by Dean Koontz
In other rooms, Mr. Lyss opened and closed doors. He didn’t suddenly scream, which was a good thing.
When the old man returned, he said, “It’s just the three. You wait here while I go downstairs and find something to burn them.”
“Please, please, I don’t want to stay here.”
“We have a responsibility, boy. You don’t just walk away and leave something like this to hatch.”
“They won’t like being burned.”
“I don’t much care about the preferences of a bunch of alien bugs, and neither should you.”
“You think they’re bugs?”
“I don’t know what the hell they are, but I know I don’t like them one bit. Now remember—you yell for me if anything starts to happen.”
“What might happen?”
“Anything might happen.”
“What should I yell?”
“Help would seem a good idea.”
Mr. Lyss hurried into the hall once more and down the stairs, leaving Nummy alone on the second floor. Well, not exactly alone. He had a feeling that the things in the cocoons were listening to him.
The ceiling creaked.
chapter 59
The pale brunette with the silver face jewelry sat two tables away from Carson and Michael. Her waitress was the same one who had served them, a perky redhead named Tori.
Carson could clearly hear Tori as she approached the woman: “Nice to see you, Denise. How’s it going this evening?”
Denise didn’t reply. She sat as before, stiffly erect, hands in her lap, staring into space.
“Denise? Is Larry coming? Honey? Is something wrong?”
When Tori tentatively touched the brunette’s shoulder, Denise reacted almost spastically. Her right hand flew up from her lap, seizing the waitress by the wrist.
Startled, Tori tried to pull away.
Denise held fast to the waitress and said, in a slow thick voice, “Help me.”
“Oh, my God. Honey, what happened to you?”
Carson saw a thread of blood unravel from the silver button on the brunette’s temple.
Even as Tori raised her voice and asked if anyone in the café knew first aid, Carson and Michael were on their feet and at her side.
“It’s all right, Denise, we’re here now, we’re here for you,” Michael assured her as he gently pried her fingers from the waitress’s wrist.
As if she felt adrift and desperate for a mooring, she gripped Michael’s hand as fiercely as she had held fast to Tori’s.
Voice trembling, Tori asked, “What’s wrong with her?”
“Call an ambulance.”
“Yeah. Okay,” the waitress agreed, but she didn’t move, riveted by horror, and Michael had to repeat the command to propel her into action.
Swinging a chair away from the table, sitting on the edge of it so that she was face to face with the brunette, Carson picked up the woman’s limp left hand and pressed two fingers to the radial artery in the wrist. “Denise? Talk to me, Denise.”
Studying the silver bead on her temple, from under which dark blood steadily seeped, Michael said, “I don’t know if it’s best to lay her down or keep her sitting up. What the hell is this thing?”
Carson said, “Her pulse is racing.”
A few people had gotten up from their dinners. Recognizing Carson’s and Michael’s competence, they hesitated to approach.
The woman’s eyes remained glazed.
“Denise? Are you here with me?”
Her empty gaze refocused from infinity. Her dark and liquid eyes brimmed with despair stripped so completely of any hope that her stare chilled Carson far more effectively than had the cold night air.
“She took me,” Denise said thickly.
“Help is on the way,” Carson assured her.
“She was me.”
“An ambulance. Just a minute or two.”
“But not me.”
A bubble of blood appeared in her left nostril.
“Hold on, Denise.”
“Tell my baby.”
“Baby?”
“Tell my baby,” she said more urgently.
“All right. Okay.”
“Me isn’t me.”
The bubble in the nostril swelled and burst. Blood oozed from her nose.
A commotion drew Carson’s attention to the front door of the restaurant. Three men entered. Two were police officers in uniform.
The ambulance couldn’t have arrived already. The civilian wasn’t dressed like a paramedic.
He remained by the door, as if guarding it, and the cops crossed the room to Denise. The nameplates under their badges identified them as BUNDY and WATSON.
“She’s injured,” Michael told them. “Some kind of nail or something. I don’t know how far it penetrated.”
“We know Denise,” Bundy said.
“Extreme tachycardia,” Carson said. “Her pulse is just flying.”
Watson said, “We’ll take it from here,” and pulled at Carson’s chair to encourage her to get to her feet and out of the way.
“There’s an ambulance coming,” Michael informed them.
“Please return to your table,” Bundy said.
When Denise wouldn’t let go of Michael’s hand, he said to the police, “She’s scared, we don’t mind staying with her.”
To Denise, Bundy said, “Let go of his hand.”
She released Michael’s hand at once.
Watson said, “Now please return to your dinner. We’ve got this covered.”
Disturbed by the cops’ cool officiousness, Carson remained at Denise’s table.
“Time to go, Denise,” Watson said. He took her by one arm. “Come with us.”
“But she’s bleeding,” Carson objected. “There’s a brain injury, she needs paramedics.”
“We can have her to the hospital before the ambulance is even here,” Watson said.
Denise had gotten to her feet.
“She has to be transported carefully,” Michael insisted.
Watson’s eyes were pale gray, a pair of polished stones. His lips were bloodless. “She walked away, didn’t she?”
“Away?”
“She walked all the way here on her own. She can walk out. We know what we’re doing.”
“You’re interfering with police business,” Bundy warned them, “and with this woman getting the care she needs.”
Carson saw Bundy’s right hand cup the Mace canister on his utility belt, and she knew that Michael saw it, too.
In their room at Falls Inn, they had unpacked and loaded a pair of pistols. The weapons were in shoulder rigs, under her blazer, under Michael’s sport coat.
Montana being Montana, the law most likely respected licenses to carry concealed weapons that had been issued in other states, but she didn’t know that for certain. Before arming themselves in this new jurisdiction, they should have at least visited the local authorities to present their credentials and request accommodation.
If they were Maced and cuffed, she and Michael would be in jail for at least twenty-four hours. Their pistols would be impounded. In a search of their motel room, the police would find and confiscate a pair of Urban Sniper shotguns and other forbidden items.
Even if they were released on bail in a timely fashion, they would be unarmed in a town where Victor’s clone would then surely know of their presence. Considering Watson’s and Bundy’s attitude and curious behavior, she suspected that the police had either been corrupted by Victor or were creatures of his creation.
Raising both hands as if in surrender, Michael said, “Sorry. Sorry. We’re just worried about the lady.”
“You let us do the worrying,” Watson said.
“Return to your table,” Bundy warned them again.
“Come along, Denise,” Watson said.
As she began to move with the cop, Denise met Carson’s eyes and said with thick-tongued urgency, “My baby.”
“All right,” Carson promised.
&
nbsp; As she and Michael returned to their table, Watson and Bundy escorted Denise across the restaurant. With her back as straight as a plumb line and her delicate chin raised, with the storklike step of a performer on a high wire, she moved with the obvious awareness that her situation remained precarious.
The civilian at the door took Denise’s free arm. Flanking their captive, he and Watson walked her out of the restaurant and into the now strange and threatening October night.
Bundy looked back at Carson and Michael as they reluctantly sat down at their table. He stared at them a moment, as if fixing them in their chairs, and then departed.
chapter 60
The Ahern property in the Lowers proved to be a cottage on a wide lot, but not one in disrepair. The paint wasn’t peeling, and the front-porch steps didn’t sag. The lawn and shrubs appeared to be well kept, and no pales were missing from the picket fence. Scalloped barge-boards and simple fretwork along the porch eaves gave the little house some charm.
Controlled by a timer, the porch light had come on at dusk. Otherwise, the place remained dark.
Directly across the street from the cottage, snarls of crisp dead weeds surrounded the burned-out concrete-block foundation of a house destroyed by fire years earlier. On the same property stood a wood-frame, corrugated-metal storage shed from which the door had broken away.
Concerned that someone from the hospital might come here in search of Travis when it was discovered that he had gone missing, he and Bryce Walker stood sentinel from within the empty storage shed. When Grace Ahern appeared in her Honda, they would break from cover and stop her in the street before she parked in the carport. She could drive them to the friend of Bryce’s from whom he believed he could get the help they needed.
The canted shed smelled of rust and wood rot and urine, with the faint underlying odor of something that had died in here and had nearly finished decomposing. A cleansing draft would have been welcome, but no breeze stirred the night.
Wrapped in the hospital blanket, which seemed thinner than it had been when he’d stripped it off the bed and rolled it, Bryce was neither warm nor freezing. The cold air nipped at his bare ankles, however, and gradually a chill crept up his calves.
As they waited, Travis’s stories about his mother revealed a woman of exceptional character, determined and indomitable, self-effacing and self-sacrificing, a woman with an inexhaustible capacity to love. Although the boy, in the manner of boys everywhere, would not say that he loved her with every fiber of his heart, the truth that he adored her was evident in everything he said about her.
But the longer they waited, the less Travis talked. Eventually, the question became not when Grace Ahern would come home but if she would show up at all.
“She wouldn’t go straight to the hospital,” the boy insisted. “She feels stale after working all day at school. That’s what she says—stale. She takes a quick shower. She gets to the hospital about six.”
She was already far behind the schedule that the boy attributed to her, but when Travis wanted to wait another ten minutes, Bryce said, “We can wait as long as you like. All night if you want.”
After that, they maintained their watch in silence, as if Travis feared that speaking of his mother would jinx her and him, that only by a stoic silence could he earn the sight of her again.
The boy’s anxiety became as manifest as the chill that coiled ever tighter as the night wore on.
Minute by minute, Bryce was overcome by a growing sympathy of such tenderness that it risked becoming pity, and he didn’t want to pity Travis Ahern because pity supposed that the mother must be already lost, like the screaming victims in the hospital basement.
chapter 61
In the silence, Nummy waited for the ceiling to creak but he also listened hard for any sound of Mr. Lyss searching downstairs for something he could use to burn the cocoons. Mr. Lyss wasn’t usually a quiet person, but now he was as quiet as a sneaky cat. No footsteps, no doors opening and closing, no bad words being said because he was having trouble finding what he wanted …
Maybe the problem wasn’t that Mr. Lyss couldn’t find what he wanted. Maybe instead the problem could be that something that wanted Mr. Lyss had found him. Maybe downstairs hung a cocoon that smelled a little bit like Mr. Lyss’s bad teeth.
Maybe three outer-space things spun these giant cocoons around themselves, the way caterpillars spun themselves up inside their own silk to become butterflies. But maybe instead the thing that spun the cocoons wasn’t in any of them, and it was creeping around the house and spinning more cocoons with its babies inside, and none of them pretty like a butterfly.
This was for sure what Grandmama meant when she said too much thinking led to too much worrying.
Although he seemed to have been gone a long time, Mr. Lyss still wasn’t making any noise downstairs, but suddenly some noise came from one of the cocoons or maybe from all of them. At first Nummy thought the things in the cocoons were whispering to one another, but then he realized this was a slithery sound, like a lot of snakes might be sliding around inside the sacks.
You would think that so much slithering would make the sacks bulge and ripple, but they didn’t. They just hung there, looking wet though Mr. Lyss said they weren’t.
Nummy stood very near the bedroom door, and he wanted to back across the threshold into the hallway, putting a little more space between himself and the cocoons. But he knew that once he went as far as the hallway, he would run for the stairs. If he ran for the stairs, that was when Mr. Lyss would finally return with his long gun, and Nummy didn’t want his head blown off and used like a basketball.
Finally, he couldn’t bear listening to the slithery sounds any longer, and he said to the cocoons, “Stop scaring me. I don’t want to be here, I have to be here, so just stop.”
To his surprise, they stopped.
For a moment, Nummy felt good that they stopped slithering when he told them to, because maybe they didn’t really mean to scare him in the first place and were sorry. But then he realized that if they stopped slithering when he told them to, they were listening to him, which meant they knew he was here in the room with them. Most of the time he was watching them, he told himself they were just cocoons, they weren’t aware of him. But they were.
Footsteps on the stairs turned out to be Mr. Lyss, which by now was the last thing Nummy was expecting.
“Are your pants still dry?” Mr. Lyss asked.
“Yes, sir. But they was slithering.”
“Your pants were slithering?”
“The things in the cocoons. Lots of slithery sounds, but the sacks they didn’t bulge or nothing.”
Mr. Lyss carried a two-gallon red can like people used to keep gasoline for their lawn mowers. He also carried a little basket with some smaller cans in it.
“Where’s your long gun?” Nummy asked.
“By the front door. I don’t think it’s smart to use a shotgun for this. Split the sack, and who knows how many things might come squirming out of it, maybe too many to shoot them all.” He put the basket on the floor beside Nummy. “Don’t drink any of that.”
“What is it?” Nummy asked.
“A couple different kinds of paint thinners, some lamp oil, and charcoal starter.” He handed Nummy a box of matches. “Hold these.”
“Why would I drink that junk?”
“I don’t know,” Mr. Lyss said, screwing the cap off the spout on the gasoline can. “Could be you’re a secret degenerate boozer, you’ll drink anything that’s got a kick to it, and I just haven’t known you long enough to see it.”
“I’m no boozer. That there’s an insult.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” Mr. Lyss said as he moved among the cocoons, holding the can high, pouring the gasoline all over them so they dripped on the floor. “I was just looking out for you.”
Right away the slithery sounds started again.
“They don’t like you doing that,” Nummy said.
“You can�
��t be sure. Maybe they’re the degenerate boozers you’re not, and they’re all excited by the smell, they think it’s cocktail time.”
The cocoons hung all around Mr. Lyss, and he turned from one to the other, saying, “Cheers,” as he raised the gasoline can to them.
The sacks bulged and rippled now like they hadn’t done before, and Nummy said, “You better get out of there.”
“I suspect you’re right,” Mr. Lyss said, but he took time to pour out what was left in the can.
The ceiling creaked louder than before, and there was the sound of wood cracking.
Certain that this was like one of those movies where people are eaten alive and nothing nice ever happens, Nummy closed his eyes. But he opened them at once because with his eyes closed he wouldn’t know if something might be coming to eat him, too.
The air was full of fumes. Nummy had to turn his head away from the cocoons, toward the door, to get any breath at all.
Mr. Lyss seemed to be breathing with no trouble. He dropped onto one knee beside the basket. One at a time, he removed the caps from the paint thinner, the charcoal starter, and the lamp oil, and he tossed each can on the carpet under the cocoons, where the contents gurgled out of them.
The fumes were worse than ever.
“I got some gas on my hands, Peaches. I’m a little leery about striking a match. You do the honors.”
“You want me to light up a match?”
“You know how, don’t you?”
“Sure, I know how.”
“Then better do it before the air’s so full of fumes it goes off like a bomb.”
Nummy slid open the box and selected a wooden match. He closed the box—you always close before striking—and scraped the match on the rough paper side. He only had to strike it twice to light it.
“There,” he said, showing it to Mr. Lyss.
“Good job.”
“Thank you.”
On the creaking ceiling, the plaster began to crack between the knotty-pine beams.
Mr. Lyss said, “Now throw the match where the carpet’s wet.”