by Dean Koontz
“Don’t plan to,” Bobby said.
No longer the smooth and self-assured performer, Jackie Jaxx had had enough for one night. “Listen, Bobby, I’m sure that whatever you have to tell us is fascinating, and you’re bound to’ve come back with a lot of boffo anecdotes, wherever you went, but I for one don’t want to hear about it.”
“Boffo anecdotes?” Bobby said.
Jackie shook his head. “Don’t want to hear ‘em. Sorry. It’s my fault, not yours. I like show biz ’cause it’s a narrow life, you know? A thin little slice of the real world, but exciting ‘cause it’s all bright colors and loud music. You don’t have to think in show biz, you can just be. I just want to be, you know. Perform, hang out, have fun. I got opinions, sure, colorful and loud opinions about everything, show-biz opinions, but I don’t know a damn thing, and I don’t want to know a damn thing, and I sure as hell don’t want to know about what happened here tonight, ’cause it’s the kind of thing that turns your world upside down, makes you curious, makes you think, and then pretty soon you’re no longer happy with all the things that made you happy before.” He raised both hands, as if to forestall argument, and said, “I’m outta here,” and a moment later he was.
At first, as he told the others what had happened to him, Bobby walked slowly around the room, marveling at ordinary items, finding wonder in the mundane, relishing the solidity of things. He put his hand on Julie’s desk, and it seemed to him that nothing in the world was more wondrous than humble Formica—all those molecules of man-made chemicals lined up in perfect, stable order. The framed prints of Disney characters, the inexpensive furniture, the half-empty bottle of Scotch, the flourishing pothos plant on a stand by the windows—all of those things were suddenly precious to him.
He had been traveling only thirty-nine minutes. He took almost as long to tell them a condensed version. He had popped out of the office at 4:47 and returned at 5:26, but he’d done enough traveling—via teleportation or otherwise—to last the rest of his life.
On the sofa, with Julie and Clint and Lee gathered around, Bobby said, “I want to stay right here in California. I don’t need to see Paris. Don’t need London. Not any more. I want to stay where I have my favorite chair, sleep every night in a bed that’s familiar—”
“Damn right you will,” Julie interjected.
“—drive my little yellow Samurai, open a medicine cabinet where the Anacin and toothpaste and mouthwash and styptic pencil and Bactine and Band-Aids are exactly where they ought to be.”
By 6:15 Frank had not reappeared. During Bobby’s account of his adventures, no one mentioned Frank’s second disappearance or wondered aloud when he would return. But all of them kept glancing at the chair from which he had vanished initially and at the comer of the room from which he had dematerialized the second time.
“How long do we wait here for him?” Julie finally asked.
“I don’t know,” Bobby said. “But I have a feeling ... a real bad feeling ... that maybe Frank’s not going to regain control of himself this time, that he’s just going to keep popping from one place to another, faster and faster, until sooner or later he’s unable to put himself back together again.”
48
WHEN HE came straight from Japan into the kitchen of his mother’s house, Candy was seething with anger, and when he saw the cats on the table, where he ate his meals, his anger grew into a full-blown rage. Violet was sitting in a chair at the table; her ever-silent sister was in another chair beside her, hanging on her. Cats lay under their chairs and around their feet, and five of the biggest were on the table, eating bits of ham that Violet fed them.
“What’re you doing?” he demanded.
Violet did not acknowledge him either with a word or a glance. Her gaze was locked with that of a dark gray mongrel that was sitting as erect as a statue of an Egyptian temple cat, patiently nibbling at a few small bits of meat offered on her pale palm.
“I’m talking to you,” he said sharply, but she did not respond.
He was sick of her silences, weary to death of her infinite strangeness. If not for the promise that he had made to his mother, he would have torn Violet open right there and fed on her. Too many years had passed since he had tasted the ambrosia in his sainted mother’s veins, and he had often thought that the blood in Violet and Verbina was, in a way, the same blood that had flowed in Roselle. He wondered—and sometimes dreamed—of how his sisters’ blood might feel upon the tongue, how it might taste.
Looming over her, staring down as she continued to commune with the gray cat, he said, “This is where I eat, damn you!”
Violet still said nothing, and Candy struck her hand, knocking the remaining bits of ham helter-skelter. He swept the plate of ham off the table, as well, and took tremendous satisfaction in the sound of it shattering on the floor.
The five cats on the table were not the least startled by his fury, and the greater number on the floor remained unfazed by the ping and clatter of china fragments.
At last Violet turned her head, tilted it back, and looked up at Candy.
Simultaneously with their mistress, the cats on the table turned their heads to look haughtily at him, too, as if they wished him to understand what a singular honor they were bestowing upon him simply by granting him their attention.
That same attitude was apparent in the disdain in Violet’s eyes and in the faint smirk that curled the edges of her ripe mouth. More than once he had found her direct gaze withering, and he had turned away from her, rattled and confused. Certain that he was her superior in every way, he was perplexed by her unfailing ability to defeat him or force him into a hasty retreat with just a look.
But this time would be different. He had never been as furious as he was at that moment, not even seven years ago when he had found his mother’s bloody, sundered body and had learned the ax had been wielded by Frank. He was angrier now because that old rage had never subsided; it had fed on itself all these years, and on the humiliation of repeatedly failing to get his hands on Frank when the opportunities to do so arose. Now it was a midnight-black bile that coursed in his veins and bathed the muscles of his heart and nourished the cells of his brain where visions of vengeance were spawned in profusion.
Refusing to be cowed by her stare, he seized her thin arm and jerked her violently to her feet.
Verbina made a soft, woeful sound upon her separation from her sister, as if they were Siamese twins, for God’s sake, as if tissue had been torn, bones split.
Shoving his face close to Violet’s, he sprayed her with spittle as he spoke: “Our mother had one cat, just one, she liked things clean and neat, she wouldn’t approve of this mess, this stinking brood of yours.”
“Who cares,” Violet said in a tone of voice that was at once disinterested and mocking. “She’s dead.”
Grabbing her by both arms, he lifted her off her feet. The chair behind her fell over as he swung her away from it. He slammed her up against the pantry door so hard that the sound was like an explosion, rattling the loose kitchen windows and some dirty silverware on a nearby counter. He had the satisfaction of seeing her face contort with pain and her eyes roll back in her head as she nearly passed out from the blow. If he had smashed her against the door any harder, her spine might have cracked. He dug his fingers cruelly into the pale flesh of her upper arms, pulled her away from the door, and slammed her into it again, though not as hard as before, just making the point that it might have been as hard, that it could be as hard the next time if she displeased him.
Her head had fallen forward, for she was teetering on the edge of consciousness. Effortlessly, he held her against the door, with her feet eight inches off the floor, as if she weighed nothing at all, thereby forcing her to consider his incredible strength. He waited for her to come around.
She was having difficulty getting her breath, and when at last she stopped gasping and raised her head to face him, he expected to see a different Violet. He had never struck her before. A fatef
ul line had been crossed, one over which he never expected to trespass. With his promise to his mother in mind, he had kept his sisters safe from the often dangerous world outside, provided them with food, kept them warm in cold weather and cool in the heat, dry when it rained, but year after year he had performed his brotherly duties with growing frustration, appalled by their increasingly shameless and mysterious behavior. Now he realized that disciplining them was a natural part of protecting them; up in Heaven, his mother had probably despaired of his ever realizing the need for discipline. Thanks to his rage, he had stumbled upon enlightenment. It felt good to hurt Violet a little, just enough to bring her to her senses and to prevent her from spiraling further into the decadence and animal sensuality to which she had surrendered herself. He knew he was right to punish her. He waited eagerly for her to lift her head and face him, for he knew that they had entered a new relationship and that the awareness of these profound changes would be evident in her eyes.
At last, breathing somewhat normally, she raised her head and met Candy’s gaze. To his surprise, none of his own enlightenment had been visited upon his sister. Her white-blond hair had fallen across her face, and she stared through it, like a jungle animal peering through its wind-tossed mane. In her icy blue eyes, he perceived something stranger and more primitive than anything he had seen there before. A gleeful wildness. Indefinable hungers. Need. Though she had been hurt when he had thrown her against the pantry door, a smile played on her full lips again. She opened her mouth, and he felt her hot breath against his face as she said, “You’re strong. Even the cats like the feel of your strong hands on me ... and so does Verbina.”
He became aware of her long bare legs. The flimsiness of her panties. The way her red T-shirt had pulled up to expose her flat belly. The swell of her full breasts, which seemed even fuller than they were because of the leanness of the rest of her. The sharp outlines of her nipples against the material of the shirt. The smoothness of her skin. Her smell.
Revulsion burst through him like pus from a secret inner abscess, and he let go of her. Turning, he saw that the cats were looking at him. Worse, they were still lying where they had been when he had pulled Violet from her chair, as if they had not been frightened by his outrage even briefly. He knew their equanimity meant that Violet had not been frightened, either, and that her erotic response to his fury—and her mocking smile—was not in the least feigned.
Verbina was slumped in her chair, her head bowed, for she was no more able to look at him directly now than she had ever been. But she was grinning, and her left hand was between her legs, her long fingers tracing lazy circles on the thin material of her panties, under which lay the dark cleft of her sex. He needed no more proof that some of Violet’s sick desire had communicated itself to Verbina, and he turned away from her too.
He tried to leave the room quickly, but without looking as if he was fleeing from them.
In his scented bedroom, safely among his mother’s belongings, Candy locked the door. He was not sure why he felt safer with the lock engaged, though he was certain it was not because he feared his sisters. There was nothing about them to fear. They were to be pitied.
For a while he sat in Roselle’s rocker, remembering the times, as a child, when he’d curled in her lap and contentedly sucked blood from a self-inflicted wound in her thumb or in the meaty part of her palm. Once, but unfortunately only once, she had made a half-inch incision in one of her breasts and held him to her bosom while he drank her blood from the same flesh where other mothers gave, and other children received, the milk of maternity.
He had been five years old that night when, in this very room and in this chair, he tasted the blood of her breast. Frank, seven years old then, had been asleep in the room at the end of the hall, and the twins, who’d only recently reached their first birthday, were asleep in a crib in the room across from their mother’s. Being alone with her when all the others slept—oh, how unique and treasured that made him feel, especially since she was sharing with him the rich liquid of her arteries and veins, which she never offered to his siblings; it was a sacred communion, dispensed and received, that remained their secret.
He recalled being in something of a swoon that night, not merely because of the heavy taste of her rich blood and the unbounded love that was represented by the gift of it, but because of the metronomic rocking of the chair and the lulling rhythms of her voice. As he sucked, she smoothed his hair away from his brow and spoke to him of God’s intricate plan for the world. She explained, as she had done many times before, that God condoned the use of violence when it was committed in the defense of those who were good and righteous. She told him how God had created men who thrived on blood, so they might be used as the earthly instruments of God’s vengeance on behalf of the righteous. Theirs was a righteous family, she said, and God had sent Candy to them to be their protector. None of this was new. But though his mother had spoken of these things many times during their secret communions , Candy never grew tired of hearing them again. Children often relish the retelling of a favorite story. And as with certain particularly magical tales, this story somehow did not become more familiar with retelling but curiously more mysterious and appealing.
That night in his sixth year, however, the story took a new turn. The time had come, his mother said, for him to apply the truly amazing talents he had been given, and embark upon the mission for which God had created him. He had begun to exhibit his phenomenal talents when he was three, the same age at which Frank’s far more meager gifts had become evident. His telekinetic abilities—primarily his talent for telekinetic transportation of his own body—particularly enchanted Roselle, and she quickly saw the potential. They would never want for money as long as he could teleport at night into places where cash and valuables were locked away: bank vaults; the jewelry-rich, walk-in safes in Beverly Hills mansions. And if he could materialize within the homes of the Pollard family’s enemies, while they slept, vengeance could be taken without fear of discovery or reprisal.
“There’s a man named Salfont,” his mother cooed to him as he took his nourishment from her wounded breast. “He’s a lawyer, one of those jackals who prey on upstanding folks, nothing good about him at all, not that one. He handled my father’s estate—that’s your dear grandpa, little Candy—probated the will, charged too much, way too much, he was greedy. They’re all greedy, those lawyers.”
The quiet, gentle tone in which she spoke was at odds with the anger she was expressing, but that contradiction added to the sweet, hypnotic quality of her message.
“I’ve tried for years to get part of the fee returned to me, like I deserve. I’ve gone to other lawyers, but they all say his fee was reasonable, they all stick up for each other, they’re alike, peas in a pod, rotten little peas in rotten little pods. Took him to court, but judges are nothing except lawyers in black robes, they make me sick, the greedy lot of them. I’ve worried at this for years, little Candy, can’t get it out of my mind. That Donald Salfont, living in his big house in Montecito, overcharging people, overcharging me, he ought to have to pay for that. Don’t you think so, little Candy? Don’t you think he ought to pay?”
He was five years old and not yet big for his age, as he would be from the time he was nine or ten. Even if he could teleport into Salfont’s bedroom, the advantage of surprise might not be sufficient to ensure success. If either Salfont or his wife happened to be awake when Candy arrived, or if the first slash of the knife failed to kill the lawyer and brought him awake in a defensive panic, Candy would not be able to overpower him. He wouldn’t be in danger of getting caught or harmed, for he could teleport home in a wink; but he would risk being recognized. Police would believe a man like Salfont, even as regarded such a fantastic accusation as murder lodged against a five-year-old boy. They would visit the Pollard place, asking questions, poking around, and God knew what they might find or come to suspect.
“So you can’t kill him, though he deserves it,” Roselle whispere
d as she rocked her favorite child. She stared down intently into his eyes as he looked up from her exposed breast. “Instead, what you have to do is take something from him as vengeance for the money he took from me, something precious to him. There’s a new baby in the Salfont house. I read about it in the paper a few months ago, a little girl baby they called Rebekah Elizabeth. What kind of name is that for a girl, I ask you? Sounds high-falutin’ to me, the kind of name a fancy lawyer and his wife give a baby ’cause they think them and theirs is better than other people. Elizabeth is a queen’s name, you see, and you just look up what Rebekah is in the Bible, see if they don’t think way too much of themselves and their little brat. Rebekah ... she’s almost six months now, they’ve had her long enough to miss her when she’s gone, miss her bad. I’ll drive you past their house tomorrow, my precious little Candy boy, let you see where it is, and tomorrow night you’ll go there and visit the Lord’s vengeance on them, my vengeance. They’ll say a rat got into the room, or something of the sort, and they’ll blame themselves until the day they’re dead too.”
The throat of Rebekah Salfont had been tender, her blood salty. Candy enjoyed the adventure of it, the thrill of entering the house of strangers without their permission or knowledge. Killing the girl while grownups slept in the adjoining room, unaware, filled him with a sense of power. He was just a boy, yet he slipped past their defenses and struck a blow for his mother, which in a way made him the man of the Pollard house. That heady feeling added an element of glory to the excitement of the kill.
His mother’s requests for vengeance were thereafter irresistible.
For the first few years of his mission, infants and very young children were his only prey. Sometimes, in order not to present a pattern to the police, he did not bite them but disposed of them in other ways, and occasionally he took hold of them and teleported out of the house with them, so no body was ever found.
Even so, if Roselle’s enemies had all been from in and around Santa Barbara, the pattern could not have been hidden. But often she required vengeance against people in far places, about whom she read in newspapers and magazines.
He remembered, in particular, a family in New York State, who won millions of dollars in the lottery. His mother had felt that their good fortune had been at the expense of the Pollard family, and that they were too greedy to be permitted to live. Candy had been fourteen at the time, and he had not understood his mother’s reasoning-but he had not questioned it, either. She was the only source of truth to him, and the thought of disobedience never crossed his mind. He had killed all five members of that family in New York, then burned their house to the ground with their bodies in it.
His mother’s thirst for vengeance followed a predictable cycle. Immediately after Candy killed someone for her, she was happy, filled with plans for the future; she would bake special treats for him and sing melodically while she worked in the kitchen, and she would begin a new quilt or an elaborate needlepoint project. But over the next four weeks her happiness would dim like a light bulb on a rheostat, and almost one month to the day after the killing, having lost interest in baking and crafts, she would begin to talk about other people who had wronged her and, by extension, the Pollard family. Within two to four more weeks, she would have settled on a target, and Candy would be dispatched to fulfill his mission. Consequently, he killed on only six or seven occasions each year.
That frequeney satisfied Roselle, but the older Candy got, the less it satisfied him. He had not merely acquired a thirst for blood but a craving that occasionally overwhelmed him. The thrill of the hunt also intoxicated him, and he longed for it as an alcoholic longed for the bottle. Not least of all, the mindless hostility of the world toward his blessed mother motivated him to kill more often. Sometimes it seemed that virtually everyone was against her, scheming to harm her physically or to take money that was rightfully hers. She had no dearth of enemies. He remembered days when fear oppressed her; then at her direction all the blinds and drapes were drawn, the doors locked and sometimes even barricaded with chairs and other furniture, against the onslaught of adversaries who never came but who might have. On those bad days she became despondent and told him that so many people were out to get her that even he could not protect her forever. When he begged her to turn him loose, she refused and only said, “It’s hopeless.”
Then, as now, he tried to supplement the approved murders with his forays into the canyons in search of small animals. But those blood feasts, rich as they sometimes were, never quenched his thirst as thoroughly as when the vessel was human.
Saddened by too many memories, Candy rose from the rocking chair and nervously paced the room. The blind was up, and he glanced with increasing interest at the night beyond the window.
After failing to catch Frank and the stranger who had teleported into the backyard with him, after the confrontation with Violet had taken that unexpected turn and left him with undissipated rage, he was smoldering, hot to kill, but in need of a target. With no enemy of the family in sight, he would have to slaughter either innocent people or the small creatures that lived in the canyons. The problem was—he dreaded evoking his sainted mother’s disappointment, up there in Heaven, yet he had no appetite for the thin blood of timid beasts.
His frustration and need built by the minute. He knew he was going to do something he would later regret, something that would make Roselle turn her face from him for a time.
Then, just when he felt he might explode, he was saved by the intrusion of a genuine enemy.
A hand touched the back of his head.
He whirled around, feeling the hand withdraw as he turned.
It had been a phantom hand. No one was there.
But he knew it was the same presence that he had sensed in the canyon last night. Someone out there, not of the Pollard family, had psychic ability of his own, and the very fact that Roselle was not his mother made him an enemy to be found and eliminated. The same person had visited Candy several times earlier in the afternoon, reaching out tentatively, probing at him but not making full contact.
Candy returned to the rocking chair. If a real enemy was going to put in an appearance, it would be worth waiting for him.
A few minutes later, he felt the touch again. Light, hesitant, quickly withdrawn.
He smiled. He started rocking. He even hummed softly—one of his mother’s favorite songs.
Banking the coals of rage eventually made them burn brighter. By the time the shy visitor grew bolder, the fire would be white hot, and the flames would consume him.
49
AT TEN minutes to seven, the doorbell rang. Felina Karaghiosis did not hear it, of course. But each room of the house had a small red signal lamp in one comer or another, and she could not miss the flashing light that was activated by the bell.
She went into the foyer and looked through the sidelight next to the front door. When she saw Alice Kasper, a neighbor from three doors down the street, she switched off the dead bolt, removed the security chain from its slot, and let her in.
“Hi, kid. How ya doin’?”
I like your hair, Felina signed.
“Do ya really? Just got it cut, and the girl said did I want the same old same old, or did I want to catch up with the times, and I thought what the hell. I’m not too old to be sexy, do ya think?”
Alice was only thirty-three, five years older than Felina. She had exchanged her trademark blond curls for a more modern cut that would require a new source of income just to pay for all the mousse she was going to use, but she looked great.
Come in. Want a drink?
“I’d love a drink, kid, and right now I could use six of ‘em, but I gotta say no. My in-laws came over, and we’re about to either play cards with ’em or shoot ’em—it depends on their attitude.”
Of all the people Felina knew in her day-to-day life, Alice was the only one, other than Clint, who understood sign language. Given the fact that most people harbored a prejudice against the deaf, t
o which they could not admit but on which they acted, Alice was her only girlfriend. But Felina happily would have given up their friendship if Mark Kasper—Alice’s son, for whom she had learned sign language—had not been born deaf.
“Why I came over, we got a call from Clint, asking me to tell ya he’s not on his way home yet, but he expects to get here maybe by eight. Since when does he work so late?”