by Dean Koontz
I walked among the crowded oaks, where the shade was so deep that no underbrush or grass could grow. Gold coins of sunshine were scattered on the dark woodland floor, and on that bare and stoneless soil my footsteps were as nearly silent as those of a sneak thief.
The quiet halted me. The bare earth puzzled me. The doubloons of light made me realize there should also have been a wealth of dead leaves all around me.
I recalled the crunch-and-crackle of the mob of freaks rushing this way and that in the other hurst of oaks.
Live oaks are perpetually green, but they drop their small oval leaves all year, and in profusion. Even if Mr. Jam Diu and a crew of industrious elves had that very morning raked up, bagged, and carried away all that the trees had shed, a few score of recently cast-off dead leaves would already have littered the ground, but not one snapped underfoot. And there were no elves. And speculating from all available evidence, I didn’t think that Jam Diu, in his position as groundskeeper, ever broke a sweat.
This grove of trees was associated with the formal landscaping of Roseland, which accounted for less than twenty of the fifty-two acres, and the other grove was in the wild fields of the estate. I could see no other difference between them that might explain this neatly swept earth.
The most important issue at hand, however, was not how the groundskeeper maintained the grove in such pristine condition or even why he felt it necessary to do so. I had to keep uppermost in mind the imprisoned boy.
Beyond the oaks, I climbed a meadow where the wild grass was in places waist-high. It had been bleached white-gold by the heat of the past summer. The rainy season had thus far been so dry that no storms had either beaten down the stiff parched grass or brought forth fresh green shoots.
At the top of the hill, I paused, looking southwest toward the mausoleum, which lay a few hundred yards away. After a moment to rest, I would have headed toward that building if movement at the periphery of vision hadn’t drawn my attention.
From the crest of the hill, the land in general descended. But the ground fell and rose and fell again in a series of waves, like a golden sea frozen in one moment of motion after a storm, when the worst turbulence had passed but the swells remained formidable and the troughs were still deep.
Half concealed by the waist-high grass and foreshortened by the angle at which I viewed them, further camouflaged by virtue of being grub-white in the white-gold pasture, they came along a crest two waves of land below me. They numbered no fewer than twenty, no more than thirty, and they passed in a peculiar gait, swift yet shambling.
Some of them were hunchbacked, their heads thrust forward and seemingly deformed, though at that distance it was difficult to tell if the asymmetric appearance of their skulls was real or a trick of light and shadow. Their arms seemed improperly jointed, flailing almost spasmodically at the tall grass, like the long limbs of agitated orangutans.
The majority were erect, without humps between their shoulders, heads held high, skulls sleeker than those of their awkward brethren. These specimens appeared to move with greater grace and might have proceeded even more rapidly if not for the malformed individuals scattered among them, who by their very presence were a hindrance.
Most might have been about six feet, some taller, some shorter. From a distance they seemed to be muscular, brutish, and I had no doubt that they would be deadly adversaries.
This time they brought no twilight with them, but they seemed to see as well in sunshine as in the pitch dark. I was certain that these were the same creatures from which I’d hidden in the feed bin and high in the oak. At this remove, I couldn’t hear them, but they looked as their growling and grunting and squealing had suggested that they might.
They disappeared off the crest, into a swale, moving away, and I let out a pent-up breath, relieved that it was my good fortune to have escaped their notice. I should have backed off the highest hill, on which I stood, but I was transfixed, waiting for another glimpse of them.
Fear slipped down my spine along vertebrae of ice. My mind seemed frozen with astonishment at what I’d seen, and my thoughts wouldn’t thaw, wouldn’t flow forward from the memory of that pack.
They appeared on another rise, heading toward a farther crest. They were now at sufficient distance that they had the quality of a mirage, and so they might not really have faded away as they seemed to, but might only have disappeared into yet taller grass.
Although I had not seen them close enough to be sure of their appearance, I had certain impressions on which I felt that I could rely. The impression of long flat heads and blunt fleshy snouts. The impression of arms, and therefore of hands unseen. They were walking upright, in fact running, but they were not animals that should be able to run on fewer than four legs. Only primates could stand that erect—men, apes, gibbons, monkeys.… These creatures belonged to none of those species. I also thought I had seen short, pointed tusks that were dark against their pale faces, sharp tusks with which to wound and eviscerate, which made me think of wild boars. Boars, hogs, swine of some kind, their bodies recast in rough primate molds, their faces tortured and sick with violence. The malformed and crookbacked individuals were no doubt accepted because every member of their tribe, malformed or not, was to one degree or another an abomination.
They didn’t reappear on the far slope, as if they dematerialized the way that ghosts sometimes do. But they were neither spirits nor figments of my imagination. Whether they were native to Roseland or were visitors who arrived and departed through some veil between this place and another realm beyond my understanding, they were surely to be avoided at all costs. They seemed to be perpetually on the move, like sharks, continually feeding, perhaps able to smell blood even when it was still safely circulating in the veins of their prey.
Nineteen
I DECIDED THAT A VISIT TO THE MAUSOLEUM MUST BE delayed. I backtracked down the sloped meadow, through the oaks where no leaf had yet been shed, and across the long yard, past Enceladus not yet crushed.
If I might die here this day, which seemed ever more likely, there was something in my bedroom that I needed to carry with me into death.
At the eucalyptus grove, I hurried along the flagstone path and arrived at the tower just as Noah Wolflaw was leaving. I can’t say which of us looked the most alarmed, but he was the only one of us carrying a shotgun.
In ordinary times, if there ever were any in Roseland, Wolflaw was Mount Vesuvius in a quiet phase, a solid figure of such calm demeanor that he seemed as enduring as any lofty cloud-capped peak of granite. But you sensed his power, volcanic and always pending, the energy that had made him such a successful and wealthy man.
Tall, large-boned, with flesh forged to his frame as if by a maker of armor, he was imposing even when he wasn’t carrying a short-barreled, pistol-grip 12-gauge. The planes of his face were bold geometry, gray eyes set deep in perfectly elliptical sockets, nose a great isosceles wedge, chin a jutting plinth from which his jawbones rose like buttresses. His thick dark hair was a mane that any stallion or lion might have coveted. Only his mouth, full-lipped and yet seeming smaller than it should have been, encouraged you to imagine that inside this strong man might be a weak one.
“Thomas!” he declared upon seeing me.
He addressed me that way not with an imperious refusal to grant me a mister, but because he found my first name so peculiar that he felt uncomfortable using it. On the day we met, he informed me that he would treat my surname as my first because “ ‘Odd’ makes me feel as if I’m spitting on you.” He didn’t seem to be a man of such delicate sensibilities that my name should trouble him, but perhaps he found himself uncharacteristically chivalrous and courtly in the company of Annamaria, who enchanted everyone she met.
Wolflaw’s shotgun alarmed me nearly as much as had the recent encounter with the primate swine, but he didn’t threaten me with it, as I half expected that he would.
Instead, he said, “How does she do what she does? And what is it that she does? I alw
ays talk to her with clear intent, and she answers in the most gracious way, yet I wind up bewildered, having either forgotten or abandoned my intentions.”
He was speaking of Annamaria, of course, and I could only say, “Yes, sir, I sympathize. But I always have the feeling there’s truth in everything she says and that I’ll understand it in time. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next month, maybe not next year, but eventually.”
“She’s got that regal graciousness Grace Kelly used to have, though Grace Kelly was a real looker. You’re probably so young you never heard of Grace Kelly.”
“She was an actress. Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief. She married the prince of Monaco.”
“You’re not the clueless pup that some might take you for.”
This was how he talked to me—and pretty much to everyone—when Annamaria wasn’t present. “Thank you, sir.”
As he spoke, he warily surveyed the eucalyptus grove around us, which was ribboned with shadows and sunshine that fashioned a kind of camouflage in which something might lurk and be difficult to see. “I came here to tell her the two of you have to leave. Today. Within the hour. Now. Do you know what she said to me?”
“I’m sure it was memorable.”
His gray eyes were made for glaring, like stainless-steel blades going for the bone. “She told me that what I wish to see come to pass would not happen if the two of you left now, that you would leave in the morning at the earliest, when my purpose in bringing you here was fulfilled.”
“Yes, that sounds like her.”
“I’ve never before had a guest refuse to leave when told to.” Anger creased his beetled brow, and when he leaned toward me, a beam of sunlight piercing the eucalyptuses seemed to lay a sharper edge on his steely stare. His voice was buttered with menace, and the threat slipped from him without hesitation: “If you presume to tell your host when you’ll leave, maybe you’ll never leave when all is said and done.”
I didn’t take his meaning to be that he feared we would stay forever. I took his meaning to be a promise of an urn and a niche in the mausoleum.
That was an extraordinary and revealing thing for him to have said. Pressure was building in Vesuvius.
“Who the hell does she think she is?”
“Did you ask her that, sir?” I wondered, because her answer was of interest to me, as well.
The steel went out of his eyes, the menace out of his voice, and he looked around the fragrant woods again, not as if worried that a pack of mutant swine was closing in this time, but as if he couldn’t quite recall how he had wound up here.
“No. She did this trick with a flower, like an illusionist’s act in Vegas or something.” He seemed rattled by the memory of her bit of magic. “Have you ever seen her do the trick with the flower?”
Before I could reply, he rolled on.
“Suddenly, I hear myself telling her that of course she could stay, the two of you, stay as long as necessary, if that’s what she wanted. I said I was just concerned about your welfare, you know, with the mountain lion on the prowl. And I apologized for being so thoughtless. I think I might even have kissed her hand. I never in my life kissed a woman’s hand. Why would I kiss a woman’s hand?”
He inhaled deeply, blew out a long exhalation of frustration, and shook his head as if astonished by his behavior.
He continued: “So she says you’ll both leave when what I wish to see come to pass has happened, when my purpose for bringing you here is fulfilled—but what the hell purpose is she talking about?”
“Your purpose, sir.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass, Thomas.”
“No, sir.”
“I don’t know why I brought her here. It was a crazy thing to do. Reckless. I don’t want her. I told Paulie that I might want her, just as an excuse, because I didn’t know how to explain myself, but he knew she wasn’t my type.”
“Mr. Sempiterno is very insightful.”
“Shut up.”
“Yes, sir. We’ll be gone tomorrow,” I promised.
Now he seemed to be talking more to himself than to me: “I don’t want her. She’s disgusting, repellent, knocked up and bloated like a cow. Nothing to get a man’s sap rising. I don’t want anything to do with her, and I never will.”
“We’ll be gone tomorrow,” I repeated.
His attention returned to me, and his too-small mouth puckered with distaste, as if I were something he would never want to find stuck to the sole of his shoe, let alone talking to him face-to-face. “You told Henry Lolam you met the one who calls himself Kenny. No one’s seen him in years. You told Chef Shilshom you saw bears with red eyes.”
“Maybe not bears, sir. Just something.”
He swept the woods with his gaze again. Even with his hard but handsome face and steely eyes, he didn’t look as strong as before, because a tremor worked his mouth.
“You see any of them in broad daylight?”
“No, sir,” I lied.
“Night’s one thing, daylight’s a whole different ball game.” He focused on me once more. “You’re always picking at people, Thomas, always trying to get information out of them, picking and picking.”
“I’m just a curious guy, sir. I always have been.”
“Shut up.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Nothing here is any of your damn business. Do you hear me, Thomas?”
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry. I’ve abused your hospitality.”
His scowl was even more impressive than his glare. “Are you being funny?”
“No, sir. If I say so myself, when I’m actually being funny, you’d find it hard not to laugh.”
“When I say shut up, I mean shut up. Shut up.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Until you leave tomorrow, stay in the guest tower.”
In consideration of the shotgun, I nodded.
“Stay in the tower, lock the doors, lock the windows, draw the draperies, and wait until morning.”
I nodded.
Seeing my attention on the shotgun, he realized belatedly that he needed to explain it. “Thought I might do some skeet shooting.”
He pushed past me on the flagstone path, and I started toward the tower door.
He said, “One other thing.”
Turning to him, I was happy to see that the shotgun cradled in his arm was still pointed at the ground.
“There aren’t phones in your rooms, but you’ve probably got a cell phone. I want you to understand, there’s nothing here that the police would be interested in. You understand?”
I nodded. I didn’t have a cell phone because I never needed to play video games or surf the Net, or exchange nude photos with a congressman.
“I’m well connected with the local authorities,” Wolflaw said. “Better connected than you are with your own pecker. A couple of them were former security guards here. I’ve done a lot for them. I’ve done more for them than you could ever guess, and I can assure you that they won’t take kindly to some worthless drifter bad-mouthing me. Is that clear?”
I nodded.
“You suddenly a dumb mute or something?”
“I understand, sir. About the cops. Stay in the tower, lock the doors, lock the windows, draw the draperies, don’t call the cops or even the fire department if the place is burning down, but just wait until morning and then, come sunrise, keep on keepin’ on right out the front gate.”
He glared at me, his girly mouth puckered in contempt, and I figured that he might soon feel comfortable calling me Odd instead of Thomas, because he said, “You really are a shithead.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll tell Annamaria you said so.”
We stared at each other, plenty of animosity on his end, mere curiosity on my end, until at last he said, “Listen … I’d rather you didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?”
“I’d rather you didn’t tell her. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. This is crazy. Does she have me hypnotized or something? Why the hell should I c
are if you tell her or don’t tell her that I called you a shithead?”
“Then I’ll tell her.”
“Don’t,” he said at once. “I don’t care what she thinks of me, she’s nothing to me, she’s as plain as a powdered doughnut without the powder. I don’t want to do anything with a woman like her, but I’d rather you didn’t tell her about my outburst.”
“Strange, the way she affects people,” I said.
“Extremely strange.”
“I won’t tell her.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
I watched him walk away through the eucalyptuses and up the vast sunlit lawn toward the main house. Even in the open, where nothing could sneak up on him, Wolflaw nervously looked left and right, and glanced back repeatedly. He was probably on guard for the mountain lion, listening for the cry of the loon, alert to the possibility that he might suddenly be confronted by the Jabberwock with eyes of flame and the frumious Bandersnatch.
Twenty
WHEN STORMY LLEWELLYN AND I WERE SIXTEEN, WE spent an evening at a carnival. In an arcade tent, we came across a fortune-telling machine the size of a phone booth, about seven feet tall. The lower three feet were enclosed, and in the glass case atop that base sat what a plaque claimed to be the mummified remains of a Gypsy woman, a dwarf who had been famous for her prognostications.
The withered, spooky figure—possibly a construct of plaster, paper, wax, and latex rather than a preserved corpse—was all tricked up in Gypsy gear. For a quarter she dispensed a small printed card in answer to your question. A quarter doesn’t seem like much to charge for a life-changing prediction, but the dead can work cheap because they don’t have to buy food or subscribe to cable TV.
A young couple who visited the machine ahead of us had asked if they would have a long and happy marriage. Although they gave Gypsy Mummy eight quarters, they never received an answer that seemed clear to them. Stormy and I heard the potential groom, Johnny, read all the answers to his girl, and although the fortune-teller’s responses were oblique, they were perfectly clear to us. One of them was this: The orchard of blighted trees produces poisonous fruit. The others were no more encouraging.