by Dean Koontz
“Because they don’t trust you with the silver.”
“Christ, it’s good to hear your voice.”
“How are Peggy and the kids?”
“Fine. Wonderful. Everyone’s healthy.”
“Give them my love and wish them a merry Christmas for me.”
“I will. You’ll have to come visit for a weekend soon. You know we haven’t seen each other in six months? We live so close, only an hour or so apart. Lou, why don’t we get together more often?”
“Maybe subconsciously we loathe each other.”
“Nobody could possibly loathe me. I’m just a big Hershey Bar. My daughter says so.”
“Well, Mr. Hershey Bar, I wonder if you could do me a favor.”
“Name it, Lou.”
“I’d like you to go back through the Times’ morgue and get me all available background on a crime that interests me.”
“What sort of crime?”
“Child molestation.”
“Ugly.”
“Also assault with intent to kill.”
“Where did it happen?”
“Somewhere in West Los Angeles. A pretty good neighborhood. The girl lived on a twenty-acre estate that’s probably since been subdivided.”
“When was this?”
“Twenty-four, maybe twenty-five years ago.”
“Who was the victim?”
“This gets touchy.”
“How so?”
“Roger, she’s a dear friend.”
“I see.”
“She’s also a celebrity of sorts, very much in the public eye.”
“I’m intrigued.”
“I don’t intend to write about this. And I don’t want anyone else writing about it.”
“If it’s twenty-five years old, it’s dead material for a newspaper.”
“I know that. But someone might be able to use it in a magazine piece. It would hurt her badly if it were all dredged up again.”
“If you aren’t writing about it, why do you need to know?”
“She’s in trouble. Bad trouble. Iwant to help her.”
“Why can’t you get the details of this thing from her?”
“She was only six years old when it happened.”
“My God.”
“She can’t possibly remember it all——or remember it correctly.”
“And what happened back then has some connection with the bad trouble she’s in now?”
“I think it might.”
“Okay. I won’t send someone else to do the work. There’d be a leak if I did. I’ll go down to the morgue and pick through the files myself.”
“Thanks, Roger.”
“And I’ll go as your friend, not as a reporter.”
“That’s good enough for me.”
“What’s the victim’s name?”
“Mary Bergen. No, wait... back then it was Mary Tanner.”
“The clairvoyant?”
“That’s right.”
“We carry her column.”
“So do I.”
“Who was the assailant?”
“Berton Mitchell. B-E-R-T-O-N. M-I-T-C-H-E-L-L. He was the caretaker for the Tanner estate.”
“I’ll get the full background. Is there something about it that especially interests you?”
“I want to know if Mitchell ever stood trial. If he had his day in court, I want to know whether he was acquitted and set free, or found guilty.”
“You said he was the assailant.”
“That doesn’t mean he was found guilty. You know what a good attorney can accomplish.”
“Anything else?”
“Most of all, if Mitchell was found guilty, I want to know if he committed suicide.”
“Is that what you’ve been told?”
“Yes. But I don’t know if it’s true.”
“Lou, if he’s still alive, and if he’s not in prison, I doubt I could find him through our files.”
“I’m not asking you to find him. If Mitchell’s alive, then I think I know where he is.”
“I’ll get back to you this afternoon.”
“I’ll be at the office.”
When he concluded his conversation with Roger Fullet, Lou placed a long-distance telephone call to the home of Dr. Oliver Railsbeck, an old friend who worked at Stanford University. They talked for fifteen minutes.
At nine-thirty, after he had learned what he could from Ollie Railsbeck, Lou walked down the hall to the guest bath. He had cleaned up the mess the previous night; the broken glass and spilled cough syrup were gone. He stood in the center of the small room and studied the mirror above the washbasin. There was no reflection but his own.
He touched the glass and the mirror frame, touched the faucets and the porcelain sink. The night before, all of these things had been splashed with blood that Mary had conjured up and briefly sustained with her psychic power. Thick wet blood that was real... yet not real. Blood that had substance, color, and texture (if only for a few seconds), but which was not of this world.
He wondered whose pain and suffering it had represented. It could be the symbolic blood of the blonde whose death Mary had predicted. Or perhaps it was Mary’s blood that had vanished from Max’s fingertips.
An omen of her death?
“God help her,” Lou said aloud.
14
MARY SAT ON an uncomfortable metal chair, her purse on her lap, her hands on the purse.
Max was on a chair at her left side. He knew she didn’t like long conversations with policemen, and that the dreary, cold, atmosphere of police stations unnerved her. Several times during the past quarter hour he had reached out and touched her. Nothing obvious. Little pats and squeezes of affection and reassurance. As always, his presence buoyed her.
To her right Lou had turned another chair around so that he could sit with his arms crossed on the back of it.
The room smelled of stale cigar smoke. The overhead lights were too bright. The only decorations on the walls were photographs of the late J. Edgar Hoover, Chief Patmore’s idol, and a military calendar that had a different battle scene for each month.
John Patmore, senior officer of the King’s Point police force, hunched over his cluttered desk and spoke earnestly into the telephone to Percy Osterman. Apparently the sheriff was doling out a considerable amount of flattery in order to persuade Patmore to cooperate with Mary. A smile that was almost a smirk played at the corners of Patmore’s weak mouth.
He was a surprisingly bland-looking man. Late forties. Round face. Mostly bald. Brown eyes. Plain features. Average height and average weight.
She worried that they hadn’t made a strong case in their plea for Patmore’s assistance. Lou had advised her not to discuss the more bizarre aspects of her story. She had said nothing about flying glass dogs, deadly sea gulls, or bathroom mirrors that brimmed with blood. All of that, Lou insisted, would confuse Patmore. After Lou explained the nature of Mary’s psychic powers, she had told the policeman only that the mass murders of the last few days were the work of one man, that he had killed a young woman in King’s Point last night (although the body had not yet been found), and that at seven o’clock this evening he would open fire with a high-powered rifle from one of the three towers that overlooked the harbor.
At last, Patmore said good-bye to Percy Osterman and put down the receiver. He leaned back in his chair. For almost a minute he stared off into space. He was smiling.
“Don’t let the chief upset you. He doesn’t mean to be insulting,” Lou said to Max and Mary. “Every once in a while he stops to think and forgets to start again.”
Ignoring the newsman, Patmore turned to Mary. “I don’t like this—a lunatic killer in my town.”
She said, “If we—”
Taking a cigar from the center drawer of his desk, Patmore said, “Not one bit do I like it. I run a very tight little town as chief of police.”
“We can—”
“In each of those towers,” Patmore said,
“because Percy Osterman vouched for you, although I still have my doubts about this psychic stuff, at six o’clock, one hour ahead of schedule if you’re right, I’ll have the men.”
Not certain that she had properly interpreted that convoluted sentence, Mary said, “Then you’ll put men in the towers tonight?”
Patmore blinked. He had started to wet the end of his cigar. He took it out of his mouth. “Now, didn’t I just say that?”
“You’ll have to excuse the chief,” Lou said. “He thinks that ‘syntax’ is the money the church collects from sinners.”
Much to Mary’s relief, the policeman studiously ignored Lou. He said, “Let’s have the details again; your vision from start to finish.”
She sighed and relaxed slightly.
She thought: this particular horror is drawing to an end.
Then: Is it? Or is it only just beginning?
“Are you feeling well?” Max asked.
“Yes,” she lied.
On the sidewalk in front of police headquarters, Max turned to Lou and said, “Well, that was a lot easier than you said it would be.”
Lou shrugged. “I’m surprised. Ordinarily it takes a surgical procedure to get a new idea into his head.”
“Evidently,” Mary said, “he’s even more impressed by Percy Osterman than you thought.”
Lou said, “That’s definitely a part of it. But I guess it’s also self-preservation. He knows that if he called you a charlatan and threw you out of his office, and then the killer did strike from one of those towers, I’d call for his resignation on the front page of my newspaper twice every week until he was out of a job.”
Max suggested they leave the cars parked and walk two blocks to the harbor. “We can have drinks and lunch at The Sea Locker while we watch the boats.”
She walked between Max and Lou, and gradually her spirits lifted. The breeze scoured Patmore’s cigar smoke from her; it sluiced away some of her tension and anxiety as well.
The weather had improved. Although the sky was still overcast, and although rain was forecast for tomorrow, this was one of those widely advertised Southern California winter days. The temperature had risen to seventy degrees. The air was so clean and fresh that it almost wasn’t there. This was the kind of day that made all of the transplanted Easterners happy they had moved.
A block from the harbor they came to a pet shop where two spaniel puppies peered out from a window cage.
“Oh, aren’t they cute!” Mary said. She slipped from between Max and Lou, went to the window.
The puppies stood with their front paws on the glass and tried to sniff the hand she offered them. Their tails whipped frantically back and forth.
“Never cared for dogs,” Lou said. “They’re too dependent.”
“They’re sweet,” she said.
“I don’t like cats either.”
Max said, “Why not?”
“They’re too independent.”
“Lou, you’re trying too hard,” Max said.
Smiling, the newsman said, “Well, in some quarters I’m known as a bitter curmudgeon. I’ve got to uphold my reputation, don’t I?”
Mary spoke to the dogs through the window, and they wiggled and barked ecstatically.
“I know how much you love animals,” Max said. “I thought about getting you a dog for Christmas. Maybe I should have done it.”
“Oh, no,” she said, still playing with the puppies. “It would have died.”
Lou looked at her curiously. “What an odd thing to say.”
Memories of mutilated cats and dogs and rabbits and other small creatures flickered in disgusting colors behind her eyes.
She turned away from the spaniels. “Alan had a great many animals when he was a boy. I had a few myself. But all of them were tortured and killed.”
“Tortured and killed?” Lou asked. “What in the name of God are you talking about?”
“Berton Mitchell’s boy did it,” Mary said. “He thought I’d falsely accused his father. So he kept sneaking onto the estate and slaughtering our pets. One by one. Year after year. Until we finally stopped keeping animals.”
With a tenderness that touched her, Max said, “So the nightmares didn’t end when Mitchell hanged himself in that prison cell.”
His gray eyes, so often flat and expressionless, were filled with sympathy and love.
Lou said, “I didn’t know that Berton Mitchell had a family.”
Mary nodded. “A wife and son. Of course, they moved off the estate after... after what happened. But they never left the city. They were always nearby.”
She glanced at the spaniels, but they no longer appealed to her. When she looked at them now, she couldn’t see anything but Alan’s dogs: dead dogs with broken legs and dozens of knife wounds, gutted dogs, beheaded dogs, dogs with their eyes punched out...
Lou said, “This Mitchell boy—”
“No more about that,” she said shakily. “Let’s get to The Sea Locker. I can use a drink.”
The men’s room at the restaurant reeked of pine-scented disinfectant.
As they washed their hands at the twin sinks (Max being careful to keep his bandaged finger dry), Lou said, “Did I ever mention my friend, Ollie Railsbeck?”
“I don’t recall the name,” Max said.
“He’s in charge of a relatively new research effort at Stanford University. They’re investigating all kinds of paranormal things—clairvoyance, precognition, psychometry, telepathy, telekinesis, astral projection, everything. ”
“I think I do remember the name,” Max said.
He turned off the water and jerked a paper towel from the dispenser. “I think they’ve asked Mary to cooperate in some experiments, but she hasn’t found the time yet.”
Pulling a towel from the dispenser on the wall, Lou said, “Ever since we learned that the Russians are spending almost a billion dollars a year on research to find military applications for psychic phenomena, the Pentagon’s been willing to part with a few bucks to fund general studies in the field. Ollie’s department and the one that Dr. Rhine started years ago at Duke University are the best programs of their sort in the country.”
“Mary’s done some work at Duke.”
“This morning I called Ollie Railsbeck and asked his opinion about what happened at the house last night, about the blood that came out of the mirror.”
“What did he say?”
“He called it ’ectoplasm.’”
“I’m familiar with the word,” Max said. He threw away his paper towel and turned toward the men’s room door.
“Wait,” Lou said. “I didn’t want to bring this up in front of Mary.”
Max leaned against the wall. “Go ahead.”
“According to Ollie, that kind of experience isn’t as unique as I thought it was. He says similar things occur at séances.”
Max raised his eyebrows. “Your friend’s spending our tax dollars to study séances? Those phony sessions the gypsies run, that dark-room-and-candles bit where people who want to talk to dead relatives get bilked out of their money?”
“There are some highly respected mediums who take their work seriously, who don’t want money or notoriety, and who conduct some of the damnedest, scariest séances.”
“They talk to ghosts?”
“Maybe. They think they do. They talk to something that seems to talk back. Anyway, Ollie says that every now and then the form of a spirit or an object will appear above the seance table or over the medium’s head while she’s in a trance.”
“And it’s not done with slide projectors focused on a plastic sheet or anything like that?”
“These apparitions have been seen and studied by researchers in a controlled laboratory environment,” Lou said. “Sometimes blood will drip out of thin air. Or what appear to be tears. Whatever the nature of the manifestation, it has substance, just as if it’s real.”
“But only for a short time. Last night the blood that came out of that mirror faded quickl
y.”
“Right. It usually lasts seconds. Sometimes a full minute. Ollie knows of a case where a child’s face floated above the medium for twenty minutes, but that’s rare. Temporarily solid apparitions like these are supposedly composed of ectoplasm, a supernatural material that, the mediums say, is able to pass between the dimensions of life and death.”
Max said, “This friend of yours believes in ghosts?”
“No. He says most of the genuinely talented mediums have highly developed psychic abilities. They score well on card tests for telepathy. Most of them have well documented records of accurate predictions. Ollie thinks that somehow, by the use of a psychic ability we don’t understand, they unconsciously create the ectoplasm.”
“He doesn’t believe it’s material from another world?”
“No. And especially not from the afterlife.”
Max thought about that for a moment. He said, “Then in Railsbeck’s view ectoplasm is sort of the realized flesh of a psychic’s subconscious thoughts.”
“Exactly,” Lou said.
“So Railsbeck supports what I’ve been saying.”
“That’s why I wanted to tell you when we were alone,” Lou said. “I didn’t want to upset Mary.”
“There’s no supernatural, demonic force operating here.”
Lou sighed and shook his head. “I’m not absolutely convinced of that. You’re probably right. But I’m keeping an open mind. However, you are convinced, and Ollie sides with you, so I’ll keep my mouth shut.”
Max made a fist of one hand and pounded it into the other. The sound was sharp; it startled Lou, and it echoed off the tile walls. “Mary created the blood that came out of the mirror, like she caused the poltergeist, but she doesn’t realize it and refuses to believe it. She’s seen something terrible, Lou. To keep from facing it, she’s used psychic powers she never knew she had in order to construct a facade of ‘supernatural’ events to mislead herself. She’s seen something she’s had to force out of her mind, something she’s buried in her subconscious. She’s using poltergeists and other supernatural bunk to distract herself from the thing she most fears about this case.”
Tense and depressed, Lou said, “We can’t help her because we don’t know what she’s hiding from herself.”