The Crooked Staircase

by Dean Koontz

  A hundred and eighty pounds of inert Yegg was a lot of dead weight. Getting him onto the board required treating him as if he were several loosely connected sacks of potatoes, and after four or five minutes of struggle, she got the job done.

  The board was too short to hold all of him. His legs were off the sled from mid-thigh down, but the drag factor wouldn’t slow her too much.

  To prevent his arms from sliding off the board, she undid the belt on his Gucci chinos, shoved his hands under the waistband, and cinched the belt tight. He lay there as if fondling himself.

  To fashion a pull for the sled, she had employed one of the extension cords that she’d found stored in a garage cabinet. After flipping up the built-in chocks on the wheels, she pulled Simon Yegg to the main elevator, leaving the baseball cap on the foyer floor.

  Descending to the basement, she lifted the paper towels and checked the color in his face and made sure he was still breathing well. Then she replaced the towels and lightly spritzed them with more chloroform.

  In the theater, the carpet somewhat resisted the squeaking wheels, and when Jane pulled the sled into the lobby, Petra sat up straight, eyes wide. The girl worked her jaws, perhaps trying to shift the wad of saliva-soaked gauze in her mouth. She made urgent noises that, through the duct tape, were not words.

  Jane propped open the door between the lobby and the theater. She maneuvered the sled into the main room.

  There were three rows of chairs, five per row, but they were neither traditional theater seats nor in harmony with the French theme. These adjustable loungers, upholstered in leather, appeared more conducive to sleep than to cinema.

  The rows of chairs were flanked by wide aisles. Because the floor sloped down to a stage and a big screen—currently out of sight behind a burgundy-velvet curtain trimmed with enormous tassels—gravity more than overcame the impediment of the carpet.

  Between the front row and the stage, an eight-foot-wide flat area extended the width of the theater. She parked the sled there, where earlier she had left three more extension cords, the workbench stool from the garage, a Bernzomatic butane lighter with a long flexible neck that she had found in a kitchen drawer, and half a dozen sixteen-ounce bottles of water.

  She passed the first of the extension cords under the sled and used it as a rope to secure Simon Yegg’s upper arms to the board. In similar fashion, she strapped down his waist and then his legs. The rubber on the cords didn’t allow knots to be drawn as tight as she preferred them; therefore, with the butane lighter, she fused them into knots that couldn’t be undone, using some of the water in one of the bottles each time the melting rubber began to flame.

  She plucked the paper towels off the wife killer’s face and tossed them aside. A faint moist residue of chloroform lent a sheen to his upper lip, which evaporated even as she watched, and a few tiny drops of dew sparkled in his nose hairs. Simon would regain consciousness in ten to fifteen minutes.

  43

  After Tanuja Shukla receives her nanomachine control mechanism, Carter Jergen gathers up the empty ampules and other debris, and he returns everything to the cooler, leaving no significant evidence behind.

  He goes to the women’s restroom and returns with the candle glass that was left there. He sets it on the table with the other two and turns off the overhead fluorescents, preferring to pass the waiting period in this softer and more atmospheric light.

  Dubose stands by the kitchen sink, smoking a joint, taking deep breaths and holding them and expelling them less with a sigh than with a gruff bearish exhalation, all the while watching the girl.

  Jergen supposes he knows what that means. This waiting period isn’t likely to be as tedious as it has been during other recent conversions.

  He settles at the table with his iPad and goes online to explore hotel possibilities for a Caribbean vacation that he’s hoping to take in September.

  But for Dubose’s smoking and what little noises Jergen makes, the church kitchen is quiet. The twins now understand that any question will receive a blow rather than an answer, as will any comment or argument. They are powerless, and they are acutely aware of it. All the Shukla moxie has evaporated. They don’t know what the injections have done to them, and fear of the unknown is paralyzing. If they aren’t in despair, if they haven’t utterly abandoned hope, they are despondent, with no current capacity for hope. Part of the reason they do not speak is no doubt because they fear that their voices will sound weak and lost, that hearing themselves will only further discourage them.

  Sooner than Jergen expects, Dubose pinches out the remainder of the joint, drops it in a jacket pocket, and crosses the room to the girl. He unties the leash from the stretcher bar and tells her to get up. When she hesitates, he jerks hard on the leash, as if he’s an impatient child and she’s a pull toy that’s wedged immobile.

  She rises from the chair, and her brother says anxiously, “What’s happening, what’re you doing?”

  Jergen leans forward, grabs the kid’s left ear, twists it hard enough to crush a little cartilage and make his point. Sanjay tries to pull his head away, but Jergen won’t allow that.

  As Dubose leads the girl toward the hallway door, she looks back and says her brother’s name, not as if calling for his help, but as if saying good-bye. Then she and Dubose are gone.

  When Jergen lets go of the ear, Sanjay tries to thrust to his feet, as if there might be some slightest chance that the leash will snap or the collar come undone, or the dinette chair disintegrate as he thrashes valiantly in it. He transitions directly from despondency to that energized form of despair called desperation. Although he surges from stoic immobility into a screaming rage, his fury will not gain him anything, for he is furious less with Dubose than with himself, with his helplessness, which will endure for the rest of his life.

  Jergen puts aside his iPad to watch Sanjay, who for the moment is more entertaining than any Caribbean vacation.

  In but a minute, Sanjay exhausts himself and sags in the chair, slick with sweat. He is like a horse that, having been thrown into a panic by a snake, has stamped and reared so often, to no avail, that it has no strength remaining for anything other than the tremors coursing through it from throttle to thigh, its blind terror otherwise expressed only in its eyes, which seem to swell in their sockets, encircled by an extraordinary field of white, the irises like twin craters in twin moons.

  Such are Sanjay’s eyes when Carter Jergen says, “In a way, she did this to herself, to you. The two of you were on the Hamlet list to be adjusted, but you weren’t near the top until her novel was published three weeks ago. Alecto Rising. The response of certain critics and too many deeply affected readers led the computer to move you to the top of the list.”

  Jergen is not sure that Sanjay can make sense of what he hears, so deeply is he sunk in misery, his mind turning round and round on a descending spiral path of grief and guilt. But Jergen and Dubose have won the day, and there’s no point in achieving a win if you can’t have some fun with it.

  “Her novel will inspire the worst ideas among impressionable younger generations. The computer identifies it as potentially a dangerous iconic work. So it’s fitting—don’t you think?—that the two of you will now be tasked with discrediting it and all your other writing, ensuring that every word the two of you have put on paper will go out of print forever.”

  Sanjay’s gaze fixed on the nearest of the candles, the faux fire bright in his eyes, which might never again be alive with a true fire.

  “It used to take eight to twelve hours after injection for the control mechanism to fully form across the brain. Only in the last few days have we been using a new version of the secret sauce that completes the job in four hours. Millions of brain-tropic molecular machines swimming upstream toward those three pounds of tissue in your skull. Sanjay Shukla is only secondarily the body in this chair before me. The essential
you is those three pounds. Can you feel those millions of invaders swimming through you and at the same time toward you? I am fascinated by it all. I wonder…when they pass through the walls of cerebral capillaries and into the very tissue of the brain, when they begin to link up and form a web across the various lobes, in the final hour of your independence, before everything settles down up there, will you feel as if spiders are creeping inside your skull?”

  Sanjay’s eyes turn from the candle and meet Jergen’s stare. In a whisper, he declares, “You’re insane.”

  “Sticks and stones,” Jergen replies.

  “Evil,” Sanjay says. “Not all madmen are evil, but all evil men are mad.”

  Jergen smiled. “You shouldn’t speak so disparagingly of someone who will shortly be your absolute master.”

  44

  Jane returned from the theater to the lobby and released the chocks on the wheels of the office chair. She rolled Petra Quist into the theater and parked her in the shadows behind the back row of seats, where she could see and hear what was to come. Then she fixed the wheels in place once more.

  After unwinding the duct tape, Jane waited while the party girl worked the sodden mass of gauze between her teeth and expelled it into her lap.

  Considering that Simon Yegg made a habit of hurting her and that she claimed to be over him, Petra seemed unduly worried about his well-being, almost breathless with concern. “My God, what’ve you done to him, did you kill him already, his face was covered, wasn’t his face covered?”

  “It’s not covered now,” Jane said, directing Petra’s attention to her nuclear love machine below, bound like Gulliver in Lilliput. She had adjusted the theater lighting so that only the stage and the area immediately in front of it were illuminated. “He’s just asleep, recovering from an encounter with chloroform.”

  “What are you going to do to him?”

  “Not a fraction of what he deserves.”

  “He’s not all bad. I mean, he’s not so nice sometimes, but he’s not a hopeless shit.”

  Jane said, “Listen, I’ve brought you into this so you can hear him and maybe learn something. Lying down there, Simon’s not at an angle where he can see you even if he turns his head, even if you weren’t in the dark up here. Among other things, you’ll learn what he really thinks about you. It’ll be worth hearing. But if you can’t keep your mouth shut, I’ll gag and duct-tape you again.”

  “No. Don’t. I can’t. I thought I was gonna puke and choke on it, you know.”

  “Then be silent.”

  “Okay. I will. But please, please, please let me go potty.”

  Those blue eyes were so pellucid that they seemed like windows to a soul in all its truth, but artful cunning was required to meet eye to eye for as long as this and seem guileless. Jane put a hand to her captive’s head, and the girl flinched. She wanted only to smooth the disarranged hair back from Petra’s forehead, which she did before saying, “Sorry, but I don’t trust you yet. In spite of all your attitude, you have so little self-esteem that you’ll go on needing Simon until you have even less respect for him than you have for yourself.”

  Sudden color pinked the girl’s pale cheeks and her chin thrust forward. She seemed about to pull the trigger on her temper. But she restrained herself, opting for a look of pitiable distress. “I really gotta pee.”

  “It’s not my chair,” Jane said, “so have at it.”

  45

  Sanjay Shukla finds no hope in the candlelight and yet another reason for despair in Carter Jergen’s eyes, and so he turns his attention to the open door through which Radley Dubose led Tanuja.

  In a voice breaking with anguish, he says, “Where has he taken my sister?”

  “If Pastor Gordon has an office here,” says Jergen, “it’s a cozy space with all the amenities. He didn’t strike me as one of those clergy who believes there’s any point to a vow of poverty. Mainly, my partner will want a nice big sofa.”

  The thin sound that escapes the younger twin suggests an intensity of grief that Jergen has never heard before.

  “You don’t have to worry that I might have any such intentions, Sanjay. That good old boy was raised in backwoods West Virginia. I wasn’t. Oh, yes, he was accepted at Princeton and earned a degree. But the standards expected of Princeton grads, if any standards are expected at all, are magnitudes below those of Harvard alumni. I’d rather be partnered with one of my own kind, but I must admit he does keep things interesting.”

  The girl’s first cry seems to issue from a greater distance than is in fact the case, and it sounds like the forlorn voice of some exotic night bird, though lonelier and eerier than a loon’s call and more miserable than the moaning of an ibis.

  Jergen’s buttoned-up old-school father, Carlton, has long been a member of New England’s preeminent bird-watching club, one of his many cultured interests. Inevitably, some of the elder Jergen’s deep knowledge of all things avian has rubbed off on his son, although by his university days, Carter’s interests were quite different from those of his old man.

  Tanuja’s protests no longer sound birdlike in any way, nor distant. They are shrill and terrible. She is apparently resisting with all her strength, though considering Dubose’s size and the ferocity of his appetites, resistance is futile.

  Kicking violently at the floor, Sanjay rocks the chair backward from the table and attempts to stand, but the taut collar-and-leash tether makes it impossible for him to unbend his body from a sitting position and thrust to his feet. He can neither release the collar nor reach far enough behind and down to the knot at the stretcher bar. The chair topples onto its side, bearing him with it. He yanks on the arms of it as though he will break them off with his bare hands, but the frame of the chair is welded steel. The minimal restraint allows the illusion of easy escape; therefore, the truth of his helplessness is all the more frustrating. He is furious in his anguish, in his excruciating grief, managing to rattle the chair in a half circle to no useful purpose. Throughout this, he never shouts or screams, but grunts and hisses and snarls in this dumb-animal striving, breathing ever more noisily, until at last he is no longer able to deny his impotence. He lies on his side in the cage of his chair, immobilized and weeping miserably.

  If the sister continues to make any noise, her protests are of little volume and contained within some room farther along the hall, where what was inevitable has come to pass.

  Carter Jergen rises from his chair and stands over Sanjay, gazing down at him. “It’s not as bad as you think. It won’t haunt you the rest of your life. You won’t forever be eaten by guilt. In fact, though your sister is traumatized and filled with shame now, she’ll have entirely recovered by dawn. No trauma, no shame. Once your control mechanisms self-assemble and you’ve become adjusted people, I only need to tell you and her to forget everything that occurred tonight, and all of it will be gone from memory—including me, including my partner and what he’s done. A thing that can’t be remembered…well, that’s as good as if it never happened.”

  46

  Cinema Parisian. The area in front of the stage and the apron of the stage itself lighted as if for live entertainment to precede the movie, the front row of seats in half light, the second row in shadow, the third in darkness draped…And at the highest point of the theater, shrouded in gloom, the lone member of the audience, Petra Quist, perhaps a candidate for redemption, perhaps beyond reclamation…

  Jane placed the workshop stool beside the mechanic’s sled and sat there as Simon Yegg muttered, his facial expression morphing to reflect the rapidly changing circumstances in one of the vivid and macabre dreams that sometimes made an ordeal of chloroform sleep.

  He startled awake, blinked at her towering over him, mumbled, “No,” and closed his eyes as though he could refuse this reality and receive another. He repeated this exercise—“No…no…no…hell, no”—each time becoming more aware o
f his hard circumstances, testing the extension cords that bound him, until he came to the realization that there was but one world for him, whereupon he said in rapid order, “This sucks. Who’re you? What’s this about? You’re the walking dead. You realize that? You’re as dead as dead gets.”

  Jane said, “Given your situation, you talk some amazing trash. But I guess maybe you’ve got a good reason to pretend you’re full-on macho.”

  He clearly didn’t like what she said, but he failed to comment on her implication. “You can’t scare me. I don’t scare. You got me good. That was smart the way you got me like this. Real smart. So let’s deal. You want money. Everyone wants money. So okay, I got money. Though you should live long enough to spend a dime.”

  After a silence, smiling as if he amused her, Jane said, “Maybe I’m not here for money. Maybe this is about the Hamlet list.”

  “The what?”

  “Maybe it’s about these bastards who call themselves the Techno Arcadians, like thirteen-year-old nerd boys meeting in a clubhouse in a tree.”

  “You sure you have the right address, honey? Maybe this would make sense to somebody next door, but it’s just noise to me.”

  His confusion seemed genuine. His brother—Booth, big man in the Department of Justice—had been steering government business to him for years, but that didn’t mean he trusted Simon enough to involve him in the conspiracy that had killed her Nick.

  She said, “Or maybe I’m here on behalf of your ex-wives.”

  He didn’t need to hesitate to formulate a deceitful comeback. “They took me to the cleaners. What more could they want?”

  “They took you? Not the way I hear it.”

  “Everybody has her story.” He realized that in addition to the cords binding him, his hands were in his pants and cinched tight under his belt. “I got a circulation problem here. My fingers are numb.”