by Dean Koontz
Snatching up the phone before the second ring, Celestina said, “Hello?”
“Miss White?”
“Yes?”
“This is Detective Bellini, with the San Francisco Police Department. Is everything all right there?”
“All right? Yes. What—”
“Is anyone with you?”
“My little girl,” she said, and belatedly she realized that this might not be a policeman, after all, but someone trying to determine if she and Angel were alone in the apartment.
“Please try not to be alarmed, Miss White, but I have a patrol car on the way to your address.”
And suddenly Celestina believed that Bellini was a cop, not because his voice contained such authority, but because her heart told her that the time had come, that the long-anticipated danger had at last materialized: the dark advent that Phimie had warned her about three years ago.
“We have reason to believe that the man who raped your sister is stalking you.”
He would come. She knew. She had always known, but had half forgotten. There was something special about Angel, and because of that specialness, she lived under a threat as surely as the newborns of Bethlehem under King Herod’s death decree. Long ago, Celestina glimpsed a complex and mysterious pattern in this, and to the eye of the artist, the symmetry of the design required that the father would sooner or later come.
“Are your doors locked?” Bellini asked.
“There’s just the front door. Yes. Locked.”
“Where are you now?”
“My bedroom.”
“Where’s your daughter?”
“Here.”
Angel was sitting up in bed, as alert as she was yellow.
“Is there a lock on your bedroom door?” Bellini asked.
“Not much of one.”
“Lock it anyway. And don’t hang up. Stay on the line until the patrolmen get there.”
Junior couldn’t leave the dead man in the hall and hope to have any quality time with Celestina.
Aftermath had a way of being discovered, often at the worst of all possible moments, which he had learned from movies and from crime stories in the media and even from personal experience. Discovery always brought the police at high speed, sounding their sirens and full of enthusiasm, because those bastards were the most past-focused losers on the face of the earth, utterly consumed by their interest in aftermath.
He jammed the 9-mm pistol under his belt, grabbed Ichabod by the feet, and dragged him quickly toward the door to Apartment 1. Smears of blood brightened the pale limestone floor in the wake of the body.
These weren’t lakes of blood, just smears, so Junior could wipe them up quickly, once he got the corpse out of the hallway, but the sight of them further infuriated him. He was here to bring closure to all the unfinished business of Spruce Hills, to free himself from vengeful spirits, to better his life and plunge henceforth entirely into a bright new future. He wasn’t here, damn it, to do building maintenance.
The cord wasn’t long enough to allow Celestina to take the telephone handset with her, so she put it down on the nightstand, beside the lamp.
“What’s wrong?” Angel asked.
“Be quiet, sugarpie,” she said, crossing the bedroom to the door, which stood only slightly ajar.
All the windows were locked. She was conscientious about them.
She knew that the front door was locked, too, because Wally had waited to hear the deadbolts clack shut. Nevertheless, she stepped into the hall, where the light wasn’t on, walked quickly past Angel’s bedroom, came to the entrance to the lamplit living room—and saw a man backing through the open front door, dragging something, dragging a dark and large and heavy rumpled something, dragging a—
Oh, dear sweet Jesus, no.
He had dragged Ichabod halfway across the threshold when he heard someone say, “No.”
Junior glanced over his shoulder even as Celestina turned and fled. He caught only a glimpse of her disappearing into the inner hallway.
Focus. Get Ichabod all the way inside. Act now, think later. No, no, proper focus requires an understanding of the need to ize: scrutinize, analyze, and prioritize. Get the bitch, get the bitch! Slow deep breaths. Channel the beautiful rage. A fully evolved man is self-controlled and calm. Move, move, move!
Suddenly so many of Zedd’s greatest maxims seemed to conflict with one another, when previously they had together formed a reliable philosophy and guide to success.
A door slammed, and after the briefest of internal debates about whether to ize or act, Junior left Ichabod straddling the threshold. He must get to Celestina before she reached a telephone, and then he could come back and finish moving the body.
Celestina slammed the door, pressed the lock button in the knob, shoved-rocked-muscled the dresser in front of the door, astonished by her own strength, and heard Angel speaking into the phone: “Mommy’s moving furniture.”
She snatched the handset away from Angel, told Bellini, “He’s here,” threw the phone on the bed, told Angel, “Stay close to me,” ran to the windows, and jerked the drapes out of the way.
Commit and command. It doesn’t matter so much whether the course of action to which you commit is prudent or hopelessly rash, doesn’t matter whatsoever whether society at large thinks it’s a “good” thing that you’re doing or a “bad” thing. As long as you commit without reservation, you will inevitably command, because so few people are ever willing to commit to anything, right or wrong, wise or unwise, that those who plunge are guaranteed to succeed more often than not even when their actions are reckless and their cause is idiotic.
Far from idiotic, Junior’s cause was his survival and salvation, and he committed himself to it with every fiber of his body, with all of his mind and heart.
Three doors in the dark hallway: one to the right, ajar, and two to the left, both closed.
To the right first. Kick the door open, simultaneously firing two rounds, because maybe this was her bedroom, where she kept a gun. Mirrors shattered: a tintinnabulation of falling glass on porcelain, glass on ceramic tile, a lot more noise than the shots themselves.
He realized that he’d trashed a deserted bathroom.
Too much clatter, drawing attention. No leisure for romance now, no chance for a two-sister score. Just kill Celestina, kill Bartholomew, and go, go.
First room on the left. Move. Kick the door open. The sense of a larger space beyond, no bathroom this time, and darker. Fan the pistol, gripping with both hands. Two quick shots: muffled cough, muffled cough.
Light switch to the left. Blinking in the brightness.
Kid’s room. Bartholomew’s room. Furniture in cheerful primary colors. Pooh posters on the wall.
Surprisingly, dolls. Quite a few dolls. Apparently the bastard boy was effeminate, a quality he sure as hell hadn’t inherited from his father.
Nobody here.
Unless under the bed, in the closet?
Waste of time to check those places. More likely, woman and boy were hiding in the last room.
Swift and yellow, Angel flew to her mother, grabbing at one of the bunched drapes as if she might hide behind it.
The window was French with small panes, so Celestina couldn’t simply break the glass and climb out.
A deep-set casement window. Two latches on the right side, one high, one low. Detachable hand crank lying on the foot-deep sill. Mechanism socket in the base casing.
Celestina jammed the shaft of the crank into the casing socket. Wouldn’t fit. Her hands were shaking. Steel fins on the shaft of the crank had to be lined up just-so with slots in the socket. She fumbled, fumbled.
Lord, please, help me here.
The maniac kicked the door.
A moment ago, he’d slammed into Angel’s room, and that was loud, but this boomed louder, thunderous enough to wake people throughout the building.
The crank engaged. Turn, turn.
Where was the patrol car? Why no siren?
The window mechanism creaked, the two tall panes began to open outward but too slowly, and the cold white night exhaled a chill plume of breath into the room.
The maniac kicked once more, but because of the bracing dresser, the door wouldn’t budge, so he kicked harder, again without success.
“Hurry,” Angel whispered.
Junior stepped back and squeezed off two shots, aiming for the lock. One round tore a chunk out of the jamb, but the other cracked through the door, shattering more than wood, and the brass knob wobbled and almost fell out.
He pushed on the door, but still it resisted, and he surprised himself by letting out a bellow of frustration that expressed quite the opposite of self-control, though no one listening could have the slightest doubt about his determination to commit and command.
Again he fired into the lock, squeezed the trigger a second time, and discovered that no rounds remained in the magazine. Extra cartridges were distributed in his pockets.
Never would he pause to reload at this desperate penultimate moment, when success or failure might be decided in mere seconds. That would be the choice of a man who thought first and acted later, the behavior of a born loser.
A plate-size piece of the door had been blasted away. Because of the light shining through from the room beyond, Junior could see that no part of the lock remained intact. In fact, he peered through the hole in the door to the back of a piece of furniture that was jammed against it, whereupon the nature of the problem became clear to him.
He tucked his left arm tight against his side and threw himself against the door. The obstructing furniture was heavy, but it moved an inch. If it would give one inch, it would give two, so it wasn’t immovable, and he was already as good as in there.
Celestina didn’t hear gunfire, but she couldn’t mistake the bullets for anything else when they cracked through the door.
The blocking dresser, which doubled as a vanity, was surmounted by a mirror. One bullet drilled through the plywood backing, made a spider-web puzzle of the silvered glass, lodged in the wall above the bed—thwack—and kicked out a spray of plaster chips.
When the two vertical panes of the casement window were still less than seven inches apart, they stuttered. The mechanism produced a dismal grinding rasp that sounded like a guttural pronunciation of the problem itself, c-c-c-corrosion, and seized up.
Even Angel, mere wisp of a cherubim, couldn’t squeeze through a seven-inch opening.
In the hall, the maniac roared in frustration.
The hateful window. The hateful, frozen window. Celestina wrenched on the crank with all of her strength, and felt something give a little, wrenched, but then the crank popped out of the socket and rapped against the sill.
She didn’t hear gunfire this time, either, but the hard crack of splintering wood attested to the passage of at least two more bullets.
Turning away from the window, Celestina grabbed the girl and pushed her toward the bed, whispering, “Down, under.”
Angel didn’t want to go, maybe because the boogeyman schemed beneath the bed in some of her nightmares.
“Scoot!” Celestina fiercely insisted.
Finally Angel dropped and slithered, vanishing under the overhanging bedclothes with a final flurry of yellow socks.
Three years ago, in St. Mary’s Hospital, with Phimie’s warning fresh in her mind, Celestina swore that she would be ready when the beast came, but here he came, and she was as not ready as possible. Time passes, the perception of a threat fades, life becomes busier, you work your butt off as a waitress, you graduate college, your little girl grows to be so vital, so vivid, so alive that you know she just has to live forever, and after all, you are the daughter of a minister, a believer in the power of compassion, in the Prince of Peace, confident that the meek shall inherit the earth, so in three long years, you don’t buy a gun, nor do you take any training in self-defense, and somehow you forget that the meek who will one day inherit the earth are those who forego aggression but are not those so pathetically meek that they won’t even defend themselves, because a failure to resist evil is a sin, and the willful refusal to defend your life is the mortal sin of passive suicide, and the failure to protect a little yellow MM girl will surely buy you a ticket to Hell on the same express train on which the slave traders rode to their own eternal enslavement, on which the masters of Dachau and old Joe Stalin traveled from power to punishment, so here, now, as the beast throws himself against the door, as he shoves aside the barricade, with what precious little time you have left, fight.
Junior shoved through the blocked door, into the bedroom, and the bitch hit him with a chair. A small, slat-back side chair with a tie-on seat cushion. She swung it like a baseball bat, and there must have been some Jackie Robinson blood in the White family line, because she had the power to knock a fastball from Brooklyn to the Bronx.
If she’d connected with his left side, as she intended, she might have broken his arm or cracked a few ribs. But he saw the chair coming, and as agile as a base runner dodging a shortstop’s tag, he turned away from her, taking the blow across his back.
This back blow wasn’t just sport, either, but more like Vietnam as he sometimes told women that he remembered it. As though pitched by a grenade blast, Junior went from his feet to the floor with chin-rapping impact, teeth guillotining together so hard that he would have severed his tongue if it had been between them.
He knew she wouldn’t just step back to calculate her batting average, so he rolled at once, out of her way, immensely relieved that he could move, because judging by the pain coruscating across his back, he wouldn’t have been surprised if she had broken his spine and paralyzed him. The chair crashed down again, exactly where Junior had been sprawled an instant before.
The crazy bitch wielded it with such ferocity that the force of the impact with the floor, redounding upon her, must have numbed her arms. She stumbled backward, dragging the chair, temporarily unable to lift it.
Entering the bedroom, Junior had expected to cast aside his pistol and draw a knife. But he was no longer in a mood for close-up work. Fortunately, he’d managed to hold on to the gun.
He hurt too much to recover quickly and take advantage of the woman’s brief vulnerability. Clambering to his feet, he backed away from her and fumbled in a pocket for spare cartridges.
She’d hidden Bartholomew somewhere.
Probably in the closet.
Plug the painter, kill the kid.
He was a man with a plan, focused, committed, ready to act and then think, as soon as he was able to act. A spasm of pain weakened his hand. Cartridges slipped through his fingers, fell to the floor.
Your deeds…will return to you, magnified beyond imagining.
Those ominous words again, turning through his memory, reel to reel. This time he actually heard them spoken. The voice commanded attention with a deeper timbre and crisper diction than his own.
He ejected the magazine from the butt of the pistol. Nearly dropped it.
Celestina circled him, half carrying but also half dragging the chair, either because her nerves were still ringing and her arms were weak—or because she was faking weakness in the hope of luring him into a reckless response. Junior circled her while she rounded on him, frantically trying to deal with the pistol without taking his eyes off his adversary.
Sirens.
The spirit of Bartholomew…will find you…and mete out the terrible judgment that you deserve.
Reverend White’s polished, somewhat theatrical, yet sincere voice rose out of the past to issue this threat in Junior’s memory as he had issued it that night, from a tape recorder, while Junior had been dancing a sweaty horizontal boogie with Seraphim in her parsonage bedroom.
The minister’s threat had been forgotten, repressed. At the time, only half-heard, merely kinky background to lovemaking, these words had amused Junior, and he’d given no serious thought to their meaning, to the message of retribution contained in them. Now, in this momen
t of extreme danger, the inflamed boil of repressed memory burst under pressure, and Junior was shocked, stunned, to realize that the minister had put a curse on him!
Sirens swelling.
Dropped cartridges gleamed on the carpet. Stoop to snatch them up? No. That was asking for a skull-cracking blow.
Celestina, the battering Baptist, back in action, came at him again. With one leg broken, another cracked, and the stretcher bar splintered, the chair wasn’t as formidable a weapon as it had been. She swung it, Junior dodged, she struck at him again, he juked, and she reeled away from him, gasping.
The bitch was getting tired, but Junior still didn’t like his odds in a hand-to-hand confrontation. Her hair was disarranged. Her eyes flashed with such wildness that he was half convinced he saw elliptical pupils like those of a jungle cat. Her lips were skinned back from her teeth in a snarl.
She looked as insane as Junior’s mother.
Too close, those sirens.
Another pocket. More cartridges. Trying to squeeze just two into the magazine, but his hands shaking and slippery with sweat.
The chair. A glancing blow, no damage, driving him backward to the window.
The sirens were right here.
Cops at the doorstep, the lunatic bitch with the chair, the clergyman’s curse—all this amounted to more than even a committed man could handle. Get out of the present, go for the future.
He threw down the pistol, the magazine, and the cartridges.
As the bitch began her backswing, Junior grabbed the chair. He didn’t try to tear it out of her hands, but used it to shove her as hard as he could.
She stepped on a broken-off chair leg, lost her balance, and fell backward into the side of the bed.
As nimble as a geriatric cat, crying out with pain, Junior nevertheless sprang onto the deep windowsill and shoved against the twin panes of the window. They were already partly open—but they were also stuck.
Crouched on the deep sill, pushing against the parted casement panes of the tall French window, using not just muscle but the entire weight of his body, leaning into them, the maniac tried to force his way out of the bedroom.
Even above the piston-knock of her heart and the bellows-wheeze of her breath, Celestina heard wood crack, a small pane of glass explode, and metal torque with a squeal. The creep was going to get away.
The window didn’t face the street. It overlooked a five-foot-wide passageway between this house and the next. The police might not spot him leaving.
