Finally the chief found his normal voice-or something that's free, and the pistol approximated it. "I need to talk to You, reach an understanding.
Now. Tonight. Why don't You come with me, Snow."
"Come where?"
"My patrol car's out front."
"But my bicycle-" "I'm not arresting You. Just a quick chat. Let's make sure we understand each other."
The last thing I wanted to do was get in a patrol car with Stevenson.
If I refused, however, he might make his invitation more formal by taking me into custody.
Then, if I tried to resist arrest, if I climbed on my bicycle and pumped the pedals hard enough to make the crank axle smokewhere would I go?
With dawn only a few hours away, I had no time to flee as far as the next town on this lonely stretch of coast. Even if I had ample time, XP limited my world to the boundaries of Moonlight Bay, where I could return home by sunrise or find an under standing friend to take me in and give me darkness.
"I'm in a mood here," Lewis Stevenson said again, through half-clenched teeth, the hardness returning to his voice. "I'm in a real mood. You coming with me?"
"Yes, sir. I'm cool with that."
Motioning with his pistol, he indicated that Orson and I were to precede him.
I walked my bike toward the end of the entrance pier, loath to have the chief behind me with the gun. I didn't need to be an animal communicator to know that Orson was nervous, too.
The pier planks ended in a concrete sidewalk flanked by flower beds full of ice plant, the blooms of which open wide in sunshine and close at night. In the low landscape lighting, snails were crossing the walkway, antennae glistening, leaving silvery trails of slime, some creeping from the right-hand bed of ice plant to the identical bed on the left, others laboriously making their way in the opposite direction, as if these humble mollusks shared humanity's restlessness and dissatisfaction with the terms of existence.
I weaved with the bike to avoid the snails, and although Orson sniffed them in passing, he stepped over them.
From behind us rose the crunching of crushed shells, the squish of jellied bodies tramped underfoot. Stevenson was stepping on not only those snails directly in his path but on every hapless gastropod in sight. Some were dispatched with a quick snap, but he stomped on others, came down on them with such force that the slap of shoe sole against concrete rang like a hammer strike.
I didn't turn to look.
I was afraid of seeing the cruel glee that I remembered too well from the faces of the young bullies who had tormented me throughout childhood, before I'd been wise enough and big enough to fight back.
Although that expression was unnerving when a child wore it, the same look-the beady eyes that seemed perfectly reptilian even without elliptical pupils, the hate-reddened cheeks, the bloodless lips drawn back in a sneer from spittle-shined teeth-would be immeasurably more disturbing on the face of an adult, especially when the adult had a gun in his hand and wore a badge.
Stevenson's black-and-white was parked at a red curb thirty feet to the left of the marina entrance, beyond the reach of the landscape lights, in deep night shade under the spreading limbs of an enormous Indian laurel.
I leaned my bike against the trunk of the tree, on which the fog hung like Spanish moss. At last I turned warily to the chief as he opened the back door on the passenger side of the patrol car.
Even in the murk, I recognized the expression on his face that I had dreaded seeing: the hatred, the irrational but unassuageable anger that makes some human beings more deadly than any other beast on the planet.
Never before had Stevenson disclosed this malevolent aspect of himself.
He hadn't seemed capable of unkindness let alone senseless hatred. If suddenly he had revealed that he wasn't the real Lewis Stevenson but an alien life-form mimicking the chief, I would have believed him.
Gesturing with the gun, Stevenson spoke to Orson: "Get in the car, fella."
"He'll be all right out here , I said.
"Get in," he urged the dog.
Orson peered suspiciously at the open car door and whined with distrust.
"He'll wait here," I said. "He never runs off."
"I want him in the car," Stevenson said icily. "There's a leash law in this town, Snow. We never enforce it with You. We always turn our heads, pretend not to see, because of. .. because a dog is exempted if he belongs to a disabled person."
I didn't antagonize Stevenson by rejecting the term disabled.
Anyway, I was interested less in that one word than in the six words I was sure he had almost said before catching himself. because of who your mother was.
"But this time," he said, "I'm not going to sit here while the damn dog trots around loose, crapping on the sidewalk, flaunting that he isn't on a leash."
Although I could have noted the contradiction between the fact that the dog of a disabled person was exempt from the leash law and the assertion that Orson was flaunting his leashlessness, I remained silent. I couldn't win any argument with Stevenson while he was in this hostile state.
"If he won't get in the car when I tell him to," Stevenson said, "You make him get in."
I hesitated, searching for a credible alternative to meek cooperation.
Second by second, our situation seemed more perilous. I'd felt safer than this when we had been in the blinding fog on the peninsula, stalked by the troop.
"Get the goddamn dog in the goddamn car now!" Stevenson ordered, and the venom in this command was so potent that he could have killed snails without stepping on them, sheerly with his voice.
Because his gun was in his hand, I remained at a disadvantage, but I took some thin comfort from the fact that he apparently didn't know that I was armed. For the time being, I had no choice but to cooperate.
"In the car, pal," I told Orson, trying not to sound fearful, trying not to let my hammering heart pound a tremor into my voice.
Reluctantly the dog obeyed.
Lewis Stevenson slammed the rear door and then opened the front. "Now You, Snow."
I settled into the passenger seat while Stevenson walked around the black-and-white to the driver's side and got in behind the wheel. He pulled his door shut and told me to close mine, which I had hoped to avoid doing.
Usually I don't suffer from claustrophobia in tight spaces, but no coffin could have been more cramped than this patrol car. The fog pressing at the windows was as psychologically suffocating as a dream about premature burial.
The interior of the car seemed chillier and damper than the night outside. Stevenson started the engine in order to be able to switch on the heater.
The police radio crackled, and a dispatcher's static-filled voice croaked like frog song. Stevenson clicked it off.
Orson stood on the floor in front of the backseat, forepaws on the steel grid that separated him from us, peering worriedly through that security barrier. When the chief pressed a console button with the barrel of his gun, the power locks on the rear doors engaged with a hard sound no less final than the thunk of a guillotine blade.
I had hoped that Stevenson would holster his pistol when he got into the car, but he kept a grip on it. He rested the weapon on his leg, the muzzle pointed at the dashboard. In the dim green light from the instrument panel, I thought I saw that his forefinger was now curled around the trigger guard rather than around the trigger itself, but this didn't lessen his advantage to any appreciable degree.
For a moment he lowered his head and closed his eyes, as though praying or gathering his thoughts.
Fog condensed on the Indian laurel, and drops of water dripped from the points of the leaves, snapping with an unrhythmical ponk-pank-ping against the roof and hood of the car.
Casually, quietly, I tucked both hands into my jacket pockets. I closed my right hand around the Glock.
I told myself that, because of my overripe imagination, I was exaggerating the threat. Stevenson was in a foul mood, yes, and from what I had see
n behind the police station, I knew that he was not the righteous arm of justice that he had long pretended to be.
But this didn't mean that he had any violent intentions. He might, indeed, want only to talk, and having said his piece, he might turn us loose unharmed.
When at last Stevenson raised his head, his eyes were servings of bitter brew in cups of bone. As his gaze flowed to me, I was again chilled by an impression of inhuman malevolence, as I had been when he'd first stepped out of the gloom beside the marina office, but this time I knew why my harp-string nerves thrummed with fear. Briefly, at a certain angle, his liquid stare rippled with a yellow luminance similar to the eyeshine that many animals exhibit at night, a cold and mysterious inner light like nothing I had ever seen before in the eyes of man or woman.
The electric and electrifying radiance passed through Chief Stevenson's eyes so fleetingly, as he turned to face me, that on any night before this one, I might have dismissed the phenomenon as merely a queer reflection of the instrument-panel lights. But since sundown, I had seen monkeys that were not merely monkeys, a cat that was somehow more than a cat, and I had waded through mysteries that flowed like rivers along the streets of Moonlight Bay, and I had learned to expect significance in the seemingly insignificant.
His eyes were inky again, glimmerless. The anger in his voice was now an undertow, while the surface current was gray despair and grief.
"It's all changed now, all changed, and no going back."
"What's changed?"
"I'm not who I used to be. I can hardly remember what I used to be like, the kind of man I was. It's lost."
I felt he was talking as much to himself as to me, grieving aloud for this loss of self that he imagined.
"I don't have anything to lose. Everything that matters has been taken from me. I'm a dead man walking, Snow. That's all I am. Can You imagine how that feels?"
"No."
"Because even You, with your shitty life, hiding from the day, coming out only at night like some slug crawling out from under a rock-even You have reasons to live."
Although the chief of police was an elected official in our town, Lewis Stevenson didn't seem to be concerned about winning my vote.
I wanted to tell him to go copulate with himself. But there is a difference between showing no fear and begging for a bullet in the head.
As he turned his face away from me to gaze at the white sludge of fog sliding thickly across the windshield, that cold fire throbbed in his eyes again, a briefer and fainter flicker than before yet more disturbing because it could no longer be dismissed as imaginary.
Lowering his voice as though afraid of being overheard, he said, "I have terrible nightmares, terrible, full of sex and blood."
I had not known exactly what to expect from this conversation; but revelations of personal torment would not have been high on my list of probable subjects.
"They started well over a year ago," he continued. "At first they came only once a week, but then with increasing frequency.
And at the start, for a while, the women in the nightmares were no one I'd ever seen in life, just pure fantasy figures. They were like those dreams You have during puberty, silken girls so ripe and eager to surrender. .. except that in these dreams, I didn't just have sex with them.
His thoughts seemed to drift with the bilious fog into darker territory.
Only his profile was presented to me, dimly lit and glistening with sour sweat, yet I glimpsed a savagery that made me hope that he would not favor me with a full-face view.
Lowering his voice further still, he said, "In these dreams, I beat them, too, punch them in the face, punch and punch and punch them until there's nothing left of their faces, choke them until their tongues swell out of their mouths. ..."
As he had begun to describe his nightmares, his voice had been marked by dread. Now, in addition to this fear, an unmistakable perverse excitement rose in him, evident not only in his husky voice but also in the new tension that gripped his body.
hungry whisper that would haunt
"Lately," he continued in a hungry whisper that would haunt my sleep for the rest of my life, "these dreams all focus on my granddaughter.
Brandy. She's ten. A pretty girl. A very pretty girl.
So slim and pretty. The things I do to her in dreams. All the things I do. You can't imagine such merciless brutality. Such exquisitely vicious inventiveness. And when I wake up, I'm beyond exhilaration.
Transcendent. In a rapture. I lie in bed, beside my wife, who sleeps on without guessing what strange thoughts obsess me, who can't possibly ever know, and I thrum with power, with the awareness that absolute freedom is available to me any time I want to seize it.
Any time. Next week. Tomorrow. Now."
Overhead, the silent laurel spoke as, in quick succession, at least a double score of its pointed green tongues trembled with too great a weight of condensed fog. Each loosed its single watery note, and I twitched at the sudden rataplan of fat droplets beating on the car, half surprised that what streamed down the windshield and across the hood was not blood.
In my jacket pocket, I closed my right hand more tightly around the Glock.
After what Stevenson had told me, I couldn't imagine any circumstances in which he could allow me to leave this car alive.
I shifted slightly in my seat, the first of several small moves that shouldn't make him suspicious but would put me in a position to shoot him through my jacket, without having to draw the pistol from the pocket.
"Last week," the chief whispered, "Kyra and Brandy came over for dinner with us, and I had trouble taking my eyes off the girl.
When I looked at her, in my mind's eye she was naked, as she is in used by the dreams. So slim. So fragile. Vulnerable. I became aro her vulnerability, by her tenderness, her weakness, and had to hide my condition from Kyra and Brandy. From Louisa. I wanted. ..
wanted to. .. needed to His sudden sobbing startled me: Waves of grief and despair swept through him once more, as they had washed through him when first he had begun to speak. His eerie needfulness, his obscene hunger, was drowned in this tide of misery and self-hatred.
"A part of me wants to kill myself," Stevenson said, "but only the smaller part, the smaller and weaker part, the fragment that's left of the man I used to be. This predator I've become will never kill himself. Never. He's too alive."
His left hand, clutched into a fist, rose to his open mouth, and he crammed it between his teeth, biting so fiercely on his clenched fingers that I wouldn't have been surprised if he had drawn his own blood; he was biting and choking back the most wretched sobs that I'd ever heard.
In this new person that Lewis Stevenson seemed to have become, there was none of the calm and steady bearing that had always made him such a credible figure of authority and justice. At least not tonight, not in this bleak mood that plagued him. Raw emotion appeared always to be flowing through him, one current or another, without any intervals of tranquil water, the tide always running, battering.
My fear of him subsided to make room for pity. I almost reached out to put a comforting hand on his shoulder, but I restrained myself because I sensed that the monster I'd been listening to a moment ago had not been vanquished or even chained.
Lowering his fist from his mouth, turning his head toward me, Stevenson revealed a face wrenched by such abysmal torment, by such agony of the heart and mind, that I had to look away.
He looked away, too, facing the windshield again, and as the laurel shed the scattershot distillate of fog, his sobs faded until he could speak.
"Since last week, I've been making excuses to visit Kyra, to be around Brandy." A tremor distorted his words at first, but it quickly faded, replaced by the hungry voice of the soulless troll. "And sometimes, late at night, when this damn mood hits me, when I get to feeling so cold and hollow inside that I want to scream and never stop screaming, I think the way to fill the emptiness, the only way to stop this awful gnawing in my gut. .. is to do what
makes me happy in the dreams.
And I'm going to do it, too. Sooner or later, I'm going to do it.
Sooner than later." The tide of emotion had now turned entirely from guilt and anguish to a quiet but demonic glee. "I'm going to do it and do it. I've been looking for girls Brandy's age, just nine or ten years old, as slim as she is, as pretty as she is. It'll be safer to start with someone who has no connection to me. Safer but no less satisfying.
It's going to feel good. It's going to feel so good, the power, the destruction, throwing off all the shackles they make You live with, tearing down the walls, being totally free, totally free at last. I'm going to bite her, this girl, when I get her alone, I'm going to bite her and bite her. In the dreams I lick their skin, and it's got a salty taste, and then I bite them, and I can feel their screams vibrating in my teeth."
Dean Koontz - Fear Nothing Page 28
