by Dean Koontz
As he passes a nearly closed door, Nicolette Calvino calls out, “John?”
He could stride into the study and smash her skull to mush. But he understands that she is a most desirable bitch and therefore must be used first. Later, when she’s begging for death, it might then be fun to hammer her face.
Preston has no problem with that if it’s what his rider wants. It’ll just be like one of his porn films crossed with one of the Saw movies except that it’ll be fully 3-D and more intimate.
The foyer features a small walk-in closet. Preston steps into it and quietly closes the door behind him.
Using Preston’s voice, the rider tells him “Stay,” as if he were a well-trained dog. In this condition, he’s more like a car than like a dog, a reliable Honda left in park with the engine idling. He is just Preston now, not Preston and Alton and Ruin, but he’s Preston in stasis, like a guy in a movie on the TV after the viewer presses the pause button. He knows he’s Preston, and he knows that he’s in a coat closet, and he is aware of holding a claw hammer. He also knows that, whatever happens, he won’t really be responsible for it, more of an observer than a participant, although a keenly interested and easily entertained observer. Preston has been an observer all of his life, rather than a participant, so there is nothing new about his current circumstances, except that he can’t go get a beer anytime he wants one.
Minnie stood in her room, beside her play table, staring at the LEGO thing. White, about three inches thick, six inches in diameter, it resembled a big rice cake, except smooth, and stood on edge like a coin. It shouldn’t hold together. It should spill apart into a bunch of pieces, but it didn’t.
For two years, she had been doing this LEGO thing; she didn’t know why. It started when she got home from the hospital after being so sick everyone thought she was dying.
Well, in a way, it started while she was in the hospital.…
She had a high fever that the usual drugs couldn’t lower. Fever but also chills, drenching sweats, terrible headaches. The thirst was almost the worst of it. Sometimes she was so thirsty, as though she’d eaten a pound of salt, and she couldn’t get enough water. Most of the time, they were giving her fluids through a needle stuck in a vein in her arm, but that didn’t relieve the thirst. They had to monitor her water intake because sometimes she would drink until her belly bloated painfully, and in spite of the pain, she desperately wanted to drink still more—even in her dreams.
She had a lot of strange dreams in the intensive-care unit, some of them while she was awake. Before she went into the hospital, she didn’t know what the word delirium meant, but she sure could define it by the time she got well and came home. The dreams, whether she was awake or asleep, often had to do with thirst: deserts where every promise of water turned out to be a mirage; pitchers and spigots from which poured only sand; being chased by some kind of monster on a hot day along dry riverbeds; a forest of parched dead trees surrounding a dusty clearing where brittle bones were scattered in the withered grass, where the only water was pooled at the bottom of an open grave, but when she scrambled into the grave, that water proved to be a mirage, as well, and something started shoveling spadefuls of chalky dirt onto her, the same half-seen monster who had chased her along the waterless river.
Delirium was funny, not ha-ha funny, but weird funny. Delirious, you were sure that not only were monsters trying to kill you but so were some people who were actually trying to help you, like Kaylin Amhurst, the intensive-care nurse. In Minnie’s hallucinations and nightmares, while in the ICU, she thought Nurse Amhurst was trying to poison her.
Sometimes, usually near the end of Minnie’s worst nightmares and hallucinations, Father Albright appeared. She loved Father Albright very much. He was the super-best person she knew besides Mom, Daddy, Naomi, and Zach. He retired not long before Minnie became ill, and Father Bill took his place, so maybe she gave Father Albright a role in her fever dreams because it was the only way she could see him anymore. He was the one good thing in the dreams. He always gave her water, and it never turned out to be salt or sand.
That was a bad year, not just because of her illness. A month before Father Albright retired and went away, Willard died. Daddy and Lionel Timmins were almost killed by a bad guy, too, and though they got an award for valor, Daddy was nevertheless nearly killed, which scared Minnie for a long time. Maybe the only good thing that year was Zach deciding he just had to become a marine.
Minnie didn’t know whether the LEGO shapes were a good or a bad thing. She first saw them in her fever dreams, except they weren’t made of LEGO blocks. They were just shapes seen from a distance; then she found herself walking around on them, as if they were buildings, and eventually she was walking around inside of them. On these tours, she knew that she had shrunk like Alice in Wonderland, until she was the tiniest thing in all of creation, and that the strange shapes she explored were what lay at the bottom of the universe, holding it up.
Her mother said that three great powers kept the universe going. The first and strongest was God. Each of the two additional powers was as strong as the other: love and imagination. Of the three, God and love were always good. Imagination, however, could be good or bad. Mozart imagined great music into existence. Hitler imagined death camps and built them. Imagination was so powerful that you had to be careful because you could imagine things into existence that you might regret. Everything in the universe was an idea before it was real. Walking inside the shapes in her delirium dreams, Minnie knew they were the ideas from which everything had started, although she didn’t know then—or now—what that meant. After all, she was only eight.
Turning away from the LEGO construction, she went to the window and watched the snow falling through the bare limbs of the scarlet oak. The weather forecast was wrong. They would get more than a foot of snow, not six inches. She didn’t know from where this certainty came, but she was confident about her prediction. It was just one of those things she knew.
Since shortly after coming in from the snow with Naomi, Minnie had been in a spooky mood. This was one of those times she sensed unseen presences so strongly that she knew sooner rather than later, they would become visible to her, like at the convenience store, the guy with half his face shot off. This time would be worse than that.
Something moved on the south lawn, at first partly screened by the branches of the oak. Then it came into the open, and she saw that it was Willard. He looked up at her in the window.
“Good old dog,” she whispered. “Good old Willard.”
Willard stood looking up through the falling snow for a long moment, and then he approached the house.
Minnie lost sight of him. She wondered if he had come inside.
Roger Hodd, reporter for the Daily Post, has a date to meet his wife, Georgia, for dinner after she gets off work. She has suggested his favorite restaurant, though it isn’t a place she particularly likes. From this, Hodd infers that she intends to ask for a divorce over dessert. She has long desired her freedom from him. Because of his temper and caustic wit, she hopes that she will be less verbally abused in a public place than in a private one. She won’t be abused at all because Hodd is going to let her sit in the restaurant alone until she realizes she’s been stood up. He’ll give her a divorce, but only after he’s made her desperate for it.
He’s in a hotel room with a hooker, whom he’s paid in advance, and he’s undressed only so far as unbuttoning one cuff of his shirt, when he says, “Come to me.” The girl on the bed is wearing nothing but her panties, and she says with all the seductive allure of Miss Piggy the Muppet, “Why don’t you come to me? I’m really ready.” He’s already buttoned his cuff and snatched his heavy leather coat off the armchair. He says, “I’ve just discovered I’ve got a lower tolerance for ugly than I thought,” and she curses him as he leaves the room.
He’s hurrying along the hotel corridor before he fully realizes what he has just done, and he has no idea why he did it. She wasn’t ugly. And even
if she was, he’s got a reasonably high tolerance for ugly if the rest of the package is okay. He’s been drinking since eleven this morning, but not heavily. Sipping. He’s not drunk. He’s been drinking so long that he hardly ever gets drunk anymore, not that he realizes.
By the time he’s in his car, piloting through billowing waves of snow, he feels like Richard Dreyfuss in that old science-fiction movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He’s obsessed with getting somewhere, not to some remote butte in Wyoming where the mother ship is going to land, but somewhere he can’t name. He ought to be afraid, but he’s not. For one thing, he’s never afraid. He’s one tough sonofabitch. Anyway, he’s been trying to slow-kill himself with booze and neurotic women for years, which is a far more gruesome way to go than setting yourself on fire. For another thing, every time the weirdness of this compulsion makes him breathe fast and his heart races, this soothing voice in his head sort of croons a wordless lullaby, and he grows calm once more.
He parks in an upscale neighborhood, near a white-brick house, which is apparently his destination. He walks around the back of the place, through the snow-covered yard, across a terrace to a door in which a key sticks out of the deadbolt lock. As he opens the door and extracts the key from the lock, a cold black something slams into his head, or at least that’s how it feels. Then it’s inside his head but his skull is intact. He screams, but it’s a silent scream because he doesn’t control his own voice anymore.
As he steps into a mud room and closes the door behind him, he keeps trying to scream, because he’s terrified as he never was during the trip here. Fright overwhelms him as he proceeds out of the mud room into a kitchen, through a dining room, toward the front of the house, and a cold sea of horror rises over him because he’s not hard-assed Roger Hodd anymore, he’s now somebody’s bitch.
Naomi stepped out of the walk-in closet in the guest bedroom and offered the attaché case to Melody. “You’ll see everything’s exactly the same as when you gave it to me. So the eggs—what’re they about, with our names on them? And there’s something in them, I couldn’t figure what it is. Eggs are very symbolic, they can symbolize about a thousand things. Are these symbolic? What’s magic about them, how do they work? Is the frost still on the briar rose, and what does that mean, anyway?”
“M’lady, all your questions will be answered soon. Tonight we travel on the storm.”
“On the storm?” Naomi said, liking the sound of that—travelers on the storm.
Melody’s pretty-enough face was so animated now that she became truly beautiful, much more full of life than she’d been before. Her molasses eyes were amazing, bright and quick, as if shining with an inner light. And her voice, always captivating, always musical and positively dripping with mystery, sounded more enchanting than ever:
“This is not a natural storm, m’lady. This is a conjured snow that falls hereabout but also accumulates in the lonely space between worlds, drifting sideways across time until it bridges this place to your kingdom, so we can glide home as smoothly as oil on glass, as quick as quicksilver.”
Naomi thrilled to every word but one. “Glide? I thought we were going to fly between the worlds?”
“We do both at once, m’lady, as you’ll understand when you see the cross-time sleigh with all its great sails filled and taut with the winds of time.”
Naomi was so dizzy with language and fantasy and possibilities that she couldn’t speak. Then she remembered a word that a kind of witless girl in The Tale of Despereaux often said when bewildered, and it amused Naomi to use it to express her stupefaction: “Gar!”
“Now you must accompany me at once to the top of the house to make further preparations, m’lady. Come, let’s go, while there is no cat afoot to espy our destination.”
Melody flew to the guest-bedroom door, and Naomi hurried after her, wondering if she would ever be able to speak as fabulously as did, apparently, all the people of her kingdom.
They dashed along the second-floor hallway to the back stairs, hastened to the third floor, breezed across Mother’s studio, darted through another door onto the landing at the head of the main stairs.
When Naomi realized that Melody intended to enter the master bedroom, she said, “Wait! That’s my parents’ private space. You need an invitation to enter.”
“We must make the preparations at the top of the house, m’lady. Later, we can only leave from the top of the house.”
“The studio is also at the top of the house.”
“But the studio is inadequate.” Indicating the master-suite door, she said, “Anyway, there’s no one within.”
“How do you know?”
“I know as I know.”
“At least we have to knock,” Naomi said. “It’s the rule.”
Melody smiled mischievously, fisted her right hand, and rapped silently on the air. Before them, the door swung open magically.
Against her better judgment and in violation of the rules, but giggling with delight, Naomi followed Melody into the master suite and closed the door behind them.
Here at the end of the afternoon, with twilight nearing, the world outside was white with whirling snow, but the master bedroom lay mostly in shadows. As Melody approached the bed with the attaché case, both nightstand lamps switched on as though attended by an invisible chambermaid, and there was just enough lovely soft light.
“You’re going to have to teach me stuff like that,” Naomi said.
“Your powers will return when your memory is restored, m’lady. And this evening you will learn many things. Many amazing things. You’ll learn more this evening than you have learned all your life so far.”
Melody put the attaché case on the bedspread and then patted the spot beside it, indicating that Naomi should sit there.
Naomi perched on the edge of the bed, legs dangling. “Now what?”
“Now you will wait here, right there exactly where you’re sitting, while I go downstairs and manifest quite dramatically to each member of your family, convince them that this is a night of magic, and bring them here one at a time.”
“Can’t I go? I want to see you manifest quite dramatically.”
“I must do this as it is written it must be done,” Melody said with a faint note of admonition. “All must be done according to the guidance of the royal mage.”
With that, she stepped lively across the room, exited onto the landing, and closed the door, leaving Naomi alone.
Naomi wished that she could shut off her overloaded mind for five minutes and allow her legions of spinning thoughts to slow to a speed that wouldn’t dizzy her. At least a thousand thoughts were in motion, each rotating on its axis but also revolving around the center of her mind like planets around a sun. All of them were such dazzling thoughts, too, all of them wonderful, except two or three fraidy-cat thoughts that simply weren’t worthy of her, compliments of Minnie’s infectious pessimism. Naomi was determined not to let those yeah-buts or what-ifs grow into ugly little mind warts that would spoil the mood and the magic. She was a positive person, a believer in believing, a first-chair flautist, and though she didn’t know much about math, she knew an enormous amount about magic.
She watched the snow falling diagonally past the window. The wind had gentled to an easy breeze. The ceaselessly unraveling snow was a calming sight.
A deep quiet filled the master suite. Naomi tried to let the quiet seep into her noisy mind.
With a growing disquiet, John roamed the ground floor and the basement, not exactly searching for anything, but half expecting to find something important or even ominous, though he had no idea what that might be.
Eventually, in the kitchen again, he used the security-system keypad beside the back door to set the perimeter alarm. Night lay almost an hour away, but none of them had a reason to go out in this weather. He had told the girls to stay inside. Zach had seemed happily occupied with his drawing tablet. John felt better with the alarm on. He didn’t allow himself the illusion that they wer
e now perfectly safe. No one anywhere was ever perfectly safe.
Forty-seven days remained before the tenth of December. John should not yet feel that a countdown clock was urgently ticking—but he felt it anyway. He could almost hear it.
When darkfall came, the lighted house would be a fishbowl to anyone outside in the night. He decided to close all the draperies and pleated shades, starting in the kitchen. As he went, he checked to be sure that the door locks and window latches were engaged.
This was the anniversary of the worst night of his life, and each window he inspected reminded him that his parents and sisters perished while he lived because of his selfishness and weakness.
On school nights, Marnie and Giselle went upstairs to bed at nine o’clock. John’s parents were teachers, early to rise, and they were usually asleep by ten.
Because he was fourteen, John was permitted to stay up later, but that night he pled weariness and retired when his sisters did, at nine. He sat in the dark until he heard his dad and mom close their door at nine-forty.
His room lay on the opposite side of the hall from his parents’ room. His window looked onto the front-porch roof.
He slipped out of the house through the window and slid shut the well-waxed bottom sash. Because it wasn’t latched, he could open it without difficulty when he returned.
During the past few months, he had sneaked out often. He was so practiced at it that a cat couldn’t have split the scene any more quietly than John did.
The thick limb of a tree overhung the north end of the porch. He reached up, grabbed it, lifted his feet off the roof, and went hand over hand just far enough to be away from the house. Then he dropped to the grass. When he came back, he would climb the tree to the porch roof and enter his room, so ready for sleep that he would pass out as his head hit the pillow.
