by Dean Koontz
“I suppose I must. However, if through no fault of mine, you drive over a cliff to your death, I will be sad.”
“If I do, I won’t blame you, Ed.”
“That will be insufficient consolation.”
The girl says, “You won’t drive over a cliff—will you, Oddie?”
“No, Jolie, I won’t. Though I might bash my head on the steering wheel until my brains come out my ears, if we don’t get started now.”
Ed is baffled. “Why would you bash your head on the steering wheel, Odd Thomas?”
“It’s just an expression of frustration, Ed. I didn’t mean it.”
“If you would bash your brains out, there is no point in our going forward with this plan.”
“I would never do such a thing, Ed. I swear.”
“I do not detect any vocal patterns of deceit.”
“Because I’m telling the truth, Ed. May we begin?”
“Drive directly forward at five miles an hour.”
Following the foregoing reminder that life often is as shot through with absurdity as it is with terror and joy, phase one of the approach to Hiskott begins.
For all that I can see, the whole world might be smouldering, its entire substance being steadily converted to gasses and soot. Maybe the smoke is less white and more gray than before, or maybe the layer of crud gathered over the Corner is so thick now that, short of going nova, the sun can’t penetrate it.
In spite of the smell of burning grass, the fumes that sting my eyes, and the hot irritation in my throat, the realm through which I travel seems to be a steadily darkening sea full of stirred silt and clouds of minute plankton. As I follow Ed’s directions down the hills, I feel as though I am descending into an oceanic abyss where eventually I will find myself in perfect blackness eons old, where eyeless and pressure-deformed creatures eke out a desperate living in a dark cold desolation.
I suspect that this feeling of sinking ever deeper has less to do with the formless, surging masses beyond the windows of the Jeep than with the fact that I am drawing nearer to the thing that once was Norris Hiskott. It’s now a unique entity of singular malevolence, and the pressure that I sense isn’t pressure at all, but instead the black-hole gravity of its evil.
Although every vent in the vehicle is tightly shut, the air seems to be increasingly polluted, and a variety of claustrophobia overcomes me, a sense of being trapped in a place where I will slowly suffocate. I sneeze once, twice, a third time.
“Gesundheit.”
“Thank you, Ed.”
Shortly after that exchange, he tells me to brake to a stop and informs me that I have arrived at the brink of the slope that leads down to the backyard of the residence in which Hiskott has spent the past five years becoming … whatever he has become. Although the murk surrounding the Jeep seems fractionally less oppressive than before, I can see nothing of the house.
Ed agrees that my original strategy and tactics are the most likely to succeed. Because he’s able to consult Google Earth for a look-down on the building, he can refine my approach enough to substantially increase my chances of success.
At his suggestion, I release my safety harness long enough to pick up the pistol and the revolver from the passenger seat. I tuck them under my belt, the pistol against my abdomen, the revolver in the small of my back. I buckle up once more and lean forward, both hands on the wheel.
Monitoring the GPS transponders on various county fire-control-agency vehicles, Ed suggests that I wait another forty seconds until those trucks are about to enter Harmony Corner. Their sirens will add to the cacophony and further mask the noise I will be making. He says that sheriff’s deputies are close behind.
Generally speaking, these harrowing moments in my unusual life, when I am compelled to reckless action and violence, do not thrill me, do not have any quality of positive excitement or exhilaration. They are characterized by fear that must not be allowed to ripen into incapacitating terror, by abhorrence, by consternation that is mostly an expectation of the confusion that usually arises in the thick of action, the battleground confusion that can be the death of me.
This, however, is one of those rare occasions in which I’m also exhilarated. I feel so right about the commitment of life and limb that I anticipate the pending encounter with exuberance. I might not be capable of the offhand amusement and ready quips of James Bond, but I do feel that taking it to the bad guys can be at times a lively and beguiling sport.
Over the years, I have noticed that these special moments are always in situations where I’m not struggling alone against some mortal threat, when I have the support of people whom I like and trust. Loyal companions are an unequaled grace, staunching fear before it bleeds you numb, a reliable antidote for creeping despair. This is true even when my team is comprised of a twelve-year-old girl a mile or more removed from the action and an artificial intelligence who has no body that might be shot or bludgeoned, or torn, as I might be shot, bludgeoned, and torn.
But, hey, I prefer our tomboy Jolie to Batman’s Robin in those embarrassing girly tights of his, and our Ed goes a long way toward rehabilitating the image of artificial intelligences that HAL 9000 ruined more than four decades earlier.
“Fire trucks arriving,” Ed alerts me. “Sirens loud, cover good, time to go.”
En route, he’s told me what I must do. Hold the wheel straight, drift neither left nor right. Don’t deviate from a direct downhill course to the house. The land is hard-packed from much sun and little rain, and supposedly it has no significant irregularities that might jolt me off course. Even Ed, with all his resources for data and his powers of computation, can’t calculate the precise speed at which I should arrive at my destination, although he advises that anything under forty miles per hour might be inadequate and anything over sixty is likely to leave me incapacitated.
When he says go, I accelerate rapidly into the blinding miasma, which races across the windshield like clouds might rush across the cockpit windows of an aircraft. Ed says the slope is long, giving me all the territory I require to build speed. The tall, dry grass, not yet on fire here, rustles under the Cherokee and swishes against its flanks, so that it sounds as if I’m racing through a shallow stream. Tires stutter on summer-baked earth that rain has not yet softened, but they have good traction. Although vibrations travel through the frame into the steering wheel, I have no trouble maintaining control.
Suddenly the false dusk relents, sunlight swells through the diminishing billows of soot and ash, and as I achieve fifty miles per hour, I am no longer blind. Here, nearer the shore, the stiff breeze angling in from the northwest pushes the smoke farther inland, leaving this most remote corner of the Corner draped only in a blue haze.
As Ed ascertained by reviewing aerial shots of the property on Google Earth, the target house, which has a large front porch, offers no porch here in back, only a patio with a trellis cover on which nothing grows. A single door most likely opens to the kitchen, and a pair of large French sliding doors probably serve the family room, which in the absence of a family is now used for God knows what purpose by the half-human Hiskott. The outdoor furniture and potted plants that might once have made a pleasant space of the patio have long previously been taken away, and nothing stands between me and those French sliders.
Because my existence is greatly complicated by my paranormal abilities, I strive always to keep the rest of my life simple, which is why I work as a fry cook, when I work at all, and which is why, when rarely I daydream of a career change, I consider only a job in shoe sales or maybe tire sales, which seems undemanding. I have few material possessions, no retirement account, and I do not own—and never have owned—a car. What I am about to do to Purvis Beamer’s Jeep Grand Cherokee is confirmation enough that, even if I had the money to purchase a nice car, I would be unwise to do so, because with a vehicle of my own to sacrifice in an emergency like this, I would never steal that of another.
I’m safely harnessed. I trust—as I must—the
impact-reduction technology in contemporary vehicles, which involves the absorption of energy through the tactical and engineered collapse of certain parts of their structure. Nevertheless, approaching the patio, I slide down in the driver’s seat as far as the harness will allow, to minimize the chance that I will be decapitated by something that might slam through the windshield. As the tires find the patio, I let go of the steering wheel and cover my face with my hands, as a child might do at the brink of the first big drop in a roller-coaster track.
An instant before impact, I move my right foot from accelerator to brake pedal. The crash must be loud, but it doesn’t seem so to me, because the air bag deploys, briefly enveloping me as though it is a gigantic prophylactic, muffling the sound of the collision. At the moment when the bag warmly embraces me, I jam my foot down on the brake, the wood of the French sliders cracks like a quick volley of rifle shots, tortured metal shrieks, and the windshield shatters. Fishtailing into the room, the Grand Cherokee batters through what I imagine to be sofas and chairs and other furniture, although I am not foolish enough even to hope that the Hiskott thing has just been killed while napping in a La-Z-Boy.
As the air bag deflates and as the Grand Cherokee comes to a stop, I switch off the engine. If the fuel tank has been ruptured, I want to avoid igniting a blaze that might draw the attention of the county firefighters away from the grass fire farther north in Harmony Corner.
I appear to be uninjured. In the morning, I’ll probably suffer from whiplash and other pains, but now everything seems to work.
The driver’s door is buckled, won’t open. The passenger door still functions. As I get out of the vehicle, I draw the pistol from under my sweatshirt, reminding myself that the magazine contains only seven rounds, not ten.
The wreckage in the family room makes it difficult to know quite what the place must have been like before I arrived. But there are cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling, a mobile of moths and flies in one of them, suggesting that the spider never lived to taste the prey that was enchanted by its architecture, and everywhere is a layer of dust that couldn’t have settled over everything in this first minute after the Jeep broke the doors down.
Pistol in a two-hand grip, I sweep the room left to right. No one. Nothing.
North of here, the sirens of the fire trucks groan into silence. The only sounds in the house are the ticks and creaks of the tortured Grand Cherokee cooling down, settling into ruin.
Hiskott might have expected me to attempt a break-in, but of a more conventional kind. He won’t have anticipated this. But he surely knows I’m here now, and my success depends on moving quickly, before one of the family, possessed, shows up in a killing frenzy.
A glance at the windows reveals that although the air is largely clear around this house and its neighbors on the flat ground below, the rest of Harmony Corner remains socked in by churning clouds of soot and ash. The marker lights and the warning lights of the fire trucks pulse and swivel deep within that seething murk, flinging off red-and-blue apparitions that chase one another through the scudding smoke.
An archway connects the family room to a large eat-in kitchen with an island. Crumbs, stale crusts of bread, desiccated cheese rinds, dried spills of sauces, and moldering wads of unidentifiable food litter the countertops. Scores of ants crawl through the debris, but they don’t scurry busily in efficient lines of march as do most ordinary ants; instead, they wander desultorily across the counters, as though they have consumed a toxin that leaves them confused and without purpose.
Piles of bones litter the filthy floor. Ham bones, beef bones, chicken bones, and others. Some have been broken as if to facilitate access to the marrow.
One of the pair of cabinet doors under the double sink has been torn off its hinges and is nowhere to be seen. From the space beyond spills a brittle drift of what appear to be dozens of rat skulls and skeletons, each sucked as clean as a turkey drumstick provided to a starving man. Not a scrap of skin or fur remains on any of them, and not a single length of scaly tail has been discarded.
The cooktop is encrusted with charred food and filth, less like a stove than like the unholy altar of some primitive temple with a long, cruel history of grisly sacrifices. I doubt that the propane-fired burners have worked in two or three years. The assumption has to be made that everything Dr. Hiskott consumes has, for a long time, been eaten raw.
According to Jolie and her mother, Ardys, the family brings their ruler everything he demands, including a great deal of food, which I believe they leave just inside the front door. I doubt that they brought him the rats.
I have been expecting a hybrid of a man and an extraterrestrial that will be far advanced beyond the condition of a human being, as clear-eyed and formidable as it also might be strange beyond easy comprehension. This unsettling evidence seems to argue instead for devolution: if not a steep intellectual decline, at least a severe diminishment of Hiskott’s ability to hold fast to any cultural norms and to repress animal compulsions.
A pantry door stands ajar, darkness beyond. Pistol still in a two-hand grip, I toe the door open wide. The inspill of pale light reveals that the shelves are bare. Not one can of vegetables or jar of fruit, or box of pasta. Sitting on the floor is a headless human skeleton. The skull rests on a shelf separate from the other bones, and a detached arm lies on the floor, one finger extended, pointed toward me as if I am expected. Neither the bones nor the floor under them are marked by the stains of decomposing flesh.
This discovery necessitates a correction to the Harmony-family history of the past five years. The skeleton is that of a child, perhaps a boy of about eight. If members of the family buried Maxy in an unmarked grave in some far corner of their property, then either the Hiskott thing ventured forth that very night to retrieve the corpse for his larder—or the dead boy was left with him, and Hiskott fashioned for the family false memories of an interment. This final twist to the story of Maxy’s already-horrific death is so unthinkable that, should I live, it will be my obligation to keep it from them. Neither Jolie nor anyone close to her must know, at least not until many years of freedom and peace have faded this part of their past as if it were a fever dream.
In this house of secrets, I feel displaced in time and space, as if, by the power of the alien presence, this land exists more on the planet of the creature’s origin than here on Earth, as if I live now not less than two years after losing Stormy but dwell instead in the dark future, on the eve of the end-of-all event that will explain the history of the universe.
The downstairs hallway is like a tunnel to the afterlife in a film about near-death experiences, a shadowy length that telescopes toward a mysterious light, though the promise at the farther end is not bright or inviting, but pallid, wintry, and uncertain. A switch turns on three ceiling fixtures. The bulbs are burned out in the second and third of them.
In the fall of light, immediately to my right, a door stands open on a landing, beyond which stairs lead down into an unrelenting darkness. A stench rises from what lies below, a witches’ brew of rancid fat, rotten vegetation, urine, and other foulness unknown. Something moves in that deep dankness, what might be heavy horn-heeled feet knocking and scraping along a concrete floor, and a voice issues an eerie trilling sound.
I try the switch on the landing wall, but it doesn’t summon any light. I pull the door shut. There is a deadbolt, which I engage. If eventually I must go into the cellar, I will require a flashlight. Before that, I need to clear the rooms on the first two floors, and hope to survive that inspection.
I move through a dining room long unused, revealed in sunlight filtered by gauzy curtains that hang between open draperies, through a study where bevies of fat moths quail from the window sheers and flutter to darker corners as if the shadows will save them from me, and then I return to the hallway, proceeding toward the foyer and the front rooms.
I am no less afraid, but my fear is tempered now by a healthy detestation and by a conviction that my mission is somet
hing even more important than freeing the Harmony family from this curse. In some fundamental sense, I am here to perform an exorcism.
TWENTY-THREE
So here we are, inside Wyvern, and might as well be a thousand miles away from Oddie for all the help we can give him. We hear him crash into the house as planned, but right after that we lose contact with him, because the car is probably smashed up and all. Ed says the Jeep is still transmitting a signal, and so is the smartphone. He’s sure that Odd is alive and well. Okay, so Ed’s super-smart, but that doesn’t mean he knows everything, he’s not like God or anything. As you can imagine, I want him to call that phone and see if Oddie’s all right, but Ed says not yet, give Oddie time to orient himself, we don’t want to distract him at a critical moment.
One of our three big worries, if we can limit them to three, is that when Oddie rocketed into the house, the boom of it alerted the county firefighting crew, and that they’ll rush to the house, see what Hiskott cannot afford for them to see, and lots of people will die before it’s over. But Ed is monitoring the emergency-band radio traffic plus all phone and cell-phone calls from anywhere in the Corner, and he says nobody seems to have noticed. The sirens, wind, fire, and just general commotion must have provided enough cover for Oddie.
I’m half sick thinking about it, but one of our other biggest worries is that Hiskott will use someone in my family to kill Oddie or that Oddie will have to kill some people in my family when he’s attacked. Either way, you know, it’s like I might just die myself if that happens, or if I don’t die, then something in me will die, and I won’t ever be the same or want to be.
If you want to know, the third thing that’s making us nuts—or making me nuts, since Ed just isn’t capable of being made nuts—is thinking about those three guests of the motor court that Hiskott took into his house over the years, those loners nobody missed, and they never came out again. Ed thinks maybe crazy old Hiskott might have done something more than mind-control them. He says maybe, after that injection of alien cells and over time, Hiskott is more alien now than human, and so he was able to infect those three and turn them into something alien, too. You know, like with a vampire bite or something less stupid than a vampire bite. Ed knows everything Hiskott and his team learned about the ETs, because he has access to those files. He says it’s major scarifying stuff. So whatever Oddie’s got to deal with in that house, it’s not a close encounter of the third kind in the cuddly Spielberg style.