by Dean Koontz
“… ignorant little bitch.”
Roger Hodd of the Daily Post didn’t have the voice of the thing who spoke to Naomi from the mirror back in September, but Naomi had no doubt that they were one and the same, that nothing was the way she had thought it was, that she had been less perspicacious than foolish.
She turned to run, in front of her the bathroom door slammed shut, she seized the knob, it wouldn’t budge. Trapped.
When Minnie told Zach to get away from the door, he instead turned toward it, to see what was wrong, and there was the woman.
Minnie screamed as the blade flashed.
Zach dropped, tucked, rolled as the cutting edge sliced the air with a whoosh where he had been. As he sprang to his feet, he heard the cleaver chop into the carpet inches short of him. The freaking maniac had swung it so hard that she cut through to the wood beneath and needed a moment to free the blade, spitting and keening like a rabid weasel or something.
Clutching her LEGO wheel to her chest with both arms, Minnie backed away from the desk toward the hall door, screaming again. Man, he hated to hear his sister screaming, it tore at him. Zach snatched up the desk chair, throwing it at the maniac to buy a few seconds. Struck, the woman stumbled backward, and by the time she regained her balance, Zach had the Mameluke sword.
Lizard-fast in spite of her long dress, the shrieking lunatic came at him before he could draw the sword from the scabbard, came at him in a fury, and he didn’t even know her. He used the sword and sheath defensively, as a cudgel, holding it by both ends and thrusting it forward to meet the descending blade. The cleaver rang off the polished-nickel scabbard, and the force of the blow almost vibrated the Mameluke out of Zach’s hands. She swung left to right, horizontally, under the sword, almost slashing his belly. He danced back, she slashed right to left, and the blade snagged his T-shirt and flashed away with a quiver of light but with none of his blood.
The smooth curved back of the claw slides harmlessly along the nape of the bitch’s neck, and the two sharp talons snare her blouse. Preston jerks, ripping the collar, pulling her against him. With his left arm, he encircles her throat. As her right arm comes up, maybe trying to shoot backward at him, he swings the hammer at her hand. He strikes the gun instead, it flies out of her grip, thuds off the area rug, clatters across the floor.
At the feel of her, the warm delectable body, Preston’s rider wants her, after all, and so does Preston, he wants to take her and kill her with a knife while he’s taking her, which is more extreme than anything he’s seen in the roughest bondage films. Time the killing cut to the moment of his orgasm. This is his rider’s desire, as well, for it believes that Death is the best sex.
The husband is coming down the stairs, the pistol-grip shotgun raised, but he can’t take a shot without killing his rich-bitch baby-making machine. She’s kicking at Preston’s shins, clawing at the arm that encircles her neck, but he feels no pain, he is supernaturally strong. He’s a match for any of the superheroes in all those movies that he has watched repeatedly while rooting for the archvillains.
Using the woman as a shield, he drags her along the hallway, toward the back of the house, grinning at Calvino, who follows them with the shotgun ready, the big tough cop with his door-buster gun, but his badge and his gun don’t matter now.
“Shoot me through her,” Preston taunts. “Go ahead. Blast both of us to Hell. You won’t want her anyway, when I’m done with her. You know what happened to your other hump? That hottie, Cindy Shooner? She committed suicide five years ago, she’s waiting for this bitch in Hell. They can compare notes about what a one-minute wonder you were in bed.”
Preston wants the cop to threaten him, to beg for her, to try some half-assed psychology, because it will be sweet to hear the terror in his voice. But Calvino says nothing, just shows him the muzzle of the 12-gauge and follows, waiting for an opportunity, but he’s not going to get one.
At the study, Preston drags his prize of fresh meat out of the hall, backward across the threshold. The cop quickly closes on them and tries to shoulder through the door, thrusting the shotgun ahead of him. But if the house cannot be used to kill, it can be used to hamper. The door closes hard against Calvino, pinning him to the jamb.
“The house is mine now,” Preston declares, grinding himself against the rich bitch’s tight butt, “and everything in it.”
Although the cop strains to break free, the door is unrelenting, denying him further entrance, squeezing him hard until he will have to retreat. Swinging his right arm past the wifey, Preston strikes at the husband’s face with the hammer, Calvino jukes, the claw gouges a chunk from the door frame.
The bitch hasn’t stopped tearing at Preston’s left arm. But suddenly she seizes the handle of the hammer, ferociously twists it, so surprises him that she takes the weapon. Trying to snatch it away from her, he unintentionally relaxes the arm around her throat. She starts to slip down and away. He grabs a fistful of her hair to yank her back. For a moment his head is fully exposed.
Face flushed and clenched with the effort to squeeze farther into the room, Calvino gains two inches. He thrusts the shotgun forward, over his wife’s head, into Preston’s face. The flash—
Backed against his desk, Zach desperately blocked every swing of the cleaver with the Marine Corps sword, but was given no opportunity to draw it from its scabbard. The crazed woman chopped high, chopped low, lunging with every slash of the wicked blade, which could probably render an entire chicken in five seconds flat. His heart pounded so hard he could hear it, a hollow ba-boom ba-boom that seemed to enter his ears by a back door, could feel it knocking against his sternum, his ribs.
Minnie had backed away to the hall door. But she seemed frozen in fear.
Zach shouted at her, “Get out! Get help!”
Reminded of Minnie, the whack job with the cleaver relented for a moment, glancing at her, maybe thinking she should chop the easier target first and demoralize Zach by killing his sister. He instantly took advantage of her mistake, didn’t attempt to draw the sword from the stupid scabbard, but just swung the whole thing at her head. The sound of the blow was hugely satisfying, one of the best things ever. Dropping the cleaver, the freaking lunatic collapsed to the floor on her back, possibly dead but probably unconscious.
Zach snatched up her weapon and stowed it in a desk drawer. He dropped onto one knee beside her, pressed fingertips to her throat, and found a pulse. He was relieved. He didn’t want to kill her if he didn’t have to. Maybe she was only crazy, not evil. And he was just thirteen, not ready for this. Maybe he could drag the nutcase into the closet, brace the door shut, and then call the cops.
Only as he pulled open the closet door did he realize that Minnie was gone.
As Minnie stepped into the hallway to shout for help, the LEGO wheel-thing was heavy, at least ten or twelve pounds when it ought to have weighed maybe twelve ounces. And it seemed to be getting heavier by the second. She was terrified for Zach. She loved him, she didn’t want to grow up without him, so her legs were already rubbery. The weight of the weird LEGO thing caused her to totter, but she knew that she should let it out of her hands only if she was in extreme danger, though she didn’t know why.
Exiting Zach’s room, she opened her mouth to shout for help—and saw Professor Sinyavski, his wild hair wilder than ever, lurching out of the storage room at the east end of the hall. But he’d said he was leaving early because of the snow.
With his bushy eyebrows, rubbery nose, and big belly, he usually looked funny in a nice way, but he didn’t look any kind of funny now. His lips were skinned back from his teeth in a snarl, his face was twisted and hateful, and his eyes seemed to be burning and icy at the same time. Maybe Professor Sinyavski was peering out at Minnie from somewhere behind those eyes, but she knew at once, for sure, Ruin looked at her from within the mathematician—and it wanted her.
Voice rough with anger and slurred as if he had been drinking, the professor said, “Piggy pig. Come here, you dirt
y piggy pig, you dirty pig.” He started toward her, staggering, and for the first time Minnie realized how big the Russian was, not just overweight but big in the chest and shoulders, his neck thick, more muscle under the fat than she had realized before.
This was extreme danger, all right. Reluctantly but without hesitation, she put the LEGO wheel on the floor and ran toward the front stairs.
“I’m Roger Hodd of the Daily Post, I’m Roger Hodd of the Daily Post.…”
The inside of the bathroom door had a thumb-turn deadbolt, but that wasn’t holding it shut. No matter how furiously Naomi wrenched at the knob, jerked on it, the door didn’t even rattle against the jamb, as if it was steel and was welded in place.
She glanced back at Roger Hodd, still on the floor, doing his pill-bug imitation. No less terrified, the man now appeared deranged, too. This time, a shaky humorless laugh punctuated “Daily Post,” and Naomi knew that soon, any second—Oh God, Oh God—he would return to the subject of tasty candy, and she shuddered at the thought of his hands on her.
As Minnie reached the stairs, a shotgun boomed on the ground floor. She had intended to go down. Instead she went up to the third-floor landing. Into Mother’s studio. Across the studio to the back stairs. Don’t glance behind. Looking over your shoulder wasted time, slowed you down. She just prayed and ran, hoping God would help her if she helped herself by running her butt off. She had to be faster than big old Professor Sinyavski. She could do the math, he’d taught her to do it. She was eight years old, he was maybe seventy, so she should be almost nine times faster than he was.
The door released John, and Nicky embraced him. She didn’t look back, didn’t want to see faceless Preston Nash or the room fouled by a spray of blood and brains.
“The kids,” she said, and together they hurried once more along the hall toward the front stairs.
A dark primitive part of her despaired that this would never stop, that Nature was a pagan beast that devoured everyone in the end, that the unrelenting idiot evil of Ruin-and-Blackwood had the power to turn the entire world against her family, one person at a time, until finally it got what it wanted. But a more profound part of her, the believer who was an artist and who knew that imagination could create something from nothing, insisted that the world was not a cancerous maze of infinite malignancies, that it arose from an intricate matrix of exquisite design, which made it possible for hope to be fulfilled. If only she and John did the right thing, the smart thing, they could save the kids, all of them, and get out of this damn box.
In the front hall, she retrieved her pistol. John hurried toward the second floor. Nicky followed him, realizing that the nape of her neck still felt cold where the convex curve of the hammer claw had slid along it, and she shivered.
Once, in a true-crime book, while browsing in a bookstore, Naomi saw a picture of a murdered girl. A police photo or something. A girl younger than Naomi. She had been raped. Punched in the face, stabbed. Her eyes in the photo were the worst thing Naomi had ever seen. Wide pretty eyes. They were the worst thing because they were the saddest thing, they brought tears to her own eyes there in the store, and she quickly closed the book and put it back on the shelf and told herself to forget she ever saw that poor face, those eyes. She worked hard to forget it, but it showed up in a dream once in a while, and now as she struggled with the bathroom door, the dead girl’s face haunted her once more.
Breathing raggedly, making strange noises, little whimpers, which frightened her because she sounded like someone wholly different from herself, Naomi figured-hoped-prayed she might be all right as long as Roger Hodd continued to drone about who he was and where he worked, showing no interest in her. But then she heard him moving, and when she turned, she saw him rising to his feet from the floor.
She gave up on the door, she couldn’t get it open anyway, and if Hodd was on the move, she didn’t dare turn her back to him. He swayed as he chanted, not looking at her or at anything in the room, for that matter, but his words had a different rhythm from the way he’d been saying them, and a new tone entered his voice. The self-pitying note and confusion became impatience and petulance, and he emphasized the word am as though arguing with someone: “I AM Roger Hodd of the Daily Post, I AM Roger Hodd of the Daily Post.… ”
Minnie raced down four flights to the landing at the ground floor, where she halted at the door to the kitchen, held her breath, and listened. The stairs were quiet. Professor Sinyavski—or the thing that had once been the professor—wasn’t thundering after her.
She looked down the next flight of stairs. All remained quiet—but then something drip-drip-dripped onto the carpeted treads. Red. Thicker than water. Blood. She glanced at the ceiling above the stairs and saw a long line, a slash in the plaster, like a wound, blood oozing out between the lips of the wound, as if the house were alive.
Her heart fluttered. She told herself that the blood wasn’t real. The only reason she saw it was because Ruin wanted her to see it. This was like a delirium hallucination except that she wasn’t feverish in a hospital bed. Or if it was real, it didn’t come from a body somewhere above the ceiling. It was like the tears of blood that a statue of the Holy Mother might weep during a minor miracle, though this was dark magic. If she allowed herself to be frightened by this, then she would be inviting Ruin to torment her with other visions, maybe with a lot worse than merely visions. But her heart fluttered anyway.
The stairwell lights went off. In the absolute darkness, the drip-drip-dripping of blood became a noisier drizzle, and she could smell the metallic odor of it. She was overwhelmed by a fear that the noise of spilling blood masked the sounds of something approaching from above or below. But this was less her imagination than it was a suggestion pressed upon her by Ruin, and if she succumbed to panic, that also would be an invitation.
Easing open the landing door, she surveyed the kitchen, saw no one. She stepped out of the stairs, quietly closing the door behind her.
First, find Mom and Daddy, get help for Zach. Minnie wouldn’t think about Zach being hurt, let alone dead. Nothing good could come from worrying about that. Zach was smart and quick and strong; he would take care of the crazy cleaver woman.
Whether or not Minnie found her parents, she could help Zachary if she had a weapon, and she could protect herself, too. She slipped across the kitchen to the drawers in which the cutlery was kept. She chose a butcher knife. She couldn’t imagine using it as a weapon, but neither could she imagine just letting someone hack her to pieces with a cleaver and not fighting back.
She closed the drawer, turned, and Professor Sinyavski seized the knife, took it away from her, threw it across the room, scooped her off her feet. She tried to fight back, but he was stronger than an old fat mathematician ought to be. He held her tight under his left arm and clamped his right hand over her mouth to silence her. “My little pretty pig. Pretty little dirty piggy.” Minnie’s scream stifled by his meaty hand, he hurried with her toward the door to the terrace and the backyard.
In Zach’s room, John and Nicky found pencils, erasers, and a couple of large drawing tablets scattered on the floor, as if they had been swept off the desk during a struggle. One of the tablets had fallen open, and John picked it up, stunned by the portrait of Alton Turner Blackwood.
From the description of the killer that John had given fifteen years previously, Nicky recognized the subject. She took the tablet from him, paged through it, her shaky hands rattling the paper as she found Blackwood again, again, and yet again.
“What’s been going on here?” John worried.
“It’s not Zach,” she said adamantly. “It’s not in our Zachary. He’d never let it have him.”
John didn’t think it would get into Zach, but it was in someone, moved on to someone after Preston’s head was blown half off, and it was loose in the house. In the house and hunting down the kids.
From the closet came a voice. “Hello? Is somebody there?”
The door was braced shut with a chair.
“Somebody? Could you let me out of here, please? Hello?”
“That’s not one of ours,” John said.
“No,” Nicky agreed.
“Let her out?”
“Hell no.”
They hurried to the girls’ room. No one. So quiet. Snow at the window. The whole house was quiet. Dead quiet.
Nicky said “Library,” and they rushed to the library. The lesson tables. The reading corner. Between the stacks. No one. Snow beating soundlessly against the windowpanes.
Stay cool. No one screaming. That was good. No screaming was good. Of course they couldn’t scream if they were dead, not if they were all dead, all dead and gutted, servus and two servae.
Guest room. The closet. The attached bath. No one. The quiet, the snow whirling at the windows, Nicky’s purple eyes so bright in her suddenly pale face.
Quicker, quicker. Storage room. Hall bath. Linen closet. No one, no one, no one.
Zach entered the kitchen by the back stairs, far past anxious and halfway to frantic, searching for Minnie, for Naomi, for his parents. He saw the door standing open, old Sinyavski in the sheeting snow with Minnie, carrying her across the terrace toward the yard in the colorless twilight. Zach didn’t know what that was about, but it couldn’t be good, even if the professor had always before seemed like a right type, never a hint that he was a god-awful freaking maniac.
On the floor lay a butcher knife. Zach picked it up. It wasn’t a pistol, but it was better than bare hands. He hurried to the open door.
With her back to the door that wouldn’t open, Naomi watched with increasing fear as Roger Hodd pulled out drawer after drawer in the master-bathroom cabinets. He still chanted, louder and more angrily with each repetition, the emphasis now on two words: “I’m Roger HODD of the Daily POST, I’m Roger HODD of the Daily POST.…” His back was to her, but Naomi could see his face in the mirror as he moved along the granite counter, and he looked insane, as if at any moment he would start shrieking like a chimpanzee and come at her snapping his teeth in a biting frenzy.
