by Dean Koontz
Shortly after nine o’clock in the morning, after dealing with the woman and washing the flatware, Mr. Vess sets loose the dogs.
At the back door, at the front door, and in his bedroom, there are call buttons that, when pushed, sound a soft buzzer in the kennel behind the barn. When the Dobermans have been sent there with the word crib, as they were sent earlier, the buzzer is a command that at once returns them to active patrol.
He uses the call button by the kitchen door and then steps to the large window by the dinette to watch the backyard.
The sky is low and gray, still shrouding the Siskiyou Mountains, but rain is no longer falling. The drooping boughs of the evergreens drip steadily. The bark on the deciduous trees is a sodden black; their limbs—some with the first fragile green buds of spring, others still barren—are so coaly that they appear to have been stripped by fire.
Some people might think that the scene is passive now, with the thunder spent and the lightning extinguished, but Mr. Vess knows that a storm is as powerful in its aftermath as in its raging. He is in harmony with this new kind of power, the quiescent power of growth that water bestows on the land.
From the back of the barn come the Dobermans. They pad side by side for a distance, but then split up and proceed each in his own direction.
They are not on attack status at this time. They will chase down and detain any intruder, but they will not kill him. To prime them for blood, Mr. Vess must speak the name Nietzsche.
One of the dogs—Liederkranz—comes onto the back porch, where he stares at the window, adoring his master. His tail wags once, and then once again, but he is on duty, and this brief and measured display of affection is all that he will allow himself.
Liederkranz returns to the backyard. He stands tall, vigilant. He gazes first to the south, then west, and then east. He lowers his head, smells the wet grass, and at last he moves off across the lawn, sniffing industriously. His ears flatten against his skull as he concentrates on a scent, tracking something that he imagines might be a threat to his master.
On a few occasions, as a reward to the Dobermans and to keep them sharp, Mr. Vess has turned loose a captive and has allowed the dogs to stalk her, forgoing the pleasure of the kill himself. It is an entertaining spectacle.
Secure behind the screen of his four-legged Praetorian Guard, Mr. Vess goes upstairs to the bathroom and adjusts the water in the shower until it is luxuriously hot. He lowers the volume of the radio but leaves it tuned to the swing-music program.
As he strips off his soiled clothing, clouds of steam pour over the top of the shower curtain. This humidity enhances the fragrance of the dark stains in his garments. Naked, he stands for a couple of minutes with his face buried in the blue jeans, the T-shirt, the denim jacket, breathing deeply at first but then delicately sniffing one exquisite nuance of odor after another, wishing that his sense of smell were twenty thousand times more intense than it is, like that of a Doberman.
Nevertheless, these aromas transport him into the night just past. He hears once more the soft popping of the sound suppressor on the pistol, the muffled cries of terror and the thin pleas for mercy in the night calm of the Templeton house. He smells Mrs. Templeton’s lilac-scented body lotion, which she’d applied to her skin before retiring, the fragrance of the sachet in the daughter’s underwear drawer. He tastes, in memory, the spider.
Regretfully, he puts the clothes aside for laundering, because by this evening he must pass for the ordinary man that he is not, and this reverse lycanthropy requires time if the transformation is to be convincing.
Therefore, as Benny Goodman plays “One O’clock Jump,” Mr. Vess plunges into the stinging-hot water, being especially vigorous with the washcloth and lavish with a bar of Irish Spring, scrubbing away the too pungent scents of sex and death, which might alarm the sheep. They must never suspect the shepherd of having a snaggle-toothed snout and a bushy tail inside his herdsman’s disguise. Taking his time, bopping to song after song, he shampoos his thick hair twice and then treats it with a penetrating conditioner. He uses a small brush to scrub under his fingernails. He is a perfectly proportioned man, lean but muscular. As always, he takes great pleasure in soaping himself, enjoying the sculpted contours of his body under his slippery hands; he feels like the music sounds, like the soap smells, like the taste of sweetened whipping cream.
Life is. Vess lives.
Chyna came out of Key West darkness and tropical thunder into a fluorescent glare that stung her bleary eyes. At first she mistook the fear that drove her pounding heart for the fear of Jim Woltz, her mother’s friend; she thought that her face was pressed to the floor under the bed in his seaside cottage. But then she remembered the killer and the captive girl.
She was sitting forward in a chair, slumped over the round table in the dining area off the knotty-pine kitchen. Her head was turned to her right, and she was looking through a window at the back porch, the backyard.
The killer had removed a seat cushion from one of the other chairs and had placed it under her head, so her face wouldn’t press uncomfortably against the wood. She shuddered at his thoughtfulness.
As she tried to lift her head, pain shot up the back of her neck and throbbed in the right side of her face. She almost blacked out, and decided not to be in a rush about getting up.
When she shifted in the chair, the clink of chains indicated that getting up might not be a choice either now or later. Her hands were in her lap, and when she tried to lift one, she lifted both, for her wrists were cuffed.
She tried to pull her feet apart—and discovered that her ankles were shackled. Judging by the noisy rattling and clinking that her small movements generated, there were other encumbrances as well.
Outside, something as black as soot bounded across the green lawn, scampered up the steps, and crossed the porch. It came to the window, jumped up, put its paws on the window stool, and peered in at her. A Doberman pinscher.
Against her breasts, Ariel holds an open book as if it is a shield, hands splayed across the binding. She is in the enormous armchair, legs drawn up beneath her, the only perfect doll of all those in the room.
Mr. Vess sits on a footstool before her.
He cleans up well. Showered, shampooed, shaved, and combed, he is presentable in any company, and any mother, seeing him on the arm of her daughter, would think that he was a prize. He is wearing loafers without socks, beige cotton Dockers, a braided leather belt, and a pale-green chambray shirt.
In her schoolgirl uniform, Ariel looks good too. Vess is pleased to see that she has regularly groomed herself in his absence, as she was instructed. It is not easy for her, taking only sponge baths and shampooing her glorious hair in the sink.
He constructed this room for others, who came before her, none of whom was in residence longer than two months. Until he’d met his Ariel, and learned what an engagingly independent spirit she was, he’d never imagined that he would insist on anyone staying this long. Consequently, a shower had seemed unnecessary.
He had first seen the girl in a newspaper photograph. Though only a tenth-grader, she had been something of a prodigy and had led her Sacramento high school team to victory in a statewide California academic decathlon. She had looked so tender. The newspaper had trembled in his hands when he had seen her, and he had known at once that he must drive to Sacramento and meet her. He’d shot the father. The mother had owned an enormous collection of dolls and had made dolls of her own as a hobby. Vess had beaten her to death with a ventriloquist dummy that had a large, carved-maple head as effective as a baseball bat.
“You’re more beautiful than ever,” he tells Ariel, and his voice is muffled by the soundproofing, as if he were speaking from inside a coffin, buried alive.
She does not reply or even acknowledge his presence. She is in her silent mode, as she has been without interruption for more than six months.
“I missed you.”
These days, she never looks at him but stares at a point abo
ve his head and off to one side. If he were to stand up from the footstool and move into her line of sight, she would still be looking over his head and to one side, though he would never quite be able to see her eyes shift in avoidance.
“I brought a few things to show you.”
From a shoe box on the floor beside the footstool, he extracts two Polaroid photographs. She will not accept them or turn her eyes to them, but Vess knows that she will examine these mementos after he leaves.
She is not as lost to this world as she pretends to be. They are engaged in a complicated game with high stakes, and she is a good player.
“This first is a picture of a lady named Sarah Templeton, the way she looked before I had her. She was in her forties but very attractive. A lovely woman.”
The armchair is so deep that the seat cushion provides a ledge in front of Ariel on which Vess can place the photograph.
“Lovely,” he repeats.
Ariel doesn’t blink. She is capable of staring fixedly without blinking for surprisingly long periods. Now and then Mr. Vess worries that she will damage her striking blue eyes; corneas require frequent lubrication. Of course, if she goes too long without blinking and her eyes become dangerously dry, the irritation will cause tears to spring up involuntarily.
“This is a second photograph of Sarah, after I was finished with her,” Mr. Vess says, and he also places this picture on the chair. “As you can see if you choose to look, the word lovely doesn’t apply any more. Beauty never lasts. Things change.”
From the shoe box he takes two more photographs.
“This is Sarah’s daughter, Laura. Before. And after. You can see she was beautiful. Like a butterfly. But there’s a worm in every butterfly, you know.”
He places these snapshots on the chair and reaches into the box again.
“This was Laura’s father. Oh, and here’s her brother…and the brother’s wife. They were incidental.”
Finally he brings out the three Polaroids of the young Asian gentleman and the Slim Jim with the bite missing.
“His name is Fuji. Like the mountain in Japan.”
Vess puts two of the three photos on the chair.
“I’ll keep one for myself. To eat. And then I’ll be Fuji, with the power of the East and the power of the mountain, and when the time comes for me to do you, you’ll feel both the boy and the mountain in me, and so many other people, all their power. It’ll be very exciting for you, Ariel, so exciting that when it’s over, you won’t even care that you’re dead.”
This is a long speech for Mr. Vess. He is for the most part not a garrulous man. The girl’s beauty, however, moves him now and then to speeches.
He holds up the Slim Jim.
“The missing bite was taken by Fuji just before I killed him. His saliva will have dried on the meat. You can taste a little of his quiet power, his inscrutable nature.”
He puts the wrapped sausage on the chair.
“I’ll be back after midnight,” Mr. Vess promises. “We’ll go out to the motor home, so you can see Laura, the real Laura, not just the picture of her. I brought her back so you could see what becomes of all pretty things. And there’s a young man too, a hitchhiker that I picked up along the way. I showed him a photograph of you, and I just didn’t like the way he looked at it. He wasn’t respectful. He leered. I didn’t like something he said about you, so I sewed his mouth shut, and I sewed his eyes shut because of the way he looked at your picture. You’ll be excited to see what I did to him. You can touch him…and Laura.”
Vess watches her closely for any tic, shudder, flinch, or subtle change in the eyes that will indicate that she hears him. He knows that she hears, but she is clever at maintaining a solemn face and a pretense of catatonic detachment.
If he can force one faint flinch from her, one tic, then he will soon shatter her completely and have her howling like a goggle-eyed patient in the deepest wards of Bedlam. That collapse into ranting insanity is always fascinating to watch.
But she is tough, this girl, with surprising inner resources. Good. The challenge thrills him.
“And from the motor home we’ll go out to the meadow with the dogs, Ariel, and you can watch while I bury Laura and the hitchhiker. Maybe the sky will clear by that time, and maybe there’ll be stars or even moonlight.”
Ariel huddles on the chair with her book, eyes distant, lips slightly parted, a deeply still girl.
“Hey, you know, I bought another doll for you. An interesting little shop in Napa, California, a place that sells the work of local craftsmen. It’s a clever rag doll. You’ll like it. I’ll give it to you later.”
Mr. Vess gets up from the footstool and takes a casual inventory of the contents of the refrigerator and the cabinet that serves as the girl’s pantry. She has enough supplies to carry her three more days, and he will restock her shelves tomorrow.
“You’re not eating quite as much as you should,” he admonishes. “That’s ungrateful of you. I’ve given you a refrigerator, a microwave, hot and cold running water. You’ve got everything you need to take care of yourself. You should eat.”
The dolls are no less responsive than the girl.
“You’ve lost two or three pounds. It hasn’t affected your looks yet, but you can’t lose any more.”
She gazes into thin air, as if waiting for her voice-box string to be pulled before she recites recorded messages.
“Don’t think you can starve yourself until you’re haggard and unattractive. You can’t escape me that way, Ariel. I’ll strap you down and force-feed you if I have to. I’ll make you swallow a rubber tube and pump baby food into your stomach. In fact, I’d enjoy it. Do you like pureed peas? Carrots? Applesauce? I guess it doesn’t matter, since you won’t taste them—unless you regurgitate.”
He gazes at her silken hair, which is red blond in the filtered light. This sight translates through all five of Vess’s extraordinary senses, and he is bathed in the sensory splendor of her hair, in all the sounds and smells and textures that the look of it conveys to him. One stimulus has so many associations for him that he could lose himself for hours in the contemplation of a single hair or one drop of rain, if he chose, because that item would become an entire world of sensation to him.
He moves to the armchair and stands over the girl.
She doesn’t acknowledge him, and although he has entered her line of sight, her gaze has somehow shifted above and to one side of him without his being aware of the moment when it happened.
She is magically evasive.
“Maybe I could get a word or two out of you if I set you on fire. What do you think? Hmmm? A little lighter fluid on that golden hair—and whoosh!”
She does not blink.
“Or I’ll give you to the dogs, see if that unties your tongue.”
No flinch, no tic, no shudder. What a girl.
Mr. Vess stoops, lowering his face toward Ariel’s, until they are nose-to-nose.
Her eyes are now directly aligned with his—yet she is still not looking at him. She seems to peer through him, as if he is not a man of flesh and blood but a haunting spirit that she can’t quite detect. This isn’t merely the old trick of letting her eyes swim out of focus; it’s a ruse infinitely more clever than that, which he can’t understand at all.
Nose-to-nose with her, Vess whispers, “We’ll go to the meadow after midnight. I’ll bury Laura and the hitchhiker. Maybe I’ll put you into the ground with them and cover you up, three in one grave. Them dead and you alive. Would you speak then, Ariel? Would you say please?”
No answer.
He waits.
Her breathing is low and even. He is so close to her that her exhalations are warm and steady against his lips, like promises of kisses to come.
She must feel his breath too.
She may be frightened of him and even repulsed by him, but she also finds him alluring. He has no doubt about this. Everyone is fascinated by bad boys.
He says, “Maybe there’ll be stars.�
��
Such a blueness in her eyes, such sparkling depths.
“Or even moonlight,” he whispers.
The steel cuffs on Chyna’s ankles were linked by a sturdy chain. A second and far longer chain, connected by a carabiner to the first, wound around the thick legs of the chair and around the stretcher bars between the legs, returned between her feet, encircled the big barrel that supported the round table, and connected again to the carabiner. The chains didn’t contain enough play to allow her to stand. Even if she’d been able to stand, she would have had to carry the chair on her back, and the restricting shape and the weight of it would have forced her to bend forward like a hunchbacked troll. And once standing, she could not have moved from the table to which she was tethered.
Her hands were cuffed in front of her. A chain was hooked into the shackle that encircled her right wrist. From there it led around her, wound between the back rails of the chair behind the tie-on pad, then to the shackle on her left wrist. This chain contained enough slack to allow her to rest her arms on the table if she wished.
She sat with her hands folded, leaning forward, staring at the red and swollen index finger on her right hand, waiting.
Her finger throbbed, and she had a headache, but her neck pain had subsided. She knew that it would return worse than ever in another twenty-four hours, like the delayed agony of severe whiplash.
Of course, if she was still alive in another twenty-four hours, neck pain would be the least of her worries.
The Doberman was no longer at the window. She had seen two at once on the lawn, padding back and forth, sniffing the grass and the air, pausing occasionally to prick their ears and listen intently, then padding away again, obviously on guard duty.
During the previous night, Chyna had used rage to overcome her terror before it had incapacitated her, but now she discovered that humiliation was even more effective at quelling fear. Having been unable to protect herself, having wound up in bondage—that was not the source of her humiliation; what mortified worse was her failure to fulfill her promise to the girl in the cellar.
I am your guardian. I’ll keep you safe.
She kept returning, in memory, to the upholstered vestibule and the view port on the inner door. The girl among the dolls had given no indication that she had heard the promise. But Chyna was sick with the certainty that she had raised false hopes, that the girl would feel betrayed and more abandoned than ever, and that she would withdraw even further into her private Elsewhere.
I am your guardian.
In retrospect, Chyna found her arrogance not merely astonishing but perverse, delusional. In twenty-six years of living, she’d never saved anyone, in any sense whatsoever. She was no heroine, no mystery-novel-series character with just a colorful dash of angst and a soupçon of endearing character flaws and, otherwise, the competence of Sherlock Holmes and James Bond combined. Keeping herself alive, mentally stable, and emotionally intact had been enough of a struggle for her. She was still a lost girl herself, fumbling blindly through the years for some insight or resolution that probably wasn’t even out there to be found, yet she’d stood at that view port and promised deliverance.
I am your guardian.
She opened her folded hands. She flattened her hands on the table and slid them across the wood as if smoothing away wrinkles in a tablecloth, and as she moved, her chains rattled.
She wasn’t a fighter, after all, no one’s paladin; she worked as a waitress. She was good at it, piling up tips, because sixteen years in her mother’s bent world had taught her that one way to ensure survival was to be ingratiating. With her customers, she was indefatigably charming, relentlessly agreeable, and always eager to please. The relationship between a diner and a waitress was, to her way of thinking, the ideal relationship, because it was brief, formal, generally conducted with a high degree of politeness, and required no baring of the heart.
I am your guardian.
In her obsessive determination to protect herself at all costs, she was always friendly with the other waitresses where she worked, but she never made friends with any of them. Friendships involved commitment, risks. She had learned not to make herself vulnerable to the hurt and betrayal that ensued from commitments.
Over the years, she’d had affairs with only two men. She had liked both and had loved the second, but the first relationship had lasted eleven months and the second only thirteen. Lovers, if they were worthwhile, required more than simple commitment; they needed revelation, sharing, the bond of emotional intimacy. She found it difficult to reveal much about her childhood or her mother, in part because her utter helplessness during those years embarrassed her. More to the point, she had come to the hard realization that her mother had never really loved her, perhaps had never been capable of loving her or anyone. And how could she expect to be cherished by any man who knew that she’d been unloved even by her mother?
She was aware that this attitude was irrational, but awareness didn’t free her. She understood that she was not responsible for what her mother had done to her, but regardless of what so many therapists claimed in their books and on their radio talk shows, understanding alone didn’t lead to healing. Even after a decade beyond her mother’s control, Chyna was at times convinced that all the dark events of all those troubled years could have been avoided if only she, Chyna, had been a better girl, more worthy.
I am your guardian.
She folded her hands on the table again. She leaned forward until her forehead was pressed to the backs of her thumbs, and she closed her eyes.
The only close friend she’d ever had was Laura Templeton. Their relationship was something that she had wanted badly but had never sought, desperately needed but did little to nurture; it was purely a testament to Laura’s vivaciousness, perseverance, and selflessness in the face of Chyna’s caution and reserve, a result of Laura’s dear heart and her singular capacity to love. And now Laura was dead.
I am your guardian.
