by Dean Koontz
Just when I thought she had drifted into sleep, Sasha said, “You hardly know me, Snowman.”
“I know your heart, what’s in it. That’s everything.”
“I’ve never talked about my family, my past, who I was and what I did before I came to KBAY.”
“Are you going to talk about that now?”
“No.”
“Good. I’m wiped out.”
“Neanderthal.”
“You Cro-Magnons all think you’re so superior.”
After a silence, she said, “Maybe I’ll never talk about the past.”
“You mean, even like about yesterday?”
“You really don’t feel a need to know, do you?”
I said, “I love the person you are. I’m sure I’d also love the person you were. But it’s who you are that I have now.”
“You never prejudge anyone.”
“I’m a saint.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. I’m a saint.”
“Asshole.”
“Better not talk that way about a saint.”
“You’re the only person I’ve ever known who always judges people solely on their actions. And forgives them when they screw up.”
“Well, me and Jesus.”
“Neanderthal.”
“Careful now,” I warned. “Better not risk divine punishment. Lightning bolts. Boils. Plagues of locusts. Rains of frogs. Hemorrhoids.”
“I’m embarrassing you, aren’t I?” she asked.
“Yes, Moe, you are.”
“All I’m saying is, this is your difference, Chris. This is the difference that makes you special. Not XP.”
I was silent.
She said, “You’re desperately searching for some smart remark that’ll get me to call you an asshole again.”
“Or at least a Neanderthal.”
“This is your difference. Sleep tight.”
She let go of my hand and rolled onto her side.
“Love you, Goodall.”
“Love you, Snowman.”
In spite of the blackout blinds and the overlapping drapes, faint traces of light defined the edges of the windows. Even this morning’s overcast heavens had been beautiful. I yearned to go outside, stand under the daytime sky, and look for faces, forms, and animals in the clouds. I yearned to be free.
I said, “Goodall?”
“Hmmm?”
“About your past.”
“Yeah?”
“You weren’t a hooker, were you?”
“Asshole.”
I sighed with contentment and closed my eyes.
Worried as I was about Orson and the three missing children, I didn’t expect to sleep well, but I slept the dreamless sleep of a clueless Neanderthal.
When I woke five hours later, Sasha wasn’t in bed. I dressed and went looking for her.
In the kitchen, a note was fixed with a magnet to the door of the refrigerator: Out on business. Back soon. For God’s sake, don’t eat those cheese enchiladas for breakfast. Have bran flakes. Moe.
While the leftover cheese enchiladas were heating in the oven, I went into the dining room, which is now Sasha’s music room, since we eat all our meals at the kitchen table. We have moved the dining table, chairs, and other furniture into the garage so the dining room can accommodate her electronic keyboard, synthesizer, sax stand with saxophone, clarinet, flute, two guitars (one electric, one acoustic), cello and cellist’s stool, music stands, and composition table.
Similarly, we converted the downstairs study into her workout room. An exercise bicycle, rowing machine, and rack of hand weights ring the room, with plush exercise mats in the center. She is deep into homeopathic medicine; consequently, the bookshelves are filled with neatly ordered bottles of vitamins, minerals, herbs—plus, for all I know, powdered wing of bat, eye-of-toad ointment, and iguana-liver marmalade.
Her extensive book collection lined the living room at her former place. Here it is shelved and stacked all over the house.
She is a woman of many passions: cooking, music, exercise, books, and me. Those are the ones I know about. I would never ask her to rank her passions in order of importance. Not because I’m afraid I’d come in fifth of the major five. I’m happy to be fifth, to have any ranking at all.
I circled the dining room, touching her guitars and cello, finally picking up her sax and blowing a few bars of “Quarter Till Three,” the old Gary U.S. Bonds hit. Sasha was teaching me to play. I wouldn’t claim that I wailed, but I wasn’t bad.
In truth, I didn’t pick up the sax to practice. You might find this romantic or disgusting, depending on your point of view, but I picked up the sax because I wanted to put my mouth where her mouth had been. I’m either Romeo or Hannibal Lecter. Your call.
For breakfast I ate three plump cheese enchiladas with a third of a pint of fresh salsa and washed everything down with an ice-cold Pepsi. If I live long enough for my metabolism to turn against me, I might one day regret never having learned to eat for any reason but the sheer fun of it. Currently, however, I am at that blissful age when no indulgence can alter my thirty-inch waistline.
In the upstairs guest bedroom that served as my study, I sat at my desk in candlelight and spent a couple of minutes looking at a pair of framed photographs of my mom and dad. Her face was full of kindness and intelligence. His face was full of kindness and wisdom.
I have rarely seen my own face in full light. The few times I’ve stood in a bright place and confronted a mirror, I’ve not seen anything in my face that I can understand. This disturbs me. How can my parents’ images shine with such virtues and mine be enigmatic?
Did their mirrors show them mysteries?
I think not.
Well, I take solace from the realization that Sasha loves me—perhaps as much as she loves cooking, perhaps even as much as she loves a good aerobic workout. I wouldn’t risk suggesting that she values me as much as she does books and music. Though I hope.
In my study, among hundreds of volumes of poetry and reference books—my own and my father’s collections combined—is a thick Latin dictionary. I looked up the word for beer.
Bobby had said, Carpe cerevisi. Seize the beer. Cerevisi appeared to be correct.
We had been friends for so long that I knew Bobby had never sat through a class in Latin. Therefore, I was touched. The apparent effort that he had taken to mock me was a sign of true friendship.
I closed the dictionary and slid it aside, next to a copy of the book I had written about my life as a child of darkness. It had been a national best-seller about four years ago, when I’d thought I knew the meaning of my life, prior to my discovery that my mother, out of fierce maternal love and a desire to free me from my disability, had inadvertently made me the poster child for doomsday.
I hadn’t opened this book in two years. It should have been on one of the shelves behind my desk. I assumed Sasha had been looking at it and neglected to put it back where she’d found it.
Also on the desk was a decorative tin box painted with the faces of dogs. In the center of the lid are these lines from Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
Therefore to this dog will I,
Tenderly not scornfully,
Render praise and favor:
With my hand upon his head,
Is my benediction said
Therefore and forever.
This tin box was a gift from my mother, given to me on the day that she brought Orson home. I keep special biscuits in it, which he particularly enjoys, and from time to time I give him a couple, not to reward him for a trick learned, because I don’t teach him tricks, and not to enforce any training, for he needs no training, but simply because the taste of them makes him happy.
When my mother brought Orson to live with us, I didn’t know how special he was. She kept this secret until long after her death, until after my father’s death. When she gave me the box, she said, “I know you’ll give him love, Chris. But also, when he needs it—and he will
need it—take pity on him. His life is no less difficult than yours.”
At the time, I assumed she meant nothing more than that animals, like us, are subject to the fear and suffering of this world. Now I know there were deeper and more complex layers of meaning in her words.
I reached toward the tin, intending to test its weight, because I wanted to be certain that it was filled with treats for Orson’s triumphant return. My hand began to shake so badly that I left the box untouched.
I folded my hands, one over the other, on the desk. Staring down at the hard white points of my knuckles, I realized that I had assumed the very pose in which I’d first seen Lilly Wing when Bobby and I returned from Wyvern.
Orson. Jimmy. Aaron. Anson. Like the barbed points on a razor-wire fence, their names spiraled through my mind. The lost boys.
I felt an obligation to all of them, a fierce sense of duty, which wasn’t entirely explicable—except that in spite of my good fortune in parents and in spite of the riches of friendship that I enjoyed, I was the ultimate lost boy, myself, and to some extent would be lost until the day I passed out of my darkness in this world into whatever light waits beyond.
Impatience abraded my nerves. In conventional searches for lost hikers, for small aircraft downed in mountainous terrain, and for boats at sea, search parties break from dusk to dawn. We were limited, instead, to the dark hours, not merely by my XP but by our need to gather our forces and to act in utmost secrecy. I wondered whether the members of conventional search parties checked their watches every two minutes, chewed their lips, and went slightly screwy with frustration while waiting for first light. My watch crystal was etched with eye tracks, my lip was shaggy with shredded skin, and I was half nuts by 12:45.
Shortly before one o’clock, as I was diligently ridding myself of the second half of my sanity, the doorbell rang.
With the Glock in hand, I went downstairs. Through one of the stained-glass sidelights, I saw Bobby on the front porch. He was turned half away from the door, staring back toward the street, as though looking for a police surveillance team in one of the parked cars or for a school of anchovies in a passing vehicle.
As he stepped inside and I closed the door behind him, I said, “Bitchin’ shirt.”
He was wearing a red and gray volcanic-beach scene with blue ferns, which looked totally cool over a long-sleeve black pullover.
“Made by Iolani,” I said. “Coconut-husk buttons, 1955.”
Instead of commenting on my erudition with even as little as a roll of the eyes, he headed for the kitchen, saying, “I saw Charlie Dai again.”
The kitchen was brightened only by the ashen face of the day pressed to the window blinds, by the digital clocks on the ovens, and by two fat candles on the table.
“Another kid is gone,” Bobby said.
I felt a tremor in my hands once more, and I put the Glock on the kitchen table. “Who, when?”
Snatching a Mountain Dew from the refrigerator, where the standard light had been replaced with a lower-wattage, pink-tinted bulb, Bobby said, “Wendy Dulcinea.”
“Oh,” I said, and wanted to say more but couldn’t speak.
Wendy’s mother, Mary, is six years older than I am; when I was thirteen, my parents paid her to give me piano lessons, and I had a devastating crush on her. At that time, I was functioning under the delusion that I would one day play rock-’n’-roll piano as well as Jerry Lee Lewis, be a keyboard-banging maniac who could make those ivories smoke. Eventually my parents and Mary concluded—and persuaded me—that the likelihood of my becoming a competent pianist was immeasurably less than the likelihood of me levitating and flying like a bird.
“Wendy’s seven.” Bobby said. “Mary was taking her to school. Backed the car out of the driveway. Then realized she’d forgotten something in the house, went in to get it. When she came back two minutes later, the car was gone. With Wendy.”
“No one saw anything?”
Bobby chugged the Mountain Dew: enough sugar to induce in him a diabetic coma, enough caffeine to keep a long-haul trucker awake through a five-hundred-mile run. He was legally wiring himself for the ordeal ahead.
“No one saw or heard anything,” he confirmed. “Neighborhood of the blind and deaf. Sometimes I think there’s something going around more contagious than your mom’s bug. We’ve got an epidemic of the shut-up-hunker-down-see-hear-smell-speak-no-evil influenza. Anyway, the cops found Mary’s car abandoned in the service lane behind the Nine Palms Plaza.”
Nine Palms was a shopping center that lost all the tenants when Fort Wyvern closed and took with it the billion dollars a year that it had pumped into the county economy. These days the shop windows at Nine Palms are boarded over, weeds bristle from cracks in the blacktop parking lot, and six of the namesake palms are withered, brown, and so dead that they have been abandoned by tree rats.
The chamber of commerce likes to call Moonlight Bay the Jewel of the Central Coast. The town remains charming, graced with fine architecture and lovely tree-lined streets, but the economic scars of Wyvern’s closure are visible everywhere. The jewel is not as bright as it once was.
“They searched all the empty shops in Nine Palms,” Bobby said, “afraid they’d find Wendy’s body, but she wasn’t there.”
“She’s alive,” I said.
Bobby looked at me pityingly.
“They’re all alive,” I insisted. “They have to be.”
I wasn’t speaking from reason now. I was speaking from my belief in miracles.
“Another crow,” Bobby said. “Mary called it a blackbird. It was left on the car seat. In the drawing, the bird is diving for prey.”
“Message?”
“‘George Dulcinea will be my servant in Hell.’”
Mary’s husband was Frank Dulcinea. “Who the hell is George?”
“Frank’s grandfather. He’s dead now. Used to be a judge in the county court system.”
“Dead how long?”
“Fifteen years.”
I was baffled and frustrated. “If this abb is kidnapping for vengeance, what’s the point of nabbing Wendy to get even with a man who’s been dead fifteen years? Wendy’s great-grandfather was gone long before she was even born. He never knew her. How could you get satisfaction from taking vengeance on a dead man?”
“Maybe it makes perfect sense if you’re an abb,” Bobby said, “with a screwed-up brain.”
“I guess.”
“Or maybe this whole crow thing is just cover, to make everyone think these kids were snatched by your standard-issue pervert, when maybe they’re really being caged in a lab somewhere.”
“Maybe, maybe, you’re full of too damn many maybes,” I said.
He shrugged. “Don’t look to me for wisdom. I’m just a wave-thrashing boardhead. This killer you mentioned. The guy in the news. He leave crows like this?”
“Not that I’ve read.”
“Serial killers, don’t they sometimes leave things like this?”
“Yeah. They’re called signatures. Like a writer’s byline. Taking credit for the work.”
I checked my wristwatch. Sunset would arrive in about five hours. We would be ready to go back to Wyvern by then. And even if we were not ready, we would go.
TWO
NEVERLAND
18
With a second bottle of Mountain Dew in hand, Bobby sat on the cellist’s stool, but he didn’t pick up the bow.
In addition to all the instruments and the composition table, the former dining room contained a music system with a CD player and an antiquated audiotape deck. In fact, there were two decks, which allowed Sasha to duplicate tapes of her own recordings. I powered up the equipment, which added as much feeble illumination to the room as the dreary daylight that seeped in at the edges of the blinds.
Sometimes, after composing a tune, Sasha is convinced that she has unwittingly plagiarized another songwriter. To satisfy herself that her work is original, she spends hours listening to cuts from which she s
uspects she has borrowed, until finally she’s willing to believe that her creation has, after all, sprung solely from her own talent.
Her music is the only thing about which Sasha exhibits more than a healthy measure of self-doubt. Her cooking, her literary opinions, her lovemaking, and all the other things she does so wonderfully are marked by a wholesome confidence and by no more than a useful amount of second-guessing. In her relationship to her music, however, she is sometimes a lost child; when she’s stricken by this vulnerability, I want more than ever to put my arm around her and to comfort her—though this is when she’s most likely to reject comforting and to rap me across the knuckles with her flute, her scaling ruler, or another handy music-room weapon.
I suppose every relationship can be enriched by a small measure of neurotic behavior. I certainly contribute a half cup of my own to our recipe.
Now I slipped the tape into the player. It was the cassette I’d found in the envelope beside Leland Delacroix’s reeking corpse in the bungalow kitchen in Dead Town.
I turned the chair away from the composition table and, sitting down, used the remote control to switch on the cassette player.
For half a minute, we heard only the hiss of unrecorded magnetic tape passing over the playback head. A soft click and a new hollow quality to the hiss marked the beginning of the recording, which at first consisted only of someone—I assumed it was Delacroix—taking deep, rhythmic breaths, as if engaged in some form of meditation or aromatherapy.
Bobby said, “I was hoping for revelation, not respiration.”
The sound was utterly mundane, with not the least inflection of fear or menace, or any other emotion. Yet the fine hairs stirred on the nape of my neck, as though these exhalations were actually coming from someone standing close behind me.
“He’s trying to get a grip on himself,” I said. “Deep, even breaths to get a grip on himself.”
A moment later, my interpretation proved true when the breathing suddenly grew ragged, then desperate. Delacroix broke down and began to weep, tried to get a grip on himself, but choked on his pain, and let loose with great trembling sobs punctuated by wordless cries of despair.