by Dean Koontz
The mailbox offered no name, only the street number.
When Jane powered down the window to look at the call box, she could see no watchful lens. Apparently, as Overton had promised, no camera was associated with the gates, either.
Using the oversized keyboard on the call box, she entered the four digits of Overton’s membership number followed by his password—VIDAR—which was the name of the Norse god who survived Ragnarok, the war to end all things and all other gods. As the immense gates began to swing inward, she wondered if all these power-mad fools gave themselves the names of pagan gods.
She drew the Heckler & Koch, screwed the sound suppressor to it, and put the weapon on the passenger seat, within easy reach.
Considering Overton’s circumstances when she had grilled him, and the suffering he would endure if she didn’t return, Jane doubted that he had deceived her. Security guards programmed not to see members would at one time have struck her as an absurd lie, purest fantasy, but she remembered the regimented mice in Shenneck’s video.
Before her waited not just a property to reconnoiter, not just an investigation to be conducted. Before her lay something new and terrible and still unknown in spite of all that she had learned.
Apprehension gripped her, and she hesitated to proceed.
But there was nowhere else to go. To anyone who didn’t know her well, her story would be taken for the ravings of a paranoid. And friends who might believe her, even if they were in a position to provide help, might pay with their lives for doing so.
Overton knew more than he’d told her, but he wouldn’t willingly tell her more. She did not have it in her to torture him, to twist more out of him with pliers, carve it out of him with blades.
She reached into a pocket of her sport coat and brought out the silver oval in which was embedded a carved-soapstone profile of a woman. Half of a broken cameo locket.
In memory she heard Travis’s voice. I knew right away it was good luck.
She smoothed her thumb across the soapstone portrait, palmed the charm, and held it tight in her fist.
After a moment, she pocketed the cameo and drove through the gates with the expectation that she would have to fight her way out.
3
* * *
BORISOVICH HAS a three-room suite with a private bathroom on the ground floor of the mansion. It is very comfortable. He is given everything he needs. He is happy. His life is without stress.
Volodin has a ground-floor suite of his own. Volodin, too, is given everything he needs. He is happy. His life, too, is without stress.
Borisovich and Volodin are playing cards at the dinette table in Borisovich’s rooms. They are competitive players, though they do not play for money. They have no need of money.
Much of their time is spent in games. All kinds of card games. And backgammon. Chess. Mah-jongg. So many games.
In the communal game room, they often play billiards or darts, or shuffleboard. And there is a bowling alley with an automatic pin-setter.
Members of Aspasia never use the game room. It is provided for Borisovich and Volodin and the girls.
Their employers are thoughtful and generous. Borisovich feels fortunate to have been hired for this job. He knows that Volodin likewise feels most fortunate. And grateful. Their employers are thoughtful. And generous.
In the morning, between nine o’clock and eleven o’clock, when members are not welcome, Borisovich and Volodin will each choose a girl to service him. There are currently eight girls in residence. They are very beautiful girls. They are submissive.
Borisovich and Volodin may do anything with the girls—except hurt them. Borisovich and Volodin are not members.
On this occasion, they are playing gin rummy.
Each of them has a glass of Coca-Cola.
They were once heavy drinkers. Neither man indulges in alcohol anymore. They do not need it.
That sad life is far behind them. They do not dwell on it. They hardly remember.
They are happy now.
Borisovich does not talk much as they play. Neither does Volodin. When they do speak, their conversation is mostly about the game or the girls, or what they had for dinner.
For many people, conversation is mostly complaint and worry. Borisovich and Volodin have nothing to complain or worry about.
They do not leave the property. The travails of life in the world beyond these walls no longer affect them.
Within reach of each man is a Wilson Combat Tactical Elite .45 fitted with a sound suppressor. In the ten months that this facility has been in operation, they have needed to kill and dispose of only two intruders who entered the grounds together on the same night.
It felt good to kill them. A change of pace.
As Volodin lays down a full set of matched cards, earning bonus points, Borisovich hears the pleasant female voice of the official enunciator: A member has been admitted at the gate.
The enunciator is not a person. It is a mechanized monitoring system of important developments at Aspasia.
Volodin also receives the message. He stiffens, and he cocks his head as if the words come to him by virtue of his ears, which they do not.
There is nothing for the two men to do. They have no authority over—or interest in—the members.
Volodin records the score.
Borisovich shuffles the cards.
4
* * *
BEYOND THE GATES, the long driveway passed between colonnades of up-lighted phoenix palms, their massive cascading crowns forming a roof over two lanes of paving stones. This spectacular approach raised in Jane the expectation of the grandest of grand hotels at the farther end or perhaps an ornate palace.
In fact, something rather like a palace appeared: an enormous Spanish-themed villa. Under the barrel-tile roof, the textured stucco walls were either a pale gold or the exquisitely staged landscape lighting painted them that shade. An imposing balustrade outlined the generous terrace in front of the Roman-arched entry.
Overton had told her to drive past the house to a secondary but imposing structure with ten garage stalls. One of the doors opened automatically to receive the Bentley.
Jane was reluctant to park in the stall, for fear that once the door closed, she would not be able to get it open and retrieve the car in an emergency. But supposing this adventure turned sour, the front gate would be a greater problem than the garage; she could never drive through that barrier. If her luck went bad, she would most likely have to escape on foot, over the high estate wall.
Overton had said that in foul weather or fair, a club member could use an underground passageway between garage and house. In Jane’s circumstances, such a route sounded like a death trap.
When she stepped out of the garage stall, the segmented door descended behind her.
She carried the pistol openly, though she held it down at her side, the silencer-elongated barrel reaching to mid-calf.
Here in the gentler precincts of the valley, the quiet of the night was almost deep enough to suggest that the metropolitan hive lying to every point of the compass had been largely depopulated.
The moon seemed to smoke like a chalice of volatile venom.
She climbed three steps from the driveway, between sections of the balustrade, onto the front terrace.
The solid-wood door was contained within the Roman arch, which was flanked by columns. Above the arch and the spandrel, capitals supported an architrave, above the architrave a fluted frieze, and above the frieze a cornice on which stood two carved-stone life-size conquistadors, each holding a shield and a lance.
Across the façade of the house, light warmed the bronze-framed windows and made jewels of the beveled panes between the muntins.
The great house had a fairy-tale quality as it stood among the palm trees, but in spite of its beauty and its magical aura, Jane thought of Poe’s “The Haunted Palace” and its hideous throng.
No camera focused on the threshold, but beside the door was a keypa
d like the one that had gained her entrance at the main gate. Again she entered Overton’s membership number and the name Vidar.
The bolts in an electronic lock retracted, and the door swung open to reveal a deep foyer with an elegant parquetry floor in two marbles—black veined with gold, white veined with black.
Pistol at her side, Jane stepped inside.
The automatic door swung shut behind her, and the lock bolts shot home.
5
* * *
IN A VOICE NO EAR CAN DETECT, the enunciator declares, A member has been admitted to the house.
Borisovich deals the cards.
“Will there be another disposal?” Volodin wonders.
“There will or there won’t,” says Borisovich.
“Never before twice in one day. Or at least not that I recall.”
“Never twice in one month. Disposals are rare.”
“They are rare,” Volodin agrees.
“They are very rare.”
Volodin reviews his cards. “Do you really want to play more gin rummy?”
“I’m all right with it.”
“We could bring out the chess set.”
“I’m all right with either.”
“Me, too,” Volodin says.
“Stay with the gin rummy?” Borisovich asks.
Volodin nods. “For a little while. Why not?”
“Why not?” Borisovich agrees.
6
* * *
BEYOND THE FOYER, the main hall soared twenty feet to a coffered ceiling, and the floor featured French-limestone tiles. The house was constructed in a U, embracing three sides of a courtyard that could be seen between limestone columns, through floor-to-ceiling bronze-framed windows. The outdoor space was softly lighted by antique lampposts, and in the center of it, a swimming pool the size of a lake glowed as blue and sparkling as an immense sapphire, from which undulant currents of steam rose like yearning spirits.
The house stood in preternatural silence, a more profound quiet than Jane had ever heard before.
Along the hallway significant bronze statues stood on plinths and elegant sideboards held matched pairs of large Satsuma vases.
If Aspasia was what it claimed to be, every cliché of bordello décor had been avoided. An atmosphere of refined taste and high style allowed the members to satisfy extreme desires while imagining themselves to be superior to the hoi polloi who lived in flyover country or went to the wrong universities or to none at all.
From Overton, she knew that the ground floor had apartments for the security men, common rooms, a kitchen, and other spaces. But the truth of the place would be found on the second floor, where each girl had a suite of her own.
Two grand staircases lay beyond the foyer, one to the right ascending to the east wing, one to the left ascending to the west wing. Limestone treads and risers. Intricate bronze balustrades. The marble-clad walls of each staircase featured niches in which stood larger-than-life-size figures of the goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome: Venus, Aphrodite, Proserpina, Ceres….
Jane stood in the silence at the bottom of the stairs, gazing up into the higher silence, and felt that this elaborate brothel was in fact a mausoleum, where dreams and hopes came to be entombed. She didn’t want to go farther. She thought of the lab mice parading in lockstep, and she wondered if, by learning more about Shenneck and his conspirators, she would discover something so monstrous that it would be difficult to see the future past it.
There had been corruption in every civilization since time immemorial. If the corruption was of the heart, the culture could think its way to health with great effort. If the corruption was of the mind, it was more difficult to feel a way toward recovery, for the heart was a deceiver. If both mind and heart were riddled with malignancies—what then?
In the end, she had no choice.
Jane climbed the stairs.
The second-floor hallway was at least twelve feet wide and no less sumptuously finished than the spaces downstairs.
According to Overton, there were ten suites on the second floor—five in the east wing, five here in the west. Beside each door, in an ornate gold-leafed frame, hung a portrait of the girl who occupied the suite beyond. The portrait was a photo processed by computer to look like a high-quality oil painting, and the space within the frame was a large flat-screen display, not a canvas.
In the event that the girl was currently with another club member or otherwise indisposed, the screen would be blank, as though some art thief had cut the canvas out of the frame. In this wing of the house, two frames lacked portraits.
If extreme desires were at the moment being satisfied, no sound of pleasure or pain escaped from any suite into the hallway.
She stopped before a portrait of a stunning Eurasian beauty posed in a Chinese side chair with an elaborately carved rosewood back depicting dragons in conflict. The girl wore red-silk pajamas with a white-carnation motif along one side. Over her left breast, the flower bloomed in a state of early dissolution, spilling snowy petals down the side of the blouse and along one silken pant leg.
Jane turned the knob, and the door proved to be automated, swinging open of its own power. No less than four inches thick. Its weight must have been formidable, making its automation necessary.
She stepped into a foyer decorated in tasteful Shanghai Deco, paneled in honey-colored wood with ebony accents, and otherwise restricted to a color palette of silver and sapphire-blue.
When the door closed softly behind her, a brief sucking sound issued from it, as if it seated in an airtight seal.
Jane felt not as if she had moved from a hallway to a room, but as if she had stepped into a vessel from another world and was about to have an encounter with something so alien that she would never be the same.
7
* * *
BEYOND THE FOYER lay a living room in which sat the girl in the portrait, wearing the red pajamas with a deflowering chrysanthemum, posed in the dragon chair.
Jane had thought the computer must have idealized the woman’s beauty as it also restyled the photograph into a faux oil painting. But she proved no less beautiful and perhaps even more stunning than the picture could convey, in her early to mid-twenties.
She smiled and rose from the chair and stood not in the boldly seductive pose of a prostitute, not even with the cultured and genteel knowing air of a courtesan, but with her arms at her sides and her head ever-so-slightly bowed, wings of shoulder-length ink-black hair framing her delicate face, almost as a well-mannered child would stand in hope of a parent’s praise. Her dark-eyed stare was direct yet somehow shy, and when she spoke, her voice seemed ten years younger than she and sincere rather than practiced.
“Good evening. I’m so happy you could visit me.”
The girl had seen the pistol that Jane held at her side, but she exhibited no alarm or even the slightest interest, as if it was not for her to judge or even wonder about what a visitor brought into this suite.
“May I bring you a cocktail? Perhaps tea or coffee?”
“No,” Jane said. And then, “No, thank you. What is your name?”
The girl tilted her head, and her smile sweetened. “What would you like my name to be?”
“Whatever it really is.”
Their voices were subdued not only because they spoke softly but also because the walls seemed to absorb sound, as if lined with soundproofing akin to that in radio-station broadcast booths.
The girl nodded. “You may call me LuLing.” Whatever her name might be, it was not LuLing. “And what may I call you?”
“What would you like my name to be?”
“May I call you Phoebe?”
“Why Phoebe?” Jane wondered.
“In Greek it means bright and shining,” said LuLing, and ducked her head shyly. “Would you enjoy music, Phoebe?”
Moving past her toward the nearest window, Jane said, “Not just yet. Could we first…talk for a little while?”
“That would be lovel
y,” said LuLing.
Jane rapped a knuckle against a pane of glass. The window seemed to be exceptionally deep, triple-pane at least.
“Will you join me on the sofa?” asked LuLing.
The girl sat with her legs drawn up under her, one arm extended gracefully along the back of the sofa.
Jane sat a few feet from LuLing and put the pistol on the cushion at her side, not between them.
“It is a special pleasure when a lady visits me,” said LuLing.
Jane had wondered if the club restricted membership to men, but evidently that wasn’t the case. “I suppose it doesn’t happen often.”
“Not often enough. Girl fun is special fun. You are quite lovely, Phoebe.”
“I’m not in your league.”
“You are as modest as you are lovely.”
“How long have you…been here, LuLing?”
The girl’s smile didn’t freeze exactly, but it was tempered with puzzlement. “There is no time here. We have no clocks. We have stepped out of the world, out of time. It is sweet here.”
“But you must know how long it’s been. A month? Three months?”
“We must not talk time. Time is the enemy of all good things.”
“Do you ever think about leaving this place?” Jane asked.
LuLing raised her eyebrows. “Why ever would I want to leave? What is out there other than ugliness and loneliness and horror?”
The woman’s conversation did not quite seem canned, but there was a quality of conditioning in her every gesture and response. As genuine as she sounded with her adolescent voice, as sincere as her every expression seemed to be, there was something about her so unreal as to be almost extraterrestrial.