by Dean Koontz
“People are still gonna know it was me in real life.”
“Real life? What’s that? This is Lala Land.”
“Jesus, how can they make a hero out of this guy?”
Crawford said, “They made heroes out of Bonnie and Clyde.”
“Antiheroes.”
“Okay, then, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
“Still.”
“They made heroes out of Jimmy Hoffa and Bugsy Siegel. Anson Oliver’s a snap.”
That night, long after Lyle Crawford had gone, when Jack tried to ignore his thousand discomforts and get some sleep, he couldn’t stop thinking about the movie, the million dollars, the harassment Toby had taken at school, the vile graffiti with which their house had been covered, the inadequacy of their savings, his disability checks, Luther in the grave, Alma alone with her arsenal, and Anson Oliver portrayed on-screen by some young actor with chiseled features and melancholy eyes, radiating an aura of saintly compassion and noble purpose exceeded only by his sex appeal.
Jack was overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness far worse than anything he had felt before. The cause of it was only partly the claustrophobic confinement of the body cast and the bed. It arose, as well, from the fact that he was tied to this City of Angels by a house that had declined in value and was currently hard to sell in a recessionary market, from the fact that he was a good cop in an age when the heroes were gangsters, and from the fact that he was unable to imagine either earning a living or finding meaning in life as anything but a cop. He was as trapped as a rat in a giant laboratory maze. Unlike the rat, he didn’t even have the illusion of freedom.
On June sixth the body cast came off. The spinal fracture was entirely healed. He had full feeling in both legs. Undoubtedly he would learn to walk again.
Initially, however, he couldn’t stand without the assistance of either two nurses or one nurse and a wheeled walker. His thighs had withered. Though his calf muscles had received some passive exercise, they were atrophied to a degree. For the first time in his life, he was soft and flabby in the middle, which was the only place he’d gained weight.
A single trip around the room, assisted by nurses and a walker, broke him out in a sweat and made his stomach muscles flutter as if he had attempted to bench-press five hundred pounds. Nevertheless, it was a day of celebration. Life went on. He felt reborn.
He paused by the window that framed the crown of the tall palm tree, and as if by the grace of an aware and benign universe, a trio of sea gulls appeared in the sky, having strayed inland from the Santa Monica shoreline. They hovered on rising thermals for half a minute or so, like three white kites. Suddenly the birds wheeled across the blue in an aerial ballet of freedom and disappeared to the west. Jack watched them until they were gone, his vision blurring, and he turned away from the window without once lowering his gaze to the city beyond and below him.
Heather and Toby visited that evening and brought Baskin-Robbins peanut-butter-and-chocolate ice cream. In spite of the flab around his waist, Jack ate his share.
That night he dreamed of sea gulls. Three. With gloriously wide wingspans. As white and luminous as angels. They flew steadily westward, soaring and diving, spiraling and looping spiritedly, but always westward, and he ran through fields below, trying to keep pace with them. He was a boy again, spreading his arms as if they were wings, zooming up hills, down grassy slopes, wildflowers lashing his legs, easily imagining himself taking to the air at any moment, free of the bonds of gravity, high in the company of the gulls. Then the fields ended while he was gazing up at the gulls, and he found himself pumping his legs in thin air, over the edge of a bluff, with pointed and bladed rocks a few hundred feet below, powerful waves exploding among them, white spray cast high into the air, and he was falling, falling. He knew, then, that it was only a dream, but he couldn’t wake up when he tried. Falling and falling, always closer to death but never quite there, falling and falling toward the jagged black maw of the rocks, toward the cold deep gullet of the hungry sea, falling, falling…
After four days of increasingly arduous therapy at Westside General, Jack was transferred to Phoenix Rehabilitation Hospital on the eleventh of June. Although the spinal fracture had healed, he had sustained some nerve damage. Nevertheless, his prognosis was excellent.
His room might have been in a motel. Carpet instead of a vinyl-tile floor, green-and-white-striped wallpaper, nicely framed prints of bucolic landscapes, garishly patterned but cheerful drapes at the window. The two hospital beds, however, belied the Holiday Inn image.
The physical therapy room, where he was taken in a wheelchair for the first time at six-thirty in the morning, June twelfth, was well equipped with exercise machines. It smelled more like a hospital than like a gym, which wasn’t bad. And perhaps because he had at least an idea of what lay ahead of him, he thought the place looked less like a gym than like a torture chamber.
His physical therapist, Moshe Bloom, was in his late twenties, six feet four, with a body so pumped and well carved that he looked as if he was in training to go on-one with an army tank. He had curly black hair, brown eyes flecked with gold, and a dark complexion enhanced by the California sun to a lustrous bronze shade. In white sneakers, white cotton slacks, white T-shirt, and skullcap, he was like a radiant apparition, floating a fraction of an inch above the floor, come to deliver a message from God, which turned out to be, “No pain, no gain.”
“Doesn’t sound like advice, the way you say it,” Jack told him.
“Oh?”
“Sounds like a threat.”
“You’ll cry like a baby after the first several sessions.”
“If that’s what you want, I can cry like a baby right now, and we can both go home.”
“You’ll fear the pain to start with.”
“I’ve had some therapy at Westside General.”
“That was just a game of patty-cake. Nothing like the hell I’m going to put you through.”
“You’re so comforting.”
Bloom shrugged his immense shoulders. “You’ve got to have no illusions about any easy rehabilitation.”
“I’m the original illusionless man.”
“Good. You’ll fear the pain at first, dread it, cower from it, beg to be sent home half crippled rather than finish the program—”
“Gee, I can hardly wait to start.”
“—but I’ll teach you to hate the pain instead of fear it—”
“Maybe I should just go to some UCLA extension classes, learn Spanish instead.”
“—and then I’ll teach you to love the pain, because it’s a sure sign that you’re making progress.”
“You need a refresher course in how to inspire your patients.”
“You’ve got to inspire yourself, McGarvey. My main job is to challenge you.”
“Call me Jack.”
The therapist shook his head. “No. To start, I’ll call you McGarvey, you call me Bloom. This relationship is always adversarial at first. You’ll need to hate me, to have a focus for your anger. When that time comes, it’ll be easier to hate me if we aren’t using first names.”
“I hate you already.”
Bloom smiled. “You’ll do all right, McGarvey.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
After the night of June tenth, Eduardo lived in denial. For the first time in his life, he was unwilling to face reality, although he knew it had never been more important to do so. It would have been healthier for him to visit the one place on the ranch where he would find—or fail to find—evidence to support his darkest suspicions about the nature of the intruder who had come into the house when he had been at Travis Potter’s office in Eagle’s Roost. Instead, it was the one place he assiduously avoided. He didn’t even look toward that knoll.
He drank too much and didn’t care. For seventy years he had lived by the motto “Moderation in all things,” and that prescription for life had led him only to this point of humbling loneliness and horror. He wished the beer�
�which he occasionally spiked with good bourbon—would have a greater numbing effect on him. He seemed to have an uncanny tolerance for alcohol. And even when he had poured down enough to turn his legs and his spine to rubber, his mind remained far too clear to suit him.
He escaped into books, reading exclusively in the genre for which he’d recently developed an appreciation. Heinlein, Clarke, Bradbury, Sturgeon, Benford, Clement, Wyndham, Christopher, Niven, Zelazny. Whereas he had first found, to his surprise, that fiction of the fantastic could be challenging and meaningful, he now found it could also be narcotizing, a better drug than any volume of beer and less taxing on the bladder. The effect—either enlightenment and wonder or intellectual and emotional anesthesia—was strictly at the discretion of the reader. Spaceships, time machines, teleportation cubicles, alien worlds, colonized moons, extraterrestrials, mutants, intelligent plants, robots, androids, clones, computers alive with artificial intelligence, telepathy, starship war fleets engaged in battles in far reaches of the galaxy, the collapse of the universe, time running backward, the end of all things! He lost himself in a fog of the fantastic, in a tomorrow that would never be, to avoid thinking about the unthinkable.
The traveler from the doorway became quiescent, holed up in the woods, and days passed without new developments. Eduardo didn’t understand why it would have come across billions of miles of space or thousands of years of time, only to proceed with the conquest of the earth at a turtle’s pace.
Of course, the very essence of something truly and deeply alien was that its motivations and actions would be mysterious and perhaps even incomprehensible to a human being. The conquest of earth might be of no interest whatsoever to the thing that had come through the doorway, and its concept of time might be so radically different from Eduardo’s that days were like minutes to it.
In science fiction novels, there were essentially three kinds of aliens. The good ones generally wanted to help humanity reach its full potential as an intelligent species and thereafter coexist in fellowship and share adventures for eternity. The bad ones wanted to enslave human beings, feed on them, plant eggs in them, hunt them for sport, or eradicate them because of a tragic misunderstanding or out of sheer viciousness. The third—and least encountered—type of extraterrestrial was neither good nor bad but so utterly alien that its purpose and destiny were as enigmatic to human beings as was the mind of God; this third type usually did the human race a great good service or a terrible evil merely by passing through on its way to the galactic rim, like a bus running across a column of busy ants on a highway, and was never even aware of the encounter, let alone that it had impacted the lives of intelligent beings.
Eduardo hadn’t a clue as to the larger intentions of the watcher in the woods, but he knew instinctively that, on a personal level, it didn’t wish him well. It wasn’t seeking eternal fellowship and shared adventures. It wasn’t blissfully unaware of him, either, so it was not one of the third type. It was strange and malevolent, and sooner or later it would kill him.
In the novels, good aliens outnumbered bad. Science fiction was basically a literature of hope.
As the warm June days passed, hope was in far shorter supply on Quartermass Ranch than in the pages of those books.
On the afternoon of June seventeenth, while Eduardo was sitting in a living-room armchair, drinking beer and reading Walter M. Miller, the telephone rang. He put down the book but not the beer, and went into the kitchen to take the call.
Travis Potter said, “Mr. Fernandez, you don’t have to worry.”
“Don’t I?”
“I got a fax from the state lab, results of the tests on the tissue samples from those raccoons, and they aren’t infected.”
“They sure are dead,” Eduardo said.
“But not from rabies. Not from plague, either. Nothing that appears to be infectious, or communicable by bite or fleas.”
“You do an autopsy?”
“Yes, sir, I did.”
“So was it boredom that killed them, or what?”
Potter hesitated. “The only thing I could find was severe brain inflammation and swelling.”
“Thought you said there was no infection?”
“There isn’t. No lesions, no abscesses or pus, just inflammation and extreme swelling. Extreme.”
“Maybe the state lab ought to test that brain tissue.”
“Brain tissue was part of what I sent them in the first place.”
“I see.”
“I’ve never encountered anything like it,” Potter told him.
Eduardo said nothing.
“Very odd,” Potter said. “Have there been more of them?”
“More dead raccoons? No. Just the three.”
“I’m going to run some toxicological studies, see if maybe we’re dealing with a poison here.”
“I haven’t put out any poisons.”
“Could be an industrial toxin.”
“It could? There’s no damned industry around here.”
“Well…a natural toxin, then.”
Eduardo said, “When you dissected them…”
“Yes?”
“…opened the skull, saw the brain inflamed and swollen…”
“So much pressure, even after death, blood and spinal fluid squirted out the instant the bone saw cut through the cranium.”
“Vivid image.”
“Sorry. But that’s why their eyes were bulging.”
“Did you just take samples of the brain tissue or…”
“Yes?”
“…did you actually dissect the brain?”
“I performed complete cerebrotomies on two of them.”
“Opened their brains all the way up?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t find anything?”
“Just what I told you.”
“Nothing…unusual?”
The puzzlement in Potter’s silence was almost audible. Then: “What would you have expected me to find, Mr. Fernandez?”
Eduardo did not respond.
“Mr. Fernandez?”
“What about their spines?” Eduardo asked. “Did you examine their spines, the whole length of their spines?”
“Yes, I did.”
“You find anything…attached?”
“Attached?” Potter said.
“Yes.”
“What do you mean, ‘attached’?”
“Might have…might have looked like a tumor.”
“Looked like a tumor?”
“Say a tumor…something like that?”
“No. Nothing like that. Nothing at all.”
Eduardo took the telephone handset away from his head long enough to swallow some beer.
When he put the phone to his ear again, he heard Travis Potter saying, “—know something you haven’t told me?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” Eduardo lied.
The veterinarian was silent this time. Maybe he was sucking on a beer of his own. Then: “If you come across any more animals like this, will you call me?”
“Yes.”
“Not just raccoons.”
“All right.”
“Any animals at all.”
“Sure.”
“Don’t move them,” Potter said.
“I won’t.”
“I want to see them in situ, just where they fell.”
“Whatever you say.”
“Well…”
“Goodbye, Doctor.”
Eduardo hung up and went to the sink. He stared out the window at the forest at the top of the sloped backyard, west of the house.
He wondered how long he would have to wait. He was sick to death of waiting.
“Come on,” he said softly to the hidden watcher in the woods.
He was ready. Ready for hell or heaven or eternal nothingness, whatever came.
He wasn’t afraid of dying.
What frightened him was the how of dying. What he might have to endure. What might be done to him in the final
minutes or hours of his life. What he might see.
On the morning of June twenty-first, as he was eating breakfast and listening to the world news on the radio, he looked up and saw a squirrel at the window in the north wall of the kitchen. It was perched on the window stool, gazing through the glass at him. Very still. Intense. As the raccoons had been.
He watched it for a while, then concentrated on his breakfast again. Each time he looked up, it was on duty.
After he washed the dishes, he went to the window, crouched, and came face-to-face with the squirrel. Only the pane of glass was between them. The animal seemed unfazed by this close inspection.
He snapped one fingernail against the glass directly in front of its face.
The squirrel didn’t flinch.
He rose, twisted the thumb-turn latch, and started to lift the lower half of the double-hung window.
The squirrel leaped down from the stool and fled to the side yard, where it turned and regarded him intently once more.
He closed and locked the window and went out to sit on the front porch. Two squirrels were already out there on the grass, waiting for him. When Eduardo sat in the hickory rocking chair, one of the small beasts remained in the grass, but the other climbed to the top porch step and kept a watch on him from that angle.
That night, abed in his barricaded room again, seeking sleep, he heard squirrels scampering on the roof. Small claws scratching at the shingles.
When he finally slept, he dreamed of rodents.
The following day, June twenty-second, the squirrels remained with him. At windows. In the yard. On the porches. When he went for a walk, they trailed him at a distance.
The twenty-third was the same, but on the morning of the twenty-fourth, he found a dead squirrel on the back porch. Clots of blood in its ears. Dried blood in its nostrils. Eyes protruding from the sockets. He found two more squirrels in the yard and a fourth on the front-porch steps, all in the same condition.
They had survived control longer than the raccoons.
Apparently the traveler was learning.
Eduardo considered calling Dr. Potter. Instead, he gathered up the four bodies and carried them to the center of the eastern meadow. He dropped them in the grass, where scavengers could find and deal with them.