Dragon Tears

by Dean Koontz

  manner of sample filth on the carpet to demonstrate the superior suction of his product.

  When it became clear to the Filipino nurse that resistance to them was going to disturb the home’s patients more than would cooperation, she spoke a few musical words in Tagalog, which Harry assumed was a curse on their ancestors and progeny, and led them through the facility to the room of the patient they sought.

  Not surprisingly, in all of Pacific View’s accommodations, there was only one eyeless woman with lids sewn shut over empty sockets. Her name was Jennifer Drackman.

  Mrs. Drackman’s handsome but “distant” son—they were told in whispered confidence while in transit—paid for three shifts of the finest private nurses, seven days a week, to care for his “mentally disoriented” mother. She was the only patient in Pacific View provided with such “suffocating” ministrations on top of the already “extravagant” care that the facility offered in its minimum package. With those and a number of other loaded words, the night supervisor made it clear, ever so politely, that she didn’t care for the son, felt the private nurses were unnecessary and an insult to the staff, and thought the patient was creepy.

  The private nurse on the graveyard shift was an exotically beautiful black woman named Tanya Delaney. She was not sure of the propriety and wisdom of letting them disturb her patient at such an ungodly hour, even if some of them were police officers, and briefly she threatened to be even more of a barrier to their survival than the night supervisor had been.

  The gaunt, mealy, bony woman in the bed was a ghastly sight, but Harry could not look away from her. She compelled attention because within the horror of her current condition there was a tragically faint but undeniable ghost of the beauty that had once been, a specter that haunted the ravaged face and body and, by refusing to relinquish entire possession of her, allowed a chilling comparison between what she most likely had been in her youth and what she had become.

  “She’s been sleeping.” Tanya Delaney spoke in a whisper, as they all did. She stood between them and the bed, making it clear that she took nursing seriously. “She doesn’t sleep peacefully very often, so I wouldn’t like to wake her.”

  Beyond the piled pillows and the patient’s face, on a nightstand that also held a cork-bottom tray with a chrome carafe of ice-water, stood a simple black-lacquered picture frame with a photograph of a good-looking young man of about twenty. An aquiline nose. Thick dark hair. His pale eyes were gray in the black-and-white photo and were surely gray in reality, the precise shade of slightly tarnished silver. It was the boy in blue jeans and a Tecate T-shirt, the boy licking his lips with a pink tongue at the sight of James Ordegard’s blood-soaked victims. Harry remembered the hateful glare in the boy’s eyes after he’d been forced back behind the yellow crime-scene tape and humiliated in front of the crowd.

  “It’s him,” Harry said softly, wonderingly.

  Tanya Delaney followed his gaze. “Bryan. Mrs. Drackman’s son.”

  Turning to meet Connie’s eyes, Harry said, “It’s him.”

  “Doesn’t look like the ratman,” Sammy said. He had moved to the corner of the room farthest from the patient, perhaps remembering that the blind supposedly compensated for their loss of sight by developing better hearing and a sharper sense of smell.

  The dog mewled once, briefly, quietly.

  Janet Marco pulled her sleepy boy tighter against her side and stared worriedly at the photograph. “Looks a little like Vince… the hair… the eyes. No wonder I thought Vince was coming back.”

  Harry wondered who Vince was, decided it wasn’t a priority, and said to Connie, “If her son really does pay all of her bills—”

  “Oh, yes, it’s the son,” said Nurse Delaney. “He takes such good care of his mother.”

  “—then the business office here will have an address for him.” Connie finished.

  Harry shook his head. “That night supervisor won’t let us look at the records, no way. She’ll guard them with her life until we come back with a warrant.”

  Nurse Delaney said, “I really think you should go before you wake her.”

  “I’m not asleep,” said the white scarecrow in the bed. Her permanently shut eyelids didn’t even twitch, lay slack, as if the muscles in them had atrophied over the years. “And I don’t want his photo here. He forces me to keep it.”

  Harry said, “Mrs. Drackman—”

  “Miss. They call me Mrs. but I’m not. Never was.” Her voice was thin but not frail. Brittle. Cold. “What do you want with him?”

  “Miss Drackman,” Harry continued, “we’re police officers. We need to ask you some questions about your son.”

  If they had the opportunity to learn more than Ticktock’s address, Harry believed they should seize it. The mother might tell them something that would reveal some vulnerability in her exceptional offspring, even if she had no idea of his true nature.

  She was silent a moment, chewing on her lip. Her mouth was pinched, her lips so bloodless they were almost gray.

  Harry looked at his watch.

  2:08.

  The wasted woman raised one arm and hooked her hand, as lean and fierce-looking as a talon, around the bed rail. “Tanya, would you leave us alone?”

  When the nurse began to voice a mild objection, the patient repeated the request more sharply, as a command.

  As soon as the nurse had gone, closing the door behind her, Jennifer Drackman said, “How many of you are there?”

  “Five,” Connie said, failing to mention the dog.

  “You aren’t all police officers, and you aren’t here just on police business,” Jennifer Drackman said with perspicacity that might have been a gift she’d been given to compensate for the long years of blindness.

  Something in her tone of voice, a curious hopefulness, induced Harry to answer her truthfully. “No. We’re not all cops, and we’re not here just as cops.”

  “What has he done to you?” the woman asked.

  He had done so much that no one could think how to put it into words succinctly.

  Interpreting the silence correctly, the woman said, “Do you know what he is?” It was an extraordinary question, and revealed that the mother was aware, at least to some degree, of the son’s difference.

  “Yes,” Harry said. “We know.”

  “Everyone thinks he’s such a nice boy,” the mother said, her voice tremulous. “They won’t listen. The stupid fools. They won’t listen. All these years… they won’t believe.”

  “We’ll listen,” Harry said. “And we already believe.”

  A look of hope flickered across the ravaged face, but hope was an expression so unfamiliar to those features that it could not be sustained. She raised her head off the pillows, a simple act that made the cords go taut with strain under the sagging skin of her neck. “Do you hate him?”

  After a moment of silence, Connie said, “Yes. I hate him.”

  “Yes,” Janet Marco said.

  “I hate him almost as much as I hate myself,” the invalid said. Her voice was now as bitter as bile. For a moment the ghost of beauty past was no longer visible in her withered face. She was sheer ugliness, a grotesque hag. “Will you kill him?”

  Harry was not sure what to say.

  Bryan Drackman’s mother was at no such loss for words: “I’d kill him myself, kill him… but I’m so weak… so weak. Will you kill him?”

  “Yes,” Harry said.

  “It won’t be easy,” she warned.

  “No, it won’t be easy,” he agreed. He glanced at his watch again. “And we don’t have much time.”

  4

  Bryan Drackman slept.

  His was a deep, satisfying sleep. Replenishing.

  He dreamed of power. He was a conduit for lightning. Though it was daylight in the dream, the heavens were almost night-dark, churning with the black clouds of Final Judgment. From that storm to end all storms, great surging rivers of electric current flowed into him, and from his hands, when he wille
d them, flashed lances and balls of lightning. He was Becoming. When that process was someday concluded, he would be the storm, a great destroyer and cleanser, washing away what had been, bathing the world in blood, and in the eyes of those who were permitted to survive, he would see respect, adoration, love, love.

  5

  Through the eyeless night came blind hands of fog, seeking. White vaporous fingers pressed inquisitively against the windows of Jennifer Drackman’s room.

  Lamplight glimmered in the cold beads of sweat on the water carafe, and burnished the stainless steel.

  Connie stood with Harry at the side of the bed. Janet sat in the nurse’s chair, holding her sleeping boy on her lap, the dog lying at her feet with its head upon its paws. Sammy stood in the corner, wrapped in shadows, silent and solemn, perhaps recognizing a few elements of his own story in the one to which they listened.

  The withered woman in the bed appeared to shrivel further while she spoke, as though she needed to burn her very substance for the requisite energy to share her dark memories.

  Harry had the feeling that she’d held fast to life all these years only for this moment, for an audience that would not merely listen patronizingly but would believe.

  In that voice of dust and corrosion, she said, “He’s only twenty years old. I was twenty-two when I became pregnant with him… but I should begin… a few years before his… conception.”

  Simple calculation revealed she was now only forty-two or forty-three. Harry heard small startled sounds and nervous fidgeting from Connie and the others as the awareness of Jennifer’s relative youth swept through them. She looked more than merely old. Ancient. Not prematurely aged by ten or even twenty years, but by forty.

  As thickening cataracts of fog formed over the night windows, the mother of Ticktock spoke of running away from home when she was sixteen, sick to death of school, childishly eager for excitement and experience, physically mature beyond her years since she’d been thirteen but, as she would later realize, emotionally underdeveloped and not half as smart as she thought she was.

  In Los Angeles and later in San Francisco, during the height of the free-love culture of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, a beautiful girl had a choice of like-minded young men with whom to crash and an almost infinite variety of mind-altering chemicals with which to experiment. After several jobs in head shops, selling psychedelic posters and Lava lamps and drug paraphernalia, she went for the main chance and started selling drugs themselves. As a dealer and a woman who was romanced by suppliers for both her sales ability and her good looks, she had the opportunity to sample a lot of exotic substances that were never widely distributed on the street.

  “Hallucinogens were my main thing,” said the lost girl still wandering somewhere within the ancient woman on the bed. “Dehydrated mushrooms from Tibetan caves, luminescent fungus from remote valleys of Peru, liquids distilled from cactus flowers and strange roots, the powdered skin of exotic African lizards, eye of newt, and anything that clever chemists could concoct in laboratories. I wanted to try it all, much of it over and over, anything that would take me places I’d never been, show me things that no one else might ever see.”

  In spite of the depths of despair into which that life had led her, a frigorific wistfulness informed Jennifer Drackman’s voice, an eerie longing.

  Harry sensed that a part of Jennifer would want to make all the same choices if given a chance to live those years again.

  He had never entirely rid himself of the chill that had seeped into him during the Pause, and now coldness spread deeper into the marrow of his bones.

  He checked his watch. 2:12.

  She continued, speaking more quickly, as if aware of his impatience. “In nineteen-seventy-two, I got myself knocked up…”

  Not sure which of three men might be the father, nevertheless she had at first been delighted by the prospect of a baby. Although she could not coherently have defined what the relentless ingestion of so many mind-altering chemicals had taught her, she felt that she had a great store of wisdom to impart to her offspring. It was then one small step of illogic to decide that continued—even increased—use of hallucinogens during pregnancy would result in the birth of a child of heightened consciousness. Those were strange days when many believed that the meaning of life was to be found in peyote and that a tab of LSD could provide access to the throne room of Heaven and a glimpse of the face of God.

  For the first two to three months of her term, Jennifer had been aglow with the prospect of nurturing the perfect child. Perhaps he would be another Dylan, Lennon, or Lenin, a genius and peacemaker, but more advanced than any of them because his enlightenment had begun in the womb, thanks to the foresight and daring of his mother.

  Then everything had changed with one bad trip. She could not recall all of the ingredients of the chemical cocktail that marked the beginning of the end of her life, but she knew that among other things it had contained LSD and the powdered carapace of a rare Asian beetle. In what she had believed to be the highest state of consciousness that she had ever achieved, a series of luminous and uplifting hallucinations had suddenly turned terrifying, filling her with a nameless but crippling dread.

  Even when the bad trip ended and the hallucinations of death and genetic horrors had passed, the dread remained with her—and grew day by day. She did not at first understand the source of her fear, but gradually she focused on the child within and came to understand that in her altered state of mind she had been sent a warning: her baby was no Dylan, but a monster, not a light unto the world but a bringer of darkness.

  Whether that perception was in fact correct or merely drug-induced madness, whether the child inside her was already a mutant or still a perfectly normal fetus, she would never know, for as a result of her overwhelming fear, she set out upon a course of action that in itself might have introduced the final mutagenic factor which, enhanced by her pharmacopeia of drugs, made Bryan what he was. She sought an abortion, but not from the usual sources, for she was afraid of midwives with their coat hangers and of back-alley doctors whose alcoholism had driven them to operate beyond the law. Instead, she resorted to strikingly untraditional and, in the end, riskier methods.

  “That was in ‘seventy-two.” She clutched the bed rail and squirmed under the sheets to pull her half-paralyzed and wasted body into a more comfortable position. Her white hair was wire-stiff.

  The light caught her face from a slightly new angle, revealing to Harry that the milk-white skin over her empty eye sockets was embroidered with a network of thread-fine blue veins.

  His watch. 2:16.

  She said, “The Supreme Court didn’t legalize abortion until early ‘seventy-three, when I was in the last month of my term, so it wasn’t available to me until it was too late.”

  In fact, had abortion been legal, she still might not have gone to a clinic, for she feared and distrusted all doctors. She first tried to rid herself of the unwanted child with the help of a mystic Indian homeopathic practitioner who operated out of an apartment in Haight-Ashbury, the center of the counterculture in San Francisco at that time. He had first given her a series of herb potions known to affect the walls of the uterus and sometimes cause miscarriages. When those medications did not work, he tried a series of potent herbal douches, administered with increasing pressure, to flush the child away.

  When those treatments failed as well, she turned in desperation to a quack offering a briefly popular radium douche, supposedly not radioactive enough to harm the woman but deadly to the fetus. That more radical approach was equally unsuccessful.

  It seemed to her as if the unwanted child was consciously aware of her efforts to be free of it and was clinging to life with inhuman tenacity, a hateful thing already stronger than any ordinary unborn mortal, invulnerable even in the womb.

  2:18.

  Harry was impatient. She had told them nothing, thus far, that would help them deal with Ticktock. “Where can we find your son?”

  Jennif
er probably felt she would never have another audience like this one, and she was not going to tailor her story to their schedule, regardless of the cost. Clearly, in the telling there was some form of expiation for her.

  Harry could barely stand the sound of the woman’s voice, and could no longer tolerate the sight of her face. He left Connie by the bed and went to the window to stare out at the fog, which looked cool and clean.

  “Life became, like, really a bad trip for me,” Jennifer said.

  Harry found it disorienting to hear this pinched and haggard ancient use such dated slang.

  She said her fear of the unborn was worse than anything she had experienced on drugs. Her certainty that she harbored a monster only increased daily. She needed sleep but dreaded it because her sleep was troubled by dreams of shocking violence, human suffering in infinite variety, and something unseen but terrible moving always in shadows.

  “One day they found me in the street, screaming, clawing at my stomach, raving about a beast inside of me. They put me in a psychiatric ward.”

  From there she had been brought to Orange County, under the care of her mother, whom she’d deserted six years earlier. Physical examinations had revealed a scarred uterus, strange adhesions and polyps, and wildly abnormal blood chemistry.

  Although no abnormalities were detectable in the unborn child, Jennifer remained convinced that it was a monster, and became more hysterical by the day, the hour. No secular or religious counseling could calm her fears.

  Hospitalized for a monitored delivery that was necessitated by the things she had done to be rid of the child, Jennifer had slipped beyond hysteria, into madness. She experienced drug flashbacks rife with visions of organic monstrosities, and developed the irrational conviction that if she merely looked upon the child she was bringing into the world, she would be at once damned to Hell. Her labor was unusually difficult and protracted, and due to her mental condition, she was restrained through most of it. But when her restraints were briefly loosened for her comfort, even as the stubborn child was coming forth, she gouged out her eyes with her own thumbs.

  At the window, staring into the faces that formed and dissolved in the fog, Harry shuddered.

  “And he was born,” Jennifer Drackman said. “He was born.”

  Even eyeless, she knew the dark nature of the creature to which she had given birth. But he was a beautiful baby, and then a lovely boy (so they told her), and then a handsome young man. Year after year no one would take seriously the paranoid ravings of a woman who had put out her own eyes.

  Harry checked his watch. 2:21.

  At most they had forty minutes of safe time remaining. Perhaps substantially less.

  “There were so many surgeries, complications from the pregnancy, my eyes, infections. My health went steadily downhill, a couple of strokes, and I never returned home with my mother. Which was good. Because he was there. I lived in a public nursing home for a lot of years, wanting to die, praying to die, but too weak to kill myself… too weak in many ways. Then, two years ago, after he killed my mother, he moved me here.”

  “How do you know he killed your mother?” Connie asked.

  “He told me so. And he told me how. He describes his power to me, how it grows and grows. He’s even shown me things…. And I believe he can do everything he says. Do you?”

  “Yes,” Connie said.

  “Where does he live?” Harry asked, still facing the fog.

  “In my mother’s house.”

  “What’s the address?”

  “My mind’s not clear on a lot of things… but I remember that.”

  She gave them the address.

  Harry thought he knew approximately where the place was. Not far from Pacific View.

  He checked his watch yet again. 2:23.

  Eager to get out of that room, and not merely because they urgently needed to deal with Bryan Drackman, Harry turned away from the window. “Let’s go.”

  Sammy Shamroe stepped out of the shadow-hung corner. Janet rose from the nurse’s chair, holding her sleeping child, and the dog got to his feet.

  But Connie had a question. It was the kind of personal question Harry ordinarily would have asked and that until tonight would have made Connie scowl with impatience because they had already learned the essentials.

  “Why does Bryan keep coming here to see you?” Connie inquired.

  “To torture me in one way or another,” the woman said.

  “That’s all—when he has a world full of people to torture?”

  Letting her hand slide off the bed rail, which she had been grasping all this time, Jennifer Drackman said, “Love.”

  “He comes because he loves you?”

  “No, no. Not him. He’s incapable of love, doesn’t understand the word, only thinks he does. But he wants love from me.” A dry, humorless laugh escaped the skeletal figure in the bed. “Can you believe he comes to me for this?”

  Harry was surprised that he could feel a grudging pity for the psychotic child who had entered the world, unwanted, from this disturbed woman.

  That room, though warm and comfortable enough, was the last place in creation to which anyone should go in search of love.

  6

  Fog poured off the Pacific and embraced the night coast, dense and deep and cool. It flowed through the sleeping town, like the ghost of an ancient ocean