by Dean Koontz
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
PART ONE - Santa Claus and His Evil Twin
One
Two
Three
PART TWO - Story Hour in the Madhouse
Four
Five
PART THREE - New Maps of Hell
Six
NEW AFTERWORD BY DEAN KOONTZ
AFTERWORD
“Mr. Murder is a superb work by a master of the thriller at the top of his form.”
—The Washington Post Book World
Martin Stillwater has a vivid imagination. It charms his loving wife, delights his two little daughters, and gives him all the inspiration he needs to write his highly successful mystery novels. But maybe Martin’s imagination is a bit too vivid . . . One rainy afternoon, a terrifying incident makes him question his grip on reality. A stranger breaks into his house, accusing Martin of stealing his wife, his children—and his life. Claiming to be the real Martin Stillwater, the intruder threatens to take what is rightfully his. The police think he’s a figment of Martin’s imagination. But Martin and his family have no choice but to believe the stranger’s threat. And run for their lives.
But wherever they go—wherever they hide—he finds them. . . .
MR. MURDER
“Koontz is a terrific what-if storyteller . . . the narrative pace is breathless.”
—People
“The resounding variations Mr. Koontz plays on this good story, here craftily retold . . . allow him to counterpoint the new horrors about us with the old horrors already inside us.” —The New York Times Book Review
"Koontz is in fine form . . . dragging the reader along through an intricate series of twists and exciting turns.”
—Chicago Tribune
“A slam-bang suspense story.” —Lexington Herald-Leader
“Koontz engrosses the reader in terror that can almost be touched.” —San Antonio Express-News
“Scary and ingenious.” —The San Jose Mercury News
“Koontz is the consummate researcher, creating settings, people, and scenes that ring true.” —Calgary Herald
“The glue that holds together Koontz’s intriguing stories is his stylish writing . . . tight and immensely readable.”
—The Sunday Denver Post
“Mr. Murder will leave an indelible imprint on your psyche. Koontz takes us on a wild ride where the outcome is always in doubt, and the final showdown is gripping.”
—The London Free Press
“Lean prose and rich characterizations . . . Playing on every emotion and keeping the story racing along, Koontz masterfully escalates the tension . . . with the most ingenious twist ending of his career.” —Publishers Weekly
“Deliciously frightening. This author manages to put a fresh spin on every novel.” —The Calgary Sun
“An exciting, strikingly bizarre thriller.”
—Lansing State Journal
“Dean Koontz has always had the uncanny ability to take the most unlikely plot and draw in the reader . . . page after page of twists and turns that keep you guessing.”
—The Sacramento Bee
“Wonderfully suspenseful . . . bound to please his legions of fans.” —The Denver Post
“Dean Koontz just keeps getting better and better. Mr. Murder may be his best novel yet, a seamless exercise in suspense . . . [that] features some of his best characters. The Stillwaters are endearing, and the family is loving but never saccharine or sappy.” —The Flint Journal
“Tightly written, brilliantly managed, Mr. Murder goes straight to the heart of everyone’s secret fears. As always, Koontz creates solid, three-dimensional characters—he’s especially good with the children here, two endearing, funny little girls who are completely believable.”
—The Anniston Star
“Koontz neatly balances terror and mayhem with a marvelous sense of humor and keen insight into human nature, most evident in his well-drawn characterizations of the endearing and resilient Emily and Charlotte. Suspense-packed action and breathless terror.”
—San Diego Blade-Citizen
“Koontz paints a vivid portrait of the Stillwater family, the warmest, most lovable collection of people since Charles Dickens’s Cratchit family in A Christmas Carol. Koontz knows how to grab a reader’s interest and keep him or her engrossed to the very last page.” —Orange Coast
“Terrific visceral energy . . . wonderfully creepy. Koontz nails the reader to the page.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Mr. Murder is a strong and important novel, entertaining and insightful, contemporary and universal.”
—Mystery Scene
“Stylish writing, tight and immensely readable.”
—The Providence Sunday Journal
“A wonderfully thought-out and suspenseful tale.”
—The Macon Telegraph
“A stylish . . . suspenseful tale.” —Wisconsin State Journal
“A flat-out entertainment paced at breakneck speed.”
—Locus
“Mr. Murder is compulsive entertainment, so genuinely conceived and plotted that its readers will be . . . flipping the pages as fast as they can.” —Mostly Murder
“A taut and emotive novel . . . a brilliant, twisting climax. Mr. Murder is a grand slam of a book. It comes head-on at you from page one, and doesn’t stop.” —Starburst
“Koontz has done it again in this first-rate mystery.”
—The Witchita Falls Times
Berkley titles by Dean Koontz
THE EYES OF DARKNESS
THE KEY TO MIDNIGHT
MR. MURDER
THE FUNHOUSE
DRAGON TEARS
SHADOWFIRES
HIDEAWAY
COLD FIRE
THE HOUSE OF THUNDER
THE VOICE OF THE NIGHT
THE BAD PLACE
THE SERVANTS OF TWILIGHT
MIDNIGHT
LIGHTNING
THE MASK
WATCHERS
TWILIGHT EYES
STRANGERS
DEMON SEED
PHANTOMS
WHISPERS
NIGHT CHILLS
DARKFALL
SHATTERED
THE VISION
THE FACE OF FEAR
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
MR. MURDER
A Berkley Book / published b
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Copyright © 1993 by Nkui, Inc.
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eISBN : 978-1-4406-3363-8
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To Phil Parks, for what is often within, and to Don Brautigam, for what is often without. And for having all that talent without any noticeable, annoying neuroses. Well, hardly any.
PART ONE
Santa Claus and His Evil Twin
Winter that year was strange and gray. The damp wind smelled of Apocalypse, and morning skies had a peculiar way of slipping cat-quick into midnight.
—The Book of Counted Sorrows
Life is an unrelenting comedy. Therein lies the tragedy of it.
—One Dead Bishop, Martin Stillwater
One
1
“I need . . .”
Leaning back in his comfortable leather office chair, rocking gently, holding a compact cassette recorder in his right hand and dictating a letter to his editor in New York, Martin Stillwater suddenly realized he was repeating the same two words in a dreamy whisper.
“. . . I need . . . I need . . . I need . . .”
Frowning, Marty clicked off the recorder.
His train of thought had clattered down a siding and chugged to a stop. He could not recall what he had been about to say.
Needed what?
The big house was not merely quiet but eerily still. Paige had taken the kids to lunch and a Saturday matinee movie.
But this childless silence was more than just a condition. It had substance. The air felt heavy with it.
He put one hand to the nape of his neck. His palm was cool and moist. He shivered.
Outside, the autumn day was as hushed as the house, as if all of southern California had been vacated. At the only window of his second-floor study, the wide louvers of the plantation shutters were ajar. Sunlight slanted between angled slats, imprinting the sofa and carpet with narrow red-gold stripes as lustrous as fox fur; the nearest luminous ribbon wrapped one corner of the U-shaped desk.
I need . . .
Instinct told him that something important had happened only a moment ago, just out of his sight, perceived subliminally.
He swiveled his chair and surveyed the room behind him. Other than the fasciae of coppery sunshine interleaved with louver shadows, the only light came from a small desk lamp with a stained-glass shade. Even in that gloom, however, he could see he was alone with his books, research files, and computer.
Perhaps the silence seemed unnaturally deep only because the house had been filled with noise and bustle since Wednesday, when the schools had closed for the Thanksgiving holiday. He missed the kids. He should have gone to the movie with them.
I need . . .
The words had been spoken with peculiar tension—and longing.
Now an ominous feeling overcame him, a keen sense of impending danger. It was the premonitory dread which characters sometimes felt in his novels, and which he always struggled to describe without resorting to clichés.
He had not actually experienced anything like it in years, not since Charlotte had been seriously ill when she was four and the doctor had prepared them for the possibility of cancer. All day in the hospital, as his little girl had been wheeled from one lab to another for tests, all that sleepless night, and during the long days that followed before the physicians ventured a diagnosis, Marty felt haunted by a malevolent spirit whose presence thickened the air, making it difficult to breathe, to move, to hope. As it turned out, his daughter had been threatened neither by supernatural malevolence nor malignancy. The problem was a treatable blood disorder. Within three months Charlotte recovered.
But he remembered that oppressive dread too well.
He was in its icy grip again, though for no discernible reason. Charlotte and Emily were healthy, well-adjusted kids. He and Paige were happy together—absurdly happy, considering how many thirty-something couples of their acquaintance were divorced, separated, or cheating on each other. Financially, they were more secure than they had ever expected to be.
Nevertheless, Marty knew something was wrong.
He put down the tape recorder, went to the window, and opened the shutters all the way. A leafless sycamore cast stark, elongated shadows across the small side yard. Beyond those gnarled branches, the pale-yellow stucco walls of the house next door appeared to have soaked up the sunshine; gold and russet reflections painted the windows; the place was silent, seemingly serene.
To the right, he could see a section of the street. The houses on the other side of the block were also Mediterranean in style, stucco with clay-tile roofs, gilded by late-afternoon sun, filigreed by overhanging queen-palm fronds. Quiet, well landscaped, planned to the square inch, their neighborhood—and indeed the entire town of Mission Viejo—seemed to be a haven from the chaos that ruled so much of the rest of the world these days.
He closed the shutters, entirely blocking the sun. Apparently the only danger was in his mind, a figment of the same active imagination that had made him, at last, a reasonably successful mystery novelist.
Yet his heart was beating faster than ever.
Marty walked out of his office into the second-floor hall, as far as the head of the stairs. He stood as still as the newel post on which he rested one hand.
He wasn’t certain what he expected to hear. The soft creak of a door, stealthy footsteps? The furtive rustles and clicks and muffled thumps of an intruder slowly making his way through the house?
Gradually, as he heard nothing suspicious and as his racing heart grew calmer, his sense of impending disaster faded. Anxiety became mere uneasiness.
“Who’s there?” he asked, just to break the silence.
The sound of his voice, full of puzzlement, dispelled the portentous mood. Now the hush was only that of an empty house, devoid of menace.
He returned to his office at the end of the hall and settled in the leather chair behind his desk. With the shutters tightly closed and no lamps on except the one with the stained-glass shade, the corners of the room seemed to recede farther than the dimensions of the walls allowed, as if it were a place in a dream.
Because the motif of the lamp shade was fruit, the protective glass on the desk top reflected luminous ovals and circles of cherry-red, plum-purple, grape-green, lemon-yellow, and berry-blue. In its polished metal and Plexiglas surfaces, the cassette recorder, which lay on the glass, also reflected the bright mosaic, glimmering as if encrusted with jewels. When he reached for the recorder, Marty saw that his hand appeared to be sheathed in the pebbly, iridescent rainbow skin of an exotic lizard.
He hesitated, studying the faux scales on the back of his hand and the phantom jewels on the recorder. Real life was as layered with illusion as any piece of fiction.
He picked up the recorder and pressed the rewind button for a second or two, seeking the last few words of the unfinished letter to his editor. The thin, high-speed whistle-shriek of his voice in reverse issued like an alien language from the small, tinny speaker.
When he thumbed the play button, he found that he had not reversed far enough: “. . . I need . . . I need . . . I need . . .”
/> Frowning, he switched the machine to rewind, taking the tape back twice as far as before.
But still: “. . . I need . . . I need . . .”
Rewind. Two seconds. Five. Ten. Stop. Play.
“. . . I need . . . I need . . . I need . . .”
After two more attempts, he found the letter: "... so I should be able to have the final draft of the new book in your hands in about a month. I think this one is . . . this one is . . . uh . . . this one . . .”
The dictation stopped. Silence unreeled from the tape—and the sound of his breathing.
By the time the two-word chant finally began to issue from the speaker, Marty had leaned forward tensely on the edge of the chair, frowning at the recorder in his hand.
“. . . I need . . . I need . . .”
He checked his watch. Not quite six minutes past four o’clock.
Initially the dreamy murmur was the same as when he’d first come to his senses and heard soft chanting like the responses to an interminable, unimaginative religious litany. After about half a minute, however, his voice on the tape changed, became sharp with urgency, swelled with anguish, then with anger.
“. . . I NEED . . . I NEED . . . I NEED . . .”
Frustration seethed through those two words.
The Marty Stillwater on the tape—who might as well have been a total stranger to the listening Marty Stillwater—sounded in acute emotional pain for want of something that he could neither describe nor imagine.
Mesmerized, he scowled at the notched white spools of the cassette player turning relentlessly behind the plastic view window.
Finally the voice fell silent, the recording ended, and Marty consulted his watch again. More than twelve minutes past four.
He had assumed that he’d lost his concentration for only a few seconds, slipped into a brief daydream. Instead, he’d sat with the recorder gripped in his hand, the letter to his editor forgotten, repeating those two words for seven minutes or longer.
Seven minutes, for God’s sake.
And he had remembered none of it. As if in a trance.
