One Door Away From Heaven

by Dean Koontz

  Repeatedly, he checked the rearview mirror, expecting to see the shimmer of headlights through the silver skeins of rain.

  He remained confident that the storm had adequately screened him from observers when he had captured the Hand. Even if other campers, at their windows, had been able to glimpse anything of significance in the bleak light and the occluding cloudburst, they would be likely to interpret what they’d seen as nothing more sinister than a father scooping up his errant child and carrying her through thunderclaps and thunderbolts to safety.

  As for the two women and the boy from that Fleetwood, he had no clue who they were or what they had been doing in his motor home. He doubted that they were associates of the Slut Queen, because if she’d come to Nun’s Lake with backup, she probably wouldn’t have stationed herself alone in the woods to watch the farmhouse.

  Whoever they were, they could not have gotten past the alarm system unless the Black Hole had let them inside. When Preston had left for the Teelroy farm, he’d told the stupid bitch to keep the Fair Wind buttoned up tight. In the past, she’d always done what he required of her. That was the deal. She knew the deal well, all the paragraphs and subparagraphs and clauses, knew it as well as if it actually existed in a written form that she could study. It was a good deal for her, a dream contract, providing a fortune in drugs and a quality of life she couldn’t otherwise have known, guaranteeing the aggressive and unrelenting dissolution for which she hungered. In spite of how crazy she was—crazy and venal and sick—she’d always upheld her end of the bargain.

  Occasionally, of course, the Hole stuffed herself with so many contraindicated chemicals that she didn’t remember the deal any more than she remembered who she was. Those depths of indulgence rarely occurred this early in the day, but nearly always at night, when he usually arranged to be present to manage her with a whiff of this same homemade anesthetic if she could not be calmed by words or by a little physical force.

  He removed the cloth from the girl’s face and threw it on the floor instead of bothering to return it to the plastic bag. She still groaned and rolled her head against the back of the seat, but the job was done: They had reached the turnoff to the Teelroy farm.

  THE DRIVING WIND gave way to hard shifting gusts that blew from more than one point of the compass, causing the door to rattle and bang against the side of the big Prevost, but still no one rushed to secure it.

  Drenched during the few seconds that he was exposed while racing from the car to the motor home, Noah Farrel entered cautiously but without pausing to knock. He ascended the steps, stood beside the co-pilot’s seat. He listened to the door thumping behind him and to the mad drumming of the rain on the metal roof, seeking other sounds that might help him to analyze the situation, hearing nothing useful.

  An unfolded sofabed occupied most of the lounge. One lamp cast light down upon three hula dolls, two motionless and one rotating its hips, and sprayed light up on a dreamily smiling painted face that filled most of the ceiling.

  Disregarding the daylight, which settled as gray as a coat of wet ashes on the windows, the only additional illumination issued from the rear of the vehicle, past the open door to the bedroom. The light back there was subdued and red.

  Saturday afternoon, when he’d left Geneva Davis’s place to do some final research on Maddoc and to pack a suitcase, and again this morning during his flight to Coeur d’Alene and then during his drive to Nun’s Lake, Noah mulled over numerous approaches to the problem, each depending on different circumstances that he might encounter when he arrived here. None of his scenarios included this situation, however, and after all his mulling, he was forced to wing it.

  The first choice was whether to proceed silently or to announce his presence. He decided on the latter course. Affecting a jolly-fellow-camper voice, he called out, “Hello! Anybody home?” And when he got no reply, he eased past the sofabed, toward the galley. “Saw your door open in the rain. Thought something was wrong.”

  More hula dolls on the dining-nook table. On the galley counter.

  He glanced toward the front of the Prevost. No one had entered behind him.

  Lightning flared repeatedly, and every window flickered like a television screen afflicted by inconstant reception. Ghostly faces, formed of shadows, swarmed the rain-smeared panes and peered into the motor home as though spirits strove to channel themselves from their plane of existence to this one through the transmitting power of the storm. Thunder boomed, and after the last peal had tolled to the far end of the sky, a tinny vibration lingered in the metal shell of the motor home, like the faint screaky voices of haunting entities.

  Proceeding toward the back, he called out once more, “You okay, neighbor? Does anybody need help here?”

  In the bathroom, hula dolls flanked the sink.

  At the open bedroom door, Noah hesitated. He called out again, but received no answer.

  He stepped across the threshold, out of the shadowy bath, into the crimson glow, which had been achieved by draping the lamps with red blouses.

  Beside the rumpled bed, she waited, standing straight, head held high on a graceful neck, as though she were a titled lady who’d risen to grant an audience to an inferior. She wore a brightly patterned sarong. Her hair appeared windblown, but she had not been out in the storm, for she was dry.

  Her bare arms hung slackly at her sides, and although her face was a mask of serenity, like the peaceful countenance of a Buddhist meditating, her eyes were as twitchy as those of a rabid animal. He’d seen this contrast before, and often in his youth. Though she didn’t appear to be amped out on meth, she was operating on a substance more potent than caffeine.

  “Are you Hawaiian?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Why the shirt?”

  “Comfort,” he said.

  “Are you Lukipela?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Did they beam you up?”

  On his long trip to Nun’s Lake, during all his planning, Noah had not anticipated, under any circumstances, that he would boldly reveal his intentions either to this woman or to Preston Maddoc. But Sinsemilla—easily identifiable from Geneva’s description—reminded him of Wendy Quail, the nurse who had killed Laura. Sinsemilla didn’t resemble Quail, but in her serene face and her bird-bright busy eyes, he detected a smugness, a self-satisfaction, a self-adoration that the nurse, too, had worn as though it were the aura of a saint. Her attitude, the atmosphere in this place, the sound of the front door banging in the wind, cranked up the heat under the stew pot of his instinct, and he suspected that Micky and Leilani were someplace beyond mere trouble. He said, “Where’s your daughter?”

  She took a step toward him, swayed, stopped. “Luki baby, your mommy’s glad you got healed all righteous and then got fast-grown into a whole new incarnation, been out there to the stars and seen cool stuff. Mommy’s glad, but it scares her, you comin’ back here like this.”

  “Where’s Leilani,” he persisted.

  “See, Mommy’s got new babies comin’, pretty babies different only in their heads, not like you used to be different, all screwed up in your hips. Mommy’s movin’ on, Luki baby, Mommy’s movin’ on and don’t want her new pretty babies hangin’ with her old gnarly babies.”

  “Has Maddoc taken her somewhere?”

  “Maybe you been to Jupiter and got healed up, but you still got the gnarly inside you, the little crip you used to be is still like a worm inside your spirit, and my new pretty babies will see all the sad gnarly in you ’cause they’re gonna be true wizard babies, got themselves total psychic powers.”

  Until now loosely cupped at her side, Sinsemilla’s right hand tightened into a fist, and Noah knew that she held a weapon.

  When he backed off a step, she rushed him. Her right arm came up, and she slashed at his face with what might have been a scalpel.

  Past his eyes the keen blade arced, glimmering with red light, two inches short of a blinding cut.

  He leaned away
from the attack, then came in under it and seized her right wrist.

  The scalpel in her left hand, unanticipated, punctured his right shoulder, which was a stroke of luck, pure good luck. She could have slashed instead of jabbed, opening his throat and one or both of his carotid arteries.

  The wound registered more as pressure than as pain. Rather than struggle to disarm her, when suddenly she was spitting and screaming like a Tasmanian devil, he kicked her legs out from under her and simultaneously pushed her backward.

  As she fell away, she held fast to the scalpel with which she’d scored, yanking it out of him. That was all pain, no pressure.

  She landed on the bed and virtually bounced to her feet, not with any grace, but with the jerky energy of a jack-inthe-box.

  Noah drew the snub-nosed .38 out of the belt-clipped holster in the small of his back, from beneath his shirt. Loath to use the revolver, he was even less enthusiastic about being carved like Christmas turkey.

  He expected only more of what she’d given him thus far, more irrational ranting and an even more determined effort to remake his face and anatomy, but she surprised him by tossing aside the blades and turning away from him. She went to the dresser, and he stepped farther into the room rather than retreat from it, because he feared that she was going for a handgun. She came up with bottles of pills instead, muttering over them, letting some drop out of her hands, throwing others aside angrily, ransacking the drawer for still more bottles, until at last she found what she wanted.

  As though she had forgotten Noah, she returned to the bed and settled down on the tossed sheets, amid the torn and crumpled pages of a book. She crossed her legs and sat like a young girl waiting for her friends to arrive for a pajama party, tossed her head, and laughed insouciantly. As she popped open the bottle of pills, she chanted in a singsong voice: “I am a sly cat, I am a summer wind, I am birds in flight, I am the sun, I am the sea, I am me!” With one of the wanted pills in hand, she allowed the others to spill among the bedclothes. At last looking up at Noah, she said, “Go, go, Luki baby, you don’t have a place here anymore.” And then, as if never she had drawn his blood, she began to rock her head back and forth, shaking her tangled locks, and she sang again: “I am a sly cat, I am a summer wind, I am birds in flight….”

  Noah retreated, backing across the bathroom, keeping a watch on the red-lit bedroom, holding fast to the gun in his right hand, using his left hand to test the wound in his shoulder. The pain was sharp but not intolerable, and though blood had spread across the front of his shirt, the bleeding wasn’t arterial. She hadn’t severed any major blood vessels or punctured a vital organ. His biggest problem would be the risk of infection—assuming he got out of here alive.

  As Noah backed into the galley, the woman continued her singsong chant, celebrating her wonderfulness, which reassured him that she remained on the bed where he had left her.

  When he reached the dinette, Noah turned, intending to flee with no regard for pride.

  A young boy, a statuesque blonde, and a dog stood in the lounge, and as much as that sounded like the opening line of one of those a-priest-a-rabbi-and-a-minister jokes, Noah didn’t have a smile in him. The boy had freckles, the blonde had a 9-mm pistol, and the dog had a bushy tail that, after a moment, began to wag so vigorously that its burden of rain spattered opposite walls of the motor home.

  ETERNALLY WAITING Indians, guardians without power, watched him bring the Hand into the house. He dumped her on the hall floor at the entrance to the maze.

  The door had bounced open when he kicked it shut after himself. He closed it and engaged the lock.

  With his hands, he pressed some of the water out of his hair, slicking it back from his face.

  The girl lay in a sopping mound. The shiny braced leg stuck out at a severe angle from the shapeless rest of her. The runt hadn’t fully regained consciousness. She muttered and sighed—and belched, which disgusted Preston no less than if she’d urinated on herself.

  He could feel the microscopic filth of this useless little cripple crawling on his hands, squirming in the webs of his fingers.

  Reluctantly, carrying her in from the Durango, he had reached the conclusion that he wasn’t going to be able to spend the time with her that he had allotted. The women and the boy in the Fleetwood were a wild card. He could no longer assume that he would have a long period of privacy here in the Mad Kingdom of Teelroy.

  Now he would have to kill the Slut Queen with less finesse than planned. He no longer had the leisure for exquisitely protracted violence. In front of the girl, he would finish her friend as quickly as he might crush the skull of a rat with a shovel.

  The runt would try to avoid watching. Therefore, in addition to binding her to the armchair, he would have to fix her head immovable and tape open her eyes.

  Preston could risk a few minutes, only a very few, to torment the girl. Then he would leave her bound and would set fire to the maze as he backed out of the hub where she would be left to die with the TV off. No episode of Touched by an Angel to buck her up in her last minutes.

  As he left, he would tell her how her brother suffered. He’d ask her where her loving God was now when she needed Him, ask her whether God was maybe off playing golf with angels or taking a snooze. Leave her to the smoke and the flames. Leave her screaming with no one to hear but cigar-store Indians.

  Over the years, assisting unto death many who were suicidal and some who were not, he had discovered first that a brute in him took pleasure in extreme violence, and second that killing the young was more thrilling than dispatching the old. Nursing homes were drab playgrounds compared to nurseries. He didn’t know why this should be so; he only knew that it was true. True for him, and thus as true as anything could be. Objective truths don’t exist, after all, only personal ones. As most ethicists agree, no philosophy is superior to that of any other. Morality is not simply relative. Morality doesn’t exist. Experience is relative, and you cannot judge the choice of experiences that others undertake if you have chosen a different path through life. You approve my pleasure in killing the young, and I’ll politely grant you the validity of your peculiar passion for bowling.

  He would not have the private hours with the Hand that he had so long anticipated, which was a grievous disappointment, although a disappointment that he could bear in light of the Hole’s pregnancy and considering the likelihood that she was carrying two, three, or even additional brats more twisted than the Hand and the Gimp, all needing more from the world than they could ever hope to give back. For the coming year, his work had been secured, his entertainment brilliantly arranged; and bliss would be his.

  The Hand blinked blearily, regaining consciousness. While the girl remained groggy and disoriented, Preston steeled himself for the unpleasant task of carrying her to the hub of the living-room maze. He touched the runt, shuddered, plucked her off the floor, and bore her into the labyrinth, through the lobes and the binding corpus callosum of the Teelroy family’s group brain as modeled here in trash and mold and mouse droppings.

  Where the TV stood and the armchair waited, the floor appeared to have been the site of a voodoo ceremony: bird bones scattered in what might have been a meaningful pattern before it had been kicked apart; distributions of human hair; fingernail and toenail clippings cast like bridal rice over all else.

  The Slut Queen was gone.

  Tied securely, left unconscious, alone for only the twenty minutes—twenty minutes!—that Preston required to drive into Nun’s Lake and return with the Hand, this vodka-sucking wad of human debris had nevertheless managed to screw things up. But then screwing things up was the only talent her useless kind possessed.

  She couldn’t have gone far. Her car still stood in the driveway, and the keys jingled softly in Preston’s pocket. She probably lay nearby in the maze, still bound and unable to move fast.

  He deposited the Hand in the armchair. Cringing with disgust, he uncoupled her brace and stripped it off her leg. If she regained her w
its before he returned, she wouldn’t be able to move any faster than the Slut Queen.

  Preston took the brace away with him. It made a good club.

  AN INDIAN in a red-and-white headdress, standing proud between towering stacks of The Saturday Evening Post, offered no cigars, but brandished a tomahawk.

  Clutching at the Indian, Micky pulled herself to her feet. Her ankles were so tightly bound, with less than two inches of play in the cord between them, that she could shuffle each foot no more than a fraction of an inch at a time. But she didn’t have far to go.

  Directly across the passageway from the chief, a bay in the maze wall featured a two-foot-diameter round table on which stood a lamp with a bell-shaped yellow glass shade. An ornate bronze finial in the form of a smiling cherub’s head fixed the shade to the lamp rod. Being not merely shackled and fettered, but also hogtied, Micky initially intended to set the lamp carefully on the floor, where she could more easily work with it. On second thought, she knocked it off the table with a sweep of her arm.

  The shade smashed, and the bulb, as well, casting this length of the labyrinth into deeper gloom. Shards of glass clinked and rattled as they spun across the floor.

  For a moment, Micky froze, listening intently. The breaking lamp had been unnervingly loud in the tomb-still house. She half expected to hear heavy and ominous footsteps, to be set upon by a mazekeeper straight out of Tales from the Crypt, a livid-eyed undead bureaucrat dressed in ragged gravecloth and displeased about being interrupted in its dinner of dead beetles. But if a mazekeeper arrived, he would exceed in grisliness the darkest imaginative efforts of those writers who created the Crypt, for he would be Preston Maddoc, not shudder-evoking in appearance, but harboring the father of all monsters under his skin.

  She stooped in the shadows, cautiously explored the floor, found a few large shards, gingerly tested them against her thumb, and found one sharp enough. When she sat on the table, it held her weight.