by Dean Koontz
He had crossed this ground often during the years that he was apprenticed to the night. Nothing about it previously intrigued him.
The oval clearing measured about sixty feet end to end, forty at its widest point. Wild grass tended to be long and silky. Here it was scrubby, bristling, growing every which way instead of in the uniform fashion ordained by rain, by prevailing winds, and by the predominant angle of sunlight. The grass wasn’t aggressive enough to choke off invading weeds, and the earth was soft underfoot.
He entered the clearing in a peach-and-scarlet twilight and therefore couldn’t overlook the digging that had been done recently by an industrious animal, perhaps a wolf or a bobcat, or possibly a pack of raccoons. Strewn in a patch of torn raw earth were human bones. A complete skeletal hand missing only the end phalange of the thumb. The radius and ulna of a forearm.
As the twilight bled away, the boy stood beside the excavation, staring at those bones, which in the purple shadows seemed to glow as if irradiated. The stars came out before he turned away from the evidence—this must be more than mere remains—and made his way back to the house.
A secluded building with stone walls and embrasured windows, well removed from the main house, served as the estate workshop, containing woodworking machines, numerous tools, and the landscaper’s equipment. Teejay, patriarch and sportsman, also kept his hunting and fishing gear in this structure.
The boy found a Coleman lantern in a carrier with a can of fuel, a packet of spare cloth mantles, and a box of wooden matches. He took this carrier, a spade, a pick, and, under a rising moon, returned with them to the distant clearing in the woods.
He sensed the raven high in flight, but he heard only a conclave of owls hooting to one another from their different podiums in the surrounding forest.
By the ghostly light of the hissing gas lantern, the boy mined the shallow grave with care. He proceeded cautiously not out of any respect for the deceased but because of concern that he might miss or destroy something that identified the remains. He had no intention of bringing in the police. He hoped to ID the dead only to satisfy his curiosity. The body appeared to have been interred in a pit no deeper than three to four feet.
To hasten decomposition and to counteract any malodor that would attract animals, the corpse had been laid in a thick bed of powdered lime and covered with a lush blanket of the stuff. The white lime had caked, hardened, combined with other minerals to form crystals, and become veined with yellow and gray. But it did the job. The bones were clean and bleached.
On close inspection, some bones were pitted, as well—pitted, pocked, etched with peculiar whorls. This suggested the murderer’s recipe called for acid of some kind to be added to tenderize, to hasten decomposition.
The skull revealed death by bludgeoning, both parietal bones having been staved in. The brain that had been pierced by shards of the skull was long gone to poisoned soil. Only a few scraps of rotted clothing remained. But perhaps the body had been interred many years earlier.
For whatever reason the raccoons or other animals had burrowed into the grave, they had not been drawn by the scent of carrion. As he dug, the boy could detect nothing other than a faint persistent odor of lime, a separate and fainter astringent scent that might have arisen from the breakdown of the acid, and underneath all, the smell of damp earth.
Carrying the lantern, he searched the clearing and gradually came to see the subtle waffle pattern of regular depressions that time, weather, and snarls of scraggly grass couldn’t entirely disguise. He had found not one grave, not evidence of just a single crime, but an entire graveyard without headstones, with no memorial flowers except for the stunted blossoms on the stems of withered weeds.
He was much stronger now than when, years earlier, the raven had selected him, and the earth was soft. He dug faster, with less care than before.
The well-limed earth disgorged the remnants of those on whom it previously had gorged. In every case, there were no fragments of a casket, only bones, scraps of fabric, the rubber soles of dissolved shoes.
The boy found three deteriorated skulls of babies killed so soon after birth that the fontanel of each, the soft spot at the top of a newborn’s head, had not yet closed and hardened. Infant bones were too soft to survive long in a grave. There were only a few smooth white discs and lozenges, like water-worn stones, that might have been fragments of hip bones and scapulars.
The third adult skeleton was not the last waiting to be found, but the boy didn’t disinter a fourth. No flesh remained on these bones, either, but he knew how long the deceased had been resting in this hole. Seven years, two months, and a few days.
As this was the most recently interred of his discoveries, the scraps of clothing not yet dissolved were larger and retained more color than those in other graves. He recognized the dress that his mother had been wearing the last day he had seen her.
The boy stood over this discovery for a while, considering his life in the guest house with his mother, comparing it to his life in the tower after she apparently abandoned him.
Long ago the owls had moved on to feed in moonlit fields, and the surrounding forest seemed to be asleep and dreaming.
The lantern hissed as if calling serpents to it, and the mantles—incombustible little bags filled with gaslight—pulsed softly.
The boy did not tremble, although he watched his shadow shiver slightly across the stunted grass and the excavated earth of the secret graveyard.
The light played masquerade with his deformed shoulders and with his misshapen head, costuming his shadow in a robe and cowl. When he lifted the pick, the shadow appeared to lift a scythe.
The boy wasn’t the goat-legged, horned god of anything, as once he wished to be. He was Death, and just being Death might be a most satisfying life.
38
RETURNING HOME AT 2:46 A.M., JOHN USED HIS CELL PHONE to call the home-security computer and switch off the alarm as he arrived at his garage door.
When he got out of the car in that subterranean space, the house still felt free of the oppressive presence that for weeks had been in residence. But with the Woburn family dead, the hateful spirit would soon find its way back here.
Spirit. He arrived at his conclusion logically, and the evidence of its accuracy appeared irrefutable now. Yet sometimes he rebelled against it. Spirit. Ghost. He wanted to think of it in other terms. Corruption. Infection. Disease. Or turn to psychologists for answers that would persuade him to deny what he knew to be true.
And that was the most remarkable thing about this rebellion: A part of him would have preferred the comfort of psychiatric theory and jargon to the truth, not only because the truth put before him an enemy who might be impossible to defeat, but also because truth in this instance was an embarrassment to the modern mind. In this age, faith remained acceptable, but recognizing a dark supernatural aspect to life could make a rational man feel foolish and gullible. The Evil of all evils thrived on the denial of its existence.
The last time he tried Scotch to settle his nerves, the night of the first day that he had gone to the state hospital to see Billy Lucas, the whiskey had not helped him. Nevertheless, he went up to the kitchen and poured a double shot over ice. His hand shook, and the neck of the Chivas bottle rattled against the rim of the glass.
In thirty-three days, another family would be destroyed. There was no way to determine the target or in what person the spirit would be concealed when it attacked.
Brenda Woburn felt it trying to take possession of her. Cold and crawling, slithering … Everywhere in my body … Skin to bones. She had been able to resist it—but only by extreme measures.
Evidently, the spirit had been unable to invade either Lenny or Davinia. Otherwise, it would have used one of the kids against the other, probably Lenny against his sister.
The factor that inoculated for possession was not youth. Billy Lucas had been only fourteen but vulnerable.
John doubted that Lenny’s limited mental capacit
y vaccinated him against possession. Davinia was highly intelligent—yet inaccessible.
Not having met the boy, having spoken with the girl too briefly, John did not know what qualities brother and sister had in common. He suspected innocence must be one. The girl seemed exceptional, gentle, kind. Perhaps the boy had been equally so.
With his Scotch, John walked the perimeter of the ground floor. He stood at windows in dark or dimly lighted rooms, searching the night, though he knew that he would find nothing suspicious. No more killing for a while. No killing here for the next sixty-five days.
Yet the compulsion to patrol was irresistible. He would be a watchdog for the rest of his life, as he had been since the night that, because of his foolishness, he facilitated the massacre of his family. His penance was eternal vigilance; never again would he know the peace of the blameless.
Minette, Naomi, and Zach seemed innocent to John, basically good kids, not morally immaculate but free from serious weaknesses. He not only loved his children, he was also proud of them. He could never credit the possibility that any of them might be a glove to hide the hand of Alton Turner Blackwood.
Perhaps no adult was innocent. But Nicolette was as virtuous as anyone he knew, charitable and kind. She was strong enough and tough-minded enough to be as resistant to possession as Brenda Woburn.
The weakest link in the Calvino chain was John himself. That assessment seemed to him as true as it was terrifying.
In the kitchen again, he poured two more ounces of Scotch.
Between leaving St. Christopher’s Home and School when he was seventeen and meeting Nicky a year later, he had spent a few months drinking most lunches and dinners: Seagram’s shooters chased with beer, an efficient route to oblivion. Without the emotional support of the staff at the school, without family or friends, he turned to the kind of spiritualism in which the spirits came in bottles sealed with tax stamps. He had an inheritance—his parents’ life-insurance, equity from the house—but it seemed like blood money. He saw an ironic kind of justice in spending it on his self-destruction, glass by glass. He wasn’t old enough to buy his own poison, but there were hobos to buy it as his agents, for a generous commission. He called them his kindly executioners, and if they had been able to purchase cyanide, he might have added it to the shopping list he gave them.
Fortunately, he made a lousy drunk because he had no practice at it and no heart for it. Oblivion was not as easy to attain as he expected. Drunk, he became grotesquely melancholy, more focused on his loss than when sober. Shooters and beer proved to be not a fast track away from memory but instead a direct route to the obsessive and vivid recollection of every wrenching experience he wanted to erase from his mind.
Alone in his apartment, in the depths of intoxication, whether sitting at the kitchen table or collapsed in a living-room recliner, he became garrulous, talking to beloved ghosts and to himself. At a certain point, when the floor ceased to be safely horizontal, when it canted like the deck of a ship, when the shapes of things no longer appeared to be right—walls curving inward toward the top, ceiling swelling down like a distended belly—and when the tall curved spout at the kitchen sink seemed as sinister as a cobra poised to strike, young John talked to God.
He perceived these monologues as rants of theological genius, as challenges to the wisdom of the Maker of the universe, as brilliant prosecutorials that demolished the very concept of a benign Creator, as jeremiads so logically argued that God could make no satisfactory response.
One night, although he was no less drunk than usual, he suddenly heard himself as an impartial witness might have heard him, and he was humiliated not only by the mush-mouthed and rambling nature of his screed but also by the sophomoric character of his arguments and accusations. He put a hand to his mouth to silence himself, but the hand fell away from his lips in an angry gesture. He kept talking, now with even less intelligence and coherence. His rant became so tedious, repetitious, and petty that his humiliation thickened into mortification. Yet still he chattered on, as though his tongue owed no obedience to him; he could not halt the insane gush of words. In every expression of grief, he heard a total self-absorption that made him cringe. In every whiny lament, he recognized the voice of a self-pitying wretch. Every tiresome accusation revealed the immaturity of a useless boy who lacked the courage to accept the blame for his own actions, who did not possess the fortitude to carry his guilt like a man.
When mortification deepened into shame, he finally found the will to shut off the torrent of words. He lurched to his feet and staggered to the bathroom, where he knelt at the toilet. Instead of words, vomit gushed forth, such a hideous stream that the next day he remembered it had been black, although surely it could not have been that dark.
He had not been drunk since that night. Wine with dinner never brought him close to inebriation. Seventeen years of sobriety. Now he stared at the second serving of Chivas Regal—and he emptied the glass into the sink.
With or without Scotch, he would not be able to sleep. He feared that he would dream of the plummeting girl.
He had no idea what he should do next. He felt adrift, unable to imagine how he might make his family safe.
Asking for guidance, he went to the kitchen door and stepped out onto the flagstone terrace at the back of the house. The night chill might clear his head and help him think.
The air was crisp, cold, but not so frigid that it made him uncomfortable. He breathed deeply and exhaled a pale plume.
A few sinuous threads of cloud slowly slithered out of the north. The moon rode deep in the west, sailing toward a far shore, but still softly illuminating the yard.
John wished his family might be saved by the simple expediency of boarding a ship or a plane with them and traveling to some distant port. But a creature who had taken the long journey back from death would not be daunted by mere mountain ranges or seas, or national borders.
He stepped off the terrace and followed a flagstone path to the rose arbor. The last flowers of the season had wilted, withered, and turned brown. The leaves were dead. The thorny trailers needed to be cut back to encourage a crop of lush blooms the following year. In moonlight, the looping brambles were a black-and-silver tangle of barbed tentacles.
Three steps from the threshold of the arch, John was halted by the sudden perception that the arbor might be dangerous. Unaffected by the night chill, now the hairs on the nape of his neck stirred as he drew near the lattice tunnel. A cold foreboding skittered down his spine, vertebra to vertebra, with quivering centipedal haste.
The interior of the twelve-foot-long arbor was darker than the surrounding night. But John could clearly see the moon-washed lawn at the farther end. No one waited in the tunnel.
After the events at the hospital, John’s nerves were raw, and he felt perpetually under an imminent threat, although Zach’s fourteenth birthday was sixty-six days away. If he allowed himself to be spooked by every dark place, to be suspicious of every closed door and blind corner, he would be worn out and useless when trouble finally came. He must resist the tendency to see Alton Turner Blackwood in every shadow.
He took another step toward the arbor but again halted, alarmed, when something brushed against his legs, not lightly but with force. Low, from right to left. Some animal. He turned, seeking it in the gloom.
Again, it brushed against him, and even as it passed, he looked down and saw nothing. He felt it against his knees, his shins, yet it remained invisible.
As John backed away from the arbor, fallen leaves rustled and flew up from the grass to his left. They had blown here earlier from the scarlet oak on the south yard. But at the moment, the still air lacked the breath to make leaves tremble, let alone to tumble them and toss them up from the lawn.
The disturbance continued across the deep yard, circled back toward John, looped around him, raced off again, as if a little wind devil were funneling this way and that, except the leaves were not spun up in a vortex but were scattered at random. As he
watched, he began to feel that the phenomenon had a frolicsome quality; it wasn’t related to his fear of the arbor, and in fact it seemed to him that this thing that was not a wind devil had warned him away from that latticework tunnel.
While he watched, the phenomenon diminished. The whirl of leaves settled, and the night grew still once more.
As the last leaves floated to rest on the grass, John thought he heard a familiar sigh of pleasure, one he hadn’t heard for a long time. If this had been a ghost, it had been a blithe spirit. Filled with sudden wonder, remembering their golden retriever that had died two years earlier, John whispered, “Willard?”
39
WHILE SITTING IN HIS CUBICLE AT THE DAILY POST, WRITING an account of events at the Woburn house and at St. Joseph’s Hospital, Roger Hodd takes hits from a flask of tequila and lime juice. Long ago, he lost interest in journalism, but the weirdness of this story keeps him more engaged in the writing than usual.
His rider, of which Hodd remains unaware, inspires certain turns of phrase and clever edits that lift the piece above the reporter’s usual fare. The rider wants its work to be well described, although this isn’t the reason it took possession of Hodd.
Shortly after dawn, when the copy has been filed, Hodd goes home to his third wife, Georgia. She is an odd combination: an incurable romantic and a rehabilitation therapist specializing in recovery from addiction. Having all her life idealized and romanticized newspaper reporters, Georgia married Roger Hodd knowing he was a heavy drinker, because she believed that she—and she alone—could cure him of his addiction and inspire him to write stories that would bring him a Pulitzer.
Hodd has always known that she would fail in this quest, and now she knows it, as well. Only after the wedding did she discover that Hodd would win a gold medal in narcissism if it were an Olympic sport and that he is not just a drunk but also a mean one. The violence that he perpetrates is psychological and verbal rather than physical. Georgia is particularly galled that she, with all her education and background in psychology, is so vulnerable to his torment. She has cried herself to sleep many nights and has lost eleven pounds since they were married ten months previously.
