by Dean Koontz
“Only because it was smart enough to know what the shotgun could do to it.”
Ahead was the access ramp down which I had traveled on my bike earlier in the night, with Orson padding at my side. Bobby angled the Jeep toward it.
Recalling the sorry beast on the bungalow roof and the way it had hidden its face behind its crossed arms, I said, “I don’t think it’s a killer.”
“Yeah, all those teeth are just for opening canned hams.”
“Orson has wicked teeth, and he’s no killer.”
“Oh, you’ve convinced me, you absolutely have. Let’s invite Big Head for a pajama party. We’ll make huge bowls of popcorn, order in a pizza, put one another’s hair up in curlers, and talk about boys.”
“Asshole.”
“A minute ago, we were brothers.”
“That was then.”
Bobby drove up the ramp to the top of the levee, between the signs warning about the dangers of the river during storms, across the barren strip of land to the street, where at last he switched on the headlights. He headed toward Lilly Wing’s house.
“I think Pia and I are going to be together again,” Bobby said, referring to Pia Klick, the artist and love of his life, who believes that she is the reincarnation of Kaha Huna, the goddess of surf.
“She says Waimea is home,” I reminded him.
“I’m going to work some major mojo.”
Mother Earth was busily rotating us toward dawn, but the streets of Moonlight Bay were so deserted and silent it was easy to imagine that it was, like Dead Town, inhabited only by ghosts and cadavers.
“Mojo? You’re into voodoo now?” I asked Bobby.
“Freudian mojo.”
“Pia’s way too smart to fall for it,” I predicted.
Although she had been acting flaky for the past three years, ever since she had gone to Hawaii to find herself, Pia was no dummy. Before Bobby ever met her, she had graduated summa cum laude from UCLA. These days, her hyperrealist paintings sold for big bucks, and the pieces she wrote for various art magazines were perceptive and brilliantly composed.
“I’m going to tell her about my new tandem board,” he said.
“Ah. The implication being there’s some wahine you’re riding it with.”
“You need a reality transfusion, bro. Pia can’t be manipulated like that. What I tell her is—I got the tandem board, and I’m ready whenever she is.”
Since Pia’s meditations had led her to the revelation that she was the reincarnation of Kaha Huna, she had decided that it would be blasphemous to have carnal relations with a mere mortal man, which meant that she would have to live the rest of her life in celibacy. This had demoralized Bobby.
An elusive squiggle of hope appeared with Pia’s subsequent realization that Bobby was the reincarnation of Kahuna, the Hawaiian god of the surf. A creation of modern surfers, the Kahuna legend is based on the life of an ancient witch doctor no more divine than your local chiropractor. Nevertheless, Pia says that Bobby, being Kahuna, is the one man on earth with whom she could make love—although in order for them to pick up where they left off, he must acknowledge his true immortal nature and embrace his fate.
A new problem arose when, either out of pride in being just mortal Bobby Halloway or out of pure stubbornness, of which he has some, Bobby refused to agree that he was the one and true god of the surf.
Compared to the difficulties of modern romance, the problems of Romeo and Juliet were piffling.
“So you’re finally going to admit you’re Kahuna,” I said, as we drove through pine-flanked streets into the higher hills of town.
“No. I’ll play it mysterious. I won’t say I’m not Kahuna. Be cool. Wrap myself in enigma when she raises the subject, and let her make what she wants of that.”
“Not good enough.”
“There’s more. I’ll also tell her about this dream where I saw her in an awesomely beautiful gold-and-blue silk holoku, levitating over these tasty, eight-foot, glassy waves, and in the dream she says to me, Papa he’e nalu—Hawaiian for surfboard.”
We were in a residential neighborhood two blocks south of Ocean Avenue, the main east-west street in Moonlight Bay, when a car turned the corner at the intersection ahead, approaching us. It was a basic, late-model, Chevrolet sedan, beige or white, with standard California license plates.
I closed my eyes to protect them from the oncoming headlights. I wanted to duck or slide down in the seat to shield my face from the light, but I could have done nothing more calculated to call attention to myself other than, perhaps, whipping out a paper bag and pulling it over my head.
As the Chevy was passing us, its headlights no longer a danger, I opened my eyes and saw two men in the front, one in the backseat. They were big guys, dressed in dark clothes, as expressionless as turnips, all interested in us. Their night-of-the-living-dead eyes were flat, cold, and disturbingly direct.
For some reason, I thought of the shadowy figure I had seen on the sloping buttress, above the tunnel that led under Highway 1.
After we were past the Chevy, Bobby said, “Legal muscle.”
“Professional trouble,” I agreed.
“They might as well have had it stenciled on their foreheads.”
Watching their taillights in the side mirror, I said, “They don’t seem to be after us, anyway. Wonder what they’re looking for.”
“Maybe Elvis.”
When the Chevy didn’t double back and follow us, I said, “So you’re gonna tell Pia that in this dream of yours, she’s levitating over some waves, and she says, Papa he’e nalu.”
“Right. In the dream, she tells me to get a tandem board we can ride together. I figured that was prophetic, so I got the board, and now I’m ready.”
“What a crock,” I said, by way of friendly criticism.
“It’s true. I had the dream.”
“No way.”
“Way. In fact, I had it three nights in a row, which weirded me out a little. I’ll tell her all that, and let her interpret it any way she wants.”
“While you play mysterious, not admitting to being Kahuna but exhibiting godlike charisma.”
He looked worried. Braking at a stop sign after having ignored all those before it, he said, “Truth. You don’t think I can pull it off?”
When it comes to charisma, I have never known anyone like Bobby: The stuff pours off him in such copious quantity that he positively wades in it.
“Bro,” I said, “you have so much charisma that if you wanted to form a suicide cult, you’d have people signing up by the thousands to jump off a cliff with you.”
He was pleased. “Yeah? You’re not spinning me?”
“No spin,” I assured him.
“Mahalo.”
“You’re welcome. But one question.”
As he accelerated away from the stop sign, he said, “Ask.”
“Why not just tell Pia that you’ve decided you’re Kahuna?”
“I can’t lie to her. I love her.”
“It’s a harmless lie.”
“Do you lie to Sasha?”
“No.”
“Does she lie to you?”
“She doesn’t lie to anyone,” I said.
“Between a man and woman in love, no lie is small or harmless.”
“You keep surprising me.”
“My wisdom?”
“Your mushy little teddy-bear heart.”
“Squeeze me, and I sing ‘Feelings.’”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
We were only a few blocks from Lilly Wing’s house.
“Go in by the back, through the alley,” I directed.
I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a police patrol car or another unmarked sedan full of granite-eyed men waiting for us, but the alleyway was deserted. Sasha Goodall’s Ford Explorer stood in front of Lilly’s garage door, and Bobby parked behind it.
Beyond the windbreak of giant eucalyptuses, the wild canyon to the east lay in unrelieved bla
ckness. Without the lamp of the moon, anything might have been out there: a bottomless abyss rather than a mere canyon, a great dark sea, the end of the earth and a yawning infinity.
As I got out of the Jeep, I remembered good Orson investigating the weeds along the verge of the canyon, urgently seeking Jimmy. His yelp of excitement when he caught the scent. His swift and selfless commitment to the chase.
Only hours ago. Yet ages ago.
Time seemed out of joint even here, far beyond the walls of the egg room.
At the thought of Orson, a coldness closed around my heart, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe.
I recalled waiting by candlelight beside my father in the cold-holding room at Mercy Hospital, two years ago this past January, waiting with my mother’s body for the hearse that would take her to Kirk’s Funeral Home, feeling as though my own body had been broken beyond repair by the loss of her, almost afraid to move or even to speak, as though I might fly apart like a hollow ceramic figurine struck with a hammer. And my father’s hospital room only a month ago. The terrible night he died. Holding his hand in mine, leaning over the bed railing to hear his final whispered words—Fear nothing, Chris. Fear nothing.—and then his hand going slack in mine. I had kissed his forehead, his rough cheek. Because I myself am a walking miracle, still healthy and whole with XP at the age of twenty-eight, I believe in miracles, in the reality of them and in our need for them, and so I held fast to my dead father’s hand, kissed his beard-stubbled cheek, still hot with fever, and waited for a miracle, all but demanded one. God help me, I expected Dad to pull a Lazarus on me, because the pain of losing him was too fierce to bear, the world unthinkably hard and cold without him, and I could not be expected to endure it, must be granted mercy, so although I have been blessed with numerous miracles in my life, I was greedy for one more, one more. I prayed to God, begged Him, bargained with Him, but there is a grace in the natural order of things that is more important than our desires, and at last I’d had to accept that grace, as bitter as it seemed at the time, and reluctantly I’d released my father’s lifeless hand.
Now I stood breathless in the alley, pierced again by the fear that I would be required to outlive Orson, my brother, that special and precious soul, who was even more an outsider in this world than I was. If he should die alone, without the hand of a friend to comfort him, without a soothing voice telling him that he was loved, I would be forever haunted by—ruined by—the thought of his solitary suffering and despair.
“Bro,” Bobby said, putting one hand on my shoulder and squeezing gently. “Gonna be all right.”
I hadn’t spoken a word, but Bobby seemed to know what fears had rooted me to the alleyway blacktop as I stared into the forbidding blackness of the canyon beyond the eucalyptus trees.
Breath returned to me in a rush, and with it came a dangerously fierce hope, one of those seizures of hope so intense it can break your heart if it goes unfulfilled, a hope that was really a mad and unreasonable conviction, which I had no right to indulge here at the end of the world: We would find Jimmy Wing, and we would find Orson, untouched and alive, and those who had meant to harm them would rot in Hell.
16
Through the wooden gate, along the narrow brick walkway, into the backyard where the aroma of jasmine was as thick as incense, I worried about how I was going to convey to Lilly Wing even a small measure of my newfound faith that her son would be discovered alive and unharmed. I had little to tell her that would support such an optimistic conclusion. In fact, if I recounted a fraction of what Bobby and I had seen in Fort Wyvern, Lilly would lose hope altogether.
Bright lights were on toward the front of the Cape Cod bungalow. In expectation of my return, only faint candlelight flickered beyond the kitchen windows at the rear.
Sasha was waiting for us at the top of the back-porch steps. She must have been in the kitchen when she heard the Jeep pulling behind the garage.
The mental image of Sasha that I carry with me is idealized—yet each time I see her, after an absence, she is lovelier than my most flattering recollection. Although my vision had adapted to the dark, the light was so poor that I could not see the arrestingly clear gray of her eyes, the mahogany shade of her hair, or the faintly freckled glow of her skin. Nevertheless, she shone.
We embraced, and she whispered, “Hey, Snowman.”
“Hey.”
“Jimmy?”
“Not yet,” I said, matching her whisper. “Now Orson’s missing.”
Her embrace tightened. “In Wyvern?”
“Yeah.”
She kissed my cheek. “He’s not just all heart and wagging tail. He’s tough. He can take care of himself.”
“We’re going back for them.”
“Damn right, and me with you.”
Sasha’s beauty is not just—or even primarily—physical. In her face, I also see her wisdom, her compassion, her courage, her eternal glory. This other beauty, this spiritual beauty—which is the deepest truth of her—sustains me in times of fear and despair, as other truths might sustain a priest enduring martyrdom under the hand of a tyrant. I see nothing blasphemous in equating Sasha’s grace with the mercy of God, for the one is a reflection of the other. The selfless love that we give to others, to the point of being willing to sacrifice our lives for them—as Sasha would give hers for me, as I would give mine for her—is all the proof I need that human beings are not mere animals of self-interest; we carry within us a divine spark, and if we choose to recognize it, our lives have dignity, meaning, hope. In Sasha, this spark is bright, a light that heals rather than wounds me.
When she hugged Bobby, who was carrying the shotgun, Sasha whispered, “Better leave that out here. Lilly’s shaky.”
“Me too,” Bobby murmured.
He put the shotgun on the porch swing. The Smith & Wesson revolver was tucked under his belt, concealed by his Hawaiian shirt.
Sasha was wearing blue jeans, a sweater, and a roomy denim jacket. When we embraced, I’d felt the concealed handgun in her shoulder holster.
I had the 9-millimeter Glock.
If my mother’s gene-swapping retrovirus had been vulnerable to gunfire, it would have met its match in us, the end of the world would have been canceled, and we would have been at a beach party.
“Cops?” I asked Sasha.
“They were here. Gone now.”
“Manuel?” I asked, meaning Manuel Ramirez, the acting chief of police, who had been my friend before he had been co-opted by the Wyvern crowd.
“Yeah. When he saw me walk through the door, he looked like he was passing a kidney stone.”
Sasha led us into the kitchen, where such a hush prevailed that our soft footsteps were, comparatively, as loud and as rude as clog dancing in a chapel. Lilly’s anguish cast a shroud over this humble house, no less tangible than a velvet pall on a casket, as though Jimmy had already been found dead.
Out of respect for my condition, the only light came from the digital clock on the oven, from the blue gas flame under the teakettle on one of the cooktop burners, and from a pair of fat, yellow candles. The candles, which were set in white saucers on the dinette table, emitted a vanilla fragrance that was inappropriately festive for this dark place and these solemn circumstances.
One side of the table was adjacent to a window, allowing space for three chairs. In the same jeans and flannel shirt she’d been wearing earlier, Lilly sat in the chair facing me.
Bobby remained by the door, watching the backyard, and Sasha went to the stove to check the teakettle.
I pulled out a chair and sat directly across the table from Lilly. The candles in the saucers were between us, and I pushed them to one side.
Lilly was sitting forward on her chair, her arms on the pine table.
“Badger,” I said.
Brow furrowed, eyes narrowed, lips pressed tightly together, she gazed at her clasped hands with such fierce attention that she seemed to be trying to read the fate of her child in the sharp points of her knuck
les, in the patterns of bones and veins and freckles, as if her hands were tarot cards or I Ching sticks.
“I’ll never stop,” I promised her.
From the subdued nature of my entrance, she already knew that I hadn’t found her son, and she didn’t acknowledge me.
Recklessly, I promised her: “We’re going to regroup, get more help, go back out there and find him.”
At last she raised her head and met my eyes. The night had aged her mercilessly. Even by the flattering light of candles, she looked gaunt, worn, as if she’d been beaten by many cruel years rather than by a few dark hours. Through a trick of light, her blond hair seemed white. Her blue eyes, once so radiant and lively, were dark now with sorrow, fear, and rage.
“My phone doesn’t work,” Lilly said in an emotionless and quiet voice, her calm demeanor belied by the powerful emotions in her eyes.
“Your phone?” At first I assumed that her mind had broken under the weight of her fear.
“After the cops were gone, I called my mom. She remarried after Dad died. Three years after. Lives in San Diego. My call couldn’t be completed. An operator broke in. Said longdistance service was disrupted. Temporarily. Equipment failure. She was lying.”
I was struck by the odd and utterly uncharacteristic patterns of her speech: the clipped sentences, staccato cadences. She seemed to be able to speak only by concentrating on small groups of words, succinct bits of information, as if afraid that while delivering a longer sentence, her voice would break and, in breaking, would set loose her pent-up feelings, reducing her to uncontrollable tears and incoherence.
“How do you know the operator was lying?” I prodded when Lilly fell silent.
“Wasn’t even a real operator. You could tell. Didn’t have the lingo right. Didn’t have the voice. Tone of voice. Didn’t have the attitude. They sound alike. They’re trained. This one was jive.”
The movement of her eyes matched the rhythms of her speech. She looked at me repeatedly but each time quickly looked away; laden with guilt and a sense of inadequacy, I assumed that she couldn’t bear the sight of me because I’d failed her. Once she’d shifted her attention from her clasped hands, she was unable to focus on anything for more than a second or two, perhaps because every object and surface in the kitchen summoned memories of Jimmy, memories that would shatter her self-control if she dared to dwell on them.