by Dean Koontz
Jack pushed the Mossberg under the bed, far enough back so she wouldn’t notice it when they made the bed in the morning but not so far back that he couldn’t get hold of it in a hurry.
“Poetry in Motion.” Johnny Tillotson. Music from an innocent age. Jack hadn’t even been born yet when that record had been made.
He sat on the edge of the bed, listening to the music, feeling mildly guilty about not sharing his fears with Heather. But he just didn’t want to upset her needlessly. She’d been through so much. In some ways, his being wounded and hospitalized had been harder on her than on him, because she’d been required to bear alone the pressures of day-to-day existence while he’d recuperated. She needed a reprieve from tension.
Probably nothing to worry about, anyway.
A few sick raccoons. A bold little crow. A strange experience in a cemetery—which was suitably creepy material for some television show like Unsolved Mysteries but hadn’t been as threatening to life and limb as any of a hundred things that could happen in the average police officer’s workday.
Loading and secreting the guns would most likely prove to have been an overreaction.
Well, he’d done what a cop should do. Prepared himself to serve and protect.
On the radio in the bathroom, Bobby Vee was singing “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes.”
Beyond the bedroom windows, snow was falling harder than before. The flakes, previously fluffy and wet, were now small, more numerous, and dry. The wind had accelerated again. Sheer curtains of snow rippled and billowed across the black night.
After his mom warned him against allowing Falstaff to sleep on the bed, after good-night kisses, after his dad told him to keep the dog on the floor, after the lights were turned out—except for the red night-light—after his mom warned him again about Falstaff, after the hall door was pulled half shut, after enough time had passed to be sure neither his mom nor his dad was going to sneak back to check on the retriever, Toby sat up in his alcove bed, patted the mattress invitingly, and whispered, “Here, Falstaff. Come on, fella.”
The dog was busily sniffing along the base of the door at the head of the back stairs. He whined softly, unhappily.
“Falstaff,” Toby said, louder than before. “Here, boy, come here, hurry.”
Falstaff glanced at him, then put his snout to the doorsill again, snuffling and whimpering at the same time.
“Come here—we’ll play covered wagon or spaceship or anything you want,” Toby wheedled.
Suddenly getting a whiff of something that displeased him, the dog sneezed twice, shook his head so hard that his long ears flapped loudly, and backed away from the door.
“Falstaff!” Toby hissed.
Finally the dog padded to him through the red light—which was the same kind of light you’d find in the engine room of a starship, or around a campfire out on a lonely prairie where the wagon train had stopped for the night, or in a freaky temple in India where you and Indiana Jones were sneaking around and trying to avoid a bunch of weird guys who worshiped Kali, Goddess of Death. With a little encouragement, Falstaff jumped onto the bed.
“Good dog.” Toby hugged him. Then in hushed, conspiratorial tones: “Okay, see, we’re in a rebel starfighter on the edge of the Crab Nebula. I’m the captain and ace gunner. You’re a super-superintelligent alien from a planet that circles the Dog Star, plus you’re psychic, see, you can read the thoughts of the bad aliens in the other starfighters, trying to blow us apart, which they don’t know. They don’t know. They’re crabs with sort of hands instead of just claws, see, like this, crab hands, scrack-scrick-scrack-scrick, and they’re mean, really really vicious. Like after their mother gives birth to eight or ten of them at once, they turn on her and eat her alive! You know? Crunch her up. Feed on her. Mean as shit, these guys. You know what I’m saying?”
Falstaff regarded him face-to-face throughout the briefing and then licked him from chin to nose when he finished.
“All right, you know! Okay, let’s see if we can ditch these crab geeks by going into hyperspace—jump across half the galaxy and leave ’em in the dust. So what’s the first thing we got to do? Yeah, right, put up the cosmic-radiation shields so we don’t wind up full of pinholes from traveling faster than all the subatomic particles we’ll be passing through.”
He switched on the reading lamp above his headboard, reached to the draw cord—“Shields up!”—and pulled the privacy drapes all the way shut. Instantly the alcove bed became a cloistered capsule that could be any sort of vehicle, ancient or futuristic, traveling as slow as a sedan chair or faster than light through any part of the world or out of it.
“Lieutenant Falstaff, are we ready?” Toby asked.
Before the game could begin, the retriever bounded off the bed and between the bunk drapes, which fell shut again behind him.
Toby grabbed the draw cord and pulled the drapes open. “What’s the matter with you?”
The dog was at the stairwell door, sniffing.
“You know, dogbreath, this could be viewed as mutiny.”
Falstaff glanced back at him, then continued to investigate whatever scent had fascinated him.
“We got crabulons trying to kill us, you want to go play dog.” Toby got out of bed and joined the retriever at the door. “I know you don’t have to pee. Dad took you out already, and you got to make yellow snow before I ever did.”
The dog whimpered again, made a disgusted sound, then backed away from the door and growled low in his throat.
“It’s nothing, it’s some steps, that’s all.”
Falstaff’s black lips skinned back from his teeth. He lowered his head as if he was ready for a gang of crabulons to come through that door right now, scrack-scrick-scrack-scrick, with their eye stalks wiggling two feet above their heads.
“Dumb dog. I’ll show you.”
He twisted open the lock, turned the knob.
The dog whimpered and backed away.
Toby opened the door. The stairs were dark. He flipped on the light and stepped onto the landing.
Falstaff hesitated, looked toward the half-open hall door as if maybe he would bolt from the bedroom.
“You’re the one was so interested,” Toby reminded him. “Now come on, I’ll show you—just stairs.”
As if he had been shamed into it, the dog joined Toby on the landing. His tail was held so low that the end of it curled around one of his hind legs.
Toby descended three steps, wincing as the first one squeaked and then the third. If Mom or Dad was in the kitchen below, he might get caught, and then they’d think he was sneaking out to grab up some snow—in his bare feet!—to bring it back to his room to watch it melt. Which wasn’t a bad idea, actually. He wondered whether snow was interesting to eat. Three steps, two squeaks, and he stopped, looked back at the dog.
“Well?”
Reluctantly, Falstaff moved to his side.
Together, they crept down the tight, enclosed spiral. Trying to make as little noise as possible. Well, one of them was trying, anyway, staying close to the wall, where the treads weren’t as likely to creak, but the other one had claws that ticked and scraped on the wood.
Toby whispered, “Stairs. Steps. See? You can go down. You can go up. Big deal. What’d you think was behind the door, huh? Doggie hell?”
Each step they descended brought one new step into view. The way the walls curved, you couldn’t see far ahead, couldn’t see the bottom, just a few steps with the paint worn thin, lots of shadows because of the dim bulbs, so maybe the lower landing was just two steps below or maybe it was a hundred, five hundred, or maybe you went down and down and around and around for ninety thousand steps, and when you reached the bottom you were at the center of the earth with dinosaurs and lost cities.
“In doggie hell,” he told Falstaff, “the devil’s a cat. You know that? Big cat, really big, stands on his hind feet, has claws like razors…”
Down and around, slow step by slow step.
“…
this big devil cat, he wears a cape made out of dog fur, necklace out of dog teeth…”
Down and around.
“…and when he plays marbles…”
Wood creaking underfoot.
“…he uses dogs’ eyes! Yeah, that’s right…”
Falstaff whimpered.
“…he’s one mean cat, big mean cat, mean as shit.”
They reached the bottom. The vestibule. The two doors.
“Kitchen,” Toby whispered, indicating one door. He turned to the other. “Back porch.”
He could probably twist open the deadbolt, slip onto the porch, scoop up a double handful of snow, even if he had to go as far as the yard to get it, but still make it back inside and all the way up to his room without his mom or dad ever knowing about it. Make a real snowball, his first. Take a taste of it. When it started to melt, he could just put it in a corner of his room, and in the morning, there’d be no evidence. Just water. Which, if anyone noticed it, he could blame on Falstaff.
Toby reached for the doorknob with his right hand and for the dead-bolt turn with his left.
The retriever jumped up, planted both paws on the wall beside the door, and clamped his jaws around Toby’s left wrist.
Toby stifled a squeal of surprise.
Falstaff held the wrist firmly, but he didn’t bite down, didn’t really hurt, just held on and rolled his eyes at Toby, as if what he would have said, if he could speak, was something like, No, you can’t open this door, it’s off limits, forget it, no way.
“What’re you doing?” Toby whispered. “Let go.”
Falstaff would not let go.
“You’re drooling on me,” Toby said as a rivulet of thick saliva trickled down his wrist and under the sleeve of his pajama tops.
The retriever worked his teeth slightly, still not hurting his master but making it clear that he could cause a little pain anytime he wanted.
“What, is Mom paying you?”
Toby let go of the doorknob with his right hand.
The dog rolled his eyes, relaxed his jaws, but didn’t entirely let go of the left wrist until Toby released the thumb-turn on the lock and lowered his hand to his side. Falstaff dropped away from the wall, onto all fours again.
Toby stared at the door, wondering if he would be able to move quickly enough to open it before the dog could leap up and seize his wrist again.
The retriever watched him closely.
Then he wondered why Falstaff didn’t want him to go outside. Dogs could sense danger. Maybe a bear was prowling around outside, one of the bears that Dad said lived in the woods. A bear could gut you and bite your head off so quick you wouldn’t have a chance to scream, crunch your skull up like hard candy, pick its teeth with your armbone, and all they’d find in the morning was a bloody scrap of pajamas and maybe a toe that the bear had overlooked.
He was scaring himself.
He checked the crack between the door and the jamb to be sure the deadbolt was actually in place. He could see the dull brass shine of it in there. Good. Safe.
Of course, Falstaff had been afraid of the door above too, curious but afraid. He hadn’t wanted to open it. Hadn’t wanted to come down here, really. But nobody had been waiting for them on the steps. No bear, for sure.
Maybe this was just a dog who spooked easy.
“My dad’s a hero,” Toby whispered.
Falstaff cocked his head.
“He’s a hero cop. He’s not afraid of nothin’, and I’m not afraid of nothin’, either.”
The dog stared at him as if to say, Yeah? So what next?
Toby looked again at the door in front of him. He could just open it a crack. Take a quick look. If a bear was on the porch, slam the door fast.
“If I wanted to go out there and pet a bear, I would.”
Falstaff waited.
“But it’s late. I’m tired. If there’s a bear out there, he’ll just have to wait till tomorrow.”
Together, he and Falstaff climbed back to his room. Dirt was scattered on the stairs. He’d felt it under his bare feet on the way down; now he felt it going up. On the high landing, he stood on his right leg and brushed off the bottom of his left foot, stood on his left foot and brushed off his right. Crossed the threshold. Closed the door. Locked it. Switched off the stair light.
Falstaff was at the window, gazing out at the backyard, and Toby joined him.
The snow was coming down so hard there would probably be nine feet of it by morning, maybe sixteen. The porch roof below was white. The ground was totally white everywhere, as far as he could see, but he couldn’t see all that far because the snow was really coming down. He couldn’t even see the woods. The caretaker’s house was swallowed by whipping white clouds of snow. Incredible.
The dog dropped to the floor and trotted away, but Toby watched the snow awhile longer. When he began to get sleepy, he turned and saw that Falstaff was sitting in the bed, waiting for him.
Toby slipped under the blankets, keeping the retriever on top of them. Letting the dog under the blankets was going one step too far. Infallible eight-year-old-boy instinct told him as much. If Mom or Dad found them like that—boy head on one pillow, dog head on the other pillow, covers pulled up to their chins—there would be big trouble.
He reached for the draw cord to shut the drapes, so he and Falstaff could go to sleep on a train, crossing Alaska in the dead of winter to get to the gold rush country and stake a claim, after which they’d change Falstaff’s name to White Fang. But as soon as the drapes began to close, the dog sprang to its feet on the mattress, ready to leap to the floor.
“Okay, all right, Jeez,” Toby said, and he pulled the drapes wide open.
The retriever settled beside him again, lying so he was facing the door at the head of the back stairs.
“Dumb dog,” Toby muttered from the edge of sleep. “Bears don’t have door keys….”
In the darkness, when Heather slid against him, smelling faintly of soap from her hot bath, Jack knew he’d have to disappoint her. He wanted her, needed her, God knew, but he remained obsessed with his experience in the cemetery. As the memory grew rapidly less vivid, as it became increasingly difficult to recall the precise nature and intensity of the emotions that had been part of the encounter, he turned it over and over more desperately in his mind, examining it repeatedly from every angle, trying to squeeze sudden enlightenment from it before it became, like all memories, a dry and faded husk of the actual experience. The conversation with the thing that had spoken through Toby had been about death—cryptic, even inscrutable, but definitely about death. Nothing was as certain to dampen desire as brooding about death, graves, and the moldering bodies of old friends.
At least, that’s what he thought when she touched him, kissed him, and murmured endearments. Instead, to his surprise, he found that he was not only ready but rampant, not merely capable but full of more vigor than he’d known since long before the shooting back in March. She was so giving yet demanding, alternately submissive and aggressive, shy yet all-knowing, as enthusiastic as a bride embarking on a new marriage, sweet and silken and alive, so wonderfully alive.
Later, as he lay on his side and she drifted asleep with her breasts pressed to his back, the two of them like a pair of spoons, he understood that making love with her had been a rejection of the frightening yet darkly alluring presence in the cemetery. A day of brooding about death had proved to be a perverse aphrodisiac.
He was facing the windows. The draperies were open. Ghosts of snow whirled past the glass, dancing white phantoms, spinning to the music of the fluting wind, waltzing spirits, pale and cold, waltzing and pale, cold and spinning, spinning….
…in cloying blackness, blindly feeling his way toward the Giver, toward an offer of peace and love, pleasure and joy, an end to all fear, ultimate freedom, his for the taking, if only he could find the way, the path, the truth. The door. Jack knew he had only to find the door, to open it, and a world of wonder and beauty would lie beyond. Th
en he understood that the door was within himself, not to be found by stumbling through eternal darkness. Such an exciting revelation. Within himself. Paradise, paradise. Joy eternal. Just open the door within himself and let it in, let it in, as simple as that, just let it in. He wanted to accept, surrender, because life was hard when it didn’t have to be. But some stubborn part of him resisted, and he sensed the frustration of the Giver beyond the door, frustration and inhuman rage. He said, I can’t, no, can’t, won’t, no. Abruptly the darkness acquired weight, compacting around him with the inevitability of stone forming around a fossil over millennia, a crushing and unrelenting pressure, and with that pressure came the Giver’s furious assertion: Everything becomes, everything becomes me, everything, everything becomes me, me, me. Must submit…useless to resist…let it in…paradise, paradise, joy forever…let it in. Hammering on his soul. Everything becomes me. Jarring blows at the very structure of him, ramming, pounding, colossal blows shaking the deepest foundations of his existence: let it in, let it in, let it in, LET IT IN, LET IT IN, LET IT IN, LET IT ININININININ—
A brief internal sizzle and crack, like the hard quick sound of an electrical arc jumping a gap, jittered through his mind, and Jack woke. His eyes snapped open. At first he lay rigid and still, so terrified he could not move.
Bodies are.
Everything becomes me.
Puppets.
Surrogates.
Jack had never before awakened so abruptly or so completely in an instant. One second in a dream, the next wide awake and alert and furiously thinking.
Listening to his frantic heart, he knew that the dream had not actually been a dream, not in the usual sense of the word, but…an intrusion. Communication. Contact. An attempt to subvert and overpower his will while he slept.
Everything becomes me.
Those three words were not so cryptic now as they had seemed before, but an arrogant assertion of superiority and a claim of dominance. They had been spoken both by the unseen Giver in the dream and by the hateful entity that communicated through Toby in the graveyard yesterday. In both instances, waking and sleeping, Jack had felt the presence of something inhuman, imperious, hostile, and violent, something that would slaughter the innocent without remorse but preferred to subvert and dominate.