by Dean Koontz
Halfway to the house, padding along between Heather and Toby, the dog stopped and looked back at Travis Potter. The vet made a go-ahead wave with one hand, and that seemed sufficient permission for Falstaff. He accompanied them up the steps and into the warm front hall.
Travis Potter had brought a fifty-pound bag of dry dog food with him. He hefted it out of the back of his Range Rover and put it on the ground against a rear tire. “Figured you wouldn’t have dog chow on hand just in case someone happened by with a golden retriever.” He explained what and how much to feed a dog Falstaff’s size.
“What do we owe you?” Jack asked.
“Zip. He didn’t cost me. Just doing a favor for poor Harry.”
“That’s nice of you. Thanks. But for the dog food?”
“Don’t worry about it. In years to come, Falstaff’s going to need his regular shots, general looking after. When you bring him to me, I’ll soak you plenty.” Grinning, he slammed the tailgate.
They went around to the side of the Rover farthest from the house, using it as shelter from the worst of the biting wind.
Travis said, “Understand Paul told you in private about Eduardo and his raccoons. Didn’t want to alarm your wife.”
“She doesn’t alarm easy.”
“You tell her, then?”
“No. Not sure why, either. Except…we’ve all got a lot on our minds already, a year of trouble, a lot of change. Anyway, wasn’t much Paul told me. Just that the coons were behaving oddly, out in broad daylight, running in circles, and then they just dropped dead.”
“I don’t think that was all of it.” Travis hesitated. He leaned back at an angle against the side of the Rover and bent his knees, slouching a little to get his head down out of the keening wind. “I think Eduardo was holding out on me. Those coons were doing something stranger than what he said.”
“Why would he hold out on you?”
“Hard to say. He was a sort of quirky old guy. Maybe…I don’t know, maybe he saw something he felt funny talking about, something he figured I wouldn’t believe. Had a lot of pride, that man. He wouldn’t want to talk about anything that might get him laughed at.”
“Any guesses what that could be?”
“Nope.”
Jack’s head was above the roof of the Rover, and the wind not only numbed his face but seemed to be scouring off his skin layer by layer. He leaned back against the vehicle, bent his knees, and slouched, mimicking the vet. Rather than look at each other, they stared out across the descending land to the south as they talked.
Jack said, “You think, like Paul does, it was something Eduardo saw that caused his heart attack, related to the raccoons?”
“And made him load a shotgun, you mean. I don’t know. Maybe. Wouldn’t rule it out. More’n two weeks before he died, I talked to him on the phone. Interesting conversation. Called him to give him the test results on the coons. Wasn’t any known disease involved—”
“The brain swelling.”
“Right. But no apparent cause. He wanted to know did I just take samples of brain tissue for the tests or do a full dissection.”
“Dissection of the brain?”
“Yeah. He asked did I open their brains all the way up. He seemed to expect, if I did that, I’d find something besides swelling. But I didn’t find anything. So then he asks me about their spines, if there was something attached to their spines.”
“Attached?”
“Odder still, huh? He asks if I examined the entire length of their spines to see if anything was attached. When I ask him what he means, he says it might’ve looked like a tumor.”
“‘Looked like.’”
The vet turned his head to the right, to look directly at Jack, but Jack stared ahead at the Montana panorama. “You heard it the same way I did. Funny way to word it, huh? Not a tumor. Might’ve looked like one but not a real tumor.” Travis gazed out at the fields again. “I asked him if he was holding out on me, but he swore he wasn’t. I told him to call me right away if he saw any animals behaving like those coons—squirrels, rabbits, whatever—but he never did. Less than three weeks later, he was dead.”
“You found him.”
“Couldn’t get him to answer his phone. Came out here to check on him. There he was, lying in the open doorway, holding on to that shotgun for dear life.”
“He hadn’t fired it.”
“No. It was just a heart attack got him.”
Under the influence of the wind, the long meadow grass rippled in brown waves. The fields resembled a rolling, dirty sea.
Jack debated whether to tell Travis about what had happened in the graveyard a short while ago. However, describing the experience was difficult. He could outline the bare events, recount the bizarre exchanges between himself and the Toby-thing. But he didn’t have the words—maybe there were no words—to adequately describe what he had felt, and feelings were the core of it. He couldn’t convey a fraction of the essential supernatural nature of the encounter.
To buy time, he said, “Any theories?”
“I suspect maybe a toxic substance was involved. Yeah, I know, there aren’t exactly piles of industrial sludge scattered all around these parts. But there are natural toxins, too, can cause dementia in wildlife, make animals act damn near as peculiar as people. How about you? See anything weird since you’ve been here?”
“In fact, yes.” Jack was relieved that the postures they had chosen relative to each other made it possible to avoid meeting the veterinarian’s eyes without causing suspicion. He told Travis about the crow at the window that morning—and how, later, it had flown tight circles over him and Toby while they played with the Frisbee.
“Curious,” Travis said. “It might be related, I guess. On the other hand, there’s nothing that bizarre about its behavior, not even pecking the glass. Crows can be damned bold. It still around here?”
They both pushed away from the Rover and stood scanning the sky. The crow was gone.
“In this wind,” Travis said, “birds are sheltering.” He turned to Jack. “Anything besides the crow?”
That business about toxic substances had convinced Jack to hold off telling Travis Potter anything about the graveyard. They were discussing two utterly different kinds of mystery: poison versus the supernatural; toxic substances as opposed to ghosts and demons and things that go bump in the night. The incident on the cemetery knoll was evidence of a strictly subjective nature, even more so than the behavior of the crow; it didn’t provide any support to the contention that something unspeakably strange was going on at Quartermass Ranch. Jack had no proof it had happened. Toby clearly recalled none of it and could not corroborate his story. If Eduardo Fernandez had seen something peculiar and withheld it from Travis, Jack sympathized with the old man and understood. The veterinarian was predisposed to the idea that extraordinary agents were at work, because of the brain swelling he’d found in the autopsies of the raccoons, but he was not likely to take seriously any talk of spirits, possession, and eerie conversations conducted in a cemetery with an entity from the Beyond.
Anything besides the crow? Travis had asked.
Jack shook his head. “That’s all.”
“Well, maybe whatever brought those coons down, it’s over with. We might never know. Nature’s full of odd little tricks.”
To avoid the vet’s eyes, Jack pulled back his jacket sleeve, glanced at his watch. “I’ve kept you too long if you want to finish your rounds before the snow sets in.”
“Never had a hope of managing that,” Travis said. “But I should make it back home before there’re any drifts the Rover can’t handle.”
They shook hands, and Jack said, “Don’t you forget, a week from tomorrow, dinner at six. Bring a guest if you’ve got a lady friend.”
Travis grinned. “You look at this mug, it’s hard to believe, but there’s a young lady willing to be seen with me. Name’s Janet.”
“Be pleased to meet her,” Jack said.
He dragged
the fifty-pound bag of dog chow away from the Rover and stood by the driveway, watching the vet turn around and head out.
Looking in the rearview mirror, Travis Potter waved.
Jack waved after him and watched until the Rover had disappeared around the curve and over the low hill just before the county road.
The day was a deeper gray than it had been when the vet arrived. Iron instead of ashes. Dungeon gray. The ever-lowering sky and the black-green phalanxes of trees seemed as formidably restricting as walls of concrete and stone.
A bitterly cold wind, sweetened by the perfume of pines and the faint scent of ozone from high mountain passes, swept out of the northwest. The boughs of the evergreens strained a low mournful sound from that rushing river of air; the grassy meadows conspired with it to produce a whispery whistle; and the eaves of the house inspired it to make soft hooting sounds like the weak protests of dying owls lying with broken wings in uncaring fields of night.
The countryside was beautiful even in that prestorm gloom, and perhaps it was as peaceful and serene as they had perceived it when they’d first driven north from Utah. At that moment, however, none of the usual travel-book adjectives sprang to mind as a singular and apt descriptive. Only one word suited now. Lonely. It was the loneliest place Jack McGarvey had ever seen, unpopulated to distant points, far from the solace of neighborhood and community.
He hefted the bag of dog chow onto his shoulder.
Big storm coming.
He went inside.
He locked the front door behind him.
He heard laughter in the kitchen and went back there to see what was happening. Falstaff was sitting on his hindquarters, forepaws raised in front of him, staring up yearningly at a piece of bologna that Toby was holding over his head.
“Dad, look, he knows how to beg,” Toby said.
The retriever licked his chops.
Toby dropped the meat.
The dog snatched it in midair, swallowed, and begged for more.
“Isn’t he great?” Toby said.
“He’s great,” Jack agreed.
“Toby’s hungrier than the dog,” Heather said, getting a large pot out of a cabinet. “He didn’t have any lunch and didn’t even eat the raisin cookies I gave him when he went outside. Early dinner okay?”
“Fine,” Jack said, dropping the bag of dog chow in a corner, with the intention of finding a cupboard for it later.
“Spaghetti?”
“Perfect.”
“We have a loaf of crusty French bread. You make the salads?”
“Sure,” Jack said as Toby fed Falstaff another bite of bologna.
Filling the pot with water at the sink, Heather said, “Travis Potter seems really nice.”
“Yeah, I like him. He’ll be bringing a date to dinner next Sunday. Janet’s her name.”
Heather smiled and seemed happier than at any time since they had come to the ranch. “Making friends.”
“I guess we are,” he said.
As he got celery, tomatoes, and a head of lettuce out of the refrigerator, he was relieved to note that neither of the kitchen windows faced the cemetery.
The prolonged and subdued twilight was in its final minutes when Toby rushed into the kitchen, the grinning dog at his heels, and cried breathlessly, “Snow!”
Heather looked up from the pot of bubbling water and roiling spaghetti, turned to the window above the sink, and saw the first flakes spiraling through the gloaming. They were huge and fluffy. The wind was in abeyance for the moment, and the immense flakes descended in lazy spirals.
Toby hurried to the north window. The dog followed, slapped its forepaws onto the sill, stood beside him, and gazed out at the miracle.
Jack put aside the knife with which he was slicing tomatoes and went to the north window as well. He stood behind Toby, his hands on the boy’s shoulders. “Your first snow.”
“But not my last!” Toby enthused.
Heather stirred the sauce in the smaller pot to be sure it was not going to stick, and then she squeezed in with her family at the window. She put her right arm around Jack and, with her left hand, idly scratched the back of Falstaff’s head.
For the first time in longer than she could remember, she felt at peace. With no more financial worries, having settled into their new home in less than a week, with Jack fully recovered, with the dangers of the city schools and streets no longer a threat to Toby, Heather was finally able to put the negativity of Los Angeles behind her. They had a dog. They were making new friends. She was confident that the peculiar anxiety attacks that had afflicted her since their arrival at Quartermass Ranch would trouble her no more.
She had lived with fear so long in the city that she had become an anxiety junkie. In rural Montana, she didn’t have to worry about drive-by gang shootings, carjackings, ATM robberies that frequently involved casual murder, drug dealers peddling crack cocaine on every corner, follow-home stickups—or child molesters who slipped off freeways, cruised residential neighborhoods, trolled for prey, and then disappeared with their catch into the anonymous urban sprawl. Consequently, her habitual need to be afraid of something had given rise to the unfocused dreads and phantom enemies that marked her first few days in these more pacific regions.
That was over now. Chapter closed.
Heavy wet snowflakes descended in battalions, in armies, swiftly conquering the dark ground, an occasional outrider finding the glass, melting. The kitchen was comfortably warm, fragrant with the aromas of cooking pasta and tomato sauce. Nothing was quite so likely to induce feelings of contentment and prosperity as being in a well-heated and cozy room while the windows revealed a world in the frigid grip of winter.
“Beautiful,” she said, enchanted by the breaking storm.
“Wow,” Toby said. “Snow. It’s really, really snow.”
They were a family. Wife, husband, child, and dog. Together and safe.
Hereafter, she was going to think only McGarvey thoughts, never Beckerman thoughts. She was going to embrace a positive outlook and shun the negativism that was both her family legacy and a poisonous residue of life in the big city.
She felt free at last.
Life was good.
After dinner, Heather decided to relax with a hot bath, and Toby settled in the living room with Falstaff to watch a video of Beethoven.
Jack went directly to the study to review the guns available to them. In addition to the weapons they’d brought from Los Angeles—a collection Heather had substantially increased after the shootout at Arkadian’s service station—a corner case was stocked with hunting rifles, a shotgun, a .22 pistol, a .45 Colt revolver, and ammunition.
He preferred to select three pieces from their own armory: a beautifully made Korth .38; a pistol-grip, pump-action Mossberg twelve-gauge; and a Micro Uzi like the one Anson Oliver had used, although this particular weapon had been converted to full automatic status. The Uzi had been acquired on the black market. It was odd that a cop’s wife should feel the need to purchase an illegal gun—odder still that it had been so easy for her to do so.
He closed the study door and stood at the desk, working quickly to ready the three firearms while he still had privacy. He didn’t want to take such precautions with Heather’s knowledge, because he would have to explain why he felt the need for protection.
She was happier than she’d been in a long time, and he could see no point in spoiling her mood until—and unless—it became necessary. The incident in the graveyard had been frightening; however, although he’d felt threatened, no blow had actually been struck, no harm done. He’d been afraid more for Toby than for himself, but the boy was back, no worse for what had happened.
And what had happened? He didn’t relish having to explain what he had sensed rather than seen: a presence spectral and enigmatic and no more solid than the wind. Hour by hour, the encounter seemed less like something he had actually experienced and more like a dream.
He loaded the .38 and put it to one side
of the desk.
He could tell her about the raccoons, of course, although he himself had never seen them and although they had done no harm to anyone. He could tell her about the shotgun Eduardo Fernandez had been clutching fiercely when he’d died. But the old man hadn’t been brought down by an enemy vulnerable to buckshot; a heart attack had felled him. A massive cardiac infarction was as scary as hell, yes, but it wasn’t a killer that could be deterred with firearms.
He fully loaded the Mossberg, pumped a shell into the breech, and then inserted one additional shell in the magazine tube. A bonus round. Eduardo had prepared his own gun in the same fashion shortly before he died….
If he tried to explain all this to Heather now, he’d succeed in alarming her—but to no purpose. Maybe there would be no trouble. He might never again come face-to-face with whatever presence he had been aware of in the cemetery. One such episode in a lifetime was more contact with the supernatural than most people ever experienced. Wait for developments. Hope there were none. But if there were, and if he obtained concrete proof of danger, then he would have to let her know that maybe, just maybe, their year of tumult was not yet at an end.
The Micro Uzi had two magazines welded at right angles, giving it a forty-round capacity. The heft of it was reassuring. More than two kilos of death waiting to be dispensed. He couldn’t imagine any enemy—wild creature or man—that the Uzi couldn’t handle.
He put the Korth in the top right-hand desk drawer, toward the back. He closed the drawer and left the study with the other two weapons.
Before slipping past the living room, Jack waited until he heard Toby laughing, then glanced around the corner of the archway. The boy was focused on the TV, Falstaff at his side. Jack hurried to the kitchen at the end of the hall, where he put the Uzi in the pantry, behind extra boxes of cornflakes, Cheerios, and shredded wheat that wouldn’t be opened for at least a week.
Upstairs in the master bedroom, breezy music played behind the closed door to the adjoining bathroom. Soaking in the tub, Heather had turned the radio to a golden-oldies station. “Dreamin’” by Johnny Burnette was just winding down.