by Dean Koontz
St. Luke’s Lutheran Church was between Mary and the Church of the Holy Trinity. It was two hundred yards north and a half a block from the harbor. It was a Spanish-style building with massive carved oak doors, and a bell tower slightly more than half as high as the one at the Catholic church.
Nothing from St. Luke’s either.
Just the ghostly wind and the cries of agitated sea gulls.
The third tower was to her left, two hundred yards away, at the edge of the water. It was only four stories high, part of Kimball’s Games and Snacks, a clapboard and cedar-shingled pavilion that housed an amusement arcade. In the summer camera-laden tourists climbed to the top and took photographs of the harbor. Now the place was closed for the season, quiet, empty.
“Will it be Kimball’s tower?” Max asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It could be any of them.”
“You’ve got to try harder,” he said.
She closed her eyes and concentrated.
Screeching angrily, a gull swooped down, flashed past their faces with only eight or ten inches to spare.
Mary jumped back in surprise, dropped her coffee mug.
“You okay?” Max asked.
“Startled. That’s all.”
“Did it touch you?”
“No.”
“They don’t dive that close unless you trespass on their nesting grounds. But there’s nowhere around here they’d lay eggs. Besides, it’s not the time of year for that.”
The dozen gulls that had entered the harbor a few minutes ago were circling overhead. They weren’t taking advantage of the wind currents as gulls usually do; there was nothing lazy or graceful about their flight. Instead, they twisted and fluttered and soared and dived and darted frantically among one another within a tightly defined sphere of air. They seemed tortured. It was surprising that they didn’t collide. Screeching at one another, they performed an unnatural, frenzied dance in midair.
“What’s upset them?” Max wondered.
“Me,” she said.
“You? What did you do?”
She was trembling. “I tried to use my clairvoyance to see which tower the killer will use.”
“So?”
“The gulls are here to stop me from doing that.”
Astounded, he said, “Mary, that makes no sense. Trained gulls?”
“Not trained. Controlled.”
“Controlled by whom? Who sent them?”
She stared at the birds.
“Who?” he asked again. “Lingard’s ghost?”
“Maybe,” she said.
He touched her shoulder. “Mary—”
“You saw the poltergeist that was after me, dammit! ”
In a let’s-calm-down-and-be-reasonable tone of voice that drove her mad, he said, “Whatever causes poltergeist phenomena can lift and hurl inanimate objects—but not living animals.”
“Listen,” she said, “you don’t know everything. You don’t know—” She looked away from him, looked up.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“The birds.”
The gulls still capered maniacally overhead, but they were silent. Perfectly silent.
“Strange,” Max said.
“I’m going inside,” she said.
She almost reached the mullioned door that connected the deck to the second-floor cocktail lounge when a sea gull struck her from behind, between the shoulders, like a hammer blow. She stumbled and instinctively put one arm across her face. The wings beat at her neck. Battered the back of her head. Thundered in her ears. These weren’t like the wings that she associated with Berton Mitchell. Those wings had been leathery, membranous. These were feathered. But that didn’t make the sea gulls any less frightening. She thought of the bird’s wickedly sharp, hooked beak, thought of it pecking out her eyes, and she screamed.
Max shouted something that she couldn’t hear.
She started to reach for the bird, realized it might tear her fingers, jerked her hand back.
Max knocked the gull away from her. It flopped on the deck, temporarily stunned.
Max opened the door, pushed her inside, went in after her, and pulled the door shut.
The bartender had seen the attack, and he was hurrying around the end of the counter, wiping his hands on a towel.
A heavyset, red-haired man at the bar swiveled around on his stool to see what was happening.
In one of the black vinyl booths by the windows a young couple—a pretty blonde in a green dress and a dark, intense man—looked up from their drinks.
Before the bartender had taken three steps, a sea gull struck the mullioned door behind Max. Two small panes broke inward. Glass tinkled musically on the floor.
The cocktail waitress dropped her tray and ran toward the stairs that led down to the restaurant foyer.
With a sound like a shotgun blast, another gull slammed into one of the five-foot by six-foot windows that overlooked the harbor. The glass cracked but held. The injured bird toppled backward to the deck outside, leaving a smear of blackish blood to mark the collision.
“They’ll kill me.”
“No,” Max said.
“That’s what they want!”
He held her protectively, but for the first time since she had known him, his arms didn’t seem big enough, his chest broad enough, his body strong enough to guarantee her safety.
A sea gull caromed off the window beside the young couple’s table. The glass cracked in a jagged, lightning-bolt pattern. The pretty blonde shrieked and scrambled out of the booth.
An instant after her companion prudently followed her, another gull rammed the same window and shattered it. Large shards of glass collapsed onto the dark pine table, bounced up in many smaller pieces, and showered over the vinyl where the couple had been sitting.
The decapitated gull landed in the center of the table; and its bloody head plopped into the woman’s martini.
Two more gulls flew in through the broken window.
“Don’t let them!” Mary shouted hysterically. “Don’t let them, don’t, don’t, oh don’t, please don’t! ”
The young couple went to their knees, taking shelter behind and half beneath a table.
Max pushed Mary into the nearest corner. He shielded her as best he could with his body. One of the birds sailed straight at him. He threw up one arm to ward it off. The creature squealed in anger, shied away, circled through the room.
The other gull attempted to land on one of the round tables in the middle of the lounge. Its wings knocked over a centerpiece—a copper and stained-glass lantern with a candle inside—and the candle set fire to the tablecloth.
The bartender used his damp towel to extinguish the flame.
The gull swooped from the table to the shelves of liquor behind the bar. Two, three, four, half a dozen, eight bottles crashed to the floor. On his stool, a few feet from the crazed gull, the red-haired man was too bewildered to be frightened. He watched the bird with fascination as it flapped and kicked and sent more bottles to the floor. The fragrance of whiskey blossomed through the room.
The first gull flew at Max again. It came in above him, fluttered wildly in the corner, then with malign intelligence dropped behind his back, onto Mary’s head.
Its feet tangled in her hair.
“God, no! No!”
She grabbed at the bird, not caring about its beak, not caring if it pecked her fingers. It was unclean. She had to get it off her. Max reached for it, too. Then it rose from her, up and away once more, circling into the room. In a second, however, it darted back and thumped into the wall beside her head. It dropped to the floor at her feet and twitched spasmodically.
Gasping for breath, her hands to her face and fingers spread, she backed away from it.
“It’s terror-stricken,” Max said.
“Kill it!” She hardly recognized her own voice; it was altered by fear and hatred.
He hesitated. “I don’t think it’s dangerous anymore.”
/> “Kill it before it flies up!”
He kicked the bird into the corner, raised his foot, and with evident reluctance stepped on its head.
Gagging, Mary turned away.
The other gull flew away from the bar and left the room through the broken window.
Everything was quiet, still.
At last the intense, dark-skinned young man stood up, helped the blonde to her feet.
The heavyset, red-haired man at the bar tossed down his drink in one gulp.
“Christ, what a mess!” the bartender said.
“What happened? Did anyone ever see gulls act like that before?”
Max touched her cheek. “Are you okay?”
She leaned on him and wept.
11
6:30.
Lights speckled the nighttime King’s Point hills like orange flame gleaming from within a jack-o’-lantern with a thousand eyes. To the west the ocean and sky melted into a single black shroud.
Max parked at the curb, switched off the headlights. He leaned over and kissed Mary. “You look lovely tonight.”
She smiled. Surprisingly, in spite of what had happened to her today, she felt lovely, feminine, buoyant. “That makes six times you’ve told me.”
“Seven’s a lucky number. You look lovely tonight.” He kissed her again. “Do you feel better? Are you relaxed?”
“The man who invented valium should be made a saint.”
“You should be made a saint,” he said. “Now don’t move. I’m feeling terribly chivalrous. I’ll come around and open your door.”
The wind from the sea was no stronger than it had been during the day, although with nightfall it grew colder and seemed also to grow noisier. It shook badly fitted shutters until they clattered. It worried loosely hinged garage doors, made them groan and creak. It scraped tree branches against the side of the house, tipped over empty trash barrels, stirred brittle feathered-end palm fronds together in a chorus of snakelike hissing, and rolled a few discarded soda cans along the streets.
Sheltered from the worst of the wind by dense shrubs, pine trees and date palms, the small single-story house at 440 Ocean Hill Lane looked warm and cozy. Soft light radiated from the leaded windows. A carriage lamp glowed beside the front door.
Lou Pasternak—owner, publisher, and editor of the twice-a-week King’s Point Press—answered the bell and hustled them inside. While they told each other how well they looked and how happy they were to see each other again, Pasternak kissed Mary on the cheek, shook hands with Max, and hung their coats in the closet.
Being in Lou’s presence was, she thought, as relaxing as taking a tranquilizer. Except for Max and her own brother, Mary liked Lou more than any other man she’d ever met. He was intelligent, kind, too generous. He was also the worst cynic she had ever met, but the cynicism was tempered by humility and a marvelous sense of humor.
She worried about him because he drank too much. But he knew he did, and he was able to talk about his drinking dispassionately. He argued that if you understood how screwed up the world was, if you saw how like a paradise it could be, if you understood that what could be never would be because most people were hopeless jackasses—well, then you needed a crutch to get through life with your sanity intact. For some people, he said, it was money or drugs or any of a hundred other things. His crutch was Scotch. And damned good bourbon.
“My mother,” Mary sometimes said to him, “led a miserable life as an alcoholic.”
“Your mother,” Lou always responded, “sounds like an alcoholic who didn’t know how to hold her liquor. There’s nothing worse than a sloppy drunk—unless it’s a self-pitying drunk.”
His drinking didn’t appear to interfere with the full life he led. He had built and still operated an extremely successful business. His editorials and reportage had won several national awards. At forty-five, although he had never been married, he had more women friends than any man Mary knew. At the moment he lived alone, but that would not last.
Although she had seen him consume Herculean quantities of liquor, she had never seen him drunk. He did not stagger, slur his speech, become maudlin or loud or obnoxious. He not only could hold his liquor, he thrived on it.
“I don’t drink to escape my responsibilities,” he had once told her. “I drink to escape the consequences of other people’s inability to meet their responsibilities.”
“Alcohol killed my mother,” she warned him. “I don’t want to see you die.”
“We all die, my dear. It’s just as good to drop of a rotted liver as it is to be felled by cancer or a stroke. Actually, I think it’s better.”
She loved him as much as she loved Max, though in different ways.
He was a stocky man, a full foot shorter than Max’s six four, even slightly shorter than Mary. He was solidly constructed. His neck, shoulders, arms, and chest were thick with muscle, powerful. He was wearing a white shirt; the sleeves were rolled up; and his forearms were matted with hair.
His face was in stark contrast to his body. He had the fine features of an inbred aristocrat. He combed his brown hair straight back from his face. His brow was high; his lively brown eyes were deeply set and sensitive; his nose was narrow, the nostrils delicate; and his mouth was almost prim. He wore wire-rimmed spectacles that made him look as if he was a college professor.
“Bourbon and ice,” he said, picking up a tall glass from the slate-topped foyer table. “My third since I got home from work. In case the wind blows down the power lines later on, I intend to be so lit up that I can do my bedtime reading by my own light.”
Although there were armchairs and a comfortable sofa, the living room was primarily furnished with books, magazines, record albums, and paintings. Stacks of books stood beside and behind the couch; books filled the space under the coffee table; recent issues of magazines overflowed a rack meant to hold a hundred of them. The one wall that was free of records and books was covered with original oils, pastels, and watercolors by local painters. Dozens of pieces in every imaginable style had been squeezed so close that their beauty overlapped; they intruded upon one another; but Lou’s taste was so good that even under these circumstances the eye was caught and held by each work at some point during a long evening. One of the armchairs was more tattered and lumpy than the other. That was where Lou sat, reading half a dozen books each week, drinking too much, and listening to opera, Benny Goodman, or Bach.
It was the friendliest room Mary had ever seen.
Lou brought their drinks. He put Bach, interpreted by Eugene Ormandy, on the stereo at low volume. “Now let’s hear the whole story. Since you called this morning, I’ve been half crazy wondering what this is about. You were so mysterious.”
Interrupted frequently by Lou’s questions, digressing into discussions of poltergeists, Mary told him everything. She began with the tracking down of Richard Lingard and ended with the sea gull attack at the Laughing Dolphin.
When she finished, the house was abnormally quiet. A grandfather clock ticked solemnly in the dining room.
Thinking about what she had said, Lou poured himself more bourbon. When he returned to his armchair, he said, “So tomorrow night at seven o’clock this killer will stab two people, perhaps killing one of them. Then he’ll climb a tower and start to shoot.”
“You believe me?” she asked.
“Of course. I’ve followed your work for years, haven’t I?”
“You believe about Lingard’s spirit?”
“If you say I should, why wouldn’t I?”
She glanced at Max.
“Will this man have anyone to shoot at tomorrow night?” Max asked. “Won’t just about everyone be at home with their families on Christmas Eve?”
“Oh,” Lou said, “he’ll have plenty of targets around the harbor. There’ll be Christmas Eve parties on dozens of boats. People on the decks. People on the docks. People everywhere.”
“I don’t think we can stop the stabbings from taking place,” Mary said. “But
maybe we can keep him from shooting anyone. Policemen can be stationed in all three towers.”
“One problem,” Lou said.
“What’s that?”
“John Patmore.”
“Your chief of police.”
“Unfortunately, he is. It’s not going to be easy to convince him that he should heed your visions.”
“If he thinks there’s even the slightest chance I might be right,” Mary said, “why shouldn’t he cooperate? After all, his job is to protect the people of King’s Point.”
Lou smiled crookedly. “My dear, you should know by now that many cops don’t see their jobs quite the same way as taxpayers do. Some cops think that all they’re required to do is wear fancy fascist uniforms, ride around in flashy patrol cars, collect envelopes of graft money, and retire at the public expense after twenty or thirty years of ‘service.’”
“You’re too cynical,” she said.
“Percy Osterman told us Patmore’s difficult,” Max added.
“Difficult? He’s stupid,” Lou said. “Ignorant beyond description. The only reason you can’t accuse him of being scatterbrained is because he doesn’t have any brains to scatter. I’m sure he’s never heard the word ‘clairvoyant.’ And when we are finally able to make him understand what it means, he won’t believe it. If something’s not within his personal experience, he doesn’t accept its existence. I’m positive he’d argue against the reality of Europe simply because he’s never been there.”
“He can call some police chiefs I’ve worked with,” Mary said. “They’ll convince him I’m genuine.”
“If he’s never met them, he won’t believe a word they say. I tell you, Mary, if ignorance is really bliss, then he’s the happiest man in the world.”
“Sheriff Osterman said we could tell Patmore to call him for an endorsement,” Max said.
Lou nodded. “That might help. Patmore’s impressed with Osterman. And I’ll go with you to see him if you’d like. But I’ve got to warn you that I won’t help your cause very much. Patmore hates me.”
“I can’t imagine why,” Max said. “Except, you probably talk like this about him to his face.”