From the Corner of His Eye

by Dean Koontz

  She could have gone at him with the chair once more, but it was falling apart. Instead, she abandoned furniture for the promise of a firearm, dropped to her knees, and snatched the discarded pistol magazine off the floor.

  The shriek of the sirens groaned into silence. The police must have pulled to the curb in the street.

  Celestina plucked a brassy bullet off the carpet.

  Another small pane of glass burst. A dismaying crack of wood. His back to her, the maniac raged at the window with the snarling ferocity of a caged beast.

  She didn’t have experience with guns, but having seen him trying to press cartridges into the magazine, she knew how to load. She inserted one round. Then a second. Enough.

  The corroded casement-operating mechanism began to give way, as did the hinges, and the window sagged outward.

  From the far end of the apartment, men shouted, “Police!”

  Celestina screamed—“Here! In here!”—as she slapped the magazine into the butt of the pistol.

  Still on her knees, she raised the weapon and realized that she was going to shoot the maniac in the back, that she had no other choice, because her inexperience didn’t allow her to aim for a leg or an arm. The moral dilemma overwhelmed her, but so did an image of Phimie lying dead in bloody sheets on the surgery table. She pulled the trigger and rocked with the recoil.

  The window gave way an instant before Celestina squeezed off the shot. The man dropped out of sight. She didn’t know if she had scored a hit.

  To the window. The warm room sucked cooling fog out of the night, and she leaned across the sill into the streaming mist.

  The narrow brick-paved serviceway lay five feet below. The maniac had knocked over trash cans while making his escape, but he wasn’t tumbled among the rest of the garbage.

  From out of the fog and darkness came the slap of running feet on bricks. He was sprinting toward the back of the house.

  “Drop the gun!”

  Celestina threw down the weapon even before she turned, and as two cops entered the room, she cried, “He’s getting away!”

  From serviceway to alley to serviceway to street, into the city and the fog and the night, Junior ran from the Cain past into the Pinchbeck future.

  During the course of this momentous day, he had employed Zedd-learned techniques to channel his hot anger into a red-hot rage. Now, without any conscious effort on his part, rage grew into molten-white fury.

  As if vengeful spirits weren’t trouble enough, he had for three years been struggling unwittingly against the terrible power of the minister’s curse, black Baptist voodoo that made his life miserable. He knew now why he had been plagued by violent nervous emesis, by epic diarrhea, by hideously disfiguring hives. The failure to find a heart mate, the humiliation with Renee Vivi, the two nasty cases of gonorrhea, the disastrous meditative catatonia, the inability to learn French and German, his loneliness, his emptiness, his thwarted attempts to find and kill the bastard boy born of Phimie’s womb: All these things and more, much more, were the hateful consequences of the vicious, vindictive voodoo of that hypocritical Christian. As a highly self-improved, fully evolved, committed man who was comfortable with his raw instincts, Junior should be sailing through life on calm seas, under perpetually sunny skies, with his sails always full of wind, but instead he was constantly cruelly battered and storm-tossed through an unrelenting night, not because of any shortcomings of mind or heart, or character, but because of black magic.

  Chapter 71

  AT ST. MARY’S HOSPITAL, where Wally had brought Angel into this world three years ago, he was now fighting for his life, for a chance to see the girl grow and to be the father she needed. He’d been taken to surgery already when Celestina and Angel arrived a few minutes behind the ambulance.

  They were driven to St. Mary’s by Detective Bellini in a police sedan. Tom Vanadium—a friend of her father’s whom she had met a few times in Spruce Hills, but whom she didn’t know well—literally rode shotgun, tensed to react, wary of the occupants of other vehicles on these foggy streets, as though one of them must surely be the maniac.

  Tom was an Oregon State Police detective, as far as Celestina knew, and she didn’t understand what he was doing here.

  Nor could she begin to imagine the nature of the disaster that had befallen him, leaving his face looking blasted and loose at all its hinges. She had last seen him at Phimie’s funeral. A few minutes ago at her doorstep, she’d recognized him only because of his port-wine birthmark.

  Her father respected and admired Tom, so she was thankful for his presence. And anyone who could survive whatever catastrophe had left him with this cubistic face was a man she wanted on her team in a crisis.

  Holding fast to her frightened Angel in the backseat of the car, Celestina was amazed by her own courage in combat and by the steady calm that served her so well now. She wasn’t shaken by the thought of what might have happened to her, and to her daughter, because her mind and her heart were with Wally—and because, having been watered with hope all of her life, she had a deep reservoir on which to draw in a time of drought.

  Bellini assured Celestina that they didn’t expect Enoch Cain to be so brazen as to follow police vehicles and to renew his assault on her at St. Mary’s. Nevertheless, he assigned a uniformed police officer to the hall outside of the waiting room that served friends and family of the patients in the intensive-care unit. And judging by that guard’s high level of vigilance, Bellini had not entirely ruled out the possibility that Cain might show up here to finish what he started in Pacific Heights.

  Like all ICU waiting rooms, where Death sits patiently, smiling in anticipation, this lounge was clean but drab, and the utilitarian furnishings didn’t pamper, as though bright colors and comfort might annoy the ascetic Reaper and motivate him to cut down more patients than otherwise he would have done.

  Even at this postmidnight hour, the lounge would sometimes be as crowded with worried loved ones as at any other time of the day. This morning, however, the only life under the threat of the scythe appeared to be Wally’s; the sole vigil being kept was for him.

  Traumatized by the violence in her mother’s bedroom, not fully aware of what happened to Wally, Angel had been tearful and anxious. A thoughtful physician gave her a glass of orange juice spiked with a small dose of a sedative, and a nurse provided pillows. Bedded down on two pillow-padded chairs, wearing a rose-colored robe over yellow pajamas, she gave herself as fully to sleep as she always did, sedative or not, which was every bit as fully as she gave herself to life when she was awake.

  After taking a preliminary statement from Celestina, Bellini left to romance a judge out of bed and obtain a search warrant for Enoch Cain’s residence, having already ordered a stakeout of the Russian Hill apartment. Celestina’s description of her assailant was a perfect match for Cain. Furthermore, the suspect’s Mercedes had been abandoned at her place. Bellini sounded confident that they would find and arrest the man soon.

  Tom Vanadium, on the other hand, was certain that Cain, having prepared for the possibility that something would go wrong during his assault on Celestina, wouldn’t be easy to locate or to apprehend. In Vanadium’s view, the maniac either had a bolt-hole waiting in the city—or was already out of the SFPD’s jurisdiction.

  “Well, maybe you’re right,” Bellini said somewhat acerbically, before departing, “but then you’ve had the advantage of an illegal search, while I’m hampered by such niceties as warrants.”

  Celestina sensed an easy camaraderie between these two men, but also tension that was perhaps related to the reference to an illegal search.

  After Bellini left, Tom questioned Celestina extensively, with an emphasis on Phimie’s rape. Although the subject was painful, she was grateful for the questions. Without this distraction, in spite of her well of hope, she might have allowed her imagination to fashion terror after terror, until Wally had died a hundred times over in her mind.

  “Your father denies the rape ever o
ccurred, apparently out of what I’d call a misguided willingness to trust in divine justice.”

  “It’s partly that,” she agreed. “But originally, Daddy wanted Phimie to tell, so the man could be charged and prosecuted. Though he’s a good Baptist, Daddy isn’t without a thirst for vengeance.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Tom said. His thin smile might have been ironic, though it wasn’t easy to interpret the meaning of any subtle expression on his hammered face.

  “And after Phimie was gone…he still hoped to learn the rapist’s name, put him in prison. But then something changed his mind…oh, maybe two years ago. Suddenly, he wanted to let it go, leave judgment to God. He said if the rapist was as twisted as Phimie claimed, then Angel and I might be in danger if we ever learned a name and went to the police. Don’t stir a hornet’s nest, let sleeping dogs lie, and all that. I don’t know what changed his mind.”

  “I do,” Tom said. “Now. Thanks to you. What changed his mind was me…this face. Cain did this to me. I spent most of ’65 in a coma. After I came out of it and recovered enough to have visitors, I asked to see your dad. About two years ago…as you say. From Max Bellini, I knew Phimie died in childbirth, not an accident, and Max’s instincts told him rape. I explained to your dad why Cain was the man. I wanted whatever information he might have. But I suppose…sitting there, looking at my face, he decided that Cain is indeed the biggest hornet’s nest ever, and he didn’t want to put his daughter and granddaughter at greater risk than necessary.”

  “Now this.”

  “Now this. But even if your dad had cooperated with me, nothing would have changed. Since Phimie never revealed his name, I wouldn’t have been able to go after Cain any differently or more effectively.”

  On the two-chair bed beside her mother, Angel issued small cries of distress in her sleep. Whatever presences flocked around her in the dream, they weren’t baby chickens.

  Murmuring reassurances, Celestina put a hand on the girl’s head and smoothed her brow, her hair, until the sour dream was sweetened by the touch.

  Still seeking some missing fact, some insight that would help him understand the maniac’s Bartholomew obsession, Tom asked more questions until Celestina suddenly realized and revealed what might be the information that he sought: Cain’s perverse insistence on playing the reverend’s taped rough draft of “This Momentous Day” throughout his long assault on her sister.

  “Phimie said the creep thought it was funny, but using Daddy’s voice as background music also…well, aroused him, maybe because it further humiliated her and because he knew it would humiliate our father. But we never told Daddy that part of it. Neither of us saw any useful reason for telling him.”

  For a while, leaning forward in his chair and staring at the floor with an intensity and an expression that could not have been inspired by the insipid vinyl tiles, Tom mulled over what she’d told him. Then: “The connection is there, but it’s still not entirely clear to me. So he took perverse pleasure in raping her with her father’s sermon as accompaniment…and maybe without his realizing it, the reverend’s message got deep inside his head. I wouldn’t think our cowardly wife killer has the capacity for guilt…although maybe your dad worked a sort of miracle and planted that very seed.”

  “Mom always says that pigs will surely fly one day if ever Daddy chooses to convince them that they’ve got wings.”

  “But in ‘This Momentous Day,’ Bartholomew is just the disciple, the historical figure, and he’s also a metaphor for the unforeseen consequences of even our most ordinary actions.”

  “So?”

  “He’s not a real contemporary person, not anyone Cain needs to fear. So how did he develop this obsession with finding someone named Bartholomew?” He met Celestina’s eyes, as if she might have answers for him. “Is there a real Bartholomew? And how does this tie in with his assault on you? Or is there any tie-in at all?”

  “I think we could wind up as crazy as he is, if we tried long enough to puzzle out his twisted logic.”

  He shook his head. “I think he’s evil, not crazy. And stupid in the way that evil often is. Too arrogant and too vain to be aware of his stupidity—and therefore always tangled up in traps of his own making. But nonetheless dangerous for being stupid. In fact, far more dangerous than a wiser man with a sense of consequences.”

  Tom Vanadium’s uninflected but curiously hypnotic voice, his pensive manner, his gray eyes so beautiful in that fractured face, his air of measured melancholy, and his evident intelligence gave him a presence that was simultaneously as solid as a great mass of granite and yet otherworldly.

  “Are all policemen as philosophical as you?” Celestina asked.

  He smiled. “Those of us who were priests first—yeah, we’re all a broody bunch. Of the others—not many, but probably more than you think.”

  Footsteps in the hall drew their attention to the open door, where the surgeon appeared in his loose cotton greens.

  Celestina rose, heart suddenly clumping in her breast, like heavy footsteps hurrying away from an approaching bearer of bad news, but she herself couldn’t run, could only stand rooted in her hope—and hear in her mind six versions of a bleak prognosis in the two seconds before the doctor actually spoke.

  “He came through the surgery well. He’ll be in post-op for a while, then brought here to the ICU. His condition’s critical, but there are degrees of critical, and I believe we’ll be able to upgrade him to serious long before this day is over. He’s going to make it.”

  This momentous day. In every ending, new beginnings. But, thank God, no ending here.

  Freed for the moment from the need to be strong for her sleeping Angel or for Wally, Celestina turned to Tom Vanadium, saw in his gray eyes both the sorrow of the world and a hope to match her own, saw in his ruined face the promise of triumph over evil, leaned against him for support, and finally dared to cry.

  Chapter 72

  IN HIS FORD VAN filled with needlepoint and Sklent and Zedd, Junior Cain—Pinchbeck to the world—left the Bay Area by a back door. He took State Highway 24 to Walnut Creek, which might or might not have walnuts, but which offered a mountain and a state park named for the devil: Mount Diablo. State Highway 4 to Antioch brought him to a crossing of the river delta west of Bethel Island. Bethel, for those who had taken good advanced courses in vocabulary improvement, meant “sacred place.”

  From the devil to the sacred and then beyond, Junior drove north on State Highway 160, which was proudly marked as a scenic route, although in these predawn hours, all lay bleak and black. Following the serpentine course of the Sacramento River, Highway 160 wove past a handful of small, widely separated towns.

  Between Isleton and Locke, Junior first became aware of several points of soreness on his face. He could feel no swelling, no cuts or scrapes, and the rearview mirror revealed only the fine features that had caused more women’s hearts to race than all the amphetamines ever manufactured.

  His body ached, too, especially his back, from the battering that he had taken. He remembered hitting the floor with his chin, and he supposed that he might have gotten knocked about the face more than he realized or remembered. If so, there would be bruises soon, but bruises would fade with time; in the interim, they might make him even more attractive to women, who would want to console him and kiss away the pain—especially when they discovered that he had sustained his injuries in a brutal fight, while rescuing a neighbor from a would-be rapist.

  Nevertheless, when the points of soreness in his brow and cheeks gradually grew worse, he stopped at a service station near Courtland, bought a bottle of Pepsi from a vending machine, and washed down yet another capsule of antihistamines. He also took another antiemetic, four aspirin, and—although he felt no trembling in his bowels—one more dose of paregoric.

  Thus armored, he at last arrived in the city of Sacramento, an hour before dawn. Sacramento, which means “sacrament” in Italian and in Spanish, calls itself the Camellia Capital of the World
, and holds a ten-day camellia festival in early March—already advertised on billboards now in mid-January. The camellia, shrub and flower, is named for G. J. Camellus, a Jesuit missionary who brought it from Asia to Europe in the eighteenth century.

  Devil mountains, sacred islands, sacramental rivers and cities, Jesuits: These spiritual references at every turn made Junior uneasy. This was a haunted night, no doubt about that. He wouldn’t have been greatly surprised if he had glanced at his rearview mirror and seen Thomas Vanadium’s blue Studebaker Lark Regal closely tailing him, not the real car raised from Quarry Lake, but a ghostly version, with the filthy-scabby-monkey spirit of the cop at the wheel, an ectoplasmic Naomi at his side, Victoria Bressler and Ichabod and Bartholomew Prosser and Neddy Gnathic in the backseat: the Studebaker packed full of spirits like a bozo-stuffed clown car in a circus, though there would be nothing funny about these revenge-minded spooks when the doors flew open and they came tumbling out.

  By the time he reached the airport, located a private-charter company, chased up the owner through the night-security man, and arranged to be flown at once to Eugene, Oregon, aboard a twin-engine Cessna, the points of pain in his face had begun to throb.

  The owner, also the pilot on this trip, was pleased to be paid cash in advance, in crisp hundred-dollar bills, rather than by check or credit card. He accepted payment hesitantly, however, and with an unconcealed grimace, as though afraid of contracting a contagion from the currency. “What’s wrong with your face?”

  Along Junior’s hairline, on his cheeks, his chin, and his upper lip, a double score of hard little knots had risen, angry red and hot to the touch. Having previously experienced a particularly vicious case of the hives, Junior realized this was something new—and worse. To the pilot, he replied, “Allergic reaction.”

  A few minutes after dawn, in excellent weather, they flew out of Sacramento, bound for Eugene. Junior would have enjoyed the scenery if his face hadn’t felt as if it were gripped by a score of white-hot pliers in the hands of the same evil trolls that had peopled all the fairy tales that his mother had ever told him when he was little.

  Shortly after nine-thirty in the morning, they landed in Eugene, and the cab driver who conveyed Junior to the town’s largest shopping center spent more time staring at his afflicted passenger in the rearview mirror than he did watching the road. Junior got out of the taxi and paid through the driver’s open window. The cabbie didn’t even wait for his fiery-faced fare to turn completely away before he crossed himself.

  Junior’s agony might have made him howl like a cankered dog or might even have dropped him to his knees if he hadn’t used the pain to fuel his anger. His knobby countenance was so sensitive that the light breeze flailed his skin as cruelly as if it had been a barbed lash. Empowered by rage even more beautiful than his countenance was monstrous, he crossed the parking lot, looking through car windows in the hope of seeing keys dangling from an ignition.

  Instead, he encountered an elderly woman getting out of a red Pontiac with a fox tail tied to the radio antenna. A quick glance around confirmed that they were unobserved, so he clubbed her on the back of the head with the butt of his 9-mm pistol.

  He was in a mood to shoot her, but this weapon was not fitted with a sound-suppressor. He’d left that gun in Celestina’s bedroom. This was the pistol that he had taken from Frieda Bliss’s collection, and it was as full of sound as Frieda had been full of spew.

  The old woman crumpled with a papery rustle, as though she were an elaborately folded piece of origami. She would be unconscious for a while, and after she came around, she probably wouldn’t remember who she was, let alone what make of car she’d been driving, until Junior was well out of Eugene.

  The doors were unlocked on a pickup parked next to the Pontiac. Junior lifted the granny onto the front seat of the truck. She was so light, so unpleasantly angular, and she rustled so much that she might have been a new species of giant mutant insect that mimicked human appearance. He was glad, after all, that he hadn’t killed her: Granny’s prickly-bur spirit might have proved to be as difficult to eradicate as a cockroach infestation. With a shudder, he tossed her purse on top of her, and slammed the truck door.

  He snatched the woman’s car keys off the pavement, slid behind the wheel of the Pontiac, and drove off to find a pharmacy, the only stop that he intended to make until he reached Spruce Hills.

  Chapter 73

  WALLY HAD NOT gone home with Death, but they had definitely been at the dance together.

  When Celestina first entered his ICU cubicle, the sight of his face scared her in spite of the surgeon’s assurances. Gray, he was, and sunken-cheeked—as though this were the eighteenth century and so many medicinal leeches had been applied to him that too much of his essential substance had been sucked out.

  He was unconscious, wired to a heart monitor, pierced by an intravenous-drip line. Clipped to his septum, an oxygen feed hissed faintly, and from his open mouth rose the barely audible wheeze of his breathing.

  For a long time, she stood beside the bed, holding his hand, confident that on some level he was aware of her presence, though he gave no indication whatsoever that he knew she was there.

  She could have used the chair. Sitting, however, she wouldn’t be able to see his face.

  In time, his hand tightened feebly on hers. And a while after that hopeful sign, his eyelids fluttered, opened.

  He was confused initially, frowning at the heart monitor and at the IV rack that loomed over him. When his eyes met Celestina’s, his gaze clarified, and the smile that he found for her brought as much light into her heart as the diamond ring he had slipped onto her finger so few hours before.

  Frown quickly followed smile, and he said thinly, “Angel…?”

  “She’s all right. Untouched.”

  A matronly nurse arrived, alerted to the patient’s return to consciousness by the telemetry device associated with the heart monitor. She fussed over him, took his temperature, and spooned two chips of ice into his parched mouth. Leaving, she gave Celestina a meaningful look and tapped her wristwatch.

  Alone again with Wally, Celestina said, “They told me that once you regained consciousness, I can only visit ten minutes at a time, and not that often, either.”

  He nodded. “Tired.”

  “The doctors tell me you’ll make a full recovery.”

  Smiling again, speaking in a voice hardly louder than a whisper, he said, “Got a wedding date to keep.”