by Dean Koontz
As he ascended past the second floor, the elevator cab suddenly impressed him as being smaller than he remembered from previous visits. The ceiling loomed low, like a lid on a cook pot.
Passing the third floor, he realized that he was breathing faster than he should be, as though he were a man on a brisk walk. The air seemed to have grown thin, inadequate.
By the time he reached the fourth floor, he became convinced that he detected a wrongness in the sound of the elevator motor, in the hum of cables drawn through guide wheels. This creak, that tick, this squeak might be the sound of a linchpin pulling loose in the heart of the machinery.
The air grew thinner still, the walls closer, the ceiling lower, the machinery more suspect.
Perhaps the doors wouldn’t open. The emergency phone might be out of order. His cell phone might not work in here.
In an earthquake, the shaft might collapse, crushing the cab to the dimensions of a coffin.
Nearing the fifth floor, he realized that these symptoms of claustrophobia, which he had never previously experienced, were a mask that concealed another fear, to which he, being a rational man, was loath to admit.
He half expected Rolf Reynerd to be waiting on the fifth floor.
How Reynerd would have known about Dunny or where Dunny lived, how he would have known when Ethan intended to come here—these were questions unanswerable without extensive investigation and perhaps without the abandonment of logic.
Nevertheless, Ethan stepped to the side of the cab, to make a smaller target of himself. He drew his pistol.
The elevator doors opened on a ten-by-twelve foyer paneled in honey-toned, figured anigre. Deserted.
Ethan didn’t holster his weapon. Identical doors served two penthouse units, and he went directly to the Whistler apartment.
With the key provided by Dunny’s attorney, he unlocked the door, eased it open, and entered cautiously.
The security alarm was not engaged. On his most recent visit, eight days ago, Ethan had set the alarm when he’d left.
The housekeeper, Mrs. Hernandez, had visited in the interim. Before Dunny landed in a hospital, in a coma, she had worked here three days a week; but now she came only on Wednesday.
In all likelihood, Mrs. Hernandez had forgotten to enter the alarm code when she’d departed last week. Yet as likely as this explanation might be, Ethan didn’t believe it. Juanita Hernandez was a responsible woman, methodically attentive to detail.
Just inside the threshold, he stood listening. He left the door open at his back.
Rain drummed on the roof, a distant rumble like the marching feet of legions gone to war in some far, hollow kingdom.
Otherwise, only silence rewarded his keen attention. Maybe instinct warned him or maybe imagination misled him, but he sensed that this was not a slack silence, that it was instead a coiled quiet as full of potential energy as a cobra, rattler, or black mamba.
Because he preferred not to draw the attention of a neighbor and didn’t want to facilitate any exit but his own, he closed the door. Locked it.
From scams, from drugs, from worse, Duncan Whistler had made himself rich. Criminals routinely grab big money, but few keep it or keep the freedom to spend it. Dunny had been clever enough to avoid arrest, to launder his money, and to pay his taxes.
Consequently, his apartment was enormous, with two connecting hallways, rooms leading into rooms, rooms that ordinarily did not spiral as they seemed to spiral now like nautilus shell into nautilus shell.
Searching in a hostile situation of the usual kind, Ethan would have proceeded with both hands on the gun, with arms out straight, maintaining a measured pressure on the trigger. He would have cleared doorways quick and low.
Instead, he gripped the pistol in his right hand, aimed at the ceiling. He proceeded cautiously but not with the full drama inherent in police-academy style.
To keep his back always to a wall, to avoid turning his back to a doorway, to move fast while scanning left-right-left, to be ever aware of his footing, of the need to stay sufficiently well balanced to assume, in an instant, a shooting stance: Doing all that, he would have had to admit that he was afraid of a dead man.
And there was the truth. Evaded, now acknowledged.
The claustrophobia in the elevator and the expectation that he would find Rolf Reynerd on the fifth floor had been nothing but attempts to deflect himself from consideration of his true fear, from the even less rational conviction that dead Dunny had risen from the morgue gurney and had wandered home with unknowable intent.
Ethan didn’t believe that dead men could walk.
He doubted that Dunny, dead or alive, would harm him.
His anxiety arose from the possibility that Duncan Whistler, if indeed he’d left the hospital garden room under his own power, might be Dunny in name only. Having nearly drowned, having spent three months in a coma, he might be suffering brain damage that made him dangerous.
Although Dunny had his good qualities, not least of all the sense to recognize in Hannah a woman of exceptional virtues, he had been capable of ruthless violence. His success in the criminal life had not resulted from polished people skills and a nice smile.
He could break heads when he needed to break them. And sometimes he’d broken them when skull cracking wasn’t necessary.
If Dunny were half the man that he’d once been, and the wrong half, Ethan preferred not to come face to face with him. Over the years, their relationship had taken peculiar turns; one final and still darker twist in the road could not be ruled out.
The huge living room featured high-end contemporary sofas and chairs, upholstered in wheat-colored silk. Tables, cabinets, and decorative objects were all Chinese antiques.
Either Dunny had discovered a genie-stuffed lamp and had wished himself exquisite taste, or he’d employed a pricey interior designer.
Here high above the olive trees, the big windows revealed the buildings across the street and a sky that looked like the soggy char and ashes of a vast, extinguished fire.
Outside: a car horn in the distance, the low somber grumble of traffic up on Wilshire Boulevard.
The June-bug jitter, scarab click, tumblebug tap of the beetle-voiced rain spoke at the window, click-click-click.
In the living room, stillness distilled. Only his breathing. His heart.
Ethan went into the study to seek the source of a soft light.
On the chinoiserie desk stood a bronze lamp with an alabaster shade. The buttery-yellow glow struck iridescent colors from the border of mother-of-pearl inlays.
Previously a framed photograph of Hannah had been displayed on the desk. It was missing.
Ethan recalled his surprise on discovering the photo during his first visit to the apartment, eleven weeks ago, after he had learned that he held authority over Dunny’s affairs.
Surprise had been matched by dismay. Although Hannah had been gone for five years, the presence of the picture seemed to be an act of emotional aggression, and somehow an insult to her memory that she should be an object of affection—and once an object of desire—to a man steeped in a life of crime and violence.
Ethan had left the photograph untouched, for even with a power of attorney covering all of Dunny’s affairs, he had felt that the picture in the handsome silver frame hadn’t been his property either to dispose of or to claim.
At the hospital on the night of Hannah’s death, again at the funeral, following twelve years of estrangement, Ethan and Dunny had spoken. Their mutual grief had not, however, brought them together otherwise. They had not exchanged a word for three years.
On the third anniversary of Hannah’s passing, Dunny had phoned to say that over those thirty-six months, he had brooded long and hard on her untimely death at thirty-two. Gradually but profoundly, the loss of her—just knowing that she was no longer out there somewhere in the world—had affected him, had changed him forever.
Dunny claimed that he was going to go straight, extract himself from all his
criminal enterprises. Ethan had not believed him, but had wished him luck. They had never spoken again.
Later, he heard through third parties that Dunny had gotten out of the life, that old friends and associates never saw him anymore, that he had become something of a hermit, bookish and withdrawn.
With those rumors, Ethan had taken enough salt to work up a thirst for truth. He remained certain that eventually he would learn Duncan Whistler had fallen back into old habits—or had never truly forsaken them.
Later still, he heard that Dunny had returned to the Church, attended Mass each week, and carried himself with a humility that had never before characterized him.
Whether this was true or not, the fact remained that Dunny had held fast to the fortune that he amassed through fraud, theft, and dealing drugs. Living in luxury paid for with such dirty money, any genuinely reformed man might have been racked with guilt until at last he put his riches to a cleansing use.
More than the photograph of Hannah had been taken from the study. An atmosphere of bookish innocence was gone, as well.
A double score of hardcover volumes were stacked on the floor, in a corner. They had been removed from two shelves of the wall-to-wall bookcase.
One of the shelves, which had seemed to be fixed like all the others, had been removed. A section of the bookcase backing, which also had appeared fixed, had been slid aside, revealing a wall safe.
The twelve-inch diameter door of the safe stood open. Ethan felt inside. The spacious box proved empty.
He hadn’t known that the study contained a safe. Logic suggested that no one but Dunny—and the installer—would have been aware of its existence.
Brain-damaged man dresses himself. Finds his way home. Remembers the combination to his safe.
Or…dead man comes home. In a mood to party, he picks up some spending money.
Dunny dead made nearly as much sense as Dunny with severe brain damage.
CHAPTER 13
FRIC IN A FRACAS: TWO TRAINS CLACKETY-CLACKING and whistling at key crossroads, Nazis in the villages, American troops fighting their way down from the hills, dead soldiers everywhere, and villainous SS officers in black uniforms herding Jews into the boxcars of a third train stopped at a station, more SS bastards shooting Catholics and burying their bodies in a mass grave here by a pine woods.
Few people knew that the Nazis had killed not only Jews but also millions of Christians. Most of the higher-echelon Nazis had adhered to a strange and informal pagan creed, worshiping land and race and myths of ancient Saxony, worshiping blood and power.
Few people knew, but Fric knew. He liked knowing things that other people didn’t. Odd bits of history. Secrets. The mysteries of alchemy. Scientific curiosities.
Like how to power an electric clock with a potato. You needed a copper peg, a zinc nail, and some wire. A potato-powered clock looked stupid, but it worked.
Like the truncated pyramid on the back of the one-dollar bill. It represents the unfinished Temple of Solomon. The eye floating above the pyramid is symbolic of the Grand Architect of the Universe.
Like who built the first elevator. Using alternatively human, animal, and water power, Roman architect Vitruvius constructed the first elevators circa 50 B.C.
Fric knew.
A lot of the weird stuff he knew didn’t have much application in daily life, didn’t alter the fact that he was short for his age, and thin for his age, or that he had a geeky neck and the huge unreal green eyes that magazine writers slobbered about when describing his mother but that made him look like a cross between a hoot owl and an alien. He liked knowing these weird things anyway, even if they did not lift him out of the mire of Fricdom.
Having exotic knowledge rare in other people made Fric feel like a wizard. Or at least like a wizard’s apprentice.
Aside from Mr. Jurgens, who came to the estate two days every month to clean and maintain the large collection of contemporary and antique electric trains, only Fric knew everything about the train room and its operation.
The trains belonged to that world-renowned movie star, Channing Manheim, who also happened to be his father. In the private world of Fric, the movie star had long been known as Ghost Dad because he was usually only here in spirit.
Ghost Dad knew very little about the train room. He had spent enough money on the collection to purchase the entire nation of Tuvalu, but he rarely played here.
Most people had never heard of the nation of Tuvalu. On nine islands in the South Pacific Ocean, with a population of just ten thousand, its major exports were copra and coconuts.
Most people had no idea what copra might be. Neither did Fric. He’d been meaning to look it up ever since he’d learned about Tuvalu.
The train room was in the higher of two basements, adjacent to the upper garage. It measured sixty-eight feet by forty-four feet, which amounted to more square footage than in the average home.
The lack of windows ensured that the real world could not intrude. The railroad fantasy ruled.
Along the two short walls, floor-to-ceiling shelves housed the train collection, except for whatever models were currently in use.
On the two long walls hung fabulous paintings of trains. Here, a locomotive exploded through thick luminous masses of fog, headlamp blazing. There, a train traveled a moonlit prairie. Trains of every vintage raced through forests, crossed rivers, climbed mountains in rain and sleet and snow and fog and dark of night, clouds billowing from their smokestacks, sparks flying from their wheels.
At the center of this great space, on a massive table with many legs, stood a sculptured landscape of green hills, fields, forests, valleys, ravines, rivers, lakes. Seven miniature villages comprised of hundreds of intricately detailed structures were served by country lanes, eighteen bridges, nine tunnels. Convex curves, concave curves, horseshoe curves, straightaways, descending grades, and ascending grades featured more train track than there were coconuts in Tuvalu.
This amazing construction measured fifty feet by thirty-two, and you could either walk around it or, by lifting a gate, enter into it and take a tour on an inner racetrack walkway, as though you were a giant vacationing in the land of Lilliput.
Fric was in the thick of it.
He had distributed armies of toy soldiers across this landscape and had been playing trains and war at the same time. Considering the resources at his command for the game, it should have been more fun than it was.
Telephones were located at both the exterior and the interior control stations. When they rang with his personal tone, the sound startled him. He seldom received calls.
Twenty-four phone lines served the estate. Two of these were dedicated to the security system, another to the off-site monitoring of the hotel-type heating and air-conditioning system. Two were fax lines, and two were dedicated Internet lines.
Sixteen of the remaining seventeen lines were rationed to family and staff. Line 24 had a higher purpose.
Fric’s father enjoyed the use of four lines because everyone in the world—once even the President of the United States—wanted to talk to him. Calls for Channing—or Chan or Channi, or even (in the case of one infatuated actress) Chi-Chi—often came in even when he wasn’t in residence.
Mrs. McBee had four lines, although this didn’t mean, as the Ghost Dad sometimes joked, that Mrs. McBee should start to think that she was as important as her boss.
Ha, ha, ha.
One of those four lines served Mr. and Mrs. McBee’s apartment. The other three were her business phones.
On an ordinary day, management of the house didn’t require those three lines. When Mrs. McBee had to plan and execute a party for four or five hundred Hollywood nitwits, however, three telephones were not always sufficient to deal with the event designer, the food caterer, the florist, the talent bookers, and the uncountable other mysterious agencies and forces that she had to marshal in order to produce an unforgettable evening.
Fric wondered if all that effort and expense was wo
rthwhile. At the end of the night, half the guests departed so drunk or so drug-fried that in the morning they wouldn’t remember where they had been.
If you sat them in lawn chairs, gave them bags of burgers, and provided tanker trucks of wine, they would get wasted as usual. Then they’d go home and puke their guts out as usual, collapse into unconsciousness as usual, and wake up the next day none the wiser.
Because he was chief of security, Mr. Truman had two lines in his apartment, one personal and one business.
Only two of the six maids lived on the estate, and they shared a phone line with the chauffeur.
The groundskeeper had a line of his own, but the totally scary chef, Mr. Hachette, and the happy cook, Mr. Baptiste, shared one of Mrs. McBee’s lines.
Ms. Hepplewhite, personal assistant to Ghost Dad, had two lines for her use.
Freddie Nielander, the famous supermodel known in Fricsylvania as Nominal Mom, had a dedicated phone line here, although she had divorced Ghost Dad nearly ten years ago and had stayed overnight less than ten times since then.
Ghost Dad once told Freddie that he called her line every now and then, hoping she would answer and would tell him that she had come back to him at last and was home forever.
Ha, ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha.
Fric had enjoyed his own line since he was six. He never called anyone, except once when he’d used his father’s contacts to get the unlisted home number for Mr. Mike Myers, the actor, who had dubbed the voice of the title character in Shrek, to tell him that Shrek absolutely, no doubt about it, rocked.
Mr. Myers had been very nice, had done the Shrek voice for him, and lots of other voices, and had made him laugh until his stomach hurt. This injury to his abdominal muscles resulted partly from the fact that Mr. Myers was wickedly funny and partly because Fric had not recently exercised his laugh-muscle group as much as he would have liked.
Fric’s father, a believer in a shitload of paranormal phenomena, had set aside the last telephone line to receive calls from the dead. That was a story in itself.
Now, for the first time in eight days, since the Ghost Dad’s most recent call, Fric heard his signature tone coming from the train-room phones.