Last Light (Novella)

by Dean Koontz

  “I first saw you two days ago,” he said.

  If she’d been sucking on a mineral pill, specifically a tablet of iron, that would have explained the taste of rust in her mouth.

  “You were at a supermarket, carrying a bag of groceries to your cool car. You didn’t see me, but I recognized you right away, from that day so long ago on Oahu.”

  Although she closed her eyes, wishing him gone, ghost images of the bastard seemed to float on the backs of her eyelids, perhaps an effect from the Tasering.

  “I almost ran up to you then, but something held me back. Maybe intuition. I don’t know. But I was so jazzed, totally amped. I mean, one glance and I was erect, girl, same way you had me when you were just sixteen, so I could hardly walk.”

  She opened her eyes. The knife drawer seemed to be a mile above her.

  “Followed you home from the supermarket. Then yesterday, when you went to work with that dog of yours, I spent a few hours here in your crib. You need a good lock. Anyway, I got to know you better.”

  Infuriated by her helplessness, Makani gathered herself into a sitting position, her back against the cabinets.

  “You didn’t come home with the dog last night. Where is he?”

  She didn’t answer him.

  “Hey, gee, don’t be like that. We’re in this together, Makani. Talk to me,” he said in a pleasant voice that made his threat more terrible, “or I’ll smash this Taser against your lips and see if I can make ’em smoke.”

  “I knew I’d go surfing today. I left my dog with a friend.”

  “Bob. That’s the name on his food and water dishes.”

  “Yeah, Bob.”

  “What breed is he—a Labrador?”

  “Yes.”

  “Black as coal, old Bob. You love old Bob, do you?”

  “He’s a good dog.”

  “Maybe after I kill you, I’ll kill him. Especially if you dis me again, like you did in the restaurant. Still tingling?”

  “No.”

  “You feel able to get up and walk when I tell you to?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, let me explain what just happened here. This was Round One. This is my favorite game. The outcome isn’t in doubt, but I still get a kick playing it. I like a three-round game. Any longer than that, it gets tedious. The mouse has three chances, for what they’re worth. You know who the mouse is?”

  “Me.”

  “That wasn’t too hard to figure, was it? You know who won the first round?”

  “You did.”

  “Me. The cat. You know how often the mouse wins?”

  “Never.”

  “Sad but true. But then I’ve never had a mouse with sharp teeth, like you.” He got up from the chair, approached her, closed the knife drawer. “Get up, sweet stuff. I’ll walk you to your car.”

  For more than one reason, she was loath to be touched by him. She was relieved when he didn’t offer to help her to her feet.

  In spite of what Sparks had said, Makani couldn’t quite believe that he would let her go.

  With the Taser in his right hand, he accompanied her into the living room, where she had left her suitcase. She picked it up.

  How long had he been in the house, watching her without her knowledge? Had he seen her transfer the money?

  Without the twenty thousand cash, she’d have to resort to Visa and American Express—but she suspected that he would have a way to find her if she used the cards. Plastic money left a trail.

  Sparks opened the door, Makani stepped onto the porch, and he followed. He walked her to her car in the driveway and watched her put the suitcase in the trunk.

  Over the Pacific, feathery cirrus clouds embellished the sky, glowing crimson with the light of a low sun, mottled with purple, reminiscent of the patterns of blood and bruises that hung in the gallery of Rainer Sparks’s demented mind.

  He opened the driver’s door, and when she got behind the wheel, he said, “Work up a clever plan, girl. Give me a run for my money. Go far, go fast. Make it fun. You have till tomorrow morning. Then it’s Round Two.”

  She started the engine, and he closed the door.

  When she backed out of the driveway, she saw his Mercedes SUV parked on the farther side of the street, half a block away.

  As she shifted out of reverse, he climbed the porch steps and sat in one of the rocking chairs, as if her home were his. He waved at her and began to rock.

  She was still looking at him when suddenly he disappeared. The chair kept rocking.

  Although he worked his will upon her mind, editing himself from her awareness, she felt no presence in her head, no slightest touch.

  On the porch, the apparently empty chair kept rocking. Rocking and rocking.

  8

  Named for the Wind

  Two miles from her home, Makani pulled into the parking lot at a strip shopping center. She opened the Chevy’s trunk, and then the suitcase. The plastic-wrapped bricks of money were still where she had put them. If Sparks knew about the cash, he chose to let her keep it, which meant that he was confident of finding her regardless of how far away she fled.

  She would probably be able to get farther than he imagined she could in what time he had given her. Speed was in her name. Her parents had intended to name her Makani ‘Olu‘olu, which meant fair wind, but after she’d been born and they had seen her, they called her Makani Miomio, which meant swift wind. Makani Miomio Hisoka-O’Brien, bearing both her mother’s maiden and married names, had been hard enough to catch when she was a crawler and then a toddler, but once she could walk, she was as fleet as a deer. She loved to run and won every race, 5Ks and marathons. Likewise, each time she caught a wave, she was promptly off her knees and onto her feet, nimble in the takeoff, quick with her maneuvers, arrowing up the face to snap-turn off the curling lip, then rocketing down again; always with bullet velocity she rode the hollow tube behind the cascading curl, shot into open air before she could be clamshelled by the collapsing wave.

  Behind the wheel again, on Coast Highway, she headed south. She didn’t think she would go on the run, after all. There was no point to it. Besides, if she couldn’t have Hawaii and the extended family that she loved, Newport Beach was her next-best home, where she had put down roots and had cautiously made friendships for more than five years. If she were harried away from this place out of fear, there would never be another home for her, only a village here, a hamlet there, city after city en route to nowhere.

  So she would leave Newport only temporarily and go no farther than Laguna Beach, the next town along the sparkling coast, where that magnificent canine specimen, Bob, was on a brief holiday with a friend of hers named Pogo. The friend’s official name, per his birth certificate and driver’s license, had three parts followed by a Roman numeral, but since childhood he had answered to nothing but Pogo, which was the only name by which most in the surfer community knew him. Except, he’d once said, for those who call me “loser” or “jackass,” which in Makani’s experience was no one.

  She wouldn’t have trusted Bob to anyone else’s care. For all of Pogo’s carefully tended image as a slacker who lived only to surf and loaf and pursue the perfect case of melanoma, he was the epitome of responsibility. People trusted him with everything from their children to their money, and never with regret. He worked part-time in a surf shop named Pet the Cat, and lived with three other self-described surf bums in an apartment above a thrift shop in nearby Costa Mesa. Currently he was house-sitting a classic beachside “cottage” for an owner who so loved his jewel-box residence that he couldn’t go on vacation if he left the place unoccupied and, in his mind, vulnerable to countless catastrophes ranging from spontaneous combustion to an invasion by a gang of droogs straight out of A Clockwork Orange.

  As the sun sank toward the horizon and briefly balanced there, as the long sunset spread faux fire across the shore and hills, the heavy summer traffic seemed to beget more of its kind, mile by mile, glasswork adance with reflections, pain
t and brightwork glimmering as if wet, a great mass of vehicles schooling south as if toward some spawning pool.

  By the time Makani arrived in Laguna Beach, the sun had gone away to brighten another hemisphere, and the stars had come out, more numerous over the ocean than to the east, where the lights of human habitation dimmed them.

  Because she had called ahead with her smartphone, Pogo was waiting for her in the open front door, good Bob at his side, the two of them rendered almost equally black by backlighting.

  After parking at the curb and locking the car, Makani hurried along a walkway of herringbone-pattern brick. On the threshold, she hugged Pogo and kissed him on the cheek. Eager for his turn at the well of love, Bob cha-chaed backward in the foyer with unrestrained delight.

  Makani loved Pogo, but most of the time she wouldn’t allow herself to think of it as being more than the paler shade of love called friendship. She had touched him often, and for the last two years, she had touched him always without apprehension. She’d never read in him a word of envy or conceit, never a line of ill will toward anyone, no truly dark secret that tormented him. His secrets were at their darkest pale gray. If he was not the only contented human being in the world, she had yet to find one of the others.

  And if you liked lean, muscled types, he was so nice to touch, not as tall as Rainer Sparks, but every bit as well put together. If anything, he was even better looking than the murderer. Pogo was the one knockout-handsome guy that Makani had ever met who wasn’t into himself, who in fact seemed oblivious of the appeal he had to women, even though they signaled their interest so boldly that they might as well have announced their availability with megaphones.

  Makani and Pogo had never gone to bed together, and she doubted they ever would. She didn’t believe that he could love her as more than a good friend. There was another girl, right here in Orange County, whom he adored far too much to put her second among women. Ironically, the object of his adoration was someone whom he could never have. And some said that Shakespeare had no contemporary relevance.

  In the foyer, as Pogo closed the door, Makani dropped to her knees to assure Bob that he was the great love of her life. Four years old, no longer puppy enough to forget his manners and leap up to put his paws on her shoulders, he pressed his big head into her hands, whimpering with pleasure as she stroked his face and then rubbed behind his ears. She cooed to him and said his name—“Bob, my lovely Bob, sweet Bobby”—and took the forepaw he offered, squeezing it affectionately.

  By touch, from this dog or any other, Makani received only a general—though sometimes intense—sense of its emotional state. At the moment, Bob overflowed with loving devotion and delight and relief that she hadn’t gone away forever.

  “We’ve had an awesome time,” Pogo said.

  “He’s got big energy. He can be crazy sometimes.”

  “Not the Bobster. He’s a mellow dude.”

  Wanting to smell her hair, Bob thrust his quivering black nose into it and sniffed noisily, probably because her hair was the best record of her day and was scented with the sea, the sun, beer, and God knew what else. To dogs, there were no bad smells.

  Abruptly, the Labrador scampered out of the foyer and along the hall, toward the back of the house, most likely to retrieve one of his squeaky tennis balls and present it to her as a gift.

  “Catch some good waves?” Pogo asked.

  “There were more top-to-bottom barrels today than anyone could ride.”

  “Sweet. You want a beer or somethin’?”

  She was surprised to hear herself say, “Just so you don’t throw it in my face,” because that comment led inevitably to his question.

  “Why would I throw it in your face?”

  She was even more surprised to hear herself say, in a tremulous voice, “Man, I’m in really big trouble, I’m going over the falls, and I don’t know what to do,” because she had never spoken of her gift with him or with anyone but Rainer Sparks.

  Putting a hand on her shoulder, he said, “There’s no trouble here, O’Brien. This is a safe zone. You want to talk?”

  She was having second thoughts. “I don’t want to get you killed.”

  “I thank you for that.”

  “I’m serious, Pogo. It’s that bad.”

  His eyes were a different shade of blue from hers, but meeting his stare, she felt somehow that she was looking into a reflection of herself. She knew that telling him everything would in no way damage their relationship or put her at risk.

  When still Makani hesitated, Pogo said, “I won’t be as easy to kill as you seem to think, O’Brien. Whether you want to talk about it or not, I want to talk about it. So don’t make me force it out of you with thumbscrews and a cattle prod, okay?”

  Her mouth trembled under the weight of a worried smile. “Okay.”

  “Let’s go to the kitchen. I was having coffee and punishing myself with Kerouac. The coffee’s good and makes perfect sense.”

  9

  Where, Oh, Where Has My Little Dog Gone?

  Rainer considered setting Makani’s house on fire.

  She wouldn’t need a home anymore. She’d be dead soon.

  She was fond of the bungalow.

  He would enjoy telling her that he had burned it down.

  Or save himself the trouble. Just claim to have torched it.

  For sure, he would kill the dog in front of her.

  She had thrown beer in his face. Defied him.

  Her death would not be easy.

  After she drove away, he went into the house. Looked in the refrigerator. Made a ham-and-cheese sandwich.

  Eating at her kitchen table, watching the GPS map displayed on his smartphone, he followed the blinking dot that was her ’54 Chevy as she drove south on Coast Highway.

  These days, you could buy a dog collar with a microminiature transponder in it, so your pooch could never be lost. Rainer had put one in her car.

  She was his dog, after all. His little bitch.

  She had been his since he first saw her ten years earlier. She just hadn’t known it.

  He always got what he wanted. Sometimes it took a while.

  The blinking dot stopped in Laguna Beach.

  The GPS system provided an address.

  He finished his dinner.

  He gathered up the clothes that she had stripped off as she had gone from front door to bedroom, when she’d first come home.

  The garments smelled of her. He liked the feel of them.

  He put them under the pillow on her bed.

  To refresh himself for what lay ahead, he needed some sleep.

  After undressing, he slipped naked into her bed.

  He never had trouble falling asleep. Insomnia was caused by anxiety. He had no anxiety. Nothing worried him. He led a perfect, beautiful life.

  He slept between Makani’s sheets. With the intoxicating smell of her.

  He dreamed that she was under him. He saw her in ecstasy. And then he saw her torn and broken, which was his ecstasy.

  10

  You Don’t Find Life by Fleeing from It

  In the pricey coastal towns of Southern California, if the house was near the beach and the real-estate ads referred to it as a cottage, you needed to put ironic quotation marks around the word—“cottage”—for it would cost upward of a couple million dollars and be a cottage only by imitation of that style. The one that Pogo was house-sitting encompassed more than 3,500 square feet, large enough to contain five real cottages within its walls. But it had gingerbread millwork and beadboard wainscoting and selected-mahogany floors and enough quaint details to fill a coffee-table book with photographs to engender seething envy in those who cherished the style.

  In the big eat-in kitchen, an old and tattered trade-paperback edition of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road lay on the table beside a mug of coffee.

  Bob was on his back, on the floor, with a dog toy, a floppy blue bunny rabbit with squeakers in each foot. He held it between his front paws, chewing
on one of its ears, breathing rapidly and squirming with delight. If he had raced to the kitchen to fetch the rabbit and bring it to Makani as a gift, he had become enthralled with it and had forgotten his original intention.

  “You spoiled him with a new toy,” she said.

  “I want him to love his uncle Pogo.”

  He brought her a mug of coffee, black, as she liked it, and she settled in a chair across the table from him.

  When Pogo sat down to his own coffee and pushed aside the book, Makani said, “The thing is, I’m a witch or something.”

  “I’ll get you a new broom for your birthday.”

  “I said ‘or something.’ I’m not into pointy black hats and cauldrons and cats. But there’s this witchy thing I can do.”

  “You sure can,” he said.

  She reached out to him. “Hold my hand.”

  He did as she asked.

  “This is embarrassing,” she said.

  “What—is hand-holding risque in Hawaii?”

  “In my experience, anyway, this is as close as you’ve ever come to having a secret, something you’d be reluctant to express. You’re thinking that…I’m lovely but somehow damaged, and you wish you could fix me.”

  His eyes widened slightly, but he said, “I am not.”

  “Yes, you are. It makes you sad, but you think I’m broken. And in a way, I am.”

  “If you say so, but I don’t see broken.”

  “I can’t read continuously. What I get, when I get anything at all, are flashes.” She let go of him and reached out with her other hand. “Try this one.”

  “Maybe we can levitate the table later,” he said, as he took her left hand in his right.

  Giving voice to his unspoken judgment of her, Makani said, “You’re spooked by what I’m doing, but you think I’m just expressing what I’ve long believed you feel about me. You think I’m pretending to see fragments of your thoughts, so I have an excuse to discuss our relationship this bluntly.”

  He did not look away from her. He was the most direct, least evasive person she had ever known. But he let go of her hand, and in his electric-blue eyes she saw what she could no longer perceive by touch: He had begun to believe that, at least to some limited extent, she was able to read his mind.