by Dean Koontz
I assumed that Noah Wolflaw must have murdered them. He’d bought Roseland from the second owner, the reclusive South American mining heir, in 1988, twenty-four years earlier. If this macabre collection had come with the property, Wolflaw would have called the police and would have been eager to have the cadavers removed.
Considering that the riding ring and the exercise yard for horses had been weed-choked for many years, considering that the strangely spotless stables offered no speck of evidence that animals had been kept there in several decades, I believed the bareback rider and her stallion must have been murdered many years before Wolflaw purchased the place. Chef Shilshom had seemed to confirm the long absence of horses from Roseland.
But when the rider’s spirit led me around this crypt to the last of the thirty-four bodies—more likely the first in order of death—it proved to be hers. The condition of the cadaver argued that her spirit must have departed it less than an hour previously. If this was Wolflaw’s work, then there had been at least one stallion stabled in Roseland after he purchased the estate.
Hers was the only body that wasn’t naked, and it wore the long white silk-and-lace nightgown in which her spirit manifested. Of the thirty-four, she alone had not been tortured, which seemed to confirm that she indeed had been the first to be murdered and that her killer had acted on that one occasion in the heat of passion; thereafter, he chose his victims with patient calculation, abusing them sexually and physically in an almost ritual fashion before finally taking their lives.
The shock of this discovery diminished slowly, but the horror grew moment by moment. In my short life, I have seen many detestable things, and I have been called upon to do repugnant things that have for a while broken me. But nothing in my experience had weighed upon me with greater power than the grievous scene in that subcellar of the mausoleum.
For a while, I had to close my eyes to such abundant evidence of evil, as if to look upon it too long would invite infection.
My legs felt weak. I swayed in my self-imposed darkness. Locked my knees. Steadied myself.
A comforting hand on my shoulder had to be that of the spirit rider. I am able to feel the touch of the lingering dead, though usually they don’t attempt to reassure me.
A life of supernatural encounters has put a keener edge on my imagination, which has been sharp since birth. The rider’s hand had been on my shoulder mere seconds when I became convinced that it wasn’t she who touched me but instead someone or something with less sympathetic intentions.
Opening my eyes, I discovered that the hand belonged, after all, to my spirit companion. I held her gaze for a moment and then met the stare of her seated corpse.
I am amazed that there are still nights when I sleep well.
The bullet wounds in the cadaver’s chest were hideous. I didn’t want to dwell on them.
Nevertheless, after a hesitation, I knelt beside the body and touched the gore-stained nightgown to confirm what I suspected. Yes. The blood that had soaked into the fabric was still tacky—and it looked wet and liquid in the wounds, which made no sense.
The murderer had staged the victims in his obscene collection as if they were dolls with which he’d played and which he discarded when he grew bored with them. They sat with their legs splayed, their slender arms limp at their sides, palms turned up as if in supplication.
Except for the woman in the nightgown—which was rucked up past her knees—his other dolls were accessorized with nothing more than the instruments of their destruction. Some had been strangled with neckties, which were still cinched so deeply in the flesh of their throats that the murderer must have been not merely enraged but in the ferocious grip of a sour and festered malignity, implacable rancor. Some had been stabbed two or three times, others much more often, and in each case the knife remained in the last wound administered.
In the case of the thirty-three who were naked, on the floor between their spread legs were hand-printed index cards, evidently to assist the killer’s memory. As a little girl will name her dolls, so each victim in this sick man’s collection was named, although I assumed these were the names with which they had lived.
Reluctantly, I went to one knee before the second corpse, trying not to look at her, to focus only on the index card. The killer had printed TAMMY VANALETTI and beside the name had drawn four neat little stars, which perhaps suggested how much he had enjoyed his time with her.
My revulsion didn’t abate, nor my sadness. But now a dark fog of anger, which doesn’t come easily to me, rose as if from the marrow in my bones and spread through my inner landscape.
Each of these women was someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, someone’s friend, perhaps someone’s mother. They weren’t toys. What he’d done to them was not a sport that could be scored with a system of stars. Precious in and of themselves, every one of them might also have been as precious to someone as Stormy had been to me.
Anger is a violent emotion, vindictive, and as dangerous to he who is driven by it as to anyone on whom it is turned. If anger is personal and selfish—and it usually is—it clouds your thinking and therefore puts you at risk. I had to remain clearheaded to deal with what would come next. I needed to keep Stormy Llewellyn out of this, to take this cruelty less personally, to trade anger for righteous indignation, which despises evil acts solely because they are evil. Anger is a red mist through which you see the world, but wrath is clarity. The angry man shoots too often from the hip and misses his target or hits the wrong one, while a wrathful man proceeds without malice but with a thirst for justice.
A date was printed under Tammy Vanaletti’s name. It couldn’t be her birthday because it was only eight years earlier, and she looked to be in her early twenties. The most logical conclusion was that he had murdered her on that date.
Tammy had been stabbed. The blood on the lips of her wounds appeared fresh.
I had no idea how this could be the case more than eight years after her murder. But I sensed that the part of my mind that never slept or rested was, like a loom, weaving all the seemingly disparate threads of Roseland into a fabric.
I went corpse to corpse, reading each card but not touching it. The date of each death was nearer the present than the one before it. Ginger Harkin, the most recent victim, had been killed less than a month earlier.
Of the thirty-three whose death dates were provided, all had been killed in the past eight years. The periodicity of the killer’s murderous urge seemed to be less than three months. Four victims per annum, year after year, with now and then an extra.
This much murder couldn’t be called a homicidal impulse or even a psychotic compulsion. This was the man’s work, his occupation, his calling.
When I turned again to the nameless spirit, I said, “Was it Noah Wolflaw who killed you?”
After a hesitation, she nodded: Yes.
“Were you his lover?”
Another hesitation. Yes.
Before I could ask a third question, she raised one hand to display an engagement ring and wedding band, which of course were not real but only the idea of the nuptial jewelry that she’d once worn in this world.
“His wife?”
Yes.
“You want him brought to justice.”
She nodded vigorously and placed both hands over her heart, as if to say that justice was her fondest desire.
“I’ll bring him down. I’ll see him in jail.”
She shook her head and drew one index finger across her throat in the universal gesture that meant Kill him.
“I’ll probably have to,” I said. “He won’t go easily.”
Twenty-five
THE LINGERING DEAD DON’T ALWAYS PROVIDE HELPFUL information, and even those who want to assist me are hampered by their psychology in death as in life. In fact, because they are lost between this world and the next, their reason is often bent by fear, by confusion, and perhaps by other emotions too complex for me to imagine. As a result, they’re likely at times to behave irr
ationally, hindering me when they mean only to help, turning away from me when they should turn toward.
Eager to get as much from Wolflaw’s murdered wife as I could before she might become less cooperative, I said, “There’s a boy in the house. Just as you suggested.”
She nodded vigorously. Her eyes welled with tears, because even spirits can weep, although their tears do not water anything in this world.
Because the boy had said that he’d been taken from someplace and that he wanted to be taken back, I had assumed he was no relation to Noah Wolflaw and didn’t belong in Roseland. But the woman’s tears forced me to reconsider my assumption.
“Your son.”
Yes.
“Is Noah Wolflaw his father?”
After another hesitation and a look of frustration, she replied in the affirmative. Yes.
“I assume you don’t know much more about me, just that I can see you and others who haven’t crossed over. But I want you to know that I’ve been drawn here because of your son. I’m meant to help him, and I will try my best.”
She appeared hopeful but also uncertain. Her maternal anxiety, carried with her even into death, made her a pitiable figure.
“He says he wants to be taken back, but I don’t know where he was brought from. Was he living somewhere else for a while, maybe with his grandparents?”
No.
“With an aunt or uncle?”
No.
“I promise you, I’ll take him back.”
To my surprise, she reacted with alarm, adamantly shaking her head. No, no, no.
“But he wants to go back, he wants it more than anything, and he’ll have to go somewhere when this is over.”
Obviously distressed, the late Mrs. Wolflaw pressed her hands to her head as though she was mentally tortured by the thought of her boy being taken anywhere.
“Serial killing isn’t the entire story of Roseland. Something damn strange is going on here, and it won’t end well. There’s not going to be a Roseland anymore, or if there is, then it’ll surely be notorious, a magnet for the morally confused, the mentally unhinged, cultists, freaks of all kinds. The boy will have to go back wherever it is that he wants to go.”
Fear twisted her lovely face, but anger caused her to swing a fist at me.
The lingering dead can touch me—and be felt—when the intention is benign. But when they mean to harm, their blows pass through me with no effect, confirming their immaterial nature.
Why this should be, I don’t have a clue. I didn’t make the rules, and if I were allowed to rewrite them, I would impose a number of changes.
I don’t even know why I should be, just that I am.
Again Mrs. Wolflaw swung at me, and a third time. Her failure to connect dismayed her so that desperation wrenched her face, and she let out a plaintive howl to which I was deaf and the world unheeding.
She was frightened and frustrated more than angry. I didn’t think that she could work up the white-hot fury that alone can transform a harmless ghost into a dangerous, furniture-slinging poltergeist.
She proved me right by turning away from me, rushing past the dead women, and vanishing as she reached her own bullet-riddled body.
Sometimes it seems that I am dreaming when I am in fact awake, my reality as unreal as the lands I walk in sleep.
Alone except for the convocation of the dead, I looked up at the six arrays of golden gears. Shining teeth meshed, bit without rending, chewed without consuming, revolved without a sound, moving across the room from wall to wall, as if they were the clockworks in Hell by which the devil measured progress toward eternity.
Twenty-six
IN THE CLOCKWORK CRYPT, THE TIMELESS DEAD GAVE silent testimony to the human potential for evil. To meet their sightless eyes would be to weep. This was no more a time for weeping than it was a time for laughter, and I moved back toward the spiral stairs, rich in wrath but without anger.
Ozzie Boone, the best-selling mystery writer who lives in Pico Mundo, is my four-hundred-pound mentor, friend, and surrogate father. He has appeared in some volumes of these memoirs, and his advice on writing shapes them all.
He told me that I must keep the tone light because the material is often so dark. Without the leavening of humor, Ozzie says, I will be writing for a small audience of bitter nihilists and dedicated depressives, and I will fail to reach those readers who might be lifted by the hope that lies at the heart of my story.
My writing can’t be published while I’m alive, if only because I would be besieged by people who would mistakenly conclude that I can control my sixth sense. They would expect me to serve as a medium between them and their loved ones on the Other Side. Others would even more completely misunderstand my gift and come to me to be healed of everything from cancer to bunions.
And here, beyond the limits of Pico Mundo, I must consider the police and the courts, where I would not likely find a sympathetic ear for my story of another world within the world they know, of a more complex reality within the reality of all things material. I would be called guilty, and the guilty on whom I turned my wrath in defense of the innocent would be declared innocent victims. My best hope would be prison, my likely destination a madhouse, and during the years that I waited for that decision, I would not be able to use my gift to help anyone because I would be woven immobile in a web of lawyers.
At the stairs, I registered something that I had seen before but not considered: a door in the farther wall. From here the stairs went up to rooms I’d already visited, but the door led to something new.
New isn’t always better. iPhones are better than rotary-dial models, but not so many years ago, some maniacs had a big new idea that they should announce their grievances by flying airliners into skyscrapers.
Nevertheless, carrying the pillowcase containing the hacksaw, I crossed to the door, hesitated, and opened it. Beyond lay a down-sloping tunnel approximately six feet wide and seven high.
As I was at the north side of the mausoleum and as the main house stood north of this building, I assumed the tunnel led under the stepped cascades, under the lawn, under the terrace, terminating in the basement of the residence.
My ultimate intention since leaving the guest tower was to sneak into the house unnoticed and then do what must be done to unravel the mysteries of Roseland and free the boy. The tunnel offered a sneakier route than I could have hoped to find—as long as I didn’t encounter Wolflaw or Sempiterno, or a swine presuming to walk like a man.
This was more than a passageway. It apparently served some other purpose, as part of the baroque mechanism that I’d discovered in the cellar and subcellar of the mausoleum.
The floor, walls, and ceiling were sheathed in copper plates, and overhead rectangular lamps striped the length of the tunnel with shadow and light. Inlaid in each wall was a single clear-glass tube through which pulsed slow-moving golden flares reminiscent of the raindrop-like luminous bursts thrown off by the flywheels.
One moment the pulses seemed to be moving toward the house, the next moment away from it. Staring directly at them for longer than a few seconds made me queasy and gave me the curious, confusing thought that I was here but not here, real but not real, both approaching the house but at the same time retreating from it.
I took care not to look directly at the tubes anymore. I kept my eyes on the path ahead and proceeded a few hundred feet.
At the end of the passageway, I opened a copper-clad door and fumbled for the light switch. Beyond lay a wine cellar with stone walls, a concrete floor decorated with the exposed ends of copper rods, and a couple of thousand bottles in redwood racks.
Something as normal as a wine cellar seemed abnormal here. You torture and kill women, you imprison your own son, you and your staff are armed for Armageddon, your house—maybe your entire estate—seems to be a machine of some kind, you have a pack of swine things chasing around the property, and you sit down of an evening with a good Cabernet Sauvignon and a bit of nice cheese to—what?�
�listen to Broadway show tunes?
Nothing in Roseland was as normal as show tunes or cheese, or wine. Maybe this had once been an ordinary mansion for a typical billionaire with the usual perversions, but not any longer.
I was tempted to open one of the bottles to see if it contained blood instead of Napa’s finest.
Behind one of two distressed-oak doors lay narrow enclosed stairs. I assumed they went up to the kitchen.
I had learned all I was ever likely to learn from Chef Shilshom, unless I attached wires to his private parts and teased information out of him with electric shocks. That wasn’t my style. Besides, the thought of getting a glimpse of the chef’s private parts made me want to scream like a little girl who finds a tarantula on her shoulder.
With much to do and perhaps too little time in which to do it, I went to the second door and gingerly opened it. A long basement corridor waited beyond, closed doors on both sides and a door at the farther end.
I listened at the first door on the left before opening it. The large room was full of hulking iron furnaces and massive boilers that appeared to date from the 1920s. They looked as if they had just come out of the factory, but I couldn’t tell if they were actually still in service, for they were quiet.
On the right, the first door opened to a storeroom in which nothing was stored, and when I opened the second door on the left, I found Victoria Mors, the maid who worked at the direction of Mrs. Tameed, doing laundry.
The washers and dryers were newer than the furnaces and boilers, but like the wine cellar, their very ordinariness made them seem out of place in this weird and increasingly grotesque world within the walls of Roseland.
Victoria Mors was sorting clothes and bedding, transferring them from a laundry cart to the washers. None of the machines was yet in operation, which was why I hadn’t heard motor or agitator noise that would have warned me that the room was occupied.