by Dean Koontz
She wrinkled her face. “Does it really matter?”
“No, I guess not. Basket, gasket, whatever you say.”
Emily squirmed out of his arms and jumped down from the bed. “I’m going to the potty,” she announced.
“That’s a start. Then take a shower, brush your teeth, and get dressed.”
Charlotte was, as usual, slower to come fully awake. By the time Emily was closing the bathroom door, Charlotte had only managed to push back the blankets and sit on the edge of her bed. She was scowling down at her bare feet.
Marty sat beside her. “They’re called ‘toes.’ ”
“Mmmm,” she said.
“You need them to fill out the ends of your socks.”
She yawned.
Marty said, “You’ll need them a lot more if you’re going to be a ballet dancer. But for most other professions, however, they’re not essential. So if you aren’t going to be a ballet dancer, then you could have them surgically removed, just the biggest ones or all ten, that’s entirely up to you.”
She cocked her head and gave him a Daddy’s-being-cute -so-let’s-humor-him look. “I think I’ll keep them.”
“Whatever you want,” he said, and kissed her forehead.
“My teeth feel furry,” she complained. “So does my tongue.”
“Maybe during the night you ate a cat.”
She was awake enough to giggle.
In the bathroom the toilet flushed, and a second later the door opened. Emily said, “Charlotte, you want privacy for the potty, or can I shower now?”
“Go ahead and shower,” Charlotte said. “You smell.”
“Yeah? Well, you stink.”
“You reek.”
“That’s because I want to,” Emily said, probably because she couldn’t think of a comeback word for “reek.”
“My gracious young daughters, such little ladies.”
As Emily disappeared back into the bathroom and began to fiddle with the shower controls, Charlotte said, “Gotta get this fuzz off my teeth.” She got up and went to the open door. At the threshold she turned to Marty. “Daddy, do we have to go to school today?”
“Not today.”
“I didn’t think so.” She hesitated. “Tomorrow?”
“I don’t know, honey. Probably not.”
Another hesitation. “Will we be going to school again ever?”
“Well, sure, of course.”
She stared at him for too long, then nodded and went into the bathroom.
Her question rattled Marty. He wasn’t sure if she was merely fantasizing about a life without school, as most kids did now and then, or whether she was expressing a more genuine concern about the depth of the trouble that had rolled over them.
He had heard the television come on in the other room while he had been sitting on the edge of the bed with Charlotte, so he knew Paige was awake. He got up to go say good morning to her.
As he was approaching the connecting door, Paige called to him. “Marty, quick, look at this.”
When he hurried into the other room, he saw her standing in front of the TV. She was watching an early-morning news program.
“It’s about us,” she said.
He recognized their own home on the screen. A woman reporter was standing in the street, her back to the house, facing the camera.
Marty squatted in front of the television and turned up the sound.
“. . . so the mystery remains, and the police would very much like to talk to Martin Stillwater this morning . . .”
“Oh, this morning they want to talk,” he said disgustedly.
Paige shushed him.
“. . . an irresponsible hoax by a writer too eager to advance his career, or something far more sinister? Now that the police laboratory has confirmed the large amount of blood in the Stillwater house is indeed of human origin, the need for the authorities to answer that question has overnight become more urgent.”
That was the end of the piece. As the reporter gave her name and location, Marty registered the word “LIVE” in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. Although the four letters had been there all along, the importance of them hadn’t registered immediately.
“Live?” Marty said. “They don’t send reporters out live unless the story’s ongoing.”
“It is ongoing,” Paige said. She was standing with her arms folded across her chest, frowning down at the television. “The lunatic is still out there somewhere.”
“I mean, like a robbery in progress or a hostage situation with a SWAT team waiting to storm the place. By TV standards, this is boring, no action, no one on scene to shove a microphone at, just an empty house for visuals. It’s not the kind of story they use for a live spot, too expensive and no excitement.”
The broadcast had gone back to the studio. To his surprise, the anchorman wasn’t one of the second-string newsreaders from a Los Angeles station, who would ordinarily have pulled duty on an early-morning program, but a well-known network face.
Astonished, Marty said, “This is national. Since when does a breaking-and-entry report rate national news?”
“You were assaulted too,” Paige said.
“So what? These days, there’s a worse crime than this every ten seconds somewhere in the country.”
“But you’re a celebrity.”
“The hell I am.”
“You may not like it, but you are.”
“I’m not that much of a celebrity, not with only two paperback bestsellers. You know how hard it is to get on this program for one of their chat segments, as an invited guest?” He rapped a knuckle against the face of the anchorman on the screen. “Harder than getting an invitation to a state dinner at the White House! Even if I hired a publicist who’d sold his soul to the devil, he couldn’t get me on this program, Paige. I’m just not big enough. I’m a nobody to them.”
“So . . . what’re you saying?”
He went to the window that provided a view of the parking lot, and parted the draperies. Pale sunlight. Steady traffic out on Pacific Coast Highway. The trees stirred lazily in the mildest of on-shore breezes.
Nothing in the scene was threatening or unusual, yet it seemed ominous to him. He felt that he was looking out at a world that was no longer familiar, a world changed for the worse. The differences were indefinable, subjective rather than objective, perceptible to the spirit more than to the senses but nonetheless real. And the pace of that dark change was accelerating. Soon the view from this room or any other would be, to him, like something seen through the porthole of a spacecraft on a far alien planet which superficially resembled his own world but which was, below its deceptive surface, infinitely strange and inimical to human life.
“I don’t think,” he said, “that the police would ordinarily have completed their tests on those blood samples so quickly, and I know it’s not standard practice to release crime-lab results so casually to the media.” He let the draperies fall into place and turned to Paige, whose brow was furrowed with worry. “National news? Live, on the scene? I don’t know what the hell is happening, Paige, but it’s even stranger than I thought it was last night.”
While Paige showered, Marty pulled up a chair in front of the television and channel-hopped, searching for other news programs. He caught the end of a second story about himself on a local channel—and then a third piece, complete, on a national show.
He was trying to guard against paranoia, but he had the distinct impression that both stories suggested, without making accusations, that the falsity of his statement to the Mission Viejo Police was a foregone conclusion and that his real motive was either to sell more books or something darker and weirder than mere career-pumping. Both programs made use of the photograph from the current issue of People, in which he resembled a movie zombie with glowing eyes, lurching out of shadows, violent and demented. And both pointedly mentioned the three guns of which he’d been relieved by the police, as if he might be a suburban survivalist living atop a bunker packed solid with arm
s and ammunition. Toward the end of the third report, he thought an implication was made to the effect that he might even be dangerous, although it was so smooth and so subtly inserted that it was more a matter of the reporter’s tone of voice and expressions than any words in the script.
Rattled, he switched off the television.
For a while he stared at the blank screen. The gray of the dead monitor matched his mood.
After everyone was showered and dressed, the girls got in the back seat of the BMW and dutifully put on their seatbelts while their parents stowed the luggage in the trunk.
When Marty slammed the trunk lid and locked it, Paige spoke to him quietly, so Charlotte and Emily couldn’t hear. “You really think we have to go this far, do these things, it’s really that bad?”
“I don’t know. Like I told you, I’ve been brooding about this ever since I woke up, since three o’clock this morning, and I still don’t know if I’m over-reacting.”
“These are serious steps to take, even risky.”
“It’s just that . . . as strange as this already is, with The Other and everything he said to me, whatever underlies it all is stranger still. More dangerous than one lunatic with a gun. Deadlier and a lot bigger than that. Something so big it’ll crush us if we try to stand up to it. That’s how I felt in the middle of the night, afraid, more scared even than when he had the kids in his car. And after what I saw on TV this morning, I’m more—not less—inclined to go with my gut feelings.”
He realized that his expression of dread was extreme, with an unmistakable flavor of paranoia. But he was no alarmist, and he was confident that his instincts could be trusted. Events had dissolved all of his doubts about his mental well-being.
He wished he could identify an enemy other than the improbable dead-ringer, for he knew intuitively that there was another enemy, and it would be comforting to have it defined. The Mafia, Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, consortiums of evil bankers, the board of directors of some ferociously greedy international conglomerate, right-wing generals intent on establishing a military dictatorship, a cabal of insane Mideastern zealots, mad scientists intent on blowing the world to smithereens for the sheer hell of it, or Satan himself in all his horned splendor—any of the standard villains of television dramas and countless novels, regardless of how unlikely and clichéd, would be preferable to an adversary without face or form or name.
Chewing her lower lip, lost in thought, Paige let her gaze travel across the breeze-ruffled trees, other parked cars, and the front of the motel, before tilting her head back and looking up at three shrieking sea gulls that wheeled across the mostly blue and uncaring azure sky.
“You sense it too,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Oppressive. We’re not being watched, but the feeling is almost the same.”
“More than that,” she said. “Different. The world has changed—or the way I look at it.”
“Me too.”
“Something’s been . . . lost.”
And we’ll never find it again, he thought.
2
The Ritz-Carlton was a remarkable hotel, exquisitely tasteful, with generous applications of marble, limestone, granite, quality art, and antiques throughout its public areas. The enormous flower arrangements, on display wherever one turned, were the most artfully fashioned that Oslett had ever seen. Attired in subdued uniforms, courteous, omnipresent, the staff seemed to outnumber the guests. All in all, it reminded Oslett of home, the Connecticut estate on which he had been raised, although the family mansion was larger than the Ritz-Carlton, was furnished with antiques only of museum quality, had a staff-to-family ratio of six to one, and featured a landing pad large enough to accommodate the military helicopters in which the President of the United States and his retinue sometimes traveled.
The two-bedroom suite with spacious living room, in which Drew Oslett and Clocker were quartered, offered every amenity from a fully stocked bar to marble shower stalls so spacious that it would have been possible for a visiting ballet dancer to practice entrechats during his morning ablutions. The towels were not by Pratesi, as were those he had used all his life, but they were good Egyptian cotton, soft and absorbent.
By 7:50 Tuesday morning, Oslett had dressed in a white cotton shirt with whalebone buttons by Theophilus Shirtmakers of London, a navy-blue cashmere blazer crafted with sublime attention to detail by his personal tailor in Rome, gray wool slacks, black oxfords (an eccentric touch) handmade by an Italian cobbler living in Paris, and a club tie in stripes of navy, maroon, and gold. The color of his silk pocket handkerchief precisely matched the gold in his tie.
Thus attired, his mood elevated by his sartorial perfection, he went looking for Clocker. He didn’t desire the big man’s company, of course; he just preferred, for his own peace of mind, to know what Clocker was up to at all times. And he nurtured the hope that one blessed day he would discover Karl Clocker dead, felled by a massive cardiac infarction, cerebral hemorrhage, or an alien death ray like those about which the big man was always reading.
Clocker was in a patio chair on the balcony off the living room, ignoring a breathtaking view of the Pacific, his nose stuck in the last chapter of Shape-Changing Gynecologists of the Dark Galaxy, or whatever the hell it was called. He was wearing the same hat with the duck feather, tweed sportcoat, and Hush Puppies, although he had on new purple socks, fresh slacks, and a clean white shirt. He’d changed into a different harlequin-pattern sweater-vest, as well, this one in blue, pink, yellow, and gray. Though he was not sporting a tie, so much black hair bristled from the open neck of his shirt that, at a glance, he appeared to be wearing a cravat.
After failing to respond to Oslett’s first “good morning, ” Clocker replied to the repetition of those words with the improbable split-finger greeting that characters gave each other on Star Trek, his attention still riveted to the paperback. If Oslett had possessed a chainsaw or cleaver, he would have severed Clocker’s hand at the wrist and tossed it into the ocean. He wondered if room service would send up a suitably sharp instrument from the chef’s collection of kitchen cutlery.
The day was warmish, already seventy. Blue skies and balmy breezes were a welcome change from the chill of the previous night.
Promptly at eight o’clock—barely in time to prevent Oslett from being driven mad by the lulling cries of sea gulls, the tranquilizing rumble of the incoming combers, and the faint laughter of the early surfers paddling their boards out to sea—the Network representative arrived to brief them on developments. He was a far different item from the hulking advance man who’d driven them from the airport to the Ritz-Carlton several hours earlier. Savile Row suit. Club tie. Good Bally wingtips. One look at him was all Oslett needed to be certain that he owned no article of clothing on which was printed a photo of Madonna with her breasts bared.
He said his name was Peter Waxhill, and he was probably telling the truth. He was high enough in the organization to know Oslett’s and Clocker’s real names—although he had booked them into the hotel as John Galbraith and John Maynard Keynes—so there was no reason for him to conceal his own.
Waxhill appeared to be in his early forties, ten years older than Oslett, but the razor-cut hair at his temples was feathered with gray. At six feet, he was tall but not overbearing; he was slim but fit, handsome but not dauntingly so, charming but not familiar. He handled himself not merely as if he had been a diplomat for decades but as if he had been genetically engineered for that career.
After introducing himself and commenting on the weather, Waxhill said, “I took the liberty of inquiring with room service if you’d had breakfast, and as they said you hadn’t, I’m afraid I took the further liberty of ordering for the three of us, so we can breakfast and discuss business simultaneously. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” Oslett said, impressed by the man’s suave-ness and efficiency.
No sooner had he responded than the suite doorbell rang, and Waxhill ushered in two waiters
pushing a serving cart covered with a white tablecloth and stacked with dishes. In the center of the living room, the waiters raised hidden leaves on the cart, converting it into a round table, and distributed chargers-plates-napkins -cups-saucers-glassware-flatware with the grace and speed of magicians manipulating playing cards. Together they caused to appear a variety of serving dishes from bottomless compartments under the table, until suddenly breakfast appeared as if from thin air: scrambled eggs with red peppers, bacon, sausages, kippers, toast, croissants, hot-house strawberries accompanied by brown sugar and small pitchers of heavy cream, fresh orange juice, and a silver-plated thermos-pot of coffee.
Waxhill complimented the waiters, thanked them, tipped them, and signed for the bill, remaining in motion the whole time, so that he was returning the room-service ticket and hotel pen to them as they were crossing the threshold into the corridor.
When Waxhill closed the door and returned to the table, Oslett said, “Harvard or Yale?”
“Yale. And you?”
“Princeton. Then Harvard.”
“In my case, Yale and then Oxford.”
“The President went to Oxford,” Oslett noted.
“Did he indeed,” Waxhill said, raising his eyebrows, pretending this was news. “Well, Oxford endures, you know.”
Apparently having finished the final chapter of Planet of the Gastrointestinal Parasites, Karl Clocker entered from the balcony, a walking embarrassment as far as Oslett was concerned. Waxhill allowed himself to be introduced to the Trekker, shook hands, and gave every impression he was not choking on revulsion or hilarity.
They pulled up three straight-backed occasional chairs and sat down to breakfast. Clocker didn’t take off his hat.
As they transferred food from the serving dishes to their plates, Waxhill said, “Overnight, we’ve picked up a few interesting bits of background on Martin Stillwater, the most important of which relates to his oldest daughter’s hospitalization five years ago.”
“What was wrong with her?” Oslett asked.
“They didn’t have a clue at first. Based on the symptoms, they suspected cancer. Charlotte—that’s the daughter, she was four years old at the time—was in rather desperate shape for a while, but it eventually proved to be an unusual blood-chemistry imbalance, quite treatable.”
