She was basically a sweet person, if a little odd, and the only time she made me uneasy was when, with passionate advocacy, she declared that the greatest rock-'n'-roll band of all time was the Partridge Family.
Anyway, the rat bones. They must have been here a long time, because no flesh adhered to them as far as I could see or cared to look. Some were white, others were stained yellow or rust red, or even black.
Except for a few scattered gray puffballs of hair, the rats' pelts surprisingly had not survived decomposition. This led me to wonder briefly if the creatures' bodies had been rendered elsewhere, their boiled bones later arranged here by someone with more sinister motives than those of Holly Keene, bikinied Bocor.
Then, under many of the skeletons, I saw that the tile floor was stained. This vile-looking residue appeared to be gummy but must have been brittle with age, because otherwise it would have lent an appalling odor to the cool dry air.
In a deeply hidden facility on these grounds, experiments in genetic engineering had been conducted perhaps were still being conducted with catastrophic results. Rats are widely used in medical research.
I had no proof but plenty of reason to suppose that these rodents had been the subjects of one of those experiments, though I couldn't imagine how they had wound up here, like this.
The mystery of the ve ve rats was only one more of Fort Wyvern's virtually infinite supply of enigmas, and it had nothing to do with the more urgent mystery of Jimmy Wing's disappearance. At least I hoped it didn't. God forbid that I should open another door, farther along the hall, and discover the ritualistically arranged skeletons of five-year-old boys.
I stepped backward, out of the rodents' equivalent of the legendary elephants' graveyard, easing the door shut with a click so preternaturally soft that it could have been heard only by a cat on methamphetamines.
A quick arc of the flashlight, hotter than ever in my hand, revealed that the corridor was still deserted.
I moved to the next door. Stainless steel. Unmarked. Lever handle.
Identical to the previous one.
Beyond was a room the size of the first, sans rat skeletons. The tile floor and painted walls gleamed as if they had been spit-polished.
I was relieved by the sight of the bare floor.
As I backed out of the second room and silently eased the door shut, the troll voice rose once more, nearer than before but still too muffled to be understood. The corridor remained deserted both ahead and behind me.
For a moment the voice grew louder and seemed to draw closer, as though the speaker was approaching a door, about to step into the hallway.
I thumbed off the flashlight.
The claustrophobic darkness closed around me again, as soft as Death's hooded robe and with pockets almost as deep.
The voice continued grumbling for several seconds but then abruptly broke off, seemingly in mid-sentence.
I didn't hear a door open or any sound to indicate that the kidnapper had entered the hallway. Besides, light would betray him when at last he came. I was still the sole presence he rebut instinct warned me that I would soon have company.
I was close to the wall, facing away from the direction I'd come, toward unexplored realms.
The extinguished flashlight was now cool in my hand, but the pistol felt hot.
The longer the quiet lasted, the more it seemed bottomless. Soon it was an abyss into which I imagined myself drifting down, down, like a deep-sea diver festooned with lead weights.
I listened so hard that I was half convinced I could feel the fine hairs vibrating in my ear canals. Yet I could hear only one sound, and it was strictly internal, the thick, liquid thud of my own heartbeat, faster than normal but not racing.
As time passed without a noise or a sudden wedge of light from an opening door farther along the corridor, the likelihood grew that in spite of what instinct told me, the troll voice had been receding rather than approaching. If the kidnapper and the boy were on the move and heading away from me, I might lose their trail if I didn't stay close behind them.
I was about to switch on the flashlight again, when a shiver of superstitious dread passed through me. If I had been in a cemetery, I would have seen a ghost skating on the moon-iced grass between tombstones. If I had been in the Northwest woods, I would have seen Big Foot shagging among the trees. If I had been in front of any garage door, I would have seen the face of Jesus or the Holy Virgin in a weather stain, warning of the Apocalypse. I was in the bowels of Wyvern, however, and unable to see any damn thing at all, so I could only feel, and what I felt was a presence, an aura, like a pressure, hovering, looming, what a medium or a psychic would call an entity, a spiritual force that could not be denied, chilling my blood and marrow.
I was in face-to-face confrontation with it. My nose was only inches from its nose, assuming it had a nose. I couldn't smell its breath, which was a good thing, as its breath must smell like rotting meat, burning sulfur, and swine manure.
Obviously, my nuclear imagination was nearing meltdown.
I told myself that this was no more real than my feverish vision of a gigantic spider in the elevator shaft.
Bobby Halloway says my imagination is a three-hundred-ring circus.
Currently, I was in ring two hundred and ninety-nine, with elephants dancing and clowns cartwheeling and tigers leaping through rings of fire. The time had come to step back, leave the main tent, go buy some popcorn and a Coke, bliss out, cool down.
I was ashamed to realize that I didn't have the guts to switch on the flashlight. I was constrained by a fear of what might be eye-to-eye with me.
Though part of me wanted to believe I was suffering a runaway chain reaction of imagination, and though I probably was just jerking my own chain, there was good reason to be afraid. Those aforementioned experiments in genetic engineering some designed by my mother, who had been a theoretical geneticist had ultimately not been controllable. In spite of a high degree of biological security, a designer strain of retrovirus had gotten out of the lab. Thanks to the remarkable talents of this new bug, the residents of Moonlight Bay and, to a lesser extent, people and animals in the wider world beyond have been ... changing.
So far, the changes have been disturbing, sometimes terrifying, but, with a few notable exceptions, they have been subtle enough that authorities have successfully concealed the truth about the catastrophe.
Even in Moonlight Bay, at most a few hundred people know what is happening.
I myself learned only a month before this April night, upon the death of my father, who knew all the dreadful details, and who revealed things to me that I now wish I didn't know. The rest of the townspeople live in happy ignorance, but they may not be out of the loop much longer, because the mutations may not remain subtle.
This was the thought that had paralyzed me when, if instinct could be trusted, I found myself facing some presence in the blind-dark passageway.
Now my heart was racing.
I was disgusted. If I didn't get control of myself, I would have to spend the rest of my life sleeping under my bed, just to be sure the boogeyman couldn't slip beneath the box springs while I was dreaming.
Holding the unlit flashlight in a tight circlet of thumb and forefinger, with my other three fingers extended, intending to prove to myself that this superstitious dread enjoyed no basis in fact, I reached into the tomb perfect darkness. And touched a face.
The side of a nose. The corner of a mouth. My little finger slid across a rubbery lip, wet teeth.
I cried out and recoiled. As I stumbled backward, I managed to click on the flashlight.
Although the beam was pointed at the floor, the backsplash of light revealed the entity before me. It had no fangs, no eyes full of crackling hellfire, but it was composed of a substance more solid than ectoplasm. It wore chinos, what appeared to be a yellow polo-style shirt, and a pecan brown sports jacket. Indeed, it wasn't something from beyond the grave but something from the Sears men's department.
>
He was about thirty years old, maybe five feet eight, as stocky as a bull standing on its hind feet in a pair of Nikes. With close-cropped black hair, eyes as mad-yellow as those of a hyena, and thick red lips, he seemed too formidable to have glided soundlessly through the seamless dark. His teeth were as small as kernels of white corn, and his smile was a cold side dish, which he served in a generous portion as he swung the club that he was holding.
Fortunately, it was a length of two-by-four rather than an iron pipe, and he was too close to execute a bone-shattering arc. Instead of recoiling farther at the sight of the club, I stepped into the guy in an attempt to minimize the impact, simultaneously trying to bring the Glock to bear on him, figuring that the very sight of it would cause him to retreat.
He swung the two-by-four not from overhead, not like a woodsman wielding an ax, but low from his side, like a golfer teeing off.
It grazed my left flank and caught me under the arm. The blow wasn't devastating, but it was unquestionably more painful than Japanese-massage therapy.
The flashlight flew out of my hand, tumbling end over end.
His yellow eyes flared. I knew that he had registered the pistol in my right hand and that it was an unpleasant surprise for him.
The tumbling flashlight struck the farther wall, bounced to the floor without shattering the lens, and revolved like the pointer in a game of spin the bottle, casting luminous spirals over the glossy blue walls.
Even as the flashlight clattered to the floor, my smiling assailant was winding up to take another swing, handling the two-by-four like a baseball bat this time.
Rocked by the first blow, I warned him, "Don't." His yellow eyes revealed no fear of the gun, and the expression on his broad blunt face was pitiless fury.
I squeezed off a shot as I twisted out of his way. The club cut the air with sufficient force to have driven shards of bone and splinters of wood into my left temporal lobe if I'd not been able to dodge it, while the 9-millimeter slug ricocheted noisily but harmlessly from wall to wall of the concrete passage.
Instead of pulling the blow, he followed all the way through, allowing the momentum of the club to swivel him three hundred and sixty degrees.
As the spinning flashlight slowed, the attacker's distorted silhouette pumped around the corridor, around and around, pumped like a carousel horse, and out of his own galloping shadow, he rushed at me when I stumbled backward against the featureless wall opposite the doors.
He was as condensed as a cube of squashed automobiles from a salvage-yard compactor, eyes bright but without depth, face knotted and florid with rage, smile fixed and humorless. He appeared to have been born, raised, educated, and groomed for one purpose, hammering me to pulp.
I did not like this man.
Yet I didn't want to kill him. As I said before, I'm not big on killing.
I surf, I read poetry, I do some writing of my own, and I like to think of myself as a sort of Renaissance man. We Renaissance men generally don't resort to bloodshed as the first and easiest solution to a problem. We think. We ponder. We brood. We weigh the possible effects and analyze the complex moral consequences of our actions, preferring to use persuasion and negotiation instead of violence, hopeful that each confrontation will culminate in handshakes and mutual respect if not always in hugs and dinner dates.
He swung the two-by-four.
I ducked, slipped sideways.
The club cracked so hard against the wall that I could almost hear the low vibrations traveling the length of the wood. The two-by-four dropped from his numbed hands, and he cursed vehemently.
Too bad it hadn't been an iron pipe. The recoil might have been nasty enough to loosen some of his milk-white baby teeth and make him cry for mama.
"All right, that's enough, " I said.
He made an obscene suggestion and, flexing his powerful hands, snatched the club off the floor, rounding on me.
He seemed to have little or no fear of the gun, probably because my reluctance to fire it, other than to squeeze off a warning shot, had convinced him that I was too chickenshit to blow him away. He didn't impress me as a particularly bright individual, and stupid people are often dangerously sure of themselves.
His body language, a sly look in his eyes, and a sudden sneer told me that he was going to feint, fake another swing with the club but not follow through. He would come at me some other way when I reacted to the false move. Perhaps he'd drive the two-by-four like a pike straight at my chest, hoping to knock me down and then smash my face.
While I like to think of myself as a Renaissance man, persuasion and negotiation were unlikely to bear fruit in this situation, and I manifestly do not like to think of myself as a dead Renaissance man.
When he feinted, I didn't wait to see what the bastard's real plan of attack might be. With apologies to poets and diplomats and gentle persons everywhere, I pulled the trigger.
I was hoping to hit him in the shoulder or arm, though I suspect it's only in movies that you can confidently calculate to wound a man rather than kill him. In real life, panic and physics and fate screw things up.
Most likely, more often than not, in spite of the best intentions, the polite wounding shot drills through the guy's brain or bounces among his ribs, off his sternum, and ends up dead-center in his heart or kills a kindly grandmother baking cookies six blocks away.
This time, though I wasn't firing another warning shot, I missed his shoulder, arm, heart, brain, and everything else that would have bled.
Panic, physics, fate. The bullet tore into the club, spraying his face with splinters and larger fragments of wood.
Suddenly convinced of his own mortality and perhaps recognizing the incomparable danger of confronting a marksman as poor as I am, the weasel pitched his makeshift cudgel, turned, and ran back toward the elevator alcove.
I juked when I saw he was going to throw the club, but my Big Bag of Really Smooth Moves was empty. Instead of ducking away from the club, I cunningly dodged straight into it, got rapped across the chest, and fell.
I was getting up even as I was going down, but by the time I made it to my feet again, my assailant was nearing the end of the hall. My legs were longer than his, but I wasn't going to be able to catch up with him easily.
If you're looking for someone to shoot a man in the back, I'm not your guy, regardless of the circumstances. My attacker safely turned the corner into the elevator alcove where he switched on a flashlight of his own.
Although I needed to nail this creep, finding Jimmy Wing was an even higher priority. The boy might have been hurt and left to die.
Besides, when the kidnapper arrived at the top of the ladder, a toothy surprise would be waiting for him. Orson wouldn't let the guy get out of the elevator shaft.
I scooped up the flashlight and hurried to the third in the line of doors along the hall. It was ajar, and I pushed it all the way open.
Of the three chambers I'd thus far explored, this was the smallest, less than half the size of the other two, so the light swept from wall to wall. Jimmy was not here.
The only item of interest was a balled-up yellow cloth about ten feet beyond the threshold. I almost ignored it, eager to try the next door along the corridor, but then I ventured inside and, with the same hand that held the gun, I plucked the rag off the floor.
It wasn't a rag, after all, but the soft cotton top from a pair of pajamas. A crew-neck pullover. About the right size for a five-year-old.
Across the chest, in red and black letters, were the words Jedi Knight.
A sudden foreboding made my mouth go dry.
When I'd followed Orson away from Lilly Wing's house, I had already reluctantly decided that her little boy was beyond saving, but subsequently, against my better judgment, I had allowed myself to hope too much. In this uncertain space between birth and death, especially here at the end of the world in Moonlight Bay, we need hope as surely as we need food and water, love and friendship. The trick, however, is to remember that hop
e is a perilous thing, that it's not a steel and concrete bridge across the void between this moment and a brighter future.
Hope is no stronger than tremulous beads of dew strung on a filament of spider web, and it alone can't long support the terrible weight of an anguished mind and a tortured heart. Because I had loved Lilly for so many years now as a friend, in other days, more deeply than one loves even the dearest friend i had wanted to spare her from this worst of all calamities, from the loss of a child. I had wanted this more desperately than I'd realized and consequently I'd been running across a bridge of hope, a high arched span, which now dissolved like gossamer and directed my attention to the chasm beneath me.
Clutching the pajama top, I returned to the corridor.
I heard the boy's name, "Jimmy, " before I realized that I was the one who had softly spoken it.
Dean Koontz - Seize The Night Page 5
