The Servants of Twilight

by Dean Koontz

  Christine felt snug. Secure.

  53

  In South Lake Tahoe, the snowmobile shop was about to close when Grace Spivey, Barlowe, and the eight others arrived. They had come from just down the street, where they had all purchased ski suits and other insulated winter clothing. They had changed into their new gear and now looked as if they belonged in Tahoe. To the surprise and delight of the owner of Mountain Country Sportmobile—a portly man whose name was Orley Treat and who said his friends called him “Skip”—they purchased four Ski-Doos and two custom-designed flatbed trailers to haul them.

  Kyle Barlowe and a churchman named George Westvec did most of the talking because Westvec knew a lot about snowmobiles, and Barlowe had a knack for getting the best price possible on anything he bought. His great size, forbidding appearance, and air of barely controlled violence gave him an advantage in any bargaining session, of course, but his negotiating skills were not limited to intimidation. He had a first-rate businessman’s knack of sensing an adversary’s strengths, weaknesses, limits, and intentions. This was something he had learned about himself only after Grace had converted him from a life of self-hatred and sociopathic behavior, and it was a discovery that was as gratifying as it was surprising. He was in Mother Grace’s everlasting debt not only because she had saved his soul but because she had provided him the opportunity to discover and explore the talents which, without her, he would never have known were there, within himself.

  Orley Treat, who was too beefy to have such a boyish nickname as “Skip,” kept trying to figure out who they were. He kept asking questions of Grace and Barlowe and the others, such as whether they belonged to a club of some kind or whether they were all related.

  Keeping in mind that the police were still interested in talking to Grace about certain recent events in Orange County, worried that one of the disciples would inadvertently say too much to Treat, Barlowe sent everyone but George Westvec to scout the nearby motels along the main road and find one with sufficient vacancies to accommodate them.

  When they paid for the snowmobiles with stacks of cash, Treat gaped at their money in disbelief. Barlowe saw greed in the man’s eyes, and figured Treat had already thought of a way to doctor his books and hide this cash from the IRS. Even though his curiosity had an almost physically painful grip on him, Treat stopped prying into their business because he was afraid of queering the deal.

  The white Ford vans weren’t equipped with trailer hitches, but Treat said he could arrange to have the welding done overnight. “They’ll be ready first thing in the morning . . . say . . . ten o’clock.”

  “Earlier,” Grace said. “Much earlier than that. We want to haul these up to the north shore come first light.”

  Treat smiled and pointed to the showroom windows, beyond which wind-driven snow was falling heavily in the sodium glow of the parking lot lights. “Weatherman’s calling for maybe eighteen inches. Stormfront won’t pass until four or five o’clock tomorrow morning, so the road crews won’t have the highway open around to the north shore until ten, even eleven o’clock. No point you folks starting out earlier.”

  Grace said, “If you can’t have the hitches on our trucks and the Ski-Doos ready to go by four-thirty in the morning, the deal’s off.”

  Barlowe knew she was bluffing because this was the only place they could get the machines they needed. But judging from the tortured expression on Treat’s face, he took her threat seriously.

  Barlowe said, “Listen, Skip, it’s only a couple of hours’ worth of welding. We’re willing to pay extra to have it done tonight.”

  “But I’ve got to prep the Ski-Doos and—”

  “Then prep them.”

  “But I was just closing for the day when you—”

  “Stay open a couple more hours,” Barlowe said. “I know it’s inconvenient. I appreciate that. I really do. But, Skip, how often do you sell four snowmobiles and two trailers in one clip?”

  Treat sighed. “Okay, it’ll be ready for pickup at four-thirty in the morning. But you’ll never get up to the north shore at that hour.”

  Grace, George Westvec, and Barlowe went outside, where the others were waiting.

  Edna Vanoff stepped forward and said, “We’ve found a motel with enough spare rooms to take us, Mother Grace. It’s just a quarter of a mile up the road here. We can walk it easy.”

  Grace looked up into the early-night sky, squinting as the snow struck her face and frosted her eyebrows. Long tangled strands of wet frizzy gray hair escaped the edges of her knitted hat, which she had pulled down over her ears. “Satan brought this storm. He’s trying to delay us. Trying to keep us from reaching the boy until it’s too late. But God will get us through.”

  54

  By nine-thirty Joey was asleep. They put him to bed between clean sheets, under a heavy blue and green quilt. Christine wanted to stay in the bedroom with him, even though she wasn’t ready for bed, but Charlie wanted to talk to her and plan for certain contingencies.

  He said, “You’ll be all right by yourself, won’t you, Joey?”

  “I guess so,” the boy said. He looked tiny, elfin, under the huge quilt and with his head propped on an enormous feather pillow.

  “I don’t want to leave him alone,” Christine said.

  Charlie said, “No one can get him here unless they come up from downstairs, and we’ll be downstairs to stop them.”

  “The window—”

  “It’s a second-story window. They’d have to put a ladder up against the house to reach it, and I doubt they’d be carrying a ladder.”

  She frowned at the window, undecided.

  Charlie said, “We’re socked in here, Christine. Listen to that wind. Even if they knew we were in these mountains, even if they knew about this particular cabin—which they don’t—they wouldn’t be able to make it up here tonight.”

  “I’ll be okay, Mom,” Joey said. “I got Chewbacca. And like Charlie said, it’s against FWA rules for witches to fly in a storm.”

  She sighed, tucked the covers in around her son, and kissed him goodnight. Joey wanted to give Charlie a goodnight kiss, too, which was a new experience for Charlie, and as he felt the boy’s lips smack his cheek, a flood of emotions washed through him: a poignant sense of the child’s profound vulnerability; a fierce desire to protect him; an awareness of the purity of the kid’s affection; a heart-wrenching impression of innocence and sweet simplicity; a touching and yet quite frightening realization of the complete trust the boy had in him. The moment was so warm, so disarming and satisfying, that Charlie couldn’t understand how he could have come to be thirty-six without having started a family of his own.

  Maybe it had been his destiny to be here, waiting for Christine and Joey, when they needed him. If he’d had his own family, he wouldn’t have been able to go to the wall for the Scavellos as he had done; these recent deeds, all beyond the call of duty, would have fallen to one of his men—who might not have been as clever or as committed as Charlie was. When Christine had walked into his office, he had been rocked by her beauty and by a feeling that they were meant to meet, one way or another, that they would have found each other in a different fashion if Grace Spivey hadn’t acted to bring them together now. Their relationship seemed . . . inevitable. And now it seemed equally inevitable and right that he should be Joey’s protector, that he should one day soon become the child’s legal father, that each night he should hear this small boy say, “Goodnight, Daddy,” instead of “Goodnight, Charlie.”

  Destiny.

  That was a word and a concept to which he had never given much thought. If anyone had asked him last week if he believed in destiny, he would probably have said he did not. Now, it seemed a simple, natural, and undeniable truth that all men and women had a destiny to fulfill and that his lay with this woman and this child.

  They closed the heavy draperies at the bedroom window, and left a lamp on with a towel draped over the shade to soften the light. Joey fell asleep while they were arr
anging the towel. Chewbacca had curled up on the bed, too. Christine quietly motioned for the dog to get down, but it just stared mournfully at her. Charlie whispered that Chewbacca could stay where he was, and finally he and Christine retreated from the room with exaggerated stealth, leaving the door ajar an inch or two.

  As they went downstairs she looked back a couple of times, as if having second thoughts about leaving the boy alone, but Charlie held her arm and steered her firmly to the table. They sat and had coffee and talked, while the wind moaned in the eaves and grainy snow tapped at the windows or hissed along the glass.

  Charlie said, “Now, once this storm is past and the roads are open farther down the mountain, I’ll want to go into the market to use the pay phone, call Henry Rankin, see what’s up. I’ll be going in every two days, at least, maybe even every day, and when I’m gone I think you and Joey ought to hole up in the battery room, under the windmill. It—”

  “No,” she said quickly. “If you go down the mountain, we go with you.”

  “It’ll get tiring if it has to be done every day.”

  “I can handle it.”

  “But maybe Joey can’t.”

  “We won’t stay here alone,” she said adamantly.

  “But with the police looking for us, we’ll be more noticeable as a group, more easily—”

  “We go with you everywhere,” she said. “Please. Please.”

  He nodded. “All right.”

  He got a map that he had purchased at the sporting goods store in Sacramento, spread it out on the table, and showed her their back door escape route, which they would use if, against all odds, Spivey’s people showed up, and if there was enough time to escape. They would go farther up the mountain, to the top of the next ridge, turn east into the valley that lay that way, find the stream at the bottom of the valley, and follow it south toward the lake. It was a journey of four or five miles—which would seem like a hundred in the snow-blanketed wilderness. But there would be good landmarks all the way and little chance of getting lost as long as they had the map and a compass.

  Gradually, their conversation drifted away from Grace Spivey, and they talked about themselves, exploring each other’s past, likes and dislikes, hopes and dreams, getting a better fix on each other than they’d had an opportunity to do thus far. In time they moved away from the table, switched off all the lights, and sat on the big sofa in front of the stone hearth, with nothing but the softly flickering firelight to hold back the shadows. Their conversation became more intimate, and more was said with fewer words, and finally even their silences conveyed a richness of information.

  Charlie couldn’t remember the first kiss; he just suddenly realized that they had been touching and kissing with increasing ardor for some time, and then his hand was on her breast, and he could feel her erect nipple through her blouse, hot upon the center of his palm. Her tongue moved within his mouth, and it was very hot, too, and her lips were searing, and when he touched her face with his fingertips the contact was so electrifying that it seemed as if sparks and smoke should issue from it. He had never wanted or needed a woman a fraction as much as he did Christine, and judging from the way her body arched against him and the way her muscles tensed, she wanted and needed him with a passion equal to his own. He knew that, in spite of their circumstances, in spite of the less than ideal trysting place that fate had provided, they would make love tonight; it was inevitable.

  Her blouse was unbuttoned now. He lowered his mouth to her breasts.

  “Charlie . . .” she said softly.

  He licked her swollen nipples, first one, then the other, lovingly.

  “No,” she said, but she did not push him away with any conviction, only halfheartedly, wanting to be convinced.

  “I love you,” he said, meaning it. In just a few days, he had fallen in love with her exquisitely composed face, with her body, with her complex mind and wit, with her courage in the face of adversity, with her indomitable spirit, with the way she walked, with the way her hair looked in the wind . . .

  “Joey . . .” she said.

  “He’s sleeping.”

  “He might wake up . . .”

  Charlie kissed her throat, felt the throbbing of her pulse against his lips. Her heart was beating fast. So was his.

  “He might come out to the gallery . . . look down and see us,” she said.

  He led her away from the firelight, to a long, deep sofa that was under the gallery overhang, out of sight. The shadows were deep and purple.

  “We shouldn’t,” she said, but she kept kissing his neck, his chin, lips, cheeks, and eyes. “Even here . . . if he wakes up . . .”

  “He’ll call to us first,” Charlie said, breathless, aching with need. “He won’t just come down into a dark living room.”

  She kissed his nose, each corner of his mouth, planted a chain of kisses along his jawline, kissed his ear.

  His hands moved over her body, and he thrilled to the perfect form and texture of her. Each sweet concavity and convexity, each enticing angle, the swell of breasts and hips, the taut flatness of belly, the ripeness of buttocks, the sleek roundness of thigh and calf—all of her seemed, to the millimeter, a precise definition of ideal femininity.

  “All right,” she said weakly. “But silently . . .”

  “Not a sound,” he promised.

  “Not a sound.”

  “Not one small sound . . .”

  The wind moaned at the window above the sofa, but he gave voice to his own intense pleasure only in his mind.

  It’s the wrong moment, she thought hazily. The wrong place. The wrong time. The wrong everything.

  Joey. Might. Wake up.

  But although it should matter, it didn’t seem to, not much, not enough for her to resist.

  He had said he loved her, and she had said she loved him, and she knew they had both meant it, that it was true, real. She didn’t know for sure how long she had loved him, but if she thought about it hard enough she would probably be able to fix the precise moment in which respect and admiration and affection had been transformed into something better and more powerful. After all, she had known him only a few days; the moment of love’s birth should not be difficult to pin down in that brief span of time. Of course, at the moment, she couldn’t think hard about anything, or clearly; she was swept away, though such a condition was out of character for her.

  In spite of their protestations of love, it wasn’t merely love that induced her to cast caution aside and take the risk of being overheard in the midst of their passion: it was good, healthy lust, too. She had never wanted a man as much as she wanted Charlie. Suddenly she had to have him within her, couldn’t breathe until he took her. His body was lean, the muscles hard and well defined; his sculpted shoulders, his rocklike biceps, smooth broad chest—everything about him excited her to an extent that she had never been excited before. Every nerve in her body was many times more sensitive than before; each kiss and touch, each stroke he took within her, was so explosively pleasurable that it bordered on pain, astonishing pleasure, pleasure that filled her and drove out everything else, every other thought, until she clung mindlessly to him, amazed at the abandon with which she embraced him, unable to understand or resist the primitive rutting fever that possessed her.

  The need to be quiet, the oath of silence, had a strangely powerful erotic effect. Even when Charlie climaxed, he did not cry out, but gripped her hips and held her against him and arched his back and opened his mouth but remained mute, and somehow, by containing the cry he also contained his energy and virility, for he didn’t lose his erection, not even for a moment, and they paused only to change positions, remaining welded together, but sliding around on the sofa until she was on top, and then she rode him with a pneumatic fluidity and a sinuous rhythm that was unlike anything he had ever known before, and he lost track of time and place, lost himself in the soft, silken, silent song of flesh and motion.

  She had never in her life been so lacking in self-con
sciousness while making love. For long moments she forgot where she was, even who she was; she became an animal, a mindlessly copulating organism intent on taking pleasure, oblivious of all else. Only once was the hypnotic rhythm of their lovemaking interrupted, and that was when she was suddenly stricken by the feeling that Joey had come downstairs and was standing in the shadows, watching them, but when she lifted her head from Charlie’s chest and looked around, she saw nothing but the shadowy forms of the furniture, backlit by the dying fire, and she knew she was only imagining things. Then love-lust-sex seized her again with a power that was startling and even scary, and she gave herself to the act, was unable to do anything else, was lost, utterly.

  Before they were done, Charlie had been shaken by three orgasms, and he had lost count of the number of times she had climaxed, but he didn’t need a scorecard to know that neither of them had ever experienced anything like this in the past. When it was over, he was still trembling, and he felt drugged. They lay for a time, neither speaking, until they gradually became aware of the wind howling outside and realized that the dying fire had allowed a chill to creep back into the room. Then, reluctantly, they dressed and went upstairs, where they prepared the second bedroom for her.

  “I should sleep with Joey and let you have this bed,” she said.

  “No. You’ll only wake him if you go in there now. The poor kid needs his rest.”

  “But where will you sleep?” she asked.

  “In the gallery.”

  “On the floor?”

  “I’ll put a sleeping bag at the head of the stairs.”

  For a moment anxiety replaced the dreaminess in her eyes. “I thought you said there was no way they could get here tonight even if—”

  He put a finger to her lips. “There isn’t any way. No way at all. But it wouldn’t do for Joey to find me sleeping in your bed in the morning, would it? And most of the sofas downstairs are too soft for sleeping. So if I’m going to use a sleeping bag, I might as well put it at the head of the stairs.”