by Dean Koontz
This time the chase led into the main hall and from there into the public lounge.
Janet damned herself for ever letting the mutt into their lives. The worst thing wasn’t even the humiliation he’d brought them with this prank, but all of the attention he was drawing. She feared attention. Huddling down, keeping quiet, staying in the corners and shadows of life was the only way to reduce the amount of abuse you had to take. Besides, she wanted to remain virtually transparent to others at least until her dead husband had rested under Arizona sands for another year or two.
Woofer was too fast for them even though he kept his snout to the floor, sniffing every step of the way.
The evening receptionist in the lounge was a young Hispanic woman in a white uniform, hair in a pony tail secured by a red ribbon. Having risen from her desk to check out the source of the oncoming tumult, she assessed the situation and acted quickly. She stepped to the front door as Woofer flew into the lounge. She opened it, and let him shoot past her into the street.
Outside, breathless, Janet halted at the bottom of the front steps. The care home was east of the coast highway, on a sloped street lined with Indian laurels and bottlebrush trees. The mercury-vapor streetlamps shed a vaguely blue light. When a fluctuant breeze shivered branches, the pavement crawled with jittering leaf shadows.
Woofer was about forty feet away, dappled by the blue light, sniffing continuously at the sidewalk, shrubs, tree trunks, curb. He tested the night air most of all, apparently seeking an elusive scent. From the bottlebrush trees, the storm had knocked down scores of bristly red blooms which littered the pavement, like colonies of mutant sea anemones washed up by an apocalyptic tide. When the dog sniffed at these, he sneezed. His progress was halting and uncertain but steadily southward.
“Woofer!” Danny shouted.
The mutt turned and looked at them.
“Come back!” Danny pleaded.
Woofer hesitated. Then he twitched his head, snapped at the air, and continued after whatever phantom he was pursuing.
Fighting back tears, Danny said, “I thought he liked me.”
The boy’s words made Janet regret the unvoiced curses she had heaped upon the dog during the chase. She called after him, as well.
“He’ll come back,” she assured Danny.
“He’s not.”
“Maybe not now but later, maybe tomorrow or the day after, he’ll come home.”
The boy’s voice trembled with loss: “How can he come home when there’s no home to find us at?”
“There’s the car,” she said lamely.
She was more acutely aware than ever that a rusted old Dodge was a grievously inadequate home. Being able to provide no better for her son suddenly made her heart so heavy that it ached. She was troubled by fear, anger, frustration, and a desperation so intense that it made her nauseous.
“Dogs have sharper senses than we do,” she said. “He’ll track us down. He’ll track us down, all right.”
Black tree shadows stirred on the pavement, a vision of the dead leaves of autumns to come.
The dog reached the end of the block and turned the corner, moving out of sight.
“He’ll track us down,” she said, but did not believe.
Stink beetles. Wet tree bark. The lime odor of damp concrete. Roasting chicken in a people place nearby. Geraniums, jasmine, dead leaves. The moldy-sour scent of earthworms rutting in the rain-soaked dirt of flowerbeds. Interesting.
Most smells now are after-the-rain smells because rain cleans up the world and leaves its own tang afterwards. But even the hardest rain can’t wash away all of the old smells, layers and layers, days and weeks of odors cast off by birds and bugs, dogs and plants, lizards and people and worms and cats—
He catches a whiff of cat fur, and freezes. He clenches his teeth at the scent, flares his nostrils. He tenses.
Funny about cats. He doesn’t hate them, really, but they’re so chasable, so hard to resist. Nothing’s more fun than a cat at its best, unless maybe a boy with a ball to throw and then something good to eat.
He’s almost ready to go after the cat, track it down, but then his snout burns with an old memory of claw scratches and a sore nose for days. He remembers the bad things about cats, how they can move so fast, slash you, then go straight up a wall or tree where you can’t go after them, and you sit below barking at them, your nose stinging and bleeding, feeling stupid, and the cat licks its fur and looks at you and then settles down to sleep, until finally you just have to go somewhere and bite on an old stick or snap a few lizards in two until you feel better.
Car fumes. Wet newspaper. Old shoe full of people foot smell.
Dead mouse. Interesting. Dead mouse rotting in the gutter. Eyes open. Tiny teeth bared. Interesting. Funny how dead things don’t move. Unless they’re dead long enough, and then they’re full of movement, but it’s still not them moving but things in them. Dead mouse, stiff tail sticking straight up in the air. Interesting.
Policeman-wolf-thing.
He snaps his head up and seeks the faint scent. Mostly this thing has a scent unlike any creature he’s ever met up with before, which is what makes it interesting. Partly it’s a human odor but only partly. It’s also a thing-that-will-kill-you odor, which you sometimes smell on people and on certain crazy-mean dogs bigger than you and on coyotes and on snakes that rattle. In fact it has more of a thing-that-will-kill-you stink than anything he’s ever run across before, which means he’s got to be careful. Mostly it has its own scent: like yet not like the sea on a cold night; like yet not like an iron fence on a hot day; like yet not like the dead and rotting mouse; like yet not like lightning, thunder, spiders, blood, and dark holes in the ground that are interesting but scary. Its faint scent is one fragile thread in the rich tapestry of night aromas, but he follows it.
Living in the modern age,
death for virtue is the wage.
So it seems in darker hours.
Evil wins, kindness cowers.
Ruled by violence and vice
We all stand upon thin ice.
Are we brave or are we mice,
here upon such thin, thin ice?
Dare we linger, dare we skate?
Dare we laugh or celebrate,
knowing we may strain the ice?
Preserve the ice at any price?
—The Book of Counted Sorrows
When tempest-tossed,
embrace chaos.
—The Book of Counted Sorrows
1
They took the coast highway because a tanker truck loaded with liquid nitrogen had overturned at the junction of the Costa Mesa and San Diego freeways, transforming them into parking lots. Harry cranked the Honda, weaving from lane to lane, speeding through yellow traffic lights, running the reds if no cars were approaching on the cross streets, driving more like Connie in a mood than like himself.
As relentless as a circling vulture, doom shadowed his every thought. In Connie’s kitchen, he’d spoken confidently of Ticktock’s vulnerability. But how vulnerable could the guy be if he could laugh off bullets and bonfires?
He said, “Thanks for not being like the people in one of those movies, they see huge bats against the full moon, victims with all the blood drained out, but they keep arguing it can’t be happening, vampires aren’t real.”
“Or like the priest sees the little girl’s head spin three-hundred-sixty degrees, her bed levitates—but he still can’t believe there’s a devil, so he consults psychology books to diagnose her.”
“What listing you think he looks up in the index?”
Connie said, “Under ‘W’ for ‘Weird shit.’”
They crossed a bridge over a back channel of Newport Harbor. House and boat lights glimmered on the black water.
“Funny,” Harry said. “You go through life thinking people who believe this stuff are as dumb as lobotomized newts—then something like this happens, and you’re instantly able to accept all kinds of fantastic ideas. At heart w
e’re all moon-worshipping savages who know the world’s a lot stranger than we want to believe.”
“Not that I’ve accepted your theory yet, your psycho superman.”
He looked at her. In the instrument-panel light, her face resembled a sculpture of some goddess from Greek mythology, rendered in hard bronze with verdigris patina. “If not my theory, then what?”
Instead of answering him, she said, “If you’re gonna drive like me, keep your eyes on the road.”
That was good advice, and he took it in time to avoid making a ton and a half of Honda jelly against the back of a lumbering old Mercedes driven by Methuselah’s grandmother and sporting a bumper sticker that said LICENSED TO KILL. Tires squealing, he whipped around the sedan. As they passed it, the venerable lady behind the wheel scowled and gave them the finger.
“Even grandmothers aren’t grandmothers any more,” Connie said.
“If not my theory, then what?” he persisted.
“I don’t know. I’m just saying—if you’re going to surf on the chaos, better never think you’ve got the pattern of the currents all figured out, ‘cause that’s when a big wave will dump you.”
He thought about that, driving in silence for a while.
To their left, the Newport Center hotels and office towers drifted by as if they were moving instead of the car, great lighted ships sailing the night on mysterious missions. The bordering lawns and rows of palms were unnaturally green and too perfect to be real, like a gargantuan stage setting. The recent storm seemed to have swept across California from out of another dimension, washing the world with strangeness, leaving behind a residue of dark magic.
“What about your mom and dad?” Connie asked. “This guy said he’d destroy everyone you love, then you.”
“They’re a few hundred miles up the coast. They’re out of this.”
“We don’t know how far he can reach.”
“If he can reach that far, he is God. Anyway, remember what I said, how maybe this guy pins a psychic tag on you? Like game wardens tag a deer or bear with an electronic gizmo to learn its migratory habits. That feels right. Which means it’s possible he can’t find my mom and dad unless I lead him to them. Maybe all he knows about me is what I’ve shown him since he tagged me this afternoon.”
“So you came to me first because…”
Because I love you? he wondered. But he said nothing.
He was relieved when she let him off that hook:
“… because we brought Ordegard down together. And if this guy was controlling Ordegard, he’s almost as angry with me as with you.”
“I had to warn you,” Harry said. “We’re in this together.”
Though he was aware of her studying him with keen interest, she said nothing. He pretended to be oblivious of her analytic stare.
After a while she said, “You think this Ticktock can tune in and hear us, see us, any time he wants? Like now?”
“I don’t know.”
“He can’t know everything, like God,” Connie said. “So maybe we’re just a blinking light on his mental tracking board, and he can only see or hear us when we can see and hear him.”
“Maybe. Probably. Who knows?”
“We better hope that’s how it is. Because if he’s listening and watching all the time, we don’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of nailing the son of a bitch. The moment we start getting close, he’ll burn us to the ground as sure as he burned down your condo.”
On the shop-lined main street of Corona Del Mar, and along the dark Newport coast where land was being graded for a new community on the ocean-facing hills and where enormous earth-moving machines stood like prehistoric beasts asleep on their feet, Harry had a crawling sensation along the back of his neck. Descending the coast highway into Laguna Beach, it got worse. He felt as if he were being watched in the same way that a mouse is watched by a stalking cat.
Laguna was an arts colony and tourist mecca, still renowned for its beauty even though it had seen better days. Speckled with golden lights and adorned with a softening mantle of greenery, serried hills sloped down from the east to the shores of the Pacific, as graceful as a lovely woman descending a stairway to the surf. But tonight the lady seemed less lovely than dangerous.
2
The house stood on a bluff above the sea. The west wall of tinted glass encompassed a primal view of sky, water, and crashing surf.
When Bryan wished to sleep during the day, electrically operated Rolladen shutters motored down to banish the sun. It was night, however, and while Bryan slept, the huge windows revealed a black sky, blacker sea, and phosphorescent incoming breakers like marching ranks of soldier ghosts.
When Bryan slept, he always dreamed.
Though most people’s dreams were in black and white, his were in full color. In fact the spectrum of colors in his dreams was greater than in real life, a fabulous variety of hues and shadings that made each vision enthrallingly intricate.
Rooms in his dreams were not simply vague suggestions of places, and landscapes were not impressionistic smears. Every locale in his sleep was vividly—even excruciatingly—detailed. If he dreamed of a forest, every leaf was rendered with veining, individually mottled and shaded. If snow, every flake was unique.
After all, he was not a dreamer like every other. He was a slumbering god. Creative.
That Tuesday evening Bryan’s dreams were, as always, filled with violence and death. His creativity was best expressed in imaginative forms of destruction.
He walked the streets of a fantasy city more labyrinthine than any that existed in the real world, a metropolis of crowding spires. When children looked upon him, they were stricken by a plague of such exquisite virulence that their small faces instantly erupted in masses of oozing pustules; bleeding lesions split their skin. When he touched strong men, they burst into flame and their eyes melted from their sockets. Young women aged before his eyes, withered and died in seconds, transformed from objects of desire into piles of worm-riddled refuse. When Bryan smiled at a shopkeeper standing in front of a corner grocery, the man fell to the pavement, writhing in agony, and swarms of cockroaches erupted from his ears, nostrils, and mouth.
For Bryan, this was not a nightmare. He enjoyed his dreams and always woke from them refreshed and excited.
The city streets faded into the uncountable rooms of an infinite bordello, with a different beautiful woman waiting to please him in every richly decorated chamber. Naked, they prostrated themselves before him, pleaded to be allowed to provide him with relief, but he would lie with none of them. Instead, he slaughtered each woman in a different fashion, endlessly inventive in his brutalities, until he was drenched with their blood.
He was not interested in sex. Power was more satisfying than sex could ever be, and by far the most satisfying power was the power to kill.
He never tired of their cries for mercy. Their voices were very much like the squeals of the small animals that had learned to fear him when he’d been a child and had just begun to Become. He had been born to rule both in the dream world and the real, to help humankind relearn the humility that it had lost.
He woke.
For long delicious minutes, Bryan lay in a tangle of black sheets, as pale upon that rumpled silk as the luminescent foam was pale upon the crest of each wave that broke on the shore below his windows. The euphoria of the bloody dream stayed with him for a while, and was immeasurably better than a post-orgasmic glow.
He longed for the day when he could brutalize the real world as he did the world in his dreams. They deserved punishment, these swarming multitudes. In their self-absorption, they had pridefully assumed that the world had been made for them, for their pleasure, and they had overrun it. But he was the apex of creation, not them. They must be profoundly humbled, and their numbers reduced.
However, he was still young, not in full control of his power, still Becoming. He didn’t yet dare to begin the cleansing of the earth that was his destiny.
N
aked, he got out of bed. The slightly cool air felt good against his bare skin.
In addition to the sleek, ultra-modern, black-lacquered bed with its silk sheets, the large room contained no other furniture except two matching black nightstands and black marble lamps with black shades. No stereo, television, or radio. There was no chair in which to relax and read; books were of no interest to him, for they contained no knowledge he needed to acquire and no entertainment equal to that he could provide himself. When he was creating and manipulating the phantom bodies in which he patrolled the outer world, he preferred to lie in bed, staring at the ceiling.
He had no clock. Didn’t need one. He was so attuned to the mechanics of the universe that he always knew the hour, minute, and second. It was part of his gift.
The entire wall opposite the bed was mirrored floor to ceiling. He had mirrors throughout the house; he liked what they showed him of himself, the image of godhood Becoming in all its grace, beauty, and power.
Except for the mirrors, the walls were painted black. The ceiling was black as well.
The black-lacquered shelves of a large bookcase contained scores of one-pint Mason jars filled with formaldehyde. Floating therein were pairs of eyes, visible to Bryan even in deep gloom. Some were the eyes of human beings: men, women, and children who had received his judgment; various shades of blue, brown, black, gray, green. Others were the eyes of the animals on which he’d first experimented with his power years ago: mice, gerbils, lizards, snakes, turtles, cats, dogs, birds, squirrels, rabbits; some were softly luminescent even in death, glowing pale red or yellow or green.
Votive eyes. Offered by his subjects. Symbols acknowledging his power, his superiority, his Becoming. At every hour of the day and night, the eyes were there, acknowledging, admiring, adoring him.
Look upon me and tremble, said the Lord. For I am mercy but also am I wrath. I am forgiveness but also am I vengeance. And whatever floweth to thee shall flow from me.
3
In spite of the humming vent fans, the room was redolent of blood, bile, intestinal gases, and an astringent disinfectant that made Connie squint.
Harry sprayed his left hand with some Binaca breath-freshener. He cupped his moistened palm over his nose, so the minty fragrance would block out at least some of the smell of death.
He offered Connie the Binaca. She hesitated, then accepted it.
The dead woman lay naked and staring on the tilted, stainless-steel table. The coroner had made a large Y incision in her abdomen, and most of her organs had been carefully removed.
She was one of Ordegard’s victims from the restaurant. Her name was Laura Kincade. Thirty years old. She had been pretty when she’d gotten out of bed that morning. Now she was a fright figure from a grisly carnival funhouse.
The fluorescent lights imparted a milky sheen to her eyes, on which were reflected twin images of the overhead microphone and the flexible, segmented-metal cable on which it hung. Her lips were parted, as if she were about to sit up, speak into the mike, and add a few comments to the official record of her autopsy.
The coroner and two assistants were working late, finishing the final of three examinations of Ordegard and his two victims. The men looked weary, both physically and spiritually.
In all her years of police work, Connie had never encountered one of those hardened forensic pathologists who appeared so frequently in the movies and on television, carving up corpses while they made crude jokes and ate pizza, untouched by the tragedies of others. On the contrary, although it was necessary to approach such a job with professional detachment, regular intimate contact with the victims of violent crime always took its toll one way or another.
Teel Bonner, the chief medical examiner, was fifty but seemed older. In the harsh fluorescent light, his face looked less tanned than sallow, and the bags under his eyes were large enough to pack for a weekend getaway.
