Breathless

by Dean Koontz

  “I was being Jim, after all,” Henry said.

  In his mind’s eye, he saw himself wearing Jim’s gloves, moving Nora from the barn in the wheelbarrow. After dinner the previous night. Being Jim. Really into the role. Well, he had taken some drama classes at Harvard.

  His visitor, the nameless woman, turned to stare at him from the trap of the potato cellar, her eyes wide.

  As he moved to the doorway, Henry said, “And Jim. Jim’s in the chicken house. Stripped and thrown in the chicken house. I didn’t have time to feed them. Let them peck the meat off his bones. A smaller grave to dig.”

  “Jim, what’s the matter with you?”

  He looked at his hands, at his clean nails, remembering the grime, the filth, the gummy blood under his fingernails from wearing the gloves and being Jim.

  “Henry,” came the dreaded whisper, “Henry … Henry,” and he dared not look to see what stood behind him.

  The woman, who could see what stood behind him, only said, “Who is Henry?”

  “Henry,” Henry said, and knew chicken-pecked Jim did not stand behind him, after all.

  “Jim,” the woman said, “back away from the door, I’m coming out of here, Jim.”

  He had worn the gloves to copy the poem from the book, and then had to wash his hands again.

  “I’m not quite sure of my exact condition,” he told the woman in the potato cellar. “I never had the time to take as many psychology courses as I wanted to.”

  She came to the doorway, but he did not back off.

  He said, “Do you hear that? Do you hear iambic pentameter? The rapping, rapping, rap-rap-rapping.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Oh, I do. I hear it all the time. This is so sad. You would have been such an exciting woman to keep in the potato cellar. Then I could have had it all. But look what this rustic world has made of me in just one day. This isn’t who I am or want to be, and clearly there can be no going back for me in any sense.”

  “Move, Jim,” she said, and tried to push him backward.

  “I’ve got to go upstairs now,” he said, “and get the hand grenade from the refrigerator.”

  He went to the stairs. After ascending three, he glanced back at her. “Do you want to come with me to get the hand grenade?”

  “No, Jim. I’ll wait here.”

  “Okay. Thank you for waiting. I’ll bring a grenade for you, and we’ll pull the pins in the potato cellar.”

  He continued up the stairs. He was sorry to hear the outside cellar door open, and the rain doors over the stairs. He really didn’t want to go out alone in the potato cellar. Oh, right. Not alone. There was Nora.

  Seventy

  The Mountaineer coasted through the moonlight. Not daring to look back, Cammy ran around the front of it as Grady pulled to a stop. She yanked open the passenger door, clambered into the SUV, and couldn’t find her voice.

  Lamar was in the backseat. In the cargo area with Merlin, Puzzle and Riddle were giggling.

  Cammy had never heard them giggle before. Under the circumstances, their sweet childlike voices sounded sinister.

  Her cry at last broke free of her throat: “Move, move, move!”

  Grady accelerated away from the house before he asked, “What? What’s wrong?”

  “Hell if I know. Jim … he … I don’t know, I think he killed Nora, she’s dead in the potato cellar.”

  This announcement put the damper on whatever fun the three pals were having, and left Grady gaping.

  After a moment, she turned to Lamar and said, “You predicted chaos, and you were right. Was that it? What’s ahead of us?”

  “Just the future,” Puzzle said from behind Lamar. “Just where we’re meant to be.”

  Henry Rouvroy, alias Jim Carlyle, descended the cellar stairs, a grenade in each hand.

  Nora remained on the floor, eyes open, in the potato cellar.

  He sat on the floor beside his sister-in-law, his wife.

  He pulled the ring from the first grenade but kept the safety lever depressed.

  For reasons he could not imagine, in his mind’s eye he saw not Jim’s naked corpse in the chicken house, among the cackling hens, but instead the senator at a press conference, waving the photo of Marcus Pipp and demanding a court-martial. Henry had advised him on that strategy, but he’d done so based on misinformation, and it had not gone well.

  The senator didn’t fire him because the senator thought the episode achieved exactly what he wanted it to achieve. The senator was an idiot.

  Henry couldn’t get Marcus Pipp’s face out of his mind. He didn’t want to die while thinking about Marcus Pipp. That’s how he died, anyway.

  Grady drove as fast as the winding road would allow, heading south out of the county, into a somewhat more settled area, where the dark hills were speckled with house lights. They were a long way still from a small city with its own TV station, but if their escape had not yet been noticed, the odds were in their favor.

  They passed a roadhouse where the parking lot was packed with pickups and the marquee advertised a country band.

  A quarter of a mile later, when they topped a hill and saw the roadblock at the intersection below, Grady braked and slid into a turn, and Cammy said, “The roadhouse. All those people. It’s some kind of chance.”

  As he crested the hill he had topped from the other direction a moment earlier, Grady glanced at the rearview mirror and saw that the pursuit was already under way.

  Bailing from the Mountaineer in the roadhouse parking lot, Cammy sprinted to the back, opened the tailgate. “Out, out, hurry!”

  Merlin leaped from the vehicle, and the lantern-eyed duo sprang after him.

  As the six of them ran toward the roadhouse entrance, Lamar said, “Where’s the music? Never heard a country crowd this quiet.”

  Inside, the joint was packed, as the herd of pickups indicated that it ought to be, but the band played no music, no dancers danced, and people were gathered in peculiar configurations at the bar, at an area to the left of the stage, and in a separate raised lounge area near the rest rooms.

  “Must be a hundred people here,” Cammy said. “Maybe a hundred fifty. Homeland Security can’t arrest them all, can’t shut up all these people. Come on. It’s time. Come on, Puzzle, Riddle, it’s time for your debut.”

  “The stage,” Grady suggested. “The microphone.”

  Behind them, Lamar said, “Oh, my God,” but Cammy didn’t look back, just kept on moving through the mostly abandoned tables, with the wolfhound and the two amazements rushing ahead of her.

  She mounted the stage, took the microphone from the stand, and said, “Please, may I have your attention!”

  Joining her, Grady said, “It’s not turned on.”

  She fumbled for a switch, found one, and her voice boomed out—“Folks, everyone, hey, I’ve got an announcement!”—and as she spoke, the black-clad legions, carrying fully automatic carbines at the ready, burst through the front doors, an instant later through a back entrance.

  The patrons turned toward her. But half the armed agents spread through the room, intimidating the crowd, while the other half came toward the stage.

  Clambering onto the stage, one of them said, “You’re under arrest,” and she heard another one telling Grady that he had the right to remain silent, and she said, “But you have no right to make us be silent!”

  In the chaos, she heard Lamar shouting at her from among the tables, and just as she was about to start clubbing one of the agents with the microphone, she understood what he was saying: “Cammy, Grady, look at the TVs!”

  In the distant lounge was a big flat screen, a smaller screen behind the bar, another to one side of the stage. The music had stopped, the dancing, the drinking, because people had been drawn to something on television.

  On the screens were Puzzle and Riddle.

  Cammy stared uncomprehending.

  Someone cranked up the sound on the flat screen as an anchorman appeared in place of Pu
zzle and Riddle. “We’ve got breaking news now, something big is happening out there tonight. Whatever this event in Michigan means, and the pair in western Pennsylvania, apparently they aren’t alone.” He spoke to someone off screen, off mike, and turned again to the camera. “I’m being told we’ve got a live report coming right now from an affiliate in Marietta, Georgia, and three more to follow, and I think somebody’s saying the same thing’s happening in Italy … France, I think I heard Italy and France. We’re going now to Marietta.”

  In Georgia, a pair like Puzzle and Riddle were capering on a lawn around which forty or fifty people had gathered, for once not to be seen on camera but to see more directly what the camera saw.

  In confusion, the armed agents in the roadhouse backed off the stage. Cammy heard a squad leader on a cell phone nearby, but the TVs interested her more than Homeland Security.

  The roadhouse crowd, however, appeared less drawn to the TVs now than to the two wonders here among them.

  Cammy carried Puzzle, and Grady carried Riddle, down from the stage, into the room, to allow these citizens of Colorado to meet the new creations with which they now shared the world.

  Puzzle whispered in her ear, “You’re so clear, you shine so bright, and there’s no sadness in you anymore.”

  Seventy-one

  Bald and hunched, his mustache white, the old man sat on a bench in the park across from the retirement home. He wore sunglasses on an overcast day. Hooked to the bench was a white cane.

  Tom Bigger sat beside the blind man and said, “What do you think of all the news?”

  “I’ve heard their voices. They sound like angels. The sound of them makes me happy. I wish I could see them. Are they beautiful?”

  “They are. They’re the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”

  “The news last evening said seventy thousand pair counted so far, worldwide.”

  “You hear the news this morning?” Tom asked.

  “No. What now? Mirna, my wife, she says the next thing we’ll discover they can fly like birds. What do you think it means?”

  “Another chance,” Tom said.

  “That’s how it feels to me, too. You know what I think?”

  “What do you think?” Tom asked.

  “One of us ever kills one of them, then that’s the end for us, for all of us. That’s the end, right there.”

  “You could be right,” Tom said. “On the news this morning, they say scientists have sequenced their genome. Know what they found?”

  “Something amazing,” the blind man said. “That’s what I hope. I’ve been waiting all my life for something amazing.”

  “First,” Tom said, “they don’t look anything like us. Not like us at all. But what the scientists say is their genome matches ours in every detail.”

  The blind man laughed. He couldn’t stop laughing for a while. The character of his laughter was sheer delight, and Tom found it infectious.

  When they had stopped laughing together, the old man said, “Have you seen one for real or just on TV?”

  “I not only saw two for real, sir, but I saw them come through—from wherever they came.”

  The blind man reached out, found his shoulder, pressed a hand to his arm. “Is this true? You were a witness?”

  “On a bluff above the sea, farther down the coast from here. It changed my life, seeing it happen.”

  “Tell me about it. Tell me all about it, please.”

  “The first thing I need to tell you is, there were squirrels on the bluff, and a dozen birds, and they all became very still when it happened. But it wasn’t the appearance of the pair that transfixed them. It was something else. I sensed something was with us that I couldn’t see, something that maybe the birds and squirrels could see, something that brought the two animals or passed them through from wherever. I don’t know. I was very afraid, but at the same time … more alive inside than I had been for a long, long time. And … I was changed.”

  The blind man considered this in silence for a while, and then he said, “Are you my Tom?”

  “Yes, Dad. I’m your Tom.”

  “Oh, I want to touch your face.”

  “It’s not a good face, Dad. I’m afraid for Mom to see it.”

  From behind the bench, a woman said, “I’ve seen it, my love. You passed me on the way to sit with your father. You didn’t know me, but I knew you.”

  Tom allowed his father to touch his face, and his father wept, not only at his son’s suffering, but also with joy.

  When Tom rose and turned to see his mother, she said, “You are so beautiful, Tom. No, look at me. You are beautiful. Your face is a face of transcendence.”

  Seventy-two

  Cammy watched them from the kitchen window as they frolicked in the new snow with Merlin. But for their black hands, black feet, and black noses, they might have been invisible.

  The coffeemaker began to gurgle, and the sudden aroma of fresh Jamaica blend flooded the kitchen.

  Grady said, “Already, I’m inadequate to homeschool them. Their minds leap ahead of mine. Think you could help?”

  “I’d like nothing more. But they’ll probably leap ahead of me too, in no time.”

  He joined her at the window, a hand on her shoulder. “Do you lie awake some nights, wondering where this is going—I mean the world now, with them in it and everything so changed?”

  She shook her head. “No. Wherever they’re going, they’re taking the world with them, and I know beyond doubt that wherever they want us to be, that’s where we’ll belong.”