by Dean Koontz
The living room of Berton Mitchell’s cottage. Windows with paper blinds drawn almost to the sills. Lacy curtains. The only light, graylight, filtering in from a cloudy afternoon. Shadowy corners. Pale yellow walls. A dark brown davenport with a pair of matching, overstuffed chairs. Pine floor, rag-twist rugs.
A six-year-old girl lying on the floor. Long dark hair tied into two ponytails with orange ribbons. Beige dress with Kelly-green piping and buttons. Me. The little girl is me. On my back. Dazed. Confused. The side of my face hurts real bad. And the back of my head. What did he do to me? My legs are spread. I can’t move them. Each of my ankles is tied securely to a different foot of a bulky armchair. My arms are stretched out behind me. My wrists are tied to the feet of another chair. Can’t move. Try to raise my head to look around. Can’t.
Maybe Mrs. Mitchell will come untie me. No. She’s gone away. Visiting relatives with Barry. Mr. Mitchell is off someplace trimming hedges.
Scared. So scared.
Footsteps... Just him. Nothing frightening. Just him. But what’s he want? What’s he doing?
He kneels beside me. He has a pillow in his hands... big feather pillow ... he shoves it ... in my face... presses down on it. This isn’t a good game... not good at all. This is wrong... scary. No light ... no air ... I scream... but the pillow muffles my voice. Try to breathe... can’t draw in anything but linen. I thrash in my bonds. Daddy, help me! And then he pulls the pillow away. He’s giggling. I gulp air and start to cry. He rams the pillow into my face again. I twist my head, can’t get out from under. I bite and chew the pillow. Spinning. Dizzy. Weightless. Dying. Hollering in my mind for Daddy, thinking oh-so-hard of him, knowing he can’t hear me. And then the pillow is taken away again; cool, delicious air rushes over my face, into my hot lungs. And the pillow is jammed onto me again. And in the final moment before I faint it’s removed. Repeatedly reprieved on the verge of suffocation, I reach the thin red line between sanity and madness. And he’s giggling as he tortures me. But finally he lifts the pillow and tosses it aside, finished with the game.
But there are worse games to come:
He takes my head in both hands... his fingers like iron claws. The ache at the back of my skull is getting infinitely worse... unbearable. He forces my head to one side ... descends upon me ... breathes across my face... hissing like a snake... moves toward my exposed neck ...
lips on my neck now... he takes a pinch of my skin between his teeth, bites hard, bites it off, swallows. I cry out at the sharp little pain ... struggle... the cords bind. He puts his mouth to the tiny wound in my neck... sucks... draws blood. And when he finally raises his head and lets go of me ... and I turn ... I see him grinning, blood smeared around his mouth and streaks of blood on his teeth.
He is only nine years old, three years older than me, but his face is carved with a very adult hatred.
Weeping, choking, I say, “What are you doing?”
He leans even closer, inches from my face. His breath is fetid, corrupted by my own blood.
“I am a demon and a vampire,”Alan says. There is a childish tone of make-believe in his voice. Yet he is also serious. “I like the taste of blood. ”
Mary said, “Ahhhh,” as if she had opened an enormous heavy door after many hours of strenuous effort.
And a flashlight beam swung back and forth at the head of the tower stairs.
And Alan walked onto the observation deck. And he centered the light on her, but not in her eyes.
And they stared at each other.
And finally he grinned and said, “Hello, Sis.”
I am still spread-eagled on the floor.
Alan returns... wearing gloves... carrying a wooden box with a wire lid. He reaches through a spring trap in the lid ... clutches something, withdraws it ... a small dark creature, its head thrust out of the top of his fist... eyes luminous... a bat... a brown bat... one of those he found in the attie of the manor house. It doesn’t appear to be scared of him... seems almost tame, not wild at all.
He isn’t allowed to keep the bats as pets. They’re dirty. Daddy told him to get rid of them.
He changes his grip on the beast, which flutters but is more docile than not... holds it with both hands... but lets the wings free. Wicka-wicka-wicka! He holds the bat above my head... six or eight inches from me ... then slowly lowers it until the luminous eyes are staring directly into my eyes ... until I beg to be released... beg him to take the bat away, put it in the box... until the membranous wings lightly brush me... until the wings strike my face with increasing force, with leathery flapping sounds, Wicka-wicka-wicka!
When peals of thunder tolled over the harbor, Mary felt as if they were waves of some tangible substance passing through her; for deep within she shook sympathetically with each crash.
The past and present were two bottomless caverns of terror between which and above which she walked on a fine thread of self-control. She needed all of her attention and will-power to maintain her equilibrium as the memories swooped over her; she wasn’t even able to speak to Alan; she couldn’t find the strength to form words.
Without switching it off, Alan put his flashlight on the belfry floor, snug against the wall, where the rain hadn’t dampened the boards. A rifle was slung from his left shoulder; he slipped the strap off his arm and put the gun down, too.
He still held the butcher knife.
He picked up the flashlight and pointed it toward the ceiling, into the hollow, cone-shaped roof. “Look, Mary. Look up. Go ahead. You should see this. Look!”
She looked—and tried to draw back from the sight. She was already pressed against the low wall; there was nowhere to run.
“They’re not all here at the moment,” Alan said. “Some have gone hunting, of course. But most of them stayed in tonight. They sensed the coming rain. See them, Mary? See the bats?”
I am only six years old, and I am tied up, on the floor, my legs spread. Alan holds the bat with both hands. He moves it between my legs, under my dress. It squeals. I am sobbing, gasping for breath, pleading with him. Alan pushes my dress up immodestly. He’s sweating. His face is pale. His lips quiver. He doesn’t look like a nine-year-old boy; he is truly demonic.
The tips of the bat’s wings tickle my bare thighs.
Tickle ... then scratch painfully.
Although I am much too young to understand the more mysterious functions of my body, too young to imagine what pleasure and pain it will one day give me, I am engulfed by primal fear, overwhelmed by terror at the thought of the bat shoved against the exposed center of me. I find this much harder to bear than having the creature on my face, and I squirm and kick uselessly at Alan, and the wings beat in the cramped space between my spread legs, and then I feel what I most dread, for Alan has forced the bat against me, and the thing writhes and nips and claws and screeches shrilly against me, and Alan is trying to ram it inside of me, and I scream at the thought, spit, cry, and the bat is screeching, too, so Alan has great difficulty merely holding on to the thing, but he forces it against me with all of his strength, and suddenly a pain, a monstrous pain, shoots up through me
The memories were physical as well as mental agony. She had refused to face them for twenty-four years; and in that time they had acquired incredible power. They struck her as if they were a man’s fists. She ached. She resisted the urge to vomit. Her legs were weak. She wept.
Alan put the flashlight on the floor again and shifted the knife from his left to his right hand.
Richard Lingard’s knife.
Max had been right about that: no ghost had picked it up. She had refused to confront the truth, had been incapable of dealing with it; therefore, she’d convinced herself that the missing knife could be explained only as the work of supernatural forces.
“I killed Max,” Alan said.
She knew that must be true, but she didn’t want to consider it. The tears for that, the shattering grief would have to come later—if she lived long enough to grieve.
T
he observation deck was fifteen feet across. Less than three yards of wet pine flooring separated her from him.
He spoke softly, not much louder than the monotonous hiss of the rain. “I’m glad you came. It’s time I finished what I started twenty-four years ago.”
When asked where the killer was from, the Ouija board had said, THE AIR is BEAUTIFUL. That wasn’t a literal translation of “Bel Air,” but it was close enough.
Why hadn’t she seen that?
She hadn’t wanted to see it.
At their feet the beam of the flashlight was diffused and cast back by the glossy paint on the deck wall, highlighting his chin and cheeks and nose. Because the rising light created odd shadows on his face, he was not handsome now; instead, he resembled one of the fright masks worn by a witch doctor in some savage ceremony. He held the knife in front of him, but he didn’t come any closer.
“I knew you’d come tonight. We’re so close, Mary. As close as two people can ever be. We share blood, but more than that, we share pain. I’ve dealt it out, and you’ve endured it. Pain binds us. Pain makes a far stronger cement than love does. Love is an abstract human concept, meaningless, nonexistent. But pain is real. I knew we were so close that I could communicate with you at a distance, without words. I knew I could make you come after me. Each day since Monday night I’ve meditated, put myself in a light trance. When my mind was clear, when I was relaxed, I tried to send thoughts to you, images of murders I intended to commit. I wanted to trigger your clairvoyant vision. And it worked, didn’t it?”
He was a raving lunatic—and yet he had such a calm demeanor, spoke in such measured tones.
“Didn’t it work, Mary?”
“Yes.”
He was pleased. “I kept a watch on Lou’s house, and when you showed up there, I knew you were after me.”
An especially fierce gust of wind buffeted her, drove deafening blasts of torrential rain against the hollow roof.
He took one step toward her.
“Stop right there!” she said frantically.
He obeyed her. He hadn’t decided suddenly to be merciful. And certainly he wasn’t afraid of her. He stopped because he was willing, even eager, to see her cower before him and to kill her slowly.
If she played along with him, she would gain minutes of life, might even find a way to escape. “If you wanted to kill me, you could have done it Monday night at the motel, before Max returned.”
“That was too easy. By making you pursue me, I had more fun.”
“Fun? Killing is fun?”
“There’s nothing like it.”
“You’re insane.”
“No,” he said serenely. “I’m just a hunter. And everybody else is a game animal. I was born to kill. It’s my purpose. I’ve no doubt about that. I’ve been killing all my life. It started with the bugs.”
She remembered: she was about four years old and Alan was seven; there was a praying mantis in a big glass jar; and Alan unscrewed the lid, squirted lighter fluid on the mantis, dropped a match into the jar. For years he had gathered insects for the sole purpose of torturing them to death with chemicals, razor blades, pins, and fire.
She said, “You were the one who killed our cats and dogs.”
“And all the other pets.”
“Barry Mitchell had nothing to do with that.”
He shrugged. “I got tired of the damned bugs.”
He took a step toward her.
“Stop!”
He stopped, grinned.
That morning she had suggested to Max that evil was not always acquired, not always learned by example. Most educated people were convinced that, without exception, the motivations behind the antisocial acts of violent people had their roots in poverty, broken homes, childhood traumas, parental neglect or parental ineptitude. Sociologists insisted criminals were spawned primarily by social systems founded on injustice. Most psychologists appeared secure in the belief that any neurosis or psychosis could be explained in terms of Freudian or Jungian theory. But was it possible that some people were rotten from the start, hopelessly corrupt before environment had an opportunity to affect them? Was that a reactionary, medieval thought? She’d read a great deal about the XYY-man, the genetically ordained criminal type that had inspired so much scientific research over the past few years. Some people might be born less civilized than most—for chemical or genetic reasons that no one fully understood.
That was a dangerous theory. It could be misinterpreted. Every racist group would point to every hated minority as evidence of genetic inferiority. In fact, if there were people who were born to do evil, they were evenly distributed among all races, religions, sexes, and nationalities.
Born evil ...
A bad seed...
She looked at Alan and knew that’s what he was: a very special creature, both more and less than human.
A bat darted in from the rain, swooped into the hollow roof with a leathery flutter of wings that made her gasp and cringe.
Wicka-wicka-wicka! “I wanted to meet you here at Kimball’s,” Alan said, “because neither of the other towers had bats in them. I thought they’d help you remember what happened twenty-four years ago.”
-and Alan takes the bat from between her legs, and it is dead, its neck is broken, soaked with her blood as well as its own, and she hurts so bad, and Alan tosses the dead bat into the box from which he got it, and he turns back to her, and she is unable to scream anymore, unable to resist, drained of strength and will, and he begins to pound her with his fists, blows landing on her stomach and chest and neck and face, a flurry of small fists driving her down into darkness... and when she comes to a short while later, he is standing over her with a knife he’s gotten from the Mitchells’ kitchen, and he brings it down, into her arm, then her side, the knife, Oh, God, the knife!
Clean thrusts. In and right out again. Clean, quick thrusts. No ripping. No tearing. No long, ugly gashes.
Max explored the dimensions of the bleeding holes with his hands and figured there wasn’t any danger of his intestines sliding out of him through an enormous jagged rent in his flesh.
He supposed he should be thankful for that.
He was losing a lot of blood. His clothes were gluey, his hands sticky, the floor stained with a warm and spreading puddle. But in the dark it probably felt like a lot more blood than it really was. It felt like quarts!
After resting only a few seconds, before the sound of footsteps ascending the tower stairs faded away, he got up on his hands and knees.
The four punctures in his chest and stomach throbbed wildly, incessantly. He choked on the pain. He felt as if a knife still protruded from each wound.
There was no special agony when he drew his breath. Neither of his lungs had been damaged.
Another small blessing.
He crawled to the left, then to the right, dripping on the floor, groping in the perfect blackness for the gun he had dropped. He found it sooner than he’d expected.
He located the nearest wall, pressed one hand against it to steady himself, and got to his feet in spite of the pain that slammed through him like an endless series of electric shocks.
He couldn’t possibly climb the tower stairs. He was barely able to walk on level ground; the steep stairs would kill him. And if by some miracle he did reach the observation deck, he would make so much noise in the ascent that the killer would be waiting for him; he’d be blown away the instant he achieved the top step.
The only thing he could do was go for help. Back to the parking lot. To the Mercedes. Fast as he could move. Let Lou know what had happened.
Aware that every second wasted might count against Mary, he pushed away from the wall. He staggered into the vast, dark room. Although he was dizzy and slightly disoriented, he thought he knew which way to go to find the corridor that served the coffee shop; but in any event, he could do nothing but trust his instinct. Each step caused new bubbles of pain to burst in his guts. He felt as if he were walking miles, and he
wondered if he were going in circles.
Just as despair began to grip him, he stumbled around a corner into a corridor that was less dark than the main hall of the arcade. Vague grayish light, the next thing to nonexistent, shimmered farther down the hall: light from the harbor boat parade, light shining through the coffee shop’s exterior windows, bouncing around, then leaking thinly through the mullioned doors.
He walked down the corridor with his right hand on his stomach, as if trying to squeeze shut his wounds. He went through the coffee shop doors, between the tables, and fell to his knees at the window that looked out on the boardwalk and harbor. It was closed, and he didn’t think he had the strength to lift it.
Love is strength, he told himself. Find strength in your love for Mary. What would you have or be without her? Nothing.
Outside, lightning ripped open the sky again. The reflections of light from its electric blade shone through the window; and for an instant it seemed to turn to ice the rain that streamed down the glass.
In the cold rain Chief John Patmore stooped beside Lou Pasternak and turned him onto his back, used the flashlight to study his face and then his blood-sodden clothes. “Bergen got to him. He’s been stabbed.”
Holtzman said, “Is he dead?”
The chief felt for a pulse in one of the cool, limp wrists. “I think he is. But you’d better call an ambulance anyway. There might be others.”
Holtzman ran back to the patrol car.
Only seven or eight feet of rain-slicked planks separated her from Alan.
She had to keep him talking. The moment he lost interest in the conversation, he’d use the butcher knife. Besides, even if she were going to die, there were things she still had to know.
“So Berton Mitchell never touched me,” she said.
“Not even once.”
“I sent an innocent man to prison.”