by Dean Koontz
she wants it to remain always exactly as Nina gave it to her.
West of the town of Running Lake, still many miles from Big Bear Lake, following ridgelines past the canyons where the wind was born, bombarded by thrashing conifers hurling cones at the pavement, Joe refused to consider the implications of Pigs and Princes. Listening to Rose tell the story, he had barely found the self-control to repress his rage. He knew that he had no reason to be furious with this woman or with the child who had a concentration-camp name, but he was livid nonetheless—perhaps because he knew how to function well in anger, as he had done throughout his youth, and not well at all in grief.
Turning the subject away from little girls at play, he said, “How does Horton Nellor fit into this—aside from owning a big chunk of Teknologik, which is deep in Project 99?”
“Just that well-connected bastards like him…are the wave of the future.” She was holding the can of Pepsi between her knees, clawing at the pull tab with her right hand. She had barely enough strength and coordination to get it open. “The wave of the future…unless Nina…unless she changes everything.”
“Big business, big government, and big media—all one beast now, united to exploit the rest of us. Is that it? Radical talk.”
The aluminum can rattled against her teeth, and a trickle of Pepsi dribbled down her chin. “Nothing but power matters to them. They don’t believe…in good and evil.”
“There are only events.”
Though she had just taken a long swallow of Pepsi, her throat sounded dry. Her voice cracked. “And what those events mean…”
“…depends only on what spin you put on them.”
He remained blindly angry with her because of what she insisted that he believe about his Nina, but he could not bear to glance at her again and see her growing weaker. He blinked at the road ahead, where showers of pine needles stitched together billowing sheets of dust, and he eased down on the accelerator, driving as fast as he dared.
The soda can slipped out of her hand, dropped on the floor, and rolled under her seat, spilling the remainder of the Pepsi. “Losin’ it, Joe.”
“Not long now.”
“Got to tell you how it was…when the plane went in.”
Four miles down, gathering speed all the way, engines shrieking, wings creaking, fuselage thrumming. Screaming passengers are pressed so hard into their seats by the accumulating gravities that many are unable to lift their heads—some praying, some vomiting, weeping, cursing, calling out the many names of God, calling out to loved ones present and far away. An eternity of plunging, four miles but as if from the moon—
—and then Rose is in a blueness, a silent bright blueness, as if she is a bird in flight, except that no dark earth lies below, only blueness all around. No sense of motion. Neither hot nor cool. A flawless hyacinth-blue sphere with her at the center. Suspended. Waiting. A deep breath held in her lungs. She tries to expel her stale breath but cannot, cannot, until—
—with an exhalation as loud as a shout, she finds herself in the meadow, still in her seat, stunned into immobility, 21-21 beside her. The nearby woods are on fire. On all sides, flames lick mounds of twisted debris. The meadow is an unspeakable charnel house. And the 747 is gone.
At the penultimate moment, the girl had transported them out of the doomed aircraft by a monumental exertion of her psychic gift, to another place, to a dimension outside space and time, and had held them in that mysterious sheltering limbo through one terrible minute of cataclysmic destruction. The effort has left 21-21 cold, shaking, and unable to speak. Her eyes, bright with reflections of the many surrounding fires, have a faraway look like those of an autistic child. Initially she cannot walk or even stand, so Rose must lift her from the seat and carry her.
Weeping for the dead scattered through the night, shuddering with horror at the carnage, wonderstruck by her survival, slammed by a hurricane of emotion, Rose stands with the girl cradled in her arms but is unable to take a single step. Then she recalls the flickering passenger-cabin lights and the spinning of the hands on her wristwatch, and she is certain that the pilot was the victim of a wet mission, remoted by the boy who lives in a steel capsule deep below the Virginia countryside. This realization propels her away from the crash site, around the burning trees, into the moonlit forest, wading through straggly underbrush, then along a deer trail powdered with silver light and dappled with shadow, to another meadow, to a ridge from which she sees the lights of Loose Change Ranch.
By the time they reach the ranch house, the girl is somewhat recovered but still not herself. She is able to walk now, but she is lethargic, brooding, distant. Approaching the house, Rose tells 21-21 to remember that her name is Mary Tucker, but 21-21 says, My name is Nina. That’s who I want to be.
Those are the last words that she will speak—perhaps forever. In the months immediately following the crash, having taken refuge with Rose’s friends in Southern California, the girl sleeps twelve to fourteen hours a day. When she’s awake, she shows no interest in anything. She sits for hours staring out a window or at a picture in a storybook, or at nothing in particular. She has no appetite, loses weight. She is pale and frail, and even her amethyst eyes seem to lose some of their color. Evidently the effort required to move herself and Rose into and out of the blue elsewhere, during the crash, has profoundly drained her, perhaps nearly killed her. Nina exhibits no paranormal abilities anymore, and Rose dwells in despondency.
By Christmas, however, Nina begins to show interest in the world around her. She watches television. She reads books again. As the winter passes, she sleeps less and eats more. Her skin regains its former glow, and the color of her eyes deepens. She still does not speak, but she seems increasingly connected. Rose encourages her to come all the way back from her self-imposed exile by speaking to her every day about the good that she can do and the hope that she can bring to others.
In a bureau drawer in the bedroom that she shares with the girl, Rose keeps a copy of the Los Angeles Post, the issue that devotes the entire front page, above the fold, to the fate of Nationwide Flight 353. It helps to remind her of the insane viciousness of her enemies. One day in July, eleven months after the disaster, she finds Nina sitting on the edge of the bed with this newspaper open to a page featuring photographs of some of the victims of the crash. The girl is touching the photo of Nina Carpenter, who had given her Pigs and Princes, and she is smiling.
Rose sits beside her and asks if she is feeling sad, remembering this lost friend.
The girl shakes her head no. Then she guides Rose’s hand to the photograph, and when Rose’s fingertips touch the newsprint, she falls away into a blue brightness not unlike the sanctuary into which she was transported in the instant before the plane crash, except that this is also a place full of motion, warmth, sensation.
Clairvoyants have long claimed to feel a residue of psychic energy on common objects, left by the people who have touched them. Sometimes they assist police in the search for a murderer by handling objects worn by the victim at the time of the assault. This energy in the Post photograph is similar but different—not left in passing by Nina but imbued in the newsprint by an act of will.
Rose feels as if she has plunged into a sea of blue light, a sea crowded with swimmers whom she cannot see but whom she feels gliding and swooping around her. Then one swimmer seems to pass through Rose and to linger in the passing, and she knows that she is with little Nina Carpenter, the girl with the lopsided smile, the giver of Pigs and Princes, who is dead and gone but safe, dead and gone but not lost forever, happy and alive in an elsewhere beyond this swarming blue brightness, which is not really a place itself but an interface between phases of existence.
Moved as deeply as she had been when she was first given the knowledge of the afterlife, in the room at the orphanage, Rose withdraws her hand from the photo of Nina Carpenter and sits silently for a while, humbled. Then she takes her own Nina into her arms and holds the girl tightly and rocks her, neither cap
able of speaking nor in need of words.
Now that this special girl’s power is being reborn, Rose knows what they must do, where they must start their work. She does not want to risk going to Lisa Peccatone again. She doesn’t believe that her old friend knowingly betrayed her, but she suspects that through Lisa’s link to the Post—and through the Post to Horton Nellor—the people at Project 99 learned of her presence on Flight 353. While Rose and Nina are believed dead, they need to take advantage of their ghostly status to operate as long as possible without drawing the attention of their enemies. First, Rose asks the girl to give the great gift of eternal truth to each of the friends who has sheltered them during these eleven months in their emotional wilderness. Then they will contact the husbands and wives and parents and children of those who perished on Flight 353, bringing them both the received knowledge of immortality and visions of their loved ones at the blue interface. With luck, they will spread their message so widely by the time they are discovered that it cannot be contained.
Rose intends to start with Joe Carpenter, but she can’t locate him. His coworkers at the Post have lost track of him. He has sold the house in Studio City. He has no listed phone. They say he is a broken man. He has gone away to die.
She must begin the work elsewhere.
Because the Post published photographs of only a fraction of the Southern California victims and because she has no easy way to gather photos of the many others, Rose decides not to use portraits, after all. Instead, she tracks down their burial places through published funeral-service notices, and she takes snapshots of their graves. It seems fitting that the imbued image should be of a headstone, that these grim memorials of bronze and granite should become doorways through which the recipients of the pictures will learn that Death is not mighty and dreadful, that beyond this bitter phase, Death himself dies.
High in the wind-churned mountains, with waves of moon-silvered conifers casting sprays of needles onto the roadway, still more than twenty miles from Big Bear Lake, Rose Tucker spoke so softly that she could barely be heard over the racing engine and the hum of the tires: “Joe, will you hold my hand?”
He could not look at her, would not look at her, dared not even glance at her for a second, because he was overcome by the childish superstition that she would be all right, perfectly fine, as long as he didn’t visually confirm the terrible truth that he heard in her voice. But he looked. She was so small, slumped in her seat, leaning against the door, the back of her head against the window, as small to his eyes as 21-21 must have appeared to her when she had fled Virginia with the girl at her side. Even in the faint glow from the instrument panel, her huge and expressive eyes were again as compelling as they had been when he’d first met her in the graveyard, full of compassion and kindness—and a strange glimmering joy that scared him.
His voice was shakier than hers. “It’s not far now.”
“Too far,” she whispered. “Just hold my hand.”
“Oh, shit.”
“It’s all right, Joe.”
The shoulder of the highway widened to a scenic rest area. He stopped the car before a vista of darkness: the hard night sky, the icy disk of a moon that seemed to shed cold instead of light, and a vast blackness of trees and rocks and canyons descending.
He released his seat belt, leaned across the console, and took her hand. Her grip was weak.
“She needs you, Joe.”
“I’m nobody’s hero, Rose. I’m nothing.”
“You need to hide her…hide her away…”
“Rose—”
“Give her time…for her power to grow.”
“I can’t save anyone.”
“I shouldn’t have started the work so soon. The day will come when…when she won’t be so vulnerable. Hide her away…let her power grow. She’ll know…when the time has come.”
She began to lose her grip on him.
He covered her hand with both of his, held it fast, would not let it slip from his grasp.
Voice raveling away, she seemed to be receding from him though she did not move: “Open…open your heart to her, Joe.”
Her eyelids fluttered.
“Rose, please don’t.”
“It’s all right.”
“Please. Don’t.”
“See you later, Joe.”
“Please.”
“See you.”
Then he was alone in the night. He held her small hand alone in the night while the wind played a hollow threnody. When at last he was able to do so, he kissed her brow.
The directions Rose had given him were easy to follow. The cabin was neither in the town of Big Bear Lake nor elsewhere along the lakefront, but higher on the northern slopes and nestled deep in pines and birches. The cracked and potholed blacktop led to a dirt driveway, at the end of which was a small white clapboard house with a shake-shingle roof.
A green Jeep Wagoneer stood beside the cabin. Joe parked behind the Jeep.
The cabin boasted a deep, elevated porch, on which three cane-backed rocking chairs were arranged side by side. A handsome black man, tall and athletically built, stood at the railing, his ebony skin highlighted with a brass tint cast by two bare yellow lightbulbs in the porch ceiling.
The girl waited at the head of the flight of four steps that led up from the driveway to the porch. She was blond and about six years old.
From under the driver’s seat, Joe retrieved the gun that he had taken from the white-haired storyteller after the scuffle on the beach. Getting out of the car, he tucked the weapon under the waistband of his jeans.
The wind shrieked and hissed through the needled teeth of the pines.
He walked to the foot of the steps.
The child had descended two of the four treads. She stared past Joe, at the Ford. She knew what had happened.
On the porch, the black man began to cry.
The girl spoke for the first time in over a year, since the moment outside the Ealings’ ranch house when she had told Rose that she wanted to be called Nina. Gazing at the car, she said only one word, in a voice soft and small: “Mother.”
Her hair was the same shade as Nina’s hair. She was as fine-boned as Nina. But her eyes were not gray like Nina’s eyes, and no matter how hard Joe tried to see Nina’s face before him, he could not deceive himself into believing that this was his daughter.
Yet again, he had been engaged in searching behavior, seeking what was lost forever.
The moon above was a thief, its glow not a radiance of its own but a weak reflection of the sun. And like the moon, this girl was a thief—not Nina but only a reflection of Nina, shining not with Nina’s brilliant light but with a pale fire.
Regardless of whether she was only a lab-born mutant with strange mental powers or really the hope of the world, Joe hated her at that moment, and hated himself for hating her—but hated her nonetheless.
17
Hot wind huffed at the windows, and the cabin smelled of pine, dust, and the black char from last winter’s cozy blazes, which coated the brick walls of the big fireplace.
The incoming electrical lines had sufficient slack to swing in the wind. From time to time they slapped against the house, causing the lights to throb and flicker. Each tremulous brownout reminded Joe of the pulsing lights at the Delmann house, and his skin prickled with dread.
The owner was the tall black man who had broken into tears on the porch. He was Louis Tucker, Mahalia’s brother, who had divorced Rose eighteen years ago, when she proved unable to have children. She had turned to him in her darkest hour. And after all this time, though he had a wife and children whom he loved, Louis clearly still loved Rose too.
“If you really believe she’s not dead, that she’s only moved on,” Joe said coldly, “why cry for her?”
“I’m crying for me,” said Louis. “Because she’s gone from here and I’ll have to wait through a lot of days to see her again.”
Two suitcases stood in the front room, just inside the door. Th
ey contained the belongings of the child.
She was at a window, staring out at the Ford, with sorrow pulled around her like sackcloth.
“I’m scared,” Louis said. “Rose was going to stay up here with Nina, but I don’t think it’s safe now. I don’t want to believe it could be true—but they might’ve found me before I got out of the last place with Nina. Couple times, way back, I thought the same car was behind us. Then it didn’t keep up.”
“They don’t have to. With their gadgets, they can follow from miles away.”
“And then just before you pulled into the driveway, I went out onto the porch ’cause I thought I heard a helicopter. Up in these mountains in this wind—does that make sense?”
“You better get her out of here,” Joe agreed.
As the wind slapped the electrical lines against the house, Louis paced to the fireplace and back, a hand pressed to his forehead as he tried to put the loss of Rose out of his mind long enough to think what to do. “I figured you and Rose…well, I thought the two of you were taking her. And if they’re onto me, then won’t she be safer with you?”
“If they’re onto you,” Joe said, “then none of us is safe here, now, anymore. There’s no way out.”
The lines slapped the house, slapped the house, and the lights pulsed, and Louis walked to the fireplace and picked up a battery-powered, long-necked butane match from the hearth.
The girl turned from the window, eyes wide, and said, “No.”
Louis Tucker flicked the switch on the butane match, and blue flame spurted from the nozzle. Laughing, he set his own hair on fire and then his shirt.
“Nina!” Joe cried.
The girl ran to his side.
The stink of burning hair spread through the room.
Ablaze, Louis moved to block the front door.
From the waistband of his jeans, Joe drew the pistol, aimed—but couldn’t pull the trigger. This man confronting him was not really Louis Tucker now; it was the boy-thing, reaching out three thousand miles from Virginia. And there was no chance that Louis would regain control of his body and live through this night. Yet Joe hesitated to squeeze off a shot, because the moment that Louis was dead, the boy would remote someone else.
The girl was probably untouchable, able to protect herself with her own paranormal power. So the boy would use Joe—and the gun in Joe’s hand—to shoot the girl point-blank in the head.
“This is fun,” the boy said in Louis’s voice, as flames seethed off his hair, as his ears charred and crackled, as his forehead and cheeks blistered. “Fun,” he said, enjoying his ride inside Louis Tucker but still blocking the exit to the porch.
Maybe, at the instant of greatest jeopardy, Nina could send herself into that safe bright blueness as she had done just before the 747 plowed into the meadow. Maybe the bullets fired at her would merely pass through the empty air where she had been. But there was a chance that she was still not fully recovered, that she wasn’t yet able to perform such a taxing feat, or even that she could perform it but would be mortally drained by it this time.
“Out the back!” Joe shouted. “Go, go!”
Nina raced to the door between the front room and the kitchen at the rear of the cabin.
Joe backed after her, keeping the pistol trained on the burning man, even though he didn’t intend to use it.
Their only hope was that the boy’s love of “fun” would give them the chance to get out of the cabin, into the open, where his ability to conduct remote viewing and to engage in mind control would be, according to Rose, severely diminished. If he gave up the toy that was Louis Tucker, he would be into Joe’s head in an instant.
Tossing aside the butane match, with flames spreading along the sleeves of his shirt and down his pants, the boy-thing said, “Oh, yeah, oh, wow,” and came after them.
Joe recalled too clearly the feeling of the ice-cold needle that had seemed to pierce the summit of his spine as he had barely escaped the Delmann house the previous night. That invading energy scared him more than the prospect of being embraced by the fiery arms of this shambling specter.
Frantically he retreated into the kitchen, slamming the door as he went, which was pointless because no door—no wall, no steel vault—could delay the boy if he abandoned Louis’s body and went incorporeal.
Nina slipped out the back door of the cabin, and a wolf pack of wind, chuffing and puling, rushed past her and inside.
As Joe followed her into the night, he heard the living room door crash into the kitchen.
Behind the cabin was a small yard of dirt and natural bunch-grass. The air was full of wind-torn leaves, pine needles, grit. Beyond a redwood picnic table and four redwood chairs, the forest rose again.