During a swift search of the house, repeating the command phrase before
they went through each new doorway, the only thing of interest they
found was in the laundry. The small room reeked of gasoline. What
Alfie had been up to was made apparent by the scraps of cloth, funnel,
and partly empty box of detergent that littered the counter beside the
sink.
"He's taking no chances this time," Oslett said. "Going after
Stillwater as if it's war."
They had to stop the boy--and fast. If he killed the Stillwater family
or even just the writer himself, he would make it impossible to
implement the murder-suicide scenario which would so neatly tie up so
many loose ends. And depending on what insane, fiery spectacle he had
in mind, he might draw so much attention to himself that keeping his
existence a secret and returning him to the fold would become
impossible.
"Damn," Oslett said, shaking his head.
"Sociopathic clones," Clocker said, almost as if trying to be
irritating, "are always big trouble."
Sipping hot chocolate, Paige took her turn at guard duty by the front
window.
Marty was sitting cross-legged on the living room floor with Charlotte
and Emily, playing with a deck of cards they'd gotten from the game
chest. It was the least animated game of Go Fish that Paige had ever
seen, conducted without comment or argument. Their faces were grim, as
if they weren't playing Go Fish at all but consulting a Tarot deck that
had nothing but bad news for them.
Studying the snowswept day outside, Paige suddenly knew that both she
and Marty shouldn't be waiting in the cabin. Turning away from the
window, she said, "This is wrong."
"What?" he asked, looking up from the cards.
"I'm going outside."
"For what?"
"That rock formation over there, under the trees, halfway out toward the
county road. I can lie down in there and still see the driveway."
Marty dropped his hand of cards. "What sense does that make?"
"Perfect sense. If he comes in the front way, like we both think he
will--like he has to--he'll go right past me, straight to the cabin.
I'll be behind him. I can pump a couple of rounds into the back of the
bastard's head before he knows what's happening."
Getting to his feet, shaking his head, Marty said, "No, it's too risky."
"If we both stay inside here, it'll be like trying to defend a fort."
"A fort sounds good to me."
"Don't you remember all those movies about the cavalry in the Old West,
defending the fort? Sooner or later, no matter how strong the place
was, the Indians overran it and got inside."
"That's just in the movies."
"Yeah, but maybe he's seen them too. Come here," she insisted.
When he joined her at the window, she pointed to the rocks, which were
barely visible in the sable shadows under the pines. "It's perfect."
"I don't like it."
"It'll work."
"I don't like it."
"You know it's right."
"Okay, so maybe it's right, but I still don't have to like it," he said
sharply.
"I'm going out."
He searched her eyes, perhaps looking for signs of fear that he could
exploit to change her mind. "You think you're an adventure story
heroine, don't you?"
"You got my imagination working."
"I wish I'd kept my mouth shut." He stared for a long moment at the
shadow-blanketed jumble of rocks, then sighed and said, "All right, but
I'm the one who'll go out there. You'll stay in here with the girls."
She shook her head. "It doesn't work that way, baby."
"Don't pull a feminist number on me."
"I'm not. It's just that . . . you're the one he's got a psychic bead
"He can sense where you are, and depending on how refined that talent
is, he might sense you're in the rocks. You have to stay in the cabin
so he'll feel you in here, come straight for you--and right past me."
"Maybe he can sense you too."
"Evidence so far indicates it's only you."
He was in an agony of fear for her, his feelings carved in every hollow
of his face. "I don't like this."
"You already said. I'm going out."
5. 6.
By the time Oslett and Clocker left the Stillwater house and crossed the
street, Spicer was getting behind the wheel of the red surveillance van.
The wind accelerated. Snow was driven out of the sky at a severe angle
and harried along the street.
Oslett walked to the driver's door of the surveillance van.
Spicer had his sunglasses on again even though the last hour or so of
daylight was upon them. His eyes, yellow or otherwise, were hidden.
He looked down at Oslett and said, "I'm going to drive this heap away
from here, clear across the county line and out of local jurisdiction
before I call the home office and get some help with body disposal."
"What about the delivery man in the florist's van?"
"Let them haul their own garbage," Spicer said.
He handed Oslett a standard-size sheet of typing paper on which the
computer had printed a map, plotting the point from which Martin
Stillwater had telephoned his parents' house. Only a few roads were
depicted on it. Oslett tucked it inside his ski jacket before either
the wind could snatch it out of his hand or the paper could become damp
from the snow.
"He's only a few miles away," Spicer said. "You take the Explorer."
He started the engine, pulled the door shut, and drove off into the
storm.
Clocker was already behind the wheel of the Explorer. Clouds of exhaust
billowed from its tailpipe.
Oslett hurried to the passenger side, got in, slammed the door, and
fished the computer map out of his jacket. "Let's go. We're running
out of time."
"Only on the human scale," Clocker said. Pulling away from the curb and
switching on the wipers to deal with the wind-driven snow, he added,
"From a cosmic point of view, time may be the one thing of which there's
an inexhaustible supply."
Paige kissed the girls and made them promise to be brave and to do
exactly what their father told them to do. Leaving them for the
uncertainty of what lay ahead was one of the hardest things she had ever
done. Pretending not to be afraid, in order to help them with their own
quest for courage, was even harder.
When Paige stepped out the front door, Marty went with her onto the
porch. Blustery wind hissed through the screen walls and rattled the
porch door at the head of the steps.
"There's one other way," he said, leaning close to her to be heard above
the storm without shouting. "If it's me that he's drawn to, maybe I
should get the hell out of here, on my own, lead him as far away from
you as I can."
"Forget it."
"But without you and the girls to worry about, maybe I can deal with
him."
"And if he kills you instead?"
"At least we wouldn't all go down."
"You think he won't come looking for us again? He wants your life,
remember. Your life, your wife, your c
hildren."
"So if he finishes me off and comes after you, you'd still have a chance
to blow his brains out."
"Oh, yeah? And when he shows up, during that little window of
opportunity I'll have before he gets close to me, how would I know
whether it was him or you?"
"You wouldn't," he admitted.
"So we'll play it this way."
"You're so damned strong," he said.
He couldn't know that her bowels were like jelly, her heart was knocking
violently, and the faint metallic taste of terror filled her dry mouth.
They hugged but briefly.
Carrying the Mossberg, she went through the porch door, down the steps,
across the shallow yard, past the BMW, and into the woods without
looking back, worried that he would become aware of the depth of her
fear and insist on dragging her back into the cabin.
Under the Quonset curve of sheltering evergreen boughs, the wind sounded
hollow and distant except when she passed beneath a couple of flue-like
openings that soared all the way up to the blind sky.
Pummeling drafts shrieked down those passages, as cold as ectoplasm and
as shrill as banshees.
Although the property sloped, the ground beneath the trees was easy to
traverse. Underbrush was sparse due to a lack of direct sun light.
Many trees were so old that the lowest branches were above her head, and
the view between the thick trunks was unobstructed all the way out to
the county road.
The soil was stony. Tables and formations of granite broke the surface
here and there, all ancient and smooth.
The formation she had pointed out to Marty was halfway between the cabin
and the county road, only twenty feet upslope from the driveway.
It resembled a crescent of teeth, blunt molars two to three feet high,
like the fossilized dental structure of a gentle herbivorous dinosaur
much larger than any ever before suspected or imagined.
Approaching the granite outcropping, in which shadows as dark as
condensed pine tar pooled behind the "molars," Paige suddenly had the
feeling that the look-alike was already there, watching the cabin from
that hiding place. Ten feet from her destination, she halted, skidding
slightly on the carpet of loose pine needles.
If he was actually there, he would have seen her coming and could have
killed her any time he wished. The fact that she was still alive argued
against his presence. Nevertheless, as she tried to get moving again,
she felt as if she had plunged to the bottom of a deep ocean trench and
was struggling to make progress against the resisting mass of an entire
sea.
Heart pounding, she circled the crescent formation and slipped into its
shadowed convexity from behind. The look-alike wasn't waiting for her.
She stretched out on her stomach. In her dark-blue ski jacket with the
hood covering her blond hair, she knew that she was as good as invisible
among the shadows and against the dark stone.
Through gaps in the stone, she could monitor the entire length of the
driveway without raising her head high enough to be seen.
Beyond the shelter of the trees, the storm swiftly escalated into a
full-scale blizzard. The volume of snow coming down into the driveway
between flanking stands of trees was so great that it almost seemed as
if she was looking into the foaming face of a waterfall.
Her ski jacket kept her upper body warm, but her jeans couldn't ward off
the penetrating cold of the stone on which she lay. As body heat
leached away, her hip and knee joints began to ache. She wished she
were wearing insulated ski pants, and she realized she should have at
least brought a blanket to put between herself and the granite.
Under the influence of the building gale, the highest branches of the
firs and pines creaked like scores of doors easing open on rusty hinges.
Not even the muffling boughs of the evergreens could soften the rising
voice of the wind.
The gradually dimming light of the day's last hour was the steely shade
of ice on a winter pond.
Every sight and sound was cold and seemed to exacerbate the chill that
pressed into her from the granite. She began to worry about how long
she could hold out before she would need to return to the cabin to get
warm.
Then a deep-blue Jeep station wagon came uphill on the county road and
made a hard, sharp turn into the driveway. It looked like the Jeep that
belonged to Marty's parents.
Rheostat at seven degrees. South from Mammoth Lakes, through billowing
curtains of snow, through whirling snowdevils, through torrents and
lashes and blasts and cataracts and airborne walls of snow, along a
highway barely defined beneath the deepening mantle, passing slow-moving
traffic at high speed, flashing his headlights to encourage
obstructionists to pull over and let him go by, even passing a county
snowplow and a cinder-spreading truck crowned with yellow and red
emergency beacons that briefly transform the millions of white flakes
into glowing embers. A left turn. Narrower road.
Uphill.
Into forested slopes. Long chain-link fence on the right, capped with
spiral razor wire, broken down in places. Not there yet. A little
farther.
Close. Soon.
The four gasoline bombs stand in a cardboard box on the floor in front
of the passenger seat, wedged into the knee space. The gaps between
them are packed with folded newspapers, so the bottles will not clatter
against one another.
Pungent fumes arise from the saturated cloth wicks. The perfume of
destruction.
Guided by the magnetic attraction of the false father, he makes an
abrupt right turn into a single-lane driveway already half hidden by
snow. He brakes as little as possible, cornering in a slide, and moving
his foot to the accelerator again even as the Jeep is still finding
purchase and both rear tires are spinning-squealing fiercely.
Directly ahead, at least a hundred yards into the woods, stands a cabin.
Soft light at the windows. Roof capped with snow.
Even if the BMW was not parked to the left of the place, he'd know he'd
found his quarry. The imposter's hateful magnetic presence pulls him
forward.
At first sight of the cabin, he decides to make a full frontal assault,
regardless of the wisdom or consequences. His mother and father are
dead, wife and children probably long dead, too, forms and faces
mockingly imitated by the vicious alien species that has stolen his own
name and memories. He seethes with rage, hatred so intense it's
physically painful, anguish like a fire in his heart, and only swift
justice will bring desperately needed relief.
The churning tires bite through the snow into dirt.
He rams his foot down on the accelerator.
The Jeep bolts forward.
A cry of savage fury and vengeance escapes him, and the mental rheostat
spins from seven degrees to three hundred and sixty.
Marty was at the front window when headlight beams pierced the
falling snow out on the county road, but at first he
couldn't see the
source. Coming uphill, the vehicle was hidden by trees and roadside
brush. Then it burst into sight--a Jeep--turning hard into the drive
way at high speed, the back end fishtailing, plumes of snow and slush
erupting behind its spinning rear tires.
An instant later, as he was still reacting to the arrival of the Jeep,
he was stricken by a brutal psychic tidal wave as strong as anything he
had previously experienced but of a different quality. This was not
merely the urgent, questing power that had hammered him on other
occasions, but a blast of black and bitter emotion, raw and uncensored ,
which put him inside the mind of his enemy as no human being ever before
could have been inside the mind of another. It was a surrealistic realm
of psychotic rage, desperation, infantile self-absorption , terror,
confusion, envy, lust, and urgent hungers so vile that a flood of sewage
and rotting corpses could not have been as repulsive
For the duration of that telepathic contact, Marty felt as if he had
been pitched into one of the deeper regions of Hell. Though the
Koontz, Dean R. - Mr. Murder Page 47
