The Crooked Staircase

by Dean Koontz

  He had gone little more than a mile before he realized the reason for his disquiet, which now grew sharper. In the museum that was his memory, there were no halls or chambers into which he would not go, but there were places he preferred over others. He wasn’t fond of revisiting recollections of night missions in Afghanistan, conducted with this technology. Primitive villages of mud bricks plastered over with stucco. Isolated compounds of graceless concrete structures. All laid with traps, sometimes with tripwires. Every dark-green doorway and every dark-green window a possible assassin’s lair. Then sudden action, a running black-green figure silhouetted against a pale-green concrete wall. Firing while on the move. Acid-green muzzle flare. Your return fire, more accurate than his, brought him strangely en pointe, his cloak flaring, as if a dance were about to begin, but it was a dance an instant long, and as he fell, the gout of green blood was almost black against the concrete backdrop. Gavin understood the peril that Jane was in, the hydra-headed and formidable nature of her enemies, and the risk that he and Jessie had taken by standing steadfast with her, but it was only now, looking at the world again through night-vision gear, when he fully appreciated that this was war, with all the horrors of combat, war in the homeland, Americans against Americans.

  20

  And so she led Sanjay through the elegantly furnished house, past big windows that in daylight might have revealed a dramatic canyon view funneling toward the sea in the distance, but that now were blinded by shifting cataracts of fog. They passed through a lamplit living room, a shadowy dining room, and into a kitchen.

  Beyond the open kitchen lay a family room, and in the family room stood a six-sided table designed for card games, and on the table were a few plates of canapés, and in the chairs were three women and three men. They were enjoying a pre-dinner game of cards, their conversation animated, their attention fixed largely on the hands they had been dealt and on the discard that the current player was making.

  Ashima was the first to realize that gods in the raiments of judgment had arrived, and she stared open-mouthed, too shocked to scream. Indeed, in the few seconds before the gunfire began, there were no screams from any of the six, only gasps of surprise and throttled pleas. Only three of the six managed to push up from their chairs in the little time that fate had allotted them, though they had no chance to flee or fight.

  To Alecto, Ashima was not her mother’s sister, because her mother was Gaea, and it was not a Fury’s role to grant mercy. Nor were there words or need of words, only the voices of the pistols roaring point-blank. A brightly colored dress of silk flared like the wings of an exotic parrot before an attempt at flight failed, and the dazzling silk furled around the fallen form of the broken would-be flyer. Figures in desperate postures, each concerned only for himself. Gesturing antically. Grotesque expressions perhaps common in the subterranean streets of Pandemonium. Those who stood then at once fell into those who remained seated, or they collapsed back into their chairs. The six-sided table shuddered, and the cards slithered onto the floor, fanning out arrangements of numbers and royal images that perhaps a gypsy might have read to ascertain the ultimate destination of the hosts and their four guests.

  Start to finish, the judgment lasted less than a minute. And when it was finished, there was no time to survey the aftermath, let alone to dwell upon it or to wonder what it meant. Anyway, it was nothing. It meant nothing. Besides, there was more to be done—and in as timely a fashion as possible.

  21

  A darkness arises around the perimeter of the kitchen, not a failure of the light, but a gathering of shapes that remind Booth Hendrickson of large birds, although he can’t discern any of their features. They are shadows where nothing exists to cast them.

  The voice of his interrogator comes and goes. Sometimes he answers her, sometimes not. As the shadows congregate at the edges of his vision, hope retreats through the intricate spirals of his mind, and despair advances.

  There was a time long ago when he was alone in the dark, but not afraid, alone in the dark with nobody to see, when like the boy in the books, he would say aloud, I think to myself, I play to myself, and nobody knows what I say to myself.

  But that is not the darkness to which he is now returning, as the control mechanism weaves its web across his brain. The darkness coming will have no play in it, no delight; and no thought of his can ever be kept secret from those who command him in his servitude.

  The coming darkness is that found in deep places, down where the crooked staircase leads, where the steps slope horizontal as well as strictly vertical, a nautilus of stairs, a maze, serving rooms where you must feel your way blindly because you have not earned a light to carry.

  He has been there before, long ago, humbled to the condition of a beaten dog. He knows the misery of servitude, of being absolutely powerless. He would rather die than return to enslavement. But he is restrained at this kitchen table with no means of killing himself. And once the web’s radials and spirals map the contours of his brain, he will be able to take his life only if ordered to do so.

  He knows the truth of the world. He has been taught. There is no escaping the cold truth of the world.

  Rule or be ruled. Use or be used. Break others or be broken by them. In every case, his only remaining option is the or.

  The rising darkness rises farther, reaching the summit of the walls, spreading to the ceiling from which shapen shadows depend like black cocoons, encroaching on the table at which he sits. The only light in all the world is that surrounding the table, and the source of the light is she who rules him. She is clothed in light, and her face is luminous, and her eyes are blue fire as she poses her questions.

  Where are you, Booth? Are you still here with me? Do you hear me, Booth Hendrickson? Can you hear me? Where are you, Booth?

  He is in despair; that’s where he is; it is a despair so pure that it will never evolve into desperation, which is energized and reckless despair, for he is without energy, drained.

  Where are you, Booth?

  For fear that she will take away her precious light and leave him enswarmed by darkness, he answers her. To his surprise, Booth speaks about that of which he must never speak. He tells her where he is—or rather where he has been and where he foresees himself: “The crooked staircase.” Once the words have been spoken, the spell of silence is broken, and what was forbidden to be expressed is suddenly expressible.

  22

  What had happened was nothing. It meant nothing. Nothing at all. The still, small voice within assured her of that. Those in this house who had appeared to be people were not in fact people. The earth was a stage, those on it merely characters guided by a script. These people’s story was no more important than any other, which is to say not important at all, mere entertainment for the gods.

  What transpired next was nothing more than stagecraft. Alecto had been a minor divinity in ancient Rome as well as in ancient Greece, but her rank didn’t mean that she was colorless. By their nature, the Furies were colorful, agents of retribution, marked by flaunt and flourish, shine and swagger, and it was incumbent upon anyone who would write about Alecto, who would become a vessel for Alecto, for the Chandi aspect of Kali, for others of their dark divinity, to uphold the sacred tradition of flamboyance.

  Tanuja stood on the stoop, waiting, the front door open wide behind her.

  The cul-de-sac was quiet in the night and muffling fog. At the only other house that contained light, luminous windows seemed not part of any structure, seemed to float in the mist like large video screens made of some lighter-than-air material, none of them tuned to a channel, offering no drama, as if none could compete with events occurring in the Chatterjee house.

  There were no shadowy forms of alarmed residents at those windows, no sirens in the distance. Most likely, the brief burst of gunfire had not traveled through walls, through night, through fog, through other walls. But it was not unlikely
that even if the sound carried, those near enough to hear it were lost in a video game or binge-watching whatever, or were seeing out Saturday with a joint of good weed, having traded reality for one virtual reality or another. The scripts of their stories did not require them to hear.

  Through the lamplight and the darkness and a thickening sea of fog, Sanjay returned with the coiled orange extension cord and the reciprocating saw. He was tall, trim, all in black. For a moment, a sharp fear pierced Tanuja, a terror of Sanjay, but this was only her little brother, her twin, blood of her blood, and the fear at once quieted away.

  They did not speak when he arrived at the stoop and followed her into the house, for there was nothing that needed to be said. There was merely stagecraft to perform. Set decoration. Steps to be taken. Always one step at a time. Never knowing what was next until it needed to be done. According to the script by which they lived.

  For a while, as they worked, Tanuja thought of Subhadra in the storm of the unfinished novelette, of the beauty of falling rain in silver skeins and the splendor of lightning born from a cumulonimbus womb, of the majesty of thunder like the rumble of colossal wheels moving creation along mysterious tracks….

  When the six severed heads were placed at intervals along the walkway leading to the front door, sister and brother stepped out of the night, into the foyer, she with her back turned to one mirror, he with his back to the other. They stood face-to-face, an arm’s length apart. Cool fog slithered through the open door, drawn by the warmth of the house.

  Sanjay wept quiet tears. She asked him why, and he didn’t know why.

  She said affectionately, “Chotti bhai, little brother.”

  He said, “Bhenji,” and his tears flowed faster.

  She said, “Peri pauna,” which meant “I touch your feet,” though she did not stoop to touch them, for he already knew how profoundly she cherished him.

  His reply, “Peri pauna,” brought tears to her eyes.

  Not quite sure why she said it, she said, “Every story must have an end. That is the way of stories.”

  Because it was what his script instructed him to say, Sanjay replied, “I will count to three.”

  He counted in perfect cadence, precisely two seconds between the numbers, no hesitation because of doubt or confusion or emotion, for their actions must be perfectly simultaneous in this, which was their last moment on the stage.

  His eyes on hers, her eyes on his, his pistol pressed to her head, hers to his, they—

  —never heard the coeternal shots that ended their lives, though the sound of a single but double-loud blast carried through the open door and along the front walkway and into the cul-de-sac, drawing the attention of a neighbor who had just stepped out to walk his dog, then the police, then the news media, and then the world in all its ignorance.

  23

  In the green night, there were natural roads through the dense scrub, carved by the ways of water and wind. Navigable slopes of gravelstone. Barren ridgelines that could be followed for a while. Even in this inhospitable territory, in some canyons enough water lay beneath the surface to slake the thirst of eucalyptus and California buckeye. Some places there were immense live oaks, too, that sprawled into tortured architectures, shaped by acidic soil and heat and insect pests that didn’t allow more natural forms, never forests of them, but transfigured groves through which the Land Rover passed as if journeying across a postapocalyptic landscape.

  Gavin knew some of this territory from years of riding horses here, although he could not possibly be familiar with all of the hundreds of square miles ahead. And in this peculiar citrine light, he was unable to recognize even some familiar landmarks. In addition to experience and instinct, however, he was relying on a battery-illumined large-faced compass that he had fixed to the console between him and Jessie.

  Although he’d had no expectation of making good time in these conditions, he worried that they were not putting the miles behind them fast enough. More than eight years from his last battlefield, he began to feel a familiar itch between the shoulder blades, a queasiness in the gut, and a tightening of the scrotum that were his instinct warning of trouble ahead.

  In the cargo area behind the backseat, the dogs had been lying down, as they mostly did when traveling in any vehicle other than the apple-green ’48 Ford pickup, wherein they liked to sit or even stand, leashed and anchored for their safety, to sightsee and let the wind blow through their fur.

  Now, as the Rover was cruising through a meadow of low scraggly grass veined with taller coastal sage, Duke and Queenie scrambled to their feet and began to growl low in their throats.

  From the backseat, Travis said, “They sure don’t like something on your side of the Rover, Uncle Gavin.”

  Although traveling five miles an hour in respect of the sudden changes the terrain could undergo, Gavin slowed further to scan the night through his side window. At first he saw nothing. Then the pack raced into view.

  “Coyotes,” he said.

  Six of them, a large pack for a species that often hunted alone. They were lean and shadowy green shapes with bright green eyes; their serrated smiles were the palest green in this macabre vision.

  “I can see them, sort of,” Travis said. “They’ve got fire in their eyes.”

  Gavin slowed further to let the beasts race ahead, but the coyotes slowed as well and hung with the Rover.

  “To them,” said Travis, “we’re like some kinda canned meat.”

  Jessie laughed. “Delivered to their door, just like pizza.”

  The dogs’ low growls were punctuated with thin keening sounds, almost whimpers. They were ready to fight. But at the same time, they acknowledged the greater ferocity of these wild creatures that, for all they might share with shepherds genetically, would go for the dogs’ throats as savagely as if Duke and Queenie were rabbits.

  Like the dogs, Gavin saw nothing amusing about being stalked by six long-toothed prairie wolves. They might be safe in this can on wheels, but they couldn’t stay in the vehicle forever if it blew a tire.

  24

  On his way to becoming adjusted, Booth Hendrickson had fallen apart. When the nanoweb finished spinning itself, it would control a human form that looked like the once dreaded man from the DOJ, and it would be powered by the electrical currents of that functioning brain, but the man would not be who he once was, and the brain would be a repository for a mind in which long-tied psychological knots had come undone, and a profound unraveling had occurred.

  As he told Jane and Gilberto about the Tahoe estate and the crooked staircase, he did so in a discursive monologue now and then bordering on incoherent. There was no way to keep him focused on the most salient facts by interrogating him, for he reacted to what she asked as if he were the ball in a pinball field, ricocheting off the question in unanticipated directions. The more questions that were put to him, the more fractured his narrative became, so that there was nothing to be done but let him talk, listen, and slowly make sense of all the puzzle pieces.

  The story that he told of childhood abuse was so extreme, so unlike anything Jane had ever heard, that she expected him to become emotional, to weep with self-pity and shake with rage. Apparently, however, his capacity for emotion had been diminished for a long time. As an adolescent and adult, what he had been able to feel seemed to have been related to his conviction of superiority, to a deeply instilled sense of being one of a class above all others. He felt contempt for the masses in general and for most individuals in particular; disgust at what he imagined to be their universal ignorance; abhorrence at their pretensions to equality; hatred of them for their claims to such feelings as love, faith, compassion, and sympathy, all of which he knew to be fictions by which they hid from themselves the truth of the world. And he had known fear as well, fear of those billions who were beneath him and who, by their stupidity and ignorance and reckless behavior, migh
t destroy the world not just for themselves but for him and those exalted people like him. Of nobler emotions, he seemed to have long been bereft. Now, in the telling of his experiences with the crooked staircase, even the ignoble emotions seemed inaccessible to him, leaving him only with fear, and in fact with just a single fear. He rambled through his story in a monotone, recalling the most hideous details with no more emotion than a mathematician reading off pages of the calculations he used to solve a problem. But from time to time he looked at Jane with sudden fright and said, “Tell me you won’t take the light away. Please, please, don’t take the light away.”

  When his story wound to its tangled end, he sat in silence, hands in his lap, head bowed, form without substance, a hollow man, his headpiece stuffed with straw.

  An hour earlier, Jane would have thought she could never pity this ruthless user of others. If she pitied him now, she did not go so far as to have sympathy with him, for that would be to confer upon him a dignity he didn’t deserve.

  When he looked at her and pleaded for light, his expression was one of abject submission with a suggestion of veneration, as if he held her in exalted honor and didn’t fear her at all, but reserved his fright for the loss of light, for being left in darkness as he had been left within the place that he called the crooked staircase. His seeming adoration gave Jane the creeps. After so long seeking absolute power, he found himself utterly powerless—and was relieved to submit, perhaps as pleased to be the face beneath the boot as he would have been to be the boot, as long as he could remain in the presence of power.

  She didn’t want his veneration.

  And it wasn’t mercy that would prevent her from turning out the lights. Even in his diminished capacity, she simply didn’t want to be alone in the dark with him.