by Dean Koontz
Determined to spare Nicolette and the kids needless anxiety, he avoided telling them about his thirty-day leave. He left in the morning as if for work, killed time at movies that didn’t entertain him, at libraries where he learned nothing he needed to know, on ten-mile walks that failed to tire him.
He no longer entertained any doubts about the supernatural nature of the threat if only because nothing else could explain how Billy had known the next-to-last thing that Alton Turner Blackwood said before John killed him: Your lovely sister, your Giselle. She had such pretty little training-bra breasts.
Nevertheless, he harbored a small hope that he kept afloat with prayer and with his long-embraced belief that the concept of fate had no validity. With the proper exercise of free will, he could see his wife and children safely through this troubled time. Such conviction, even if tenuous, was essential to hold fast to sanity.
If October fifth passed without murders to match Blackwood’s second slaughter, if the pattern of the past changed, John would never need to tell the kids—though perhaps one day he would tell Nicky—that he had endured thirty-three days of gut-twisting dread.
If instead the murders occurred, he would share everything with Nicky and together they would decide what to do. But if the ghost of a homicidal psychopath really could return from the grave and use a human being as a puppet, there seemed to be no weapon that any man or woman could employ against it.
Walking the grid blocks of the city, rambling the lakeside park, and during movies that he only half saw, John was gnawed by a sense of helplessness not only in regard to the defense of his loved ones but also because he could do nothing to warn whatever family might be the second in this current killing spree.
Twenty years earlier, after the Valdanes, the Sollenburgs had been Blackwood’s next target.
Their master suite lay at the farther end of the house from other bedrooms, the main living spaces intervening: convenient for a murderer who planned to kill his targets in a certain order and who hoped not to alert the fourth and final victim when executing the first three.
The parents, Louis and Rhoda, had been murdered in their bed, beginning with the husband. Louis was shot once in the head while sleeping. The presence of steel-wool fibers in the wound indicated that the killer had fashioned a homemade silencer for his 9-mm pistol.
Perhaps the muffled gunfire woke Rhoda or perhaps she woke when Blackwood switched on the light. He shot her twice as she sprang off the bed, and she died on the floor.
With no scream from either victim and the gunfire adequately muffled, Blackwood was able to make his way across the house at his leisure, taking the time to savor the murders he had just committed and to anticipate with dark delight the brutalities soon to come.
The homemade silencer deteriorated quickly. He carried a pillow from the parents’ bedroom to further suppress the sound of the shot with which he killed Eric, the fifteen-year-old son, in his bed.
With three dead, Blackwood was alone with seventeen-year-old Sharon Sollenburg. Subsequently, the medical examiner estimated that she had been shot more than four hours after her brother was killed.
The humiliations and cruelties that the girl suffered during those four hours, as reported in the autopsy, sickened even homicide detectives who thought they had seen everything but discovered now a more savage and inventive monster than they had known before.
Her suffering did not end when Blackwood shot her. The ratio of high serotonin to lower free histamine levels in the wound indicated that she had taken at least half an hour to die.
Torn candy wrappers and smears of chocolate on the upholstery suggested that her murderer sat in an armchair and ate three Almond Joy bars while he watched life fade from her. Blood on the wrappers indicated that he had not washed his hands between his games with the girl and his snack.
Like the victims at the Valdane house, all four Sollenburgs were left with black quarters epoxied to their eyelids, carefully shaped coins of dried feces on their tongues, and specially prepared hollow eggs in their bound hands.
Twenty years later, in this great city, there must be thousands of families consisting of father, mother, son, and daughter. There was no way to know who might be marked for death.
Furthermore, it could be wrong to assume the killer would not seek a family of five instead of four, one with two or three girls instead of a single daughter. After all, the widowed aunt who was part of the Valdane family, two decades ago, was a grandmother at the Lucas house in the here and now, and the ages of one set of victims were not identical to the ages of the other. The methods of murder and certain other details were the same, but the scenarios were not in every aspect identical.
This entire state did not have half enough police to mount protective surveillance of every family in the city that might be targeted.
As September became October, the green trees of summer dressed themselves in the spectacle of autumn. Purple beeches became bright copper, and frisia turned even more orange than the yellow buckeye. Silver-leafed poplars paid out a dividend of gold, and the enormous scarlet oak on the south yard of the Calvino property lived up to its name for the first time all year.
Late on the afternoon of October fourth, on the eve of the dreaded date, when John came home early from pretending to work, the house was transformed. He felt the difference the moment that he got out of the car in the basement garage, a freshness to the air, a curious perception that everything was cleaner than it had been, a sense that a pall had been lifted from the place. This feeling only increased as he ascended through the residence.
He had been weighed down by worry and had not realized that an oppressive aura had settled on the house itself. For weeks, the rooms had felt less harmonious in their proportions than before; the lamps and ceiling fixtures had appeared to be dialed down even when all the dimmer switches were at their highest settings; the artworks and the furnishings had seemed tired and in conflict with one another; and although the air had not reeked of Billy Lucas’s urine, it had been stale, like the air in a moldering old museum, thick with dust and history. He realized all of that only in retrospect, now that the house was bright and welcoming once more.
Perhaps no one else felt the change as profoundly as did John, for only he suspected—all right, knew—that something had come home with him from the state hospital twenty-six days earlier. If Nicky and the kids weren’t consciously aware that the house had been under a kind of cloud that had now dissipated, they must have felt the difference because they were all livelier and merrier at dinner than they had been for days. The rapid conversation had its old bounce—from wit to badinage, to persiflage, and back again.
The food tasted better, too, and the wine, not because Walter and Imogene had outdone themselves, for their standards were always high, but because the familiar cheerful atmosphere of the house had been restored, which was an essential spice that, like salt, enhanced the flavor of all things. If something otherworldly had been here the past three and a half weeks, that presence was now inarguably gone.
Once he had convinced himself to embrace the unknown, to accept that a malevolent spirit might find its way back into the world and into his life, John had imagined that the haunting would progress as it did in books and movies. First came subtle moments of strangeness for which reasoned explanations might be fashioned, and then ever more bizarre and fearsome manifestations escalated to the third act, when the terror would reveal its true ferocity and the invaded house would become a hell on Earth. Until now he had not considered that a haunting might peter out between the first and the second acts, that the ties binding the haunter and the haunted might be as vulnerable to weariness and indifference as were so many relationships in which both parties were living.
John entertained this hopeful thought only through the soup and partway through the entrée. Long before dessert, he realized the invading spirit had not dissipated or departed forever. By whatever means such entities traveled, whether by magic or by moonl
ight, or on wheels of sheer malevolence, this one had gone in search of its next Billy Lucas, for the glove in which it would conceal itself to murder another family. With that blood ceremony completed, it would return.
29
MACE VOLKER IS A DELIVERYMAN AND A THIEF. NOW THIRTY, he has delivered flowers for a florist since he was nineteen, and he has been stealing since he was eleven. He has never been caught nor has he even once come under suspicion, for he is blessed with a gentle and open face, a most appealing voice, and a fearless nature, all of which he uses as instruments of deception no less artfully than a concert pianist uses his supple, nimble hands.
Mace shoplifts, picks pockets, burglarizes homes. He doesn’t steal solely or even primarily for financial reasons but mainly for the thrill. Stolen cash and goods have a powerful sensual appeal and feel better to him than the silky skin of a beautiful woman. He can’t achieve climax merely by caressing stolen money, but he can become fiercely aroused by the texture of it, sometimes teasing himself for an hour or more, into a sweat of desire, merely by handling purloined twenties and hundreds. A psychiatrist might say Mace is a fetishist. He has had a few girlfriends, but only to see how much he can steal from them: money and possessions, honor and hope and self-respect. Generally he turns to prostitutes for satisfaction, and the best sex is always when he steals from them the money with which he paid for their services.
There are ten doors into Mace Volker: his sensitive and thieving fingertips.
Twice a week, he delivers flowers to the Calvino house, roses for Nicolette’s studio, and occasionally a dining-table arrangement. This fourth of October, shortly before five o’clock, he has three dozen long-stemmed yellow roses for the artist, each dozen in its own plastic sleeve. He is not taken when he rings the doorbell, but by his index finger on the button, he is known and wanted.
Walter Nash signs for the flowers. Because Walter’s arms are filled with the bundled roses and the greens that come with them, Mace assists him, upon leaving, by pulling the front door shut from outside. Taken. Mace isn’t aware that he is no longer alone, that he is now a horse with a rider that might in time dismount without ever making itself known to him—or that might choose instead to ride him to death.
Deliveries concluded, Mace returns the van to the florist’s shop where he works. Ellie Shaw, the owner, is behind the cashier’s counter, totaling out the register, and Mace hands in his clipboard manifest, with the signatures of those customers who received the flowers. Ellie is in her late thirties and quite pretty, but Mace has never really seen her as a woman because she is his boss and, therefore, he can’t use her and steal from her without serious consequences. As they talk briefly about the day, Mace imagines her naked, which he has never done before—other women, never Ellie—but to his surprise and alarm he also vividly envisions her strangled with a striped necktie, her swollen grayish tongue protruding from her mouth and her dead eyes wide in the final look of terror with which she rewarded her enthusiastic murderer. This fantasy pumps him rigid with desire.
Rattled by this vision and afraid that Ellie will notice his condition, he mentions a nonexistent engagement with a young lady and flees to his car in the employee parking lot. Behind the wheel and on the move, wondering at his savage flight of imagination, Mace stops at a traffic light where a young woman and a girl of about ten stand hand in hand, waiting to cross the intersection. With graphic detail and an intensity that rocks Mace, he suddenly sees them both naked, stepping into the street—but then bound to chairs in a rough room, raw and red and carved like scrimshaw.
So as not to alarm the horse unnecessarily, the rider reins in its tendency to envision objects of its desire in conditions of total subjugation and physical ruin. In truth, Mace Volker is shocked by his hallucinatory episodes but not entirely repelled. He is, after all, a thief who is thrilled by the act of stealing rather than by the gain received from what is stolen; and he will realize now that the ultimate act of theft is the taking of a life. This realization may have an interesting effect upon the deliveryman’s future criminal career.
Having burglarized a house during his lunch hour and having taken some good diamond jewelry that he hopes will bring him as much as twelve to fifteen thousand dollars, Mace drives now to a tavern he knows in a part of the city that was once on the skids but is being gentrified. This is the kind of neighborhood in which a white-collar bar isn’t a dive and serves as a respectable front for a fence who, paying hard cash for stolen merchandise, also finds the streets safe enough that he doesn’t need to worry about being hijacked when coming or going. The tavern has a black-granite and mahogany facade. Inside, the booths and bar stools are occupied by more upwardly mobile young couples than young loners.
Mace gets a bottle of Heineken, no glass, from the bartender, who knows him and who uses the house phone to seek permission for him to go to the back office. After receiving the bartender’s thumbs-up, Mace pushes through the swinging door into the small kitchen, which produces only sandwiches, French fries, and onion rings. A door at the farther end of the fragrant room leads to a narrow staircase with a ceiling-mounted camera at the top that covers his ascent. On the upper landing, he waits for a moment at a steel door before it opens and he is ushered inside.
This is the reception room. The office of Barry Quist, tavern owner and fence (among other things), is through an inner door. Here in the first room is a table on one edge of which sits a beefy man in shirtsleeves, his shoulder rig and pistol in plain sight. Another guy in shirtsleeves, equally solid and well-armed, has opened the door for Mace. He closes it and, though he knows Mace doesn’t carry, he pats him down for a weapon before he returns to a chair on which lies an open issue of Sports Illustrated. These two men are always with Barry Quist, but Mace has never heard their names. He thinks of them as One and Two, One being the behemoth who opened the door. They look like men who, in a fight, will not shirk from committing any cruelty and will be stopped by nothing short of a bullet in the brain. With six straight-backed chairs in two groups separated by a tall magazine rack holding a collection of glossy publications, the place resembles a dentist’s waiting lounge—if you wanted a dentist who would knock your teeth out with a hammer.
On the table lies a pistol with an extended magazine, which evidently belongs to the man currently doing business with Barry in the fence’s office. Beside the pistol lies a sound suppressor, which can be screwed onto the barrel.
In one of the straight-backed chairs sits a stunning blonde who also belongs to the man now with Barry. Two has come out from behind the table and is sitting on it so that he can chat her up. Evidently they know each other, and the guy she has come with is named Reese. Two speaks to her as if he is a concerned friend: “All I’m sayin’ is get from Reese as much as you can, as fast as you can. He wants everything he sees, and he’s always movin’ on.” The blonde says she knows her guy, she’s got him by the pecker and she knows how to make him heel like a well-trained poodle. Two shakes his head and says, “If he got all the money in the world and he laid every woman worth the time, then suddenly he’d start wantin’ little boys. He’s never gonna stop wantin’ what he doesn’t have or can’t have.”
The inner door features an electronic lock, and it buzzes a moment before Reese comes into the reception room. He is a crocodile in a five-thousand-dollar suit, his claws given a civilized shape and a coat of clear polish by a manicurist, his wide mouth designed for efficient consumption, his eyes restless with hunger. He consults his twenty-thousand-dollar wristwatch in such a way that he displays it for others to admire. But his expression sours at the sight of it, as if recently he has seen a more expensive watch and is dissatisfied with this instrument that has previously so pleased him.
Reese has many doors by which he can be entered, but the eyes are the easiest. Taken.
As flower deliveryman Mace Volker, now only himself, proceeds into Barry Quist’s sanctum sanctorum to negotiate a price for the stolen jewelry, Reese Salsetto recovers his pis
tol as well as the precision-machined sound suppressor, which fits in a separate sleeve of his custom shoulder holster. His rider is content for the moment to use neither spurs nor reins, and Reese is unaware that he is no longer the master of himself. To Brittany Zeller, the blonde, he says, “Let’s go, Puss.”
Crossing the kitchen and then the busy tavern, Reese is aware that every man’s attention is drawn irresistibly to Brittany. Every man covets her and envies him.
They have a seven-thirty dinner reservation at one of the city’s finest restaurants, where he is a valued customer. In the street, at his Mercedes S600, Reese tells Brittany that he wants to move the reservation to eight o’clock, so they will have time to go back to his place first. He explains that he has bought something wonderful for her birthday—three days hence—and he’s so eager to see how she likes it that he can’t wait until then to give her the gift. They’ll have a martini together at home and go from there to the restaurant.
This change of plans is the desire of Reese’s rider, but it is so subtly encouraged that Reese doesn’t detect the pressure of the bridle or feel the bit between his teeth. Already, the rider knows everything about its horse: Reese’s history, hopes, needs, desires, every secret in the nautilus turns of the popinjay thug’s twisted and corrupted heart. In all those interwound darknesses, the rider has discovered a family that will be a pleasure to reduce to bloody ruin. Its expectation had been that four or five changes of horses would be necessary before a target family would be found. But Mace Volker to Reese Salsetto is all that’s needed.
Home, to Reese, is a flashy penthouse apartment neither as large as he feels that he deserves nor on quite as high a floor as he desires. But this building is one of the finest, and in another year, he will ascend to higher and much larger quarters. The style is plush Art Deco, the furnishings of the best quality. The decor was provided by a woman whom Reese believes to be the classiest and most talented interior designer in the city largely on the basis of her British accent.
