by Dean Koontz
“So I tried a local call. To Ben’s mother. My late husband’s mother. Jimmy’s grandma. She lives across town. Couldn’t get a dial tone. Now the phone is dead. No phone at all.”
From the far end of the kitchen came the clink of china, then the rattle of spoons as Sasha searched through the flatware in a drawer.
Lilly said, “The cops weren’t cops, either. Looked like cops. Uniforms. Badges. Guns. Men I’ve known all my life. Manuel. He looks like Manuel. Doesn’t act like Manuel anymore.”
“What was different?”
“They asked a few questions. Scribbled some notes. Made a plaster impression of the footprint. Outside Jimmy’s window. Dusted for fingerprints, but not everywhere they should have. It wasn’t real. Wasn’t thorough at all. They didn’t even find the crow.”
“Crow?”
“They didn’t…care somehow,” she continued, as if she hadn’t heard my question, was struggling to understand their indifference. “Lou, my father-in-law, used to be a cop. He was thorough. And he cared. What’s he have to do with this, anyway? He was a good cop. A kind man. You always knew he cared. Not like…them.”
I turned to Sasha for some illumination about the crow and Louis Wing. She nodded, which I took to mean that she understood and would clue me in later if Lilly, in her distress, didn’t make the connections for me.
Playing devil’s advocate, I said to Lilly, “The police have to be detached, impersonal, to do their job right.”
“It wasn’t that. They’ll look for Jimmy. They’ll investigate. They’ll try. I think they will. But they were also…managing me.”
“Managing?”
“They said not to talk. Not to anyone. For twenty-four hours. Talking jeopardizes the investigation. Child abductions scare the public, see? Cause panic. Police phones ring off the hook. They spend all their time calming people. Can’t put full resources into finding Jimmy. Bullshit. I’m not stupid. I’m coming apart here, coming apart…but not stupid.” She almost lost her composure, took a deep breath, and finished in the same controlled, flat voice: “They just want to shut me up. Shut me up for twenty-four hours. And I don’t know why.”
I understood Manuel’s motivation for seeking her silence. He needed to buy time until he could determine whether this was a conventional crime or one connected to events at Wyvern, because he was diligent about concealing the latter. Right now he was hoping that the kidnapper was a common variety of sociopath, a pedophile or satanic cultist, or someone with a grudge against Lilly. But the perpetrator might be one of those who were becoming, a man whose DNA was so disturbed by an aggressive infection of the retrovirus that his psychology was deteriorating, his sense of humanity dissolving in an acid of utterly alien urges and needs, compulsions darker and stranger than even the worst of bestial desires. Or maybe there was another connection to Wyvern, because these days so much that went wrong in Moonlight Bay could be traced to those haunted grounds beyond the chain-link and razor wire.
If Jimmy’s kidnapper was one of the becoming, he’d never stand trial. If captured, he would be taken to the deeply hidden genetics labs in Fort Wyvern if they were, as we suspected, still operating, or he would be transported to a similar and equally secret facility elsewhere, to be studied and tested, as part of the desperate search for a cure. In that event, Lilly would be pressured to accept an officially concocted story of what had happened to her son. If she couldn’t be persuaded, if she couldn’t be threatened, then she would be killed or railroaded into the psychiatric ward at Mercy Hospital, in the name of national security and the public welfare, though in truth she would be sacrificed for no reason other than to protect the political eminences who had brought us to this brink.
Sasha came to the table with a cup of tea, which she placed in front of Lilly. On the saucer was a wedge of lemon. Beside the cup, she put a cream-and-sugar set on a matching china tray, with a small silver spoon for the sugar.
Instead of grounding us in reality, these domestic details gave a dreamlike quality to the proceedings. If Alice, the White Rabbit, and the Mad Hatter had joined us at the table, I would not have been surprised.
Apparently, Lilly had asked for tea, but now she seemed barely aware that it had been put before her. The power of her repressed emotions was growing so visible that she wouldn’t be able to maintain her composure much longer, yet for the moment she continued to speak in an uninflected drone: “Phone’s dead. Okay. What if I drive to my mother-in-law’s? To tell her about Jimmy. Will I be stopped? Stopped on the way? Advised to be silent? For Jimmy’s sake? And if I won’t stop? If I won’t be silent?”
“How much has Sasha told you?” I asked.
Lilly’s eyes fixed on mine, then moved at once away. “Something happened at Wyvern. Something strange. Bad. In some way it affects us. Everyone in Moonlight Bay. They’re trying to keep it quiet. It might explain Jimmy’s disappearance. Somehow.”
I turned to look at Sasha, who had retreated to the farther side of the kitchen. “That’s all?”
“Isn’t she in greater danger if she knows more?” Sasha asked.
“Definitely,” Bobby said from his watch position at the rear door.
Considering the depth of Lilly’s distress, I agreed that it was not wise to tell her every detail of what we knew. If she understood the apocalyptic threat looming over us, over all humanity, she might lose her last desperate faith that she would see her little boy alive again. I would never be the one who robbed her of that remaining hope.
Besides, I detected a dusting of gray in the night beyond the kitchen windows, a precursor of dawn so subtle that anyone without my heightened appreciation for shades of darkness was not likely to notice. We were running out of time. Soon I would have to hide from the sun, which I preferred to do in the well-prepared sanctuary of my own home.
Lilly said, “I deserve to know. To know everything.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“Everything.”
“But there’s not enough time now. We—”
“I’m scared,” she whispered.
I pushed aside her cup of tea and reached across the table with both hands. “You aren’t alone.”
She looked at my hands but didn’t take them, perhaps because she was afraid that by putting her hands in mine, she would lose her grip on her emotions.
Keeping my hands on the table, palms up, I said, “Knowing more now won’t help you. Later, I’ll tell you everything. Everything. But now…If whoever took Jimmy has nothing to do with…the mess at Wyvern, Manuel will try hard to bring him back to you. I know he will. But if it is related to Wyvern, then none of the police, Manuel included, can be trusted. Then it’s up to us. And we’ve got to assume it will be up to us.”
“This is so wrong.”
“Yes.”
“Crazy.”
“Yes.”
“So wrong,” she repeated, and her flat voice was increasingly eerie. Her effort to maintain her composure left her face clenched as tight as a fist.
I couldn’t bear the sight of her in such acute pain, but I did not avert my gaze. When she was able to look at me, I wanted her to see the commitment in my eyes; perhaps she could take some comfort from it.
“You’ve got to stay here,” I said, “so we’ll know where to get hold of you if…when we find Jimmy.”
“What hope do you have?” she said, and though her voice remained flat, a flutter passed through it. “You against…who? The police? The army? The government? You against all of them?”
“It isn’t hopeless. Nothing’s hopeless in this world—unless we want it to be. But, Lilly…you’ve got to stay here. Because if this isn’t about Wyvern, isn’t connected, then the police might need your help. Or might bring you good news. Even the police.”
“But you shouldn’t be alone,” Sasha said.
“When we leave,” Bobby said, “I’ll bring Jenna here.” Jenna Wing was Lilly’s mother-in-law. “Would that be okay?”
Lilly nodded.
&n
bsp; She was not going to take my hands, so I folded them on the table, as hers were folded.
I said, “You asked what they could do if you decided not to be silent, not to play this their way. Anything. That’s what they can do.” I hesitated. Then: “I don’t know where my mother was going on the day she died. She was driving out of town. Maybe to break this conspiracy wide open. Because she knew, Lilly. She knew what had happened at Wyvern. She never got where she was going. Neither would you.”
Her eyes widened. “The accident, the car crash.”
“No accident.”
For the first time since I’d sat across the table from her, Lilly met my eyes and held my gaze for longer than two or three words: “Your mother. Genetics. Her work. That’s how you know so much about this.”
I didn’t take the opportunity to explain more to Lilly, for fear she might reach the correct conclusion that my mother was not merely a righteous whistle-blower, that she was among those fundamentally responsible for what had gone wrong at Wyvern. And if what happened to Jimmy was related to the Wyvern cover-up, Lilly might take the next step in logic, concluding that her son was in jeopardy as a direct result of my mother’s work. While this was probably true, she might leap thereafter into the realm of the illogical, assume that I was one of the conspirators, one of the enemy, and withdraw from me. Regardless of what my mother could have done, I was Lilly’s friend and her best hope of finding her child.
“Your best chance, Jimmy’s best chance, is to trust us. Me, Bobby, Sasha. Trust us, Lilly.”
“There’s nothing I can do. Nothing,” she said bitterly.
Her clenched face changed, though it didn’t relax with relief at being able to share this burden with friends. Instead, the wretched twist of pain that distorted her features drew tighter, into a hard knot of anger, as she was overcome by a simultaneously dispiriting and infuriating recognition of her helplessness.
When her husband, Ben, died three years ago, Lilly had left her job as a teacher’s aide, because she couldn’t support Jimmy on that income, and she had risked the life-insurance money to open a gift shop in an area of the harbor popular with tourists. With hard work, she made the business viable. To overcome loneliness and grief at the loss of Ben, she filled her spare hours with Jimmy and with self-education: She learned to lay bricks, installing the walkways around her bungalow; she built a fine picket fence, stripped and refinished the cabinets in her kitchen, and became a first-class gardener, with the best landscaping in her neighborhood. She was accustomed to taking care of herself, to coping. Even in adversity, she had always before remained an optimist; she was a doer, a fighter, all but incapable of thinking of herself as a victim.
Perhaps for the first time in her life, Lilly felt entirely helpless, pitted against forces she could neither fully understand nor successfully defy. This time self-reliance was not enough; worse, there seemed to be no positive action that she could take. Because it was not in her nature to embrace victimhood, she could not find solace in self-pity, either. She could only wait. Wait for Jimmy to be found alive. Wait for him to be found dead. Or, perhaps worst of all, wait all her life without knowing what had happened to him. Because of this intolerable helplessness, she was racked equally by anger, terror, and a portentous grief.
At last she unclasped her hands.
Her eyes blurred with tears that she struggled not to shed.
Because I thought she was going to reach out to me, I reached toward her again.
Instead, she covered her face with her hands and, sobbing, said, “Oh, Chris, I’m so ashamed.”
I didn’t know whether she meant that her helplessness shamed her or that she was ashamed of losing control, of weeping.
I went around the table and tried to pull her into my arms.
She resisted for a moment, then rose from her chair and hugged me. Burying her face against my shoulder, voice raw with anguish, she said, “I was so…oh, God…I was so cruel to you.”
Stunned, confused, I said, “No, no. Lilly, Badger, no, not you, not ever.”
“I didn’t have…the guts.” She was shaking as if in the thrall of a fever, words stuttering out of her, teeth chattering, clutching at me with the desperation of a lost and terrified child.
I held her tight, unable to speak because her pain tore at me. I remained baffled by her declaration of shame; yet, in retrospect, I believe an understanding was beginning to come to me.
“All my big talk,” she said, her voice becoming even less clear, distorted by a choking remorse. “Just talk. But I wasn’t…couldn’t…when it counted…couldn’t.” She gasped for breath and held me tighter than ever. “I told you the difference didn’t matter to me, but in the end it did.”
“Stop,” I whispered. “It’s all right, all right.”
“Your difference,” she said, but by now I knew what she meant. “Your difference. In the end it mattered. And I turned away from you. But here you are. Here you are when I need you.”
Bobby moved from the kitchen onto the back porch. He wasn’t investigating a suspicious noise, and he wasn’t stepping outside to give us privacy. His slacker indifference was a shell inside which was concealed a snail-soft sentimental Bobby Halloway that he thought was unknown to everyone, even to me.
Sasha started to follow Bobby. When she glanced at me, I shook my head, encouraging her to stay.
Visibly discomfited, she busied herself by brewing another serving of tea to replace the one that had cooled, untouched, in the cup on the table.
“You never turned away from me, never, never,” I told Lilly, holding her, smoothing her hair with one hand, and wishing that life had never brought us to a moment where she felt compelled to speak of this.
For four years, beginning when we were sixteen, we hoped to build a life together, but we grew up. For one thing, we realized that any children we conceived would be at too high a risk of XP. I’ve made peace with my limitations, but I couldn’t justify creating a child who would be burdened with them. And if the child was born without XP, he—or she—would be fatherless at a young age, for I wasn’t likely to survive far into his teenage years. Though I would have been content to live childless with Lilly, she longed to have a family, which was natural and right. She struggled, too, with the certainty of being a young widow—and with the awful prospect of the increasing physical and neurological disorders that were likely to plague me during my final few years: slurred speech, hearing loss, uncontrollable tremors of the head and the hands, perhaps even mental impairment.
“We both knew it had to end, both of us,” I told Lilly, which was true, because belatedly I’d recognized the horrendous obligation that I would eventually become to her, all in the name of love.
To be honest, I might selfishly have seduced her into marriage and allowed her to suffer with me during my eventual descent into infirmity and disability, because the comfort and companionship she could have provided would have made my decline less frightening and more tolerable. I might have closed my mind to the realization that I was ruining her life in order to improve mine. I am not adequate material for sainthood; I am not selfless. She had voiced the first doubts, tentative and apologetic; listening to her, over a period of weeks, I’d reluctantly arrived at the realization that although she would make any sacrifice for me—and though I wanted to let her make those sacrifices—what love she still had for me after my death would inevitably be corroded with resentment and with a justified bitterness. Because I am not going to have a long life, I have a deep and thoroughly selfish need to want those who have known me to keep me alive in memory. And I am vain enough to want those memories to be cherished, to be full of affection and laughter. Finally I had understood that, for my sake as much as Lilly’s, we had to forgo our dream of a life together—or risk watching the dream devolve into a nightmare.
Now, with Lilly in my arms, I realized that because she had been the first to express doubts about our relationship, she felt the full responsibility for its collapse. When w
e’d ceased to be lovers and decided to settle for friendship, my continued longing for her and my melancholy about the end of our dream must have been dismally apparent, because I’d been neither kind enough nor man enough to spare her from them. Unwittingly, I had sharpened the thorn of guilt in her heart, and eight years too late, I needed to heal the wound that I had caused.
When I began to tell her all this, Lilly attempted to protest. By habit, she blamed herself, and over the years she had learned to take a masochistic solace in her imagined culpability, which she was now reluctant to do without. Earlier, I’d incorrectly believed that her inability to meet my eyes resulted from my failure to find Jimmy; like her, I’d been quick to torture myself with blame. This side of Eden, whether we realize it or not, we feel the stain on our souls, and at every opportunity, we try to scrub it away with steel-wool guilt.
I held fast to this dear woman, talking her into accepting exoneration, trying to make her see me for the needy fool that I am, insisting that she understand how close I had come, eight years ago, to manipulating her into sacrificing her future for me. Diligently, I tarnished the shining image she held of me. This was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do…because as I held her and quieted her tears, I realized how much I still cherished her, treasured her, and how desperately I wanted her to think only well of me, though we would never be lovers again.
“We did what was right. Both of us. If we hadn’t made the decision we made eight years ago,” I concluded, “you wouldn’t have found Ben, and I would never have found Sasha. Those are precious moments in our lives—your meeting Ben, my meeting Sasha. Sacred moments.”
“I love you, Chris.”
“I love you, too.”
“Not like I once loved you.”
“I know.”
“Better than that.”
“I know,” I said.
“Purer than that.”