Relentless

by Koontz, Dean

  I met her eyes, that double-barreled gaze of truth. “I think. Yeah. I think.”

  Finished cleaning her pistol, she said, “You know another thing I’m sure about?”

  “If there’s a big surprise in it, I can’t handle another one.”

  “I’m sure, you’ll never again have a problem with a tool or a machine. No more hammered thumbs, no vacuum-cleaner catastrophes.”

  “That’ll take a second miracle.”

  “Because all that clumsiness was never anything but an elaborate excuse not to have a gun, not to learn how to use one.”

  “Where did you get your psychology degree?”

  “The school of common sense. If you could turn the toasting of a slice of bread into a calamity, no one would ever want you to pick up a gun.”

  “Calamity is a pretty strong word.”

  “Kitchen-repair bill was three thousand bucks. And you are not a clumsy man. Consider your writing. Consider how you are in bed.”

  “I’m no Jon Bon Jovi.”

  “I’m no longer a schoolgirl with expectations as low as that. You learned the basics of guns today, and the world didn’t end.”

  “The day’s not over.”

  She kissed me. Her tongue was sweet.

  “Aunt Edith was right about one thing,” I said. “I sure do know how to pick ’em.”

  Watching from the Mountaineer, Lassie had laughed at me so much that she needed to pee.

  Thereafter, Penny drove us off the shingle, to the dirt road, and back toward Highway 101.

  “How did the gun thing go?” Milo asked.

  “Your mother’s still alive,” I said.

  “What about your feet?”

  “I didn’t shoot either of them.”

  “Triumph.”

  My disposable cell phone rang, and it was Vivian Norby She had gotten a disposable of her own, and she gave me the number.

  “How’s it going?” Vivian asked.

  “We haven’t driven your Mountaineer off a cliff.”

  “You mean you’ve made Penny do all that driving herself?”

  “I’m not going to let you sit Milo anymore. Obviously, he’s a bad influence.”

  “Listen,” Vivian said, “I’ve been on the Net doing research, and I’ve got some interesting news. I don’t think Thomas Landulf was Waxx’s only victim in Smokeville. There’s maybe another one, his name is Henry Casas, and he’s sort of alive.”

  Smokeville was so picturesque that you kept looking for the gnomes and elfenfolk who constructed it.

  The buildings on the main street and most of the houses were Victorian, with enough gingerbread to make any Modern Movement architect grind his teeth to dust.

  This settlement of four thousand lay on lowlands just above the sea. Its western neighborhoods sloped down through cedars and hemlocks to the shore.

  In the sea were magnificent rock towers, weathered into fanciful shapes, from which the wind, when at sufficient force, raised the voices of mournful oboes, of soft uilleann pipes and penny whistles yearning for Ireland.

  Warburton Motor Court was a collection of quaint little cottages from the 1930s, shaded by the robes of immense deodar cedars like giant monks gathered for worship.

  Cash in advance and the license-plate number of the Mountaineer bought us enough trust from the desk clerk that I was not asked to provide a credit card or a driver’s license. I signed the register as Kenton Ewen, borrowing two of my lost uncles’ first names.

  Milo abandoned one trunk when we fled the peninsula house, but he had the bread-box thing he saved from that debacle, the items that Grimbald obtained, and a second trunk of oddities, curiosities, and incomprehensibles. He was eager to set up shop in the cramped living room of the cottage.

  According to the address Vivian Norby obtained, Henry Casas lived within easy walking distance of Warburton Motor Court. Given his circumstances, we felt that I would have the best chance of seeing him if I went alone.

  Penny and I were loath to split up, but we were now armed and less vulnerable than before. She remained with Milo and Lassie in the motor-court cottage.

  Henry Casas’s house was a splendid Victorian with a deep front porch and an Italianate double door with a stained-glass fanlight.

  Two and a half years ago, Henry’s mother moved to Smokeville from Atlanta, to run his house and to oversee his care.

  The woman who answered the doorbell appeared to be in her mid-fifties. Her flawless skin, doe eyes, and petite frame suggested a delicate flower, but her hands were strong and marked by work, and there was about her an air of one who never shrank from a challenge.

  “Good afternoon.” She had a southern accent.

  “Are you Mrs. Casas?”

  “Henry’s mother, yes.”

  “Mrs. Casas, my name is—”

  “I know who you are, Mr. Greenwich. I can’t for the life of me imagine why you’re here, but it’s a pleasure to welcome you.”

  She stepped back from the threshold and ushered me inside.

  Although she assumed that I hoped to see her son, she took me first to the library, which had many books and no DVDs.

  The most striking things in the room were two paintings by Henry. His talent was immense.

  A narrative artist of real genius, his technique was meticulous. One work was egg tempera on a gesso foundation, the other a dry-brush watercolor. His sense of light, the clarity of his execution riveted the eye. Clearly, he was influenced by Andrew Wyeth, but his subjects were his own, as was the complexity of his intent.

  Turning from the second painting, I went directly to the heart of the matter: “Mrs. Casas, was your son a friend of Thomas Landulf?”

  She met my eyes no less directly than did Penny, and I saw that she had already decided to trust me. “Yes. They were good friends.”

  “Does Henry believe that Tom Landulf killed his wife and child, then set himself afire?”

  “No, Mr. Greenwich, he does not.”

  “Please call me Cubby.”

  “Thank you, Cubby. I’m Arabella. Bella to friends.”

  “Does Henry wonder if his assailants may have been the same people who murdered the Landulfs?”

  “He is certain of it. But the police consider the Landulf matter settled. And they have made no progress on Henry’s case.”

  “Bella, the people who killed the Landulfs and brutalized your son—they’re now trying to kill my family, and me.”

  “Then God help you, Cubby. And I’m sure Henry will want to help as well. I assume you want to see him.”

  “If it’s not too great an imposition.”

  “Are you prepared for him? Do you know what was done to him?”

  “Yes. But I would guess hearing about it isn’t the same as seeing him firsthand.”

  “Not the same at all,” she agreed. “The thing to remember is, he does not want pity or even sympathy. Especially not from someone he admires, like you.”

  I nodded. “I won’t offend him.”

  “You may have heard a police theory that Henry solicited men in a gay bar and went somewhere with them, not realizing he had fallen into the hands of psychopaths.”

  “I hadn’t heard that.”

  “Well, it isn’t true. Henry is not gay, and neither were those who mutilated him. He was awakened in this house, taken from it in the middle of the night—and brought back two months later. Please wait here while I let him know you’ve come to visit.”

  Alone for the next ten minutes, I gave my mind and heart to the appreciation of the two paintings.

  Henry Casas would do no more of his great work. At the age of thirty-six, he was blinded by the measured application of an acid. His hands were amputated at the wrists with surgical precision.

  Perhaps because he had been known to speak so articulately about painting and culture, in resistance to certain ideological art, his tongue and his vocal cords were removed.

  Now he lived without sight, without a sense of taste, without an easy m
eans of communication, with no outlet for his talent, still this side of death but perhaps, on his worst days, wondering if he should take the final steps.

  A former first-floor drawing room had been converted into a combination bedroom, sitting room, and studio, with a wooden floor and no carpet.

  Easels and art supplies suggested that somehow Henry still worked, though no paintings were in view.

  Barefoot, in jeans and a flannel shirt, he sat in a wheeled office chair, at a computer, from which he turned toward us as we approached.

  His glass eyes—actually plastic hemispheres—were attached to his ocular muscles and moved like real eyes, though he was blind.

  He remained a handsome man, and nothing in his expression or his attitude suggested he felt defeated.

  Mechanical hands, not prostheses meant to look like real hands but three-digit robotic devices, had been attached to the stumps of his wrists and evidently were operated by nerve impulses.

  When I told him what a pleasure it was to meet him and spoke of my admiration for the paintings in the library, in such terms that I hoped he would know I was sincere, he listened with a smile.

  In reply, he turned to the computer keyboard, and with one of his steel fingers, he began to type.

  I could hardly imagine the laborious effort he had expended teaching himself to find the right keys without the assistance of eyes and with fingers that could not feel what they touched.

  When he finished, I assumed I should step closer to read the words on the screen, but before I could move, he pressed a final key, and a synthesized computer voice spoke what he had written: “I’m a crazed fan. Halfway through your new book. Splendid.”

  Bella indicated a portable CD player and an audio edition of One O’Clock Jump on a table beside the sofa.

  His mother had explained why I had come. He was willing to answer my questions, was in fact eager to help.

  I told him about Shearman Waxx, a condensed version of what we had already endured at the critic’s hands.

  On the phone earlier, Vivian Norby had called Waxx not merely an enigma but more precisely a black hole. After hours of work on the Internet, she had been able to learn nothing more about him than we already knew.

  Who were his parents? Where was he born? Where did he go to school? What jobs did he have before his first book on creative writing was adopted in so many universities and he was hired as a reviewer? Even questions of that fundamental nature could not be answered.

  In frustration, wondering if Waxx might have written anything under a pseudonym, Vivian made search strings out of some Waxx-isms, favorite and unique expressions that were repeated in his reviews—and she was led to an art critic named Russell Bertrand, who was published regularly in the foremost art journal in the country.

  Russell Bertrand excoriated some painters and sculptors as viciously as Waxx went after some writers. Not only were Waxx-isms embedded in Bertrand’s reviews, but his prose also proved to be burdened by Waxx’s signature syntax.

  When Vivian sought Bertrand’s biography, she found that it was more spare than Waxx’s bio, without even a home location to be found on Google Earth. Another black hole. Or the same one.

  Next, Vivian searched Bertrand’s review archives, looking for artists he savaged with particular enthusiasm, one of whom was Henry Casas in Smokeville, California.

  Henry and Bella were encouraged by the headway we had made in our investigation, but I warned them to keep their expectations realistic. We were a long way from having any evidence that Waxx—alias Russell Bertrand—had committed crimes.

  My hope that Henry might be able to describe his kidnapper was not fulfilled. He had been sedated through most of the period when he had been in captivity.

  Speaking through his computer, he said one thing that rattled me: “Not just one of them. During two months, I heard eight … ten voices. Maybe more.”

  If his perceptions during captivity were not so drug-addled that they should be dismissed, then we had gone from a lone psycho to a pair of them—and now to an entire organization, which defied belief.

  “One thing more,” Henry said. “Mother, show him.”

  “Are you sure we should?” his mother asked.

  Henry nodded vigorously.

  “Come see,” she said, and led me across the room to a pair of tall cabinets. From one of these, she withdrew a painting and held it for my consideration.

  This work was not exquisite, as were those in the library. It lacked the clarity and the powerful, singular use of extreme light that exemplified the other pieces. The technique was far short of masterful, the images were not complex, and objects were not of the proper proportions. Yet you could see the same mind at work, the same creative sensibility.

  I turned to Henry to ask how he had done this, and I saw that with his right foot, he held a brush, which now he manipulated with considerable finesse.

  His determination and indomitable spirit were admirable, but that made no less tragic the fact that he remained a first-rate talent reduced to methods of execution that could never properly express the visions in his mind.

  “He knows it can’t approach the quality of what he did before,” his mother said. “He has to use my eyes, my description of what he achieves with each brushstroke before he lays down the next one. But what he hopes, what I hope, is eventually he’ll create more primitive expressions of his vision that will, in their own way, be wonderful. And if it never happens, it’s worth the struggle. Every image he paints—it’s spitting in the faces of those bastards. But no one must know. We don’t want them coming back. If Henry finds a way to do work of a certain caliber—it’ll be his legacy, shown after his death.”

  Her dedication to her son was no less impressive than Henry’s dedication to exploring his talent under these worst imaginable conditions.

  Putting away the painting and removing another from the same cabinet, Bella said, “His kidnappers and the people who worked on Henry when he was conscious—they were careful to keep their faces concealed. Only one went unmasked. Henry has struggled to produce that face, time and again, but I don’t think it’s of any value to you. It’s not just the fact that he now lacks sufficient technique for portraiture. Clearly, the drugs on which they kept him affected his perceptions.”

  When she turned the painting toward me, I saw a countenance not well-rendered and not identical to what I had seen, but nonetheless I recognized the deformed individual in the Maserati.

  Zazu, Who’s Who,

  Here Dog, There Dog,

  Doom, Zoom, Boom

  As long as I can remember, novelists and filmmakers and cult leaders have been depicting and predicting the end of the world by fire or ice, by asteroid or magnetic-pole shift, and they have always found a large audience for their visions.

  In the hearts of modern men and women, there is an inescapable awareness that something is wrong with this slice of history they have inherited, that in spite of the towering cities and the mighty armies and the science-fiction technology made real, the moment is fragile, the foundation undermined.

  During my walk from the Casases’ house to the motor court where we were staying, in spite of my blithe spirit and flaming optimism and high standing in the Society of Great Fools, a sense of impending catastrophe impressed itself upon me.

  But if disaster came, it would be the collapse of civilization, not the end of the world. This blue transparent sky, the sea, the shore, the land, the dark evergreens ever rising—all would endure, unaffected by human misery.

  With its rich Victorian architecture and peaceful tree-lined streets, Smokeville served as a symbol of what the modern world had thrown away: the respect for tradition that can be rock under our feet; the certitude of our place in the universe and of our purpose, which allows peace of mind.

  Fire, ice, asteroids, and pole shifts are bogeymen with which we distract ourselves from the real threat of our time. In an age when everyone invents his own truth, there is no community, on
ly factions. Without community, there can be no consensus to resist the greedy, the envious, the power-mad narcissists who seize control and turn the institutions of civilization into a series of doom machines.

  Have a nice day.

  As I arrived at the motor court, I made an effort to spiff up my mood. Civilization wouldn’t collapse. At worst, my sense of impending catastrophe meant that Penny, Milo, Lassie, and I were going to die. There. With a little attitude adjustment, I saved millions of lives.

  Penny had closed the draperies. As I approached, I detected her at a window, peeking out between panels of fabric.

  When she let me in, she declared, “I feel like a mouse.”

  “I was thinking some Chinese take-out.”

  With great earnestness, she said, “We’re the mice, trying to get to the other side of the woods, like in my story, and Shearman Waxx is the owl, and I know the mice are the heroes, mice are always the heroes because they’re little and cute, and you can’t have cute little villains, but I gotta tell you, Cubby, I want to be the owl so bad, I want to swoop down on Waxx and snap him up in my beak and tear his guts out. Being mice sucks.”

  “So you missed me, huh?”

  “Splitting up sucks. When are you going to the Landulf house?”

  “It’ll be dark in an hour, so now’s not good. I want to wait until morning.”

  “We’re going with you. We’re not hiding here like mice.”

  “Were you standing at the window the whole time?”

  “Not the whole time. I was working with the laptop, but after a while I got claustrophobia, then a little vertigo on top of the claustrophobia, then nausea on top of the vertigo. It wasn’t as bad as that time we were stuck in the elevator with Hud Jacklight, but it was similar.”

  We had left Penny’s laptop and Milo’s at the peninsula house, but we still had mine.