by Dean Koontz
Emily looked smug. “You’re just mad because I showed it was all a lie. She never heard of boys having tickles.”
“Sheesh!”
“So there,” Emily said.
“Twerp.”
“Snerp.”
“That’s not even a word.”
“It is if I want it to be.”
The doorbell rang and rang as if someone was leaning on it.
Vic peered through the fish-eye lens at the man on the front stoop. It was Marty Stillwater.
He opened the door, stepping back so his neighbor could enter. “My God, Marty, it looked like a police convention over there. What was that all about?”
Marty stared at him intensely for a moment, especially at the gun in his right hand, then seemed to make some decision and blinked. Wet from the rain, his skin looked glazed and as unnaturally white as the face of a porcelain figurine. He seemed shrunken, shriveled, like a man recovering from a serious illness.
“Are you all right, is Paige all right?” Kathy asked, entering the hall behind Vic.
Hesitantly, Marty stepped across the threshold and stopped just inside the foyer, not entering quite far enough to allow Vic to close the door.
“What,” Vic asked, “you’re worried about dripping on the floor? You know Kathy thinks I’m a hopeless mess, she’s had everything in the house Scotchgarded! Come in, come in.”
Without entering farther, Marty looked past Vic into the living room, then up toward the head of the stairs. He was wearing a black raincoat buttoned to the neck, and it was too large for him, which was part of the reason he seemed shrunken.
Just when Vic thought the man was stricken mute, Marty said, “Where’re the kids?”
“They’re okay,” Vic assured him, “they’re safe.”
“I need them,” Marty said. His voice was no longer raspy, as it had been earlier, but wooden. “I need them.”
“Well, for God’s sake, old buddy, can’t you at least come in long enough to tell us what—”
“I need them now,” Marty said, “they’re mine.”
Not a wooden voice, after all, Vic Delorio realized, but tightly controlled, as if Marty was biting back anger or terror or some other strong emotion, afraid of losing his grip on himself. He trembled a little. Some of that rain on his face might have been sweat.
Coming forward along the hall, Kathy said, “Marty, what’s wrong?”
Vic had been about to ask the same question. Marty Stillwater was usually such an easy-going guy, relaxed, quick to smile, but now he was stiff, awkward. Whatever he’d been through tonight, it had left deep marks on him.
Before Marty could respond, Charlotte and Emily appeared at the end of the hall, where it opened on the family room. They must have slipped into their raincoats the minute they heard their father’s voice. They were buttoning up as they came.
Charlotte’s voice wavered as she said, “Daddy?”
At the sight of his daughters, Marty’s eyes flooded with tears. When Charlotte spoke to him, he took another step inside, so Vic could close the door.
The kids ran past Kathy, and Marty dropped to his knees on the foyer floor, and the kids just about flew into his arms hard enough to knock him over. As the three of them hugged one another, the girls talked at once: “Daddy, are you okay? We were so scared. Are you okay? I love you, Daddy. You were all yucky bloody. I told her it wasn’t your blood. Was it a burglar, was it Mrs. Sanchez, did she go berserk, did the mailman go berserk, who went berserk, are you all right, is Mommy all right, is it over now, why do nice people just suddenly go berserk anyway?” All three were chattering at once, in fact, because Marty kept talking through all of their questions: “My Charlotte, my Emily, my kids, I love you, I love you so much, I won’t let them steal you away again, never again.” He kissed their cheeks, their foreheads, hugged them fiercely, smoothed their hair with his shaky hands, and in general made over them as if he hadn’t seen them in years.
Kathy was smiling and at the same time crying quietly, daubing at her eyes with a yellow dish towel.
Vic supposed the reunion was touching, but he wasn’t as moved by it as his wife was, partly because Marty looked and sounded peculiar to him, not strange in the way he expected a man to be strange after fighting off an intruder in his house—if that was actually what had happened—but just . . . well, just strange. Odd. The things Marty was saying were slightly weird: “My Emily, Charlotte, mine, just as cute as in your picture, mine, we’ll be together, it’s my destiny.” His tone of voice was also unusual, too shaky and urgent if the ordeal was over, which the departure of the police surely indicated, but also too forced. Dramatic. Overly dramatic. He wasn’t speaking spontaneously but seemed to be playing a stage role, struggling to remember the right thing to say.
Everyone said creative people were strange, especially writers, and when Vic first met Martin Stillwater, he expected the novelist to be eccentric. But Marty had disappointed in that regard; he had been the most normal, levelheaded neighbor anyone could hope to have. Until now.
Getting to his feet, holding on to his daughters, Marty said, “We’ve got to go.” He turned toward the front door.
Vic said, “Wait a second, Marty, buddy, you can’t just blow out of here like that, with us so damned curious and all.”
Marty had let go of Charlotte only long enough to open the door. He grabbed her hand again as the wind whistled into the foyer and rattled the framed embroidery of bluebirds and spring flowers that hung on the wall.
When the writer stepped outside without responding to Vic in any way, Vic glanced at Kathy and saw her expression had changed. Tears still glistened on her cheeks, but her eyes were dry, and she looked puzzled.
So it isn’t just me, he thought.
He went outside and saw that the writer was already off the stoop, heading down the walk in the wind-tossed rain, holding the girls’ hands. The air was chilly. Frogs were singing, but their songs were unnatural, cold and tinny, like the grinding-racheting of stripped gears in frozen machinery. The sound of them made Vic want to go back inside, sit in front of the fire, and drink a lot of hot coffee with brandy in it.
“Damn it, Marty, wait a minute!”
The writer turned, looked back, with the girls cuddling close to his sides.
Vic said, “We’re your friends, we want to help. Whatever’s wrong, we want to help.”
“Nothing you can do, Victor.”
“Victor? Man, you know I hate ‘Victor,’ nobody calls me that, not even my dear old gray-haired mother if she knows what’s good for her.”
“Sorry . . . Vic. I’m just . . . I’ve got a lot on my mind.” With the girls in tow, he started down the walkway again.
A car was parked directly at the end of the walk. A new Buick. It looked bejeweled in the rain. Engine running. Lights on. Nobody inside.
Dashing off the stoop into the storm, which was no longer the cloudburst it had been but still drenching, Vic caught up with them. “This your car?”
“Yeah,” Marty said.
“Since when?”
“Bought it today.”
“Where’s Paige?”
“We’re going to meet her.” Marty’s face was as white as the skull hidden beneath it. He was trembling visibly, and his eyes looked strange in the glow of the street lamp. “Listen, Vic, the kids are going to be soaked to the skin.”
“I’m the one getting soaked,” Vic said. “They’ve got raincoats. Paige isn’t over at the house?”
“She left already.” Marty glanced worriedly at his house across the street, where lights still glowed at both the first- and second-floor windows. “We’re going to meet her.”
“You remember what you told me—”
“Vic, please—”
“I almost forgot myself, what you told me, and then you were on your way down the walk and I remembered.”
“We’ve got to go, Vic.”
“You told me not to give the kids to anyone if Paige wasn’t with
them. Not anyone. You remember what you said?”
Marty carried two large suitcases downstairs, into the kitchen.
The Beretta 9mm Parabellum was stuffed under the waistband of his chinos. It pressed uncomfortably against his belly. He wore a reindeer-pattern wool sweater, which concealed the gun. His red-and-black ski jacket was unzipped, so he could reach the pistol easily, just by dropping the bags.
Paige entered the kitchen behind him. She was carrying one suitcase and the Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun.
“Don’t open the outer door,” Marty told her as he went through the small connecting door between the kitchen and the dark garage.
He didn’t want the two-bay door open while they loaded the car because then it would become a point of vulnerability. As far as he knew, The Other might have crept back when the cops had left, might be outside at that very minute.
Following him into the garage, Paige switched on the overhead fluorescent panels. The long bulbs flickered but didn’t immediately catch because the starters were bad. Shadows leaped and spun along the walls, between the cars, in the open rafters.
Torturing his injured neck, Marty involuntarily turned his head sharply toward each leaping phantom. None of them had a face at all, let alone a face identical to his.
The fluorescent came on all the way. The hard white light, cold and flat as a winter-morning sun, brought the shadow dancers to a sudden halt.
He is within a few feet of the Buick, holding tightly to his kids’ hands, so close to getting away with them. His Charlotte. His Emily. His future, his destiny, so close, so infuriatingly close.
But Vic won’t let go. The guy is a leech. Follows them all the way from the house, as if oblivious of the rain, continuously babbling, asking questions, a nosy bastard.
So close to the car. The engine running, headlights on. Emily in one hand, Charlotte in the other, and they love him, they really love him. They were hugging and kissing him back there in the foyer, so happy to see him, his little girls. They know their daddy, their real daddy. If he can just get into the car, close the doors, and drive away, they’re his forever.
Maybe he can kill Vic, the nosy bastard. Then it would be so easy to escape. But he’s not sure he can pull it off.
“You told me not to give the kids to anyone if Paige wasn’t with them,” Vic says. “Not anyone. You remember what you said?”
He stares at Vic, not thinking about an answer as much as about wasting the son of a bitch. But he’s hungry again, shaky and weak in the knees, starting to crave the candy bars on the front seat, sugar, carbohydrates, more energy for the repairs he’s still undergoing.
“Marty? You remember what you said?”
He has no gun, either, which wouldn’t ordinarily be a problem. He’s been well-trained to kill with his hands. He might even have enough strength to do so, in spite of his condition and the fact that Vic appears to be tough enough to put up a fight.
“I thought it was strange,” Vic says, “but you told me, you said not even to give them to you unless Paige was with you.”
The problem is that the bastard does have a gun. And he’s suspicious.
Second by second, all hope of escape is crumbling, washing away in the rain. The girls are still holding his hand. He’s got a firm grip on them, yes, but they’re about to start slipping away, and he doesn’t know what to do. He gapes at Vic, mind spinning, as stuck for something to say as he was stuck for something to write when he sat in his office earlier in the day and tried to begin a new book.
Move, move, confront, challenge, grapple, and prevail.
Abruptly he realizes that to confront this problem and prevail, he needs to act like a friend, the way friends treat each other and talk with each other in the movies. That will allay all suspicion.
A river of movie memories rushes through his mind, and he flows with them. “Vic, good heavens, Vic, did I ... did I say that?” He imagines he is Jimmy Stewart because everyone likes and trusts Jimmy Stewart. “I don’t know what I meant, musta been outta my head with worry. Gosh, it’s just that . . . just that I’ve been so darned crazy scared with all this stuff that’s been happening, this crazy stuff.”
“What has been happening, Marty?”
Fearful but still gracious, halting but sincere, Jimmy Stewart in a Hitchcock film: “It’s complicated, Vic, it’s all . . . it’s screwy, unbelievable, I half don’t believe it myself. It’d take an hour to tell you, and I don’t have an hour, don’t have an hour, no sir, not now, I sure don’t. My kids, these kids, they’re in danger, Vic, and God help me if anything happens to them. I wouldn’t want to live.”
He can see that his new manner is having the desired effect. He hustles the kids the last few steps to the car, confident that the neighbor isn’t going to stop them.
But Vic follows, splashing through a puddle. “Can’t you tell me anything?”
Opening the back door of the Buick, ushering the girls inside, he turns to Vic once more. “I’m ashamed to say this, but it’s me put them in danger, me, their father, because of what I do for a living.”
Vic looks baffled. “You write books.”
“Vic, you know what an obsessive fan is?”
Vic’s eyes widen, then narrow as a gust of wind flings raindrops in his face. “Like that woman and Michael J. Fox a few years ago.”
“That’s it, that’s right, like Michael J. Fox.” The girls are both in the car. He slams the door. “Only it’s a guy bothering us, not some crazy woman, and tonight he goes too far, breaks in the house, he’s violent, I had to hurt him. Me. You imagine me having to hurt anybody, Vic? Now I’m afraid he’ll be back, and I’ve got to get the girls away from here.”
“My God,” Vic says, totally suckered by the tale.
“Now that’s all I have time to tell you, Vic, more than I have time to tell you, so you just . . . you just . . . you go back inside there before you catch your death of pneumonia. I’ll call you in a few days, I’ll tell you the rest.”
Vic hesitates. “If we can do anything to help—”
“Go on now, go on, I appreciate what you’ve done already, but the only thing more you can do to help is get out of this rain. Look at you, you’re drenched, for heaven’s sake. Go get out of this rain, so I don’t have to worry about you comin’ down with pneumonia on account of me.”
Joining Marty at the back of the BMW, where he had dropped the bags, Paige put down the third suitcase and the Mossberg. When he unlocked and raised the trunk lid, she saw the three boxes inside. “What’re those?”
He said, “Stuff we might need.”
“Like what?”
“I’ll explain later.” He heaved the suitcases into the trunk.
When only two of the three would fit, she said, “The stuff I’ve packed is all bare necessities. At least one box has to go.”
“No. I’ll put the smallest suitcase in the back seat, on the floor, under Emily’s feet. Her feet don’t reach the floor anyway.”
Halfway to the house, Vic looks back toward the Buick.
Still playing Jimmy Stewart: “Go on, Vic, go on now. There’s Kathy on the stoop, gonna catch her death, too, if you don’t get inside, the both of you.”
He turns away, rounds the back of the Buick, and only looks at the house again when he reaches the driver’s door.
Vic is on the stoop with Kathy, too far away now to prevent his escape, with or without a gun.
He waves at the Delorios, and they wave back. He gets into the Buick, behind the steering wheel, the oversize raincoat bunching up around him. He pulls the door shut.
Across the street, in his own house, lights are aglow upstairs and down. The imposter is in there with Paige. His beautiful Paige. He can’t do anything about that, not yet, not without a gun.
When he turns to look into the back seat, he sees that Charlotte and Emily have already buckled themselves into the safety harnesses. They are good girls. And so cute in their yellow raincoats and matching vinyl hats. Even in their pict
ure, they are not this cute.
They both start talking, Charlotte first: “Where’re we going, Daddy, where’d we get this car?”
Emily says, “Where’s Mommy?”
Before he can answer them, they launch an unmerciful salvo of questions:
“What happened, who’d you shoot, did you kill anybody? ”
“Was it Mrs. Sanchez?”
“Did she go berserk like Hannibal the Cannibal, Daddy, was she really whacko?” Charlotte asked.
Peering through the passenger-side window, he sees the Delorios go into their house together and close the front door.
Emily says, “Daddy, is it true?”
“Yeah, Daddy, is it true, what you told Mr. Delorio, like with Michael J. Fox, is it true? He’s cute.”
“Just be quiet,” he tells them impatiently. He shifts the Buick into gear, tramps the accelerator. The car bucks in place because he’s forgotten to release the handbrake, which he does, but then the car jolts forward and stalls.
“Why isn’t Mom with you?” Emily asks.
Charlotte’s excitement is growing, and the sound of her voice is making him dizzy: “Boy, you had blood all over your shirt, you sure must’ve shot somebody, it was really disgusting, maximum gross.”
The craving for food is intense. His hands are shaking so badly that the keys jangle noisily when he tries to restart the engine. Although the hunger won’t be nearly as bad this time as previously, he’ll be able to go only a few blocks before he’ll be overwhelmed with a need for those candy bars.
“Where’s Mommy?”
“He must’ve tried to shoot you first, did he try to shoot you first, did he have a knife, that would’ve been scary, a knife, what did he have, Daddy?”
The starter grinds, the car chugs, but the engine won’t turn over, as if he has flooded it.
“Where’s Mommy?”
“Did you actually fight him with your bare hands, take a knife away from him or something, Daddy, how could you do that, do you know karate, do you?”
“Where’s Mommy? I want to know where Mommy is.”
Rain thumps off the car roof. Pongs off the hood. The flooded engine is maddeningly unresponsive: ruuurrrrr-ruuurrrrr -ruuurrrrr. Windshield wipers thudding, thudding. Back and forth. Back and forth. Pounding incessantly. Girlish voices in the back seat, increasingly shrill. Like the strident buzzing of bees. Buzz-buzz-buzz. Has to concentrate to keep his trembling hand firmly on the key. Sweaty, spastic fingers keep slipping off. Afraid of overcompensating, maybe snap the key off in the ignition. Ruuurrrrr-ruuurrrrr. Starving. Need to eat. Need to get away from here. Thump. Pong. Incessant pounding. Pain revives in his nearly healed wounds. Hurts to breathe. Damn engine. Ruuurrrrr. Won’t start. Ruuurrrrr-ruuurrrrr. Daddy-Daddy-Daddy-Daddy -Daddy, buzzzzzzzzzzzz.
