by Dean Koontz
When Heather touched Alma’s shoulder, the woman looked up from the pie dough, and her eyes were as blank as those of a mannequin. Then she blinked and wiped her flour-coated hands on her apron. “Heather, you didn’t have to come—you should’ve stayed with Jack.”
They embraced, and Heather said, “I wish there was something I could do, Alma.”
“So do I, girl. So do I.”
As they leaned back from each other, Heather said, “What’s all this cooking?”
“We’re going to have the funeral tomorrow afternoon. No delay. Get the hard part over with. A lot of family and friends will be by tomorrow after the services. Got to feed them.”
“Others will do this for you.”
“I’d rather help,” Alma said. “What else am I going to do? Sit and think? I sure don’t want to think. If I don’t stay busy, keep my mind occupied, then I’m just going to go stark raving crazy. You know what I mean?”
Heather nodded. “Yes. I know.”
“The word is,” Alma said, “Jack’s going to be in the hospital, then rehab, for maybe months, and you and Toby are going to be alone. Are you ready for that?”
“We’ll see him every day. We’re in this together.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Well, I know it’s going to be lonely but—”
“That’s not what I mean, either. Come on, I want to show you something.”
Heather followed Alma into the master bedroom, and Alma closed the door. “Luther always worried about me being alone if anything happened to him, so he made sure I knew how to take care of myself.”
Sitting on the vanity bench, Heather watched with amazement as Alma retrieved a variety of weapons from concealment.
She got a pistol-grip shotgun from under the bed. “This is the best home-defense weapon you can get. Twelve-gauge. Powerful enough to knock down some creep high on PCP, thinks he’s Superman. You don’t have to be able to aim perfectly, just point it and pull the trigger, and the spread will get him.” She placed the shotgun on the beige chenille bedspread.
From the back of a closet Alma fetched a heavy, wicked-looking rifle with a vented barrel, a scope, and a large magazine. “Heckler and Koch HK91 assault rifle,” she said. “You can’t buy these in California so easy any more.” She put it on the bed beside the shotgun.
She opened a nightstand drawer and plucked out a formidable handgun. “Browning nine-millimeter semiautomatic. There’s one like it in the other nightstand.”
Heather said, “My God, you’ve got an arsenal here.”
“Just different guns for different uses.”
Alma Bryson was five feet eight but by no means an Amazon. She was attractive, willowy, with delicate features, a swanlike neck, and wrists almost as thin and fragile as those of a ten-year-old girl. Her slender, graceful hands appeared incapable of controlling some of the heavy weaponry she possessed, but she was evidently proficient with all of it.
Getting up from the vanity bench, Heather said, “I can see having a handgun for protection, maybe even that shotgun. But an assault rifle?”
Looking at the Heckler and Koch, Alma said, “Accurate enough at a hundred yards to put a three-shot group in a half-inch circle. Fires a 7.62 NATO cartridge so powerful it’ll penetrate a tree, a brick wall, even a car, and still take out the guy who’s hiding on the other side. Very reliable. You can fire hundreds of rounds, until it’s almost too hot to touch, and it still won’t jam. I think you should have one, Heather. You should be ready.”
Heather felt as if she had followed the white rabbit down a burrow into a strange, dark world. “Ready for what?”
Alma’s gentle face hardened, and her voice was tight with anger. “Luther saw it coming years ago. Said politicians were tearing down a thousand years of civilization brick by brick but weren’t building anything to replace it.”
“True enough, but—”
“Said cops would be expected to hold it all together when it started to collapse, but by then cops would’ve been blamed for so much and been painted as the villains so often, no one would respect them enough to let them hold it together.”
Rage was Alma Bryson’s refuge from grief. She was able to hold off tears only with fury.
Although Heather worried that her friend’s method of coping wasn’t healthy, she could think of nothing to offer in its place. Sympathy was inadequate. Alma and Luther had been married sixteen years and had been devoted to each other. Because they’d been unable to have children, they were especially close. Heather could only imagine the depth of Alma’s pain. It was a hard world. Real love, true and deep, wasn’t easy to find even once. Nearly impossible to find it twice. Alma must feel the best times of her life were past, though she was only thirty-eight. She needed more than kind words, more than just a shoulder to cry on. She needed someone or something at which to be furious—politicians, the system.
Perhaps her anger wasn’t unhealthy, after all. Maybe if a lot more people had gotten angry enough decades ago, the country wouldn’t have reached sudh perilous straits.
“You have guns?” Alma asked.
“One.”
“What is it?”
“A pistol.”
“You know how to use it?”
“Yes.”
“You need more than just a pistol.”
“I feel uncomfortable with guns, Alma.”
“It’s on the TV now, going to be all over the papers tomorrow—what happened at Arkadian’s station. People are going to know you and Toby are alone, people who don’t like cops or cops’ wives. Some jackass reporter will probably even print your address. You’ve got to be ready for anything these days, anything.”
Alma’s paranoia, which came as such a surprise and which seemed so out of character, chilled Heather. Even as she shivered at the icy glint in her friend’s eyes, however, a part of her wondered if Alma’s assessment of the situation was more rational than it sounded. That she could seriously consider such a paranoid view was enough to make her shiver again, harder than before.
“You’ve got to prepare for the worst,” Alma Bryson said, picking up the shotgun, turning it over in her hands. “It’s not just your life on the line. You’ve got Toby to think about too.”
She stood there, a slender and pretty black woman, an aficionado of jazz and opera, a lover of museums, educated and refined, as warm and loving a person as anyone Heather had ever known, capable of a smile that would charm wild beasts and a musical laugh that angels might have envied, holding a shotgun that looked absurdly large and evil in the hands of someone so lovely and delicate, who had embraced rage because the only alternative to rage was suicidal despair. Alma was like a figure on a poster urging revolution, not a real person but a wildly romanticized symbol. Heather had the disquieting feeling that she was not looking at merely one troubled woman struggling to elude the grasp of bitter grief and disabling hopelessness but at the grim future of their entire troubled society, a harbinger of an all-obliterating storm.
“Tearing it down brick by brick,” Alma said solemnly, “but building nothing to replace it.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
For twenty-nine uneventful nights, the Montana stillness was disturbed only by periodic fits of winter wind, the hoot of a hunting owl, and the distant forlorn howling of timber wolves. Gradually Eduardo Fernandez regained his usual confidence and ceased to regard each oncoming dusk with quiet dread.
He might have recovered his equilibrium more quickly if he’d had more work to occupy him. Inclement weather prevented him from performing routine maintenance around the ranch; with electric heat and plenty of cordwood for the fireplaces, he had little to do during the winter months except hunker down and wait for spring.
It had never been a working ranch since he had managed it. Thirty-four years ago, he and Margarite had been hired by Stanley Quartermass, a wealthy film producer, who had fallen in love with Montana and wanted a second home there. No animals or crops were raised for profit
; the ranch was strictly a secluded hideaway.
Quartermass loved horses, so he built a comfortable, heated stable with ten stalls a hundred yards south of the house. He spent about two months per year at the ranch, in one- and two-week visits, and it was Eduardo’s duty, in the producer’s absence, to ensure that the horses received first-rate care and plenty of exercise. Tending to the animals and keeping the property in good repair had constituted the largest part of his job, and Margarite had been the housekeeper.
Until eight years ago, Eduardo and Margarite had lived in the cozy, two-bedroom, single-story caretaker’s house. That fieldstone structure stood eighty or ninety yards behind—and due west of—the main house, cloistered among pines at the edge of the higher woods. Tommy, their only child, had been raised there until city life exerted its fatal attraction when he was eighteen.
When Stanley Quartermass died in a private-plane crash, Eduardo and Margarite had been surprised to learn that the ranch had been left to them, along with sufficient funds to allow immediate retirement. The producer had taken care of his four ex-wives while he was alive and had fathered no children from any of his marriages, so he used the greater part of his estate to provide generously for key employees.
They had sold the horses, closed up the caretaker’s house, and moved into the Victorian-style main house, with its gables, decorative shutters, scalloped eaves, and wide porches. It felt strange to be a person of property, but the security was welcome even—or perhaps especially—when it came late in life.
Now Eduardo was a widowed retiree with plenty of security but with too little work to occupy him. And with too many strange thoughts preying on his mind. Luminous trees…
On three occasions during March, he drove his Jeep Cherokee into Eagle’s Roost, the nearest town. He ate at Jasper’s Diner because he liked their Salisbury steak, home fries, and pepper slaw. He bought magazines and a few paperback books at the High Plains Pharmacy, and he shopped for groceries at the only supermarket. His ranch was just sixteen miles from Eagle’s Roost, so he could have gone daily if he’d wished, but three times a month was usually enough. The town was small, three to four thousand souls; however, even in its isolation, it was too much a part of the modern world to appeal to a man as accustomed to rural peace as he was.
Each time he’d gone shopping, he’d considered stopping at the county sheriff’s substation to report the peculiar noise and strange lights in the woods. But he was sure the deputy would figure him for an old fool and do nothing but file the report in a folder labeled CRACKPOTS.
In the third week of March, spring officially arrived—and the following day a storm put down eight inches of new snow. Winter was not quick to relinquish its grasp there on the eastern slopes of the Rockies.
He took daily walks, as had been his habit all his life, but he stayed on the long driveway, which he plowed himself after each snow, or he crossed the open fields south of the house and stables. He avoided the lower woods, which lay east and downhill from the house, but he also stayed away from those to the north and even the higher forests to the west.
His cowardice irritated him, not least of all because he was unable to understand it. He’d always been an advocate of reason and logic, always said there was too little of either in the world. He was scornful of people who operated more from emotion than from intellect. But reason failed him now, and logic could not overcome the instinctual awareness of danger that caused him to avoid the trees and the perpetual twilight under their boughs.
By the end of March, he began to think that the phenomenon had been a singular occurrence without notable consequences. A rare but natural event. Perhaps an electromagnetic disturbance of some kind. No more threat to him than a summer thunderstorm.
On April first, he unloaded the two rifles and two shotguns. After cleaning them, he returned the guns to the cabinet in the study.
However, still slightly uneasy, he kept the .22 target pistol on his nightstand. It didn’t pack a tremendous punch but, loaded with hollow-point cartridges, it could do some damage.
In the dark hours of the morning of April fourth, Eduardo was awakened by the low throbbing that swelled and faded, swelled and faded. As in early March, that pulsating sound was accompanied by an eerie electronic oscillation.
He sat straight up in bed, blinking at the window. During the three years since Margarite had died, he’d not slept in the master bedroom at the front of the house, which they had shared. Instead, he bunked down in one of two back bedrooms. Consequently, the window faced west, a hundred and eighty degrees around the compass from the eastern woods where he had seen the strange light. The night sky was deep and black beyond the window.
The Stiffel lamp on the nightstand had a pull-chain instead of a thumb switch. Just before he turned it on, he had the feeling that something was in the room with him, something he would be better off not seeing. He hesitated, fingers tightly pinching the metal beads of the pull. Intently he searched the darkness, his heart pounding, as if he had wakened into a nightmare replete with a monster. When at last he tugged the chain, however, the light revealed that he was alone.
He picked up his wristwatch from the nightstand and checked the time. Nineteen minutes past one o’clock.
He threw off the covers and got out of bed. He was in his long underwear. His blue jeans and a flannel shirt were close at hand, folded over the back of an armchair, beside which stood a pair of boots. He was already wearing socks, because his feet often got cold during the night if he slept without them.
The sound was louder than it had been a month before, and it pulsed through the house with noticeably greater effect than before. In March, Eduardo had experienced a sense of pressure along with the rhythmic pounding—which, like the sound, crested repeatedly in a series of waves. Now the pressure had increased dramatically. He didn’t merely sense it but felt it, indescribably different from the pressure of turbulent air, more like the invisible tides of a cold sea washing across his body.
By the time he hurriedly dressed and snatched the loaded .22 pistol from the nightstand, the pull-chain was swinging wildly and clinking against the burnished brass body of the lamp. The windowpanes vibrated. The paintings rattled against the walls, askew on their wires.
He rushed downstairs into the foyer, where there was no need to switch on a light. In the front door, the beveled edges of the leaded panes in the oval window sparkled with reflections of the mysterious glow outside. It was far brighter than it had been the previous month. The bevels broke down the amber radiance into all the colors of the spectrum, projecting bright prismatic patterns of blue and green and yellow and red across the ceiling and walls, so it seemed as if he was in a church with stained-glass murals.
In the dark living room to his left, where no light penetrated from outside because the drapes were drawn, a collection of crystal paperweights and other bibelots rattled and clinked against the end tables on which they stood and against one another. Porcelains vibrated on the glass shelves of a display cabinet.
To his right, in the book-lined study, the marble-and-brass desk set bounced on the blotter, a pencil drawer popped open and banged shut in time with the pressure waves, and the executive chair behind the desk wobbled around enough to make its wheels creak.
As Eduardo opened the front door, most of the spots and spears of colored light flew away, vanished as if into another dimension, and the rest fled to the right-hand wall of the foyer, where they melted together in a vibrant mosaic.
The woods were luminous precisely where they had been luminous last month. The amber glow emanated from the same group of closely packed trees and from the ground beneath, as if the evergreen needles and cones and bark and dirt and stones and snow were the incandescent elements of a lamp, shining brightly without being consumed. This time the light was more dazzling than before, just as the throbbing was louder and the waves of pressure more forceful.
He found himself at the head of the steps but did not remember exiting the ho
use or crossing the porch. He looked back and saw that he had closed the front door behind him.
Punishing waves of bass sound throbbed through the night at the rate of perhaps thirty a minute, but his heart was beating six times faster. He wanted to turn and run back into the house.
He looked down at the pistol in his hand. He wished the shotgun had been loaded and beside his bed.
When he raised his head and turned his eyes away from the gun, he was startled to see that the woods had moved closer to him. The glowing trees loomed.
Then he realized that he, not the woods, had moved. He glanced back again and saw the house thirty to forty feet behind him. He had descended the steps without being aware of it. His tracks marred the snow.
“No,” he said shakily.
The swelling sound was like a surf with an undertow that pulled him relentlessly from the safety of the shore. The ululant electronic wail seemed like a siren’s song, penetrating him, speaking to him on a level so deep that he seemed to understand the message without hearing the words, a music in his blood, luring him toward the cold fire in the woods.
His thoughts grew fuzzy.
He peered up at the star-punctured sky, trying to clear his head. A delicate filigree of clouds shone against the black vault, rendered luminous by the silver light of the quarter moon.
He closed his eyes. Found the strength to resist the pull of each ebbing wave of sound.
But when he opened his eyes, he discovered his resistance was imaginary. He was even closer to the trees than before, only thirty feet from the perimeter of the forest, so close he had to squint against the blinding brightness emanating from the branches, the trunks, and the ground under the pines.
The moody amber light was now threaded with red, like blood in an egg yolk.
Eduardo was scared, miles past fear into sheer terror, fighting a looseness in his bowels and a weakness in his bladder, shaking so violently that he would not have been surprised to hear his bones rattling together—yet his heart was no longer racing. It had slowed drastically and now matched the steady thirty-beats-per-minute of the pulsating sound that seemed to issue from every radiant surface.