by Dean Koontz
Prior to leaving for Eagle’s Roost, he had turned on lights in every room. He clearly remembered all of the glowing windows as he had driven away. He had been embarrassed by his childlike reluctance to return to a dark house.
Well, it was dark now. As black as the inside of the devil’s bowels.
Before he quite realized what he was doing, Eduardo pressed the master lock switch, simultaneously securing all the doors on the station wagon.
He sat for a while, just staring at the house. The front door was closed, and all the windows he could see were unbroken. Nothing appeared out of order.
Except that every light in every room had been turned off. By whom? By what?
He supposed a power failure could have been responsible—but he didn’t believe it. Sometimes, a Montana thunderstorm could be a real stemwinder; in the winter, blizzard winds and accumulated ice could play havoc with electrical service. But there had been no bad weather tonight and only the mildest breeze. He hadn’t noticed any downed power lines on the way home.
The house waited.
Couldn’t sit in the car all night. Couldn’t live in it, for God’s sake.
He drove slowly along the last stretch of driveway and stopped in front of the garage. He picked up the remote control and pressed the single button.
The automatic garage door rolled up. Inside the three-vehicle space, the overhead convenience lamp, which was on a three-minute timer, shed enough light to reveal that nothing was amiss in the garage.
So much for the power-failure theory.
Instead of pulling forward ten feet and into the garage, he stayed where he was. He put the Cherokee in Park but didn’t switch off the engine. He left the headlights on too.
He picked up the shotgun from where it was angled muzzle-down in the knee space in front of the passenger seat, and he got out of the station wagon. He left the driver’s door wide open.
Door open, lights on, engine running.
He didn’t like to think that he would cut and run at the first sign of trouble. But if it was run or die, he was sure as hell going to be faster than anything that might be chasing him.
Although the pump-action twelve-gauge shotgun contained only five rounds—one already in the breech and four in the magazine tube—he was unconcerned that he hadn’t brought any spare shells. If he was unlucky enough to encounter something that couldn’t be brought down with five shots at close range, he wouldn’t live long enough to reload, anyway.
He went to the front of the house, climbed the porch steps, and tried the front door. It was locked.
His house key was on a bead chain, separate from the car keys. He fished it out of his jeans and unlocked the door.
Standing outside, holding the shotgun in his right hand, he reached cross-body with his left, inside the half-open door, fumbling for the light switch. He expected something to rush at him from out of the coaly downstairs hallway—or to put its hand over his as he patted the wall in search of the switch plate.
He flipped the switch, and light filled the hall, spilled over him onto the front porch. He crossed the threshold and took a couple of steps inside, leaving the door open behind him.
The house was quiet.
Dark rooms on both sides of the hallway. Study to his left. Living room to his right.
He hated to turn his back on either room, but finally he moved to the right, through the archway, the shotgun held in front of him. When he turned on the overhead light, the expansive living room proved to be deserted. No intruder. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Then he noticed a dark clump lying on the white fringe at the edge of the Chinese carpet. At first glance he thought it was feces, that an animal had gotten in the house and done its business right there. But when he stood over it and looked closer, he saw it was only a caked wad of damp earth. A couple of blades of grass bristled from it.
Back in the hallway, he noticed, for the first time, smaller crumbs of dirt littering the polished oak floor.
He ventured cautiously into the study, where there was no ceiling fixture. The influx of light from the hallway dispelled enough shadows to allow him to find and click on the desk lamp.
Crumbs and smears of dirt, now dry, soiled the blotter on the desk. More of it on the red leather seat of the chair.
“What the hell?” he wondered softly.
Warily he rolled aside the mirrored doors on the study closet, but no one was hiding in there.
In the hall he checked the foyer closet too. Nobody.
The front door was still standing open. He couldn’t decide what to do about it. He liked it open because it offered an unobstructed exit if he wanted to get out fast. On the other hand, if he searched the house top to bottom and found no one in it, he would have to come back, lock the door, and search every room again to guard against the possibility that someone had slipped in behind his back. Reluctantly he closed it and engaged the dead bolt.
The beige wall-to-wall carpet that was used through the upstairs also extended down the inlaid-oak staircase, with its heavy handrail. In the center of a few of the lower treads were crumbled chunks of dry earth, not much, just enough to catch his eye.
He peered up at the second floor.
No. First, the downstairs.
He found nothing in the powder room, in the closet under the stairs, in the large dining room, in the laundry room, in the service bath. But there was dirt again in the kitchen, more than elsewhere.
His unfinished dinner of rigatoni, sausage, and butter bread was on the table, for he’d been interrupted in mid-meal by the intrusion of the raccoon—and by its spasmodic death. Smudges of now dry mud marked the rim of his dinner plate. The table around the plate was littered with pea-size lumps of dry earth, a spade-shaped brown leaf curled into a miniature scroll, and a dead beetle the size of a penny.
The beetle was on its back, six stiff legs in the air. When he flicked it over with one finger, he saw that its shell was iridescent blue-green.
Two flattened wads of dirt, like dollar pancakes, were stuck to the seat of the chair. On the oak floor around the chair was more detritus.
Another concentration of soil lay in front of the refrigerator. Altogether, it amounted to a couple of tablespoons’ worth, but there were also a few blades of grass, another dead leaf, and an earthworm. The worm was still alive but curled up on itself, suffering from a lack of moisture.
A crawling sensation along the nape of his neck and a sudden conviction that he was being watched made him clutch the shotgun with both hands and spin toward one window, then the other. No pale, ghastly face was pressed to either pane of glass, as he had imagined.
Only the night.
The chrome handle on the refrigerator was dulled by filth, and he did not touch it. He opened the door by gripping the edge. The food and beverages inside seemed untouched, everything just as he’d left it.
The doors of both double ovens were hanging open. He closed them without touching the handles, which were also smeared in places with unidentifiable crud.
Caught on a sharp edge of the oven door was a torn scrap of fabric, half an inch wide and less than an inch long. It was pale blue, with a fragmentary curve of darker blue that might have been a portion of a repeating pattern against the lighter background.
Eduardo stared at the fragment of cloth for a personal eternity. Time seemed to stop, and the universe hung as still as the pendulum of a broken grandfather clock—until icy spicules of profound fear formed in his blood and made him shudder so violently that his teeth actually chattered. The graveyard…He whipped around again, toward one window, the other, but nothing was there.
Only the night. The night. The blind, featureless, uncaring face of the night.
He searched the upstairs. Telltale chunks, crumbs, and smears of earth—once moist, now dry—could be found in most rooms. Another leaf. Two more dead beetles as dry as ancient papyrus. A pebble the size of a cherry pit, smooth and gray.
He realized that some of the s
witch plates and light switches were soiled. Thereafter, he flicked the lights on with his sleeve-covered arm or the shotgun barrel.
When he had examined every chamber, probed to the back of every closet, inspected behind and under every piece of furniture where a hollow space might conceivably offer concealment even to something as large as a seven-or eight-year-old child, and when he was satisfied that nothing was hiding on the second floor, he returned to the end of the upstairs hall and pulled on the dangling release cord that lowered the attic trapdoor. He pulled down the folding ladder fixed to the back of the trap.
The attic lights could be turned on from the hall, so he didn’t have to ascend into darkness. He searched every shadowed niche in the deep and dusty eaves, where snowflake moths hung in webs like laces of ice and feeding spiders loomed as cold and black as winter shadows.
Downstairs in the kitchen again, he slid aside the brass bolt on the cellar door. It worked only from the kitchen. Nothing could have gone down there and relocked from the far side.
On the other hand, the front and back doors of the house had been bolted when he’d driven into town. No one could have gotten inside—or locked up again upon leaving—without a key, and he had the only keys in existence. Yet the damned bolts were engaged when he’d come home; his search had revealed no broken or unlatched window, yet an intruder definitely had come and gone.
He went into the cellar and searched the two large, windowless rooms. They were cool, slightly musty, and deserted.
For the moment, the house was secure.
He was the only resident.
He went outside, locking the front entrance after him, and drove the Cherokee into the garage. He put down the door with the remote control before getting out of the wagon.
For the next several hours, he scrubbed and vacuumed the mess in the house with an urgency and unflagging energy that approached a state of frenzy. He used liquid soap, strong ammonia water, and Lysol spray, determined that every soiled surface should be not merely clean but disinfected, as close to sterile as possible outside of a hospital surgery or laboratory. He broke into a sustained sweat that soaked his shirt and pasted his hair to his scalp. The muscles in his neck, shoulders, and arms began to ache from the repetitive scouring motions. The mild arthritis in his hands flared up; his knuckles swelled and reddened from gripping the scrub brushes and rags with almost manic ferocity, but his response was to grip them tighter still, until the pain dizzied him and brought tears to his eyes.
Eduardo knew he was striving not merely to sanitize the house but to cleanse himself of certain terrible ideas that he could not tolerate, would not explore, absolutely would not. He made himself into a cleaning machine, an insensate robot, focusing so intently and narrowly on the menial task at hand that he was purged of all unwanted thoughts, breathing deeply of the ammonia fumes as if they could disinfect his mind, seeking to exhaust himself so thoroughly that he would be able to sleep and, perhaps, even forget.
As he cleaned, he disposed of all used paper towels, rags, brushes, and sponges in a large plastic bag. When he was finished, he knotted the top of the bag and deposited it outside in a trash can. Ordinarily, he would have rinsed and saved sponges and brushes for reuse, but not this time.
Instead of removing the disposable paper bag from the vacuum sweeper, he put the entire machine out with the trash. He didn’t want to think about the origin of the microscopic particles now trapped in its brushes and stuck to the inside of its plastic suction hose, most of them so tiny that he could never be sure they were expunged unless he disassembled the sweeper to scrub every inch and reachable crevice with bleach, and maybe not even then.
From the refrigerator, he removed all the foods and beverages that might have been touched by…the intruder. Anything in plastic wrap or aluminum foil had to go, even if it didn’t appear to have been tampered with: Swiss cheese, cheddar, leftover ham, half a Bermuda onion. Resealable containers had to be tossed: a one-pound tub of soft butter with a snap-on plastic lid; jars of dill and sweet pickles, olives, maraschino cherries, mayonnaise, mustard, and more; bottles with screw-top caps—salad dressing, soy sauce, ketchup. An open box of raisins, an open carton of milk. The thought of anything touching his lips that had first been touched by the intruder made him gag and shudder. By the time he finished with the refrigerator, it held little more than unopened cans of soft drinks and bottles of beer.
But after all, he was dealing with contamination. Couldn’t be too careful. No measure was too extreme.
Not merely bacterial contamination, either. If only it was that simple. God, if only. Spiritual contamination. A darkness capable of spreading through the heart, seeping deep into the soul.
Don’t even think about it. Don’t. Don’t.
Too tired to think. Too old to think. Too scared.
From the garage he fetched a blue Styrofoam cooler, into which he emptied the entire contents of the bin under the automatic icemaker in the freezer. He wedged eight bottles of beer into the ice and stuck a bottle opener in his hip pocket.
Leaving all the lights on, he carried the cooler and the shotgun upstairs to the back bedroom, where he had been sleeping for the past three years. He put the beer and the gun beside the bed.
The bedroom door had only a flimsy privacy latch in the knob, which he engaged by pushing a brass button. All that was needed to break through from the hallway was one good kick, so he tilted a straight-backed chair under the knob and jammed it tightly in place.
Don’t think about what might come through the door.
Shut the mind down. Focus on the arthritis, muscle pain, sore neck, let it blot out thought.
He took a shower, washing himself as assiduously as he had scoured the soiled portions of the house. He finished only when he had used the entire supply of hot water.
He dressed but not for bed. Socks, chinos, a T-shirt. He stood his boots beside the bed, next to the shotgun.
Although the nightstand clock and his watch agreed that it was two-fifty in the morning, Eduardo was not sleepy. He sat on the bed, propped against a pile of pillows and the headboard.
Using the remote control, he switched on the television and checked out the seemingly endless array of channels provided by the satellite dish behind the stables. He found an action movie, cops and drug dealers, lots of running and jumping and shooting, fistfights and car chases and explosions. He turned the volume all the way off because he wanted to be able to heat whatever sounds might arise elsewhere in the house.
He drank the first beer fast, staring at the television. He was not trying to follow the plot of the movie, just letting his mind fill with the abstract whirl of motion and the bright ripple-flare of changing colors. Scrubbing at the dark stains of those terrible thoughts. Those stubborn stains.
Something ticked against the west-facing window.
He looked at the draperies, which he had drawn tightly shut.
Another tick. Like a pebble thrown against the glass.
His heart began to pound.
He forced himself to look at the TV again. Motion. Color. He finished the beer. Opened a second.
Tick. And again, almost at once. Tick.
Perhaps it was just a moth or a scarab beetle trying to reach the light that the closed drapes couldn’t entirely contain.
He could get up, go to the window, discover it was just a flying beetle that was banging against the glass, relieve his mind.
Don’t even think about it.
He took a long swallow of the second beer.
Tick.
Something standing on the dark lawn below, looking up at the window. Something that knew exactly where he was, wanted to make contact.
But not a raccoon this time.
Don’t, don’t, don’t.
No cute furry face with a little black mask this time. No beautiful coat and black-ringed tail.
Motion, color, beer. Scrub out the diseased thought, purge the contamination.
Tick.
Because if he didn’t rid himself of the monstrous thought that soiled his mind, he would sooner or later lose his grip on sanity. Sooner.
Tick.
If he went to the window and parted the draperies and looked down at the thing on the lawn, even insanity would be no refuge. Once he had seen, once he knew, then there would be only a single way out. Shotgun barrel in his mouth, one toe hooked in the trigger.
Tick.
He turned up the volume control on the television. Loud. Louder. He finished the second beer. Turned the volume up even louder, until the raucous soundtrack of the violent movie seemed to shake the room. Popped the cap off a third beer. Purging his thoughts. Maybe in the morning he would have forgotten the sick, demented considerations that plagued him so persistently tonight, forgotten them or washed them away in tides of alcohol. Or perhaps he would die in his sleep. He almost didn’t care which. He poured down a long swallow of the third beer, seeking one form of oblivion or another.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Through March, April, and May, as Jack lay cupped in felt-lined plaster with his legs often in traction, he suffered pain, cramps, spastic muscle twitches, uncontrollable nerve tics, and itchy skin where it could not be scratched inside a cast. He endured those discomforts and others with few complaints, and he thanked God that he would live to hold his wife again and see his son grow up.
His health worries were even more numerous than his discomforts. The risk of bedsores was ever-present, though the body cast had been formed with great care and though most of the nurses were concerned, solicitous, and skilled. Once a pressure sore became ulcerated, it would not heal easily, and gangrene could set in quickly. Because he was periodically catheterized, his chances of contracting an infection of the urethra were increased, which could lead to a more serious case of cystitis. Any patient immobilized for long periods was in jeopardy of developing blood clots that could break loose and spin through the body, lodge in the heart or brain, killing him or causing substantial brain damage; though Jack was medicated to reduce the danger of that complication, it was the one that most deeply concerned him.