by Dean Koontz
“We’ve got to stay together,” she said, passing him the first of three more shells. “I swear, it wants to keep us apart, that’s what it’s been doing. We’re stronger together. Where in the house is easiest to defend?”
“I’m thinking.” He loaded one, two, three shells in the tube-type magazine. “Give me some spares.”
From the computer speakers came music. A recording of one of Naomi’s flute solos of which she was particularly proud.
John and Nicky turned to the monitor. The page of Blackwood’s journal blinked off the screen. A photo flashed up. The same photo of John’s mother that had been in the file labeled CALVINO1 on Billy Lucas’s computer, which he had gotten from this same serial-killer site. That photo flashed away, and one of John’s father appeared.
Nicky said, “What’s happening?”
John’s dad blinked away. Replaced by his sister Marnie. Then Giselle. Then the faces appeared one at a time in rotation: fast, faster, blindingly fast.
John glanced at the gallery of his children’s birthday pictures, at the familiar furniture, the walls, the ceiling. Their house, their home. Not theirs alone anymore.
The screen blanked. Still the flute music. A new photo. Zach. Now Naomi. Minnie. Nicky. John.
“It’s starting,” he said.
“Screw this. We’ll stop it,” Nicky said almost savagely, and switched off the computer. She put the entire box of shells on the desk. “But how? John, it’s crazy. How can we defend against a thing like this?”
Stuffing four shells in one pants pocket, four in the other, he said, “Abelard told me it can’t really hurt us with the house. It has to get into someone and come at us that way.”
Nicky looked at the pistol in his rig, at the shotgun in his hands, and he could read her thoughts.
Billy Lucas had killed his family. The enemy within.
“I shouldn’t have all the guns.” He handed the pistol to her. “You’re a good shot. It’s double action, just pull through the first resistance. It’s stiffer than you’re used to, but you’ll be fine.”
As she stared at the weapon in her hands, abhorrence distorted her lovely features.
John could read that expression, too. “Nicky, listen, you watch me for any sign, any slightest sign that I’m … not me anymore.”
A tremor softened her mouth. “What if I—”
“You won’t,” he interrupted. “It can’t get in you, not you.”
“If I were to do anything to one of the kids—”
“Not a woman as good as you,” he insisted. “It’s me that I’m not too sure of. I’m the one with a history of … letting the team down.”
“Bullshit. You’re the best man I’ve ever known. And it won’t be the kids. Not our kids. It’ll come at us from somewhere else, in someone from outside.”
“You just watch me for any sign,” he repeated. “Any slightest sign. And don’t hesitate to pull the trigger. It’ll look like me, but it won’t be me anymore. And if it’s in me, it’ll go for you first because you have the other gun.”
She grabbed the back of his neck, pulled his face to hers, and kissed him as if it might be the last time she ever would.
In the past twenty-one days, Lionel Timmins hadn’t been able to find any hinges to open doors on the Woburn investigation. There was the link between Reese Salsetto and Andy Tane, but day by day it seemed to be a link that didn’t connect with this chain of events, just a coincidence. The more he probed into the weirdness on the night of the fourth—culminating in the furious violence at the hospital—the less sense it made.
And day by unnerving day, with increasing seriousness, Lionel reviewed his memory of the curious atmosphere in the Woburn house and the experience with the screen saver that had formed into a blue hand on Davinia’s computer. The repulsive cold squirming against his palm and spread fingers. The sharp nip as if a fang had pierced his skin. His persistent sense of being watched. The sound of doors closing on the deserted second floor, footsteps in empty rooms.
Alternately questioning his sanity and assuring himself that he was merely gathering information with which to set John Calvino’s mind at ease, Lionel found his way to the yellow-brick house of the former exorcist late on the afternoon of the twenty-fifth. He didn’t call ahead for an appointment, but used his intimidating physique and his badge to batter at Peter Abelard’s resistance to grant an interview. Lionel didn’t look much like a cop in his wool toboggan cap and navy peacoat, but the ex-priest relented.
When he learned that John had been there earlier, Lionel was not surprised. He was amazed, however, to discover that this smoke-saturated man who bore no resemblance to his idea of a priest was nonetheless eerily convincing. The interview chilled him.
In the street outside Peter Abelard’s house, as Lionel stood watching the white sky come apart and drift down in cold crystals, he stuck out his tongue to catch the flakes, as he had done when he was very young, trying to remember what it had been like to be a boy who believed in wonders and in Mystery with a capital M.
Now, in his car, a few blocks from the Calvino house, he still didn’t know if he was aboard the superstition express all the way to the end of the line or if he would get off at the next station. Whatever happened, he owed John Calvino a longer and more serious discussion of the evidence, and he owed it to him now.
Sitting on her parents’ bed, beside the attaché case, watching the glorious snow falling outside, hoping that the hush of the room would seep into her noisy brain and bring her clarity of mind, Naomi thought that she heard a chanting voice, as if from a radio with the volume set low. On the nearest nightstand stood a clock radio, but it wasn’t the source of the rhythmic murmur.
The chanting repeatedly faded, although it never went entirely away. Each time it returned, the volume was never louder than it had been at its previous loudest, and she could not make out the words. Pretty soon, curiosity got the better of Naomi, which was only what curiosity was supposed to do, to her way of thinking, because without curiosity there would be no progress, and humankind would still be living in grotesquely primitive conditions, without iPods, nonfat yogurt, and shopping malls.
She was pretty sure Melody had told her not to move from her perch on the bed. She didn’t want to be one of those graceless people who used her status to justify all kinds of obnoxious behavior, but the inescapable fact seemed to be that if there was royalty from a far world in the house, it was not Melody. She Who Must Be Obeyed was instead a certain eleven-year-old going on twelve. She got up from the bed and followed the sound, turning her head this way and that to get a bead on it.
A short hallway opened off the bedroom, with a walk-in closet on each side. Naomi switched on the hall light. The chanting didn’t arise from either of the closets.
At the end of the hall, the door to the bathroom stood ajar. The room beyond was almost dark at this hour, little of the storm light penetrating the clerestory windows high in the walls.
The rhythmic sound was definitely chanting. A male voice. But she couldn’t quite make out what he was saying.
Naomi wasn’t an impetuous girl given to flinging herself into harm’s way. This chanting might be weird but surely it didn’t arise from an ill-intentioned person. Melody wouldn’t have brought her up here if anything were amiss. No doubt the chanting had something to do with the preparations for departure. Magicians were always chanting.
She pushed open the bathroom door, felt for the light switch, and the room brightened.
The most desperate-looking man sat on the floor, knees drawn up to his chest, arms wrapped around his legs to pull himself into a ball like a pill bug. His tarnished-penny eyes were so wide with terror, they looked as if they might fall out of his sockets. He bobbed his head up and down, up and down. As if trying to convince himself, he muttered, “I’m Roger Hodd of the Daily Post, I’m Roger Hodd of the Daily Post, I’m Roger Hodd of the Daily Post.…”
John with the shotgun, Nicky with the pistol, hurried a
long the ground-floor hall toward the front stairs, on their way to the children, who should be upstairs.
The doorbell rang.
She said, “Don’t answer it!”
They were just past the foot of the main stairs, with only the foyer between them and the front door, so that John clearly heard the clack of the deadbolt sliding out of the striker plate in the door frame.
“No,” Nicky said, and raised the pistol.
John brought up the shotgun as the front door swung inward. The perimeter alarm had been engaged. The siren should have sounded. It didn’t. A meddling phantom had invaded the system.
The door swung wide, but no one stood on the threshold. A taunt. A lure. Someone might be out there, to the left or the right of the doorway, back pressed to the wall of the house, waiting for John to step into a trap.
There was no music, flute or otherwise, and the breeze barely murmured, but snow whirled as if waltzing on the porch, flung off thin veils that fluttered silently into the foyer, sparkling in the chandelier light.
For eighteen years, John had dreaded this moment without fully recognizing that on an unconscious level he believed implicitly the impossible would happen, that the killer of his family would return from the grave. Two years previously, when Minnie seemed close to death, her illness was so mysterious that John then became conscious of his conviction that Blackwood’s promise to him would be kept. As Minnie lay in delirium, her fever uncontrollable, Blackwood prowled the edges of John’s imagination, and it became easier by the day to believe that a spirit, not a virus, was killing her. Since then, his dread had grown, and now it almost seemed that he’d drawn Blackwood back into the world, that by so often imagining the worst, he had issued an invitation.
Now the open door and the vacant threshold argued for boldness on his part, because he would be the last victim on this killer’s agenda. It wanted him to witness the brutalization of everyone he loved before slitting him open to steam in the winter night. At this moment of the open door, Nicky far more than John was in danger.
“Go upstairs to the kids,” he said. “I’ll check this out.”
“No. I’m with you. Do it fast. Do it now.”
Zach was near the door that he had just closed, Minnie stood beside her brother’s desk, and Willard materialized through the wall.
Always, when Minnie thought about Willard as he had been, she thought about play and fun, laughter and love. Even the sight of Dead Willard could lift her heart, though the truth was that the dog did not come back into the world to play or to make her laugh. He wasn’t scary like the ghost with the blasted face in the convenience store, but you didn’t want to cuddle Dead Willard, either. He wouldn’t feel soft, furry, and warm anymore. You might feel a coldness when you tried to touch him or nothing at all, which would be worse. The sight of Willard scared Minnie now, because he meant trouble was coming.
The dog raced to her, dashed to Zach, disappeared through the door to the hall, and at once returned by the same route.
“What’s wrong with you?” Zach asked Minnie as he watched her watching the ghost dog that he couldn’t see.
Willard barked, barked, but even Minnie couldn’t hear him. She could see only that he was trying to bark out from his reality into theirs.
She said, “Zach, get away from the door.”
“Why?”
“Get away from the door!”
The dog did his best. Nobody could blame good old Willard when the gray-dress woman from twenty days earlier, the woman who might have been a door-to-door Jesus-talker but wasn’t, burst into the room and swung a meat cleaver at Zach.
Roger Hodd was told, with his own voice, to Stay. He finds that he can’t disobey. He is a dog, not a man anymore, just a dog with a master who has him by the short hairs of his mind, and minute by minute his sanity is melting away. As a reporter, he gets to ask the questions, and you either have to tell him the truth, lie, or say “No comment,” and no matter what you say, he can characterize it as either the truth or a lie, as he sees fit. That is his authority, his power, but no longer. He doesn’t get to ask questions here, and this thing that has controlled him like a marionette, that isn’t in him at the moment but that can still make him Stay, is going to do something monstrous with him, then to him.
The girl pushes the door open wider, turns on the lights, and gapes at him from the threshold. She asks if he’s all right, if he needs help. How stupid is the little gash? Of course he needs help, he’s dying here. He wants to tell her that she’s a brain-dead future whore, that she’s dumber than the load she probably has in her pants, but then his rider returns, fully controlling Hodd once more, and he says to the girl, “You are a sweet treat, aren’t you? I want my sweet candy. Give me some tasty candy, you ignorant little bitch.” As abruptly as it mounted him, the rider dismounts, for it has business elsewhere, but Roger Hodd remains on Stay.
Swaddled in the odors of wool coats and fake-fur collars and sheepskin linings, Preston Nash waits in the lightless closet, like a Level 3 threat in a video game, the claw hammer ready in his hand. He remains unafraid. After almost twenty years strung out on drugs and drink, he has so often walked with Death along one brink or another that his capacity for fear is burnt out, until the only things that can at times frighten him are his worst hallucinations. Long-term users of ecstasy—a drug Preston dislikes—lose the ability to know joy naturally because their brains stop producing endorphins. As they must rely on their drug of choice for happiness, he relies on his for terror that the real world—a faded and threadbare place to him—no longer can supply. So he waits for his new and interesting companion, the sharer of his flesh, with pleasant anticipation.
He is idling on a Stay command with nothing to do but think, and he likes what he is thinking. Although not in control of his body, he has the benefit of all his senses when his spirit driver gets behind the wheel and takes him for a spin. Preston’s vision, smell, touch, taste, and hearing remain as sharp as ever, but the intensity of these experiences will be beyond anything he, as a lifelong observer rather than participant, has ever known. He has killed thousands in the virtual worlds of games, but this will be real and intense. He has bedded women, mostly those for whom he’s paid, and he’s seen thousands of women used and roughly abused in adult films, but he has never raped or beaten one. He suspects his spirit driver will inspire him to do things this night that will be more outrageous and thrilling than anything he’s ever seen on film. He hopes he’ll be allowed the wife. But certainly the girls. What lies before him now is the opportunity to play with the real world as he has previously only played with virtual ones.
As Preston listens to John and Nicolette Calvino in the foyer, his spirit companion returns.
John went from the foyer to the porch as he would have cleared a doorway in any murder house where the killer might still be found: low, quick, shotgun tracking with his eyes to the left, right. The porch was deserted. He surveyed the autumn-brown lawn that lay half-concealed under its first coat of winter white, saw no one either there or in the street.
Stepping inside, he looked at Nicky and shook his head. He closed the door, twisted the deadbolt turn, and watched the lock for a moment, waiting for it to disengage.
“The kids,” she said worriedly.
He went to Nicky, peered up the stairs beyond her, and said, “Let me take the lead. Stay a few steps back, so we don’t make one target of ourselves.”
“You think someone’s in the house already?”
“The alarm is set, but it didn’t go off when the door opened. Maybe someone came in earlier and it didn’t go off then, either.”
He had never seen her face this grim. She looked at the pistol in her right hand and said, “There’s no way we can call the police, someone you know.”
“I knew Andy Tane. The only cop you can trust is me—and maybe not me, either. After we’ve got the kids safe with us, we’ll bar the doors or nail them or something—then sweep the house room by room. You with
me?”
“Yeah.”
“Remember—stay behind me. Two targets, not one.”
He climbed three stairs, glanced back, and saw her surveying the foyer ceiling as if this were not her home but instead a cave unknown to her, in which hung bats and other rabid threats.
Ridden again, Preston thrills to the vicious rage of his demon master, a hatred so exhilarating that it’s like an infinite roller coaster without rising inclines, only breathtaking plunges, one after the other, allowing but a moment to shudder in anticipation of the next free-fall into fury.
He quietly opens the closet door, steps into the foyer, and sees John Calvino climbing the stairs, his attention on spaces above, and Nicolette turning away to follow her husband. Just a rich-bitch, tight-assed, art-school phony, vomiting her pretentious swill onto canvas after canvas, a baby machine pumping out more little phonies to live in this oh-so-precious fantasy life of hers. She needs to be taught how the world really is, needs to be brought down and broken and forced to admit she’s just filth like everyone else.
Preston’s rider finesses from him a stealth and swiftness that he—always awkward and so long enervated—has never shown before. The woman doesn’t hear him coming. He raises the hammer as he closes on her, dismayed that he is going to be allowed only to kill her. But the dismay lasts just an instant, because he is in the game, in it as he has never been before, no longer merely a player sitting in an armchair. Although ridden by Death and a demon, Preston feels more alive now than ever before, and he knows that when the claw end of the hammer cracks through the top of her skull and gouges the art out of her brain forever, his pleasure will be an order of magnitude more intense than anything he has felt before, orgasmic.
He swings the hammer down.
If Nicky heard the squeak of a shoe or the rustle of clothing behind her, she didn’t consciously register it, but she smelled bad breath—garlic, beer, rotten teeth—and strong body odor, and she instinctively ducked her head, hunched her shoulders. Something cold and curved brushed along the nape of her neck and apparently hooked in the collar of her blouse. She was jerked backward. Off balance, she fell against her attacker.
