by Dean Koontz
he turned, she would not be able to slip away before he glimpsed her from the corner of his eye—yet she was unable to move now while there was still a chance to avoid him. She was afraid that if she made any sound whatsoever, he would hear it and spin toward her. Even the microwhispers of carpet fibers compressing under her shoe, if she moved, seemed certain to draw his attention.
The visitor was doing something so bizarre that Chyna was as transfixed by his activity as by her fear. His hands were raised in front of him, stretched as high as he could reach, and his spread fingers languorously combed the air. He seemed to be in a trance, as though trying to seine psychic impressions from the ether.
He was a big man. Six feet two, maybe even taller. Muscular. Narrow waist, enormous shoulders. His denim jacket stretched tautly across his broad back.
His hair was thick and brown, neatly barbered against the nape of his bull neck, but Chyna could not see his face. She hoped never to see it.
His seining fingers, stained with blood, looked crushingly strong. He would be able to choke the life out of her with a single-hand grip.
“Come to me,” he murmured.
Even in a whisper, his rough voice had a timbre and a power that were magnetic.
“Come to me.”
He seemed to be speaking not to a vision that only he could see but to Chyna, as if his senses were so acute that he had been able to detect her merely from the movement of the air that she had displaced when she’d stepped soundlessly through the doorway.
Then she saw the spider. It dangled from the ceiling on a gossamer filament a foot above the killer’s reaching hands.
“Please.”
As if responding to the man’s supplications, the spider spun out its thread, descending.
The killer stopped reaching, turned his hand palm-up. “Little one,” he breathed.
Fat and black, the obedient spider reeled itself down into the big open palm.
The killer brought his hand to his mouth and tipped his head back slightly. He either crushed the spider and ate it—or ate it alive.
He stood motionless, savoring.
Finally, without looking back, he went to the head of the stairs on the right, at the midpoint of the hallway, and descended spider-quick and almost spider-silent to the first floor.
Chyna shuddered, stunned to be alive.
The house held a drowning depth of stillness as a dam held water, with tremendous pent-up power and pressure on the breast.
When Chyna found the courage to move, she cautiously approached the head of the stairs. She feared that the visitor had not fully descended to the first floor, that he was toying with her, standing just out of sight, waiting, smiling. He would reach for her, palms up, and say, Come to me.
She held her breath, risked exposure, and looked down. The stairs curved through gradients of gloom to the foyer below. She could see just well enough to be sure that he wasn’t there.
As far as Chyna could discern, no lamps were on downstairs. She wondered what he was doing in that darkness, guided only by the pale moonglow at the windows. Perhaps he was in a corner, crouched like a spider, sensitive to the faintest changes in the patterns of the air, dreaming of silent stalkings and the frenzied rending of prey.
She went quickly past the head of the stairs, into the last length of hallway, to the next open door and the second source of amber light, dreading what she might find. But she could cope with both the dread and the finding. It was always not knowing, turning away from truth, that caused night sweats and bad dreams.
This room was smaller than the master suite, with no sitting area. A corner desk. A double bed. One nightstand with a brass lamp, a dresser, a vanity with a padded bench.
On the wall above the bed was a poster-size portrait of Freud. Chyna loathed Freud. But Laura, dear of heart and idealistic, clung to a belief in many aspects of Freudian theory; she embraced the dream of a guiltless world, with everyone a victim of his troubled past and yearning for rehabilitation.
Laura was lying facedown on the bed, atop the sheets and the blankets. Her wrists were handcuffed behind her. A second pair of handcuffs secured her ankles. Linking both of those shiny steel restraints was a shackling chain.
She had been violated. The pants of her baggy blue pajamas had been cut off with a neatness worthy of a conscientious tailor; the blue panels of cloth had been smoothed across the blankets to both sides of her. The pajama shirt had been shoved up her back; now it was gathered in rumpled folds across her shoulders and the nape of her neck.
Chyna moved deeper into the room, her fear equaled now by a swelling sorrow that seemed to enlarge her heart yet leave it cold and empty. When she caught a faint odor of spilled semen, her fear and sorrow were matched by anger. As she stooped beside the bed, her hands curled into such hard fists that her fingernails pressed painfully into her palms.
Sweat-damp blond hair was pasted to the side of Laura’s face. Her delicate features were salt-pale and clenched in anxiety, and her eyes were squeezed tightly shut.
She was not dead. Not dead. It seemed impossible.
The girl—terror had reduced her to the condition of a girl—was murmuring so softly that the words couldn’t be heard even from a distance of inches, yet so urgently that the meaning was harrowingly clear. It was a prayer, one that Chyna had recited on numerous nights long ago, in far places: a prayer for mercy, a plea to be delivered from this horror untouched and alive, dear God, please, untouched and alive.
On those other nights, Chyna had been spared both violation and death. Already, half of Laura’s petition had gone unanswered.
Chyna’s throat tightened with anguish, and she could barely speak: “It’s me.”
Laura’s eyelids sprang open, and her blue eyes rolled like those of a terrified horse, wide with disbelief. “All dead.”
“Ssshhh,” Chyna whispered.
“Blood. His hands.”
“Ssshhh. I’ll get you out of here.”
“Stank like blood. Jack’s dead. Nina. Everyone.”
Jack, her brother, whom Chyna had not met. Nina, her sister-in-law. Evidently the killer had been to the vineyard manager’s bungalow before coming to the main house. Four dead. There was no help to be found anywhere on the sprawling property.
Chyna glanced worriedly at the open door, then quickly rose to test the handcuffs on Laura’s wrists. Securely locked.
With fettered hands and fettered ankles linked by a chain, Laura was thoroughly hobbled. She wouldn’t be able to stand, let alone walk.
Chyna wasn’t strong enough to carry her.
She saw her reflection in the vanity mirror across the room, and she realized with a shock how nakedly her terror was revealed in her wrenched face.
Trying to look more composed for Laura’s sake, Chyna stopped beside the bed again and murmured almost as softly as her friend had been praying: “Is there a gun?”
“What?”
“A gun in the house?”
“No.”
“Nowhere in the house?”
“No, no.”
“Shit.”
“Jack.”
“What?”
“Has one.”
“A gun? At the bungalow?” Chyna asked.
“Jack has a gun.”
Chyna didn’t have time to get to the bungalow and back before the killer returned to Laura’s room. Anyway, more likely than not, he had already found the gun and confiscated it.
“Do you know who he is?”
“No.” Laura’s sky-blue eyes appeared to darken with despair. “Get out.”
“I’ll find a weapon.”
“Get out,” Laura whispered more urgently, cold sweat glistening on her brow.
“A knife,” Chyna said.
“Don’t die for me.” Then, sotto voce, tremulously but fiercely, fiercely she said: “Run, Chyna. Oh, God, please run!”
“I’ll be back.”
“Run.”
From outside, a sound arose. A t
ruck engine. Approaching.
Astonished, Chyna shot to her feet. “Someone’s coming. Help’s coming.”
Laura’s bedroom was toward the front of the house. Chyna stepped to the nearer of two windows, which provided a view of the half-mile driveway leading in from the two-lane county road.
A quarter of a mile away, bright headlights pierced the night. Judging by the height of the lights from the ground, Chyna concluded that the truck was big.
How miraculous that anyone would show up at this hour, in this lonely place.
As a thrill of hope swept through Chyna, she realized that the killer would have heard the engine too. The man or men in the truck wouldn’t know what trouble they were getting into. When they stopped in front of the house, they would be dead men breathing.
“Hold on,” she said, touched Laura’s damp forehead to reassure her, and then crossed the room to the door, leaving her friend under the smug and somber gaze of Sigmund Freud.
The hallway was deserted.
Chyna hurried to the head of the curved stairs, hesitated to commit herself to the tenebrous lair below, but then realized that she had nowhere else to go. She went down as fast as she dared without the support of the handrail. Staying clear of the balustrade. Too exposed there. Close to the wall was better.
She quickly passed a series of large landscape paintings in ornate frames, which seemed almost to be windows on actual pastoral vistas. Earlier, they had been bright and cheerful scenes. Now they were ominous: goblin forests, black rivers, killing fields.
The foyer. An oval area rug on polished oak. Through a closed door to the right was Paul Templeton’s study. Through the archway on the left was the dark living room.
The killer could be anywhere.
Outside, the roar of the truck grew louder. It was almost to the house. The driver would be shot through the windshield the moment that he braked to a stop. Or gunned down when he stepped out from behind the steering wheel.
Chyna had to warn him, not solely for his sake but for her own, for Laura’s. He was their only hope.
Certain that the spider-eating intruder was nearby, she expected a savage attack and, abandoning caution, flew at the front door. The oval rug rucked beneath her feet, twisted, and nearly spun out from under her. She stumbled, reached out to break her fall, and slammed both palms flat against the front door.
Such a noise, hellacious noise, booming through the house, had surely drawn the killer’s attention away from the approaching truck.
Chyna fumbled, found the knob, and twisted it. The door was unlocked. Gasping, she pulled it open.
A cool breeze out of the northwest, faintly scented by freshly turned vineyard earth and fungicide, whistled through the bare limbs of the maple trees that flanked the front walkway. Snuffling like a pack of hounds, it rushed past her into the foyer as she stepped out onto the front porch.
The truck had already passed the house and was heading away from her. It would come around for a second approach on the end-loop of the driveway, which was wide enough to accommodate produce haulers in the harvest season, and park facing out toward the county road. But it wasn’t a truck after all. A motor home. An older model with rounded lines, well kept, forty feet long, either blue or green. Its chrome glimmered like quicksilver under the late-winter moon.
Amazed that she had not yet been stabbed or shot or struck from behind, glancing back at the open front door where the killer hadn’t yet appeared, Chyna headed for the porch steps.
The motor home rounded the end of the loop, beginning to turn toward her. Its twin beams swept across the Templetons’ barn and other outbuildings.
Larch and maple and evergreen shadows fled before the arcing headlights. They flickered darkly through the trellis at the end of the porch, along the white balustrade, across the lawn and the stone walkway, stretching impossibly, swooping into the night as if trying frantically to tear free of the trees that cast them.
The deep quiet in the house, the lack of lights downstairs, the killer’s failure to attack her as she escaped, the timely arrival of the motor home—suddenly all of those things made chilling sense. The killer was driving the motor home.
“No.”
Chyna swiftly retreated from the porch steps and scrambled back into the foyer.
At her heels, the headlights came all the way around the end of the driveway loop. They pierced the trellis grid, projecting geometric patterns across the porch floor and the front wall of the house.
She closed the door and fumbled for the big lock above the knob. Found the thumb-turn. Engaged the heavy deadbolt.
Then she realized her mistake. The front door had been unlocked because the killer had gone out that way. If he found it locked now, he would know that Laura wasn’t the only person alive in the house, and the hunt would begin.
Her sweaty fingers slipped on the brass thumb-turn, but the bolt snapped open with a hard clack.
Earlier, he must have parked the vehicle near the end of the half-mile-long driveway, out toward the county road, and must have walked to the house.
Now tires crunched through gravel. Air brakes issued a soft whoosh and a softer whine, and the motor home came to a full stop in front of the house.
Remembering the oval rug that had turned under her feet and had nearly sent her sprawling, Chyna dropped to her knees. She crawled across the wool, smoothing the rumples with her hands. If the killer tripped over the disarranged rug, he would know that it hadn’t been in that condition when he’d left.
Footsteps arose outside: boot heels ringing off the flagstone walkway.
Chyna came to her feet and turned toward the study. No good. She couldn’t know for sure where he would go when he reentered the house, and if he stepped into the study, she would be trapped in there with him.
His tread echoed hollowly from the wooden porch steps.
Chyna lunged across the foyer, through the archway, into the dark living room—and immediately came to a halt, afraid of stumbling into furniture and knocking it over. She edged forward, feeling her way with both hands, vision hampered by the muddy-red ghost images of the motor-home headlights, which still floated faintly across her retinas.
The front door opened.
Less than halfway across the living room, Chyna squatted beside an armchair. If the killer entered and switched on the lights, he would see her.
Without closing the door behind him, the man appeared in the foyer, beyond the arch. He was dimly limned by the glow from the second-floor hallway. He passed the living room and went directly to the stairs.
Laura.
Chyna still had no weapon.
She thought of the fireplace poker. Not good enough. Unless she caved in his skull on the first blow or broke his arm, he would wrest the poker away from her. She had the strength of terror, but maybe that wouldn’t be enough.
Rather than rise to her feet and blunder blindly across the living room, she stayed down and crawled because it was safer and quicker. She reached the dining-room archway and angled toward where she thought she’d find the kitchen door.
She thumped into a chair. It rattled against a table leg. On the table, something shifted with a clink-clink, and she remembered seeing carefully arranged ceramic fruit in a copper bowl.
She didn’t think that he could have heard these sounds all the way upstairs, so she kept going. There was nothing to do but keep going anyway, whether he had heard or not.
When she reached the swinging door sooner than she had expected, she got to her feet.
Though the infiltrating moonlight was already dim, it suddenly faded away, causing the flesh on the nape of her neck to crawl with a dire expectation. She turned, pressing her back against the doorframe, certain that the killer was close behind her, silhouetted in front of a window, blocking the lunar glow, but he wasn’t there. The silver radiance no longer painted the glass. Evidently the storm clouds, rolling out of the northwest since before midnight, had finally shrouded the moon.
Pushing on the swinging door, she went into the kitchen.
She wouldn’t need to switch on the overhead fluorescent panels. The upper of the double ovens featured a digital clock with green numerals that emitted a surprising amount of light, enough to allow her to find her way around the room.
She. recalled having seen a section of butcher-block countertop to one side of the stainless-steel sinks. The sinks were in front of the wider of the two windows. She slid her hand along the cold granite counters until she located the remembered wooden surface.
The house above her seemed filled with a higher order of silence than ever before.
What’s the bastard doing up there in all that silence, up there in all that silence with Laura?
Under the butcher block was a drawer where she expected to find knives. Found them. Neatly slotted in a holder.
She withdrew one. Too short. Another. This one was a bread knife with a blunt round end. The third that she selected proved to be a butcher knife. She carefully tested the cutting edge against the ball of her thumb and found it satisfyingly sharp.
Upstairs, Laura screamed.
Chyna started toward the dining-room door but sensed intuitively that she dared not go that way. She rushed instead to the back stairs, even though they couldn’t be climbed without making noise.
She switched on the light in the stairwell. The killer could not see her here.
From the second floor, Laura cried out again—a terrible wail of despair, pain, horror, like a cry that might have been heard in the poison-gas chambers at Dachau or in the windowless interrogation rooms of Siberian prisons during the era of the gulags. It was not a scream for help or even a begging for mercy, but a plea for release at any cost, even death.
Chyna clambered up the stairs into that scream, which presented her with real resistance, as if she were a swimmer struggling toward the surface of a sea, against a great weight of water. As cold as an Arctic current, the cry chilled her, numbed her, throbbed icily in the hollows of her bones. She was overcome by a compulsion to scream with Laura as a dog wails in sympathy when it hears another dog suffering, a primal need to howl in misery at the sheer helplessness of human existence in a universe full of dead stars, and she had to fight that urge.
Laura’s scream spiraled into a bawling for her mother, though she must know that her mother was dead. “Mommy, Mommy, Mommeeeeee.” She was reduced to the dependency of an infant, too terrified of life itself to find solace anywhere but in the familiar succoring breast and in the sound of that same heartbeat remembered from the womb.
And then sudden quiet.
Bleak silence.
On the landing, halfway to the second floor, Chyna was surprised to realize that the thousand-fathom weight of the scream had brought her to a standstill. Her legs were weak; her calf and thigh muscles quivered as if she had run a marathon. She seemed on the brink of collapse.
Because it might signify the end of hope, the silence was now as oppressive as the scream. She bent her head under a hush as heavy as an iron crown, hunched her shoulders, and huddled miserably upon herself.
It would be so easy to lean against the wall, slide down to the floor, put the knife aside, and curl defensively. Just wait until he had gone away. Wait until a relative or a friend of the family arrived, discovered the bodies, went for the police, and took care of everything.
Instead, after pausing only a few seconds on the landing, Chyna forced herself to continue the climb, heart pounding so hard that it seemed as if each blow might knock her down.
Her arms shook uncontrollably. In her white-knuckle grip, the butcher knife carved wobbly patterns in the air in front of her, and she wondered if she would have the strength, in any confrontation, to thrust and slash effectively.
