Mr. Murder

by Dean Koontz

  Pressing relentlessly forward, The Other bent Marty backward and over the balustrade, trying to strangle him. Hands of iron. Fingers like hydraulic pincers driven by a powerful motor. Compressing the carotid arteries.

  Marty rammed a knee into his assailant’s crotch, but it was blocked. The attempt left him unbalanced, with just one foot on the floor, and he was shoved farther across the balustrade, until he was both pinned against and balanced on the handrail.

  Choking, unable to breathe, aware that the worst danger was the diminution of blood to his brain, Marty clasped his hands in a wedge and drove them upward between The Other’s arms, trying to spread them wider and break the strangulating grip. The assailant redoubled his efforts, determined to hold tight. Marty strained harder, too, and his overworked heart pounded painfully against his breastbone.

  They should have been equally matched, damn it, they were the same height, same weight, same build, in the same physical condition, to all appearances the same man.

  Yet The Other, though suffering two potentially mortal bullet wounds, was the stronger, and not merely because he had the advantage of a superior position, better leverage. He seemed to possess inhuman power.

  Face to face with his duplicate, washed by each hot explosive breath, Marty might have been gazing into a mirror, though the savage reflection before him was contorted by expressions he’d never seen on his own face. Bestial rage. Hatred as purely toxic as cyanide. Spasms of maniacal pleasure twisted the familiar features as the strangler thrilled to the act of murder.

  With lips peeled back from his teeth, spittle flying as he spoke, impossibly but repeatedly tightening his strangle-hold to emphasize his words, The Other said, “Need my life now, my life, mine, mine, now. Need my family, now, mine, now, now, now, need it, NEED IT!”

  Negative fireflies swooped and darted across Marty’s field of vision, negative because they were the photo-opposite of the lantern-bearing fireflies on a warm summer night, not pulses of light in the darkness but pulses of darkness in the light. Five, ten, twenty, a hundred, a teeming swarm. The looming face of The Other vanished in sections under the blinking black swarm.

  Despairing of breaking the assailant’s grip, Marty clawed at the hate-filled face. But he couldn’t quite reach it. His every effort seemed feeble, hopeless.

  So many negative fireflies.

  Glimpsed between them: the vicious and wrathful face of his wife’s demanding new husband, the domineering face of his daughters’ stern new father.

  Fireflies. Everywhere, everywhere. Spreading their wings of obliteration.

  Bang. Loud as a rifle shot. Second, third, fourth explosions—one right after another. Balusters breaking.

  The handrail cracked. Sagged backward. It no longer received support from the balusters that had gone to splinters under it.

  Marty stopped resisting the attacker and frantically tried to wrap his legs and arms around the railing in the hope of clinging to the anchored remains instead of hurtling out through the opening gap. But the center section of the balustrade disintegrated so completely, so swiftly, he couldn’t find purchase in its crumbling elements, and the weight of his clutching assailant lent gravity more assistance than it required. As they teetered on the brink, however, Marty’s actions altered the dynamics of their struggle just enough so The Other rolled past him and fell first. The assailant let go of Marty’s throat but dragged him along in the top position. They dropped into the stairwell, crashed through the outer railing, instantly making kindling of it, and slammed into the Mexican-tile floor of the foyer.

  The drop had been sixteen feet, not a tremendous distance, probably not even a lethal distance, and their momentum had been broken by the lower railing. Yet the impact knocked out what little breath Marty had drawn on the way down, even though he was cushioned by The Other, who hit the Mexican tiles back-first with the resounding thwack of a sledgehammer.

  Gasping, coughing, Marty pushed away from his double and tried to scramble out of reach. He was breathless, lightheaded, and not sure if he had broken any bones. When he gasped, the air stung his raw throat, and when he coughed, the pain might not have been worse if he’d tried to swallow a tangled wad of barbed wire and bent nails. Scrambling cat-quick, which was what he had in mind, actually proved to be out of the question, and he could only drag himself across the foyer floor, hitching and shuddering like a bug that had been squirted with insecticide.

  Blinking away tears squeezed out of him by the violent coughing, he spotted the Smith & Wesson. It was about fifteen feet away, well beyond the point at which the transition from tile floor to hardwood marked the end of the entrance foyer and the beginning of the living room. Considering the intensity with which he focused on it and the dedication with which he dragged his half-numb and aching body toward it, the pistol might have been the Holy Grail.

  He became aware of a rumble separate from the sounds of the storm, followed by a thump, which he blearily assumed had something to do with The Other, but he didn’t pause to look back. Maybe what he heard was a death twitch, heels drumming on the floor, one final convulsion. At the very least the bastard must be gravely injured. Crippled and dying. But Marty wanted to get his trembling hands on the gun before celebrating his own survival.

  He reached the pistol, clutched it, and let out a grunt of weary triumph. He flopped on his side, eeled around, and aimed back toward the foyer, prepared to discover that his dogged pursuer was looming over him.

  But The Other was still flat on his back. Legs splayed out. Arms at his sides. Motionless. Might even be dead. No such luck. His head lolled toward Marty. His face was pale, glazed with sweat, as white and shiny as a porcelain mask.

  “Broke,” he wheezed.

  He seemed able to move only his head and the fingers of his right hand, though not the hand itself. A grimace of effort, rather than pain, contorted his features. He lifted his head off the floor, and the still-vital fingers curled and uncurled like the legs of a dying tarantula, but he appeared incapable of sitting up or bending either leg at the knee.

  “Broke,” he repeated.

  Something in the way the word was spoken made Marty think of a toy soldier, bent springs, and ruined gears.

  Steadying himself against the wall with one hand, Marty got to his feet.

  “Gonna kill me?” The Other asked.

  The prospect of putting a bullet in the brain of an injured and defenseless man was repulsive in the extreme, but Marty was tempted to commit the atrocity and worry about the psychological and legal consequences later. He was restrained as much by curiosity as by moral considerations.

  “Kill you? Love to.” His voice was hoarse and no doubt would be so for a day or two, until he recovered from the strangulation attempt. “Who the hell are you?” Every raspy word reminded him of how fortunate he was to have lived to ask the question.

  The low rumble came again, the same noise he had heard when he’d been crawling toward the pistol. This time he recognized it: not the convulsions and drumming heels of a dying man, but simply the vibrations of the automatic garage door, which had been going up the first time, and which now was coming down.

  Voices arose in the kitchen as Paige and the girls entered the house from the garage.

  Less shaky by the second, and having caught his breath, Marty hurried across the living room, toward the dining room, eager to stop the kids before they saw anything of what had happened. For a long time to come, they would have trouble feeling comfortable in their own home, knowing an intruder had gotten in and had tried to kill their father. But they would be more seriously traumatized if they saw the destruction and the bloodstained man lying paralyzed on the foyer floor. Considering the macabre fact that the intruder was also a dead-ringer for their father, they might never sleep well in this house again.

  When Marty burst into the kitchen from the dining room, letting the swinging door slap back and forth behind him, Paige turned in surprise from the rack where she was hanging her raincoat. St
ill in their yellow slickers and floppy vinyl hats, the girls grinned and tilted their heads expectantly, probably figuring that his explosive entrance was the start of a joke or one of Daddy’s silly impromptu performances.

  “Get them out of here,” he croaked at Paige, trying to sound calm, defeated by his coarse voice and all-too-evident tension.

  “What’s happened to you?”

  “Now,” he insisted, “right away, take them across the street to Vic and Kathy’s.”

  The girls saw the gun in his hand. Their grins vanished, and their eyes widened.

  Paige said, “You’re bleeding. What—”

  “Not me,” he interrupted, belatedly realizing that he’d gotten the blood of The Other all over his shirt when he’d fallen atop the man. “I’m okay.”

  “What’s happened?” Paige demanded.

  Yanking open the connecting door to the garage, he said, “We’ve had a thing here.” His throat hurt when he talked, yet he was all but babbling in his urgent desire to get them safely out of the house, incoherent for perhaps the first time in his word-obsessed life. “A problem, a thing, Jesus, you know, like a thing that happened, some trouble—”

  “Marty—”

  “Come on, over to the Delorios’ place, all of you.” He stepped across the threshold, into the dark garage, hit the Genie button, and the big door rumbled upward. He met Paige’s eyes. “They’ll be safe at the Delorios’ place.”

  Not bothering to pull her coat off the rack, Paige shepherded the girls past him, into the garage, toward the rising door.

  “Call the police,” he shouted after her, wincing at the pain that a shout cost him.

  She glanced back at him, her face lined with worry.

  He said, “I’m all right, but we got a guy here, shot bad.”

  “Come with us,” she pleaded.

  “Can’t. Call the police.”

  “Marty—”

  “Go, Paige, just go!”

  She moved between Charlotte and Emily, took each of them by the hand, and led them out of the garage, into the downpour, turning to look back at him only once more.

  He watched until they reached the end of the driveway, checked left and right for traffic, and then started across the street. Step by step, as they moved away through the silver curtains of rain, they looked less like real people and more like three retreating spirits. He had the disconcertingly prescient feeling that he would never see them alive again; he knew it was nothing more than an irrational adrenaline-hyped reaction to what he’d been through, but the fear took root in him and grew nevertheless.

  A cold wet wind invaded the deepest reaches of the garage, and the perspiration on Marty’s face felt as if it had been instantly transformed into ice.

  He stepped back into the kitchen and pushed the door shut.

  Though he was shivering, half freezing, he craved a cold drink because his throat burned as if it harbored a kerosene fire.

  Maybe the man in the foyer was dying, having convulsions right that second, or a heart attack. He was in damned bad shape. So it would be a good idea to get in there and watch over him, in case CPR was necessary before the authorities arrived. Marty didn’t care if the guy died—wanted him dead—but not until a lot of questions were answered and these recent events made at least some sense.

  But before he did anything else, he had to get a drink to soothe his throat. Right now, every swallow was torture. When the cops arrived, he would have to be prepared to do a lot of talking.

  Tap water didn’t seem cold enough to do the trick, so he opened the refrigerator, which he could have sworn was a lot emptier than it had been earlier in the day, and grabbed a carton of milk. No, the idea of milk made him gag. Milk reminded him of blood because it was a bodily fluid, which was ridiculous, of course; but the events of the past hour were irrational, so it followed that some of his reactions would be irrational as well. He returned the carton to the shelf, reached for the orange juice, then saw the bottles of Corona and sixteen-ounce cans of Coors. Nothing had ever looked more desirable than those chilled beers. He grabbed one of the cans because it contained one-third more ounces than a bottle of Corona.

  The first long swallow fueled the fire in his throat instead of quenching it. The second hurt slightly less than the first, the third less than the second, and thereafter every sip was as soothing as medicated honey.

  With the pistol in one hand and the half-empty can of Coors in the other, shivering more at the memory of what had happened and at the prospect of what lay ahead than because of the icy beer, he went back through the house to the foyer.

  The Other was gone.

  Marty was so startled, he dropped the Coors. The can rolled behind him, spilling foamy beer on the hardwood floor of the living room. Although the can had slipped out of his grasp so easily, nothing short of hydraulic prybars could have forced him to let go of the gun.

  Broken balusters, a section of handrail, and splinters littered the foyer floor. Several Mexican tiles were cracked and chipped from the impact of hard oak and Smith & Wesson steel. No body.

  From the moment the double entered Marty’s office, the waking day had drifted into nightmare without the usual prerequisite of sleep. Events had slipped the chains of reality, and his own home had become a dark dreamscape. As surreal as the confrontation had been, he hadn’t seriously doubted its actuality while it had been playing out. And he didn’t doubt it now, either. He hadn’t shot a figment of the mind, been strangled by an illusion, or plunged alone through the gallery railing. Lying incapacitated in the foyer, The Other had been as real as the shattered balustrade still scattered on the tiles.

  Alarmed by the possibility that Paige and the girls had been attacked in the street before they had gotten to the Delorios’ house, Marty turned to the front door. It was locked. From the inside. The security chain was in place. The madman hadn’t left the house by that route.

  Hadn’t left it at all. How could he, in his condition? Don’t panic. Be calm. Think it through.

  Marty would have bet a year of his life that The Other’s catastrophic injuries had been real, not pretense. The bastard’s back had been broken. His inability to move more than his head and the fingers of one hand meant his spine probably had been severed, as well, when he had done his gravity dance with the floor.

  So where was he?

  Not upstairs. Even if his spine hadn’t been damaged, even if he’d escaped quadriplegia, he couldn’t have dragged his battered body up to the second floor during the short time Marty had been in the kitchen.

  Opposite the entrance to the living room, a small den opened off the study. The dishwater-gray light of the storm-washed dusk seeped between the open slats of the shutters, illuminating nothing. Marty stepped through the doorway, snapped on the lights. The den was deserted. At the closet, he slid open the mirrored door, but The Other wasn’t hiding in there, either.

  Foyer closet. Nothing. Powder bath. Nothing. The deep closet under the stairs. Laundry. Family room. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  Marty searched frantically, recklessly, heedless of his safety. He expected to discover his would-be killer nearby and essentially helpless, perhaps even dead, this feeble attempt at escape having depleted the last of the man’s resources.

  Instead, in the kitchen, he found the back door standing open to the patio. A gust of cold wind swept in from outside, rattling the cupboard doors. On the rack by the entrance to the garage, Paige’s raincoat billowed with false life.

  While Marty had been returning to the foyer via the dining room and living room, The Other had headed for the kitchen by another route. He must have gone along the short hall that led from the foyer past the powder bath and laundry, and then crossed one end of the family room. He couldn’t have crawled that far so quickly. He had been on his feet, perhaps unsteady, but on his feet nonetheless.

  No. It wasn’t possible. Okay, maybe the guy didn’t have a severed spine, after all. Maybe not even a fractured spine. But his back had
to have been broken. He couldn’t simply have sprung to his feet and capered off.

  The waking nightmare had displaced reality again. It was time once more to stalk—and be stalked—by something which enjoyed the regenerative powers of a monster in a dream, something which said it had come looking for a life and which seemed fearfully equipped to take it.

  Marty stepped through the open door onto the patio.

  Renewed fear lifted him to a higher state of awareness in which colors were more intense, odors were more pungent, and sounds were clearer and more refined than ever before. The feeling was akin to the inexpressibly keen sensations of certain childhood and adolescent dreams—especially those in which the dreamer travels the skies as effortlessly as a bird, or experiences sexual communion with a woman of such exquisite form that, later, neither her face nor body can be recalled but only the essential radiance of perfect beauty. Those special dreams seemed not to be fantasies at all but glimpses of a greater and more detailed reality beyond the reality of the waking world. Stepping through the kitchen door, passing out of the warm house into the cold realm of nature, Marty was strangely reminded of the ravishing vividness of those long-forgotten visions, for now he experienced similarly acute sensations, alert to every nuance of what he saw-heard-smelled-touched.

  From the thick thatching of bougainvillea overhead, scores of drips and drizzles splashed into puddles as black as oil in the fading light. Upon that liquid blackness floated crimson blossoms in patterns that, though random, seemed consciously mysterious, as portentous and full of meaning as the ancient calligraphy of some long-dead Chinese mystic.

  Around the perimeter of the backyard—small and walled, as in most southern California neighborhoods—Indian laurels and clustered eugenias shivered miserably in the brisk wind. Near the northwest corner, the long and tender trailers of a pair of red-gum eucalyptus lashed the air, shedding oblong leaves as smoky-silver as the wings of dragonflies. In the shadows cast by the trees—and behind several of the larger shrubs—were places in which a man could hide.