by Dean Koontz
The kids knew John was an orphan. When asked how he had come to be alone in the world, he didn’t quite lie to them, but implied that he was abandoned in infancy, knew nothing of his folks, and grew up in a church home for boys. He suspected that all three sensed some tragedy untold, but only Naomi now and then raised the subject, for she assumed, as was her nature, that orphanage life must have been marked by sweet melancholy yet also by grand adventure; if her father’s past might be filled with romance in the classic meaning of the word, she yearned to be told about every thrilling episode.
When Minette turned eighteen, John intended to tell all three kids the truth, but he saw no reason to burden children with such a fearsome and disquieting tale. He knew too well what it was like to make one’s way through adolescence in the shadow of primal horror. He intended—and now hoped—that they would grow up without that abomination seeded in their minds.
When he finished the Scotch, he rinsed the glass, left it in the sink, and went to the adjoining dayroom. Here Walter and Imogene Nash took their lunch, made out their shopping lists, and did their planning related to the maintenance of the house.
He sat at the walnut secretary, on which lay their spiral-bound month-by-month planner. He opened the book where it was paper-clipped, to a two-page spread for the month of September.
Serial killers, especially obsessive ritualists who selected their targets with some care, like Blackwood, might kill at any time if the opportunity arose, but their major crimes usually occurred at regular intervals. The periodicity was often related to phases of the moon, though no one knew why, not even the sociopaths themselves.
Alton Turner Blackwood had not been strictly guided by the lunar calendar, but he had not been far off that schedule. The number thirty-three had meant something to him: He had murdered each of the families thirty-three days after murdering the previous one.
Billy Lucas massacred his family on the second of September. Counting from there in the day planner, John determined that the next slaughter, if it transpired, would be on the night of October fifth, only hours less than twenty-seven days from now. The third family would die on the seventh of November.
And if his superstitious expectation was fulfilled, the fourth family—he, Nicky, the children—would be scheduled for extermination on the tenth of December.
He was only mildly surprised when he discovered that the last of the four events fell on the night of Zach’s fourteenth birthday. John had been fourteen when his family had been murdered by Blackwood. The synchronicity confirmed the validity of his dread.
After closing the day planner, he phoned the homicide-division personnel office to leave a message, taking a second sick day. He also called Lionel Timmins, his sometime partner, and left a similar voice mail on his cell phone.
The laundry lay at the farther end of the dayroom from the secretary. John found his attention drawn to that closed door.
He remembered Walter Nash warning him about an “ugly stink” in the laundry room. Perhaps a rat crawled in through the dryer exhaust duct and died in the machine.
Or perhaps not.
It’s just curious how the smell came on so suddenly. One minute the laundry room is fine, and a minute later, it reeks.
In his current state of mind, John Calvino sensed a deadly spider spinning somewhere nearby but out of sight. Every detail of his day seemed to be a silken fiber in an elaborate surrounding web. Nothing could be dismissed as insignificant. Each occurrence related to all others in ways visible and invisible, and soon the spiral and the radial filaments would begin to vibrate as the architect of this ominous filigree circled toward the hub, toward the prey it hoped to trap there.
The longer he stared at the laundry-room door, the more gravity it exerted on him. He felt pulled toward it.
Another development or two, which need not have an obvious supernatural quality, which need only be strange and inexplicable, might snap the remaining threads that tethered him to the mooring mast of logic that was essential to any police investigation, and superstition would cast him adrift as surely as a dirigible was pulled aloft by its swollen helium ballonets. He had chosen a law-enforcement career and then the homicide division as a lifework of atonement for being the sole survivor in his family. He had proved to be a formidable detective in part because he possessed a talent for taking a few threads of evidence and from them reasoning his way to a correct picture of the entire tapestry of a crime. He did not know how he could proceed with confidence if ever reason failed him.
Reluctantly, as if the floor beneath him were a high wire and he an inexperienced aerialist certain of a fall, John rose from the walnut secretary and went to the laundry room. He opened the door and crossed the threshold.
The foul, strong, pervasive stench was that of Billy Lucas’s uniquely repulsive urine, unmistakable in its singularity, which Coleman Hanes, the orderly, had attributed to the boy’s regimen of medications. In his mind’s eye, John saw the dark disgusting yellow-brown stream sheeting down the armored glass.
The ceramic-tile floor appeared spotless. No puddle of urine, not even one drop of filth.
Holding his breath, he looked in the washer and dryer. They had not been fouled.
He opened the cabinet doors on either side of the machines. The shelves were dry.
He looked at the surface-mounted, four-faceted ceiling vent from which warm air flowed. No dark fluid dripped from those angled vanes. Anyway, urine could not be in the heating system, for if it were, the stench would not be confined to this one room.
No urine was present, only the sulfurous stink of it.
Backing out of the laundry room, John closed the door. He switched off the dayroom lights and returned to the kitchen, where he drew deep breaths of clean air.
At the sink, he pumped soap from the dispenser and lathered his hands. Although he had touched nothing that required this sanitizing, he rinsed his hands in the hottest water he could tolerate, for as long as he could endure the sting.
The stench in the laundry room undid the effect of the Scotch. His nerves were tightly wound again. In the deep lake of his mind, schools of dark expectations darted in a frenzy that he must quell not merely to sleep but also to be able to keep his family safe.
He clicked off the stove-hood light and in full darkness went to the French door that offered access to the flagstone terrace and the backyard. He raised the pleated shade that provided privacy and stared out at the rain-smeared lights of distant neighborhoods beyond the wooded ravine.
The threat did not wait in the ravine. Although blinded by the night, John knew that nothing lurked anywhere across the unseen lawn, neither under the deodar cedar nor among its needled branches, nor in the playhouse that its limbs embraced. No enemy watched this house either from Willard’s grave or from within the rose arbor.
He recalled the hard and inexplicable thump that had shuddered through his Ford when he had been parked under the main-entrance portico at the state hospital, when he had started the engine to leave.
Hours later, in the garage under this house, after he hung up his raincoat, three knocks and then three more had issued from the shadows and then from within the plastered ceiling. At the time, he attributed the noises to pockets of air vibrating through a copper water line.
Now intuition, as real as the marrow in his bones, told John Calvino that the knocking was instead an unseen visitor finding its way into a house that was strange to it, much as a blind man might be heard exploring new territory with his white cane.
The enemy did not lurk in the night. The enemy was already in the house.
Although he might be deemed a mental case if he made the claim out loud, John knew that when he came home, he had brought something with him.
From the journal of Alton Turner Blackwood:
The boy in the round room, high in the stone tower, hid his photograph of the beautiful dead movie star in all her naked glory, and always handled it with care. His one treasure.
He simmered with resentment of the old man, Teejay Blackwood. Of Anita, his mother, who abandoned him to his constrained life at Crown Hill. Of Regina, his mother’s sister, and of young Melissa, Regina’s daughter, who could go where they wished on the estate at any time of day or night, who never spoke to him, who mocked him to servants and laughed at him behind his back.
For the longest time, his resentment didn’t grow into full-blown anger. It remained only a bitter brooding over insults and injuries.
Fear of being beaten restrained his anger. And he dreaded having his few freedoms taken away. There was a subcellar with which he had been threatened more than once, a kingdom of silverfish and spiders.
He also feared what might lie beyond the 280 acres of Crown Hill. The old man often told him that in the world beyond, he would be called a monster, hunted down, and killed. In the early years, when his mother seemed to care about him, she also warned him against yearning for a life outside the estate. “If you leave here, you’ll destroy not only your life but also mine.”
The raven taught him freedom.
One hot June twilight, the boy cranked open all four windows in the tower room to encourage a cross-breeze.
With a flutter, the raven landed in the orange light that bathed the sill of the west window. With one sharp obsidian eye, the bird studied the hard-faced, graceless boy in his armchair with a book.
The bird cocked its head this way, that, the other. It assessed everything. Then it flew across the round room, out the east window, into the purple sky.
The boy believed his winged visitor wasn’t merely a bird. Raven first, but spirit also, an omen, a harbinger.
From a bowl of fruit, he selected three grapes. With a knife he cut each grape in half to free its scent. He put the pieces side by side on the western windowsill.
He suspected that if the bird was more than a bird, it would return for this fleshy offering. As the orange light thickened to red, the raven alighted on the sill.
The boy watched it eat the grapes, and it watched him watching it. When the bird flew across the room once more and out the eastern window, the boy felt they had conducted a wordless conversation. A profound communion had occurred. But what it meant, he didn’t know.
The next day at twilight, the raven appeared again, accepting more grapes. On the following dusk, quartered strawberries.
That third evening, two hours after the berries, the bird returned, the first time it visited after dark.
Sitting in lamplight, the boy stared at the bold raven on the shadowed sill, and the raven stared at the boy, and after a while the boy perceived that the creature had come to offer him something. But what? For half an hour, he waited, wondering, and then he knew. The bird had come to offer him the night.
Before the raven flew across the room, the boy was on his feet, striding toward the east window. An instant after the bird sailed through the open casement, the boy clutched the center post with one hand and leaned out so far that he risked a fall.
As the raven glided down from the tower and away, moonlight glimmered wetly on the glossy black wings, scapulars, and tail feathers, as if the bird were a spill of ink that wrote the boy’s future on the wind.
He hurried to the oak door, threw it open, and raced down the winding stairs. His footfalls were the drumming of a dragon heart, his urgent breathing echoing gustily off coiled-stone walls, like exhalations of fire.
Although he had long slept by day and lived in the late night, the easier to avoid the others whose company he was denied, he had never ventured from the house and the most immediate of the grounds. The time had come, the raven with its offer, the night and all its possibilities.
On these 280 acres were meadows and deep woods. Vales and hills. Rock formations and caves. Two streams and a pond. Although he could not set foot off the estate, before him waited a fenced world ripe for exploration.
And because the family and the servants slept, they would dream on unaware of how far he roamed and of what he did. He might do anything, anything, and they would think he walked the public rooms of the house or huddled in his tower, if they thought of him at all.
Always, he had been a shambler or a tottler, a clumsy construct of knobby joints and crude bones, stilting along in a praying-mantis gait. But suddenly in this night, racing across the east lawn in the wake of the liberating raven, the boy discovered a strange grace in his ungainly body.
Although, in the movies, the grim reaper was nothing but bones within his robe and cowl—as in Jillian Hathaway’s famous Circle of Evil—the harvesting spirit was shown to move effortlessly, to flow, to glide as if skating on a slick of blood. Now, as the raven circled over the boy, carving the fat moon with its pinions, he too flowed, glided, skated across the lawn, into a meadow, toward the woods.
The boy was not yet me. He had one thing to learn and one thing to do. Then he would become the man that I am now.
19
THE RAIN DIMINISHED DURING THE NIGHT AND ENDED AS dawn broke. By the time John turned off the county highway onto the beech-lined approach road that served the state hospital, the cloud cover was worn thin, but it was nowhere threadbare enough to reveal blue sky.
On the hilltop, the institution huddled fortresslike, its parapeted roof resembling battlements, its windows wider than arrow loops in a castle wall but not by much, as though the place had been designed to defend against the sanity of the outside world rather than to keep its disturbed or even insane patients from wreaking havoc beyond its walls.
He parked under the portico again and displayed his POLICE placard on the dashboard.
On the telephone hours earlier, Dennis Mummers, who manned the third-floor security desk during the graveyard shift, said something about Billy Lucas that required this second visit. When John asked about the boy’s reaction to the search of his room, the guard’s response did not at first seem significant. Later, it did.
He didn’t say anything. Something’s happened to him. He kind of cratered. He’s funked out, withdrawn, not talking at all to anyone.
Karen Eisler, smelling of break-time cigarettes and wintermint breath freshener, entered John in the log at the reception desk.
Because he had spoken to Coleman Hanes en route, not more than twenty minutes earlier, the orderly did not have to be paged. He was waiting when John arrived.
In the elevator, Hanes said, “I’d still prefer you saw him in the conference room, like yesterday.”
“If he’s in total withdrawal, a wall of armored glass between us only makes my job harder.”
“I can’t leave anyone alone with him in his room, as much for his protection as for the visitor’s.”
“No problem. Stay with us.”
“We’ve put him in restraints for your visit. I don’t think it’s necessary, the way he is now, but it’s the rule.”
In the security vestibule, John surrendered his service pistol.
Walking the third-floor hall, Hanes said, “He stopped eating last evening. This morning, he’s refused liquids. If this keeps up, we’ll have to force-feed him. That’s an ugly thing.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
“It’s still damn ugly.”
Billy’s room—pale-blue walls, white ceiling, white tile floor—contained a safely upholstered chair without tufting or welting and a yard-square molded-plastic table tall enough for dining. A four-foot-wide concrete shelf protruding from a wall served as a bed, made comfortable with a thick foam mattress.
Lying on his back, head propped on two pillows, Billy did not react when they entered.
The restraints consisted of nylon-mesh netting that wrapped his torso, keeping his arms crossed on his chest, and between his ankles a trammeling strap to which the upper-body netting was secured.
John stood over Billy for a moment, hoping not to see what he expected to see, but he saw it at once, and the sight so affected him that his legs grew weak and he sat on the edge of the bed.
Coleman Hanes closed the door an
d stood with his back to it.
The boy’s once fiery eyes were burnt out, still blue but as without depth as the glass orbs of a cheap doll, lacking their former intensity of feeling, their challenge and arrogance. Billy stared at the ceiling, but perhaps he did not see it. Although he blinked from time to time, he never changed focus, his steady stare like that of a blind man lost in thought.
His face remained as smooth as before. But his fresh-cream complexion had in less than a day curdled into a pallor. A gray tint shadowed the skin in the hollows of his eyes, as if those two fierce flames, now extinguished, had produced a residue of ashes.
His hair looked vaguely damp, perhaps with sweat, and his pale forehead appeared greasy.
“Billy?” John said. “Billy, do you remember me?”
The gaze remained fixed, not on the ceiling but on something in another place, another time.
“Yesterday, the voice was yours, Billy, the voice but not the words.”
The boy’s mouth hung open slightly, as though he had exhaled his final breath and waited with the patience of the dead for a mortician to sew his parted lips together.
“Not the words and not the hatred.”
Body as limp as a cadaver prior to rigor mortis, Billy did not strain whatsoever against the restrictive netting.
“You were just a boy when he … walked in. Now you’re just a boy again. You see? I understand. I know.”
Billy’s silence and stillness signified not mere indifference, but instead a mortal apathy born of despair, a retreat from all feeling and all hope.