not been afraid, only concerned about doing what needed to be done.
Now his heart knocked hard, though not because he was worried about the consequences of what he’d done, which he wasn’t. These events—the insane attack, the shooting, the failure of the 911 system—had something to do with Jane and her boy. She’d said her enemies would be here in force and seal off the valley as best they could. But suddenly it seemed they hadn’t just sealed it off. They had also transported the valley out of the world as Bernie had always known it, out of the real world into the darkest corner of the Twilight Zone where anything could happen but nothing good could be expected.
As Bernie approached a large Winnebago, one of the other motor homes currently in the park, a deeply tanned barrel-chested man in sandals and khaki shorts stepped out of it. He gestured toward the farther side of the pool. “What’s going on? What the hell happened over there?”
“Crazy man,” Bernie replied. He kept moving. “Big fight. Somebody shot somebody.”
“Oh shit.”
Before boarding the Tiffin, Bernie disconnected it from the park’s power supply. By the time he took the .45 from his waistband and put it on the console box and got behind the wheel and started the engine, the Winnebago was roaring past on its way out of the park. A minute later a Thor Motor Coach decamped, and behind it a Fleetwood.
5
PASSENGER AS ALWAYS, CARTER JERGEN is being driven through the quivering thermals that rise from the sun-scorched blacktop, the wasteland flat and sere and daunting to all sides, like a dreamscape in which emaciated horses bearing dead riders will appear in a long, ghastly procession, as they do sometimes in his sleep.
The four-door six-wheel VelociRaptor is a big vehicle, but it’s a subcompact compared to the Valleywide Waste Management übertruck, which could demolish it in the equivalent of a head-butting contest. The V-Raptor is the very essence of cool, yes, but driving cool wheels when you go off a cliff won’t buy you a soft landing.
Having conceived of his mortality while touring the scene of slaughter in the kitchen of the Corrigan house, Carter Jergen is hour by hour becoming more obsessed with the prospect of his death, which previously had seemed no more likely than going to bed here in California and waking up on the moon.
He doesn’t want to find the dumpster-lifting truck and endure the demolition derby that might ensue. He doesn’t want to come face-to-face with Arlen Hosteen, because Hosteen has gone through the forbidden door and fallen down the forbidden stairs and is just an older version of Ramsey Corrigan, the teenage mutant death machine. After having been enthusiastically in the hunt for Jane Hawk, Jergen does not any longer want to find her, either. Now that he’s able to conceive of his death, he’s increasingly concerned that Jane Hawk will deliver it to him. He’s surprised by the transformation he’s undergoing, but he’s pretty close to embracing a live-and-let-live attitude, and it doesn’t feel half bad.
“Maybe we need to step back and rethink,” he says.
“Step back from what?” Dubose asks.