by Dean Koontz
Connie resorted to a previously used title: “Surrender.”
“Stay Away.”
“Are You Lonesome Tonight?”
After a hesitation, the perp admitted: “Lonely Man.”
Harry still couldn’t get a fix on the voice. Sweat was really pouring off him now, wispy remnants of the spider web clung to his hair and tickled his brow, his mouth tasted like the bottom of a pestle in Frankenstein’s laboratory, and he felt as if he’d stepped out of reality into some drug addict’s dark hallucinations.
“Let Yourself Go,” Connie advised.
“I Feel So Bad,” the perp repeated.
Harry knew he shouldn’t be so disoriented by the peculiar twists this pursuit kept taking. These were the 1990s, after all, an age of unreason if ever there had been one, when the bizarre was so common as to establish a new definition of normality. Like the holdup men who had recently taken to threatening convenience-store clerks not with guns but with syringes full of AIDS-tainted blood.
Connie called to the perp, “Let Me Be Your Teddy Bear,” which seemed, to Harry, an odd turn in the song-title conversation.
But the perp came right back at her in a voice full of yearning and suspicion: “You Don’t Know Me.”
Connie needed only a few seconds to find the right follow-up: “Doncha Think It’s Time?”
And talk about bizarre: Richard Ramirez, the serial killer known as the Night Stalker, was visited regularly in prison by a stream of attractive young women who found him appealing, exciting, a romantic figure. Or what about that guy in Wisconsin not long ago, cooking parts of his victims for dinner, keeping rows of severed heads in his refrigerator, and neighbors said, well, yeah, there had been bad smells coming from his apartment for years, and now and then they heard screams and high-powered electric saws, but the screaming never lasted long, and anyway the guy seemed so nice, he seemed to care about people. The 1990s. No decade like it.
“Too Much,” the perp finally said, evidently disbelieving Connie’s professed romantic interest.
“Poor Boy,” she said with apparently genuine sympathy.
“Way Down.” The perp’s voice, now annoyingly whiny, echoed off the cobwebbed rafters as he admitted his lack of self-esteem, a very ‘90s sort of excuse.
“Wear My Ring Around Your Neck,” Connie said, romancing him as she prowled through the maze, no doubt intending to blow him away the moment she caught sight of him.
The perp didn’t reply.
Harry kept on the move, too, diligently searching each shadowy niche and byway, but feeling useless. He had never imagined that in the last decade of this strange century, he might have to be an expert on rock-‘n’-roll trivia to be an effective cop.
He hated crap like this, but Connie loved it. She embraced the chaos of the times; there was something dark and wild in her.
Harry reached an aisle that was perpendicular to his. It was deserted—except for a couple of naked mannequins that had toppled over long ago, one atop the other. Hunkered down, shoulders hunched protectively, Harry moved on.
“Wear My Ring Around Your Neck,” Connie called out again from elsewhere in the maze.
Maybe the perp was hesitating because he thought it was an offer that a guy should make to a gal, not the other way around. Though definitely a ‘90s man, maybe the bastard still had an old-fashioned sense of gender roles.
“Treat Me Nice,” Connie said.
No answer.
“Love Me Tender,” Connie said.
The perp still did not respond, and Harry was alarmed that the conversation had become a monologue. The creep might be close to Connie, letting her talk so he could get a better, final fix on her.
Harry was about to shout a warning when an explosion shook the building. He froze, crossing his arms protectively over his face. But the blast had not occurred in the attic; there had been no flash.
From the floor below came cries of agony and terror, confused voices, shouts of anger.
Evidently other cops had entered the lower room where the ladder gave access to the attic, and the perp had heard them. He’d dropped a grenade through the trapdoor.
The gruesome screams conjured an image in Harry’s mind: some guy trying to keep his intestines from spilling out of his belly.
He knew that he and Connie were in a rare moment of total agreement, experiencing the same dread and fury. For once he didn’t give a damn about the perp’s legal rights, excessive use of force, or the proper way of doing things. He just wanted the bastard dead.
Above the screams, Connie tried to re-establish the dialogue: “Love Me Tender.”
“Tell Me Why” the perp demanded, still doubting her sincerity.
“My Baby Left Me,” Connie said.
The screams were subsiding on the floor below. Either the injured man was dying, or others were moving him out of the room where the grenade had detonated.
“Anyway You Want Me,” Connie said.
The perp was silent for a moment. Then his voice echoed through the room, infuriatingly directionless, “I Feel So Bad.”
“I’m Yours,” Connie said.
Harry couldn’t get over the speed with which she thought of the appropriate titles.
“Lonely Man.” the perp said, and indeed he sounded miserable.
“I’ve Got a Thing About You Baby,” Connie said.
She’s a genius, Harry thought admiringly. And seriously obsessed with Presley.
Counting on the perp being pretty much distracted by Connie’s weird seduction, Harry risked showing himself. Because he was directly under the peak of the roof, he rose slowly to his full height, and surveyed the garret on all sides.
Some piles of boxes were shoulder-high, but many others were only a few inches higher than Harry’s waist. A lot of human forms stared back from the shadows, tucked in among the boxes and even sitting on them. But all of them must have been mannequins because none moved or shot at him.
“Lonely Man. All Shook Up,” the perp said despairingly.
“There’s Always Me.”
“Please Don’t Stop Loving Me.”
“Can’t Help Falling in Love,” Connie said.
Standing, Harry had a slightly better sense of the direction from which the voices arose. Both Connie and the perp were ahead of him, but at first he couldn’t discern if they were close to each other. He could not see over the boxes into any of the other avenues of the maze.
“Don’t Be Cruel,” the perp pleaded.
“Love Me,” Connie urged.
“I Need Your Love Tonight.”
They were at the west end of the attic, the south side, and they were close to each other.
“Stuck on You,” Connie insisted.
“Don’t Be Cruel.”
Harry sensed an escalation in the intensity of the dialogue, subtly conveyed in the gunman’s tone, in the speed of responses, and in his repetition of the same title.
“I Need Your Love Tonight.”
“Don’t Be Cruel.”
Harry stopped putting caution first. He hurried toward the voices, into an area more densely populated by mannequins, groups clustered in niches between boxes. Pale shoulders, graceful arms, hands pointing or raised as if in greeting. Painted eyes sightless in the gloom, painted lips eternally parted in half-formed smiles, in greetings never vocalized, in passionless erotic sighs.
More spiders lived there, too, evidenced by webs that tangled in his hair and stuck to his clothes. As he moved, he wiped the gossamer off his face. Wispy rags of it dissolved on his tongue and lips, and his mouth flooded with saliva as nausea gripped him. He choked down his gorge and expelled a wad of spittle and spider stuff.
“It’s Now or Never,” Connie promised from somewhere nearby.
The familiar answering three words had become less of a plea than a warning: “Don’t Be Cruel.”
Harry had the feeling the guy wasn’t being lulled at all but was ticking toward a new explosion.
He proceeded ano
ther few feet and stopped, turning his head from side to side, listening intently, afraid he would miss something because the booming of his own heart was so loud in his ears.
“I’m Yours, Puppet on a String, Let Yourself Go,” Connie urged, voice falling to a stage whisper to foster a false sense of intimacy with her prey.
Although Harry respected Connie’s skills and instincts, he was afraid that her eagerness to sucker the perp was distracting her from the realization that the perp might not be responding out of his confusion and longing but out of a similar desire to sucker her.
“Playing for Keeps, One Broken Heart for Sale,” Connie said.
She sounded as if she was right on top of Harry, in the next aisle, surely no farther than two aisles away, and parallel with him.
“Ain’t That Loving You Baby, Crying in the Chapel.” Connie’s whisper had grown more fierce than seductive, as if she was also aware that something had gone wrong with the dialogue.
Harry tensed, waiting for the perp’s response, squinting into the gloom ahead, then turning to look back the way he had come when he imagined the smiling, moon-faced killer stealing up behind him.
The attic seemed to be not merely silent but the source of all silence, as the sun was the source of light. The unseen spiders moved with perfect stealth through all the dark corners of that high room, and millions of dust motes drifted as soundlessly as planets and asteroids in the airless void of space, and on both sides of Harry, gatherings of mannequins stared without seeing, listened without hearing, posed without knowing.
Forced between clenched teeth, hard as a threat, Connie’s whisper had ceased to be an invitation, had become a challenge; and song titles no longer constituted her entire rap: “Anyway You Want Me, you toad, come on, come to mama. Let Yourself Go, dirtbag.”
No reply.
The attic was silent but also eerily still, filled with less motion than a dead man’s mind.
Harry had the strange feeling that he was becoming one of the mannequins that stood around him, his flesh transformed into plaster, his bones into steel rods, sinews and tendons changing into bundles of wire. He let only his eyes move, and his gaze slid across the inanimate citizens of the garret.
Painted eyes. Pale breasts with permanently erect nipples, round thighs, tight buttocks, curving away into darkness. Hairless torsos. Men and women. Bald heads or matted wigs caked with dust.
Painted lips. Puckered as if to plant a kiss, or in a playful pout, or parted slightly as if in erotic surprise at the electricity of a lover’s touch, others formed into shy smiles, some coy, some with a broader curve, the dull gleam of teeth, here a more thoughtful smile, and there a full and perpetual laugh. No. Wrong. The dull gleam of teeth. Mannequin teeth don’t gleam. No saliva on mannequin teeth.
Which one, there, there, in the back of the niche, behind four true mannequins, one clever mime, peering out between bald and bewigged heads, almost lost in shadows but moist eyes glistening in the dimness, no more than six feet away, face to face, the smile opening wider as Harry watched, wider but as humorless as a wound, the weak chin, the moon face, and one more song title so soft as to be barely audible, “Blue Moon,” Harry taking in all of this in an instant, even as he was bringing up the muzzle of his revolver and squeezing the trigger.
The perp opened fire with his Browning 9mm maybe a fraction of a second before Harry did, and the attic was filled with the crashes and echoes of shots. He saw the flash of the pistol’s muzzle, which seemed to be directly in front of his chest, oh God please, and he emptied his revolver faster than seemed possible, all in a blink if he’d dared to blink, the weapon bucking so hard that it seemed likely to fly out of his grip.
Something hit him hard in the gut, and he knew he had been shot, though he had no pain yet, just a sharp pressure and a flare of heat. And before the pain could follow, he was knocked backward, mannequins toppling into him, driving him against the wall of the aisle. The stacked boxes rocked, and some were dislodged into the next branch of the maze. Harry was carried to the floor in a clatter of plaster limbs and hard pale bodies, trapped under them, gasping for breath, trying to shout for help, able to make no sound louder than a wheeze. He smelled the distinct metallic odor of blood.
Someone snapped on the attic lights, a long string of small bulbs hanging just under the peak of the roof, but that improved visibility only for a second or two, just long enough for Harry to see that the perp was part of the weight that held him on the floor. The moon face peered down from the top of the heap, between the naked interlocking limbs and past the hairless skulls of the mannequins, his eyes now as sightless as theirs. His smile was gone. His lips were’ painted, but with blood.
Although Harry knew that the lights were not actually going out, it seemed as though they were on a dimmer being cycled off. He tried to call out for help but still could only wheeze. His gaze shifted from the moon face toward the fading lightbulbs overhead. The last thing he saw was a rafter streaming with tattered cobwebs. Cobwebs that fluttered like the flags of long-lost nations. Then he slipped into darkness as deep as a dead man’s dream.
7
Out of the west-northwest, ominous clouds rolled like silent battalions of war machines, driven by a high-altitude wind. Though the day was still calm and pleasantly warm at ground level, the blue sky steadily vanished behind those thunderheads.
Janet Marco parked her broken-down Dodge at one end of the alleyway. With her five-year-old son, Danny, and the stray dog that had recently attached itself to them, she walked along that narrow backstreet, examining the contents of one garbage can after another, seeking survival in the discards of others.
The east side of the alley was flanked by a deep but narrow ravine filled with immense eucalyptus trees and a tangle of dried brush, while the west side was defined by a series of two- and three-car garages separated by wrought-iron and painted-wood gates. Beyond some of the gates, Janet glimpsed small patios and cobbled courtyards shaded by palms, magnolias, ficuses, and Australian tree ferns that flourished in the ocean air. The houses all faced the Pacific over the roofs of other houses on lower tiers of the Laguna hills, so they were mostly three stories tall, vertical piles of stone and stucco and weathered cedar shingles designed to make maximum use of the expensive real estate.
Though the neighborhood was affluent, the rewards of scavenging were pretty much the same there as anywhere else: aluminum cans that could be returned to a recycling center for pennies, and redeemable bottles. However, once in a while she found a treasure: bags of clothes that were out of style but looked unworn, broken appliances that would fetch a couple of dollars from a second-hand shop if they needed only minor repairs, unwanted costume jewelry, or books and old-fashioned phonograph records that could be resold to specialty shops for collectors.
Danny toted a plastic garbage bag into which Janet dropped the aluminum cans. She carried another bag to hold the bottles.
As they progressed along the alleyway, under a rapidly darkening sky, Janet repeatedly glanced back at the Dodge. She worried about the car and tried never to get more than two blocks from it, keeping it in sight as much as possible. The car was not only a means of conveyance; it was their shelter from the sun and the rain, and a place to store their meager belongings. It was home.
She lived in dread of a mechanical breakdown severe enough to be irreparable—or irreparable within their means, which was the same thing. But she was most afraid of theft, because with the car gone they would have no roof over their heads, no safe place to sleep.
She knew that no one was likely to steal such a rolling wreck. The thief’s desperation would have to exceed Janet’s own, and she could not conceive of anyone more desperate than she was.
From a large brown plastic trash can, she extracted half a dozen aluminum cans that someone had already flattened and that ought to have been separated for recycling. She put them in Danny’s garbage bag.
The boy watched solemnly. He said nothing. He was a quiet child. H
is father had intimidated him into being the next thing to a mute, and in the year since Janet had cut that domineering bastard out of their lives, Danny had become only slightly less withdrawn.
Janet glanced back at the car. Still there.
Cloud shadows fell over the alleyway, and a soft salt-scented breeze arose. From far out over the sea came a low peal of thunder.
She hurried to the next can, and Danny followed her.
The dog, which Danny had named Woofer, sniffed at the trash containers, padded to a nearby gate, and poked his snout between the iron bars. His tail wagged continuously. He was a friendly mutt, reasonably well-behaved, the size of a golden retriever, with a black and brown coat, and a cute face. But Janet tolerated the cost of feeding him only because he had drawn so many smiles from the boy in the past few days. Until Woofer came along, she had almost forgotten what Danny’s smile was like.
Again, she glanced at the battered Dodge. It was all right.
She looked toward the other end of the alley, and then toward the brush-choked ravine and peeling trunks of the huge eucalyptuses across the way. She was afraid not of just car thieves, and not merely of residents who might object to her rummaging through their garbage. She was also afraid of the cop who had been harassing her lately. No. Not a cop. Something that pretended to be a cop. Those strange eyes, the kind and freckled face that could change so swiftly into a creature out of a nightmare…
Janet Marco had one religion: fear. She had been born into that cruel faith without being aware of it, as full of wonder and the capacity for delight as any child. But her parents were alcoholics, and their sacrament of distilled spirits revealed in them an unholy rage and a capacity for sadism. They vigorously instructed her in the doctrines and dogmas of the cult of fear. She learned of only one god, which was neither a specific person nor a force; to her, god was merely power, and whoever wielded it was automatically elevated to the status of deity.
That she had fallen under the thrall of a wife-beater and control freak like Vince Marco, as soon as she was old enough to escape her parents, was no surprise. By then she was devoted to victimhood, had a need to be oppressed. Vince was lazy, shiftless, a drunkard, a gambler, a womanizer, but he was highly skilled and energetic when it came to crushing the spirit of a wife.
For eight years they had moved around the West, never staying longer than six months in any town, while Vince made a subsistence living—although not always an honest one. He didn’t want Janet to develop friendships. If he remained the only consistent presence in her life, he had total control; there was no one to advise and encourage her to rebel.
As long as she was utterly subservient and wore her fear for him to see, the beatings and torments were less severe than when she was more stoical and denied him the pleasure of her anguish. The god of fear appreciated visible expressions of his disciple’s devotion every bit as much as did the Christian God of love. Perversely, fear became her refuge and her only defense against even greater savageries.
And so she might have continued until she was no better than a shivering, terrorized animal cowering in its burrow… but Danny came along to save her. After the baby was born, she began to fear for him as much as for herself. What would happen to Danny if Vince went too far some night and, in an alcoholic frenzy, beat her to death? How would Danny cope alone, so small, so helpless? In time she feared harm to Danny more than to herself—which should have added to her burden but which was strangely liberating. Vince didn’t realize it, but he was no longer the only consistent presence in her life. Her child, by his very existence, was an argument for rebellion and a source of courage.
She still might never have become courageous enough to throw off her yoke if Vince had not raised his hand to the boy. One night a year ago, in a dilapidated rental house with a desert-brown lawn on the outskirts of Tucson, Vince had come home reeking of beer and sweat and some other woman’s perfume, and had beaten Janet for sport. Danny was four then, too small to protect his mother but old enough to feel that he ought to defend her. When he appeared in his pajamas and tried to intervene, his father slapped him repeatedly, viciously, knocked him down, and kicked at him until the boy scrambled out of the house into the front yard, weeping and terrified.
Janet had endured the beating, but later, when both her husband and her boy were asleep, she’d gone to the kitchen and taken a knife from a wall rack near the stove. Utterly fearless for the first—and perhaps last—time in her life, she returned to the bedroom and stabbed Vince repeatedly in the throat, neck, chest, and stomach. He woke as the first wound was inflicted, tried to scream, but only gurgled as his mouth filled with blood. He resisted, briefly and ineffectually.
After checking on Danny in the next room to be sure he had not awakened, Janet wrapped Vince’s body in the bloodstained bed sheets. She tied the shroud in place at his ankles and neck with clothesline, dragged him through the house, out of the kitchen door, and across the backyard.
The high moon grew alternately dim and bright as clouds like galleons sailed eastward across the sky, but Janet was not concerned about being seen. The shacks along that stretch of the state route were widely spaced, and no lights glowed in either of the two nearest homes.
Driven by the grim understanding that the police could take her from Danny as surely as Vince might have done, she hauled the corpse to the end of the property and out into the night desert, which stretched unpopulated to the far mountains. She struggled between mesquite shrubs and still-rooted tumbleweeds, across soft sand in some places and hard tables of shale in others.
When the cold face of the moon shone, it revealed a hostile landscape of stark shadows and sharp alabaster shapes. In one of the deeper shadows—an arroyo carved by centuries of flash floods— Janet abandoned the corpse.
