by Dean Koontz
“They were killed in different bedrooms. Lovers would have been found together. And if Barry was alive, he’d have come forward.”
“Not if he was the killer.”
“What?”
“It’s not impossible.”
“Nothing’s impossible, but—”
“Barry would have been twenty-one when the house burned that night. Maybe almost twenty-two. Roger, isn’t that a bit old for a boy to be living with his mother?”
“Hell, no. Lou, we didn’t all rush out to grab our piece of the action at sixteen, like you did. I lived with my folks until I was twenty-three. Why are you so anxious to believe Barry’s alive?”
“It would make things easier to understand down here.”
“You’re too good a newsman to try to reshape facts to fit some preconceived notion.”
“Yeah. You’re right. I’ve run into another stone wall.”
“What’s the story with this Mary Bergen? What are you involved in?”
“I’m afraid it’s going to be very messy. I don’t want to talk about it yet.”
“And maybe I don’t want to hear about it either.”
“Go play with your train.”
“Somehow I’m no longer in the mood for play. Take care of yourself, Lou. Be careful. Be damned careful. And... Merry Christmas.”
17
THEY SAT IN Lou’s living room, listening to music—and waiting for something to happen. Mary couldn’t imagine a grimmer Christmas. She and Max weren’t even able to exchange gifts. The things he had gotten her were at the stores where he’d left them to be wrapped, and as she’d become preoccupied with this case, she’d had no opportunity to go shopping for him.
Her spirits lifted when Alan called at three o’clock to say he was in San Francisco at his friend’s house. He’d tried the number in Bel Air, and the housekeeper had told him to call Lou. He was worried, but she understated the gravity of her situation and calmed him. No sense ruining his Christmas, too. When Alan finally hung up, her spirits sank again; she missed him so much.
Because no one had eaten breakfast or lunch, Lou served an early dinner at five o’clock. Chicken Kiev on a bed of rice. Cylinders of grilled zucchini filled with spinach pate. Tomatoes stuffed with hot cheese, bread crumbs, and peppers. There were baked apples for dessert.
No one was hungry. They picked at their food. Mary didn’t even taste her wine. By six o’clock they were finished.
Over coffee Mary said, “Lou, do you have a Ouija board?”
He put down his cup. “I have one, but I haven’t used it in years.”
“Do you know where it is?”
“The spare bedroom closet, I think.”
“Would you get it while Max and I clear the table?”
“Sure. What are we going to do with it?”
“I’m tired of waiting for the killer to make the next move,” she said. “We’re going to try to force the issue.”
“I’m all for that. But how?”
Max said, “Sometimes, when Mary can’t recall the fine details of a vision, she can prod her memory with a Ouija board. She doesn’t get answers from the spirit world, mind you. The things she wants to know are things she’s forgotten. They’re buried in her subconscious. Not always, but often enough to make it worthwhile when nothing else works, the Ouija board provides her with a pipeline to her subconscious.”
Lou nodded with understanding. “The answers the board gives actually come from Mary.”
“Right,” Max said.
“But I don’t consciously guide the trivet,” she said. “I let it go where it wants to go.”
“Where your subconscious wants it to go,” Max said. “You do influence the trivet with your fingers, but in a way that you’re not aware of.”
“I suppose,” she said.
Lou put a few more drops of cream in his coffee and said, “So the Ouija board acts like a lens.”
“Exactly,” she said. “It focuses my attention, my memory, and my psychic abilities.”
Lou drank his coffee in three long swallows and stood up. “It sure sounds interesting. Anything’s better than sitting around waiting for the ax to fall. I’ll be right back.” He hurried out of the dining room and down the hall toward the spare bedroom.
Max and Mary stacked the dishes and silver-ware in the kitchen sink. She finished wiping off the glossy pine dining table just as Lou returned.
“One Ouija board, as requested,” he said.
Mary went into the living room to fetch her notebook from the sofa where she’d left it with her purse.
Lou said, “Got to clean out that spare bedroom closet one of these days. The board was literally buried in crap.”
“Literally?” Max said, amused.
“Well, it was under at least a hundred issues of The New York Review of Books. ”
“Ouch,” Max said. “You set me up for that one.”
Lou took a note pad and pencil from the kitchen counter and sat down at the table. He was prepared to record each letter that the Ouija board gave them.
Mary opened the board on one corner of the table. She placed the felt-footed trivet on it.
Max sat down, laced his fingers, and cracked his knuckles.
She opened her spiral-bound notebook to a page filled with her handwriting.
“What’s that?” Lou asked.
“Questions I want to ask it,” Mary said.
She pulled up her chair and sat down at a ninety-degree angle to Max. She put the tips of her fingertips on one side of the plastic triangle. Max put his fingertips on another side of it; his hands were nearly too large for the game.
“Start easy,” Max told her.
She was tense, and that was not good. The trivet wouldn’t move an inch if her touch was too heavy. She took several deep breaths. She tried to make her arms limp. She wanted her fingers to feel independent of her—loose, soft, like rags.
Max wasn’t as nervous as she was. He didn’t appear to need any preparation.
Finally, when she had achieved a relatively relaxed state of mind and body, she stared at the board in front of her and said, “Are you ready to give us answers?”
The indicator didn’t move.
“Are you ready to give us answers?”
Nothing.
“Are you ready to give us answers?”
Under their fingers, as if it were suddenly embodied with a life energy of its own, the indicator glided to that part of the board marked YES.
“Good,” she said. “We are in pursuit of a man who has killed at least eight people in the last few days. Is he still here in King’s Point?”
The indicator swept around the board, returned to YES.
She asked, “Is King’s Point this man’s home-town?”
NO.
“Where does he come from?”
ALL OUR YESTERDAYS.
“Make sense to anyone?” Lou asked.
Refining the question, trying to be more specific, Mary asked, “Where does the killer live?”
Letter by letter: BEAUTIFUL.
“Beautiful?” Lou asked. “Is that in answer to your question, Mary?”
“A town named Beautiful?” she asked.
The trivet didn’t move.
“Where does the killer live?” she asked again.
The trivet picked out seventeen letters.
Lou wrote them down as they were given, and when the indicator ceased to move, he said, “It says, ‘THE AIR IS BEAUTIFUL.’ What’s that supposed to mean?”
The air at Mary’s back seemed suddenly colder, as if an icy breath had been expelled against the nape of her neck. The answers the Ouija board gave were less direct and more perplexing than usual. Supposedly the Ouija messages came from her, from deep in her subconscious mind. Ordinarily she believed that was true. But not now. Tonight she felt another presence, an unseen presence looming over her.
“We’re getting sidetracked,” Max said impatiently. He looked at the trivet. “Wh
ere is the killer staying in King’s Point?”
The indicator slid back and forth, then quickly moved from one letter to another.
Lou copied them down, but the word was so simple that Mary didn’t need to ask what had been recorded: HOTEL.
“Which hotel?” Max asked.
The indicator didn’t move.
“Which hotel?”
Again, it spelled HOTEL.
Lou said, “Try something else.”
Mary said, “The man we’re after has killed women with a knife. Where did he get that knife?”
“That’s not important,” Max said.
The trivet moved: LINGARD.
“You made it spell that,” Max said.
“I don’t believe I did.”
“Then why did you ask it such a question? We don’t really have to know where the knife came from.”
“I wanted to see what it would say.”
Max studied her with piercing gray eyes.
She looked away from him, consulted her notebook and addressed the board again. “Did I ever know a girl by the name of Beverly Pulchaski?”
SHE IS DEAD.
“Did I ever know her?”
SHE IS DEAD.
“Did I know a girl named Susan Haven?”
SHE IS DEAD.
Cold breath on the neck again.
She shuddered.
“Did I ever know Linda Proctor?”
SHE IS DEAD.
“Did I know Marie Sanzini?”
SHE IS DEAD.
Mary sighed. The muscles in her arms and shoulders flexed repeatedly, involuntarily. It was a struggle to stay sufficiently relaxed to allow the Ouija indicator to function. Already she was weary.
Lou said, “Who were those women?”
She said, “The nurses who were murdered in Anaheim. When I first foresaw their deaths, I had the notion that I knew or at least had met one of them. But if I ever did, I can’t remember where or when it was.”
“Probably because you don’t want to remember,” Max said.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because maybe if you remembered, we’d know who the killer was. And maybe you don’t want to know that.”
“Don’t be absurd, Max. I want to know very much.”
“Even if the killer’s connected somehow to Berton Mitchell and the wings? Even if, by finding the killer, you’re forced to remember what you’ve spent your life forgetting?”
She stared at him and licked her lips. “I’m feeling something right now that I never thought I’d feel.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m scared of you, Max.”
There was an unearthly quiet in the house. The three of them seemed suspended in time.
Max spoke softly, but his voice filled the room. “You’re scared of me because you think I’m going to force you to face up to what happened twenty-four years ago.”
“Is that all it is?”
“What else?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
Max asked the board another question, but he did not take his wintry gray eyes from her. “Did Mary know Rochelle Drake?”
SHE IS DEAD.
“I know she’s dead,” Max said irritably, still watching Mary, suffocating her with his attention, pinning her with his gaze. “But did Mary ever know her?”
DEAD.
“Who’s Rochelle Drake?” Lou asked.
Mary took the opportunity to look away from Max. Her mouth was dry. Her heart was beating much too fast.
To Lou, Max said, “Rochelle Drake was the girl who was killed in that Santa Ana beauty salon a few days ago. I swear I’ve heard the name before. Haven’t you?”
“Can’t say I have,” Lou said.
“Well, I’m positive I heard the name before Percy Osterman used it in the morgue. I don’t think I ever met the girl. But I heard the name. I can’t imagine where.”
Mary said, “Well, I don’t remember her. I would have recognized her at the morgue if I’d ever seen her before.”
Suddenly, beneath their hands, the trivet began to move in wide, aimless circles.
“What the hell?” Max said, surprised.
Lou said, “No one asked it a question.”
Mary allowed her hands to float freely with the indicator as it moved less erratically and with increasing purpose. Her thoughts were too muddled at the moment, and she was too frightened to have the wit to decipher the chain of letters as it grew. Finally the trivet stopped. She took her hands from it at once; they ached with the strain of forced relaxation.
Lou said, “It’s a name.” He held up the note pad for them to see.
P-A-T-R-I-C-I-A-S-P-O-O-N-E-R.
Patricia Spooner? Mary thought. She stared at the name in disbelief.
She felt as if a snake of ice lay at the center of her, its crystalline tongue flicking rapidly, its sinuous body radiating cold like the coils of a freezer.
“Who’s Patricia Spooner?” Max asked.
“Means nothing to me,” Lou said.
“I ... knew her,” Mary said stiffly.
“When?” Max asked.
“Eleven... twelve years ago.”
“You’ve never mentioned her.”
“She was a good friend at UCLA.”
“A college friend?”
“Yes. A very pretty girl.”
“Why does her name come up now?”
“I don’t have any idea.”
“It came from your subconscious.”
“No. I’m not controlling the trivet.”
“Nonsense,” Max said.
“There’s someone... something here with us.”
“Maybe the board just gave us the name of the next victim,” Lou said, to avert a quarrel. “Have you kept in touch with this Patricia Spooner? Maybe we should call her and see if she’s okay.”
Max said, “Should we call Patricia Spooner? Mary?”
“She’s dead,” Mary said.
Lou said, “Oh, my God. Then the man we’re after’s already killed her?”
She had difficulty speaking. “Patty... Patty’s been... dead... dead almost... eleven years.”
Although the room was not warm, Lou was perspiring. He wiped his aristocratic face with his broad, thick-fingered, big-knuckled hand. He looked as pale as she felt. “How? Mary, how did Patty Spooner die?”
Mary shivered and closed her eyes. She opened them at once because the memories behind them were too ugly, too brutal. “She was... murdered.”
The dead, Mary thought, don’t stay dead. Not forever. Not even for long. They rise up from their graves. The ground doesn’t hold them. Remorse doesn’t hold them. Neither grief nor acceptance, neither fear nor forgetfulness holds them. Nothing holds them. They come back. Berton Mitchell. Barry Mitchell. Virginia Mitchell. My mother. My father. And now Patty Spooner. Oh, God, don’t let them come back. I’ve been haunted by the dead most of my life. I’ve had enough!
“Murdered,” Lou said quietly, almost as if in shock.
Mary said, “There was a church. Patty and I sometimes went to Mass together. I was a practicing Catholic then. It was a lovely church. It had a very large, hand-carved wooden altar that was made in Poland and shipped over here in the early nineteen hundreds. The church was open all the time, night and day. Patty liked to go and sit in the front pew when no one else was there. Late at night. Her mother had died of a heart condition a few years before. She was always lighting candles for her mother. Patty was very devout. She... she died there.”
“In the church?” Lou asked.
Max was watching her intently. He put a hand on her shoulder; vibrations, more emotional than physical, neither good nor bad but powerful, exploded through her from the point of contact.
Max said, “Who killed her?”
“They never found him.”
Lou leaned across the table. His eyebrows were drawn together, his face pinched. “She was your good friend. Didn’t you use your psychic talent to see the
killer’s face, his name?”
“I tried,” Mary said faintly. “I got a few things. Bits and pieces of images. But it was one of those cases when my power didn’t help much. She was strangled with a priest’s white silk stole. I got terrible emanations from it. Wicked, evil vibrations. No clear pictures. Just formless images. The church was filled with them. Like... invisible clouds of evil. The killer had damaged the altar ... urinated on it.”
Lou got up so abruptly that he knocked over his chair, but he didn’t appear to notice it. He stood with one hand on his head as if attempting to force back an unsettling idea. “It’s madness. What are we up against? Is it possible that the man we’re trying to find here in King’s Point is the same man who killed your friend?”
“His style is the same, isn’t it?” Max said.
“So damned brutal,” Lou said. “And with the religious angle. The roots of these recent killings might go back at least eleven years. Perhaps a lot further than that.”
Mary saw what he meant, though curiously, until this moment, she had never seen a connection between Patty’s death and any other.
Sensing the effect Lou’s revelation had upon her, Max squeezed her shoulder reassuringly. Sometimes he didn’t seem to know his own strength; his grip was slightly painful.
Agitated as she had never seen him, moving quickly and jerkily, Lou went into the kitchen and got a twelve-ounce tumbler from the cabinet beside the refrigerator. He picked up a bottle of Wild Turkey that was on the counter by the sink, and he poured about four ounces for himself. Glass in hand, he came back and stood in the dining room archway. “It gets more complicated all the time. How many other people has this man killed that we don’t even know about? Over the years, how many other unsolved murders was he responsible for?” Lou swallowed some bourbon. “This creature, whoever and whatever he is—and I’m increasingly disposed to think of him as a thing—has been prowling about, raping, killing, completely unchecked, unhindered for at least eleven years. It scares the hell out of me.”
A peal of thunder punctuated his last few words. It reverberated in the window glass. The Christmas night rainstorm was on the way, as forecast.
Max glanced at the plastic trivet. “Let’s ask the board how many victims there have been.”
She almost objected. My arms ache, she almost said. Too tired for more of that. Exhausted. Drained.