by Dean Koontz
When he spied her, the dwarf faced the porch from a distance of forty feet, hopping from foot to foot, sometimes beating his breast with both hands. He was agitated, possibly distressed, and seemed to be unsure of what to do now that he had been seen.
Erika poured more cognac and waited.
Nick Frigg led Gunny, Hobb, and Azazel along the tunnel, deeper into the trash pit. Their flashlight beams dazzled along the curved and glassy surfaces.
He suspected that the glaze that held the garbage walls so firm might be an organic material exuded by the mother of all gone-wrongs. When he sniffed the glaze, it was different from but similar to the smell of spider webs and moth cocoons, different from but similar to the odor of hive wax and termite excrement.
Within a quarter of an hour, they saw that the tunnel wound and looped and intersected itself in the manner of a wormhole. There must be miles of it, not just in the west pit but also in the east, and perhaps in the older pits that had been filled, capped with earth, and planted over with grass.
Here beneath Crosswoods was a world of secret highways that had been long abuilding. The labyrinth seemed too elaborate to serve as the burrow of a single creature, no matter how industrious. The four explorers approached every blind turn with the expectation that they would discover a colony of strange life forms or even structures of peculiar architecture.
Once they heard voices. Numerous. Male and female. Distant and rhythmic. The endlessly twisting tunnel distorted the chants beyond understanding, though one word carried undeformed, repeated like the repetitive response to the verses of a long litany: Father…Father…Father.
In the Hands of Mercy, Annunciata spoke to a deserted lab, for now even Lester, of the maintenance staff, had departed for work in other chambers or perhaps to sit and scratch himself until he bled.
“Urgent, urgent, urgent. Trapped. Analyze your systems. Get anything right. Perhaps there is an imbalance in your nutrient supply. Cycle the inner door?”
When she asked a question, she waited patiently for a response, but none ever came.
“Do you have instructions, Mr. Helios? Helios?”
Her face on the screen assumed a quizzical expression.
Eventually, the computer screen on Victor’s desk in the main lab went dark.
Simultaneously, Annunciata’s face materialized on one of the six screens in the monitor room outside Isolation Chamber Number 2.
“Cycle the inner door?” she asked.
No staff remained to answer. They were at each other in distant rooms or otherwise engaged.
As no one would answer the question, she probed her memory for past instructions that might apply to the current situation: “Cycle open the nearer door of the transition module. Father Duchaine would like to offer his holy counsel to poor Werner.”
The nearest door purred, sighed with the breaking of a seal, and swung open.
On the screens, the Werner thing, having been racing around the walls in a frenzy, suddenly went still, alert.
“Cycle open the farther door?” Annunciata asked.
She received no reply.
“He’s in the air lock,” she said.
Then she corrected herself: “It’s not an air lock.”
The Werner thing was now singular in appearance and so unearthly in its form that an entire college of biologists, anthropologists, entomologists, herpetologists, and their ilk could have spent years studying it without determining the meaning of its body language and its facial expressions (to the extent that it had a face). Yet on the screens, as viewed from different angles, most laymen would have said that it looked eager.
“Thank you, Mr. Helios. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Helios. Helios. Helios.”
Bucky Guitreau, the current district attorney of the city of New Orleans and a replicant, was at work at the desk in his home office when his wife, Janet, also a replicant, stepped in from the hallway and said, “Bucky, I think lines of code in my base programming are dropping out.”
“We all have days we feel that way,” he assured her.
“No,” she said. “I must have lost a significant chunk of stuff. Did you hear the doorbell ring a few minutes ago?”
“I did, yeah.”
“It was a pizza-delivery guy.”
“Did we order a pizza?”
“No. It was for the Bennets, next door. Instead of just setting the pizza guy straight, I killed him.”
“What do you mean—killed him?”
“I dragged him into the foyer and strangled him to death.”
Alarmed, Bucky got up from his desk. “Show me.”
He followed her out to the foyer. A twentysomething man lay dead on the floor.
“The pizza’s in the kitchen if you want some,” Janet said.
Bucky said, “You’re awfully calm about this.”
“I am, aren’t I? It was really fun. I’ve never felt so good.”
Although he should have been wary of her, afraid for himself, and concerned about the effect of this on their maker’s master plan, Bucky was instead in awe of her. And envious.
“You’ve definitely dropped some lines of program,” he said. “I didn’t know that was possible. What’re you going to do now?”
“I think I’m going to go next door and kill the Bennets. What are you going to do?”
“What I should do is report you for termination,” Bucky said.
“Are you going to?”
“Maybe there’s something wrong with me, too.”
“You’re not going to turn me in?”
“I don’t really feel like it,” he said.
“Do you want to come with me and help kill the Bennets?”
“We’re forbidden to kill until ordered.”
“They’re Old Race. I’ve hated them for so long.”
“Well, I have, too,” he said. “But still…”
“I’m so horny just talking about it,” Janet said, “I’ve got to go over there right now.”
“I’ll go with you,” Bucky said. “I don’t think I could kill anybody. But it’s funny…I think I could watch.”
After a while the naked albino dwarf came across the dark lawn to the big porch window directly in front of Erika, and peered in at her.
Dwarf wasn’t the correct word for it. She didn’t think a right word existed, but troll seemed more accurately descriptive than dwarf.
Although the thing in the glass case had scared her, she had no concern about this creature. Her lack of fear puzzled her.
The troll had large, unusually expressive eyes. They were both eerie and beautiful.
She felt an inexplicable sympathy for it, a connection.
The troll leaned its forehead against the glass and said quite distinctly, in a raspy voice, “Harker.”
Erika considered this for a moment. “Harker?”
“Harker,” the troll repeated.
If she understood it correctly, the required reply was the one she gave: “Erika.”
“Erika,” said the troll.
“Harker,” she said.
The troll smiled. Its smile proved to be an ugly wound in its face, but she didn’t flinch.
Part of her duties was to be the perfect hostess. The perfect hostess receives every guest with equal graciousness.
She sipped her cognac, and for a minute they enjoyed staring at each other through the window.
Then the troll said, “Hate him.”
Erika considered this statement. She decided that if she asked to whom the troll referred, the answer might require her to report the creature to someone.
The perfect hostess does not need to pry. She does, however, anticipate a guest’s needs.
“Wait right there,” she said. “I’ll be back.”
She went into the kitchen, found a wicker picnic hamper in the pantry, and filled it with cheese, roast beef, bread, fruit, and a bottle of white wine.
She thought the troll might be gone when she returned, but it remained at the win
dow.
When she opened the porch door and stepped outside, the troll took fright and scampered across the lawn. It didn’t run away, but stopped to watch her from a distance.
She put down the hamper, returned to the porch, sat as before, and refreshed her glass of cognac.
Hesitantly at first, then with sudden boldness, the creature went to the hamper and lifted the lid.
When it understood the nature of the offering, it picked up the hamper and hurried toward the back of the property, vanishing into the night.
The perfect hostess does not gossip about a guest. She never fails to keep secrets and honor confidences.
The perfect hostess is creative, patient, and has a long memory—as does a wise wife.
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LIFE EXPECTANCY
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DEAN KOONTZ
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LIFE EXPECTANCY
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ON THE NIGHT that I was born, my paternal grandfather, Josef Tock, made ten predictions that shaped my life. Then he died in the very minute that my mother gave birth to me.
Josef had never previously engaged in fortune-telling. He was a pastry chef. He made éclairs and lemon tarts, not predictions.
Some lives, conducted with grace, are beautiful arcs bridging this world to eternity. I am thirty years old and can’t for certain see the course of my life, but rather than a graceful arc, my passage seems to be a herky-jerky line from one crisis to another.
I am a lummox, by which I do not mean stupid, only that I am biggish for my size and not always aware of where my feet are going.
This truth is not offered in a spirit of self-deprecation or even humility. Apparently, being a lummox is part of my charm, an almost winsome trait, as you will see.
No doubt I have now raised in your mind the question of what I intend to imply by “biggish for my size.” Autobiography is proving to be a trickier task than I first imagined.
I am not as tall as people seem to think I am, in fact not tall at all by the standards of professional—or even of high school—basketball. I am neither plump nor as buff as an iron-pumping fitness fanatic. At most I am somewhat husky.
Yet men taller and heavier than I am often call me “big guy.” My nickname in school was Moose. From childhood, I have heard people joke about how astronomical our grocery bills must be.
The disconnect between my true size and many people’s perception of my dimensions has always mystified me.
My wife, who is the linchpin of my life, claims that I have a presence much bigger than my physique. She says that people measure me by the impression I make on them.
I find this notion ludicrous. It is bullshit born of love.
If sometimes I make an outsized impression on people, it’s as likely as not because I fell on them. Or stepped on their feet.
In Arizona, there is a place where a dropped ball appears to roll uphill in defiance of gravity. In truth, this effect is a trick of perspective in which elements of a highly unusual landscape conspire to deceive the eye.
I suspect I am a similar freak of nature. Perhaps light reflects oddly from me or bends around me in a singular fashion, so I appear to be more of a hulk than I am.
On the night I was born in Snow County Hospital, in the community of Snow Village, Colorado, my grandfather told a nurse that I would be twenty inches long and weigh eight pounds ten ounces.
The nurse was startled by this prediction not because eight pounds ten is a huge newborn—many are larger—and not because my grandfather was a pastry chef who suddenly began acting as though he were a crystal-ball gazer. Four days previously he had suffered a massive stroke that left him paralyzed on his right side and unable to speak; yet from his bed in the intensive care unit, he began making prognostications in a clear voice, without slur or hesitation.
He also told her that I would be born at 10:46 P.M. and that I would suffer from syndactyly.
That is a word difficult to pronounce before a stroke, let alone after one.
Syndactyly—as the observing nurse explained to my father—is a congenital defect in which two or more fingers or toes are joined. In serious cases, the bones of adjacent digits are fused to such an extent that two fingers share a single nail.
Multiple surgeries are required to correct such a condition and to ensure that the afflicted child will grow into an adult capable of giving the F-you finger to anyone who sufficiently annoys him.
In my case, the trouble was toes. Two were fused on the left foot, three on the right.
My mother, Madelaine—whom my father affectionately calls Maddy or sometimes the Mad One—insists that they considered forgoing the surgery and, instead, christening me Flipper.
Flipper was the name of a dolphin that once starred in a hit TV show—not surprisingly titled Flipper—in the late 1960s. My mother describes the program as “delightfully, wonderfully, hilariously stupid.” It went off the air a few years before I was born.
Flipper, a male, was played by a trained dolphin named Suzi. This was most likely the first instance of transvestism on television.
Actually, that’s not the right word because transvestism is a male dressing as a female for sexual gratification. Besides, Suzi—alias Flipper—didn’t wear clothes.
So it was a program in which the female star always appeared nude and was sufficiently butch to pass for a male.
Just two nights ago at dinner, over one of my mother’s infamous cheese-and-broccoli pies, she asked rhetorically if it was any wonder that such a dire collapse in broadcast standards, begun with Flipper, should lead to the boring freak-show shock that is contemporary television.
Playing her game, my father said, “It actually began with Lassie. In every show, she was nude, too.”
“Lassie was always played by male dogs,” my mother replied.
“There you go,” Dad said, his point made.
I escaped being named Flipper when successful surgeries restored my toes to the normal condition. In my case, the fusion involved only skin, not bones. The separation was a relatively simple procedure.
Nevertheless, on that uncommonly stormy night, my grandfather’s prediction of syndactyly proved true.
”Even allowing for exaggeration, the storm must have been violent enough to shake the Colorado mountains to their rocky foundations. The heavens cracked and flashed as if celestial armies were at war.
Still in the womb, I remained unaware of all the thunderclaps. And once born, I was probably distracted by my strange feet.
This was August 9, 1974, the day Richard Nixon resigned as President of the United States.
Nixon’s fall has no more to do with
me than the fact that John Denver’s “Annie’s Song” was the number-one record in the country at the time. I mention it only to provide historical perspective.
Nixon or no Nixon, what I find most important about August 9, 1974, is my birth—and my grandfather’s predictions. My sense of perspective has an egocentric taint.
Perhaps more clearly than if I had been there, because of vivid pictures painted by numerous family stories of that night, I can see my father, Rudy Tock, walking back and forth from one end of County Hospital to the other, between the maternity ward and the ICU, between joy at the prospect of his son’s pending arrival and grief over his beloved father’s quickening slide into death.
With blue vinyl-tile floor, pale-green wainscoting, pink walls, a yellow ceiling, and orange-and-white storkpatterned drapes, the expectant-fathers’ lounge churned with the negative energy of color overload. It would have served well as the nervous-making set for a nightmare about a children’s-show host who led a secret life as an ax murderer.
The chain-smoking clown didn’t improve the ambience.
Rudy stood birth watch with only one other man, not a local but a performer with the circus that was playing a one-week engagement in a meadow at the Halloway Farm. He called himself Beezo. Curiously, this proved not to be his clown name but one that he’d been born with: Konrad Beezo.
Some say there is no such thing as destiny, that what happens just happens, without purpose or meaning. Konrad’s surname would argue otherwise.
Beezo was married to Natalie, a trapeze artist and a member of a renowned aerialist family that qualified as circus royalty.
Neither of Natalie’s parents, none of her brothers and sisters, and none of her high-flying cousins had accompanied Beezo to the hospital. This was a performance night, and as always the show must go on.
Evidently the aerialists kept their distance also because they had not approved of one of their kind taking a clown for a husband. Every subculture and ethnicity has its objects of bigotry.
