by Dean Koontz
time, or maybe the time and the place are right but the weather’s wrong, I don’t know—Oh, Lord, listen to me—but I’ve really got to know if you can, if you are, how you feel, whether you feel, I mean, whether you think you could feel—”
Instead of gaping at her as though she had been possessed by an inarticulate demon, Wally urgently fumbled a small box out of his jacket pocket and blurted, “Will you marry me?”
He hit Celestina with the big question, the huge question, just as she paused in her babbling to suck in a deep breath, the better to spout even more nonsense, whereupon this panicky inhalation caught in her breast, caught so stubbornly that she was certain she would need the attention of paramedics to start breathing again, but then Wally popped open the box, revealing a lovely engagement ring, the sight of which made the trapped breath explode from her, and then she was breathing fine, although snuffling and crying and just generally a mess. “I love you, Wally.”
Grinning but with an odd edge of concern in his expression that Celestina could see even through her tears, Wally said, “Does that mean you…you will?”
“Will I love you tomorrow, you mean, and the day after tomorrow, and on forever? Of course, forever, Wally, always.”
“Marry, I mean.”
Her heart fell and her confusion soared. “Isn’t that what you asked?”
“And is that what you answered?”
“Oh!” She blotted her eyes on the heels of her hands. “Wait! Give me a second chance. I can do it better, I’m sure I can.”
“Me too.” He closed the ring box. Took a deep breath. Opened the box again. “Celestina, when I met you, my heart was beating but it was dead. It was cold inside me. I thought it would never be warm again, but because of you, it is. You have given my life back to me, and I want now to give my life to you. Will you marry me?”
Celestina extended her left hand, which shook so badly that she nearly knocked over both their wineglasses. “I will.”
Neither of them was aware that their personal drama, in all its clumsiness and glory, had focused the attention of everyone in the restaurant. The cheer that went up at Celestina’s acceptance of his proposal caused her to start, knocking the ring from Wally’s hand as he attempted to slip it on her finger. The ring bounced across the table, they both grabbed for it, Wally made the catch, and this time she was properly betrothed, to wild applause and laughter.
Dessert was on the house. The waiter brought the four best items on the menu, to spare them the need to make two small decisions after having made such a big one.
After coffee had been served, when Celestina and Wally were no longer the center of attention, he indicated the array of desserts with his fork, smiled, and said, “I just want you to know, Celie, that these are sweets enough until we’re married.”
She was astonished and moved. “I’m a hopeless throw-back to the nineteenth century. How could you realize what’s been on my mind?”
“It was in your heart, too, and anything that’s in your heart is there for anyone to see. Will your father marry us?”
“Once he regains consciousness.”
“We’ll have a grand wedding.”
“It doesn’t have to be grand,” she said, with a seductive leer, “but if we’re going to wait, then the wedding better be soon.”
From Sparky, Tom Vanadium had borrowed a master key with which he could open the door to Cain’s apartment, but he preferred not to employ it as long as he could enter by a back route. The less often he used the halls that were frequented by residents, the more likely he would be able to keep his flesh-and-blood presence a secret from Cain and sustain his ghostly reputation. If too many tenants got a look at his memorable face, he would become a topic of discussion among neighbors, and the wife killer might tumble to the truth.
He raised the window in the kitchen and climbed outside, onto the landing of the fire escape. Feeling like a high-roaming cousin to the Phantom of the Opera, bearing the requisite fearsome scars if not the unrequited love for a soprano, Vanadium descended through the foggy night, down two flights of the switchback iron stairs to the kitchen at Cain’s apartment.
All windows opening onto the fire escape featured a laminated sandwich of glass and steel-wire mesh to prevent easy access by burglars. Tom Vanadium knew all the tricks of the best B-and-E artists, but he didn’t need to break in order to enter here.
During the cleaning, installation of new carpet, and painting that had followed the removal of the diarrheic pig set loose by one of Cain’s disgruntled girlfriends, the wife killer had spent a few nights in a hotel. Nolly took advantage of the opportunity to bring his associate James Hunnicolt—Jimmy Gadget—onto the premises to provide a customized, undetectable, exterior window-latch release.
As he’d been instructed, Vanadium felt along the return edge of the carved limestone casing to the right of the window until he located a quarter-inch-diameter steel pin that protruded an inch. The pin was grooved to facilitate a grip. An insistent, steady pull was required, but as promised, the thumb-turn latch on the inside disengaged.
He raised the lower sash of the tall double-hung window and slipped quietly into the dark kitchen. Because the window served also as an emergency exit, it wasn’t set above a counter, and ingress was easy.
This room didn’t face the street by which Cain would approach the building, so Vanadium switched on the lights. He spent fifteen minutes examining the mundane contents of the cupboards, searching for nothing in particular, merely getting an idea of how the suspect lived—and, admittedly, hoping for an item as helpful to a conviction as a severed head in the refrigerator or at least a plastic-wrapped kilo of marijuana in the freezer.
He found nothing especially gratifying, switched off the lights, and moved on to the living room. If Cain was coming home, he could glance up from the street and see lights ablaze here, so Vanadium resorted to a small flashlight, always carefully hooding the lens with one hand.
Nolly, Kathleen, and Sparky had prepared him for Industrial Woman, but when the flashlight beam flared off her fork-and-fan-blade face, Vanadium twitched in fright. Without fully realizing what he was doing, he crossed himself.
The white Buick glided through the tides of fog like a ghost ship plying a ghost sea.
Wally drove slowly, carefully, with all the responsibility that you would expect from an obstetrician, pediatrician, and spanking-new fiancé. The trip home to Pacific Heights took twice as long as it would have taken in clear weather on a night without a pledge of troth.
He wanted Celestina to sit in her seat and use her lap belt, but she insisted on cuddling next to him, as if she were a high-school girl and he were her teenage beau.
Although this was perhaps the happiest evening of Celestina’s life, it wasn’t without a note of melancholy. She couldn’t avoid thinking about Phimie.
Happiness could grow out of unspeakable tragedy with such vigor that it produced dazzling blooms and lush green bracts. This insight served, for Celestina, as a primary inspiration for her painting and as proof of the grace granted in this world that we might perceive and be sustained by the promise of an ultimate joy to come.
Out of Phimie’s humiliation, terror, suffering, and death had come Angel, whom Celestina had first and briefly hated, but whom now she loved more than she loved Wally, more than she loved herself or even life itself. Phimie, through Angel, had brought Celestina both to Wally and to a fuller understanding of their father’s meaning when he spoke of this momentous day, an understanding that brought power to her painting and so deeply touched the people who saw and bought her art.
Not one day in anyone’s life, so her father taught, is an uneventful day, no day without profound meaning, no matter how dull and boring it might seem, no matter whether you are a seamstress or a queen, a shoeshine boy or a movie star, a renowned philosopher or a Down’s-syndrome child. Because in every day of your life, there are opportunities to perform little kindnesses for others, both by conscious acts of wil
l and unconscious example. Each smallest act of kindness—even just words of hope when they are needed, the remembrance of a birthday, a compliment that engenders a smile—reverberates across great distances and spans of time, affecting lives unknown to the one whose generous spirit was the source of this good echo, because kindness is passed on and grows each time it’s passed, until a simple courtesy becomes an act of selfless courage years later and far away. Likewise, each small meanness, each thoughtless expression of hatred, each envious and bitter act, regardless of how petty, can inspire others, and is therefore the seed that ultimately produces evil fruit, poisoning people whom you have never met and never will. All human lives are so profoundly and intricately entwined—those dead, those living, those generations yet to come—that the fate of all is the fate of each, and the hope of humanity rests in every heart and in every pair of hands. Therefore, after every failure, we are obliged to strive again for success, and when faced with the end of one thing, we must build something new and better in the ashes, just as from pain and grief, we must weave hope, for each of us is a thread critical to the strength—to the very survival—of the human tapestry. Every hour in every life contains such often-unrecognized potential to affect the world that the great days for which we, in our dissatisfaction, so often yearn are already with us; all great days and thrilling possibilities are combined always in this momentous day.
Or as her father often said, happily mocking his own rhetorical eloquence: “Brighten the corner where you are, and you will light the world.”
“Bartholomew, huh?” asked Wally as he piloted them through banks of earthbound clouds.
Startled, Celestina said, “Good grief, you’re spooky. How could you know what I’m thinking?”
“I already told you—anything in your heart is as easy to read as the open page of a book.”
In the sermon that brought him a moment of fame that he’d found more uncomfortable than not, Daddy had used the life of Bartholomew to illustrate his point that every day in every life is of the most profound importance. Bartholomew is arguably the most obscure of the twelve disciples. Some would say Lebbaeus is less known, some might even point to Thomas the doubter. But Bartholomew certainly casts a shadow far shorter than those of Peter, Matthew, James, John, and Philip. Daddy’s purpose in proclaiming Bartholomew the most obscure of the twelve was then to imagine in vivid detail how that apostle’s actions, seemingly of little consequence at the time, had resonated down through history, through hundreds of millions of lives—and then to assert that the life of each chambermaid listening to this sermon, the life of each car mechanic, each teacher, each truck driver, each waitress, each doctor, each janitor, was as important as the resonant life of Bartholomew, although each dwelt beyond the lamp of fame and labored without the applause of multitudes.
At the end of the famous sermon, Celestina’s father had wished to all well-meaning people that into their lives should fall a rain of benign effects from the kind and selfless actions of countless Bartholomews whom they would never meet. And he assures those who are selfish or envious or lacking in compassion, or who in fact commit acts of great evil, that their deeds will return to them, magnified beyond imagining, for they are at war with the purpose of life. If the spirit of Bartholomew cannot enter their hearts and change them, then it will find them and mete out the terrible judgment they deserve.
“I knew,” said Wally, braking for a red traffic light, “that you’d be thinking of Phimie now, and thinking of her would lead you to your father’s words, because as short as her life might have been, Phimie was a Bartholomew. She left her mark.”
Phimie must be honored now with laughter instead of with tears, because her life had left Celestina with so many memories of joy and with joy personified in Angel. To fend off tears, she said, “Listen, Clark Kent, we women need our little secrets, our private thoughts. If you can really read my heart this easily, I guess I’m going to have to start wearing lead brassieres.”
“Sounds uncomfortable.”
“Don’t worry, love. I’ll make sure the snaps are constructed so you can get it off me easily enough.”
“Ah, evidently you can read my mind. Scarier than heart reading any day. Maybe there’s a thin line between minister’s daughter and witch.”
“Maybe. So better never cross me.”
The traffic light turned green. Now onward home.
Rolex recovered and bright upon his wrist, Junior Cain drove his Mercedes with a restraint that required more self-control than he had realized he could tap, even with the guidance of Zedd.
He was so hot with resentment that he wanted to rocket through the hilly streets of the city, ignoring all traffic lights and stop signs, pegging the speedometer needle at its highest mark, as though he might eventually be air-cooled by sufficient speed. He wanted to slam through unwary pedestrians, crack their bones, and send them tumbling.
So burning with anger was he that his car, by direct thermal transmission from his hands upon the wheel, should have been glowing cherry red in the January night, should have been scorching tunnels of clear dry air through the cold fog. Rancor, virulence, acrimony, vehemence: All words learned for the purpose of self-improvement were useless to him now, because none adequately conveyed the merest minim of his anger, which swelled as vast and molten as the sun, far more formidable than his assiduously enhanced vocabulary.
Fortunately, the chill fog didn’t burn away from the Mercedes, considering that it facilitated the stalking of Celestina. The mist swaddled the white Buick in which she rode, increasing the chances that Junior might lose track of her, but it also cloaked the Mercedes and all but ensured that she and her friend wouldn’t realize that the pair of headlights behind them were always those of the same vehicle.
Junior had no idea who the driver of the Buick might be, but he hated the tall lanky son of a bitch because he figured the guy was humping Celestina, who would never have humped anyone but Junior if she had met him first, because like her sister, like all women, she would find him irresistible. He felt that he had a prior claim on her because of his relationship to the family; he was the father of her sister’s bastard boy, after all, which made him their blood by shared progeny.
In his masterpiece The Beauty of Rage: Channel Your Anger and Be a Winner, Zedd explains that every fully evolved man is able to take anger at one person or thing and instantly redirect it to any new person or thing, using it to achieve dominance, control, or any goal he seeks. Anger should not be an emotion that gradually arises again at each new justifiable cause, but should be held in the heart and nurtured, under control but sustained, so that the full white-hot power of it can be instantly tapped as needed, whether or not there has been provocation.
Busily, earnestly, with great satisfaction, Junior redirected his anger at Celestina and at the man with her. These two were, after all, guardians of the true Bartholomew, and therefore Junior’s enemies.
A Dumpster and a dead musician had humbled him as thoroughly as he had ever been humbled before, as completely as violent nervous emesis and volcanic diarrhea had humbled him, and he had no tolerance for being humbled. Humility is for losers.
In the dark Dumpster, tormented by ceaseless torrents of what-ifs, convinced that the spirit of Vanadium was going to slam the lid and lock him in with a revivified corpse, Junior had for a while been reduced to the condition of a helpless child. Paralyzed by fear, withdrawn to the corner of the Dumpster farthest from the putrefying pianist, squatting in trash, he had shaken with such violence that his castanet teeth had chattered in a frenzied flamenco rhythm to which his bones seemed to knock, knock, like bootheels on a dance floor. He had heard himself whimpering but couldn’t stop, had felt tears of shame burning down his cheeks but couldn’t halt the flow, had felt his bladder ready to burst from the needle prick of terror but had with heroic effort managed to refrain from wetting his pants.
For a while he thought the fear would end only when he perished from it, but eventually it fa
ded, and in its place poured forth self-pity from a bottomless well. Self-pity, of course, is the ideal fuel for anger; which was why, pursuing the Buick through fog, climbing now toward Pacific Heights, Junior was in a murderous rage.
By the time he reached Cain’s bedroom, Tom Vanadium recognized that the austere decor of the apartment had probably been inspired by the minimalism that the wife killer had noted in the detective’s own house in Spruce Hills. This was an uncanny discovery, troubling for reasons that Vanadium couldn’t entirely define, but he remained convinced that his perception was correct.
Cain’s Spruce Hills home, which he’d shared with Naomi, hadn’t been furnished anything like this. The difference between there and here—and the similarity to Vanadium’s digs—could be explained neither by wealth alone nor by a change of taste arising from the experience of city life.
The barren white walls, the stark furniture starkly arranged, the rigorous exclusion of bric-a-brac and mementos: this resulted in the closest thing to a true monastic cell to be found outside of a monastery. The only quality of the apartment that identified it as a secular residence was its comfortable size, and if Industrial Woman had been replaced with a crucifix, even size might have been insufficient to rule out residence by some fortunate friar.
So. Two monks they were: one in the service of everlasting light, the other in the service of eternal darkness.
Before he searched the bedroom, Vanadium walked quickly back through the rooms that he had already inspected, suddenly remembering the three bizarre paintings of which Nolly, Kathleen, and Sparky had spoken, and wondering how he could have overlooked them. They were not here. He was able to locate, however, the places on the walls where the art works had hung, because the nails still bristled from the pocket plaster, and picture hooks dangled from the nails.
Intuition told Tom Vanadium that the removal of the paintings was significant, but he wasn’t a talented enough Sherlock to leap immediately to the meaning of their absence.
In the bedroom once more, before poring through the contents of the nightstand drawers, the dresser drawers, and the closet, he looked in the adjacent bathroom, switched on the light because there was no window—and found Bartholomew on a wall, slashed and punctured, disfigured by hundreds of wounds.
Wally parked the Buick at the curb in front of the house in which he lived, and when Celestina slid across the car seat to the passenger’s door, he said, “No, wait here. I’ll fetch Angel and drive the two of you home.”
“Good grief, we can walk from here, Wally.”
“It’s chilly and foggy and late, and there might be villains afoot at this hour,” he intoned with mock gravity. “The two of you are Lipscomb women now, or soon will be, and Lipscomb women never go unescorted through the dangerous urban night.”
“Mmmmm. I feel positively pampered.”
The kiss was lovely, long and easy, full of restrained passion that boded well for nights to come in the marriage bed.
“I love you, Celie.”
“I love you, Wally. I’ve never been happier.”
Leaving the engine running and the heater on, he got out of the car, leaned back inside, said, “Better lock up while I’m gone,” and then closed his door.
Although Celestina felt a little paranoid, being so security-minded in this safe neighborhood, nevertheless she searched out the master-control button and engaged the power locks.
Lipscomb women gladly obey the wishes of Lipscomb men—unless they disagree, of course, or don’t disagree but are just feeling mulish.
The floor of the spacious bathroom featured beige marble tiles with diamond-shaped inlays of black granite. The countertop and the shower stall were fabricated from matching marble, and the same marble was employed in the wainscoting.
Above the wainscoting, the walls were Sheetrock, unlike the plaster elsewhere in the apartment. On one of them, Enoch Cain had scrawled Bartholomew three times.
Great anger was apparent in the way that the uneven, red block letters had been drawn on the wall in hard slashes. But the lettering looked like the work of a calm and rational mind compared to what had been done after the three Bartholomews were printed.
With some sharp instrument, probably a knife, Cain had stabbed and gouged the red letters, working on the wall with such fury that two of the Bartholomews were barely readable anymore. The Sheetrock was marked by hundreds of scores and punctures.
Judging by the smeariness of the letters and by the fact that some had run before they dried, the writing instrument hadn’t been a felt-tip marker, as Vanadium first thought. A spattering of red droplets on the closed lid of the toilet and across the beige marble floor, all dry now, gave rise to a suspicion.
He spat on his right thumb, scrubbed the thumb against one of the dried drips on the floor, rubbed thumb and forefinger together, and brought the freshened spoor to his nose. He smelled blood.
But whose blood?
Other three-year-olds, stirred from sleep after eleven o’clock at night, might be grumpy and would certainly be torpid, bleary-eyed, and uncommunicative. Angel awake was always fully awake, soaking up color-texture-mood, marveling in the baroque detail of Creation, and generally lending support to the apperception-test prediction that she might be an art prodigy.
As she clambered through the open door into Celestina’s lap, the girl said, “Uncle Wally gave me an Oreo.”
“Did you put it in your shoe?”
“Why in my shoe?”
“Is it under your hood?”
“It’s in my tummy!”
“Then you can’t eat it.”
“I already ate it.”
“Then it’s gone forever. How sad.”
