Sasha called to the Stanwyks through the open kitchen door.
Mungojerrie had crossed the kitchen without hesitation and had disappeared into deeper reaches of the house.
When Sasha got no answer to her third "Roger, Marie, hello, " she drew the . 38 from her shoulder holster and stepped inside.
Bobby, Roosevelt, and I followed her. If Sasha had been wearing skirts, we might have happily hidden behind them, but we were more comfortable with the cover provided by the Smith & Wesson.
From the porch, the house had seemed silent, but as we crossed the kitchen, we heard voices coming from the front room. They were not directed at us.
We stopped and listened, not quite able to make out the words.
Quickly, however, when music rose, it became apparent that we were hearing not live voices but those on television or radio.
Sasha's entrance to the dining room was instructive and more than a little intriguing. Both hands on the gun. Arms out straight and locked.
The weapon just below her line of sight. She cleared the doorway fast, slid to the left, her back against the wall. After she moved mostly out of view, I could still see just enough of her arms to know she swung the . 38 left, then right, then left again, covering the room.
Her performance was professional, instinctive, and no less smooth than her on-air voice.
Maybe she's watched a lot of television cop dramas over the years.
Yeah.
"Clear, " she whispered.
Tall, ornate hutches seemed to loom over us, as if tipping away from the walls, porcelain and silver treasures gleaming darkly behind leaded glass doors with beveled panes. The crystal chandelier wasn't lit, but reflections of nearby candle flames winked along its strings of beads and off the cut edges of its dangling pendants.
In the center of the dining-room table, surrounded by eight or ten candles, was a large punch bowl half full of what appeared to be fruit juice. A few clean drinking glasses stood to one side, and scattered across the table were several empty plastic pharmacy bottles of prescription medication.
The lighting wasn't good enough to allow us to read the labels on the bottles, as they lay, and none of us wanted to touch anything.
Death lives here, the cat had said, and maybe that was what had given us the idea, from the moment we entered the house, that this was a crime scene.
Upon seeing the tableau on the dining-room table, we looked at one another, and it was clear that all of us suspected the nature of the crime, though we didn't speak its name.
I could have used my flashlight, but I might have drawn unwanted attention. Under the circumstances, any attention would be unwanted.
Besides, the name of the medication wasn't important.
Sasha led us into the large living room, where the illumination came from a television screen nested in an ornate French cabinet with japanned panels. Even in the poor light, I could see that the chamber was as crowded as an automobile salvage yard, not with junked cars but with Victorian excess, deeply carved and intricately painted neo-rococo furniture, richly patterned brocade upholstery, wallpaper with Gothic-style tracery, heavy velvet drapes with cascades of braided fringe, capped with solid helmets cut in elaborate Gothic forms, an Egyptian settee with beaded-wood spindles and damask seat cushions, Moorish lamps featuring black cherubs in gilded turbans supporting beaded shades, bibelots densely arranged on every shelf and table.
Amidst the layers on layers of decor, the cadavers almost seemed like additional decorative items.
Even in the flickery light of the television, we could see a man stretched out on the Egyptian settee. He was dressed in dark slacks and a white shirt. Before lying down, he'd taken off his shoes and placed them on the floor with the laces neatly tucked in, as though concerned about soiling the upholstery on the seat cushions. Beside the shoes stood a drinking glass identical to those in the dining roomwaterford crystal, judging by appearance in which remained an inch of fruit juice.
His left arm trailed off the settee, the back of the hand against the Persian carpet, palm turned up. His other arm lay across his chest.
His head was propped on two small brocade pillows, and his face was concealed beneath a square of black silk.
Sasha was covering the room behind us, less interested in the corpse than in guarding against a surprise assault.
The black veil over the face did not bellow or even flutter. The man under it was not breathing.
I knew that he was dead, knew what killed him not a contagious disease, but a phenobarbital fizz or its lethal equivalent yet I was reluctant to remove the silk mask for the same reason that any child, having pondered the possibility of a boogeyman, is hesitant to push back the sheets, rise up on his mattress, lean out, and peek under the bed.
Hesitantly, I pinched a corner of the silk square between thumb and forefinger, and pulled it off the man's face.
[ He was alive. That was my first impression. His eyes were open, and I thought I saw life in them.
After a breathless moment, I realized that his stare was fixed.
His eyes appeared to be moving only because reflections of images on the TV screen were twitching in them.
The light was just bright enough to allow me to identify the deceased.
His name was Tom Sparkman. He was an associate of Roger Stanwyk's, a professor at Ashdon, also a biochemist, and no doubt deeply involved in Wyvern business.
The body showed no signs of corruption. It couldn't have been here a long time.
Reluctantly, I touched the back of my left hand to Sparkman's brow.
"Still warm, " I whispered.
We followed Roosevelt to a button-tufted sofa with carved-wood rails at seat and crest, on which a second man lay, with hands folded across his abdomen. This one was wearing his shoes, and his drained glass lay on its side on the carpet, where he'd dropped it.
Roosevelt peeled back the square of black silk that concealed the man's face. The light was not as good here, the corpse not as close to the television as Sparkman, and I wasn't able to identify the body.
Two seconds after switching on my flashlight, I clicked it off.
Cadaver number two was Lennart To regard, a Swedish mathematician on a four-year contract to teach one class a semester at Ashdon, which was surely a front for his real work, at Wyvern. To regard's eyes were closed.
His face was relaxed. A faint smile suggested he was having a pleasant dream or was in the middle of one when death claimed him.
Bobby slipped two fingers under To regard's wrist, feeling for a pulse.
He shook his head, nothing.
Bat wing shadows swooped along one wall, across the ceiling.
Sasha spun toward the movement.
I reached under my jacket, but there was no shoulder holster, no gun.
The shadows were only shadows, sent flying through the room by a sudden flurry of action on the television screen.
The third corpse was slumped in a huge armchair, legs propped on a matching footstool, arms on the chair arms. Bobby stripped away the silk hood, I flashed the light on and off, and Roosevelt whispered, "Colonel Ellway." Colonel Eaton Ellway had been second in command of Fort Wyvern and had retired to Moonlight Bay after the base was closed.
Retired. Or engaged in a clandestine assignment in civilian clothes.
With no additional dead men to investigate, I finally registered what was on the television. It was tuned to a cable channel that was running an animated feature film, Disney's The Lion King.
We stood for a moment, listening to the house.
Other music and other voices came from other rooms.
Neither the music nor the voices were made by the living.
Death lives here.
From the living room a chamber grossly misnamedwe cautiously crossed the front hall to the study. Sasha and Roosevelt halted at the doorway.
A tambour door was open on an entertainment center incorporated into a wall of bookshelves, and The Lion King was
on the television, with the volume low. Nathan Lane and company were singing "Hakuna Matata.
" Inside, Bobby and I found two more members of this suicide club with squares of black silk over their heads. A man sat at the desk, and a woman was slumped in a Morris chair, empty drinking glasses near each of them.
I no longer had the heart to strip away their veils. The black silk might have been cult paraphernalia with a symbolic meaning that was comprehensible only to those who had come together in this ritual of self-destruction. I thought, however, that at least in part, it might be meant to express their guilt at being involved in work that had brought humanity to these straits. If they felt remorse, then their deaths had a degree of dignity, and disturbing them seemed disrespectful.
Before we had left the living room, I had once more covered the faces of Sparkman, To regard, and Ellway.
Bobby seemed to understand the reason for my hesitancy, and he lifted the veil on the man at the desk, while I used the flashlight with the hope of making an identification. This was no one that either of us knew, a handsome man with a small, well-trimmed gray mustache.
Bobby replaced the silk.
The woman reclining in the Morris chair was also a stranger, but when I directed the light at her face, I didn't immediately switch it off.
With a soft whistle, Bobby sucked air between his teeth, and I muttered, "God." I had to struggle to keep my hand from shaking, to keep the light steady.
Sensing bad news, Sasha and Roosevelt came in from the hall, and though neither of them spoke a word, their faces revealed all that needed to be said about their shock and revulsion.
The dead woman's eyes were open. The left was a normal brown eye.
The right was green, and not remotely normal. There was almost no white in it. The iris was huge and golden, the lens a gold-green. The black pupil was not round but ellipticallike the pupil in the eye of a snake.
The socket encircling that terrifying eye was badly misshapen.
Indeed, there were subtle but fearsome deformities in the entire bone structure along the right side of her once lovely face, brow, temple, cheek, jaw.
Her mouth hung open in a silent cry. Her lips were peeled back in a rictus, revealing her teeth, which for the most part appeared normal.
A few on the right side, however, were sharply pointed, and one eyetooth seemed to have been in the process of reshaping itself into a fang.
I moved the beam of the flashlight down her body, to her hands, which were in her lap. I expected to see more mutation, but both her hands were normal. They were folded tightly together, and clasped in them was a rosary, black beads, silver chain, an exquisite little silver crucifix.
Such desperation was apparent in the posture of her pale hands, such pathos, that I switched off the light, overcome by pity. To stare at this grim evidence of her final distress seemed invasive, indecent.
Upon finding the first body in the living room, in spite of the black silk veils, I'd known that these people had not committed suicide solely out of guilt over their involvement in the research at Wyvern.
Perhaps some felt guilty, perhaps all of them did, but they participated in this chemical hara-kiri primarily because they were becoming and because they were deeply fearful of what they were becoming.
To date, as the rogue retrovirus has transferred other species' DNA into human cells, the effects have been limited. They manifest, if at all, only psychologically, except for telltale animal eye shine in the most seriously afflicted.
Some of the big brains have been confident that physical change is impossible. They believe that as the cells of the body wear out and are routinely replaced, new cells will not contain the sequences of animal DNA that contaminated the previous generation not even if stem cells, which control growth throughout the human body, are infected.
This disfigured woman in the Morris chair proved that they were woefully wrong. Hideous physical change clearly can accompany mental deterioration.
Each infected individual receives a load of alien DNA different from the one that anybody else receives, which means that the effect is singular in every case. Some of the infected may not undergo any perceptible change, mentally or physically, because they receive DNA fragments from so many sources that there is no focused cumulative effect other than a general destabilization of the system, resulting in rapidly metastasizing cancers and deadly autoimmune disorders. Others may go mad, psychologically devolve into a subhuman condition, driven by murderous rages, unspeakable needs. Those who, in addition, suffer physical metamorphosis will be radically different from one another, a nightmare zoo My mouth seemed to be choked with dust. My throat felt tight and parched. Even my cardiac muscle seemed to have withered, for in my own ears, my heartbeat was juiceless, dry, and strange.
The singing and comic antics of the characters in The Lion King failed to fill me with magic-kingdom joy.
I hoped Manuel knew what he was talking about when he predicted the imminent availability of a vaccine, a cure.
Bobby gently draped the square of silk over the woman's face, concealing her tortured features.
As Bobby's hands came close to her, I tensed and found myself repositioning my grip on the extinguished flashlight, as if I might use it as a weapon. I half expected to see the woman's eyes shift, to hear her snarl, to see those pointed teeth flash and blood spurt, even as she looped the rosary around his neck and pulled him down into a deadly embrace.
I am not the only one with a hyperactive imagination. I saw a wariness in Bobby's face. His hands twitched nervously as he replaced the silk.
And after we left the study, Sasha hesitated and then returned to the open door to check the room once more. She no longer gripped the . 38 in both hands but nonetheless held it at the ready, as though she wouldn't have been surprised to discover that even a glassful of the Jonestown punch, their version of a Heaven's Gate cocktail, was not poisonous enough to put down the creature in the Morris chair.
Also on the ground floor were a sewing room and a laundry room, but both were deserted.
In the hallway, Roosevelt whispered Mungojerrie's name, because we had yet to see the cat since we'd entered the house.
A soft answering meow followed by two more, audible above the competing sound tracks of the Disney movie, drew us forward along the hall.
Mungojerrie was sitting on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs.
In the gloom, his radiant green eyes fixed on Roosevelt, then shifted to Sasha when she quietly but urgently suggested that we get the hell out of here.
Without the cat, we had little chance of conducting a successful search of Wyvern. We were hostage to his curiosity to whatever it was that motivated him to turn his back to us on the newel post, sprint agilely up the handrail, spring to the stairs, and disappear into the darkness of the upper floor.
"What's he doing? " I asked Roosevelt.
"Wish I knew. It takes two to communicate, " he murmured.
As before, Sasha took the point position as we ascended the stairs.
I brought up the rear. The carpeted treads creaked a little underfoot, more than a little under Roosevelt's feet, but the movie sound track drifting up from the living room and studyand similar sounds coming from upstairs effectively masked the noises we made.
At the top of the stairs, I turned and looked down. There weren't any dead people standing in the foyer, with their heads concealed under black silk. Not even one. I had expected five.
Six doors led off the upstairs hall. Five were open, and pulsing light came from three rooms. Competing sound tracks indicated that The Lion King was not the universal choice of entertainment for these condemned.
Unwilling to pass an unexplored room and possibly leave an assailant behind us, Sasha went to the first door, which was closed. I stood with my back to the wall at the hinged edge of the door, and she put her back to the wall on the other side. I reached across, gripped the knob, and turned it. When I pushed the door open, Sasha went through
fast and low, the gun in her right hand, feeling for the light switch with her left.
Dean Koontz - Seize The Night Page 34
