One Door Away From Heaven

by Dean Koontz

  The vicious beast whose malodor Old Yeller smelled around that motor home is not one she has met before. It is something or someone of her world.

  This is not entirely reassuring. He remembers her reaction to Vern Tuttle, the teeth-collecting serial killer, when they had been watching him from the bedroom in the Windchaser as he had conversed with his bathroom mirror. She had wagged her tail a little. If such a fiend as Tuttle hadn’t put her hackles up, how much worse must the human monster be in this new motor home, this ominous juggernaut? It has, after all, elicited a growl from her.

  Since he is confident that their mysterious campground neighbors are not hostile extraterrestrials and, therefore, do not require any action from him, evasive or otherwise, the prudent course would be to stay safely inside the Fleetwood. He finds it difficult, however, to be entirely judicious or even cautious as long as the memory of the radiant girl continues to haunt him.

  He cannot put her out of his mind.

  When he closes his eyes, he can see her standing beside the driver’s seat, leaning forward, peering out of the windshield. Her expression of profound loneliness and loss resonates with him because it expresses emotions he knows too well, feelings that rise anew in him each time he dares to dwell upon what happened in the Colorado mountains before he ever was Curtis Hammond.

  At last he realizes that he would not be his mother’s son if he could turn away from this wounded-looking girl. The prudent course is not always the course that the heart demands.

  He is here, after all, to change the world. And as always, this task begins with the rescue of one soul, and then the next, and then the next, with patience and commitment.

  When he moves from lounge to nook and interrupts Cass and Polly at their maps, explaining what he intends to do, they are opposed to his plan. They prefer that he remain safely in the Fleetwood until, come morning, they can pull up stakes and head for Seattle. There, the large population will provide adequate commotion and give him cover until he is confidently Curtis Hammond, is at last producing an ordinary energy signature, and is beyond detection.

  Their adamant resistance to his leaving the motor home is for a moment frustrating. Then, using the template through which they are most comfortable regarding these recent events, he reminds them that they are his royal guards and that while valuing their valiant service and respecting their sage advice, he cannot allow his guards to dictate what an heir to the throne may or may not do. “That’s no more a choice for me than it would be for Princess Leia.”

  Perhaps they realize that he’s using their own rope to tie their hands, so to speak, because he’s previously denied being ET royalty, but this strategy nevertheless flummoxes them. They continue to be in such awe of his off-world origins and so thrilled to be a part of his mission that they can’t long resist him. As much as they might like to deal with him sometimes as the sovereign majesty of a far planet and sometimes as just a ten-year-old boy, they cannot have it both ways. Realizing this, they beam megadata at each other with one of their Spelkenfelter glances, sigh prettily, as only they can sigh, and prepare to provide him with an armed escort.

  Although they would prefer that Curtis remain indoors, they reveal a quiet enthusiasm at the prospect of accompanying him now that he’s pulled rank on them. After all, as they themselves have said, they are girls who like adventure.

  They are dressed this afternoon in carved-leather cowboy boots, blue jeans, and blue-checkered Western shirts with bolo ties. This seems to be a suitable costume for bodyguards, though it lacks the dazzle of low-cut toreador pants, halter tops, and navel opals.

  Each of the twins slings a purse over her right shoulder. Each purse contains a 9-mm pistol.

  “You stay between us, sweetie,” Polly cautions Curtis, which seems an odd form of address if she insists on viewing him as alien royalty, though he sure likes it.

  Cass leaves the Fleetwood first, keeping her right hand inside the purse that is slung over her shoulder.

  Sister-become follows Cass. Curtis follows the dog, and Polly comes last, right hand firmly on the pistol in her purse, too.

  At only a few minutes past three o’clock on a summer afternoon, the day looks more like a winter twilight, and in spite of the warm air, the gray light imposes a chilly impression on everything that it touches, emphasizing the trace of frosty silver in each evergreen needle, plating the lake with a mirage of ice.

  Outside, Old Yeller assumes the lead, following her previous route to the juggernaut, though with no pee stops this time.

  Few campers are out and about. Having finished battening down for the storm, most are inside.

  The radiant girl hasn’t returned to the front of the motor home. Curtis can see nothing more than a dim light farther back in the big vehicle, filtered by the tinted windshield, and reflections of pine branches and sullen clouds on the surface of the glass.

  Cass intends to knock on the door, but Curtis halts her with a softly spoken “No.”

  As before, the dog senses not only that a vicious beast of the human variety frequents this motor home, but also that it is, as before, not in residence at this time. Once more, she detects two presences, the first producing both the bitter odor of a soul in despair and the pheromonal stench of a spirit profoundly corrupted. The second is one who, having so long endured fear, is steeped in chronic anxiety, although utterly free of despair.

  Curtis infers that the fear-troubled heart is that of the girl whom earlier he saw through the windshield.

  The corrupted presence is so unappealing that the dog skins her teeth back from her lips, producing an expression as close to one of disgust as the form of her face allows. If sister-become could pucker her muzzle sufficiently to spit, she would do so.

  Curtis can’t be certain if the object of this disgust poses a threat. Perhaps it is revealing, however, that this person seems not to be troubled by any of the fear that is a yoke upon the girl.

  While the twins, bracketing him, keep a watch on the surrounding campground, Curtis places both hands on the door of the motor home. On the micro level, where will can prevail over matter, he senses a low-voltage electrical circuit and recognizes that it is similar to the alarm-system circuit on the Fleetwood, which the twins engage each night.

  Every circuit has a switch. The low-voltage flow is energy, but the switch is mechanical and therefore vulnerable to the power of the will. Curtis has a strong will. The alarm is engaged—and then not.

  The door is securely locked. And then unlocked. Quietly, he opens it and peers into the cockpit, which is deserted.

  Two steps up, and in.

  He hears one of the twins hiss in disapproval, but he doesn’t turn back.

  A single lamp lights the lounge. One of the sofas has been folded out to form a bed.

  She is sitting on the bed, writing rapidly in a journal. One leg is bent, the other stuck straight out in the grip of a steel brace.

  The radiant girl.

  Intently focused on her composition, she doesn’t hear the door open and doesn’t at first realize that someone has entered and is standing at the head of the steps.

  Sister-become follows Curtis, pushes halfway between his legs to get a clear look at this steel-braced vision.

  This movement attracts the girl’s attention, and she looks up.

  Curtis says, “You shine.”

  Chapter 66

  AFTER REVERSING the Camaro into the cover of the trees, Micky stood for a while, leaning against the car, watching the turnoff to the Teelroy farm from a distance of about seventy yards. Three vehicles passed during the next ten minutes, giving her a chance to determine that from this far away she wouldn’t be able to discern if Maddoc had come alone in the Durango, even if she could positively identify the vehicle itself. She moved fifty yards farther west.

  Less than twenty minutes later, positioned behind a tree, she saw the Durango approaching from the direction of Nun’s Lake. When the SUV slowed for the right turn into the Teelroy driveway, M
icky could see that the driver was alone: Preston Maddoc.

  She hurried east, back the way that she had come, and took up a new position in the shelter of a pine near the Camaro. From here, she couldn’t see the front porch of the farmhouse clearly enough to watch Leonard Teelroy greet Maddoc. She was able to see the parked Durango, however; and when it began to move again, she would have time to get into her car, ease out from among the trees, and follow him back to Nun’s Lake at such a distance that she wouldn’t raise his suspicion.

  Her irrational hope had been that he might bring Leilani with him, in which case she would have crept to the farmhouse with the intention of disabling the Durango and with the hope that in the subsequent confusion, she might have an opportunity to spirit the girl away, before Maddoc could know that she had gone.

  The irrational hope had not been fulfilled. She could choose between waiting here to follow Maddoc or returning to Nun’s Lake to inquire after him—or Jordan Banks—at all three campgrounds.

  She feared that if she returned to town, she might not receive accurate information at the campground offices. Or Maddoc could have used a name that she didn’t know. Or perhaps he never registered his motor home at any campground, but temporarily parked it in a public place, having no intention of staying in this place overnight. Then, as she went from one registration clerk to the next, in search of him, he might cut short his pursuit of extraterrestrials at the Teelroy farm, hook the Durango to the Prevost, and hit the highway. Returning to Nun’s Lake ahead of Maddoc, Micky risked losing him, and even if the risk might be small, she didn’t intend to take it.

  Given her own brief encounter with Leonard Teelroy, Micky didn’t expect Maddoc to spend much time with him. Teelroy was an eccentric, a transparent fraud looking to make a buck, and more than a few slices short of a full loaf. His tale of alien healers wasn’t likely to beguile the doom doctor for any length of time, regardless of what had motivated Maddoc to start following the UFO trail more than four and a half years ago.

  Yet five minutes passed, then five more, and the SUV remained at the farmhouse.

  Time on her hands gave Micky time to think, and she realized that she hadn’t phoned Aunt Gen. Having left Seattle at an ungodly hour, she would have awakened Geneva if she’d called from the motel. She’d intended to use a public phone in Nun’s Lake, but as soon as she arrived, she’d plunged into the search for Maddoc and forgotten everything else. Gen would be worried. But if everything went well, maybe Micky could call Gen later today from some roadside restaurant in Washington State, with Leilani at her side waiting to say hello and to make some wise-ass remark about Alec Baldwin.

  As dark as iron in places, the sky at last grew heavy enough to press an anxious breath from the still afternoon. The pleasantly warm day began to cool. All around Micky, trees shivered, and whispered to the wind.

  Birds like black arrows, singly and in volleys, returned to their quivers in the pine branches, with flap and flutter, vanishing among the layered boughs: a reliable prediction that the storm would soon break.

  Turning to follow a cry of sparrows, Micky discovered Preston Maddoc, and a club descending.

  Then she was on the ground with no awareness of falling, with pine needles and dirt in her mouth, lacking sufficient energy to spit them out.

  She watched a beetle crawling a few inches in front of her nose, busy on its journey, disinterested in her. The bug appeared huge from this perspective, and just beyond it loomed a pine cone as large as a mountain.

  Her vision blurred. She blinked to clear it. The blink knocked loose a keystone in the arch of her skull, and great blocks of pain tumbled in upon her. And darkness.

  Chapter 67

  CURTIS HAMMOND SEES the girl first through his own eyes, and he doesn’t perceive the previous radiance seen when she’d stood gazing out the windshield.

  Then sister-become climbs the steps and pushes between his legs. Through the eyes of the innocent dog, eyes that also are peripherally aware at all times of the playful Presence, the girl is radiant indeed, softly aglow, lit from within.

  The dog at once adores her but hangs back shyly, almost as she might hang back in awe if ever the playful Presence called her closer to smooth her fur or to scratch under her chin.

  “You shine,” Curtis declares.

  “You don’t win points with girls,” she admonishes, “by telling them they’re sweaty.”

  She speaks softly, and as she speaks, she glances toward the rear of the motor home.

  Being a boy who has been engaged in clandestine operations on more than one world, Curtis is quick on the uptake with clues like this, and he lowers his voice further. “I didn’t mean sweat.”

  “Then was it a rude reference to this?” she asks, patting her stainless-steel brace.

  Oh, Lord, he’s put his foot in a cow pie again, metaphorically speaking. Recently, he’d begun to think that he was getting pretty good at socializing, not as good as Cary Grant in virtually any Cary Grant movie, but better than, say, Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber or in The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Now this.

  Striving to recover from this misstep, he assures her: “I’m not really a Gump.”

  “I didn’t think you were,” she says, and smiles.

  The smile warms him, and it all but melts sister-become, who would go closer to the radiant girl, roll on her back, and put all four paws in the air as an expression of complete submission if shyness did not restrain her.

  When the girl’s eyebrows lift and she looks past Curtis, he glances over his shoulder to see that Polly has come onto the steps behind him and, even though still one step below, is able to look over his head. She is no less formidable in appearance than she is lovely, even with her gun concealed. Her gas-flame eyes have gone ice-blue, and judging by the flintiness with which she surveys the interior of the motor home and then regards the girl, her time in Hollywood has either inspired in her a useful ruthlessness or has taught her how to act hard-assed with conviction.

  In the lounge wall opposite the girl’s bed is a window, to which movement draws her and Curtis’s attention. Cass has found something to stand upon outside, perhaps an overturned trash barrel or a picnic table, which she has dragged near the motor home. Her head is framed in that window, and like her sister, she looks as redoubtable as Clint Eastwood in a full go-ahead-make-my-day squint.

  “Wow,” the girl exclaims softly, putting aside her journal and turning her attention to Curtis once more, “you travel with Amazons.”

  “Just two,” he says.

  “Who are you?”

  Because he can see the girl shine when he looks through the eyes of the perceptive dog, and because he knows what this radiance means, he decides that he must be as immediately straightforward with this person as, ultimately, he was with the twins. And thus he answers: “I’m being Curtis Hammond.”

  “I’m being Leilani Klonk,” she replies, swinging her braced leg like a counterweight that pulls her to a seated position on the edge of the sofabed. “How did you turn off the alarm and unlock the door, Curtis?”

  He shrugs. “Willpower over matter, on the micro level where will can prevail.”

  “That’s exactly how I’m growing breasts.”

  “It’s not working,” he replies.

  “I think maybe it is. I was positively concave before. At least now I’m just flat. Why’d you come here?”

  “To change the world,” Curtis says.

  Polly lays a warning hand upon his shoulder.

  “It’s all right,” he tells his royal guard.

  “To change the world,” Leilani repeats, glancing again toward the back of the motor home before pushing off the bed to a standing position. “Have you had any luck so far?”

  “Well, I’m just starting, and it’s a long job.”

  With a rather different-looking hand, Leilani points to a happy face painted on the ceiling and then to hula dolls swiveling their hips on nearby tables. “You’re changing the world starting here?
”

  “According to my mother, all the truths of life and all the answers to its mysteries are present to be seen and understood in every incident in our lives, in every place, regardless of how grand or humble it may be.”

  Again indicating the ceiling and the swiveling dolls, Leilani says, “And regardless of how tacky?”

  “My mother has wisdom to sustain us through any situation, crisis, or loss. But she never said anything about tackiness, pro or con.”

  “Is this your mother?” Leilani asks, referring to Polly.

  “No. This is Polly, and never ask her if she wants a cracker. I’ve agreed to eat them for her. Looking in the window there is Cass. As for my mother…well, have you ever been to Utah?”

  “These past four years, I’ve been everywhere but Mars.”

  “You wouldn’t like Mars. It’s airless, cold, and boring. But in Utah, at a truck stop, did you ever meet a waitress named Donella?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “Oh, you’d recall, all right. Donella doesn’t look anything like my mother, since they’re not the same species, although Mother could have looked exactly like her if she were being Donella.”

  “Of course,” says Leilani.

  “As far as that goes, I could look like Donella, too, except that I don’t have enough mass.”

  “Mass.” Leilani nods sympathetically. “It’s always a problem, isn’t it?”

  “Not always. But what I’m trying to say is that in her way, Donella reminds me of my mother. The fine hulking shoulders, a neck made to burst restraining collars, the proud chins of a fattened bull. Majestic. Magnificent.”

  “Already I like your mom better than mine,” says Leilani.

  “I’d be honored to meet your mother.”

  “Trust me,” the radiant girl advises, “you wouldn’t. That’s why we’re all but whispering. She’s a terror.”