Mr. Murder

by Dean Koontz

  Don’t be too confident. Figure the creep has another weapon besides the one he dropped, gun or knife. Stay low, clear that doorway fast. Easier to die in a doorway than anywhere else because every door opens on the unknown. Keep your gun in both hands as you move, arms in front of you, straight and locked, sweep left and right as you cross the threshold, swinging the gun to cover both flanks. Then slip to one side or the other and keep your back against the wall as you move, so you always know your back is safe, only three sides to worry about.

  All of that wisdom flashed through his mind, as it might have passed through the mind of one of his hard-nosed police characters—yet he behaved like any panicked civilian, stumbling heedlessly into the upstairs hall, holding the pistol in only his right hand, arms loose, breathing explosively, making more of a target than a threat of himself, because when you came right down to it, he wasn’t a cop, only an asshole who sometimes wrote about them. No matter how long you indulged the fantasy, you couldn’t live the fantasy, you couldn’t act like a cop in a pressurized situation unless you had trained like a cop. He had been as guilty as anyone of confusing reality and fiction, thinking he was as invincible as the hero on a printed page, and he’d been damned lucky the other Marty hadn’t been waiting for him. The upstairs hall was deserted.

  He looked exactly like me.

  Couldn’t think about that now, no time for it yet. Concentrate on staying alive, wasting the bastard before he hurt Paige or the girls. If you survive, there’ll be time to seek an explanation for that astonishing resemblance, solve the mystery, but not now.

  Listen. Movement?

  Maybe.

  No. Nothing.

  Keep the gun up, muzzle aimed ahead.

  Just outside the office doorway, a smeary handprint in wet blood marred the wall. A horrid amount of blood was puddled on the light-beige carpet there. At least part of the time when Marty had stood behind his desk, stunned and temporarily immobilized by the violence, the wounded man had leaned against this hallway wall, perhaps trying unsuccessfully to staunch his bleeding wounds.

  Marty was sweating, nauseated and afraid. Perspiration trickled into the corner of his left eye, stinging, blurring his vision. He blotted his slick forehead with his shirt sleeve, blinked furiously to wash the salt out of his eye.

  When the intruder had shoved away from the wall and started moving—perhaps while Marty was still frozen behind his desk—he had walked through his own pooled blood. His route was marked by fragmentary red imprints of the ridged patterns on athletic-shoe soles as well as by a continuous scarlet drizzle.

  Silence in the house. With a little luck, maybe it was the silence of the dead.

  Shivering, Marty cautiously followed the repulsive trail past the hall bath, around the corner, past the double-door entrance to the dark master bedroom, past the head of the stairs. He stopped at that point where the second-floor hall became a gallery overlooking the living room.

  On his right was a bleached oak railing, beyond which hung the brass chandelier that he’d switched on when he’d passed through the foyer earlier. Below the chandelier were the descending stairs and the two-story, tile-floored entrance foyer that flowed directly into the two-story living room.

  To his left and a few feet farther along the gallery was the room Paige used as a home office. One day it would become another bedroom for Charlotte or Emily when they decided they were ready to sleep separately. The door stood half open. Bat-black shadows swarmed beyond, relieved only by the gray storm light of the waning day, which hardly penetrated the windows.

  The blood trail led past that office to the end of the gallery, directly to the door of the girls’ bedroom, which was closed. The intruder was in there, and it was infuriating to think of him among the girls’ belongings, touching things, tainting their room with his blood and madness.

  He recalled the angry voice, touched with lunacy yet so like his own voice: My Paige, she’s mine, my Charlotte, my Emily . . .

  “Like hell, they’re yours,” Marty said, keeping the Smith & Wesson aimed squarely at the closed door.

  He glanced at his wristwatch.

  4:28.

  Now what?

  He could stay there in the hallway, ready to blow the bastard to Hell if the door opened. Wait for Paige and the kids, shout to them when they came in, tell Paige to call 911. Then she could hustle the kids across the street to Vic and Kathy Delorio’s house, where they’d be safe, while he covered the door until the police arrived.

  That plan sounded good, responsible, cool and calm. Briefly, the knocking of his heart against his ribs became less insistent, less punishing.

  Then the curse of a writer’s imagination hit him hard, a black whirlpool sucking him down into dark possibilities, the curse of what if, what if, what if. What if the other Marty was still strong enough to push open the window in the girls’ room, climb out onto the patio cover at the back of the house, and jump down to the lawn from there? What if he fled along the side of the house and out to the street just as Paige was pulling into the driveway with the girls?

  It might happen. Could happen. Would happen. Or something else just as bad would happen, worse. The whirlpool of reality spun out more terrible possibilities than the darkest thoughts of any writer’s mind. In this age of social dissolution, even on the most peaceful streets in the quietest neighborhoods, unexpected acts of grotesque savagery could occur, whereupon people were shocked and horrified but not surprised.

  He might be guarding the door to a deserted room.

  4:29.

  Paige might be turning the corner two blocks away, entering their street.

  Maybe the neighbors had heard the gunshots and had already called the police. Please, God, let that be the case.

  He had no conscionable choice but to throw open the door to the girls’ room, go in, and confirm whether The Other was there or not.

  The Other. In his office, when the confrontation had begun, he’d quickly dismissed his initial thought that he was dealing with something supernatural. A spirit could not be as solid and three-dimensional as this man was. If they existed at all, creatures from the other side of the line between life and death would not be vulnerable to bullets. Yet a feeling of the uncanny persisted, weighed heavier on him moment by moment. Although he suspected that the nature of this adversary was far stranger than ghosts or shape-changing demons, that it was simultaneously more terrifying and more mundane, that it was born of this world and no other, he nevertheless could not help but think of it in terms usually reserved for stories of haunting spirits: Ghost, Phantom, Revenant, Apparition, Specter, The Uninvited, The Undying, The Entity.

  The Other.

  The door waited.

  The silence of the house was deeper than death.

  Already focused narrowly on the pursuit of The Other, Marty’s attention constricted further, until he was oblivious of his own heartbeat, blind to everything but the door, deaf to all sounds except those that might come from the girls’ room, conscious of no sensation except the pressure of his finger on the trigger of the pistol.

  The blood trail.

  Red fragments of shoeprints.

  The door.

  Waiting.

  He was rooted in indecision.

  The door.

  Something suddenly clattered above him. He snapped his head back and looked at the ceiling. He was directly under the three-foot-square, seven-foot-deep shaft that soared up to a dome-shaped Plexiglas skylight. Rain was beating against the Plexiglas. Only rain, the clatter of rain.

  As if the strain of indecision had snapped him back to the full spectrum of reality, he was abruptly deluged by all the voices of the storm, of which he’d been utterly unaware while tracking The Other. He’d been intently listening through the background racket for the stealthier sounds of his quarry. Now the wind’s gibbering-hooting-moaning, the rataplan of rain, fulminant thunder, the bony scraping of a tree limb against one side of the house, the tinny rattle of a loose section o
f rain gutter, and less identifiable noises flooded over him.

  The neighbors couldn’t have heard gunshots above the raging storm. So much for that hope.

  Marty seemed to be swept forward by the tumult, along the blood trail, one hesitant step, then another, inexorably toward the waiting door.

  8

  The storm ushered in an early twilight, bleak and protracted, and Paige had the headlights on all the way home from the girls’ school. Though turned to the highest speed, the windshield wipers could barely cope with the cataracts that poured out of the draining sky. Either the latest drought would be broken this rainy season or nature was playing a cruel trick by raising expectations she would not fulfill. Intersections were flooded. Gutters overflowed. The BMW spread great white wings of water as it passed through one deep puddle after another. And out of the misty murk, the headlights of oncoming cars swam at them like the searching lamps of bathyscaphes probing deep ocean trenches.

  “We’re a submarine,” Charlotte said excitedly from the passenger seat beside Paige, looking out of the side window through plumes of tire spray, “swimming with the whales, Captain Nemo and the Nautilus twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea, giant squids stalking us. Remember the giant squid, Mom, from the movie?”

  “I remember,” Paige said without taking her eyes from the road.

  “Up periscope,” Charlotte said, gripping the handles of that imaginary instrument, squinting through the eyepiece. “Raiding the sea lanes, ramming ships with our super-strong steel bow—boom!—and the crazy captain playing his huge pipe organ! You remember the pipe organ, Mom?”

  “I remember.”

  “Diving deeper, deeper, the pressure hull starting to crack, but the crazy Captain Nemo says deeper, playing his pipe organ and saying deeper, and all the time here comes the squid.” She broke into the shark’s theme from the movie Jaws: “Dum-dum, dum-dum, dum-dum, dum-dum, da-da-dum!”

  “That’s silly,” Emily said from the rear seat.

  Charlotte turned in her shoulder harness to look back between the front seats. “What’s silly?”

  “Giant squid.”

  “Oh, is that so? Maybe you wouldn’t think they were so silly if you were swimming and one of them came up under you and bit you in half, ate you in two bites, then spit out your bones like grape seeds.”

  “Squid don’t eat people,” Emily said.

  “Of course they do.”

  “Other way around.”

  “Huh?”

  “People eat squid,” Emily said.

  “No way.”

  “Way.”

  “Where’d you get a dumb idea like that?”

  “Saw it on a menu at a restaurant.”

  “What restaurant?” Charlotte asked.

  “Couple different restaurants. You were there. Isn’t it true, Mom—don’t people eat squid?”

  “Yes, they do,” Paige agreed.

  “You’re just agreeing with her so she won’t look like a dumb seven-year-old,” Charlotte said skeptically.

  “No, it’s true,” Paige assured her. “People eat squid.”

  “How?” Charlotte asked, as if the very thought beggared her imagination.

  “Well,” Paige said, braking for a red traffic light, “not all in one piece, you know.”

  “I guess not!” Charlotte said. “Not a giant squid, anyway. ”

  “You can slice the tentacles and sauté them in garlic butter for one thing,” Paige said, and looked at her daughter to see what impact that bit of culinary news would have.

  Charlotte grimaced and faced forward again. “You’re trying to gross me out.”

  “Tastes good,” Paige insisted.

  “I’d rather eat dirt.”

  “Tastes better than dirt, I assure you.”

  Emily piped up from the back seat again: “You can also slice their tentacles and french-fry ’em.”

  “That’s right,” Paige said.

  Charlotte’s judgment was simple and direct: “Yuch.”

  “They’re like little onion rings, only squid,” Emily said.

  “This is sick.”

  “Little gummy french-fried squid rings dripping gooey squid ink,” Emily said, and giggled.

  Turning in her seat again to look at her sister, Charlotte said, “You’re a disgusting troll.”

  “Anyway,” Emily said, “we’re not in a submarine.”

  “Of course we’re not,” Charlotte said. “We’re in a car.”

  “No, we’re in a hypofoil.”

  “A what?”

  Emily said, “Like we saw on TV that time, the boat that goes between England and somewhere, and it rides on top of the water, really zoooooming along.”

  “Honey, you mean ‘hydrofoil,’ ” Paige said, taking her foot off the brake when the light turned green, and accelerating cautiously across the flooded intersection.

  “Yeah,” Emily said. “Hyderfoil. We’re in a hyderfoil, going to England to meet the queen. I’m going to have tea with the queen, drink tea and eat squid and talk about the family jewels.”

  Paige almost laughed out loud at that one.

  “The queen doesn’t serve squid,” Charlotte said exasperatedly.

  “Bet she does,” said Emily.

  “No, she serves crumpets and scones and trollops and stuff,” Charlotte said.

  This time Paige did laugh out loud. She had a vivid image in her head: The very proper and gracious Queen of England inquiring of a gentleman guest if he would like a trollop with his tea, and indicating a garish hooker waiting nearby in Frederick’s of Hollywood lingerie.

  “What’s so funny?” Charlotte asked.

  Stifling her laugh, Paige lied: “Nothing, I was just thinking about something, something else, happened a long time ago, wouldn’t seem funny to you now, just an old Mommy memory.”

  The last thing she wanted was to inhibit their conversation. When she was in the car with them, she rarely turned on the radio. Nothing on the dial was half as entertaining as the Charlotte and Emily Show.

  As the rain began to fall harder than ever, Emily proved to be in one of her more loquacious moods. “It’s a lot more fun going on a hyderfoil to see the queen than being in a submarine with a giant squid chomping on it.”

  “The queen is boring,” Charlotte said.

  “Is not.”

  “Is too.”

  “She has a torture chamber under the palace.”

  Charlotte turned in her seat again, interested in spite of herself. “She does?”

  “Yeah,” Emily said. “And she keeps a guy down there in an iron mask.”

  “An iron mask?”

  “An iron mask,” Emily repeated somberly.

  “Why?”

  “He’s real ugly,” Emily said.

  Paige decided both of them were going to grow up to be writers. They had inherited Marty’s vivid and restless imagination. They would probably be as driven to exercise it as he was, although what they wrote would be quite different from their father’s novels, and far different from the work of each other.

  She couldn’t wait to tell Marty about submarines, hyderfoils, giant squids, french-fried tentacles, and trollops with the queen.

  She had decided to take Paul Guthridge’s preliminary diagnosis to heart, attribute Marty’s unnerving symptoms to nothing but stress, and stop worrying—at least until they got test results revealing something worse. Nothing was going to happen to Marty. He was a force of nature, a deep well of energy and laughter, indomitable and resilient. He would bounce back just as Charlotte had bounced off her deathbed five years ago. Nothing was going to happen to any of them because they had too much living to do, too many good times ahead of them.

  A fierce bolt of lightning—which seldom accompanied storms in southern California but which blazed in plenitude this time—crackled across the sky, pulling after it a bang of thunder, as incandescent as any celestial chariot that might carry God out of the heavens on Judgment Day.

  9

/>   Marty was only six or eight feet from the girls’ bedroom door. He approached from the hinged side, so he could reach across for the knob, hurl the door inward, and avoid silhouetting himself squarely in the frame.

  Trying not to tread in the blood, he glanced down for just a second at the carpet, where the spatters of gore were smaller and fewer than at other points along the hall. He glimpsed an anomaly that registered only subconsciously at first, and he eased forward another step with his gaze riveted on the door again before fully realizing what he’d seen: an impression of the forward half of a shoe sole, faintly inked in red, like twenty or thirty others he’d already passed, except that the narrow portion of this imprint, the toe, was pointed differently from all the others, in the wrong direction, back the way he had come.

  Marty froze as he grasped the import of the shoeprint.

  The Other had gone as far as the girls’ bedroom but not into it. He had turned back, having somehow reduced the flow of blood so dramatically that he was no longer clearly marking his trail—except for one telltale shoeprint and perhaps a couple that Marty hadn’t noticed.

  Swinging around, holding the gun in both hands, Marty cried out at the sight of The Other coming at him from Paige’s office, moving much too fast for a man with chest wounds and minus a pint or two of blood. He hit Marty hard, smashing in under the pistol, driving him into the gallery railing and forcing his arms up.

  Marty pulled the trigger reflexively while he was being carried backward, but the bullet ploughed into the hallway ceiling. The sturdy handrail slammed the small of his back, and a half-strangled scream escaped him as white-hot pain shot horizontally across his kidneys and played spike-shoed hopscotch up the knuckled staircase of his spine.

  Even as he screamed, he lost the gun. It popped out of his hands and arced back over his head into the empty vaulted space behind him.

  The tortured oak railing shuddered, a loud dry crack signaled imminent collapse, and Marty was sure they were going to crash into the stairwell. But the balusters did not give way, and the handrail held fast to the newel post at each end.