Dean Koontz - (1973)

by Shattered(Lit)

  He had passed this way less than five minutes ago when he had been on his way to the vending machines, and this door had not been open then.

  And it was hardly an hour when the motel janitor would be coming to work Alex put his back to the wet concrete wall, his head resting in the center of the neatly stenciled black-and-white sign which was painted there (MAINTENANCE AND SUPPLIES-MOTEL EmPLOYEES ONLY), and listened for movement inside the room.

  A minute passed in silence.

  Cautiously he reached out and pushed the oversized metal door all the way open. It swung inward without a sound, and an equally soundless gray light came out.

  Doyle looked inside. Directly across the large room, a second door, also metal and also oversized, stood wide open to the rain.

  Beyond it was a section of the amoeboid parking lot. Good enough. The stranger had been here and had already gone.

  He went into the room and looked around. It was slightly larger than the place that contained the vending machines. Toward the back, along the wall, were barrels of industrial cleaning compounds: soaps, abrasives, waxes, furniture polish. There were also electric floor waxers and buffers, a forest of long-handled mops and brooms and window washing sponges. Two riding lawn mowers stood in the middle of the room with a host of gardening tools and huge coils of transparent green plastic hose. At the front, closer to the doors, were the workbenches, carpentry tools, a standing jigsaw, and even a small wood lathe. To Doyle's right, the entire wall was covered with pegboard; the silhouettes of dozens of tools had been painted on the pegboard and the tools themselves hung over their own black outlines.

  The gardening ax was missing, but everything else was clean and hung neatly in place.

  The barrels of cleaning compounds were too widely spaced and too small to effectively conceal a man, especially a man as tall and broad-shouldered as the one whom he had seen crossing the courtyard earlier in the night.

  Doyle walked farther into the room and was halfway to the second door, only fifteen feet from it when he suddenly understood the full implications of the missing ax on the pegboard. He almost froze in place. Then, warned by some sixth sense, he crouched and turned with more speed and agility than he had ever shown in his life.

  Looming immediately behind him, nightmarishly large, the wild-eyed blond man raised both hands and swung the gardening ax.

  Thirteen Not once in his entire thirty years had Alex Doyle been in a fight-not a fist fight, wrestling match, or even a juvenile push-and-shove. He had never dealt out physical punishment to anyone, and neither had he taken any himself. Whether coward or genuinely committed pacifist or both, he had always managed to avoid controversial subjects in casual discussions, had avoided arguments and taking sides and forming relationships which might conceivably have led to violence. He was a civilized man. His few friends and acquaintances had always been as gentle as he was himself, and often even gentler. He was singularly unprepared to handle a raging maniac who was wielding a well-sharpened gardener's ax.

  However, instinct served where experience failed. Almost as if he had been combat-trained, Alex fell backward, away from the glittering blade, and rolled across the greasestained cement floor until he came up hard against the two riding lawn mowers.

  His intellectual acceptance of the situation lagged far behind his automatic physical-emotional realization of the danger. He had heard the ax whistle past, inches from his head, and he knew what it would have done to him if it had found its mark . . .

  Yet, it was inconceivable that anyone could want to take his life, especially in such a sudden bloody fashion. He was Alex Doyle. The man without enemies. The man who had walked softly and carried no stick at all-the man who had often sacrificed his pride to save himself from just this sort of madness.

  The stranger moved fast.

  Dazed as he was, numb with surprise at the suddenness and extreme ferocity of the attack, Alex still saw the man coming.

  The stranger lifted the ax.

  "Don't!" Doyle said. He barely recognized his own voice. He had not lost all of his new-found courage. However, it was now tempered by a healthy fear which put it in the proper perspective.

  The five-inch razored blade swept up, reached the top of its arc in one smooth movement, almost a precision instrument in those strong hands. Sharp slivers of light danced brightly on the cutting edge.

  The blade hesitated up there, high and cold and fantastic-and then it fell.

  Alex rolled.

  The ax dropped in his wake. It made the moist air whistle once again, and it thudded into a solid rubber tire on one of the lawn mowers, splitting the deep tread.

  Doyle came to his feet, and once more powered by a mindless drive for selfpreservation, vaulted over one of the workbenches, clearing the four-foot width with more ease then he would ever have thought possible. He stumbled, though, and nearly fell flat on his face when he came down on the other side.

  Behind him, the madman cursed: a curiously wordless, low grunt of anger and frustration.

  Doyle turned, fully expecting the ax to cleave either his head or the surface of the wooden bench behind him. He had, at last, come to terms with his predicament. He knew that he might die here.

  Across the room, the stranger hunched his ' r broad shoulders and put all his strength into them, wrenched the blade free of the solid, uninflated tire in which it had become wedged. He turned, his wet shoes scraping unpleasantly on the concrete floor, and he clutched the ax in both hands as if it were some sacred and all-powerful talisman which would ward off evil magic and protect the bearer from the work of malevolent sorcerers. There was something of the superstitious savage in this man, especially in and around those enormous dark-ringed eyes . . .

  Those same eyes now located Doyle. Incredibly, the stranger bobbed his head and smiled.

  Alex did not return the smile.

  He could not return it. He was almost physically ill with premonitions of death, and he wished that he had never left the room.

  He was still too far away from the doors to make a run for either of them. Before he could have crossed the open floor and gained the threshold, he would almost certainly have felt the ax blade bite down between his shoulder blades . . .

  Rain dripping from his clothes, the stranger moved in on Doyle, quiet and swift for such a large man. The noises which he had made outside, on the steps and promenades, could not have been accidental. He had been luring Alex along those shadowy corridors, drawing him to a place where he might be trapped.

  A place like this.

  Now only the wooden bench separated them.

  "Who are you?" Doyle asked.

  The stranger was no longer smiling when he stopped on the other side of the waisthigh bench. In fact, he was frowning intensely, even wincing, as if he were being cruelly pinched or jabbed with pins. What was it, what was on his mind? More than murder, now? He was annoyed considerably by something; that much was obvious. His mouth was set in a tight, straight, grim line, and he appeared to be struggling desperately to choke back a reaction to an inner pain.

  "What do you want from us?" Doyle asked.

  The man only glared at him.

  "We've never hurt you."

  No answer.

  "You don't even know us, do you?"

  Even though his voice was weak, an involuntary whisper, and even though the terror that it betrayed might have goaded the madman into even bolder action, Doyle had to ask the questions. All of his life he had been able to settle other people's anger with sympathetic words, and now it became essential that he elicit some response-at least contrition-from this man. "What have you to gain by hurting me?"

  The madman swung the ax horizontally this time, from right to left, trying to chop Doyle's torso from his legs.

  It was close. His long arms had sufficient reach and strength to make the trick work, even with the bench between them. But Doyle saw it coming just in time to avoid it. He scrambled backward, out of the murderous arc.

 
Then he tripped over a large metal toolbox which he had not noticed. He windmilled his arms in a hopeless attempt to recover, lost his balance altogether. The room tilted around him. In that instant Doyle knew that he probably did not have a chance of getting out of this place alive. He was not going to return to Room 318, where Colin waited for him, was never going to finish the drive to San Francisco or see the new furniture in the new house or begin his wonderful new job with the agency or make love to Courtney again. Never. Falling, he saw the tall blond man start around the end of the workbench.

  He did not stay down on the floor any measurable length of time, not even a second. The moment he hit, he pushed to his feet and staggered backward, trying to keep out of the madman's reach for at least one more precious minute.

  In three short steps, however, he backed straight into the pegboard wall where the tools were hung.

  Even as Doyle realized that he had nowhere left to run, the stranger stepped in front of him and swung the ax from right to left.

  Doyle crouched.

  The blade skimmed the pegboard above his head.

  Rising even as he heard the ax whine by him, Doyle grabbed a heavy claw hammer which dangled from a hook on the wall. He had it in his hand when he was knocked sideways and down by a blow from the ax.

  The hammer clattered across the floor.

  But losing the hammer, Doyle thought, was the least of his troubles. The oppressive, pulsing pain in his side and chest made him all but helpless. Had he been cut up? Torn open? The pain . . .

  pain was terrible, the worst he had ever endured. But please, God, no . . . Please, please, not this. Not death. Not all the blood and having to lie in all the blood while the ax rose and fell and methodically dismembered him. Not death, dammit. Anything else. All he could see on the other side of death was nothingness, perpetual blackness; and the vision was so complete and vivid and horrifying that he never even recognized the incongruity and futility of praying to a God in whose existence he did not believe.

  just: God, God, please . . . Not this. Anything but this. Please .

  . .

  All of this flashed through his mind in a fraction of a second, before he realized that he had not been caught by the ax blade.

  instead, he had been hit on the backswing of the first blow. He had taken the head of the ax, the three-inch-wide top of it, just below the ribs on his right side. There had been enough force in the blow to knock the wind out of him and to leave him with a welt and eventually a bruise. But that was all. There was no torn flesh. No blood.

  But where was the madman-and the ax?

  Doyle looked up, blinked tears out of his eyes.

  The stranger had dropped the weapon. He was pressing the palms of his hands against his temples, grimacing furiously. Perspiration had popped out on his forehead and was trickling down his reddened face.

  Gasping for breath, Alex clamhered to his feet and leaned back against the wall, too weak and pain-racked to move any farther.

  The stranger saw him. He bent down to pick up the ax, but stopped short of it. He gave a strangled cry, turned, and stumbled out of the room, out into the night and the rain.

  For a long while, as he struggled to regain his breath and to overcome the pain which stitched his side, Alex was certain that he had been granted only a temporary reprieve.

  it made no sense for this stranger to walk away from a job so nearly finished. The man had desperately needed to kill Doyle. There had been nothing playful or joking about him. Each time that he had swung that ax, he had intended to sever flesh and spill blood.

  Certainly, he was insane. And the insane were unpredictable. But it was likewise true that a madman's violent compulsions were not easily or rapidly dissipated.

  Yet the man did not return.

  The pain in Doyle's side gradually eased until he could stand erect, could walk. His breath came much less raggedly than it had, although he could not inhale too deeply without amplifying the pain.

  His heartbeat softened and slowed.

  And he was left alone.

  He walked slowly to the door, his right hand pressed to his side, and he leaned against the frame for a moment, then stepped outside.

  The rain and wind struck him with more force than ever, chilling him.

  The parking lot was deserted. The green brown cars sparkled with water, all still and unremarkable.

  He listened to the night.

  The only sounds were the steady drumming of the rain and the fluting of the wind along the building.

  it seemed almost as if the events in the maintenance room had been nothing but a bad dream. If he had not had the pain in his side to convince him of its reality, he might have gone back to look for the ax and the other signs of what had happened.

  He walked back toward the courtyard in the center of the motel complex, splashing through puddles rather than walk around them, wary of every velvety shadow, stopping half a dozen times to listen for imagined footsteps following close behind him.

  But there were no footsteps other than his own.

  At the top of the stairs which led to the second level, in the northeast corner of the courtyard overlook, he leaned against the iron safety rail to catch his breath and to clamp down on the renewed thump of dull pain in his side and chest.

  He was cold. Deep-down cold and shivering. The raindrops struck him like chips of ice and melted down his face.

  As he sucked the crisp air, he looked at the dozens of identical doors and windows, all of them closed and lightless . . .

  And he wondered, suddenly, why he had not screamed for help when the stranger had first attacked him with the ax. Even though they had been clear at the back of the motel, and even though the thunder of rain and wind was a blanket over other sounds, his voice would have carried into these rooms, would have awakened these people. if he screamed as loudly as he could, surely someone would have to come to see what was wrong. Someone would have called the police. But he had been so frightened that the thought of crying out for help had never occurred to him. The battle had been strangely noiseless, a nightmare of nearly silent thrust and counterthrust which had not reached the motel guests.

  And then, remembering various newspaper stories he had read, accounts of the average man's indifference to the commission of a rape or murder in front of his eyes, Doyle wondered if anyone would have answered his call for help? Or would they all have turned and put pillows over their heads? Would these people in these identical rooms have reacted unemotionally and identically: with reluctance and perhaps apathy?

  it was not a nice thought.

  Shaking violently now, he tried to stop thinking about it as he pushed away from the rail and walked down the rainwashed promenade toward their room.

  Fourteen When Doyle finished drying his hair, Colin folded the white motel towel and carried it into the bathroom, where he draped it over the shower rail with the rain-soaked clothes. Trying to handle himself in a calm and dignified manner-even though he was wearing only undershorts and eyeglasses, and even though he was obviously quite frightened-the boy came back into the main room and sat down in the middle of his own bed. He stared openly at Doyle's bruised right side.

  Alex cautiously explored the tender flesh with the tips of his fingers, until he was satisfied that nothing was broken or so seriously damaged that it demanded a doctor's attention.

  "Hurt?" Colin asked.

  "Like a bitch."

  "Maybe we should get some ice to put on it." "It's just a bruise. Not much to be done."

  "You think it's just a bruise," Colin said.

  "The worst of the pain is gone already. I'll be stiff and sore for a few days, but there isn't any way to avoid that."

  "What do we do now?"

  Doyle had, of course, told the boy everything about the ax battle and the tall, gaunt man with the wild eyes. He had known that Colin would recognize a lie and would probe for the truth until he got it.

  This was not a child whom you could treat like
a child.

  Doyle stopped massaging his discolored flesh and considered the boy's question. "Well . . . We definitely have to change the route we'd planned on taking from here to Salt Lake City. Instead of using Route 40, we'll take either Interstate 80 or Route 24 and-"

  "We changed plans before," Colin said, blinking owlishly behind his thick, round glasses. "And it didn't work. He picked us up again. "

  "He picked us up again only when we returned to I-70, the road that he was using," Doyle said. "This time we won't go back to the main roads at all. We'll take the longer way around. We'll figure a new way into Reno from Salt Lake City-then a secondary road from Reno to San Francisco."

  Colin thought about that for a minute. "Maybe we should stay at new motels, too. Pick them at random."

  "We have reservations and deposits waiting for us," Doyle said.

  "That's what I mean." The boy was somber.

  "That sounds like paranoia, " Doyle said, surprised.

  "I guess."

  Doyle sat up straighter against the headboard. "You think that this character knows where we intend to stop each night?"

  "He keeps picking us up in the mornings," the boy said defensively.

  "But how would he know our plans?"

  Colin shrugged.

  "He would have to be somebody we know," Doyle said, not warming to the idea at all, afraid to warm to it. "I don't know him. Do you?"

  Colin just shrugged again.

  "I've already described him," Doyle said. "A big man. Light, almost white hair, cut short. Blue eyes. Handsome. A little gaunt . . . Does he sound like somebody you know?"

  "I can't tell from a description like that," Colin said.

  "Exactly. He's like ten million guys. So we'll operate under the assumtion that he is a total stranger, that he's just your average American madman, the kind you read about in the newspapers every day."

  "He was waiting for us in Philly."

  "Not waiting. He happened to-"

  "He started out with us," Colin said. "He was right there behind us from the first."

  Doyle did not want to consider that the man might know them, might have some real or imagined grudge against them. If that were the case, this whole crazy thing would not end with the trip. If this maniac knew them, he could pick them up again in San Francisco. He could come after them any time he wanted. "He's a stranger," Alex insisted.