One Door Away From Heaven

by Dean Koontz

  “—as kidnappers—”

  “—then let’s—”

  “—move ass.”

  “Curtis, you run ahead with me,” Cass directs, now treating him less like alien royalty than like an ordinary boy. “Help me pull up stakes. We’ll have to hit the road as quick as we can, storm or no storm, and head for the state line.”

  “I’ll stay with you, Leilani,” Polly says.

  Reluctant to leave the girl’s side, Curtis digs in his heels and holds Cass back, but only long enough to say, “Don’t worry, you’ll like the Spelkenfelters.”

  “Oh,” Leilani assures him, “I like nothing better than a good Spelkenfelter.”

  This eccentric answer spawns in Curtis several questions.

  Cass denies him further socializing when she hisses, “Curtis!” Her tone of voice is not unlike the one that his mother had used on the three occasions when he’d displeased her.

  Lightning spears the sky. The prickly shadows of the evergreens leap, leap across the brightened ground, over the walls of the ranked motor homes and trailers, as though running from those hot celestial forks or from the roar of thunder that after two seconds chases them.

  The dog sprints for the Fleetwood, Cass sets a pace that argues for the proposition that she has some canine blood in her veins, too, and Curtis follows where duty calls.

  He looks back once, and the radiant girl is rocking along on her braced leg faster than he had expected. This world is as vivid as any Curtis has ever seen, and more dazzling than many, but even among the uncountable glories of this place and even with the fabulous Polluxia at her side, Leilani Klonk is the focus of this scene and seems to trail the whole world behind her as if it were but a cloak.

  A PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR’S license reliably received a snappy response anywhere in the country, regardless of the state in which it had been issued. As often as not, women who had a moment earlier looked through you suddenly found you to be a man of dark mystery and magnetic power. Thousands upon thousands of detective novels, episodes of television programs, and suspense films were a magic brush that painted a romantic veneer over many a wart and wattle.

  The male registration clerk at the campground office didn’t flutter his eyelashes with desire when Noah Farrel flashed his PI license, but the guy responded, as did most men, with acute interest and a sort of friendly envy. Fifty-ish, he had a pale face wider at the bottom than at the top, and a body that matched the proportions of the face, as though the dullness of his life had distorted him and pulled him down more effectively than gravity could ever manage. He wanted all the vicarious thrills he could get from Noah. Convincing him that cows could sing opera would be easier than getting him to believe that a private detective’s work amounted to a boring parade of faithless-husband and disloyal-employee investigations. He knew that it must be a whirl of hot babes, cool gunplay, fast cars, and fat envelopes full of cash money. He asked more questions than Noah, not only about the current case, but also about the Life. Noah lied baldly in response, portraying this investigation as a grindingly tedious hunt for potentially key claimants in a class-action suit against a major corporation, with a legal filing deadline looming so near that he had to track people on their vacations, and he fabricated glamorous details about his prior adventures.

  The helpful clerk confirmed that Jordan Banks had rented a prime campsite earlier in the afternoon. The license number and description of the motor home—a converted Prevost bus—matched the information that Noah had obtained, through police contacts, from the California Department of Motor Vehicles. Bingo.

  The clerk also recognized Micky when Noah presented a photograph that he’d obtained from her aunt. “Oh, yeah, absolutely, she come around earlier today, before Mr. Banks arrived, asking had he checked in yet.”

  Alarm stiffened Noah’s bones and drew him up from a slump to full height. If Maddoc knew that she had come looking for him…

  “She’s his sister,” said the clerk. “Pullin’ a surprise for his birthday, so I didn’t say word one to him when he checked in later.” His eyes narrowed. “Say, she is his sister, you think?”

  “Yes. Yes, she is. Has she been back since Mr. Banks arrived?”

  “Nope. Hope she comes around ’fore my shift ends. She’s a tonic to the eyes, that girl.”

  “Do I need a visitor’s pass?” Noah asked.

  “Don’t work that easy. If he didn’t leave your name, which he didn’t, I have to send one of my grounds boys down there to campsite sixty-two and ask if I should put you through. Problem is, one of ’em is off sick today, and the other’s run half-crazy doin’ two jobs. I got to go down there myself and do the askin’ while you wait here.”

  The first lightning of the coming storm flared beyond the office windows, and a hammerfall of thunder rattled every pane, sparing Noah the expense of fishing a C-note from his wallet and playing out one of the most cliched scenes in all of detective fiction.

  The clerk winced and said, “Don’t like to leave my station in a storm. Got responsibilities here. Hell, anyway, you’re next thing to the cops, aren’t you?”

  “Next thing,” Noah agreed.

  “Go on, then. Pull your car up, and I’ll raise the gate.”

  THE FIRST BOLT of lightning, thrown open with a crash, had not unlocked the rain. The longer part of a minute passed before another bolt, brighter than the first, slammed out of the hasp of the heavens and opened a door to the storm.

  Scattered drops of rain, as fat as grapes, snapped into the oiled lane that served the many campsites, striking with such force that sprays of smaller droplets bounced a foot high from each point of impact.

  Leilani’s best speed was behind her. The cyborg leg might appear to be ass-kicking fearsome, but it cramped sooner than she expected, perhaps because she’d done so little walking these past few days when they had been on the road. She lost the smooth hip action necessary to keep swinging along, and she couldn’t reestablish the rhythm.

  The prelude to the symphony of rain lasted only seconds before a Niagara cascaded onto the campground, a concert composed entirely of furious drums. The downpour came so hard that even where the trees arched across the lane, the instantly sodden boughs provided little protection.

  She tried to shield her journal against her body, but the wind whipped sheets of rain against her, and she saw the pressboard cover darkening as it sucked up the water. She was already soaked to the skin, as wet as if she’d gone swimming fully clothed, and clutching the notebook against her chest provided it no protection whatsoever.

  Putting a hand on Leilani’s shoulder and leaning close to be heard over the roar of the rain and over thunder that now came in volleys, Polly said, “Not far! That Fleetwood, thirty yards!”

  Pushing the journal into Polly’s hands, Leilani said, “Take this! Go ahead! I’ll catch up!”

  Polly insisted they were close, and Leilani knew they were close, but she couldn’t move as fast as Polly because the cramps in her leg had grown painful, and because she was unable to recover the correct hip rhythm no matter how hard she tried, and because the dirt service lane—generously oiled to suppress the dust—proved slippery when wet, adding to her balance problems. No matter how aggressively she insisted on being a dangerous young mutant every day of her life, she was undeniably a disabled little girl in a situation like this, regardless of how much that galled her. She pushed the journal into Polly’s hands, gut-wrenched by the thought that rain was seeping through the pages, smearing the ink, making her elaborate code hard if not impossible to read, gut-wrenched because between these covers were years of her suffering, not merely tales of Sinsemilla and Dr. Doom, but so many memories of Lukipela in detail that she might not be able to perfectly recall. On these pages were the observations and the ideas that would help her to become a writer, to become someone, to take her shapeless life and to impress meaning and purpose upon it, and it seemed to her that if she lost these four hundred pages of tightly written, highly condensed experience,
if she allowed them to be reduced to meaningless blurs and smears, then her life would be meaningless, as well. On one level, she knew this fear was unfounded, but that wasn’t the level on which she was operating, so she shoved the journal into Polly’s hands and screamed, “Take it, keep it dry, it’s my life, it’s my LIFE!” Maybe this seemed crazy to Polly, and in fact it was crazy, absolutely loony, but she must have seen something in Leilani’s face or eyes that scared her, shook her, moved her, because maybe twenty-five yards from the Fleetwood, she accepted the journal and tried to jam it in her purse, and when it wouldn’t fit, she ran with it. The sky, an ocean coming down; the wind, a banshee whirling. Leilani slipped and slid, staggered and stumbled, but kept hitching forward, propelling herself toward the Fleetwood, relying as much on the power of positive thinking as on her legs. Polly sprinted ten yards, slowed, looked back, still fifteen yards from the trailer, no longer the vivid figure that she had been, but merely a gray phantom of an Amazon, faded by curtain upon curtain of rain. Leilani waved her onward—“Go, go!”—until Polly turned away and continued running. Polly closed to within ten yards of the motor home, Leilani within twenty, every yard a gazelle leap for the woman and every yard a struggle for the girl, until she wondered why she hadn’t applied the power of positive thinking as determinedly to the healing of her twisted leg as she had to the growth of her breasts.

  DOWN ON THE FLOOR, Micky was half convinced she could see the rank stench like a faint green-yellow fog eddying in the first few inches above the floorboards.

  She sought the butane lighter but couldn’t find it. After less than a minute spent in the search, she took another and longer look at the bizarre walls towering over her, and realized that using fire to undo the knots in her bonds presented a greater danger than a minor skin burn. Shackled and fettered, able to squirm along hardly more efficiently than an inchworm, she dared not risk unintentionally igniting a major blaze.

  As a second blast of thunder rocked the day and as the tramp-tramp-tramp of rain marched across the roof, she scanned the walls, seeking some item in the trash that might serve her. Only the coffee cans held promise.

  Maxwell House. Four rows of large four-pound cans, each row measuring six cans wide, were wedged between columns of twine-bundled newspapers, with more papers stacked under and atop them. A plastic lid capped each can.

  No one would keep twenty-four unopened cans of Maxwell House here instead of in a pantry. People saved empty coffee containers to store things in. Teelroy, who apparently had never thrown out anything in his life, who seemed to have filled his home with an eccentric collection worthy of a chapter in a psychology textbook, surely would not have left any of these twenty-four empty.

  Micky inched away from the chair, passed the TV, arrived at the Maxwell House display, rose onto her knees with more than a little effort, and got a firm grip on one of the cans in the topmost of the four rows. She hesitated to wrench the container out of the stacks, fearful that she would trigger a sudden collapse of the entire wall, burying herself in a ton of moldering trash.

  After studying the structure, assessing its stability, she opted for action, realizing that she had no other choice. At first the can seemed to be as immovable as a stone mortared in a rampart. Then it wiggled a little between the compressed block of newsprint above it and the second row of cans below. Wiggled, slid, and came loose.

  Still on her knees, bracing the can between her thighs, Micky pried at the stubborn lid. Over the years, the plastic had pressure bonded to the aluminum. Micky clawed in frustration, but at last tore it off.

  At least a hundred small pale crescents, varying in color from white to dirty yellow, spilled out of the can, onto the floor at her knees, before she corrected its tilt. Thousands of little quarter-moons filled the container, and Micky stared in bafflement for a second, not because she failed to identify the contents, but because she couldn’t wrap her mind around the scope of Teelroy’s obsessive hoarding. Fingernail and toenail clippings: years’ worth.

  Not all had come from the same two hands. Some were smaller than others and bright with nail polish: a woman’s trimmings. Maybe the whole family had contributed in years past when there had been more people living here than just poor Leonard with his needful, desperate eyes. Multigenerational obsession.

  She set the can aside, worked loose another one. Too light. Not likely to contain anything of use to her. She clawed it open anyway.

  Hair. Oily hair clippings.

  When Micky popped the lid off a third can, a clean calcium scent wafted up, a sort of seashell smell. Peering inside, she cried out and let the container drop from between her thighs.

  The can rolled across the floor, spilling the tiny white skeletons of six or eight birds, all as fragile as sugar lace. They were too small to have been anything but canaries or parakeets. The Teelroys evidently had kept parakeets, and every time one of their little birds had died, they had somehow separated feathers and flesh from the bones, saving those blanched and brittle remains for…For what? Sentimental reasons? The papery bones crumbled as the skeletons rattled across the floor, and the skulls, none bigger than a cherry tomato, bounced and tumbled and rattled like misshapen dice.

  Maybe she had too quickly dismissed the idea that she was dead and in Hell. This place had surely been a hell of sorts for Leonard Teelroy and evidently for other Teelroys before him.

  These coffee cans weren’t going to yield anything of use.

  This foul room didn’t contain a clock, but she could hear one ticking nonetheless, counting down to Preston Maddoc’s return.

  CLUTCHING the rain-soaked journal, Polly reached the Fleetwood, opened the door, climbed inside, paused on the steps, turned to urge Leilani to hurry—and saw that the girl had vanished.

  Having disconnected the utility hookups, Curtis appeared around the front of the motor home just as Cass, ensconced in the driver’s seat, started the engine.

  “Trouble!” Polly shouted, tossing the journal into the lounge and then plunging out of the Fleetwood, once more into the downpour.

  She surveyed the rain-washed campgrounds, numb with disbelief. The girl had been right behind her. Polly had looked back, and the girl had been trailing by no more than fifteen feet, and Polly had sprinted the rest of the way to the Fleetwood in maybe five seconds, for God’s sake; and yet the girl was gone.

  THE WINDSHIELD WIPERS were barely able to cope with the torrents that streamed down the glass, but Noah piloted his rental car through the campgrounds and located site 62 with little difficulty, though he wondered if he should have made arrangements for an ark instead of a coupe.

  He gaped in amazement at Maddoc’s motor home, a behemoth that appeared to be almost as big as the average roadside diner. It rose in the deluge as a galleon might loom out of the mists on a storm-tossed sea, and Noah’s Mazda seemed like a rowboat riding a deep trough windward of the great ship’s starboard hull.

  His intention had been to scout site 62 and find a place from which he could maintain surveillance on it at least for fifteen or twenty minutes, until he had gained a better sense of the situation. That plan had to be discarded, however, when he saw that the door to the Prevost stood wide open in the tempest.

  The wind pinned the door against the wall of the vehicle. Rain slashed into the cockpit, and during the minute that Noah watched, no one appeared to close up.

  Something was wrong.

  LIGHTNING BARED its bright teeth in the sky, and its reflection gnashed in the mirrored blacktop surface of the county road.

  Nun’s Lake lay two miles behind Preston, the farmhouse just a mile ahead.

  In spite of having been washed thoroughly by the rain, he felt dirty. The desperate nature of the moment had required that he touch the Hand, including the most deformed parts of her, without a chance to pull on a pair of gloves.

  Unless he could find work gloves at the Teelroy house, he would have to touch her again, more than once, before the afternoon drew to a close, if only to carry h
er into the filthy heart of the living-room portion of the maze, where he had left the Slut Queen. There, he would secure her to the armchair, which would allow her a front-row seat for the murder of her friend.

  She herself would die in that armchair, after he had indulged the brute within and had done a satisfying number of hurtful things to her. He had been born for this, and so had she. Both of them were broken spokes in the dumb grinding wheel of nature.

  Those tortures could be conducted without touching the Hand directly, using imaginative instruments. Therefore, the moment that he had secured her, he would vigorously wash his hands with a strong soap and lots of water nearly hot enough to scald. He would feel clean then, and the coiling nausea in his stomach would relent, and he would be able to enjoy his necessary work.

  He worried at the possibility that the Toad might not have soap, and then he let out a short sharp bark of laughter. Even as slovenly as that bearded geek had been, it was more likely that he would have thousands of slivers of soap-bar remains, carefully stored and maybe even cataloged, than that he would have no soap at all.

  Slowly regaining consciousness, the Hand groaned softly on the seat beside him. She was sitting up, restrained by the belt, her head slumped against the window in the passenger’s door.

  The plastic Hefty OneZip bag lay on the console, folded but not sealed. Driving with one hand, he fished the anesthetic-saturated washcloth out of the bag and spread it over the girl’s face.

  He didn’t want to apply it continuously, for fear of killing her too soon and too mercifully.

  Her groaning subsided to an anxious murmur, and her hideous hand stopped twitching in her lap, but she didn’t grow as still as she had been previously. Once exposed to the air, the homemade anesthetic in the cloth had begun to evaporate, and the rain had further diluted the chemical, even though he had quickly returned the cloth to the bag after initially felling her with the fumes.