by Dean Koontz
Although the day was windless, the roses shuddered, as if the thorny vines winding through the crisscrossed lattice were trying to pull loose and reach for her.
Inside the arbor, with the roses trembling and petals falling, Minnie felt the watcher brush past her, and by that contact she knew that it called itself Ruin. This seemed to be a peculiar name, yet she was certain that it was the right one. Ruin.
For as long as Minette could remember, she had from time to time felt unseen presences that other people didn’t feel. Occasionally she got a glimpse of them. Presences. Spirits. People who weren’t alive anymore.
They weren’t always where you expected them to be. They didn’t hang around graveyards.
Two of them were in a convenience store where Mom stopped now and then. Minnie could feel both of them. She had seen one, a man with part of his face shot off. Something bad happened in the store a long time ago.
Minnie usually stayed in the car.
When she was little, the presences sometimes scared her. But she learned that they were all right if you just ignored them.
If you stared at them too long or if you spoke to them, that was an invitation. If you didn’t invite them, you could go months and months without seeing one.
Ruin was the first in years that kind of scared her. Ruin was different somehow.
She was usually alone when she became aware of Ruin watching, but sometimes it watched all of them when they were having dinner or playing games. That was the worst.
Although aware of the presences when they were near, Minnie never knew what they wanted, what they might be thinking or feeling, if they thought or felt anything at all.
In the case of Ruin, however, especially when it watched all of them, she knew exactly what it was feeling. Hatred. Hatred and rage.
Anyway, Ruin was a ghost or some kind of spirit new to her, new but nonetheless a spirit, and spirits could not harm her or anyone else. If she ignored it, if she did nothing to invite it, then it would have to go away.
After math with old Professor Sinyavski, in the late afternoon of the day Zach had encountered something in the service mezzanine that tested his sphincter control—I know you, boy, I know you now—he returned to his room and discovered that the stupid meat fork, which he had hidden under some stuff in a bottom desk drawer, had been restored. Presto! The previously wrecked shank was no longer bent. The tines were straight, not twined together. The polished steel bore no indications of ever having been stressed.
This suggested that of the two explanations for the incident—either supernatural or delusional—the latter was more likely. Nuts. He was nuts. Loony, loco, crackers, screwy, one shoe short of a pair.
Maybe for his own good, he should sign himself into a monkey house, wear one of those monkey jackets with the long sleeves that tied behind your back, and be entertained by stupid freaking monkey thoughts swinging through his empty skull.
Or not.
Being able to consider the idea that he might be insane pretty much ruled out madness. Raving lunatics never wondered if they were lunatics; they believed the other six billion people in the world were lunatics and that they themselves were pillars of reason.
Instead of convincing Zach that what happened in the service mezzanine must have been a delusion, the restored fork ticked him off and made him more determined than ever to learn the truth about what was happening in this house. He knew when he was being jacked around. He wasn’t a dog so dumb that he didn’t see the leash. He wasn’t a naive idiot who would happily chow down on cow pies because someone told him they were chocolate cake.
With insanity off the table, one explanation remained: something supernatural. If a supernatural force could screw up the meat fork, then it was a no-brainer that the same supernatural force could make it right again.
Any alternate theory would now have to identify a human villain, some clown with a self-serving reason for replacing the twisted fork with an identical but undamaged utensil.
Zach gave himself a week to think and to see what might happen next. He thought, all right, but nothing happened. The trapdoor didn’t fall open by itself, and the ladder didn’t self-deploy. Every night, feeling like a wuss, he braced his closet door with a chair, but the knob never rattled and nothing in there turned on the light.
His parents were the high command, and he was a grunt. A grunt didn’t go to the high command with a wild story about a ghost in the service mezzanine unless he had the ghost in chains.
Zach gave himself another week. And then another.
He began to wonder if that one episode was going to be the whole of it. Some half-assed ghost rides in from the hereafter, plays with a stupid light switch and a trapdoor ladder, screws up a meat fork, fixes the fork, gets bored, and splits for some other ghost gig. That scenario seemed even more lame than the usual brain-dead horror movie full of boneheads doing every wrong thing to get themselves killed.
But if it was finished, that would be okay with Zach. He wanted to be a marine, not a ghostbuster.
Dr. Westlake doubted very much that Nicolette’s idiosyncratic adverse reaction to Vicodin could continue to manifest three and a half weeks after she took her last dose. But he wanted to research the issue and get back to her the next day.
She said nothing about the hallucination to John. She hoped to avoid worrying him.
The following day, when Dr. Westlake called, he all but ruled out the possibility that her latest experience could be related to Vicodin; however, he wanted her to have a complete blood workup, just as a precaution.
Nicky never fretted about anything. Brooding about possible calamities seemed to be ingratitude. Her life was bright with family and love, her paintings were acclaimed and sold for excellent prices, and in return her minimum obligation included being happy and giving thanks for her good fortune.
Always, even during darker times, she’d been cheerful, hopeful. Surely life was too short to waste any of it in the expectation of disaster. Even when Minnie had been ill and the malady difficult to diagnose, Nicolette prayed but didn’t dwell for a moment on darker possibilities, on any possibility except Minnie’s complete recovery.
She wasn’t a Pollyanna. She knew terrible things happened to the best of people, to people far better than she would ever be, even to people as good and as innocent as Minette. But she also knew that the power of the imagination could shape reality. Every day she made real on canvas the scenes that would be otherwise confined forever to her mind; therefore, it seemed a half step in logic to believe that the imagination might directly influence reality, without the physical intervention of the artist, that what was feared obsessively might manifest in the real world. Worry wasn’t worth the risk of worry’s possible consequences.
Returning to her painting with enthusiasm, she finished the triptych during the week she waited to learn the results of the blood workup. The painting turned out well, perhaps as good as anything she’d done to date, and the laboratory tests confirmed that she was in good health.
She started another picture. A second week passed, a third, and she experienced no more hallucinations. Happy with her work, Nicky became convinced that regardless of what Dr. Westlake said, the weird episode in the bathroom indeed had been related to Vicodin, one last spasm of its influence in her system, and that she would be troubled no further.
Although aware of a persistent tension in John, she had seen its like before. She assumed that when at last he nailed the killer of the schoolteacher and closed his current case, his stress would be relieved.
As September waned and then October dawned, the beautiful autumn revealed no blemish except for Nicky’s dream. She woke from it nearly every night, with no memory of its characters or story, yet certain that it was always the same dream. Because she never woke in fear and routinely returned to sleep without difficulty, she didn’t believe this dream qualified as a nightmare, but sometimes it left her with an unclean feeling so that she rose to wash her face and hands.
> She had a vague recollection of being the object of desire in the dream, of being wanted desperately by someone whom she did not want in return. The intensity and persistence of whoever wanted her and her unrelenting resistance left Nicky exhausted when she woke, which is perhaps why she never had trouble falling asleep again.
When he arrived home after relinquishing the key to the Lucas house, John learned from Walter Nash that the stench in the laundry room had relented as abruptly as it had arisen. “Doesn’t seem to be any reason to dismantle the dryer,” Walter said. “Whatever the stink was, it must not have been a decomposing rat. It’s a mystery for the moment, but I’ll keep thinking on it.”
Over dinner, Nicky and the kids seemed subdued, but John thought his own mental state must be the damper on the evening. Billy Lucas was gone and with him any hope that he might one day answer further questions. Worse, John was found in the Lucas house without a valid reason, and he revealed his concern that his family might be targeted for murder, a fear that must have appeared irrational to Ken Sharp. He could not predict how the day’s events would affect his ability to protect Nicky and the kids, but he knew his options would be fewer.
The following morning, he returned to work and to the case of Edward Hartman, the high-school teacher who had been beaten to death in his lakeside home. Lionel Timmins, the partner with whom he shared responsibility for the investigation, had been chasing leads during John’s two sick days; over coffee in an unused interrogation room, Lionel brought him up to date.
Timmins was black, fourteen years older than John, three inches shorter, forty pounds heavier, and so broad in the upper torso that some other cops called him the Walking Chest. He had been married, but his obsessive commitment to his job led to a divorce before any kids came along. His elderly mother and her two spinster sisters lived with him; and although he was devoted to those ladies, no one with a healthy survival instinct would ever call Lionel a mama’s boy.
In countless ways, John and Lionel were different from each other, but in one way they were more alike than any other two detectives in the division: Homicide investigation was less a job to them than it was a sacred calling. As a sixteen-year-old, Lionel had been charged with the brutal murder of a woman named Andrea Solano, during the course of a burglary. The state tried him as an adult, the jury convicted him, and the judge sentenced him to life imprisonment. While he was in prison, his beloved father died. After Lionel spent six years in a high-security cell, the real burglar-murderer was arrested in another case and tied to the Solano killing by evidence in his possession; eventually, he confessed. Without that lucky break, Lionel would have rotted in prison. Released, the crime expunged from his record, he became a cop and eventually a detective with two compelling goals: first, to put murderers behind bars, on death row if they deserved it; second, to be sure that, at least on his watch, no one hung a murder conviction around the neck of an innocent man.
As partners, they were friends but not best buddies, largely because they spent less time together than other paired detectives. They worked as a team, but they did not ride in tandem. Both were devoted family men when at home, which they preferred to the world beyond those walls, but at work they were loners, each with his unique style of investigation, each impatient with the accommodations that same-car partners inevitably had to make for each other. They divvied up leads, accomplished twice as much as they would if yoked together, backed up each other when the task required that, compared notes at the end of every day, and had the highest case-closed record in Robbery-Homicide.
The Hartman assignment should have been engaging; the victim was a teacher, as John’s murdered parents had been. But he was not able to focus as sharply as necessary. He was distracted by thoughts of the Lucas murders and by fear of October fifth, which would be the date of the next killings if the crimes of Alton Turner Blackwood were indeed being replayed. The Hartman investigation swiftly became the poorest effort of his career.
Six days after returning to work, he received a summons to the office of Nelson Burchard, chief of detectives. Ken Sharp had filed a report about John’s visits to Billy at the hospital, the illegal entries at the Lucas house, and their conversation in Billy’s room.
Burchard employed a wise-old-uncle managerial style and rarely raised his voice. As a disciplinarian, he preferred to approach the situation as alternately a caring surrogate father, an understanding colleague, and a therapist. He was stout within the physical limits of the department, white-haired, with a face made for dinner-theater comedies about twinkly-eyed older men who were assumed to be a bit daft because they claimed to be Santa Claus or angels who needed to earn their wings.
In order to explain his actions, John had to reveal what had happened to his family when he was fourteen. The story earned him Nelson Burchard’s pity, which he didn’t want and which seemed both genuine yet unctuous. The man’s cloying earnestness made John’s revelations even harder to disclose than he expected.
As caring as he might have been, Burchard also saw at once that an experience of such horror at a young age might seed psychological problems that could make a career in Robbery-Homicide particularly taxing, problems that might not sprout and ripen until they were, so to speak, fertilized by a case disturbingly reminiscent of the long-ago trauma.
“I understand your concern that Billy was imitating Blackwood. But he did turn himself in. If he intended to kill again, he wouldn’t have done that.” Burchard leaned forward in one of the armchairs in the counseling corner of his office. “Did you really worry that he might escape the state hospital?”
“No. I don’t know. Maybe.” Although John could not have avoided telling Burchard about what happened twenty years earlier, he found it impossible to raise the theory that a murderous spirit might have operated through Billy Lucas. Possession was not a word any defense lawyer would ever use or any judge ever countenance. “The striking similarities between the Valdane and Lucas massacres wasn’t something I could ignore. I just … I had to know.… I’m not entirely sure why, but I had to know if Blackwood inspired Billy.”
“You told Ken Sharp there were documents on the boy’s computer—they indicated your family was one of his targets.”
“There were. I saw them the first time I was in the house. But someone deleted them.”
Burchard’s jolly face remained in a Christmas Eve expression, though his eyes now twinkled less with goodwill than with the glint of a forensic surgeon’s scalpel. “Ken reviewed the backup CDs made of the computer’s hard drive. There aren’t any documents about your family on those, either.”
The armchair seemed like an execution-chamber chair. John wanted to get up and move around. He remained seated and said nothing.
“The backup CDs were secure in the evidence locker,” Burchard said. “You don’t think someone could have gotten to them?”
“No. I don’t. Not in the locker. I can’t explain it, sir. But I stand by what I said that I saw.”
As if it pained him to look at John just then, Burchard turned his attention to a window and the steel-gray sky. “Whatever the boy’s intentions might have been, he’s dead. There’ll be no more killing of families now.”
“October fifth,” John said. “That’s the day. Or would have been if his murders were an homage. Blackwood’s homicidal periodicity was precise. Thirty-three days.”
When he looked at John again, Burchard said, “But he’s dead.”
“What if he didn’t do it alone?”
“But he did. There’s no evidence anyone else was in that house when it all went down.”
“I’m just wondering if—”
“It’s not your case,” Burchard interrupted. “How’s the Hartman job coming along?”
After a hesitation, John said, “I’m sure Lionel’s making progress.”
“But you?”
John shrugged.
“You’re my Thoroughbreds, you and Lionel. But … presenting yourself at the state hospital as the case d
etective. Trespassing twice in the Lucas house. Maybe all this has knocked you off your stride. Would you say it has?”
“Not so that I can’t regain my footing.”
“You drive every case hard, John. Maybe you need time to rest and think. Time to put this behind you.” As John began to protest, Burchard raised a hand to halt him. “I’m not talking about a formal suspension. Nothing that’ll wind up on your ten card. You just ask for a thirty-day leave without pay, I’ll authorize it right now.”
“If I don’t want a thirty-day leave?”
“I’d have to pass Sharp’s report upstairs to Parker Moss.”
Moss was the Area 1 commander, a good enough cop but at times a by-the-book sonofabitch.
“And then what?” John asked.
“Maybe a review-board hearing, but probably not. For sure, he’ll want mandatory psychological counseling and an evaluation. Because of the undisclosed childhood trauma.”
“I’m not coming unwrapped.”
“I don’t believe you are. Which is why I’d prefer dealing with it this way. But if it gets to Moss, he’ll follow protocols.”
“You want my tin and my piece?”
“No. On unpaid leave you still follow off-duty rules. You carry at all times, you’re plainclothes auxiliary.”
Under the circumstances, it was important to John to be able legally to continue carrying a concealed weapon.
“All right,” he conceded. “But what’ll you tell Lionel?”
“That’s up to you.”
“Family matters,” John decided.
“He’ll want to know more than that.”
“Yeah. But we never pry at each other.”
“Then it’s family matters,” Burchard said.
“It has the virtue of being true.”
“You’d be uncomfortable lying to him?”
“Couldn’t do it,” John said.
On unpaid leave, he had little more to do than to anticipate October fifth. That he became increasingly restless and apprehensive day by day was no surprise.
