by Dean Koontz
Should shoot him. Should blow his head off. Satisfying. Can’t risk it. Too many people around.
On the road again. Interstate 15. West. Candy bars and Coke at eighty miles an hour. Desolate plains. Hills of sand, shale. Volcanic rock. Many-armed Joshua trees standing sentinel.
As a pilgrim to a holy place, as a lemming to the sea, as a comet on its eternal course, westward, westward, trying to out-race the ocean-seeking sun.
Marty owned five guns.
He was not a hunter or collector. He didn’t shoot skeet or take target practice for the fun of it. Unlike several people he knew, he hadn’t armed himself out of fear of social collapse—though sometimes he saw signs of it everywhere. He could not even say that he liked guns, but he recognized the need for them in a troubled world.
He had purchased the weapons one by one for research purposes. As a mystery novelist, writing about cops and killers, he believed he had a responsibility to know whereof he wrote. Because he was not a gun hobbyist and had a finite amount of time to research all of the many backgrounds and subjects upon which each novel touched, minor mistakes were inevitable now and then, but he felt more comfortable writing about a weapon if he had fired it.
In his nightstand he kept an unloaded Korth .38 revolver and a box of cartridges. The Korth was a handmade weapon of the highest quality, produced in Germany. After learning to use it for a novel titled The Deadly Twilight, he had kept it for home defense.
Several times, he and Paige had taken the girls to an indoor shooting range to witness target practice, instilling in them a deep respect for the revolver. When Charlotte and Emily were old enough, he would teach them to use a gun, though one less powerful and with less recoil than the Korth. Firearm accidents virtually always resulted from ignorance. In Switzerland, where every male citizen was required to own a firearm to defend the country in times of trouble, gun instruction was universal and tragic accidents extremely rare.
He removed the .38 from the nightstand, loaded it, and took it to the garage, where he tucked it in the glove compartment of their second car, a green Ford Taurus. He wanted it for protection to and from his one-o’clock appointment with Dr. Guthridge.
A Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun, a Colt M16 A2 rifle, and two pistols—a Beretta Model 92 and a Smith & Wesson 5904—were stored in their original boxes inside a locked metal cabinet in one corner of the garage. There were also boxes of ammunition in every caliber required. He unpacked each weapon, which had been cleaned and oiled before being put away, and loaded it.
He put the Beretta in the kitchen, in an upper cabinet beside the stove, in front of a pair of ceramic casserole dishes. The girls would not happen upon it there before he called a family conference to explain the reasons for his extraordinary precautions—if he could explain.
The M16 went on an upper shelf in the foyer closet just inside the front door. He put the Smith & Wesson in his office desk, in the second drawer of the right-hand drawer bank, and slipped the Mossberg under the bed in the master bedroom.
Throughout his preparations, he worried that he was deranged, arming himself against a threat that did not exist. Considering the seven-minute fugue he had experienced on Saturday, messing around with weapons was the last thing he should be doing.
He had no proof of impending danger. He was operating sheerly on instinct, a soldier ant mindlessly constructing fortifications. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. By nature he was a thinker, a planner, a brooder, and only last of all a man of action. But this was a flood of instinctual response, and he was swept away by it.
Then, just as he finished hiding the shotgun in the master bedroom, worries about his mental condition were abruptly outweighed by another consideration. The oppressive atmosphere of his recent dream was with him again, the feeling that some terrible weight was bearing down on him at a murderous speed. The air seemed to thicken. It was almost as bad as in the nightmare. And getting worse.
God help me, he thought—and was not sure if he was asking for protection from some unknown enemy or from dark impulses in himself.
“I need . . .”
Dust devils. Dancing on the high desert.
Sunlight sparkling in broken bottles along the highway.
Fastest thing on the road. Passing cars, trucks. The landscape a blur. Scattered towns, all blurs.
Faster. Faster. As if being sucked into a black hole.
Past Victorville.
Past Apple Valley.
Through the Cajon Pass at forty-two hundred feet above sea level.
Then descending. Past San Bernardino. Onto the Riverside Freeway.
Riverside. Carona.
Through the Santa Ana Mountains.
“I need to be . . .”
South. The Costa Mesa Freeway.
The City of Orange. Tustin. In the southern California suburban maze.
Such powerful magnetism, pulling, pulling ruthlessly.
More than magnetism. Gravity. Down into the vortex of the black hole.
Switch to the Santa Ana Freeway.
Mouth dry. A bitter metallic taste. Heart pounding fiercely, pulse throbbing in his temples.
“I need to be someone.”
Faster. As if tied to a massive anchor on an endless chain, plummeting into the lightless fathoms of a bottomless ocean trench.
Past Irvine, Laguna Hills, El Toro.
Into the dark heart of the mystery.
“. . . need . . . need . . . need . . . need . . . need . . .”
Mission Viejo. This exit. Yes.
Off the freeway.
Seeking the magnet. The enigmatic attractant.
All the way from Kansas City to find the unknown, to discover his strange and wondrous future. Home. Identity. Meaning.
Turn left here, two blocks, turn right. Unfamiliar streets. But to find the way, he needs only to give himself to the power that pulls him.
Mediterranean houses. Neatly trimmed lawns. Palm shadows on pale-yellow stucco walls.
Here.
That house.
To the curb. Stop. Half a block away.
Just a house like the others. Except. Something inside. Whatever he first sensed in faraway Kansas. Whatever draws him. Something.
The attractant.
Inside.
Waiting.
A wordless cry of triumph escapes him, and he shudders violently with relief. He no longer needs to seek his destiny. Although he does not yet know what it may be, he is certain that he’s found it, and he sags in his seat, his sweaty hands slipping off the steering wheel, pleased to be at the end of the long journey.
He is more excited than he has ever been, filled with curiosity; however, released at last from the iron grip of compulsion, he loses his sense of urgency. His trip-hammering heart decelerates to a more normal number of beats per minute. His ears stop ringing, and he is able to breathe more deeply and evenly than he has for at least fifty miles. In startlingly short order, he is as outwardly calm and self-contained as he was in the big house in Kansas City, where he gratefully shared the tender intimacies of death with the man and woman in the antique Georgian bed.
By the time Marty took the keys to the Taurus off the kitchen pegboard, stepped into the garage, locked the door to the house, and pushed the button to raise the automatic garage door, his awareness of impending danger was so acute and harrowing that he was on the edge of blind panic. In the feverish thrall of paranoia, he was convinced that he was being hunted by an uncanny enemy who employed not merely the usual five senses but paranormal means, a truly crazy notion, for God’s sake, straight out of the National Enquirer, crazy yet inescapable because he actually could feel a presence . . . a violent stalking presence that was conscious of him, pressing him, probing. He felt as if a viscous fluid was squirting into his skull under tremendous pressure, compressing his brain, squeezing consciousness out of him. A very real physical effect was part of it, too, because he was as weighed down as a deep-sea diver under a crushing tonnage of w
ater, joints aching, muscles burning, lungs reluctant to expand and accept new breath. Extreme sensitivity to every stimulant nearly incapacitated him: the hard clatter of the rising garage door was ear-splitting; intruding sunlight seared his eyes; and a musty odor—ordinarily too faint to be detected—exploded like a poisonous cloud of spores out of a corner of the garage, so pungent that it made him nauseous.
In an instant, the seizure passed, and he was in full control of himself. Although it had seemed as if his skull would burst, the internal pressure relented as abruptly as it had grown, and he no longer teetered on the brink of unconsciousness. The pain in his joints and muscles was gone, and the sunlight didn’t sting his eyes. It was like snapping out of a nightmare—except he was awake on both sides of the snap.
Marty leaned against the Taurus. He was hesitant to believe that the worst was past, waiting tensely for another inexplicable wave of paranoid terror to batter him.
He looked out from the shadowy garage at the street, which was simultaneously familiar and strange, half expecting some monstrous phantasm to rise out of the pavement or descend through the sun-drenched air, a creature inhuman and merciless, ferocious and bent upon his destruction, the invisible specter of his nightmare now made flesh.
His confidence didn’t return, and he couldn’t stop shaking, but his apprehension gradually diminished to a tolerable level, until he was able to consider whether he dared to drive. What if a similarly disorienting spasm of fear hit him while he was behind the wheel? He would be virtually oblivious of stop signs, oncoming traffic, and hazards of all kinds.
More than ever, he needed to see Dr. Guthridge.
He wondered if he should go back into the house and call a taxi. But this wasn’t New York City, streets aswarm with cabs; in southern California, the words “taxi service” were, more often than not, an oxymoron. By the time he could reach Guthridge’s office by taxi, he might have missed his appointment.
He got in the car, started the engine. With wary concentration, he backed out of the garage and into the street, handling the wheel as stiffly as a ninety-year-old man acutely aware of the brittleness of his bones and the tenuous thread of his existence.
All the way to the doctor’s office in Irvine, Marty Stillwater thought about Paige and Charlotte and Emily. By the treachery of his own weak flesh, he could be denied the satisfaction of seeing the girls become women, the pleasure of growing old at his wife’s side. Although he believed in a world beyond death where eventually he might be reunited with those he loved, life was so precious that even the promise of a blissful eternity would not compensate for the loss of a few years on this side of the veil.
From half a block away, the killer watches the car slowly back out of the garage.
As the Ford turns away from him and gradually recedes through the vinegar-gold autumn sunshine, he realizes the magnet which drew him from Kansas is in that car. Perhaps it is the dimly seen man behind the steering wheel—though it might not be a person at all but a talisman hidden elsewhere in the vehicle, a magical object beyond his understanding and to which his destiny is linked for reasons yet unclear.
The killer almost starts the Honda to follow the attractant, but decides the stranger in the Ford will return sooner or later.
He puts on his shoulder holster, slips the pistol into it, and shrugs into the leather jacket.
From the glove compartment, he removes the zippered leather case that contains his set of burglary tools. It includes seven spring-steel picks, an L-shaped tension tool, and a miniature aerosol can of graphite lubricant.
He gets out of the car and proceeds boldly along the sidewalk toward the house.
At the end of the driveway stands a white mailbox on which is stenciled a single name—STILLWATER. Those ten black letters seem to possess symbolic power. Still water. Calm. Peace. He has found still water. He has come through much turbulence, violent rapids and whirlpools, and now he has found a place where he can rest, where his soul will be soothed.
Between the garage and the property-line fence, he opens the gravity latch on a wrought-iron gate. He follows a walkway flanked by the garage on his left and a head-high eugenia hedge on his right, all the way to the rear of the house.
The shallow backyard is lushly planted. It boasts mature ficus trees and a continuation of the sideyard eugenia hedge, which screen him from the prying eyes of neighbors.
The patio is sheltered by an open-beam redwood cover through which thorny trailers of bougainvillea are densely intertwined. Even on this last day of November, clusters of blood-red flowers fringe the patio roof. The concrete floor is spattered with fallen petals, as though a hard-fought battle was waged here.
A kitchen door and large sliding glass door provide two possible entrances from the patio. Both are locked.
The sliding door, beyond which he can see a deserted family room with comfortable furniture and a large television, is further secured by a wooden pole wedged into the interior track. If he gets through the lock, he nevertheless will need to break the glass to reach inside and remove the pole.
He knocks sharply on the other door, although the window beside it reveals that no one is in the kitchen. When there is no response, he knocks again with the same result.
From his compact kit of burglary tools, he withdraws the can of graphite. Crouching before the door, he sprays the lubricant into the lock. Dirt, rust, or other contamination can bind the pin tumblers.
He trades the graphite spray for the tension tool and that pick known as a “rake.” He inserts the L-shaped wrench first to maintain the necessary tension on the lock core. He pushes the rake into the key channel as deep as it will go, then brings it up until he feels it press against the pins. Squinting into the lock, he rapidly draws the rake out, but it does not raise all of the pin tumblers to their shear point, so he tries again, and again, and finally on the sixth try the channel seems to be clear.
He turns the knob.
The door opens.
He half expects an alarm to go off, but there is no siren. A quick scan of the header and jamb fails to reveal magnetic switches, so there must not be a silent alarm, either.
After he puts the tools away and zippers shut the leather case, he steps across the threshold and softly closes the door behind him.
He stands for a while in the cool, shadowy kitchen, absorbing the vibrations, which are good. This house welcomes him. Here, his future begins, and it will be immeasurably brighter than his confused and amnesia-riddled past.
As he moves out of the kitchen to explore the premises, he does not draw the P7 from his shoulder holster. He is sure that no one is at home. He senses no danger, only opportunity.
“I need to be someone,” he tells the house, as if it is a living entity with the power to grant his wishes.
The ground floor offers nothing of interest. The usual rooms are filled with comfortable but unremarkable furniture.
Upstairs, he stops only briefly at each room, getting an overall picture of the second-floor layout before taking time for a thorough investigation. There’s a master bedroom with attached bath, walk-in closet . . . a guest bedroom . . . kids’ room . . . another bath . . .
The final bedroom at the end of the hall—which puts him at the front of the house—is used as an office. It contains a big desk and computer system, but it’s more cozy than businesslike. A plump sofa stands under the shuttered windows, a stained-glass lamp on the desk.
One of the two longest walls is covered with paintings hung in a double row, frames almost touching. Although the pieces of the collection are obviously by more than one artist, the subject matter, without exception, is dark and violent, rendered with unimpeachable skill: twisted shadows, disembodied eyes wide with terror, a Ouija board on which stands a blood-spotted trivet, ink-black palm trees silhouetted against an ominous sunset, a face distorted by a funhouse mirror, the gleaming steel blades of sharp knives and scissors, a mean street where menacing figures lurk just beyond the sour-yellow glow
of street lamps, leafless trees with coaly limbs, a hot-eyed raven perched upon a bleached skull, pistols, revolvers, shotguns, an ice pick, meat cleaver, hatchet, a queerly stained hammer lying obscenely on a silk negligee and lace-trimmed bedsheet . . .
He likes this artwork.
It speaks to him.
This is life as he knows it.
Turning from the gallery wall, he clicks on the stained-glass lamp and marvels at its multi-hued luminous beauty.
In the clear sheet of glass that protects the top of the desk, the mirror-image circles and ovals and teardrops of color are still lovely but darker than when viewed directly. In some indefinable way, they are also foreboding.
Leaning forward, he sees the twin ovals of his eyes staring back at him from the polished glass. Glimmering with their own tiny reflections of the mosaic lamplight, they seem to be not eyes, in fact, but the luminous sensors of a machine—or, if eyes, then the fevered eyes of something soulless—and he quickly looks away from them before too much self-examination leads him to fearful thoughts and intolerable conclusions.
“I need to be someone,” he says nervously.
His gaze falls upon a photograph in a silver frame, which also stands on the desk. A woman and two little girls. A pretty trio. Smiling.
He picks up the photograph to study it more closely. He presses one fingertip against the woman’s face and wishes he could touch her for real, feel her warm and pliant skin. He slides his finger across the glass, first touching the blond-haired child, and then the dark-haired pixie.
After a minute or two, when he moves away from the desk, he carries the photograph with him. The three faces in the portrait are so appealing that he needs to be able to look at them again whenever the desire arises.
As he investigates the titles on the spines of the volumes in the bookcases, he makes a discovery that gives him an understanding, however incomplete, of why he was drawn from the gray autumnal plains of the Midwest to the post-Thanksgiving sun of California.
On a few of the shelves, the books—mystery novels—are by the same author: Martin Stillwater. The surname is the one he saw on the mailbox outside.
