Mr. Murder

by Dean Koontz

  “Forget it,” Karl said. “You’re on a new voyage of discovery, outward to worlds unknown.”

  “And you’ve got a new name too?”

  “Yes.”

  “None of my business what it is, huh?”

  “Exactly.”

  Karl left that same afternoon, an hour before dusk.

  As they accompanied him to the Range Rover, he withdrew an envelope from an inside pocket of his tweed jacket and handed it to Paige, explaining that it was the grant deed to the cabin and the land on which it stood.

  “I bought and prepared two getaway properties, one at each end of the country, so I’d be prepared for this day when it came. Owned them both under untraceable false names. I’ve transferred this one to Ann and John Gault, since I can only use one of them.”

  He seemed embarrassed when Paige hugged him.

  “Karl,” Marty said, “what would have happened to us without you? We owe you everything.”

  The big man was actually blushing. “You’d have done all right, somehow. You’re survivors. Anything I’ve done for you, it’s only what anyone would have.”

  “Not these days,” Marty said.

  “Even these days,” Karl said, “there are more good people than not. I really believe that. I have to.”

  At the Range Rover, Charlotte and Emily kissed Karl goodbye because they all knew, without having to say it, that they would never see him again.

  Emily gave him Peepers. “You need someone,” she said. “You’re all alone. Besides, he’ll never get used to calling me Suzie Lori. He’s your pet now.”

  “Thank you, Emily. I’ll take good care of him.”

  When Karl got behind the wheel and closed the door, Marty leaned in the open window. “If we wreck the Network, you think they’ll ever put it back together again?”

  “It or something like it,” Karl said without hesitation.

  Unsettled, Marty said, “I guess we’ll know if they do ... when they cancel all elections.”

  “Oh, elections would never be canceled, at least not in any way that was ever apparent,” Karl said as he started the Rover. “They’d go on just as usual, with competing political parties, conventions, debates, bitter campaigns, all the hoopla and shouting. But every one of the candidates would be selected from Network loyalists. If they ever do take over, John, only they will know.”

  Marty was suddenly as cold as he had ever been in the blizzard on Tuesday night.

  Karl raised one hand in the split-finger greeting that Marty recognized from Star Trek. “Live long and prosper, ” he said, and left them.

  Marty stood in the gravel driveway, watching the Rover until it reached the county road, turned left, and dwindled out of sight.

  9

  That December and throughout the following year, when the headlines screamed of the Network scandal, treason, political conspiracy, assassination, and one world crisis after another, John and Ann Gault didn’t pay as much attention to the newspapers and the television news as they had expected they would. They had new lives to build, which was not a simple undertaking.

  Ann cut her blond hair short and dyed it brown. Before meeting any of their neighbors living in the scattered cabins and ranches of that rural area, John grew a beard; not to his surprise, it came in more than half gray, and a lot of gray began to show up on his head, as well.

  A simple tint changed Rebecca’s hair from blond to auburn, and Suzie Lori was sufficiently transformed with a new and much shorter style. Both girls were growing fast. Time would swiftly blur the resemblance between them and whoever they once might have been.

  Remembering to use new names was easy compared to creating and committing to memory a simple but credible false past. They made a game of it, rather like Look Who’s the Monkey Now.

  The nightmares were persistent. Though the enemy they had known was as comfortable in daylight as not, they irrationally viewed each nightfall with an uneasiness that people had felt in ancient and more superstitious times. And sudden noises made everybody jump.

  Christmas Eve had been the first time that John dared to hope they would really be able to imagine a new life and find happiness again. It was then that Suzie Lori inquired about the popcorn.

  “What popcorn?” John asked.

  “Santa’s evil twin put ten pounds in the microwave,” she said, “even though that much corn wouldn’t fit. But even if it would fit, what happened when it started to pop?”

  That night, story hour was held for the first time in more than three weeks. Thereafter, it became routine.

  In late January, they felt safe enough to register Rebecca and Suzie Lori in the public school system.

  By spring, there were new friends and a growing store of Gault-family memories that were not fabricated.

  Because they had seventy thousand in cash and owned their humble house outright, they were under little pressure to find work. They also had four boxes full of the first editions of the early novels of Martin Stillwater. The cover of Time magazine had asked a question that would never be answered—Where is Martin Stillwater?—and first editions that had once been worth a couple of hundred dollars each on the collectors’ market had begun selling, by spring, for five times that price; they would probably continue to appreciate faster than blue-chip investments in the years to come. Sold one or two at a time, in far cities, they would keep the family nest egg fat during lean years.

  John presented himself to new neighbors and acquaintances as a former insurance salesman from New York City. He claimed to have come into a substantial though not enormous inheritance. He was indulging a lifelong dream of living in a rural setting, struggling to be a poet. “If I don’t start selling some poems in a few years, maybe I’ll write a novel,” he sometimes said, “and if that doesn’t turn out right—then I’ll start worrying.”

  Ann was content to be seen as a housewife; however, freed from the pressures of the past—troubled clients and freeway commuting—she rediscovered a talent for drawing that she had not tapped since high school. She began doing illustrations for the poems and stories in her husband’s ring-bound notebook of original compositions, which he had been writing for years: Stories for Rebecca and Suzie Lori.

  They had lived in Wyoming five years when Santa’s Evil Twin by John Gault with illustrations by Ann Gault became a smash Christmas bestseller. They allowed no jacket photo of author and artist. They politely declined offers of promotional tours and interviews, preferring a quiet life and the chance to do more books for children.

  The girls remained healthy, grew tall, and Rebecca began selectively dating boys, all of whom Suzie Lori found wanting in one way or another.

  Sometimes John and Ann felt they lived too much in a fantasy, and they made an effort to keep up with current events, watching for signs and portents that they didn’t even like to discuss with each other. But the world was endlessly troubled and tedious. Too few people seemed able to imagine life without the crushing hand of one government or another, one war or another, one form of hatred or another, so the Gaults always lost interest in the news and returned to the world they imagined for themselves.

  One day a paperback novel arrived in the mail. The plain brown envelope bore no return address, and no note of any kind was included with the book. It was a science-fiction novel set in the far future, when humankind had conquered the stars but not all of its problems. The title was The Clone Rebellion. John and Ann read it. They found it to be admirably well-imagined, and they regretted that they would never have the opportunity to express their admiration to the author.

  NEW AFTERWORD BY DEAN KOONTZ

  AFTERWORD

  The most frequently asked question posed to every writer by readers is May I commission you to embroider a complete set of bed linens with the imperial crest of Napoleon? Some writers, lacking any talent for embroidery, must regretfully decline the commission and resort to some other work— mayonnaise tasting, spider ranching, repackaging bulk lard for resale in small gift
boxes—as a secondary source of income. Those who are wizards of embroidery sometimes wish that they didn’t have to spend so many hours with their threads and needles, and could devote more time to creating fiction; but then they remind themselves that they should be grateful to have a trade to fall back on in the event that their writing careers ever falter, and in a spirit of remorse, they flail themselves ferociously with brambles or chains or live snakes, whatever their particular social circle deems the appropriate whipping material.

  The second most frequently asked question posed to every writer by readers (hereinafter “The Question”) is Where do you get your ideas? The noun ideas is frequently modified by an adjective like fascinating (which brings a smile to the author’s face), crazy (which inspires a wince), or hilarious (which occasions delight in the author if the book under discussion is one of his comedies, but plunges him into a foul mood if the book is one without a single comic line).

  Because a wise writer is grateful to his readers, he politely answers The Question as best he can. A third of the time, the reader will not sincerely care where the writer gets his ideas; he has asked The Question only as a prelude to pitching an idea of his own, which he wants the target novelist to write for him. Frequently, this is not a genuine reader; he has not read a novel since some well-meaning teacher destroyed his love of literature by subjecting him to Silas Marner in the eighth grade; he is instead a person who fantasizes about being a writer (hereinafter “The Megalomaniac”). “My idea is yours for nothing, ” The Megalomaniac often says. “All I want is to have my name on the cover.” As often, he will instead say, “All I want for the idea is half the income. ”

  The ideas being offered are usually of this nature: “It’s like Gone With the Wind meets The Silence of the Lambs. Serial killers in the Civil War, but mostly a love story.” This kind of pitch sometimes has a lunatic logic that seduces you into taking it seriously for a minute, until you conjure a mental image of Ashley Wilkes in his root cellar, chortling maniacally over jars containing his collection of human thumbs. The Firm crossed with Jurassic Park. Which I suppose would be the story of a corrupt law firm representing the interests of reckless dinosaur cloners, and of a crusading young attorney who exposes his bosses at the risk of being hunted down and squashed by a T. rex. These are not ideas, of course; some of them are that more ephemeral thing called a concept, and some of them are just flogged air. Seneca, a Roman philosopher who lived from 3 B.C. to A.D. 65, wrote that “the human voice is nothing but flogged air.” I am not as cynical as Seneca, but when it comes to novel ideas offered by The Megalomaniac, the ancient Roman’s wisdom often applies.

  The biggest idea I was ever offered came at a cocktail party where a gentleman stipulated that he wanted only “a reasonable commission,” and then announced, “I’ve got a whole new genre of fiction that’ll make you the richest guy in publishing.” I always explain that I can put in the long hours and the hard work to write a novel only when I’m passionate about a story and that I’m only passionate about stories that arise in my own—admittedly strange— head. This gentleman, like every other bearer of big ideas, ignored me and then gave me the shortest pitch I’d ever received, describing his new genre in seven words: “Tom Clancy without all the military stuff.” That was it. He had no more. He was intellectually exhausted, and no wonder. All that I needed to do was pick up the ball and run with it.

  So where do I get my ideas? Usually, I begin a novel with a premise that intrigues me. The Husband , for instance, had its genesis in a peculiar thought that struck me when I was reading a news story about a kidnapping. What if, I wondered, a man was not rich, yet his wife was kidnapped. Imagine you are an ordinary guy, making a middle-class living, and someone snatches your wife and calls you to demand two million in ransom. They know you have eleven thousand bucks in your checking account. They know your landscaping/gardening business isn’t a cash cow. Yet they are confident you will raise two million in seventy-two hours if you love your wife enough. Because you might take this to be a hoax, they put your wife on the phone and hurt her to make her scream. Then they tell you to look across the street at a man walking a dog; a shot rings out, and the dogwalker falls dead. They shoot him just to prove how serious they are.

  With a startling premise like that in mind, I next need to know what the story is about. I don’t mean the plot. I never plot a novel. I just go with the premise and a couple of lead characters who seem to me to have the potential for change and personal revelation. If characters come alive, they will plot the story as it evolves—plot it by the actions that grow naturally out of who they are. When I say I need to know what the story is about, I mean what it is about beneath the plot, on a subtextual level, what aspect of the human condition is explored in its theme or themes. The Husband, for instance, is about courage and self-sacrifice, how those qualities are born of and nurtured by love as well as by a recognition that life has meaning and that this world has mysterious depths.

  The idea for Mr. Murder sprang from an article about me that appeared in People related to the publication of Watchers. People is a good and responsible publication. At that time, none of my books had yet risen to the top of the bestseller lists, so my publisher was delighted that People would do a story about me. In fact, it was the first time I did an interview for a national magazine (since then I’ve done as few as I can, as I’m not comfortable with publicity).

  At the time, I was striving to avoid the horror-writer label (which I struggle to avoid to this day) because, while I admired much in the horror genre, I did not feel that I wrote it. For marketing purposes, however, my publisher was determined not only to use the label (she even hoped I would let her sew it on the back of my neck) but also to be sure that any publicity I did reinforced it. Thus, while I conducted my People interview without ever referencing the horror genre, the publisher’s publicity department pressed the magazine writer hard to identify me that way.

  A week or so after the interview, the photographer showed up, a great guy named Jim McHugh. Jim is very talented and has a knack for putting the subject of a photo session at ease, quite a task with me, because I am as intensely averse to such shoots as any ferret is averse to being given a perm. Jim took a great many clever photos, and near the end of the day got a call from the magazine requesting a “scary” shot using a fog machine and/or “someone in a monster suit.” Uh-oh. I didn’t think we were going to be able to get Gerda, my wife, to agree to wear a monster suit. Besides, I knew at once that this was my publisher pushing the image she wanted to sell. I refused fog machines and monster suits, but because Jim was a good guy and needed to give his employer at least something vaguely scary, I agreed to pose in front of a stand of leafless trees thrusting their black branches into a twilight sky. We spent fifteen minutes on the shot, and Jim assured me that it wouldn’t be used because we had so many better photos from the session.

  Here’s a rule of thumb about the press: If they have a hundred photos in which your appearance ranges from ordinary to movie-star handsome, but also have one photo that makes you look like a freak, they will use the freak shot every time. They say that it has more energy.

  When the magazine appeared, the scary-guy photo was, of course, the two-page spread that opened the story. Because of the lens used, because of the extreme angle of the shot (taken from the ground, shooting up), and because of the low light, I did not recognize myself. No one who knew me recognized me, either. Just before I saw the magazine, my editor at Berkley Books (at that time my primary paperback publisher) called me to prepare me for what I would see. Because we had (and still have, all these years later) a fine and down-to-earth relationship, she truthfully said, “Well, you look like a fat and extremely dangerous biker.” As I was five foot eleven and weighed 155 pounds, the fat part annoyed, though I considered that I might win over a new audience of extremely dangerous bikers if they thought I was one of them. When I saw the magazine, I realized my editor had been kind. I looked like a vicious psychotic
molester of defenseless small animals, and the article, of course, labeled me a horror writer, though otherwise it was pretty much fair and balanced.

  What stuck in readers’ minds, however, was not what the story said but what it showed in the photos, and especially the two-page image of Dangerous Dean. Friends who hadn’t seen me in a while called from all over the country to say, “What the hell happened to you? You look like a fat, drugged-out hit man” or the equivalent. And what text fact did stick in readers’ mind was the word horror.

  Out of this experience came the idea for a novel about a young, up-and-coming suspense novelist whose life is changed by a story in People that makes him look scary and labels him “Mr. Murder.” All I knew when I began the novel was that some extraordinary thing would happen to my lead character and that because of the article in the magazine, the police would not believe him and would think that he was inventing the threat against himself just to generate publicity and to sell himself as “Mr. Murder,” though that was an image he had not sought and in fact abhorred. Within two pages, the identical twin occurred to me, and I was on with the story at a run. Without the humiliation of the Dangerous Dean photo in a national magazine, I would never have written Mr. Murder.

  As if I hadn’t suffered humiliation enough, the film rights to Mr. Murder were sold for a staggering sum. (I have come to regret all but two film sales in my career, because my luck with Hollywood has been on a par with the luck of any piece of roadkill you see lying alongside a highway.) The buyer was a production company formed just a couple of years prior, with the initial capital of one billion dollars— phenomenal start-up financing in those days and not exactly chump change as I write this, almost fifteen years later. They put the property into rapid development, and got a commitment from Bruce Willis to play Marty Stillwater. At that time, Bruce Willis was arguably the biggest action star in Hollywood and inarguably the best. His believable physical toughness and his ability to play comedy made him perfect for the role. Idiot that I am, I celebrated.