by Dean Koontz
“Now and then.”
“Maybe it’s a Humvee in disguise.”
“If this baby were a Transformer,” Pogo said, “about the most it would change into is a 1968 Dodge Charger.”
“As good as it gets. The 440 Magnum?”
“You’ve got an ear for gear.” Pogo drove out of the parking lot and turned right into the street.
Pax said, “You had to make some space to fit it. But the body looks factory normal.”
Pogo grinned. “Wouldn’t be fun if it looked like what it was.”
They were going to Bibi’s apartment. It seemed the most logical place to start. Nancy had given them her key, assuming only that Pax was staying there, not that he had another purpose as well.
“You sometimes think,” Pogo asked, “the Bibi we know isn’t the full Bibi?”
“She is exactly what she says she is. That’s part of her beauty. No deception. No masks. But I know what you mean. She’s at the same time a mystery.”
“She’s way deep,” Pogo said. “She’s got these currents running through her, they come up from some abyss, so deep that if you tried to scuba down there, you’d be crushed, you know, by the weight of all the ocean above.”
Pax nodded. “Sometimes it’s like she doesn’t know about herself what you just said.”
Braking to a stop at a red traffic light, Pogo spoke without glancing at Pax, though they were both wearing sunglasses and were therefore somewhat armored against the revelation of sentimentality. “I don’t know if I’ll ever love anybody as much as Beebs. She’s a sister to me, sister and brother and best friend, she’s the whole package. It means so much, man, I wouldn’t ever try for anything else, and spoil the way it is.”
“I know. You don’t have to say it. She feels the same.”
“Well, I just wanted it clear between us. Made me so damn happy when I first met you and you were what she said you were.”
“She deserves me, huh?”
“She deserves better, but you’re worth settling for.”
Pax laughed, and the traffic light changed, and he said, “You ever considered being a SEAL? I think maybe you’d make it.”
“I was born a seal, lowercase. Made for the ocean, but not the Navy. I’m not a dude with ambition.”
“I know,” Pax said. “Aspiration is your thing, not ambition. Skill rather than money. Honor rather than fame.”
“Bro, you have me confused with another Pogo.”
“Don’t think so. I know what’s under the hood. I have an ear for gear.”
They were silent for a block or so. Although the day was mild, the hard March sunlight laid a wintry glaze on window glass and white stucco walls, and even painted glistening icy-looking edges on the stiff green blades of the fan palms.
“You really think we can help her?” Pogo asked.
“I can’t stand to think anything else.”
“But brain cancer, a coma. Woof. A lot of bad news.”
“Cancer, yeah. But it’s not a coma. The brain waves prove that much. Not a coma.”
“Then what is it?”
Pax had been thinking about that since the third time Bibi’s voice had come to him. “We see her lying in the bed, and we think that’s her, that’s Bibi, but maybe it’s not. Not all of her, anyway.”
Pulling into the parking lot behind Bibi’s apartment complex, Pogo said, “Tell me you aren’t gassing off on some evil-twin trip.”
“When you’re asleep and dreaming, you’re in a sense dead to the real world, you’re living in the dream. Bibi’s not dreaming, but—”
“According to the brain waves, she’s dreaming.”
“The EEG also says she’s awake, which isn’t exactly the case, either. Anyway, she said she’s not dreaming.”
“Said? Said when?”
As Pogo slotted the Honda between younger vehicles of higher pedigrees, Pax sighed. “Okay. Here goes.” He recounted the three times that Bibi had spoken inside his head. “On one level, she’s aware of what’s going on in the hospital room…but right now it’s not where she’s living.”
“Yeah? So where is she living?”
“Damn if I know.”
“Living somewhere without her body.”
“I’m not saying it makes sense.”
“I thought that’s exactly what you were saying.”
“I’m saying, whether it makes sense or not, it’s what seems to be true. And she wants me—us—to find her.”
Pogo switched off the engine. Blond, tanned, eyes as dark and clear as sapphires, he looked in profile less like a standard-issue California surf rat than like a ship’s captain in the making. There was about him an aura of competence and responsibility that could be discerned also in the lines of his face, though a decade or two might pass before subtle evidence in the bone became obvious to everyone. Whatever he might make of himself, however, he would always be of the sea; just looking at him, you could almost hear waves breaking on the shore. After pondering, Pogo said, “I don’t know if I believe in telepathy.”
“Don’t know I do, either,” Pax admitted. “One thing I do know—wherever she is, even if it is a dream, what happens to her there affects her here. The bruises, the abrasions, the tattoo.”
“This is mondo weird.”
“I have a hunch, when we figure it out, it won’t be weird at all. When we’ve got all the pieces, it’ll make perfect sense.”
“Totally clever, how you got me to jump into this at the hospital, before you let me know what a kelphead mission it is.”
“You’d have jumped in with both feet anyway. What’s a kelphead?”
“A fool. Bad surfer. Hardly ever on his board, mostly wiped out with his head in the kelp. I was one before she taught me the right moves. ‘Find me,’ huh? How does that work?”
Removing his sunglasses, Pax said, “Seems logical to start here at the apartment.”
Pogo took off his shades. “What if we suck at this Sherlock stuff?”
“We won’t.”
As Pax opened his door, Pogo said, “What happens to her there affects her here?”
Pax turned his head and met Pogo’s eyes. He knew what question would come next, because anyone who truly loved her could not leave it unasked.
The kid said, “Then what if…what if she dies there?”
“She won’t,” Pax said, and got out of the car.
The voice of a stern but caring woman, who might have been a nurse or an elementary-school teacher before recording directions for a GPS system, encouraged Bibi through fog and darkness. She drove south along the coast to Laguna Canyon Road, then inland along that twisty route, which had its dangerous stretches even in the best of weather.
She indulged no superstition regarding the world after midnight, didn’t believe that she had entered the witching hour when broomstick riders filled the sky, but she had a sense of impending occult menace on this particular night, as on no other. Justified paranoia plucked the harpstrings of her nerves until she half expected that, behind the cataracts of fog, the world was being rearranged like a vast stage undergoing set changes. Balancing that irrational fear was an intuitive feeling that Pax must be coming home to her, that in fact he was already nearby. From time to time, she glanced to her right, with the peculiar expectation that he rode in the passenger seat, but of course he was never there.
As the canyon road wound among the folded foothills, the fog that slowly tumbled like great masses of dripping white laundry gradually gave way to sheer curtains and then to isolated tattered scraps. By the time she passed under the first freeway and turned off the canyon road onto a state route, no shred of mist remained, and a while later, after she passed under the last of the county’s freeways, she came to lonely territory, low hills and arid meadows of scraggly grass, bleak in the moon-chilled night.
Her virtual companion, whose succinct guidance had thus far been flawless, spoke for the first time out of character, as should not have been possible. The voice sounded like that of a young
girl. “In two hundred yards, you will want to stop at a house on the left.”
The highway topped a low rise and turned to the right as it descended, and ahead stood the promised house, soft light in its curtained windows. Two things about the three-story residence caused Bibi to take her foot off the accelerator and let the car coast down the gentle slope. First, it seemed to belong not merely in another state than California but on another continent, not here in open country but on a city street, with other houses crowded against it. Although lacking porch or portico, with no grand steps leading up to the front door, the house looked stately, its brick walls enhanced with limestone quoins at the corners and limestone surrounds at each window. Four chimneys pierced the steeply pitched roof, which might have been of slate. In addition to the strangeness of such a house in such a place, a feeling of familiarity caused Bibi to bring the coasting car almost to a stop. She had never traveled this highway before, had never seen this house. She could not recall having seen one very like it anywhere else, and yet moment by moment it seemed more familiar to her, until she was gripped by full-blown déjà vu.
As she eased past the place, a sudden memory flashed into her mind’s eye: Ashley Bell in a white dress with pale-blue lace collar, standing at a third-floor window, gazing out from this very house. She could recall nothing else, neither the occasion nor the date, but the memory was so clear and so poignant that she knew it must be real. The feeling of kindredness between Bibi and this girl, which had overcome her upon first seeing the photograph in Calida’s office, the sense of an equivalence between them, a sisterhood, rose in her once more, even more intense than previously. Ashley Bell in a white dress with pale-blue collar, standing at a third-floor window…If Bibi had known this child, then here was another incidence of self-deception, another part of her life edited out and burned away with the use of Captain’s memory trick.
She didn’t dare swing the Honda into the dirt driveway and approach the house boldly. There were countless foolish ways to die, but she hoped to avoid the egregiously stupid ones. She accelerated, drove over another low rise, out of sight of the residence, and parked on the shoulder of the highway. She sat contemplating her next move, trying to decide whether it might be egregiously stupid or just stupid. But in the end, there was nothing else she could do other than investigate the house.
The young girl’s voice that had issued from the GPS might have been that of Ashley Bell. Who else could it have been? There was no other child in this affair. After an absence of some hours, the supernatural forces that Calida had let into Bibi’s life seemed to have returned.
Bibi’s apartment was tastefully furnished in mid-century modern with Art Deco accents, simple and clean and welcoming and, in these circumstances, mysterious. Paxton dropped his duffel bag inside the front door. He stood with Pogo, surveying the living room, the dining area, the open kitchen beyond, listening warily, as though something unknown and unpleasant might materialize at any moment.
“What’re we looking for?” Pogo asked.
“Anything that doesn’t seem like our girl.”
“That’s kind of vague, don’t you think?”
“It’s as clear as could be. If someone laid out three hats and said one of them was Bibi’s, you’d know which it was—wouldn’t you?”
“She doesn’t like hats.”
“Exactly. If you see a hat, it’s suspicious.”
“So a hat is just like a metaphor for anything unBibi.”
“We’ll know it when we see it.”
“We will, huh?”
“If we’re expecting to see it, yes. People go through life failing to see all sorts of amazing things because they aren’t expecting to see them.”
“Do all Navy SEALs have a tendency to go mystical?”
“War,” Pax said, “either dulls the mind to despair or sharpens it toward intuitive truths.”
“Who said that?”
“I did. Let’s split up the rooms.”
“I’ll take her study,” Pogo said. “You take the bedroom. I wouldn’t feel right, looking through her lady things.”
Pax didn’t feel right looking through them, either, although not entirely for the same reason that Pogo would have found the task disconcerting. When he was eleven, a week after the sudden death of Sally May Colter—his much loved maternal grandmother—his mom had taken him to Sally’s house to pack the woman’s clothes in boxes to donate to a thrift shop. They also sorted through Sally’s books and jewelry and bibelots, deciding which items should be given to which friends and relatives as remembrances of her. That would have been a grim day, if his mom hadn’t told him numerous stories about Sally that he hadn’t known and that had kept her fresh in memory all these years. Going through the drawers in Bibi’s nightstands, highboy, and dresser, he repeatedly felt as if he were conducting a preliminary assessment to determine what would need to be disposed of upon her death.
In the walk-in closet, standing on a three-step stool, he found the metal lockbox on the highest shelf. It was about twenty inches square, ten inches deep.
He could not imagine anything more unBibi than this. She was practical, and the box was not. Fire-resistant but not fireproof, it would buckle in a vigorous blaze, and the lip of the lid would sneer open, inhaling flames. Portable, it was no obstacle to a burglar, but instead invited attention. And what was the point of having a lockbox for which you taped the key to the lid, as she had done?
Having finished searching the study, Pogo was looking through the kitchen cabinets when Pax entered and put his discovery on the dinette table. Against the red Formica, the metal box with its baked-on black finish looked ominous, as if they might be wise to call in a bomb-disposal specialist to deal with it.
“Something?” Pogo asked.
“Maybe.”
They sat at the table. Pax used the key. The piano hinge was a little stiff, but the lid opened all the way. Most of the contents lay under a rumpled chamois cloth, which held within its loose folds a worn and cracked and dirt-crusted dog collar.
Lifting that item with one finger, Pax said, “Have you seen this before?”
“No.”
“Why would she keep such a thing?”
Pogo took the collar, and as he examined it, dirt crumbled between his fingers. “Jasper,” he said, reading the name that had been neatly scored into the leather.
“Did she once have a dog named Jasper?”
“Kinda, sort of.” Frowning, Pogo pointed to another object in the document box, a spiral-bound notebook. “It’s full of stories about a dog named Jasper.”
The notebook measured perhaps six by nine inches and was almost an inch thick, containing well in excess of two hundred lined pages. On the cover, the name and logo of the stationery company had been painted over, creating a pale-beige background for a beautifully designed and rendered pen-and-ink Art Deco drawing of a leaping panther and a leaping gazelle, each on its hind legs and bounding away from the other.
“I drew that for her,” he said, “I drew special covers for most of her diaries and notebooks. She loved Art Deco even then.”
“I didn’t know you had such talent.”
Pogo shrugged.
“How old were you when you did this?”
“She was…ten when she wrote the Jasper stories, so I’d have been eight.”
“You had this technique at eight? Hell, you’re a prodigy.”
“I’m no Norman Rockwell. Drawing ability shows up early, that’s all. A sense of form. Perspective. People go to art school not to learn it, just to refine it. I could have. But there’s lots of things I could have done. Could-do only matters if it’s also want-to-do.”
Everyone, Pax believed, was more than she or he appeared to be, and one of the saddest things about the human condition was that most people never realized what talents, capacities, and depth they possessed. That Pogo had taken a full measure of himself must be one reason that Bibi so loved him.
“Why a panther and gazelle?
”
“It’s just a cool design. If there was another reason, I don’t remember.”
Pax fanned through the pages of neat handwriting, much like Bibi’s cursive script twelve years later, but with girlish flourishes that she no longer employed. Sometimes she dotted an i with a tiny circle, sometimes not, apparently preferring the circle when the word was particularly colorful, and she always dotted j’s with asterisks.
“She wrote the first draft of each story in a tablet,” Pogo said. “Edited it a couple times. Then copied it into the notebook.”
Short stories filled two-thirds of the volume. On the first blank page following them, Pax discovered two lines of verse that he recognized as coming from one of Bibi’s favorite poems, “The Evening of the Mind” by Donald Justice: Now comes the evening of the mind / Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood.
The stories had been written in blue ink. These lines of verse were in black. The blue had faded with time. The black remained dark and appeared freshly inscribed. Not a single i had been capped with a circle instead of a dot; and there were none of the other flourishes to be found in the handwriting of the ten-year-old Bibi.
Still puzzling over the leather collar, Pogo said, “She told me Olaf was wearing a worn-out, muddy collar when he showed up in that rainstorm. But she never told me there was a name on it.”
“Jasper. The name of the dog in these stories. Maybe she knew someone who had a dog named Jasper and this was his collar.”
Pogo shook his head. “The dog in the stories is her invention. Entirely. And it was smaller than Olaf. A black-and-gray mongrel, not a golden retriever. This collar would’ve been too big for Jasper.”
Pogo turning the leather strap. The buckle softly clinking. Bits of dirt flaking through his fingers and onto the table.
He said, “What’re the odds that she’d write all those stories about an abandoned dog named Jasper, and one day an abandoned dog named Jasper would show up at her front door?”
“The best in Vegas couldn’t figure those odds,” Pax said. “Maybe what you’re wondering is…could it have been a coincidence?”