by Dean Koontz
“My competition,” said Regina.
Under the maidenhair tree, in the privileged afternoon, in the golden light of a sun swelling toward the horizon as if to burst, the awkward boy stood as though rooted, the ugly boy, towering and rough and shatter-faced, watching the elegant hands of the beautiful women as they dealt and received the cards, moisture beading on their tall glasses of iced tea, lemon slices and leaves of mint, their skin as flawless as that of the bisque-porcelain figurines in the drawing-room display case, and the ugly boy was pierced by a sharp yearning as the women ordered their cards, not yearning for the women but for something he could not name, watching as Melissa put upon the table four threes, one in each suit, and with them won the hand, watching as Regina totaled their scores, the fluid shuffling of the deck, the languid dealing of the cards, their grace and catlike confidence, their glittering eyes as Regina recounted how her sister, the mother of the ugly boy, wound up dead and buried in the wildwood.
47
THE CITY HAD KNOWN SNOW IN OTHER OCTOBERS, BUT USUALLY only flurries, at most two or three inches. The forecast called for this storm to lay down six inches, which would make it one of the deeper snows of October but not a record blizzard.
While the kids were in the library, enduring math with Leonid Sinyavski, John and Nicolette sat in armchairs in his ground-floor study, where the gallery of birthday photographs confronted him with a poignant reminder of all that he might lose. Beyond the window, the sky was invisible now, scattering white petals by the million, and toward the back of the yard, the deodar cedar had begun to robe itself in winter.
Quietly and without excuses, John told Nicky that he was in his second thirty-day leave, that he had been pretending to go to work as usual but instead had undertaken an investigation of a personal nature. As crisply as he would lay out the facts of any case to Nelson Burchard or to an assistant district attorney, he presented them to her, beginning with his first visit to Billy Lucas at the state hospital.
She realized why he had hoped to spare her the worry of all this until he understood the situation as fully as possible, and his secrecy neither offended nor disappointed her. Like all good artists, Nicky could empathize with the fear and anguish of others. Like every great artist who had been able to maintain a human perspective, she didn’t believe that she was the center of the world, to be included in everything first above all others; she lived instead with the conviction that her talent and her success required of her both humility and a generosity of spirit.
And at last he told her the one thing he had withheld from her all these years, the last thing Blackwood had said before John shot him: You’ll be a daddy someday. Then I’ll come back and use your wife and kids harder than I used your slutty sisters here tonight.
“I never told you more than that I shot him. Well … I shot him point-blank in the face. He was dead as he fell. But I stood over him and emptied the gun into his head. I shot him and shot him, Nicky, I shot him until he didn’t have a face at all.”
“Good,” Nicky said. “And good that you didn’t tell me the last thing he said to you. Why should that have been in my head all the lovely months I carried Zach, Naomi, Minnie? I only love you more for sparing me that craziness—until you couldn’t anymore.”
Although John expected her to be understanding, Nicky surprised him by her readiness to accept the possibility of a supernatural threat, but then she stunned him with the revelation that she, too, sensed something uncanny if not malevolent in the house and that she’d had experiences that felt occult in nature. The man glimpsed in the mirror—Kiss me—before it seemed to explode in her face. Perhaps the same man again in the photographic studies for the portrait of the children.
Nicky’s inability to finish that painting, her distressing sense that somehow it had become a study of loss and despair, rocked John so hard that he felt as if some many-legged horror crawled the nape of his neck. When reflexively he reached back to clap the nonexistent insect, he discovered that his hands had gone cold and clammy.
Too disturbed to remain seated, he got up from the chair. He stepped to the window, peering intently at the snow-flocked backyard, half expecting to see some scaled and horned and lantern-eyed demonic beast slouching through the storm, forty-seven days ahead of schedule and hungry for children.
Nicky said, “It’s like the house—or whatever’s in it—has been working damn hard to keep us isolated from one another, playing to our fear—and our love—in just the right way to turn each of us inward.”
He heard her get up from her chair. When she spoke again, she sounded as if she was at the gallery wall, but he didn’t turn toward her. For some reason, the storm increasingly disquieted him, and he didn’t want to look away from it.
“You never read Blackwood’s journal?” she asked.
“No. He was dead. I didn’t want to read his self-justifications, his craziness. I didn’t want to let him even deeper into my head. I don’t know … it would have been like being there in the house again with everyone dead.”
“He couldn’t have written about that before you shot him.”
“No. He couldn’t. But that’s how I felt. The therapist at the orphanage got a Xerox of it from the police. He read it to better understand Blackwood, to get some idea what my confrontation with him might have been like. He told me a little about it, but he never read to me from it.”
“I want to read it,” Nicky said. “I mean … I don’t want to, but I have to. How can we get a copy? Would the therapist still have it, do you think? Or the police back there?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. That website where Billy Lucas got the photos of my mom and dad, my sisters. It’s devoted to serial killers and mass murderers. Maybe you could look there.”
“Do you remember the name of the site?” When he gave it to her, she said, “Let’s use your computer,” and he heard her going to his desk.
Turning from the window, John said, “That’s all ancient history. The only thing it can do for me is just twist my nerves tighter. I’m already so jumpy I can’t think straight anymore. And I damn sure need to think straight.” He glanced at his wristwatch—3:38. “Better tell Walter and Imogene to leave early. The streets are already a mess. They need to get home before there’s an accident clogging every intersection.”
At the desk, Nicky switched on the computer. “I’ll let you know what I find.”
“Crazy is what you’ll find. Madness, evil, the dark side of the moon. You won’t have much appetite by dinner.”
As he opened the door to the hall, she spoke his name, and he turned to her.
“There’s never been anything we couldn’t get through together,” she said. “We’ll get through this somehow. Father Bill isn’t the whole Church, and neither is Peter Abelard. We’ve got forty-seven days. We’ll make a plan. You and me against the world—that seems like a fair match to me.”
Her smile charmed even now.
John said, “I love you,” and refrained from saying, Baby, it’s not just you and me against the world. It’s you and me against Hell itself.
The website offered a free side and a pay side. Of course the former proved to be a tease, and the latter contained the deep archives.
When Nicky discovered that Alton Turner Blackwood’s handwritten journal was available for viewing by subscribers only, she used a credit card to sign up.
The first thing she noticed about the document was that the killer’s handwriting was so neat as to be almost fussy, as though he believed that meticulous penmanship imposed rationality on his insane musings. And he dotted each letter i with a little zero.
After sending Walter and Imogene home for the day in spite of their insistence that they were leaving too much work undone, John went to the second floor, to the library, intending to suggest that Professor Sinyavski might also want to leave early to avoid the worst of the snowstorm. Instead of a math lesson in progress, he found the library deserted, the lights off.
In his current
state of mind, any variation from the children’s routine alarmed him. He hurried along the hallway to the girls’ room, knocked, received no answer, knocked again, then opened the door. No one there.
He crossed the hall to Zach’s door, rapped sharply, and was relieved to hear his son say, “Come in.”
John opened the door, leaned into the room, and saw Zach with a drawing tablet. “So you’ve learned all the math there is?”
“Just about. But Professor Sinyavski wanted to leave early. He won’t drive in snow. Remember last year, his girlfriend brought him on snowy days, the one with the huge hair and—”
“Where are the girls?”
“Naomi was doing her full Naomi thing about the first snow of the season. I think Minnie went outside with her.”
Downstairs, John hurried from window to window, searching for the girls in one yard and another—but he found them in the mud room, where they had just taken off their boots and hung up their coats. Their noses were red, their cheeks pink, and their eyes lively.
“It’s just too little snow yet, a pathetic fleece, you can’t do anything really memorable,” Naomi explained. “You can’t even make a good snow angel yet, and just forget a snowball fight.”
“I told her,” Minnie said.
“She did. She told me. She always tells me.”
“I’m waiting for when you listen,” Minnie said.
“You better be a good waiter, Mouse.”
“And I’ll probably have to live like a hundred years before it happens. Don’t call me Mouse.”
“Don’t either of you go out there later without me. All right?”
“You want a snowball fight?” Minnie asked.
“I always win them, don’t I?” John said.
“We were littler last year,” Naomi said. “We’ll whup your butt this time.”
“Maybe you will. Until then, stay in the house.”
Freed early from the unspeakable torment of math class, Naomi felt her spirits soar to rare heights. But then she was brought down again by the crashing disappointment of the too-slow snow and the humiliation of Sister Half-Pint being proved right. Oh, she wasn’t depressed, never depressed, she didn’t have time for that, but she wasn’t exactly in the mood to tie a dozen ribbons in her hair and cartwheel through the halls.
Nine days had passed since mysterious Melody beamed up or down, or sideways, or whatever, smack into the civic auditorium to give her the totally splendid attaché case full of the so-called magical items that, in all fairness, were pretty convincingly magical-looking. The frost might be on the boring briar rose, but Melody didn’t seem to know one thing about how to pace a truly thrilling adventure. Melody would never be Louisa May Alcott. At this rate, by the time they flew between the tedious worlds, Minnie would be a hundred, and Naomi herself would be too senile to be the princess of anywhere.
After coming in from the useless wisp of a snowstorm, Naomi was at loose ends for forty minutes, not sure what she wanted to do, just bumping around the house like a thoroughly frustrated moth looking for an open window. But then at 4:20, she bumped her way into the library, and she decided the best of all best things to do would be to read the third novel in the series about Drumblezorn the dragon and his not-anymore-completely-savage young student, the Joan of Arc wannabe.
As she located the novel and took it from the shelf, someone tapped on her shoulder, and when she turned—speak of the devil—there was Melody! Her dress was as drab as ever, but her face seemed more animated than Naomi had previously seen it, her eyes virtually shining with excitement.
“M’lady, I am proud of you—that you have put your kingdom above your family and kept the secret of the attaché case.”
That didn’t sound quite right to Naomi. “Well, I’m a zippered-lips champion at keeping secrets, but I wouldn’t put my kingdom above my family, and why would I have to, anyway?”
“But you have, and that’s the glorious thing. Because … the time has come. Tonight’s the night. Very soon, we fly between the worlds.”
48
NICOLETTE SAT AT JOHN’S DESK, READING ALTON TURNER Blackwood’s journal in a hologrammatic format on the computer, at first with academic interest but then with grim fascination. As she turned the electronic pages, a steadily intensifying dread gripped her. Her respect grew for the formidable threat that the malformed man had been during his lifetime and might still be in death.
She had not expected to be so rattled. Yes, she believed every word John told her. And she’d had uncanny experiences of her own. And Stephanie’s worried phone call on the night of the nineteenth, six days earlier, must have been something like a heads-up warning from Providence. Yet Nicky hoped that in reading the journal she would be relieved to find that, like most sociopathic killers, Blackwood was essentially a bug intelligence, bright perhaps and dangerous, but as narrowly focused as a praying mantis stalking prey, as a spider whose world was limited to its web. If his inner landscape was like those of uncounted butchering maniacs before him, it would be harder to credit the notion that he, of all such bloody-minded bugs in human form, should be the one empowered to return from Beyond, with or without demonic assistance.
She was a woman of faith but in a modern sense that until now allowed for Heaven but doubted Hades, that welcomed the notion of angels but relegated devils to cartoons and horror movies. After half an hour of reading Blackwood’s lurid account of his origins, however, she knew in her bones that she needed to take seriously the idea of his enduring spirit. He wasn’t as easy to dismiss as Big Foot or vampires, or the Loch Ness monster. He was like the presence you felt in the dark when you woke past midnight, that was still there but not visible when you switched on the lamp. He was akin to the thing that pricked your intuition at twilight in a lonely place, pricked it so sharply that you felt something like flukes twitching in your blood.
Beyond the computer screen, at the other end of the room, she half saw someone hurry past the window, through the snow, across the back terrace. Maybe Walter and Imogene hadn’t left yet, and he was tending to some final task before heading home to beat the worst of the storm.
A minute later a door closed so quietly that Nicky almost didn’t hear it. Then quick soft footsteps along the hallway.
She looked up, expecting someone to push open the study door, which was three-quarters closed. As the footsteps passed and then receded, she called out, “John?”
Whoever it might be, he evidently hadn’t heard her. He didn’t double back to see if she wanted something.
Although Blackwood’s journal fascinated her in a deeply morbid way, she was spending too much time on the early pages. She could go back later and read with more care if she wished. Now she skimmed through the seemingly endless lines of painstaking penmanship, in search of what the killer had written about his reasons for switching from single murders to the destruction of entire families.
Preston Nash is sitting alone in his basement apartment, eating corn chips with salsa, drinking beer, and playing Grand Theft Auto, really living the action, when suddenly for no reason at all, he says out loud, “Come to me.”
The next thing he knows, he’s got the key to the Calvino house in a pants pocket, and he’s driving his parents’ second car, which he is forbidden to operate even though he’s thirty-six and a grown man. Preston has suffered fugues in the past, when because of drugs or booze he slips into a dissociative state. Then he does things of which he’s less than half aware, hours of activity that later he dimly remembers or can’t recall at all. But he hasn’t chugged enough beer or popped enough pills to be in that condition now.
Besides, this is different from a fugue. Weirder. He’s acutely aware of what he’s doing, and he doesn’t want to be doing it, but he can’t stop. He’s compelled to get to the Calvino house. He feels as if his life depends on it, but he doesn’t know why. In spite of the storm, the world around him isn’t blurred and remote. It is black-and-white, which has nothing to do with the snow and the bare tre
es, because all the other vehicles on the road are either black or white, or a shade of gray, as are all the signs for businesses and all the clothes that the pedestrians are wearing. The only color in the world right now seems to be Preston, what he wears, and the car he drives.
He isn’t frightened. He thinks he ought to be in a fear sweat, vibrating like one of those coin-operated massaging beds in a cheesy motel, but something tells him that he should remain calm, that he’s all right. The times he’s ever been afraid, he’s always been sober. This thing that’s happening to him isn’t like being drunk, yet it’s just enough like being drunk to keep the tangles combed out of his nerves.
So he parks a block from the Calvino house. He walks to their place as briskly as a punctual man with an important appointment to keep. He is not a graceful guy. Most of the time, the world seems to Preston to be the deck of a ship in a storm, and he is pleased with himself if he can just stay on his feet and not be washed overboard. But now he strides along the snow-covered sidewalk without a misstep. Onto the lawn and along the north side of the handsome white-brick house. Across the back terrace to a windowless door. It’s locked. He uses his key.
Taken.
The rider mounts this horse for the first time since the fifth of October, and though it rode Preston secretly back then, it makes itself known to him now. He submits to control instantly, even more obedient to his master than an avatar in a video game is obedient to whoever holds the joystick, and color floods back into the world around him.
Leaving his key in the door, Preston enters the mud room. The girls’ boots stand on a rubber mat that glistens with snowmelt, and their coats hang from wall hooks. Preston closes the door behind him. Along one wall is a utility cabinet with upper doors, drawers below. Preston, who has never been here before, opens exactly the right drawer and removes from it a claw hammer.
Two inner doors lead out of the mud room, one to the kitchen, one to the ground-floor hallway. Preston enters the hall and hurries as quietly as possible toward the front of the house.
