by Dean Koontz
Sasha was still pleading with him, though she must have realized that Father Tom Eliot was beyond her reach, beyond the help of anyone in this world.
As if trying to scourge the devil from himself, he began to claw his cheeks, digging his fingernails deep, and with those pincers, he went at his right eye as though to pluck it out of himself.
Feathers suddenly whirled through the air, spinning around the priest, and I was briefly confused, astonished, until I realized that Sasha had fired the .38. The pillow couldn’t have entirely muffled the shot, but I’d heard nothing other than Father Tom’s wail drilling my skull.
The priest jerked from the impact of the slug, but he didn’t drop. He didn’t bite off that skirling lament or stop tearing at himself.
I heard the second shot—whump—and the third.
Tom Eliot crumpled to the floor, lay twitching, briefly kicked his legs as if he were a dog chasing rabbits in his sleep, and then was motionless, dead.
Sasha had relieved him from his agony but had also saved him from the self-destruction that he believed would condemn his immortal soul to eternal damnation.
So much had happened since the priest had thrown the chair at Roosevelt and the vanity bench at Sasha that I was surprised to hear Elton John still singing “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?”
Before dropping the pillow, Sasha turned toward the television and fired one more round, blowing out the screen.
As satisfying as it was to put an end to the inappropriately uplifting music and images of The Lion King, we were all alarmed by the total darkness that claimed the room following a shower of sparks from the terminated TV. We assumed that the becoming priest must be dead, because any of us would be worm food, for sure, with three .38 slugs in the chest, but as Bobby had noted the previous night, there were no rules here on the eve of the Apocalypse.
When I reached for my flashlight, it was no longer snugged under my belt. I must have dropped it during the struggle.
In my imagination, the dead priest had already self-resurrected and had become something that an entire division of marines couldn’t kill.
Bobby switched on one of the nightstand lamps.
The dead man was still nothing more than a man, and still dead, a ruined heap that didn’t bear close inspection.
Holstering the .38, Sasha turned away from the body and stood with her shoulders slumped, head hung, one hand covering her face, collecting herself.
The lamp featured a three-way switch, and Bobby clicked it to the lowest level of light. The shade was rose-colored silk, which left the room still mostly in shadow but bright enough to prevent us from succumbing to an attack of the brain twitches.
I spotted my flashlight on the floor, snatched it up, and jammed it under my belt again.
Trying to quiet my breathing, I went to the nearer of two windows. The drapes were a heavy tapestry, as thick as an elephant’s hide, with a blackout liner. This would have suppressed the sound of gunfire almost as effectively as the plush pillow through which Sasha had fired the revolver.
I pulled aside one drape and peered out at the lamplit street. No one was pointing or running toward the Stanwyk residence. No traffic had stopped in front of the house. In fact, the street appeared to be deserted.
As far as I can recall, none of us said anything until we were all the way downstairs and in the kitchen again, where the solemn cat was waiting for us in the light of the oil lamp. Perhaps we simply didn’t say anything memorable, but I think that we did, indeed, make our way through the house in numbed silence.
Bobby stripped off his Hawaiian shirt and black cotton pullover, which were damp with blood. Along his left side were four slashes, wounds inflicted by the cleric’s teratoid hand.
That was a useful word from my mom’s world of genetic science. It meant something monstrous, described an organism or a portion of an organism deformed because of damaged genetic material. As a kid, I was always interested in my mother’s research and theories, because she was, as she liked to put it, searching for God in the clockworks, which I thought must be the most important work anyone could do. But God prefers to see what we can make of ourselves on our own, and He doesn’t make it easy for us to find Him on this side of death. Along the way, when we think we’ve located the door behind which He waits, it opens not on anything divine but on something teratoid.
In the half bath adjoining the kitchen, Sasha found first-aid supplies and a bottle of aspirin.
Bobby stood at the kitchen sink, using a fresh dishcloth and liquid soap to clean his wounds, hissing between clenched teeth.
“Hurt?” I asked.
“No.”
“Bullshit.”
“You?”
“Bruises.”
The four cuts in his side weren’t deep, but they bled freely.
Roosevelt settled into a chair at the table. He’d gotten some ice cubes from the freezer and wrapped them in a dish towel. He held this compress to his left eye, which was swelling shut. Fortunately, the bud vase hadn’t shattered when it hit him, because otherwise he might have had splinters of porcelain in his eye.
“Bad?” I asked.
“Had worse.”
“Football?”
“Alex Karras.”
“Great player.”
“Big.”
“He run you down?”
“More than once.”
“Like a truck,” I suggested.
“A Mack. This was just a damn vase.”
Sasha saturated a cloth with hydrogen peroxide and pressed it repeatedly to Bobby’s wounds. Every time she took the cloth away, the shallow cuts bubbled furiously with bloody foam.
I couldn’t have ached in more places if I’d spent the past six hours tumbling around in an industrial clothes dryer.
I washed down two aspirin with a few sips of an Orange Crush that I found in the Stanwyks’ refrigerator. The can shook so badly that I drizzled more soda over my chin and clothes than I managed to drink—suggesting that my folks had been misguided when they allowed me to stop wearing a bib at the age of five.
After several applications of the peroxide, Sasha switched to rubbing alcohol and repeated the treatment. Bobby wasn’t bothering to hiss anymore; he was just grinding his teeth to dust. Finally, when he had ground away enough dental surface to be limited to a soft diet for life, she smeared the still-weeping wounds with Neosporin.
This extensive first aid was conducted without comment. We all knew why it was necessary to apply as many antibacteriological agents as possible to his wounds, and talking about it would only scare the crap out of us.
In the weeks and months to come, Bobby would be spending more time than usual in front of a mirror, checking himself out, and not because he was vain. He’d be more aware of his hands, too, watching for something…teratoid.
Roosevelt’s eye was swollen to a slit. Nevertheless, he still believed in the ice.
While Sasha finished wrapping Bobby’s cuts with gauze bandages, I found a chalk message slate and pegboard beside the door connecting the kitchen to the garage. Sets of car keys hung on the pegs. Sasha wouldn’t have to hot-wire a car, after all.
In the garage were a red Jaguar and a white Ford Expedition.
By flashlight, I lowered the rear seat in the Expedition to enlarge the cargo area. This would allow Roosevelt and Bobby to lie down, below window level. We might draw more attention as a group than Sasha would draw if she appeared to be alone.
Because Sasha knew exactly where we were going out on Haddenbeck Road, she would drive.
When Bobby entered the garage with Sasha and Roosevelt, he was wearing his pullover and Hawaiian shirt again, and moving somewhat stiffly.
“You be okay back here?” I asked, indicating the rear of the Expedition.
“I’ll grab some nap time.”
In the front passenger’s seat, when I slumped below the window line in a classic fugitive-on-the-lam posture, I became acutely aware of every contusion, neck to toe. But I
was alive. Earlier, I’d been sure we wouldn’t all leave the Stanwyk house with beating hearts and brain activity, but I’d been wrong. When it comes to presentiments of disaster, perhaps cats know things, but Christopher Snow’s hunches can’t necessarily be trusted—which is comforting, actually.
When Sasha started the engine, Mungojerrie scrambled onto the console between the front seats. He sat erect, ears pricked, looking forward, like a misplaced hood ornament.
Sasha used a remote control to put up the electric garage door, and I said, “You okay?”
“No.”
“Good.”
I knew that she was physically unhurt and that her answer referred to her emotional state. Killing Tom Eliot, Sasha had done the only thing she could do, perhaps saving one or more of our lives while sparing the priest from a hideous frenzy of self-destruction, and yet the firing of those three shots had sickened her; now she was living under a grave weight of moral responsibility. Not guilt. She was smart enough to know that no guilt should attend what she’d done. But she also knew that even moral acts can have dimensions that scar the mind and wound the heart. If she had answered my question with a smile and assurances that she was fine, she would not have been the Sasha Goodall that I love, and I would have had reason to suspect that she was becoming.
We rode through Moonlight Bay in silence, each of us occupied with his or her own thoughts.
A couple miles from the Stanwyk house, the cat lost interest in the view through the windshield. He surprised me by stepping down onto my chest and peering into my eyes.
His green gaze was intense and unwavering, and I met it directly for an eerily long time, wondering what he might be thinking.
How radically different his thinking must be from ours, even if he shares our high level of intelligence. He experiences this world from a perspective nearly as unlike ours as our perspective would be unlike that of a being raised on another planet. He faces each day without carrying on his back the weight of human history, philosophy, triumph, tragedy, noble intentions, foolishness, greed, envy, and hubris; it must be liberating to be without that burden. He is both savage and civilized. He is closer to nature than we are; therefore, he has fewer illusions about it, knows that life is hard by design, that nature is beautiful but cold. And although Roosevelt says other cats of Mungojerrie’s breed escaped from Wyvern, their numbers cannot be large; while Mungojerrie isn’t as singular a specimen as Orson seems to be, and while cats by nature are more adaptable to solitude than dogs are, this small creature must at times know a profound loneliness.
When I began to pet him, Mungojerrie broke eye contact and curled up on my chest. He was a small, warm weight, and I could feel his heartbeat both against my body and under my stroking hand.
I am not an animal communicator, but I think I know why he led us into the Stanwyk house. We were not there to bear witness to the dead. We were there solely to do what needed to be done for Father Tom Eliot.
Since time immemorial, people have suspected that some animals have at least one sense in addition to our own. An awareness of things we do not see. A prescience.
Couple that special perception with intelligence, and suppose that with greater intelligence comes a more refined conscience. In passing the Stanwyk house, Mungojerrie might have sensed the mental anguish, the spiritual agony, and the emotional pain of Father Tom Eliot—and might have felt compelled to bring deliverance to that suffering man.
Or maybe I’m full of crap.
The possibility exists that I am both full of crap and right about Mungojerrie.
Cats know things.
23
Haddenbeck Road is a lonely stretch of two-lane blacktop that for a few miles runs due east, paralleling the southern perimeter of Fort Wyvern, but then strikes southeast, serving a score of ranches in the least populated portion of the county. Summer heat, winter rains, and California’s most violent weather—earthquakes—have left the pavement cracked, hoved, and ragged at the edges. Skirts of wild grass and, for a short while here in early spring, an embroidery of wildflowers separate the highway from the sensuously rolling fields that embrace it.
When we had traveled some distance without encountering oncoming headlights, Sasha suddenly braked to a halt and said, “Look at this.”
I sat up in full view, as did Roosevelt and Bobby, and surveyed the night around us in confusion as Sasha rammed the Expedition into reverse and backed up about twenty feet.
“Almost ran over them,” she said.
On the pavement ahead of us, revealed by the headlights, were enough snakes to fill the cages of every reptile house in every zoo in the country.
Leaning forward into the front seat, Bobby whistled softly and said, “Must be an open door to Hell around here somewhere.”
“All rattlers?” Roosevelt asked, taking the ice pack off his swollen eye, squinting for a better look.
“Hard to tell,” Sasha said. “But I think so.”
Mungojerrie stood with hind paws on my right knee, forepaws on the dashboard, head craned forward. He made one of those cat sounds that are half hiss, half growl, and all loathing.
Even from a distance of only twenty-five feet, it was impossible to make an accurate count of the number of serpents in the squirming mass on the highway, and I had no intention of wading in among them to take a reliable census. At a guess, there were as few as seventy or eighty, as many as a hundred.
In my experience, rattlesnakes are lone hunters and do not, as a matter of course, travel in groups. You’ll see them in numbers only if you’re unlucky enough to stumble into one of their nests—and few if any nests would contain this many individuals.
The behavior of these serpents was even stranger than the fact that they were gathering here in the open. They twined over and under and around one another, in a slowly seething sinuous mass, and from among these slippery braids, eight or ten heads rose at any one time, weaving two, three, four feet into the air, with jaws cracked, fangs bared, tongues flickering, then shrank back into the scaly swarm as new and equally wicked-looking heads rose from the roiling multitude, one set of sentinels replacing another.
It was as if the Medusa, of classic Grecian myth, were lying on Haddenbeck Road, napping, while her elaborate coiffure of serpents groomed itself.
“You going to drive through that?” I asked.
“Rather not,” Sasha said.
“Close the vents, crank this buggy up to warp speed,” Bobby said, “and take us for a ride on the rattlesnake road.”
Roosevelt said, “My mama always says, ‘Patience pays.’”
“The snakes aren’t here because we are,” I said. “They don’t care about us. They aren’t blocking us. We just happened to come through here at the wrong time. They’ll move on, probably sooner than later.”
Bobby patted my shoulder. “Roosevelt’s mom is a lot more succinct than you are, dude.”
Every snake that rose into sentry position from the churning host immediately focused its attention on us. Depending on the angle at which the headlamps caught them, their eyes brightened and flared red or silver, less often green, like small jewels.
I assumed that the light drew their interest. Desert rattlers, like most snakes, are nearly as deaf as dirt. Their vision is good, especially at night, when their slit-shaped pupils dilate to expose more of their sensitive retinas. Their sense of smell may not be as powerful as that of a dog, since they’re seldom called upon to track down escaped prisoners or to sniff out dope in smugglers’ luggage; however, in addition to a good nose, a snake has a second organ of smell—Jacobson’s organ, consisting of two pouches lined with sensory tissue—located in the roof of the mouth. That’s why a serpent’s forked tongue flicks ceaselessly: It licks microscopic particles of odor from the air, conveying these clusters of molecules to the pouches in its mouth, to savor and analyze them. Now these rattlers were busily licking the air for our scents to determine if suitably delicious prey might be found behind the headlights.
Weird became weirder when one of the weaving sentries abruptly reared back and struck at another that had risen beside it. The bitten rattler bit back; the two coiled around each other and then dropped to the pavement. The flexuous swarm closed over them, and for a minute, turmoil swept through the braided multitude, which writhed not languorously, as before, but in a frenzy, as supple and quick as lashing whips, twisting and coiling excitedly, as though the urge to bite their own had spread beyond the angry pair we’d seen strike each other, briefly sparking civil war within the colony.
As the slithery horde grew calmer again, Sasha said, “Do snakes usually bite one another?”
“Probably not,” I said.
“Wouldn’t think they’d be vulnerable to their own venom,” said Roosevelt, returning the ice pack to his left eye.
“Well,” Bobby said, “if we’re ever condemned to live through high school again, maybe we can make a science project out of that question.”
Again, one of the rearing rattlers, weaving above the rest and licking the air for prey, struck at another of the sentries, and then a third grew agitated enough to strike the first. The trio raveled down into the swarm, and another siege of spastic thrashing whipped through the undulant masses.
“It’s the birds again,” I said. “The coyotes.”
“The folks at the Stanwyks’,” Roosevelt added.
“Psychological implosion,” Sasha said.
“I don’t suppose a snake has much of a psyche to be logical about,” Bobby said, “but yeah, it sure looks like part of the same phenomenon.”
“They’re moving,” Roosevelt noted.
Indeed, the squirming legions were, so to speak, on the march. They began to move across the two-lane blacktop, across the narrow dirt shoulder, vanishing into the tall grass and wildflowers to the right of the highway.