by Dean Koontz
Frustration to anger, anger to hatred, hatred to violence. Violence sometimes soothes.
Itching to hit something, anything, he turns in his seat, glares back at the girls, screams at them, “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”
They are stunned. As if he has never spoken to them like this before.
The little one bites her lip, can’t bear to look at him, turns her face to the side window.
“Quiet, for Christ’s sake, be quiet!”
When he faces forward again and tries to start the car, the older girl bursts into tears as if she’s a baby. Wipers thudding, starter grinding, engine wallowing, the steady thump of rain, and now her whiny weeping, so piercing, grating, just too much to bear. He screams wordlessly at her, loud enough to drown out her crying and all the other sounds for a moment. He considers climbing into the back seat with the damn shrieking little thing, make it stop, hit it, shake it, clamp one hand over its nose and mouth until it can’t make a sound of any kind, until it finally stops crying, stops struggling, just stops, stops—
—and abruptly the engine chugs, turns over, purrs sweetly.
“I’ll be right back,” Paige said as Marty put the suitcase on the floor behind the driver’s seat of the BMW.
He looked up in time to see that she was heading into the house. “Wait, what’re you doing?”
“Got to turn off all the lights.”
“To hell with that. Don’t go back in there.”
It was a moment from fiction, straight out of a novel or movie, and Marty recognized it as such. Having packed, having gotten as far as the car, that close to escaping unscathed, they would return to the house to complete an inessential task, confident of their safety, and somehow the psychopath would be in there, either because he had returned while they were in the garage or because he had successfully hidden in some cleverly concealed niche throughout the police search of the premises. They would move from room to room, switching off the lights, letting darkness spill through the house—whereupon the look-alike would materialize, a shadow out of shadows, wielding a large butcher’s knife taken from the rack of implements in their own kitchen, slashing, stabbing, killing one or both of them.
Marty knew real life was neither as extravagantly colorful as the most eventful fiction nor half as drab as the average academic novel—and less predictable than either. His fear of returning to the house to switch off the lights was irrational, the product of a too-fertile imagination and a novelist’s predilection to anticipate drama, malevolence, and tragedy in every turn of human affairs, in every change of weather, plan, dream, hope, or roll of dice.
Nevertheless, they weren’t going back into the damn house. No way in hell.
“Leave the lights on,” he said. “Lock up, raise the garage door, let’s get the kids and get out of here.”
Maybe Paige had lived with a novelist long enough for her own imagination to be corrupted, or maybe she remembered all of the blood in the upstairs hall. For whatever reason, she didn’t protest that leaving so many lights on would be a waste of electricity. She thumbed the button to activate the Genie lift, and shut the door to the kitchen with her other hand.
As Marty closed and locked the trunk of the BMW, the garage door finished rising. With a final clatter it settled into the full-open position.
He looked out at the rainy night, his right hand straying to the butt of the Beretta at his waistband. His imagination was still churning, and he was prepared to see the indomitable look-alike coming up the driveway.
What he saw, instead, was worse than any image conjured by his imagination. A car was parked across the street in front of the Delorios’ house. It wasn’t the Delorios’ car. Marty had never seen it before. The headlights were on, though the driver was having difficulty getting the engine to turn over; it cranked and cranked. Although the driver was only a dark shape, the small pale oval of a child’s face was visible at the rear window, staring out from the back seat. Even at a distance, Marty was sure that the little girl in the Buick was Emily.
At the connecting door to the kitchen, Paige was fumbling for house keys in the pockets of her corduroy jacket.
Marty was in the grip of paralytic shock. He couldn’t call out to Paige, couldn’t move.
Across the street, the engine of the Buick caught, chugged consumptively, then roared fully to life. Clouds of crystallized fumes billowed from the exhaust pipe.
Marty didn’t realize he’d shattered the paralysis and begun to move until he was out of the garage, in the middle of the driveway, sprinting through the cold rain toward the street. He felt as though he had teleported thirty feet in a tiny fraction of a second, but it was just that, operating on instinct and sheer animal terror, his body was ahead of his mind.
The Beretta was in his hand. He didn’t recall drawing it out of his waistband.
The Buick pulled away from the curb and Marty turned left to follow it. The car was moving slowly because the driver had not yet realized that he was being pursued.
Emily was still visible. Her frightened face was now pressed tightly to the glass. She was staring directly at her father.
Marty was closing on the car, ten feet from the rear bumper. Then it accelerated smoothly away from him, much faster than he could run. Its tires parted the puddles with a percolative burble and plash.
Like a passenger on Charon’s gondola, Emily was being ferried not just along a street but across the river Styx, into the land of the dead.
A black wave of despair washed over Marty, but his heart began to pound even more fiercely than before, and he found a strength he had not imagined he possessed. He ran harder than ever, splashing through puddles, feet hammering the blacktop with what seemed like jackhammer force, pumping his arms, head tucked down, eyes always on the prize.
At the end of the block the Buick slowed. It came to a full stop at the intersection.
Gasping, Marty caught up with it. Back bumper. Rear fender. Rear door.
Emily’s face was at the window.
She was looking up at him now.
His senses were as heightened by terror as if he’d taken mind-altering drugs. He was hallucinogenically aware of every detail of the scores of raindrops on the glass between himself and his daughter—their curved and pendulous shapes, the bleak whorls and shards of light from the street lamps reflected in their quivering surfaces—as if each of those droplets was equal in importance to anything else in the world. Likewise, he saw the interior of the car not just as a dark blur but as an elaborate dimensional tapestry of shadows in countless hues of gray, blue, black. Beyond Emily’s pale face, in that intricate needlework of dusk and gloom, was another figure, a second child: Charlotte.
Just as he drew even with the driver’s door and reached for the handle, the car began to move again. It swung right, through the intersection.
Marty slipped and almost fell on the wet pavement. He regained his balance, held on to the gun, and scrambled after the Buick as it turned into the cross street.
The driver was looking to the right, unaware of Marty on his left. He was wearing a black coat. Only the back of his head was visible through the rain-streaked side window. His hair was darker than Vic Delorio’s.
Because the car was still moving slowly as it completed the turn, Marty caught up with it again, breathing strenuously, ears filled with the hard drumming of his heart. He didn’t reach for the door this time because maybe it was locked. He would squander the element of surprise by trying it. Raising the Beretta, he aimed at the back of the man’s head.
The kids could be hit by a ricochet, flying glass. He had to risk it. Otherwise, they were lost forever.
Though there was little chance the driver was Vic Delorio or another innocent person, Marty couldn’t squeeze the trigger without knowing for sure at whom he was shooting. Still moving, paralleling the car, he shouted, “Hey, hey, hey!”
The driver snapped his head around to look out the side window.
Along the barrel of the pist
ol, Marty stared at his own face. The Other. The glass before him seemed like a cursed mirror in which his reflection was not confined to precise mimicry but was free to reveal more vicious emotions than anyone would ever want the world to see: as it confronted him, that looking-glass face clenched with hatred and fury.
Startled, the driver had let his foot slip off the accelerator. For the briefest moment the Buick slowed.
No more than four feet from the window, Marty squeezed off two rounds. In the instant before the resonant thunder of the first gunshot echoed off an infinitude of wet surfaces across the rainswept night, he thought he saw the driver drop to the side and down, still holding the steering wheel with at least one hand but trying to get his head out of the line of fire. The muzzle flashed, and shattering glass obscured the bastard’s fate.
Even as the second shot boomed close after the first, the car tires shrieked. The Buick bolted forward, as a mean horse might explode out of a rodeo gate.
He ran after the car, but it blew away from him with a backwash of turbulent air and exhaust fumes. The look-alike was still alive, perhaps injured but still alive and determined to escape.
Rocketing eastward, the Buick began to angle onto the wrong side of the two-lane street. On that trajectory, it was going to jump the curb and crash into someone’s front lawn.
In his treacherous mind’s eye, Marty imagined the car hitting the curb at high speed, flipping, rolling, slamming into one of the trees or the side of a house, bursting into flames, his daughters trapped in a coffin of blazing steel. In the darkest corner of his mind, he could even hear them screaming as the fire seared the flesh from their bones.
Then, as he pursued it, the Buick swung back across the center line, into its own lane. It was still moving fast, too fast, and he had no hope of catching it.
But he ran as if it was his own life for which he was running, his throat beginning to burn again as he breathed through his open mouth, chest aching, needles of pain lancing the length of his legs. His right hand was clamped so fiercely around the butt of the Beretta that the muscles in his arm throbbed from wrist to shoulder. And with each desperate stride, the names of his daughters echoed through his mind in an unvoiced scream of loss and grief.
When their father shouted at them to shut up, Charlotte was as hurt as if he’d slapped her face, for in her nine years, nothing she had said and no stunt she’d pulled had ever before made him so angry. Yet she didn’t understand what had infuriated him because all she’d done was ask some questions. His scolding of her was so unfair; and the fact that he had never been unfair in her recollection only added sting to his reprimand. He seemed angry with her for no other reason than that she was herself, as if something about her very nature suddenly repelled and disgusted him, which was an unbearable thought because she couldn’t change who she was, what she was, and maybe her own father was never again going to like her. He would never be able to take back the look of rage and hatred on his face, and she would never be able to forget it as long as she lived. Everything had changed between them forever. All of this she thought and understood in a second, even before he had finished shouting at them, and she burst into tears.
Dimly aware that the car finally started, pulled away from the curb, and reached the end of the block, Charlotte rose partway out of her misery only when Em turned from the window, grabbed her arm, and shook her. Em whispered fiercely, “Daddy.”
At first, Charlotte thought Em was unjustly peeved with her for making Daddy angry and was warning her to be quiet. But before she could launch into sisterly combat, she realized there had been joyful excitement in Em’s voice.
Something important was happening.
Blinking back tears, she saw that Em was already pressed to the window again. As the car pulled through the intersection and turned right, Charlotte followed the direction of her sister’s gaze.
As soon as she spotted Daddy running alongside the car, she knew he was her real father. The daddy behind the wheel—the daddy with the hateful look on his face, who screamed at children for no reason—was a fake. Somebody else. Or some thing else, maybe like in the movies, grown out of a seed pod from another galaxy, one day just a lot of ugly goop and the next day all formed into Daddy’s look-alike. She suffered no confusion at the sight of two identical fathers, had no trouble knowing which was the real one, as an adult might have, because she was a kid and kids knew these things.
Keeping pace with the car as it turned into the next street, pointing the gun at the window of the driver’s door, Daddy yelled, “Hey, hey, hey!”
As the fake daddy realized who was shouting at him, Charlotte reached out as far as her safety belt would allow, grabbed a handful of Em’s coat, and yanked her sister away from the window. “Get down, cover your face, quick!”
They leaned toward each other, cuddled together, shielded each other’s heads with their arms.
BAM!
The gunfire was the loudest sound Charlotte had ever heard. Her ears rang.
She almost started to cry again, in fear this time, but she had to be tough for Em. At a time like this a big sister had to think about her responsibilities.
BAM!
Even as the second shot boomed a heartbeat after the first, Charlotte knew the fake daddy had been hit because he squealed with pain and cursed, spitting out the S-word over and over. He was still in good enough shape to drive, and the car leaped forward.
They seemed out of control, swinging to the left, going very fast, then turning sharply back to the right.
Charlotte sensed they were going to crash into something. If they weren’t smashed to smithereens in the wreck, she and Em had to be ready to move fast when they came to a stop, get out of the car, and out of the way so Daddy could deal with the fake.
She had no doubt Daddy could handle the other man. Though she wasn’t old enough to have read any of his novels, she knew he wrote about killers and guns and car chases, just this sort of thing, so he would know exactly what to do. The fake would be real sorry he had messed with Daddy; he would wind up in prison for a long, long time.
The car swerved back to the left, and in the front seat the fake made small bleating sounds of pain that reminded her of the cries of Wayne the Gerbil that time when somehow he’d gotten one small foot stuck in the mechanism of his exercise wheel. But Wayne never cursed, of course, and this man was cursing more angrily than ever, not just using the S-word but God’s name in vain, plus all sorts of words she had never heard before but knew were unquestionably bad language of the worst kind.
Keeping a grip on Em, Charlotte felt along her seatbelt with her free hand, seeking the release button, found it, and held her thumb lightly on it.
The car jolted over something, and the driver hit the brakes. They slid sideways on the wet street. The back end of the car swung around to the left, and her tummy turned over as if they were on an amusement-park ride.
The driver’s side of the car slammed hard into something, but not hard enough to kill them. She jammed her thumb on the release button, and her safety belt retracted. Fumbling at Em’s waist—“Your belt, get your belt off!”—she found her sister’s release button in a second or two.
Em’s door was jammed against whatever they had hit. They had to go out Charlotte’s side.
She pulled Em across her. Pushed open the door. Shoved Em through it.
At the same time, Em was pulling her, as if Em herself was the one doing the rescuing, and Charlotte wanted to say, Hey, who’s the big sister here?
The fake daddy saw or heard them getting out. He lunged for them across the back of the front seat—“Little bitch!”—and grabbed Charlotte’s floppy rain hat.
She scooted out from under the hat, through the door, into the night and rain, tumbling onto her hands and knees on the blacktop. Looking up, she saw that Em was already tottering across the street toward the far sidewalk, wobbling like a baby that had just learned to walk. Charlotte scrambled up and ran after her sister.
&
nbsp; Somebody was shouting their names.
Daddy.
Their real Daddy.
Three-quarters of a block away, the speeding Buick hit a broken tree branch in a huge puddle and slid on a churning foam of water.
Marty was heartened by the chance to close the gap but horrified by the thought of what might happen to his daughters. The mental film clip of a car crash didn’t just play through his mind again; it had never stopped playing. Now it seemed about to be translated out of his imagination, the way scenes were translated from mental images into words on the page, except that this time he was taking it one large step further, leaping over type-script, translating directly from imagination into reality. He had the crazy idea that the Buick wouldn’t have gone out of control if he hadn’t pictured it doing so, and that his daughters would burn to death in the car merely because he had imagined it happening.
The Buick came to a sudden and noisy stop against the side of a parked Ford Explorer. Though the clang of the collision jarred the night, the car didn’t roll or burn.
To Marty’s astonishment, the right-side rear passenger door flew open, and his kids erupted like a pair of joke snakes exploding from a tin can.
As far as he could tell, they weren’t seriously hurt, and he shouted at them to get away from the Buick. But they didn’t need his advice. They had an agenda of their own, and immediately scrambled across the street, looking for cover.
He kept running. Now that the girls were out of the car, his fury was greater than his fear. He wanted to hurt the driver, kill him. It wasn’t a hot rage but cold, a mindless reptilian savagery that scared him even as he surrendered to it.
