Ticktock

by Dean Koontz

  “That’s one of the things you said. How did you start the fire on the boat?”

  “Wasn’t me. Was Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, kicked over a lantern.”

  Scootie made a weird chuffing, wheezing sound. Tommy could have sworn it was doggy laughter.

  Another police cruiser appeared on the arched bridge ahead of them, entering the island from the mainland.

  “Truth—where did the birds come from?” Tommy asked.

  “Well, it’s the eternal mystery, isn’t it: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

  The oncoming patrol car stopped at the foot of the bridge and flashed its headlights at them.

  “Thinks we might be bad guys,” Del said.

  “Oh, no.”

  “Relax.”

  Del stopped beside the cruiser.

  Tommy said, “Don’t turn him into a cat or a crow or something.”

  “I was thinking—a goose.”

  The electric window purred down.

  The cop had already lowered his window. He sounded surprised when he said, “Del?”

  “Hi, Marty!”

  “I didn’t realize it was you,” the cop said, smiling at her from behind the wheel of his cruiser. “New car?”

  “You like it?”

  “A real beauty. Yours or your mom’s?”

  “You know Mom.”

  “Don’t you go breaking any speed limits.”

  “If I do, will you personally paddle me?”

  Marty, the cop, laughed. “I’d be delighted.”

  “What’s all the hubbub?” Del asked innocently.

  “You won’t believe this. Some fool rammed a big damn boat high speed into the sea wall.”

  “Must’ve been having a great party on board. Why do I never get invited to the great parties?”

  Apparently uninterested in Tommy, Marty said, “Hi, Scootie.”

  Craning his burly head to look past Del, out the side window, the Labrador grinned, tongue lolling.

  To Del, Marty said, “Tell your mom we’ll be watching for her in that car.”

  “You might not see her,” Del said, “but you’ll sure hear the sonic boom.”

  Laughing, Marty drove away, and Del continued onto the bridge, over the back channel, to the mainland.

  Tommy said, “What happens when he discovers the yacht on the sea wall is yours?”

  “He won’t know. It’s not in my name. It’s registered to our offshore corporation.”

  “Offshore corporation? How far off? Mars?”

  “Grand Cayman, in the Caribbean.”

  “What happens when this car is reported stolen?”

  “It won’t be. Mom’ll have it brought back before it’s missed.”

  “Scootie smells.”

  “It’s only his wet coat.”

  “It better be,” Tommy said. “Truth—was it just chance that you happened to be driving by that vacant lot when I rolled the Corvette, or did you know I was going to be there?”

  “Of course I didn’t know. Like I said, though, we’re clearly each other’s destiny.”

  “God, you’re infuriating!” Tommy said.

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Poor confused Tommy.”

  “Infuriating.”

  “Actually, you mean to say interesting.”

  “Infuriating.”

  “Interesting. In fact, you’re enthralled with me.”

  He sighed.

  “Aren’t you?” she teased. “Enthralled.”

  He sighed again.

  “Aren’t you?” she insisted.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re so sweet,” she said. “Such a sweet man.”

  “Want me to shoot you?”

  “Not yet. Wait till I’m dying.”

  “That’s not going to be easy.”

  Del’s mother lived in a private guard-gated community on a hill overlooking Newport Beach. The guardhouse was finished in mottled-pastel stucco with cast-stone wainscot and cast-stone quoins at the corners, and it stood under several enormous, theatrically lighted phoenix palms.

  Because no resident sticker adorned the Ferrari windshield, the young guard had to open the gatehouse door and lean out to ask whom Del was visiting. He was slack-faced and sleepy-eyed when he first appeared, but the moment he saw her, his face tightened and his eyes brightened.

  “Miss Payne!”

  “Hi, Mickey.”

  “New car?”

  She said, “Maybe. We’re test-driving it.”

  The guard came out of the gatehouse, into the rain, and stooped beside Del’s open window to be at her level. “Quite a machine.”

  “My mom could make it go to the moon.”

  “If she had this,” the guard said, “the community would have to put in speed bumps the size of garbage Dumpsters to slow her down.”

  “How’s Emmy?”

  Although Mickey was not wearing a raincoat, he seemed to be oblivious to the downpour, as though Del so completely commanded his awareness that he simply didn’t have the capacity also to notice the inclement weather—or anything else, for that matter. Tommy knew exactly how the poor guy felt.

  “Emmy’s great,” Mickey said. “She’s in total remission.”

  “That’s wonderful, Mickey.”

  “The doctors can’t believe it.”

  “I told you not to lose hope, didn’t I?”

  “If the tests keep coming back as clear as they do now, they’ll probably release her from the hospital in about three days. I just pray to God she’ll never…never have to…go back.”

  “She’ll be fine, Mickey.”

  “It’s so nice of you to go visit her the way you do.”

  “Oh, I adore her, Mickey. She’s an absolute angel. It’s no trouble at all.”

  “She thinks the world of you, Miss Payne. She sure loved that storybook you brought her.” Looking past Del, he said, “Hi, Scootie.”

  The Labrador chuffed.

  Del said, “Mickey, this is my friend, Tommy Tofu.”

  Mickey said, “Glad to meet you, Mr. Tofu.”

  Peering between Del and the dog, Tommy said, “Likewise. You’re getting soaked, Mickey.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes, you are,” Del said. “You better get back inside, dear. Tell Emmy I’ll see her the day after tomorrow. And after she’s been out of the hospital a while and put on a little weight, maybe she can come to my studio on the peninsula and sit for me. I’d like to paint her portrait.”

  “Oh, she’d love that, Miss Payne. Getting her portrait done—she’d feel like a princess.”

  Dripping, Mickey returned to the gatehouse, and Del put up the car window.

  In front of them, a massive iron gate ornamented with gilded balls rolled out of the way, admitting them to the private community.

  As Del piloted the Ferrari through the open gate, Tommy said, “Who’s Emmy?”

  “His little girl. Eight years old, cute as a button.”

  “She’s in total remission from what?”

  “Cancer.”

  “That’s tough—eight years old and hit with cancer.”

  “She’ll be absolutely fine now. Won’t she, Scootie-wootums?”

  The Labrador leaned over to nuzzle and lick her neck, and she giggled.

  They cruised along winding streets lined with enormous houses behind deep and lushly landscaped grounds.

  “I’m sorry we have to wake your mother at three-thirty in the morning,” Tommy said.

  “You’re just so delightfully thoughtful and polite,” Del said, reaching over to pinch his cheek. “But don’t worry yourself. Mom will be awake and busy.”

  “She’s a night person, huh?”

  “She’s an around-the-clock person. She never sleeps.”

  “Never?”

  “Well, not since Tonopah,” Del amended.

  “Tonopah, Nevada?”

  “Actually, outside Tonopah, close to Mud Lake.”


  “Mud Lake? What’re you talking about?”

  “That was twenty-eight years ago.”

  “Twenty-eight years?”

  “Approximately. I’m twenty-seven.”

  “Your mother hasn’t slept since before you were born?”

  “She was twenty-three then.”

  “Everyone has to sleep,” Tommy said.

  “Not everyone. You’ve been up all night. Are you sleepy?”

  “I was earlier, but—”

  “Here we are,” she said happily, turning a corner and driving into a cul-de-sac.

  At the end of the short street stood a grove of palm trees and behind them a stone estate wall illuminated by landscape lighting so subtle that Tommy couldn’t always discern the source.

  Set in the wall was a tall bronze gate with two-inch-square pickets. In an eighteen-inch-deep cast header across the top of the gate were what appeared to be hieroglyphics. The massive portal made the main gate to the community look, by comparison, like a tin-foil construction.

  Del stopped, put down her window, and pushed a call button on an intercom box set in a stone post.

  From the speaker came a solemn male voice with a British accent. “Who’s calling, please?”

  “It’s me, Mummingford.”

  “Good morning, Miss Payne,” said the voice on the intercom.

  The gate rolled open ponderously.

  “Mummingford?” Tommy asked.

  As she put up her window, Del said, “The butler.”

  “He’s on duty at this hour?”

  “Someone’s always on duty. Mummingford prefers the night shift, actually, because it’s usually more interesting here,” Del explained as she drove forward through the gateway arch.

  “What’re those hieroglyphics on the gate?”

  “It says, ‘Toto, we’re not in Kansas any more.’”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I. Mom has a whimsical side.”

  Looking back at the gate as they passed through the wall, Tommy said, “What language is it written in?”

  “The Great Pile,” Del said.

  “That’s a language?”

  “No, that’s the name of the house. Look.”

  The Payne mansion, standing on perhaps three acres of grounds behind the estate wall, was easily the largest in the neighborhood. It was an enormous, sprawling, wildly romantic Mediterranean villa with deep loggias behind colonnades, arches upon arches, lattice panels dripping with the white blossoms of night-blooming jasmine, balustraded balconies shaded by trellises groaning under the weight of red-flowering bougainvillaea, bell towers and cupolas, so many steeply pitched barrel-tile roofs hipping into one another that Tommy might have been looking down on an entire Italian village rather than at a single structure. The scene was so cunningly and romantically lighted that it could well have been the most insanely ornate stage setting in the most maniacally extravagant Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that the singular British genius of Broadway kitsch had ever created.

  The driveway descended slightly into a spacious, stone-paved motor court at the center of which stood a four-tiered fountain featuring fifteen life-size marble maidens in togas, pouring water from vases.

  As she drove the Ferrari around the astonishing fountain to the front door, Del said, “Mom wanted to build a more modern place, but the community’s architectural guidelines specified Mediterranean, and the architectural committee had a very narrow definition of the word. She became so frustrated with the approval process that she designed the most ridiculously exaggerated Mediterranean house the world had ever seen, thinking they’d be appalled and reconsider her previous plans—but they loved it. By then it seemed a good joke to her, so she built the place.”

  “She built all this as a joke?”

  “My mom’s nothing if not cool. Anyway, some people in this neighborhood have named their houses, so Mom called this place The Great Pile.”

  She parked in front of an arched portico supported by marble columns featuring carved vines and bunches of grapes.

  Warm amber and rose-colored light seemed to glow behind every beveled pane of every leaded-glass window in the house.

  “Is she having a party at this hour?”

  “Party? No, no. She just likes the place to be lit up like, as she puts it, ‘a cruise ship on a dark sea.’”

  “Why?”

  “To remind herself that we’re all passengers on an endless and magical journey.”

  “She actually said that?”

  “Isn’t it a pretty thought?” Del said.

  “She sure sounds like your mother.”

  The limestone front walk was bordered by inlaid mosaic patterns created with terra-cotta and yellow ceramic tiles. Scootie raced ahead of them, tail wagging.

  The ornate surround at the twelve-foot-high door consisted of sixteen highly embellished scenes intricately carved in limestone, all depicting a haloed monk in different poses but always with the same beatific expression, surrounded by joyous crowds of smiling and capering animals with their own haloes—dogs, cats, doves, mice, goats, cows, horses, pigs, camels, chickens, ducks, raccoons, owls, geese, rabbits.

  “Saint Francis of Assisi, talking to the animals,” Del said. “They’re antique carvings by an unknown sculptor, taken out of a fifteenth-century Italian monastery that was mostly destroyed in World War Two.”

  “Is it the same order of monks that produces all those Elvis paintings on velvet?”

  Grinning at him, she said, “Mom’s going to like you.”

  The massive mahogany door swung open as they reached it, and a tall silver-haired man in a white shirt, black tie, black suit, and mirror-polished black shoes stood just beyond the threshold. A fluffy white beach towel was folded precisely over his left arm, as a waiter might carry a linen bar towel to wrap a champagne bottle.

  With a reverberant British accent, he said, “Welcome to The Great Pile.”

  “Is Mom still making you say that, Mummingford?”

  “I shall never tire of it, Miss Payne.”

  “Mummingford, this is my friend, Tommy Phan.”

  Tommy was surprised to hear her say his name correctly.

  “Honored to meet you, Mr. Phan,” Mummingford said, half bowing from the waist as he stepped back from the doorway.

  “Thank you,” Tommy said, nodding in acknowledgment of the bow and almost giving the words a crisp British accent.

  Scootie preceded them through the doorway.

  Mummingford led the dog aside, dropped to one knee, and began to dry the mutt and blot its paws with the beach towel.

  As Del closed the door, Tommy said, “I’m afraid we’re as soaked as Scootie. We’re going to make a mess.”

  “Alas, you are,” said Mummingford drily. “But I must tolerate Miss Payne to an extent I’m not obliged to tolerate the dog. And her friends enjoy sufferance as well.”

  “Where’s Mom?” Del asked.

  “She awaits you in the music room, Miss Payne. I’ll send his nibs along to join you as soon as he’s presentably dry.”

  Scootie grinned out of a cowl of white cotton, enjoying his rubdown.

  “We can’t stay long,” Del told the butler. “We’re on the lam from a doll snake rat-quick monster thing. But could we please have coffee and a tray of breakfast pastries?”

  “In a trice, Miss Payne.”

  “You’re a dear, Mummingford.”

  “It’s the cross I bear,” said Mummingford.

  The grand hall, at least a hundred feet long, was floored with highly polished black granite on which their wet rubber-soled shoes squeaked with each step. The white walls were hung with enormous unframed canvases: all abstract art full of motion and color, each piece illuminated precisely to the edges of the canvas by projector lamps in the ceiling, so it seemed as if the art glowed from within. The ceiling was paneled with bands of polished steel alternating with bands of brushed steel. A double cove provided indirect lighting above, and additional i
ndirect lighting flooded out at floor level from a groove in the black-granite baseboard.

  Sensing Tommy’s amazement, Del said, “Mom built the outside of the house to please the community architectural committee, but inside it’s as modern as a spaceship and as Mediterranean as Coca-Cola.”

  The music room was two-thirds of the way along the main hall, on the left. A black-lacquered door opened onto a room floored with polished white limestone speckled with gracefully curved marine fossils. The sound-baffled ceiling and walls were padded and then upholstered in charcoal-gray fabric, as if this were a recording studio, and indirect lighting was tucked behind the baffles.

  The chamber was huge, approximately forty by sixty feet. In the center was a twenty-by-thirty custom carpet with a geometric pattern in half a dozen subtly different shades of taupe and gold. In the center of the carpet were a black leather sofa and four black leather armchairs arranged in a conversational grouping around a solid rectangular-block coffee table veneered with a parquetry of faux-ivory squares.

  Although a hundred music lovers could have been seated in the room for a piano recital, no piano was provided. The music—Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade”—didn’t issue from a state-of-the-art entertainment system with Surround Sound speakers, either. It came, instead, from what appeared to be a small, table-model, Art Deco radio that stood in the center of the faux-ivory coffee table, in a cone of light from a tightly focused halogen lamp in the ceiling. The tinny and static-spotted quality of the sound suggested that the radio was actually a cassette or CD player loaded with one of those authentic as-recorded-live-on-dance-night-in-the-forties radio programs.

  Del’s mother sat in one of the chairs, eyes closed, smiling as beatifically as Saint Francis in the limestone carvings around the front door, swaying her head from side to side with the music, keeping time by patting her hands against the arms of the chair. Although she was fifty, she looked at least ten years younger: quite a striking woman, not blond like Del but olive-skinned with jet-black hair, delicate features, and a swanlike neck. She reminded Tommy of the elfin actress in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Audrey Hepburn.

  When Del lowered the volume on the radio, Mrs. Payne opened her eyes. They were as blue as Del’s and even deeper. Her smile widened. “Good heavens, dear, you look like a drowned rat.” She rose from the chair and regarded Tommy. “And so do you, young man.”