Breathless

by Dean Koontz

  and paws as white as tennis shoes.

  Growing up with Sneakers was a fine adventure, although the dog reserved the greater part of his devotion for Grady’s mother. He loved his human brother, but he adored Ellen Adams.

  Grady’s dad, Paul, worked at the lumber mill. A few weeks before his son’s eighth birthday, he was killed on the job.

  The huge sizing saw, which cut logs into manageable lengths, had every safety feature. The saw was not the problem.

  People were the problem. A group opposed to logging operations had driven dozens of eight-inch spikes into each of numerous randomly selected, mature, mill-ready pines. The spiking didn’t kill the trees but rendered them useless for lumber.

  Harvesting crews identified most of the ruined specimens. Only one slipped past their inspection.

  The giant circular saw ripped the spikes from the wood, tangled them into bristling knots, and spat them out. When the blade met the resistance of the steel spikes, a sensor killed the power to the saw. But already the mangled spikes were in flight at maximum velocity, as was a piece of broken blade like a wide and toothy smile.

  Grady never heard exactly what the shrapnel did to his father. Considering the vivid images his imagination conjured, perhaps he should have been told. But perhaps not.

  Millworkers, police, friends, and the family priest advised Ellen not to view the body. But Paul had been, she said, “the other half of my heart.” She declined to heed their advice.

  She accompanied her lost husband from the mill to the coroner’s office. Later, she went with him from coroner to mortician.

  His mother’s courage in a time of terrible loss, and her faith, were profound. Young Grady had drawn his strength from her example.

  He loved his dad. The loss was so grievous, he felt as though he had been cut open and robbed of a vital essence. Every morning for a long time, when he woke, he was aware of being incomplete.

  Because his mother endured, Grady endured. For him, endurance led to acquiescence, then to acceptance, and at last to peace.

  Long before he found peace, only a month following his father’s death, after waking past midnight, he went downstairs to get a snack. He wasn’t hungry, but he couldn’t just lie in bed and think.

  A lamp already lit the downstairs hallway. His mom sat at the table in the kitchen, which was brightened only by the spill from the hall lamp. Her back to him, she gazed at the night beyond the window.

  Beside her chair sat Sneakers, his head in her lap. With her right hand, she tenderly, ceaselessly stroked the dog’s head.

  His mom didn’t know Grady stood in the doorway. The dog surely knew, but he would not turn from the woman’s consoling hand.

  Grady could think of nothing to say. As quietly as if he were the ghost of a boy, he retreated from the kitchen, returned to bed.

  A few nights later, waking at one in the morning, he silently went downstairs and found her as before, with the dog.

  He stood for a while in the doorway, unannounced. It felt right that he should be with her yet at this distance, watching over her as she stared through the window at the night.

  During the next month, he joined her a few more times, as silent and unnoticed as a guardian spirit. When he returned to his bed, he always wondered when his mother slept. Perhaps she didn’t.

  One night he went downstairs and found the hall lamp off. His mother wasn’t in the kitchen, nor was Sneakers.

  Grady assumed that she had changed her routine. He, too, was sleeping better than in the weeks immediately after his dad’s death.

  A year passed before he again discovered her and Sneakers at the kitchen table, in the dark. She had never entirely stopped coming here in the emptiest hours. Perhaps she came more nights than not.

  This time he said, “Mom,” and went to her side. He touched her shoulder. She reached up and took his hand in hers. After a moment, he said, “Do you think … he’ll come to visit?”

  She had the softest voice: “What? A ghost? No, sweetheart. This is my past and future window. When I want my past, I see your father working out there in the vegetable garden.”

  They grew tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, radishes, and more, for their own use.

  Grady sat at the table with her.

  “When I want my future,” she continued, “I see you tall and handsome and grown, with a family of your own. And I see myself with your dad again, in a new world without struggle.”

  “Don’t be sad,” Grady said.

  “Oh, honey, I’m not sad. Have I ever seemed sad to you?”

  “No. Just … here like this.”

  “When I say I see myself with your dad again, I’m not saying that I wish it. I mean I truly see it.”

  Grady peered through the window and saw only the night.

  “Believing isn’t wishing, Grady. What you know with your heart is the only thing you really ever know.”

  By then she had taken a job in the office of the lumber mill. She spent five days a week where Paul died. They needed the money.

  For a long time, Grady was concerned about her working at the mill. He thought she suffered the constant reminder of the twisted spikes and the broken saw blade.

  He came to understand, however, that she liked the job. Being at the mill, among the people who had worked with Paul, was a way of keeping the memory of her husband sharp and clear.

  One Saturday when he was fourteen, Grady came home from a part-time job to discover that Sneakers had died. His mom had dug the grave.

  She had prepared the body for burial. She wrapped the beloved dog in a bedsheet, then in the finest thing she owned, an exquisite Irish-lace tablecloth used only on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.

  Grady found her sitting on the back-porch steps, cradling the shrouded body, weeping, waiting for him. Two people were required to put Sneakers in the grave with respect and gentleness.

  As the summer sun waned, they lowered the dog to his rest. Grady wanted to shovel the earth into the grave, but his mom insisted she would do it. “He was so sweet,” she said. “He was so sweet to me.”

  Determined to be strong for him, she never allowed Grady to see her crying for his father. She couldn’t hide her tears for the dog.

  His father had given her the dog. On lonely nights, the dog had grieved with her. Now she’d lost Sneakers, but in a way, she had also lost her husband again.

  Later, Grady sat with his mom in the dark kitchen. The dog’s grave lay in a direct line with the window, at the end of the yard.

  Grady was six years older than he’d been when his dad died. His mother could talk more frankly about love and loss, about grief and faith, about the sharpness of her pain, than she had talked back in the day.

  Although she had withheld from him the depth of her anguish and her fear about their future—for a while, they had been in danger of losing the house—she never deceived him. She had always told him as much as she thought he was old enough to handle.

  The night of the day that Sneakers died, Grady realized that all of his mother’s sterling qualities arose from the same basic virtue. She loved Truth, and she did not lie.

  Until she drew her last breath—far too young—she never told him a falsehood. Because of her, Grady valued nothing higher than veracity.

  In this age, lies were the universal lubricant of the culture. A love of Truth and a commitment to it were seldom rewarded and were often punished.

  So you came home to the mountains, and you built tables and chairs and consoles in one Craftsman style or another. The simple materials and the clean lines of such furniture revealed where a woodworker dared to take a shortcut or to employ a substandard technique. Honest craftsmanship and a commitment to quality were evident in a finished piece, and no one could spin the truth of your work into a lie.

  As Grady sat at the table, watching the night, as Merlin sat sentry at the French door, the south end of the moonlit yard suddenly became slightly brighter than it had been. The source of the light lay o
ut of sight.

  Grady rose, stepped around the table, and put his face to the window. He expected to see lights in the workshop, which earlier he locked tight. Instead, the glow came from the garage, to which the workshop was attached.

  Nevertheless, he knew this intruder must be the same that had toured the workshop and later had taken the baked chicken breasts.

  Fourteen

  Upon finding the bloody handprint on the wall near the head of the cellar stairs, Henry Rouvroy considered firing the shotgun down into the darkness. Restraint was not a quality of character natural to him, yet he managed to resist the urge to squeeze the trigger.

  When he flicked the switch and light bloomed, he found no one waiting at the bottom of the stairs. He let out his pent-up breath.

  Listening to the room below, he became convinced that someone down there likewise listened to him.

  He almost whispered a name. But he kept his silence for fear of receiving an answer in a familiar voice.

  Anyone in the cellar could leave by the outer door, which opened onto exterior stairs that led up to the lawn. Henry couldn’t imprison the intruder, but he could prevent him from returning to the ground floor by this route.

  After switching off the cellar light, he closed the door and slid the bolt into the latch plate. He doubted it would hold against a determined assault. He fetched a chair from the nearby dinette, tipped it on its back legs, and wedged the headrail under the doorknob.

  He continued his sweep of the house, making sure no one was concealed anywhere, checking that windows were securely latched. He felt exposed at every pane of glass while he closed the draperies.

  In the bedroom, on the bed, he had left the pistol with which he had killed Jim and Nora. During his absence, someone had taken it. The shoulder holster and the spare magazine were also gone.

  A small smear of blood brightened the beige chenille bedspread.

  Two spaces remained to be searched: the closet and the bathroom. Both doors were in the same wall, and they were closed.

  Taking a wide stance to brace himself against the recoil, Henry leveled the pistol-grip shotgun at the closet, fired, fired again. In this closed space, the sound slammed off the walls with a blowback that he could almost feel. He fired two rounds at the bathroom.

  The buckshot punched holes through both of the cheap hollow-core doors, with enough velocity remaining to tear up whoever might be waiting beyond. The absence of a scream suggested that he’d wasted ammunition.

  He pumped the last round into the breech, dug spare shells out of his pockets, and reloaded the magazine.

  His hands trembled, stomach acid scalded the back of his throat, and his bowels felt loose. But he neither vomited nor soiled his pants.

  In such a pressurized situation, with everything at risk, not losing control of bodily functions seemed to be a triumph. Henry gained confidence from the fact that his underwear remained dry.

  Killing unsuspecting people was far easier than defending your life against an armed enemy.

  That was a truth they didn’t teach you at Harvard. At least not in any of the classes that Henry had taken.

  The anticipation of violence before a murder was pleasurable, but the expectation of being shot in the head wasn’t in the least exhilarating, no matter what psychology professors said about death having a subconscious appeal similar to that of sex. A good-looking woman chained in a potato cellar had infinitely more appeal than stalking—and being stalked by—someone who perhaps wanted to blow your brains out.

  He opened the riddled door to the closet and found no one alive or dead. In the bathroom, buckshot had shattered the mirror.

  Having secured the residence, he felt safer but far from safe. The house was not a fortress. Anyway, sooner or later, he would have to go outside.

  Fifteen

  Standing in the dark, face to the kitchen window, looking south beyond the house, Grady saw lights in the garage windows. And the big roll-up door was raised.

  Getting into the garage would not have been difficult for an intruder. Neither of the two windows had a working latch. In a rural county with a crime rate almost as low as that in the Vatican, he’d never seen a need for garage security.

  For a minute, he watched for a silhouette of someone against the big rectangle of light. But then he returned to his chair and poured his first mug of coffee from the thermos.

  Sitting at the French door, Merlin issued a thin, inquisitive sound.

  “I don’t know,” Grady said, “but I think maybe the idea is to determine if we’re watching. If we’re watching, we’d be expected to go out to the garage to see what’s up.”

  The dog said nothing.

  “My feeling is,” Grady said, “it’s better if it looks like we’ve gone to bed. If no one thinks we’re watching, then there might be something to see.”

  Having been seasoned with cinnamon, the black coffee gave off a mellow aroma. The brew tasted as good as it smelled.

  Watchfulness and patient waiting were tasks for which Grady possessed the temperament and the skills, and with which he had years of deep experience.

  His friend Marcus Pipp had called him Iguana. Like that lizard, he could sit motionless for so long that his stillness became a kind of camouflage. You could see him, yet you forgot he was there.

  Marcus had been dead for ten years. Grady still thought of him more days than not.

  A United States senator killed Mrs. Pipp’s boy. Grady should have seen it coming and should have acted to prevent Marcus’s death; therefore, he was in part at fault.

  Some would not agree with that assessment. Present when Marcus died, Grady knew the truth. He would neither endorse the official lie nor make excuses for himself.

  His mother said the lies you told yourself were the worst lies of all. If you could not face every truth about yourself, you would not know who you really were. You could not redeem yourself if you failed to recognize the need for redemption.

  Grady recognized the need for redemption, all right, and he realized that to finish the task, he would have to live a long life.

  Having gotten to his feet again, Merlin padded through the gloom to his water bowl, which was wide and deep. In the stillness of the kitchen, he sounded like a Clydesdale drinking from a trough.

  Out in the yard, only the moon now relieved the darkness. The garage lights had gone off.

  Seeking affection, the wolfhound came to Grady. Merlin’s head was above the table, and Grady gently worked the dog’s ears between his thumb and forefinger.

  When your task was patient watchfulness, the anchored body frustrated the mind into cutting loose, setting sail. Your thoughts tended to tack through an archipelago of disconnected subjects. The journey could seem to have no destination—yet could bring you to a port worth exploring.

  He found himself in a vivid memory of the afternoon woods, at the instant when Merlin passed through the last trees into the golden meadow. Beyond the woods, the sunshine seemed witchy, as lurid as a coppery twilight, glimmering as if a cloud of sequined atmosphere had plumed through an open door from a realm more magical than this one.

  He had hesitated to follow the wolfhound, but when he stepped from the forest, he had found the meadow descending in sunshine as ordinary as ever it was. He had dismissed the perception of coppery scintillation as a short-lived phenomenon resulting from his angle of view and from the contrast between dusky woodland and open field. And then the appearance of the white animals caused him to forget the unique quality of the light.

  Now, as he sat at the kitchen table, the nape of his neck prickled, and the memory replayed like a film loop. Again, again. And again. Each time, the experience returned to Grady with greater force. He didn’t merely recall the shimmering incandescence but saw it as he had never relived a previous memory: in three dimensions, with the true color and the poignant detail of the event itself, hypersensitive to every nuance.

  He seemed to be transported to the deer trail, to the pregnant m
oment. Charcoal and gray, untethered shadow, Merlin strode toward the meadow as Grady hesitated behind him. Overhead: the canopy of evergreen boughs, more feathery than needled, green-dark and still and fragrant. Ahead: pine trunks and limbs almost black against the backdrop of twinkling and glistering coppery light, the compelling and coruscating light, the significant light, the light.

  The memory relented, the past moment in the woods released him to the present moment in the kitchen, and he found himself standing at the table, having knocked over the chair as he’d gotten to his feet. He had experienced not merely a memory but something else for which he had no name, a re-immersion in a past event, all five senses fully engaged.

  And it was as though, earlier in the day, during the actual occurrence, he was blinded to the intense character of the light, and was able to perceive the momentous quality of it only when he experienced it through recollection, from the safety of this later hour.

  His scalp crawled, cold sweat slicked the nape of his neck, and he heard his heart knocking.

  Grady’s eyes were sufficiently dark-adapted that he could see Merlin a few feet away, alert and regarding him with interest.

  Beyond the window, beyond the shadowed porch, the burning moon seemed to have dusted the yard and the trees with its phosphorescent ashes. The night lay as still as if it were airless.

  Then something moved in the moonlight: quick, lithe, on all fours, white. Two of them.

  Sixteen

  The most expensive of the hotel-casino’s five restaurants had a large holding bar that featured a black-marble floor with small diamond-shaped inlays of gold onyx. The walls were clad in the same marble but without the diamonds. A highly dimensional black-marble ceiling glowed with panels of backlit translucent gold onyx at the bottom of each coffer. Instead of a mirror behind the black-marble bar, huge panels of backlit onyx were inlaid with the silhouettes of Art Deco wolves perpetually leaping.

  If Dracula had moonlighted as an interior designer, he might have created a room like this.

  Sitting at the bar, Lamar Woolsey ordered his only alcoholic beverage of the evening: a bottle of Elephant Beer, a Danish import.

  Some people at the cocktail tables were waiting to be told by the maître d’ that their dinner tables were ready, but those at the bar had not come for dinner. They were mostly men, but whether men or women, they fled the casino for a respite from self-destruction.

  Their moods ranged between forced gaiety and somber reflection, but the impression they all made on Lamar was of desperation.

  They had come to the games of chance with hope. Emily Dickinson, the poet, had written that “Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul …” But if your hope was hope for the wrong thing, it could be a sharp-beaked hawk that ravaged the soul and the heart.

  In his easy way, Lamar chatted up six fugitives from cards and dice, as they came and went. Eventually, in each conversation, he briefly waxed philosophical, and then said, “Don’t think, just answer. What’s the first word comes into your mind when I say hope?”

  As he nursed his beer, he didn’t know what answer he would find appealing, but it wasn’t among the first five: luck, money, money, change, none.

  The sixth of these brief companions, Eugene O’Malley, appeared to be in his late twenties. He had such an innocent face and such a humble manner that beard stubble and bloodshot eyes didn’t make him appear dissolute, only harried.

  Both arms on the bar, hands around a bottle of Dos Equis, he replied “Home,”