by Dean Koontz
Such a period of unconsciousness suggested a serious knock on the head, the danger of concussion. She did not feel concussed—no dizziness, no blurred vision, no nausea—and when she explored her skull with her fingertips, she found no tender spot.
Brooding about what had happened, she rinsed the drinking glass and dried it with paper towels. She returned it to the drawer from which she had gotten it earlier.
As she threw the paper towels and the length of floss in the small trash can, her tongue found the hole from which the first molar on the lower left side had been extracted a month earlier. She knew at once a possible explanation for the man in the mirror and the exploding glass.
The oral surgery had taken a few hours because every speck of the fused roots of the broken-off tooth had to be drilled out of the jawbone. Her periodontist, Dr. Westlake, prescribed Vicodin for the post-operative pain, which was sharp and persistent. Nicky took the drug only twice before experiencing a serious adverse effect, a rare idiosyncratic reaction: frightening hallucinations.
Those visions were different in substance but akin in feeling to the apparition in the mirror. She had not taken Vicodin in twenty-six days, but it must somehow be the culprit in this case.
She would have to call Dr. Westlake to inquire if a flashback hallucination was possible after so much time. She knew that some drugs remained in the body, at least in trace amounts, weeks after being taken. Such a possibility disquieted her.
In the library, Zach and Naomi and Minnie sat at different tables, and Leonid Sinyavski cycled from one to the other, providing different levels of instruction, yet making them feel as though they were a class of equals.
Math was a sport to Zachary. The problems were games to be won. And good math skills would be crucial if he became a marine sniper targeting bad guys at two thousand yards. Even if he didn’t qualify for sniper training or if he decided against it, military strategy was intellectually demanding, and knowledge of higher mathematics would always be super-useful no matter what his specialty.
He liked Professor Sinyavski: the cartoony white hair bristling every which way, those bizarro eyebrows like huge furry caterpillars predicting a hard winter, the rubbery face and the exaggerated expressions meant to drive a point home, the way he made you feel smart even when you were stuck in stupid. But this time Zach couldn’t concentrate on geometry. He wished away the two-hour session with such intensity that of course it crawled past like twenty hours.
All that he could think about was the encounter in the service mezzanine. The bent shank of the fork. The braided tines. The low, hoarse whisper: I know you, boy, I know you now.
The incident either happened or it didn’t.
If it happened, some godawful supernatural presence lurked in the mezzanine. No real person could be stabbed and not bleed. No real person could twist the stainless-steel prongs of a big old meat fork as if they were blades of grass.
If it didn’t happen, then Zach must be mentally ill.
He didn’t believe he could be flat-out insane. He didn’t wear an aluminum-foil hat to prevent telepathic aliens from reading his thoughts, he didn’t eat live bugs—or dead ones, either—and he didn’t think God was talking to him and telling him to kill everyone he saw who wore blue socks or something. At worst, he might be having delusions, moments of delirium, like because of some stupid blood-chemistry imbalance. If that was true, he wasn’t really even halfway nuts, he was just the screwed-up victim of a medical condition, and no danger to anyone except maybe to himself.
The damaged meat fork seemed to disprove the delusion theory. Unless he imagined the fork along with everything else.
To accept the supernatural explanation would be to acknowledge that there were things you couldn’t deal with no matter how strong and smart and brave and well-trained in the art of self-defense you might become. Zach loathed admitting such a thing.
But to accept the mental-illness explanation, he would have to admit a similar and even more distressing fact: that no matter how smart and courageous and well-intentioned you were, there was always a chance that you would not become the person you envisioned yourself being, because your own mind or body could fail you.
In either case, a supernatural invasion of the service mezzanine or some half-assed madness, sooner or later he would need to have a conversation with his parents about the situation, which was dead sure to be almost as just-kill-me-now mortifying as the conversation he had with his dad about sex a year or so previously.
Before he sat down with his folks to reveal that he was either a superstitious idiot or a foaming-at-the-mouth lunatic in the making, Zach wanted to think further about what had happened. Maybe he would arrive at a third explanation that would obviously be the correct one and that would spare him embarrassment.
To make a point, Professor Sinyavski pulled a small red ball from Minnie’s left ear, turned it into a trio of green balls in front of their eyes, and juggled the three until somehow they all became yellow without anyone noticing when it happened.
To Zachary, this kind of prestidigitation no longer qualified as magic. His world had changed a little while earlier; and now reality encompassed things that once seemed impossible.
Naomi doubted that any human being really understood math, they simply all pretended to have it down pat, when in truth they were every bit as confused by it as she was. Math was nothing but a giant hoax, and everyone participated in it, everyone faked a belief in math so they could be done with the hideous classes and the drudgery of the hateful homework and get on with life. The sun came up every morning, so the sun was real, and every time you inhaled you got the air you needed, so the atmosphere was obviously real, but half the time when you tried to use math to solve the simplest problem, the math absolutely would not work, which meant that it couldn’t be real like the sun and the atmosphere. Math was a waste of time.
Not only was math a waste of time, it was also immensely boring, so she pretended to understand what dear Professor Sinyavski prattled on about, and she pretended actually to listen to the sweet man. Mostly she had him bamboozled, which suggested a future as an actress might indeed be in her cards. While she handily deceived the genius Russian into believing he had her attention, Naomi actually thought about the enchanted mirror they had secreted in the storage room, and she wondered if they had been too hasty about removing it from their bedroom.
I know you now, my ignorant little bitch.
In memory, as clear as anything on a CD, she could hear the creepy voice that had spoken to her and to her alone, and it still scared her. But she realized now that she should not have judged the nature of the entire vast and fabulous land beyond the mirror from evidence consisting of merely eight words spoken by a perhaps evil but certainly rude individual. There were many rude people on this side of the looking glass, too, and evil ones, but this entire world wasn’t rude and evil. If a magic kingdom truly waited beyond the mirror—a real magic kingdom, not just another Disney World—it would be populated by all kinds of people, good and bad. She had probably heard the voice of a wicked wizard, perhaps the sworn archenemy of the kingdom’s good and noble prince, in which case he had probably spoken to her with the sole intention of scaring her off, chasing her away from the prince, who needed her at his side, and from her glorious destiny.
For more years than she could remember, for eons, Naomi dreamed of finding a doorway to a more magical world than this one, and now that she finally discovered precisely such a portal, she allowed a typical eight-year-old booby with a still-developing brain to spook her from pursuing the adventure for which she’d been born. You had to be so careful with peewee siblings. In spite of their laughable big-baby ways, they could be so convincing that they infected you with fraidy-cat flu before you realized it was contagious.
Later, this evening, after Minnie went to sleep and could no longer spread her plague of panic, Naomi would return to the storage room to investigate the mirror further. She wouldn’t try to step into it or
reach through it. She wouldn’t even touch it. But she owed it to herself, to her future, to see if she could contact the prince who might wait for her in the world beyond. The wizard—or whatever he might be—had essentially phoned her through the mirror, and she had received his call. Maybe if she placed the call, if she faced the mirror and asked for the prince, for the rightful ruler of that land, he would speak to her, and her life of great magic would begin.
Minnie could see that Naomi schemed at something. She could tell that Zach worried about something.
Some kind of big trouble was coming. Minnie wished that good old Willard, the best dog ever, were still alive.
26
THE INTERIOR OF THE LUCAS RESIDENCE SEEMED LESS BRIGHT than it should have been, as though the sin of murder so thickened the air that sunshine could pierce only inches past the windowpanes.
Room by room, John turned on every light for which he could find a wall switch. He could not bear to tour the house in shadows again.
The living room, converted to a bedroom for wheelchair-bound Sandra, had not interested him before because no one had been killed there. Now he circled through it in search of items that might have been purchased at Piper’s Gallery, and he found them everywhere.
On her nightstand stood a crystal cat. In a semicircle around the animal were three green candles of a kind sold by Annalena.
The nightstand drawer contained a dozen bottles of various herbs in capsule form. There were sticks of incense, a porcelain holder in which to fix them, and a box of wooden matches.
John saw the corner of something dark protruding from between Sandra’s two bed pillows. A red sachet plump with a perfumed cloth.
He assumed the sachet would smell sweet, but the scent proved to be faint and vaguely unpleasant. He could not identify the fragrance, and the more often that he held it to his nose to inhale, the more his stomach turned with incipient nausea.
Bookshelves surrounded a fireplace above which a flat-screen TV was mounted. Instead of books, the shelves held crystal cats of different kinds, crystal spheres and obelisks.
The Lucases owned two real cats that had fled the murder house on the night: British spotted shorthairs named Posh and Fluff.
On an end table stood a geode, its hard black crust filled with red crystal spears. In the shop, it would have dazzled, but here it looked like a snarling maw bristling with hundreds of bloody teeth.
What had sparkled in the Fourth Avenue store instead darkled in this house. What had been cheerful there had here become cheerless.
Across the width of the mantel were clear-glass cups holding fat candles, most of them green, a few blue, and one black.
Elsewhere on the ground floor, he found Piper’s Gallery items in the kitchen. A pantry shelf crammed full of double-stacked jars of exotic dried herbs. A crystal sphere on a redwood stand at the center of the dinette table, three half-melted candles encircling it.
In the study, where Robert Lucas was murdered with a hammer, there were no candles or crystal pieces, nothing from the gallery.
Upstairs, the grandmother’s room was also free of Annalena’s merchandise.
John dreaded returning to Celine’s room, where to his mind’s ear the bed was as saturated with screams as with blood. But he needed to know if she possessed items from Piper’s Gallery. He would have overlooked them on his previous visit, unaware that they might be significant.
He found nothing, and he was further convinced that the calla lilies had been left there by Billy after he rang them over his sister’s corpse. Celine was his fourth and final victim.
In Billy’s room, among the shelves of paperbacks nestled a pair of crystal lizards—one green, one clear—and a blue obelisk. On his nightstand a volcanic-rock geode featured deposited purple crystals of amethyst. A pair of three-inch-diameter scented blue candles in glass holders stood on his desk.
None of those things had seemed significant before. Now they intrigued John.
Apparently only the disabled mother, Sandra, and her son—who supposedly adored her—had bought in to Annalena’s theory of natural therapies that would help them to “prosper in all ways.”
This mattered, but John could see no reason that it should. He sensed that these objects had not brought the Lucases into greater harmony with nature but, to the contrary, had in some mysterious way endangered them. If he could discover why that was true, he would better understand the threat to Nicky and the kids, and he would have more hope of protecting them. His intuition told him as much, and intuition never failed him.
Throughout this second search of the house, he half expected to hear the silvery ringing of the calla-lily bells. The sound did not arise, perhaps because the entity that came with him from the state hospital the previous day was no longer his fellow traveler, but waited for him at home.
As John pored through the boy’s desk drawers again, a voice that was not otherworldly said, “Breaking and entering, Calvino?”
27
KEN SHARP WAS ONE OF THE DETECTIVES WHO HAD CAUGHT the Lucas call. The case belonged to him and his partner, Sam Tanner, and of everyone in Robbery-Homicide, they were the most jealous of their turf.
When Sharp entered Billy’s room, he seemed less puzzled than offended. Head shaved to hide creeping baldness, eyes set deep, nose hawkish, having a tendency to flush with impatience as readily as with rage, he possessed a face better suited to intimidating scowls than to smiles of friendship.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked.
“A neighbor had a key.”
“That’s how you got in. I’m wondering why?”
Twenty years earlier, the police and the courts protected John from reporters who were in those days marginally more responsible and less invasive than the aggressively sensational crew currently running the media circus. His role in Blackwood’s death was more suggested than described, and his status as a juvenile ensured his privacy. In the wake of his loss, he was allowed to fade into his grief and guilt, and the orphanage became a wall between his future and that night of horror. Even when he went to the police academy, the background report on him reached no further into the past than to his departure from St. Christopher’s Home and School at the age of seventeen years six months, where his record had been exemplary both in terms of academic achievement and discipline.
If they knew his full story, some would suggest that his ordeal might make him psychologically unfit to be a homicide detective. Was not his choice of this career an indication of an obsessive focus on his loss? Did it not suggest in his pursuit of every murderer that he might be seeking symbolic revenge for the slaughter of his family? And in that case, could he be trusted to treat every suspect with a presumption of innocence, or was he likely to abuse his power as an officer of the law?
The moment he revealed the events of that long-ago night, his life and the lives of his wife and children would change. His ability to function as a detective would be diminished, might even be more profoundly affected than he believed, in ways he could not predict. And of all the people in Robbery-Homicide, Ken Sharp was the least likely to treat John’s revelations with discretion.
Sitting on the edge of the desk, his mood far less casual than his posture suggested, Sharp said, “And just minutes ago I heard you’ve been up to the state hospital twice to see the butcher boy. You told them you were assigned to the case.”
That was a harder blow to John’s credibility than being caught searching Billy’s desk.
“No. I didn’t tell them I was the go-to guy. I will admit … I let them make that assumption.”
“You did, huh? Why the hell did you, John?”
Sooner rather than later, he would have to tell someone about the eerie similarities between the murders of the Valdane family two decades earlier and the recent massacre of the Lucases. He was morally bound to warn that the crimes of Alton Turner Blackwood were perhaps being imitated half a continent away from the place where they were once committed. He didn’t k
now how he could deliver that warning without mentioning his suspicion that this case had a supernatural dimension, an assertion that might require him to be suspended and to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
Sharp’s face looked boiled. “An orderly up there says maybe you think Billy’s innocent, you think he’s some kind of victim himself.”
“No. That’s wrong. I know he did it. But it’s not that simple.”
“Hey, pal, it’s as goddamn simple as anything gets. He’s naked on the front porch, drenched in blood. He says he did them all. His prints are on every weapon. The lab says his semen was in the sister. What you’ve got here is you’ve got the definition of an open-and-shut case.”
This was neither the time at which nor the audience to which John would have chosen to make his revelations, but he could not avoid telling at least some of his story to Sharp.
Rolling shut the desk drawer he had been searching, switching on Billy’s computer, he said, “I have reason to believe the killer—the boy—intended to murder more families than his own.”
“That would be a noisemaker if it’s true. What reason?”
“First, I want you to understand why I poached your case. My own family is one of the others he intended to kill.”
John did not look up from the computer to see Sharp’s reaction, but he heard both surprise and skepticism in the man’s voice.
“Your family? How’s he know your family? He never said anything about whacking a cop’s family.”
“There’s a document on this computer,” John said, “photos of my wife and kids. It’s the start of a murder scrapbook.”
On the computer were two documents of interest—CALVINO1 and CALVINO2—the first of which would crack the lock on John’s past whether he wanted that door flung open or not. He could see no way to show Ken Sharp the second document but not the first.
