I called to him again, not sotto voce this time but at the top of my voice.
I might as well have spoken in a murmur, because my shout drew no more response than my whisper. No surprise. I hadn't expected a reply.
Angrily, I wadded the thin pajama top and stuffed it in a coat pocket.
With the illusion of hope dispelled, I could more clearly see the truth.
The boy wasn't here, not in any of the rooms along this hallway, not on the level below this one or on the level above. I'd thought it must have been difficult for the kidnapper to descend the maintenance ladder with Jimmy, but Jimmy hadn't been with him. The yellow-eyed bastard had at some point realized he was being followed by a ma nand a dog. He had put Jimmy elsewhere before carrying the pajama top which was saturated with the boy's scentinto the rat catacombs under the warehouse, hoping to mislead us.
I remembered how uncertain Orson had become after leading me so confidently to the warehouse entrance. He had wandered nervously back and forth in the serviceway, sniffing the air, as though puzzled by contradictory spoor.
After I'd entered the warehouse, Orson had remained loyally at my side as we had been drawn by the noises rising from deeper in the building.
By the time I'd found the Darth Vader action figure, I'd forgotten Orson's hesitancy and had become convinced that I was close to finding Jimmy.
Now I ran toward the elevator alcove, wondering why I hadn't heard a bark or a snarl. I'd expected the kidnapper to be surprised when he found a dog waiting for him on the main level. But if he'd known that he was being tracked and had taken the trouble to use the pajama top to establish a false trail, perhaps he was prepared to deal with Orson.
When I reached the alcove, it was deserted. The shaft wasn't aglow with the kidnapper's light, which I had glimpsed just before I'd gone into the third room and found the pajama top.
I directed my flashlight up toward the warehouse, then down at the bottom of the shaft, one floor below. There was no sign of my quarry in either direction.
He might have descended. Maybe he was more familiar with this section of the Wyvern maze than I was. If he knew of a passage connecting .
the lowest level of the warehouse with another facility, elsewhere on the military base, he could have left by that back door.
Nevertheless, I intended to go upstairs and find Orson, whose continued silence worried me.
I could risk climbing with one hand partly encumbered, but I couldn't hold both the flashlight and the pistol and still keep my balance.
The Glock wouldn't be helpful if I wasn't able to see trouble coming, so I holstered it and kept the light.
As I ascended from the second subterranean level toward the first, I became convinced that the kidnapper had not gone all the way up to the ground floor of the warehouse. He had climbed just one level, halfway.
He was waiting there. I was certain of it. He was waiting there like a troll with a lemon-sour gaze. Going to ambush me as I clambered past the next entrance to the shaft. Lean out, smile to reveal all his neat doll-size teeth, and take a whack at my head with another club.
Maybe he'd even discovered a better weapon this time. An iron pipe.
An ax. A scuba diver's spear gun loaded with a barbed, explosive-tipped, shark-killing bolt. A tactical nuclear weapon.
I slowed and finally stopped before I reached the rectangular black hole in the shaft wall. From a few rungs below, I played the flashlight beam into the alcove, but I was at an angle that allowed me to see little more than the ceiling of that space.
Indecisive, I hung on the ladder, listening.
Finally I overcame my trepidation by reminding myself that any delay could be deadly. After all, a humongous mutant tarantula was crawling toward me from the pit below, poison dripping off its serrated mandibles, fiercely angry because it hadn't gotten me on my way down.
Nothing gives us courage more readily than the desire to avoid looking like a damn fool.
Emboldened, I quickly climbed past the first basement, to the main level, into the office where I had left Orson. I was neither hammered into mush by a blunt instrument nor shredded by giant arachnid jaws.
My dog was gone.
Drawing the pistol once more, I hurried from the office into the huge main room of the warehouse.
Flocks of shadows flew away from me, then circled to roost in even greater profusion at my back.
"Orson! " When circumstances left him no alternative, he was a first-rate fighter my brother the dog and always reliable. He wouldn't have allowed the kidnapper to pass, at least not without extracting a painful toll.
I'd seen no blood in the office, and there was none here, either.
"Orson! " Echoes of his name rippled across the corrugated steel walls.
The repetition of those two hollow syllables was reminiscent of a church bell tolling in the distance, which made me think of funerals, and in my mind rose a vivid image of good Orson lying battered and broken, a glaze of death in his eyes.
My tongue grew so thick and my throat so tight with fear that I could barely swallow.
The door by which we'd entered was wide open, just as we had left it.
Outside, the sleeping moon remained bedded down in mattresses of clouds to the west. Only stars lit the sky.
The cool clear air hung motionless, as sharp with dire promise as the suspended blade of a guillotine.
The flashlight beam revealed a discarded socket wrench that had been left behind so long ago it was orange with rust, from its ratchet handle to its business end. An empty oil can waited for wind strong enough to roll it elsewhere. A weed bristled out of a crack in the blacktop, tiny yellow flowers rising defiantly from this inhospitable compost.
Otherwise, the serviceway was empty. No man, no dog.
Whatever might lie ahead, I'd deal with it more effectively if I recovered my night vision. I switched off the light and tucked it under my belt. "Orson! " I risked nothing by calling out at the top of my voice. The man I'd encountered under the warehouse already knew where I was.
"Orson! " Possibly the dog had split shortly after I'd left him. He might have become convinced we'd followed the wrong trail. Maybe he had caught a fresh scent of Jimmy, weighing the risks of disregarding my instructions against the need to locate the missing child as quickly as possible, perhaps he had left the warehouse and returned to the hunt. He might be with the boy now, ready to confront the kidnapper when the creep showed up to collect his captive.
For a two-bit philosopher full of smug homilies about the danger of investing too much emotional capital in mere hope, I was laboring mightily to build another of those gossamer bridges.
I drew a deep breath, but before I could shout again, Orson barked twice.
At least I assumed it was Orson. For all I knew, it could have been the Hound of the Baskervilles. I wasn't able to determine the direction from which the sound had come.
I called to him once more.
No response.
"Patience, " I counseled myself.
I waited. Sometimes there is nothing to be done but wait. Most times, in fact. We like to think we operate the loom that weaves the future, but the only foot on that treadle is the foot of fate.
In the distance, the dog barked again, ferociously this time.
I got a fix on the sound and ran toward it, from serviceway to serviceway, from shadow to shadow, among abandoned warehouses that loomed as massive and black and cold as temples to the cruel gods of lost religions, then into a broad paved area that might have been a parking lot or a staging area for trucks delivering freight.
I had run a considerable distance, leaving the pavement and plunging through knee-high grass lush from the recent rains, when the moon rolled over in its bed. By the light that came through the disarranged covers, I saw ranks of low structures less than half a mile away.
These were the small houses once occupied by the married military personnel and their families who preferred on-base living.
&
nbsp; Although the barking had stopped, I kept moving, certain that Orson and perhaps Jimmy could be found ahead. The grass ended at a cracked sidewalk. I leaped across a gutter choked with dead leaves, scraps of paper, and other debris, into a street lined on both sides with enormous old Indian laurels. Half the trees were flourishing, and the moonlit pavement under them was dappled with leaf shadows, but an equal number were dead, clawing at the sky with gnarled black branches.
The barking rose once more, closer but still not near enough to be precisely located. This time it was punctuated by yawps, yelp sand then a squeal of pain.
My heart knocked against my ribs harder than it had when I'd been dodging the two-by-four, and I was gasping for breath.
The avenue I followed led among the dreary rows of decaying, single-story houses. Branching from it was a large but orderly grid of other streets.
More barking, another squeal, then silence.
I stopped in the middle of the street, turning my head left and right, listening intently, trying to control my labored wheezing. I waited for more battle sounds.
The living trees were as still as those that were leafless and rotting.
The breath I'd outrun caught up with me quickly. But as I grew quiet, the night grew even quieter.
In its current condition, Fort Wyvern is most comprehensible to me if I think of it as a theme park, a twisted Disneyland created by Walt Disney's evil twin. Here the guiding themes are not magic and wonder but weirdness and menace, a celebration not of life but of death.
As Disneyland is divided into territories main Street USA, Tomorrow land, Adventure land, Fantasy landwyvern is composed of many attractions.
These three thousand small houses and associated buildings, among which I now stood, constitute the "land" that I call Dead Town. If ghosts walked in any neighborhood of Fort Wyvern, this would be the place where they would choose to do their haunting.
No sound was louder than the moon pulling the clouds around itself once more.
As though I had crossed into the land of the dead without having the good manners to die first, I slowly drifted spirit-silent along the starlit street, seeking some sign of Orson. So profoundly hushed and lonely was the night, so preternaturally still, I could easily believe that mine was the only heart beating within a thousand miles.
Washed by the faint radiance of far nebulae, Dead Town appears to be merely sleeping, an ordinary suburb dreaming its way toward breakfast.
The single-story cottages, bungalows, and duplexes are revealed in no detail, and the bare geometry of walls and roofs presents a deceptive image of solidity, order, and purpose.
Nothing more than the pale light of a full moon, however, is required to expose the ghost-town reality. Indeed, on some streets, a half-moon is sufficient. Rain gutters droop from rusted fasteners.
Clapboard walls, once pristine white and maintained with military discipline, are piebald and peeling. Many of the windows are broken, yawning like hungry mouths, and the lunar light licks the jagged edges of the glass teeth.
Because the landscape sprinkler systems no longer function, the only trees surviving are those with taproots that have found some deep store of water that sustains them through California's long rainless summer and autumn. The shrubbery is withered beyond recovery, reduced to wicker webs and stubble. The grass grows green only during the wet winter, and by June it is as golden and crisp as wheat waiting for the thresher.
The Department of Defense doesn't have sufficient funds either to raze these buildings or to keep them in good repair against the possibility of future need, and no buyers exist for Wyvern. Of the numerous military bases closed following the collapse of the Soviet Union, some were sold off to civilian interests, transformed into tracts of houses and shopping centers. But here along California's central coast, vast reaches of open land, some farmed and some not, remain in the event that Los Angeles, like a creeping fungus, should eventually cast spoors this far north or the suburban circuitry of Silicon Valley should encroach on us from the opposite direction. Currently, Wyvern has more value to mice, lizards, and coyotes than to people.
Besides, if a would-be developer had placed an offer for these 134, 456 acres, he would most likely have been rebuffed. There is reason to believe that Wyvern was never entirely vacated, that secret facilities, far beneath its increasingly weathered surface, continue to be manned and to carry out clandestine projects worthy of such fictional lunatics as Doctors Moreau and Jekyll. No press release was ever issued expressing compassionate concern for the unemployed mad scientists of Wyvern or announcing a retraining program, and since many of them resided on base and had little community involvement, no locals wondered where they had gone. Abandonment, here, is but a refinement of the sophisticated camouflage under which this work has long been performed.
I reached an intersection, where I stopped to listen. When the restless moon rolled out of its covers yet again, I turned in a full circle, studying the ranks of houses, the lunar-resistant darkness between them, and the compartmentalized gloom beyond their windows.
Sometimes, prowling Wyvern, I become convinced that I am being watched not necessarily stalked in a predatory way, but shadowed by someone with a keen interest in my every move. I've learned to trust my intuition. This time I felt that I was alone, unobserved.
I returned the Glock to my holster. The pattern of the grip was impressed into my damp palm.
I consulted my wristwatch. Nine minutes past one o'clock.
Moving out of the street to a leafy Indian laurel, I unclipped the phone from my belt and switched it on. I squatted with my back against the tree.
Bobby Halloway, my best friend for more than seventeen years, has several phone numbers. He has given the most private of these to no more than five friends, and he answers that line at any hour. I keyed in the number and pressed send.
Bobby picked up on the third ring, "This better be important." Although I believed that I was alone in this part of Dead Town, I spoke softly, "Were you sleeping? "
"Eating kibby." Kibby is Mediterranean cuisine, ground beef, onion, pine nuts, and herbs wrapped in a moist ball of bulgur and quickly deep-fried.
"Eating it with what? "
"Cucumbers, tomatoes, some pickled turnip."
"At least I didn't call when you were having sex."
"This is worse."
"You're way serious about your kibby."
"So entirely serious."
"I've just been radically clamshelled, " I said, which is surfer lingo for being enfolded by a large collapsing wave and wiped off your board.
Bobby said, "You at the beach? "
"I'm speaking figuratively."
"Don't do that."
"Sometimes it's best, " I said, meaning that someone might be tapping his phone.
"I hate this crap."
"Get used to it, bro."
"Kibby spoiler."
"I'm looking for a missing weed." A weed is a small person, and the term is usually but not always used as a synonym for grommet, which means a preadolescent surfer.
Jimmy Wing was too young to be a surfer, but he was indeed a small person.
"Weed? " Bobby asked.
"A totally small weed."
"You playing at being Nancy Drew again? "
"In Nancy work up to my neck, " I confirmed.
"Kak, " he said, which along this stretch of coast is not a nice thing for one surfer to call another, though I believed I detected a note of affection in his voice that was almost equal to the disgust.
A sudden flapping caused me to leap to my feet before I realized that the source of the sound was just a night bird settling into the branches overhead. A nighthawk or an oilbird, a lone nightingale or chimney swift out of its element, nothing as large as an owl.
"This is stone-dead serious, Bobby. I need your help."
"You see what you get for ever going inland? " Bobby lives far out on the southern horn of the bay, and surfing is his vocation and avocation, his
life's purpose, the foundation of his philosophy, not merely his favorite sport but a true spiritual enterprise. The ocean is his cathedral, and he hears the voice of God only in the rumble of the waves. As far as Bobby is concerned, little of real consequence ever occurs farther than half a mile from the beach.
Peering into the branches overhead, I was unable to spot the now quiet bird, even though the moonlight was bright and though the struggling laurel was not richly clothe in leaves. To Bobby, I said again, "I need your help."
"You can do it yourself. Just stand on a chair, tie a noose around your neck, and jump."
"Don't have a chair."
Dean Koontz - Seize The Night Page 6
