Dean Koontz - Fear Nothing

by Fear Nothing(Lit)

  I repeated the question: "What was wrong with the monkey?"

  When at last Angela spoke, her voice was hardly louder than a whisper: "It wasn't a monkey."

  I knew that I had heard her correctly, yet her words made no sense.

  "Not a monkey? But You said-" "It appeared to be a monkey."

  "Appeared?

  "And it was a monkey, of course."

  Lost, I said nothing.

  "Was and wasn't," she whispered. "And that's what was wrong with it."

  She did not seem entirely rational. I began to wonder if her fantastic story had been more fantasy than truth-and if she knew the difference.

  Turning away from the votive candles, she met my eyes. She was not ugly anymore, but she wasn't pretty again, either. Hers was a face of ashes and shadows. "Maybe I shouldn't have called You. I was emotional about your dad dying. I wasn't thinking clearly."

  "You said I need to know. . - to defend myself She nodded. "You do.

  That's right. You need to know. You're hanging by such a thin thread.

  You need to know who hates You."

  I held out my hand to her, but she didn't take it.

  "Angela," I pleaded, "I want to know what really happened to my parents."

  "They're dead. They're gone. I loved them, Chris, loved them as friends, but they're gone."

  "I still need to know."

  "If You're thinking that somebody has to pay for their deaths. ..

  then You have to realize that nobody ever will. Not in your lifetime.

  Not in anyone's. No matter how much of the truth You learn, no one will be made to pay. No matter what You try to do.

  I found that I had drawn my hand back and had curled it into a fist on the table. After a silence, I said, "We'll see."

  "I've quit my job at Mercy this evening." Revealing this sad news, she appeared to shrink, until she resembled a child in adult clothing, once more the girl who had brought iced tea, medicine, and pillows to her disabled mother. "I'm not a nurse anymore."

  "What will You do?"

  She didn't answer.

  "It was all You ever wanted to be," I reminded her.

  "Doesn't seem any point to it now. Bandaging wounds in a war is vital work. Bandaging wounds in the middle of Armageddon is foolish.

  Besides, I'm becoming. I'm becoming. Don't You see?"

  In fact, I didn't see.

  "I'm becoming. Another me. Another Angela. Someone I don't want to be. Something I don't dare think about."

  I still didn't know what to make of her apocalyptic talk. Was it a rational response to the secrets of Wyvern or the result of the personal despair arising from the loss of her husband?

  She said, "If You insist on knowing about this, then once You know, there's nothing to do but sit back, drink what pleases You most, and watch it all end."

  "I insist anyway."

  "Then I guess it's time for show-and-tell," Angela said with evident mbivalence. "But. .. oh, Chris, it's going to break your heart."

  Sadness elongated her features. "I think You need to know. .. but it's going to break your heart."

  When she turned from me and crossed the kitchen, I began to follow her.

  She stopped me. "I'll have to turn some lights on to get what I need.

  You better wait here, and I'll bring everything back."

  I watched her navigate the dark dining room. In the living room, she switched on a single lamp, and from there she moved out of sight.

  Restlessly, I circled this room to which I had been confined, my mind spinning as I prowled. The monkey was and was not a monkey, and its wrongness lay in this simultaneous wasness and notness. This would seem to make sense only in a Lewis Carroll world, with Alice at the bottom of a magical rabbit hole.

  At the back door, I tried the dead bolt again. Locked.

  I drew the curtain aside and surveyed the night. I could not see Orson.

  Trees were stirring. The wind had returned.

  Moonlight was on the move. Apparently, new weather was coming in from the Pacific. As the wind flung tattered clouds across the face of the moon, a silvery radiance appeared to ripple across the nightscape. In fact, what traveled were the dappling shadows of the clouds, and the movement of the light was but an illusion.

  Nevertheless, the backyard was transformed into a winter stream, and the light purled like water moving under ice.

  From elsewhere in the house came a brief wordless cry. It was as thin and forlorn as Angela herself.

  The cry was so short-lived and so hollow that it might have been no more real than the movement of the moonlight across the backyard, merely a ghost of sound haunting a room in my mind. Like the monkey, it possessed both a quality of wasness and notness.

  As the door curtain slipped through my fingers and fell silently across the glass, however, a muffled thump sounded elsewhere in the house and shuddered through the walls.

  The second cry was briefer and thinner than the first-but it was unmistakably a bleat of pain and terror.

  Maybe she had merely fallen off a step stool and sprained her ankle.

  Maybe I'd heard only wind and birds in the eaves. Maybe the moon is made of cheese and the sky is a chocolate nonpareil with sugar stars.

  I called loudly to Angela.

  She didn't answer.

  The house was not so large that she could have failed to hear me. Her silence was ominous.

  Cursing under my breath, I drew the Glock from my jacket pocket. I held it in the candlelight, searching desperately for safeties.

  I found only one switch that might be what I wanted. When I pressed it down, an intense beam of red light shot out of a smaller hole below the muzzle and painted a bright dot on the refrigerator door.

  My dad, wanting a weapon that was user-friendly even to gentle professors of literature, had paid extra for laser sighting. Good man.

  I didn't know much about handguns, but I knew some models of pistols featured "safe action" systems with only internal safety devices that disengaged as the trigger was pulled and, after firing, engaged again.

  Maybe this was one of those weapons. If not, then I would either find myself unable to get off a shot when confronted by an assailant-or, fumbling in panic, would shoot myself in the foot.

  Although I wasn't trained for this work, there was no one but me to do the job. Admittedly, I thought about getting out of there, climbing on my bike, riding to safety, and placing an anonymous emergency call to the police. Thereafter, however, I would never be able to look at myself in a mirror-or even meet Orson's eyes.

  I didn't like the way my hands were shaking, but I sure as hell couldn't pause for deep-breathing exercises or meditation.

  As I crossed the kitchen to the open door at the dining room, I considered returning the pistol to my pocket and taking a knife from the cutlery drawer. Telling the story of the monkey, Angela had shown me where the blades were kept.

  Reason prevailed. I was no more practiced with knives than I was expert with firearms.

  Besides, using a knife, slashing and gouging at another human being, seemed to require a ruthlessness greater than that needed to pull a trigger. I figured I could do whatever was necessary if my life-or Angela's-was on the line, but I couldn't rule out the possibility that I was better suited to the comparatively dry business of shooting than to the up-close-and-personal wet work of evisceration. In a desperate confrontation, a flinch might be fatal.

  As a thirteen-year-old boy, I had been able to look into the crematorium. Yet all these years later, I still wasn't ready to watch the grimmer show in an embalming chamber.

  Swiftly crossing the dining room, I called out to Angela once more.

  Again, she failed to respond.

  I wouldn't call her a third time. If indeed an intruder was in the house, I would only be revealing my position each time I shouted Angela's name.

  In the living room, I didn't pause to switch off the lamp, but I stepped wide of it and averted my face.

>   Squinting in the stinging rain of foyer light, I glanced through the open door to the study. No one was in there.

  The powder-room door was ajar. I pushed it all the way open. I didn't need to turn on a light to see that no one was in there, either.

  Feeling naked without my cap, which I had left on the kitchen table, I switched off the ceiling fixture in the foyer. Blessed gloom fell.

  I peered up at the landing where the shadowy stairs turned back and disappeared overhead. As far as I could tell, no lights were lit on the upper floor-which was fine with me. My dark-adapted eyes were my biggest advantage.

  The cellular phone was clipped to my belt. As I started up the stairs, I considered calling the police.

  After my failure to keep our appointment earlier in the evening, however, Lewis Stevenson might be looking for me. If so, then the chief himself would answer this call. Maybe the bald man with the earring would come along for the ride.

  Manuel Ramirez couldn't assist me himself, because he was the duty officer this evening, restricted to the station. I didn't feel safe asking for any other officer. As far as I knew, Chief Stevenson might not be the only compromised cop in Moonlight Bay; perhaps every member of the force, except Manuel, was involved in this conspiracy. In fact, in spite of our friendship, I couldn't trust Manuel, either, not until I knew a lot more about this situation.

  Climbing the stairs, I gripped the Glock with both hands, ready to press the laser-sighting switch if someone moved. I kept reminding myself that playing hero meant trying not to shoot Angela by mistake.

  I turned at the landing and saw that the upper flight was darker than the lower. No ambient light from the living room reached this high. I ascended quickly and silently.

  My heart was doing more than idling; it was revving nicely, but I was surprised that it wasn't racing. Only yesterday, I could not have imagined that I would be able to adapt so rapidly to the prospect of imminent violence. I was even beginning to recognize within myself a disconcerting enthusiasm for danger.

  Four doors opened off the upstairs hall. Three were closed.

  The fourth-the door farthest from the stairs-was ajar, and from the room beyond came a soft light.

  I disliked passing the three closed rooms without confirming that they were deserted. I would be leaving my back vulnerable.

  Given my XP, however, and especially considering how quickly my eyes would sting and water when exposed to very bright light, I'd be able to search those spaces only with the pistol in my right hand and the penlight in my left. This would be awkward, time-consuming, and dangerous. Each time I stepped into a room, no matter how low I crouched and how fast I moved, the penlight would instantly pinpoint my location for any would-be assailant before I found him with the narrow beam.

  My best hope was to play to my strengths, which meant using the darkness, blending with the shadows. Moving sideways along the hall, keeping a watch in both directions, I made no sound, and neither did anyone else in the house.

  The second door on the left was open only a crack, and the narrow wedge of light revealed little of the room beyond. Using the gun barrel, I pushed the door inward.

  The master bedroom. Cozy. The bed was neatly made. A gaily colored afghan draped one arm of an easy chair, and on the footstool waited a folded newspaper. On the bureau, a collection of antique perfume bottles sparkled.

  One of the nightstand lamps was aglow. The bulb was not strong, and the pleated-fabric shade screened most of the rays.

  Angela was nowhere to be seen.

  A closet door stood open. Perhaps Angela had come upstairs to fetch something from there. I couldn't see anything but hanging clothes and shoe boxes.

  The door to the adjacent bathroom was ajar, and the bathroom was dark.

  To anyone in there, looking out, I was a well-lit target.

  I approached the bathroom as obliquely as possible, aiming the Glock at the black gap between the door and the jamb. When I pushed on the door, it opened without resistance.

  The smell stopped me from crossing the threshold.

  Because the glow of the nightstand lamp didn't illuminate much of the space before me, I fished the penlight from my pocket.

  The beam glistered across a red pool on a white tile floor. The walls were sprayed with arterial gouts.

  Angela Ferryman was slumped on the floor, head bent backward over the rim of the toilet bowl. Her eyes were as wide, pale, and flat as those of a dead seagull that I had once found on the beach.

  At a glance, I thought her throat appeared to have been slashed repeatedly with a half-sharp knife. I couldn't bear to look at her too closely or for too long.

  The smell was not merely blood. Dying, she had fouled herself.

  A draft bathed me in the stench.

  A casement window was cranked all the way open. It wasn't a typically small bathroom window but large enough to have provided escape for the killer, who must have been liberally splashed with his victim's blood.

  Perhaps Angela had left the window open. If there was a firststory porch roof under it, the killer could have entered as well as exited by this route.

  Orson had not barked-but then this window was toward the front of the house, and the dog was at the back.

  Angela's hands were at her sides, almost lost in the sleeves of the cardigan. She looked so innocent. She looked twelve.

  All her life, she had given of herself to others. Now someone, unimpressed by her selfless giving, had cruelly taken all that was left.

  Anguished, shaking uncontrollably, I turned away from the bathroom.

  I hadn't approached Angela with questions. I hadn't brought her to this hideous end. She had called me, and although she had used her car phone, someone had known that she needed to be silenced permanently and quickly. Maybe these faceless conspirators decided that her despair made her dangerous. She had quit her job at the hospital. She felt that she had no reason to live. And she was terrified of becoming, whatever that meant. She was a woman with nothing to lose, beyond their control. They would have killed her even if I had not responded to her call.

  Nevertheless, I was awash in guilt, drowning in cold currents, robbed of breath, and I stood gasping.

  Nausea followed those currents, rippling like a fat slippery eel through my gut, swimming up my throat and almost surging into my mouth.

  I choked it down.

  I needed to get out of here, yet I couldn't move. I was half crushed under a weight of terror and guilt.

  My right arm hung at my side, pulled as straight as a plumb line by the weight of the gun. The penlight, clutched in my left hand, stitched jagged patterns on the wall.

  I could not think clearly. My thoughts rolled thickly, like tangled masses of seaweed in a sludge tide.

  On the nearer nightstand, the telephone rang.

  I kept my distance from it. I had the queer feeling that this caller was the deep-breather who had left the message on my answering machine, that he would try to steal some vital aspect of me with his bloodhound inhalations, as if my very soul could be vacuumed out of me and drawn away across the open telephone line. I didn't want to hear his low, eerie, tuneless humming.

  When at last the phone fell silent, my head had been somewhat cleared by the strident ringing. I clicked off the penlight, returned it to my pocket, raised the big pistol from my side-and realized that someone had switched on the light in the upstairs hall.

  Because of the open window and the blood smeared on the frame, I had assumed I was alone in the house with Angela's body. I was wrong. An intruder was still present-waiting between me and the stairs.

  The killer couldn't have slipped out of the master bath by way of the bedroom; a messy trail of blood would have marked his passage across the cream-colored carpet. Yet why would he have escaped from the upstairs only to return immediately through a ground-floor door or window?

  If, after fleeing, he had changed his mind about leaving a potential witness and had decided to come back to get me, he w
ouldn't have turned on the light to announce his presence. He would have preferred to take me by surprise.

  Cautiously, squinting against the glare, I stepped into the hallway.

  It was deserted.

  The three doors that had been closed when I had first come upstairs were now standing wide open. The rooms beyond them were forbiddingly bright.

  Like blood out of a wound, silence welled from the bottom of the house into this upstairs hall. Then a sound rose, but it came from outside: the keening of the wind under the eaves.