The Key to Midnight

by Dean Koontz

  He took her hand before she realized what he’d done. She no longer had the strength to wrench away from him.

  “I’m going to stay here until you close your eyes and cooperate with me,” he said quietly. “Or until the walls crush you or the ceiling presses you into the floor. Which will it be?”

  She slumped against the wall.

  “Close your eyes,” he said.

  Tears blurred her vision so completely that she couldn’t see his face. He might have been anyone.

  “Close your eyes.”

  Weeping, she slid down the wall, her back in the corner, until she was sitting on the floor.

  He dropped to his knees in front of her. Now he was holding both of her hands. “Close your eyes, Joanna. Please. Trust me.”

  Sobbing uncontrollably, Joanna closed her eyes, and immediately she felt that she was in a coffin, one of those hulking bronze models with a lead lining, and the lid was bolted down just inches above her face. Such a narrow space, shallow and dark, as black as the heart of a moonless midnight, so utterly lightless that the darkness might have been a living thing, an amorphous entity that flowed all around her and molded to her shape, sucking the heat of life out of her.

  Nevertheless, cornered and in an extreme state of helplessness, she could do nothing but keep her eyes closed and listen to Alex. His voice was a beacon that marked the way to release, to freedom.

  “Keep your eyes closed. No need to look,” Alex said softly. “I’ll be your eyes. I’ll tell you what’s happening.”

  She couldn’t stop sobbing.

  “The walls aren’t closing in as fast as they were. Barely creeping inward now. Barely creeping... and now... now they’ve stopped altogether. The ceiling too... not descending any more. Everything’s stopped. Stable. Do you hear me, Joanna?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “No, don’t open your eyes yet. Squeeze them tight shut. Just visualize what I’m telling you. See the world through me.”

  She nodded.

  The air wasn’t normal, but it was thinner than it had been since the seizure had stricken her. Breathable. Sweet.

  “Eyes closed... closed... but see what’s happening,” Alex said as softly and lullingly as a hypnotist. “The ceiling is starting to withdraw ... moving up where it belongs. The walls too... pulling back from you, back from us, away... slowly away. You understand? The room is getting larger... a lot of space now. Do you feel the room gradually getting bigger, Joanna?”

  “Yes,” she said, and though hot tears were still streaming from her eyes, she was no longer sobbing.

  Alex spoke to her in that fashion for several minutes, and Joanna listened closely to each word and visualized each statement. Eventually the air pressure returned to normal; she was no longer suffocating.

  When her tears had dried and when her breathing had become rhythmic, relaxed, almost normal, he said, “Okay, open your eyes.”

  She opened them, although reluctantly. The living room was as it should be.

  “You made it all go away,” she said wonderingly. “You made it right again.”

  He was still holding her hands. He gently squeezed them, smiled, and said, “Not just me. We did it together. And from now on, I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to do it alone.”

  “Oh, no. Never by myself.”

  “Yes, you will. Because this phobia isn’t a natural part of your psychological makeup. I’d bet everything I own that it’s just posthypnotic suggestion. You don’t need psychoanalysis to get rid of it. From now on, when a seizure hits you, just close your eyes and picture everything opening up and moving away from you.”

  “But I’ve tried that before. It never worked... until now, until you....”

  “Just once, you needed someone to hold your hand and force you to face up to the fear, someone who wouldn’t be driven away. Until tonight, you thought it was an interior problem, an embarrassing mental illness. Now you know it’s an exterior problem, not your fault, like a curse someone placed on you.”

  Joanna looked at the ceiling, daring it to descend.

  Alex said, “Subsequent attacks ought to be less and less fierce—until they finally stop altogether. Neither the paranoia nor the claustrophobia has any genuine roots in you. They were both grafted onto you by the bastards who transformed you from Lisa into Joanna. You’ve been programmed. Now you have the power to reprogram yourself to be like other people.”

  To be like other people ...

  For the first time in more than a decade, Joanna felt that she had at least some control of her life. She could at last deal with the malignant forces that had made a loner of her. From this day forward, if she wanted an intimate relationship with Alex or with anyone else, nothing within her could prevent her from having what she wanted. The only obstacles remaining were external. That thought was exhilarating, like a rejuvenation drug, water from the fountain of youth. The years dropped from her. Time ran backward. She felt as though she were a girl again. She would never hereafter cringe in fear as the ceiling descended and the walls closed in on her, nor would spells of irrational paranoia keep her from the succor and sanctuary of her friends.

  To be like other people ...

  The cage door had been opened. She was free.

  27

  The photographs no longer disturbed Joanna. She studied them in the same spirit of awe that people must have known when gazing into the first mirrors many centuries ago—with a superstitious fascination but not with fear.

  Alex sat beside her on the sofa, reading aloud from some of the reports in the massive Chelgrin file. They discussed what he read, trying to see the information from every angle, searching for a perspective that might have been overlooked at the time of the investigation.

  As the evening wore on, Joanna made a list of the ways in which she and Lisa Chelgrin were alike. Intellectually, she was more than half convinced that Alex was right, that she was indeed the missing daughter of the senator. But emotionally, she lacked conviction. Could it really be possible that the mother and father she remembered so well—Elizabeth and Robert Rand—were mere- ly phantoms, that they had never existed except in her mind? And the apartment in London—was it conceivable that she had never actually lived in that place? She needed to see the evidence in black and white, a list of reasons why she should seriously consider such outrageous concepts.

  As Joanna was reading the list yet again, Alex pulled another report from the file, glanced at it, and said, “Here’s something damned curious. I’d forgotten all about it.”

  “What?”

  “It’s an interview with Mr. and Mrs. Morimoto.”

  “Who’re they?”

  “Lovely people,” Alex said. “Domestic servants. They’ve been employed by Tom Chelgrin since Lisa... since you were five years old.”

  “The senator brought a couple from Japan to work in his home?”

  “No, no. They’re both second-generation Japanese Americans. From San Francisco, I think.”

  “Still, like you said, it’s curious. Now there’s a Japanese link between me and Lisa.”

  “You haven’t heard the half of it.”

  Frowning, she said, “You think the Morimotos had something to do with my ... with Lisa’s disappearance?”

  “Not at all. They’re good people. Not a drop of larceny in them. Besides, they weren’t in Jamaica when Lisa disappeared. They were at the senator’s house in Virginia, near Washington.”

  “So what is it exactly that you find so curious about them?”

  Paging through the transcript of the Morimoto interview, he said, “Well... the Morimotos were around the house all day, every day when Lisa was growing up. Fumi was the cook. She did a little light housekeeping too. Her husband, Koji, was a combination house manager and butler. They both were Lisa’s baby-sitters when she was growing up, and she adored them. She picked up a lot of Japanese from them. The senator was all in favor of that. He thought it was a good idea to teach languages to children when they were very yo
ung and had fewer mental blocks against learning. He sent Lisa to an elementary school where she was taught French beginning in the first grade—”

  “I speak French.”

  “—and where she was taught German starting in the third grade.”

  “I speak German too,” Joanna said.

  She added those items to her list of similarities. The pen trembled slightly in her fingers.

  “So what I’m leading up to,” Alex said, “is that Tom Chelgrin used the Morimotos to tutor Lisa in Japanese. She spoke it fluently. Better than she spoke either French or German.”

  Joanna looked up from the list that she was making. She felt dizzy. “My God.”

  “Yeah. Too incredible to be coincidence.”

  “But I learned Japanese in England,” she insisted.

  “Did you?”

  “At the university—and from my boyfriend.”

  “Did you?”

  They stared at each other.

  For Joanna, the impossible now seemed probable.

  28

  Joanna found the letters in her bedroom closet, at the bottom of a box of snapshots and other mementos. They were in one thin bundle, tied together with faded yellow ribbon. She brought them back to the living room and gave them to Alex. “I don’t really know why I’ve held on to them all these years.”

  “You probably kept them because you were told to keep them.”

  “Told—by whom?”

  “By the people who kidnapped Lisa. By the people who tinkered with your mind. Letters like these are superficial proof of your Joanna Rand identity.”

  “Only superficial?”

  “We’ll see.”

  The packet contained five letters, three of which were from J. Compton Woolrich, a London solicitor and the executor of the Robert and Elizabeth Rand estate. The final letter from Woolrich mentioned the enclosure of an after-tax, estate-settlement check in excess of three hundred thousand dollars.

  As far as Joanna could see, that money from Woolrich blasted an enormous hole in Alex’s conspiracy theory.

  “You actually received that check?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And it cleared? You got the money?”

  “Every dime. And if there was such a large estate, then my father and mother—Robert and Elizabeth—must have been real people.”

  “Maybe,” Alex said doubtfully. “Real people. But even if they did exist, that doesn’t mean you were their daughter.”

  “How else could I inherit from them?”

  Instead of responding, he read the last two of the five letters, both of which were from the claims office of the United British-Continental Insurance Association, Limited. Upon its receipt of the medical examiner’s official certification of the death of Robert and Elizabeth (nee Henderson) Rand, British-Continental had honored Robert’s life insurance policy and had paid the full death benefits to Joanna, the sole surviving heir. The sum received—which was in addition to the three hundred thousand dollars that had been realized from the liquidation of the estate—was a hundred thousand pounds Sterling, minus the applicable taxes.

  “A hundred thousand pounds. More than another hundred and fifty thousand bucks. And you received this too?” Alex asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Quite a lot of money.”

  “It was,” Joanna agreed. “But I needed virtually all of it to purchase this building and renovate it. The place needed a lot of work. Then I had to use most of what was left to operate the Moonglow until it became profitable—which, thank God, wasn’t all that long.”

  Alex shuffled the letters, stopped when he found the last one from the London solicitor, and said, “This Woolrich guy—did you do all of your business with him by mail and on the phone?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You met him face-to-face?”

  “Sure. Lots of times.”

  “When? Where?”

  “He was my father’s... He was Robert Rand’s personal attorney. They were also friends. He was a dinner guest at our apartment in London at least three or four times a year.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Very kind, gentle,” Joanna said. “After my parents were killed in the accident near Brighton—well, if they were my parents—Mr. Woolrich came to see me a number of times. And not just when he needed my approval or my signature to proceed with the settlement of the estate. He paid me frequent visits. I was horribly depressed. He worried about keeping my spirits up. I don’t know how I’d have gotten through without him. He loved jokes. He always had a couple of new jokes to tell me every time he came by. Usually quite funny jokes too. Always trying to get a little laugh out of me. He was extraordinarily considerate. He never made me go to his office on business. He always came to me. He never put me out in the least. He was warm and considerate. He was a nice man. I liked him.”

  Alex studied her with narrowed eyes, very much the detective again. “Did you listen to yourself just now?”

  “What?”

  “The way you sounded.”

  “How did I sound?”

  Rather than answer, he got up from the couch and began to pace. “Tell me one of his jokes.”

  “Jokes?”

  “Yes. Tell me one.”

  “You can’t be serious. I don’t remember any. Not after all these years.”

  “His jokes were usually quite funny. You stressed that. Seems reasonable to assume you might remember at least one.”

  She was puzzled by his interest. “Well, I don’t. Sorry. Why does it matter anyway?”

  He stopped pacing and stared down at her.

  Those eyes. Once again she was aware of their power. They opened her with a glance and left her defenseless. She had thought she was armored against their effect, but she wasn’t. Paranoia surged in her, the stark terror of having no secrets and no place to hide. She fought off that brief madness and retained her composure.

  “If you could recall one of his jokes,” Alex said, “you’d provide some much needed detail. You’d be adding verisimilitude to what are now, frankly, very thin recollections of him.”

  “I’m not trying to hide anything. I’m giving you all the details I can.”

  “I know. That’s what bothers me.” Alex sat beside her again. “Didn’t you notice anything odd about the way you summed up Woolrich a moment ago?”

  “Odd?”

  “Your voice changed. In fact, your whole manner changed. Subtly. But I noticed it. As soon as you started talking about this Woolrich, you spoke in... almost a monotone, choppy sentences... as if you were reciting something you’d memorized.”

  “Really now, Alex. You make me sound like a zombie. You were imagining it.”

  “My business is observation, not imagination. Tell me more about Woolrich. What does he look like?”

  “Does it really matter?”

  Alex was quick to press the point. “Don’t you remember that either?”

  She sighed. “He was in his forties when my parents died. A slender man. Five foot ten. Maybe a hundred forty or a hundred fifty pounds. Very nervous. Talked rather fast. Energetic. He had a pinched face. Pale. Thin lips. Brown eyes. Brown, thinning hair. He wore heavy tortoiseshell glasses, and he—”

  Joanna stopped in midsentence, because suddenly she could hear what Alex had heard before. She sounded as if she were standing at attention in front of a class of schoolchildren, reciting an assigned poem. It was eerie, and she shivered.

  “Do you correspond with Woolrich?” Alex asked.

  “Write letters to him? Why should I?”

  “He was your father’s friend.”

  “They were casual friends, not best buddies.”

  “But he was your friend too.”

  “Yes, well, in a way he was.”

  “And after all he did for you when you were feeling so low—”

  “Maybe I should have kept in touch with him.”

  “That would have been more in character, don’t you think?
You aren’t a thoughtless person.”

  “You know how it is. Friends drift apart.”

  “Not always.”

  “Well, they generally do when you put twelve thousand miles between them.” She frowned. “You’re making me feel guilty.”

  Alex shook his head. “You’re missing my point. Look, if Woolrich was really a friend of your father’s and if he actually was extraordinarily helpful to you after the accident in Brighton, you would have maintained contact with him at least for a couple of years. That would be like you. From what I know of you, it’s entirely out of character for you to forget a friend so quickly and easily.”

  Joanna smiled ruefully. “You have an idealized image of me.”

  “No. I’m aware of your faults. But ingratitude isn’t one of them. I think this J. Compton Woolrich never existed—which is why you couldn’t possibly have kept in touch with him.”

  “But I remember him!” Joanna said exasperatedly.

  “As I said, you may have been made to remember a lot of things that never happened.”

  “Programmed,” she said sarcastically.

  “I’m close to the truth,” he said confidently. “Do you realize how tense it’s made you to have to listen to me?”

  She realized that she was leaning forward, shoulders drawn up, hunched as if in anticipation of a blow to the back of the neck. She was even biting her fingernails. She sat back on the couch and tried to relax.

  “I heard the change in my voice when I was telling you what Woolrich looked like. A monotone. It’s spooky. And when I try to expand on those few memories of him... I can’t recall anything new. There’s no color, no detail. It all seems... flat. Like photographs or a painting. But I did receive those letters from him.”

  “That’s another thing that bothers me. You said that after the accident, Woolrich came to visit you frequently.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “So why would he write to you at all?”

  “Well, of course, he had to be careful....” Joanna frowned. “I’ll be damned. I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about that.”

  Alex shook the thin packet of correspondence as if he hoped a secret would drop out of it. “There isn’t anything in these three letters that requires a written notice to you. He could have conducted all this business in person. He didn’t even have to deliver the settlement check by mail.” Alex tossed the letters on the coffee table. “The only reason that these were sent to you was so you’d have superficial proof of your phony background.”