by Dean Koontz
“And they’re still loose?”
“Three of the prisoners were killed in the attempt to recapture them. The military police enlisted our help. That’s when most of the cops in the department were contaminated. But the other six and all the animals…they were never found.”
The man-size barn door opened, and Toby stepped into the threshold. “Daddy?” Shuffling as much as walking, he came to his father and hugged him fiercely. He grinned at me. “Hello, Christopher.”
“Hi, Toby.”
“Hi, Orson,” the boy said, letting go of his father and dropping to his knees to greet the dog.
Orson liked Toby. He allowed himself to be petted.
“Come visit,” Toby said.
To Manuel, I said, “There’s a whole new troop now. Not violent like the first. Or at least…not violent yet. All tagged with transponders, which means they were set loose on purpose. Why?”
“To find the first troop and report their whereabouts. They’re so elusive that all other attempts to locate them have failed. It’s a desperation plan, an attempt to do something before the first troop breeds too large. But this isn’t working, either. It’s just creating another problem.”
“And not only because of Father Eliot.”
Manuel stared at me for a long moment. “You’ve learned a lot, haven’t you?”
“Not enough. And too much.”
“You’re right—Father Tom isn’t the problem. Some have sought him out. Others chew the transponders out of each other. This new troop…they’re not violent but they’re plenty smart and they’ve become disobedient. They want their freedom. At any cost.”
Hugging Orson, Toby repeated his invitation to me: “Come visit, Christopher.”
Before I could respond, Manuel said, “It’s almost dawn, Toby. Chris has to be going home.”
I looked toward the eastern horizon, but if the night sky was beginning to turn gray in that direction, the fog prevented me from seeing the change.
“We’ve been friends for quite a few years,” Manuel said. “Seems like I owed you some pieces of the explanation. You’ve always been good to Toby. But you know enough now. I’ve done what’s right for an old friend. Maybe I’ve done too much. You go on home now.” Without my noticing, he had moved his right hand to the gun in his holster. He patted the weapon. “We won’t be watching any Jackie Chan movies anymore, you and me.”
He was telling me not to come back. I wouldn’t have tried to maintain our friendship, but I might have returned to see Toby from time to time. Not now.
I called Orson to my side, and Toby reluctantly let him go.
“Maybe one more thing,” Manuel said as I gripped the handlebars of my bike. “The benign animals who’ve been enhanced—the cats, the dogs, the new monkeys—they know their origins. Your mother…well, maybe you could say she’s a legend to them…their maker…almost like their god. They know who you are, and they revere you. None of them would ever hurt you. But the original troop and most of the people who’ve been altered…even if on some level they like what they’re becoming, they still hate your mother because of what they’ve lost. And they hate you for obvious reasons. Sooner or later, they’re going to act on that. Against you. Against people close to you.”
I nodded. I was already acting on that assumption. “And you can’t protect me?”
He didn’t reply. He put his arm around his son. In this new Moonlight Bay, family might still matter for a while, but already the concept of community was slipping away.
“Can’t or won’t protect me?” I wondered. Without waiting through another silence, I said, “You never told me who Carl Scorso is,” referring to the bald man with the earring, who had apparently taken my father’s body to an autopsy room in some secure facility still operative beneath a far corner of Fort Wyvern.
“He’s one of the original prisoners who signed on for the experiments. The genetic damage related to his previous sociopathic behavior has been identified and edited out. He’s not a dangerous man anymore. He’s one of their few successes.”
I stared at him but couldn’t read his true thoughts. “He killed a transient and tore the guy’s eyes out.”
“No. The troop killed the transient. Scorso just found the body along the road and brought it to Sandy Kirk for disposal. It happens now and then. Hitchhikers, drifters…there’s always been lots of them moving up and down the California coast. These days, some of them don’t get farther than Moonlight Bay.”
“And you live with that, too.”
“I do what I’m told,” he said coldly.
Toby put his arms around his father as if to protect him, giving me a look of dismay because of the way that I’d challenged his dad.
Manuel said, “We do what we’re told. That’s the way it is here, these days, Chris. Decisions have been made at a very high level to let this business play out quietly. A very high level. Just suppose the President of the United States himself was something of a science buff, and suppose that he saw a chance to make history by putting huge funds behind genetic engineering the way Roosevelt and Truman funded the Manhattan Project, the way Kennedy funded the effort to put a man on the moon, and suppose he and everyone around him—and the politicians who’ve come after him—are now determined to cover this up.”
“Is that what’s happened?”
“No one at the top wants to risk the public’s wrath. Maybe they’re not just afraid of being booted out of office. Maybe they’re afraid of being tried for crimes against humanity. Afraid of being torn apart by angry mobs. I mean…soldiers from Wyvern and their families, who might’ve been contaminated—they’re all over the country now. How many have they passed it to? Could be panic in the streets. An international movement to quarantine the whole U.S. And for no good reason. Because the powers that be think the whole thing might run its course without a major effect, peak soon and then just peter out.”
“Is there a chance of that?”
“Maybe.”
“I don’t think there’s a chance of that.”
He shrugged and with one hand smoothed Toby’s hair, which was spiky and disarranged from the strap on the goggles that he’d been wearing. “Not all the people with symptoms of change are like Lewis Stevenson. What’s happening to them has infinite variety. And some who go through a bad phase…they get over it. They’re in flux. This isn’t an event, like an earthquake or a tornado. This is a process. If it had ever gotten to be necessary, I would’ve dealt with Lewis myself.”
Admitting nothing, I said, “Maybe it was more necessary than you realized.”
“Can’t have just anybody making those judgment calls. There’s got to be order, stability.”
“But there is none.”
“There’s me,” he said.
“Is it possible you’re infected and don’t know it?”
“No. Not possible.”
“Is it possible you’re changing and don’t realize it?”
“No.”
“Becoming?”
“No.”
“You scare the hell out of me, Manuel.”
The owl hooted again.
A faint but welcome breeze stirred like a ladle through the soupy fog.
“Go home,” Manuel said. “It’ll be light soon.”
“Who ordered Angela Ferryman killed?”
“Go home.”
“Who?”
“No one.”
“I think she was murdered because she was going to try to go public. She had nothing to lose, she told me. She was afraid of what she was…becoming.”
“The troop killed her.”
“Who controls the troop?”
“No one. We can’t even find the fuckers.”
I thought I knew one place where they hung out: the drainage culvert in the hills, where I’d found the collection of skulls. But I wasn’t going to share this information with Manuel, because at this point I couldn’t be sure who were my most dangerous enemies: the troop—or Manuel and th
e other cops.
“If no one sent them after her, why’d they do it?”
“They have their own agenda. Maybe sometimes it matches ours. They don’t want the world to know about this, either. Their future isn’t in undoing what’s been done. Their future is the new world coming. So if somehow they learned Angela’s plans, they’d deal with her. There’s no mastermind behind this, Chris. There’re all these factions—the benign animals, the malevolent ones, the scientists at Wyvern, people who’ve been changed for the worse, people who’ve been changed for the better. Lots of competing factions. Chaos. And the chaos will get worse before it gets better. Now go home. Drop this. Drop it before someone targets you like they targeted Angela.”
“Is that a threat?”
He didn’t reply.
As I started away, walking the bicycle across the backyard, Toby said, “Christopher Snow. Snow for Christmas. Christmas and Santa. Santa and sleigh. Sleigh on snow. Snow for Christmas. Christopher Snow.” He laughed with innocent delight, entertained by this awkward word game, and he was clearly pleased by my surprise.
The Toby Ramirez I had known would not have been capable of even such a simple word-association game as this one.
To Manuel, I said, “They’ve begun to pay for your cooperation, haven’t they?”
His fierce pride in Toby’s exhibition of this new verbal skill was so touching and so deeply sad that I could not look at him.
“In spite of all that he didn’t have, he was always happy,” I said of Toby. “He found a purpose, fulfillment. Now what if they can take him far enough that he’s dissatisfied with what he is…but then they can’t take him all the way to normal?”
“They will,” Manuel said with a measure of conviction for which there could be no justification. “They will.”
“The same people who’ve created this nightmare?”
“It’s not got only a dark side.”
I thought of the pitiful wails of the visitor in the rectory attic, the melancholy quality of its changeling voice, the terrible yearning in its desperate attempts to convey meaning in a caterwaul. I thought of Orson on that summer night, despairing under the stars.
“God help you, Toby,” I said, because he was my friend, too. “God bless you.”
“God had His chance,” Manuel said. “From now on, we’ll make our own luck.”
I had to get away from there, and not solely because dawn was soon to arrive. I started walking the bike across the backyard again—and didn’t realize that I’d broken into a run until I was past the house and in the street.
When I glanced back at the Nantucket-style residence, it looked different from the way that it had always been before. Smaller than I remembered. Huddled. Forbidding.
In the east, a silver-gray paleness was forming high above the world, either sunrise seeping in or Judgment coming.
In twelve hours I had lost my father, the friendship of Manuel and Toby, many illusions, and much innocence. I was overcome by the terrifying feeling that more and perhaps worse losses lay ahead.
Orson and I fled to Sasha’s house.
31
Sasha’s house is owned by KBAY and is a perk of her position as general manager of the station. It’s a small two-story Victorian with elaborate millwork enhancing the faces of the dormers, all the gableboards, the eaves, the window and door surrounds, and the porch railings.
The house would be a jewel box if it weren’t painted the station colors. The walls are canary yellow. The shutters and porch railings are coral pink. All the other millwork is the precise shade of Key-lime pie. The result is as though a flock of Jimmy Buffett fans, high on Margaritas and piña coladas, painted the place during a long party weekend.
Sasha doesn’t mind the flamboyant exterior. As she notes, she lives within the house, not outside where she can see it.
The deep back porch is enclosed with glass; and with the help of an electric space heater in cooler months, Sasha has transformed it into an herb greenhouse. On tables and benches and sturdy metal racks stand hundreds of terra-cotta pots and plastic trays in which she cultivates tarragon and thyme, angelica and arrowroot, chervil and cardamom and coriander and chicory, spearmint and sweet cicely, ginseng, hyssop, balm and basil, marjoram and mint and mullein, dill, fennel, rosemary, chamomile, tansy. She uses these in her cooking, to make wonderful, subtly scented potpourris, and to brew health teas that challenge the gag reflex far less than you would expect.
I don’t bother to carry a key of my own. A spare is tucked into a terra-cotta pot shaped like a toad, under the yellowish leaves of a rue plant. As the deadly dawn brightened to a paler gray in the east and the world prepared to murder dreams, I let myself into the shelter of Sasha’s home.
In the kitchen, I immediately switched on the radio. Sasha was winding through the last half hour of her show, giving a weather report. We were still in the wet season, and a storm was coming in from the northwest. We would have rain shortly after nightfall.
If she had predicted that we were due for a hundred-foot tidal wave and volcanic eruptions with major rivers of lava, I would have listened with pleasure. When I heard her smooth, slightly throaty radio voice, a big stupid smile came over my face, and even on this morning near the end of the world, I couldn’t help but be simultaneously soothed and aroused.
As the day brightened beyond the windows, Orson padded directly to the pair of hard-plastic bowls that stood on a rubber mat in one corner. His name is painted on each: Wherever he goes, whether to Bobby’s cottage or to Sasha’s, he is family.
As a puppy, my dog was given a series of names, but he didn’t care to respond to any of them on a regular basis. After noticing how intently the mutt focused on old Orson Welles movies when we ran them on video—and especially on the appearance of Welles himself in any scene—we jokingly renamed him after the actor-director. He has ever since answered to this moniker.
When he found both bowls empty, Orson picked up one of them in his mouth and brought it to me. I filled it with water and returned it to the rubber mat, which prevented it from sliding on the white ceramic-tile floor.
He snatched up the second bowl and looked beseechingly at me. As is true of virtually any dog, Orson’s eyes and face are better designed for a beseeching look than are the expressive features of the most talented actor who ever trod the boards.
At the dining table with Roosevelt and Orson and Mungojerrie aboard the Nostromo, I had recalled those well-executed but jokey paintings of dogs playing poker and it had occurred to me that my subconscious had been trying to tell me something important by so vividly resurrecting this image from my memory. Now I understood. Each of the dogs in those paintings represents a familiar human type, and each is obviously as smart as any human being. On the Nostromo, because of the game that Orson and the cat had played with each other, “mocking their stereotypes,” I had realized that some of these animals out of Wyvern might be far smarter than I had previously thought—so smart that I wasn’t yet ready to face the awesome truth. If they could hold cards and talk, they might win their share of poker hands; they might even take me to the cleaners.
“It’s a little early,” I said, taking the food dish from Orson. “But you did have a very active night.”
After shaking a serving of his favorite dry dog food from the box into his bowl, I circled the kitchen, closing the Levolor blinds against the growing threat of the day. As I was shutting the last of them, I thought I heard a door close softly elsewhere in the house.
I froze, listening.
“Something?” I whispered.
Orson looked up from his bowl, sniffed the air, cocked his head, then chuffed and once more turned his attention to his food.
The three-hundred-ring circus of my mind.
At the sink I washed my hands and splashed some cold water on my face.
Sasha keeps an immaculate kitchen, gleaming and sweet-smelling, but it’s cluttered. She’s a superb cook, and clusters of exotic appliances take up at le
ast half the counter space. So many pots, pans, ladles, and utensils dangle from overhead racks that you feel as if you’re spelunking through a cavern where every inch of the ceiling is hung with stalactites.
I moved through her house, closing blinds, feeling the vibrant spirit of her in every corner. She is so alive that she leaves an aura behind her that lingers long after she has gone.
Her home has no interior-design theme, no harmony in the flow of furniture and artwork. Rather, each room is a testament to one of her consuming passions. She is a woman of many passions.
All meals are taken at a large kitchen table, because the dining room is dedicated to her music. Along one wall is an electronic keyboard, a full-scale synthesizer with which she could compose for an orchestra if she wished, and adjacent to this is her composition table with music stand and a stack of pages with blank musical staffs awaiting her pencil. In the center of the room is a drum set. In a corner stands a high-quality cello with a low, cellist’s stool. In another corner, beside a music stand, a saxophone hangs on a brass sax rack. There are two guitars as well, one acoustic and one electric.
The living room isn’t about appearances but about books—another of her passions. The walls are lined with bookshelves, which overflow with hardcovers and paperbacks. The furniture is not trendy, neither stylish nor styleless: neutral-tone chairs and sofas selected for the comfort they provide, for the fact that they’re perfect for sitting and talking or for spending long hours with a book.
On the second floor, the first room from the head of the stairs features an exercise bicycle, a rowing machine, a set of hand weights from two to twenty pounds, calibrated in two-pound increments, and exercise mats. This is her homeopathic-medicine room, as well, where she keeps scores of bottles of vitamins and minerals, and where she practices yoga. When she uses the Exercycle, she won’t get off until she’s streaming sweat and has churned up at least thirty miles on the odometer. She stays on the rowing machine until she’s crossed Lake Tahoe in her mind, keeping a steady rhythm by singing tunes by Sarah McLachlan or Juliana Hatfield or Meredith Brooks or Sasha Goodall, and when she does stomach crunches and leg lifts, the padded mats under her seem as if they will start smoking before she’s half done. When she’s finished exercising, she’s always more energetic than when she began, flushed and buoyant. And when she concludes a session of meditation in various yoga positions, the intensity of her relaxation seems powerful enough to blow out the walls of the room.
