by Dean Koontz
Minnie shouted, “He’s already dead! He can’t be killed twice!”
“He’s clumsy, Dad,” Zach said. “Dead-guy clumsy. But there’s not much room in here.”
“Use the thing!” Minnie urged.
On their knees in the snow, face-to-face with Minnie, Nicky and Naomi held fast to the small fingers that the girl hooked through the lattice, Naomi crying. Nicky said, “What thing, baby? What thing?”
“The wheel-thing.”
John pleaded: “What is it, Minnie, how do I use it?”
“It’s an idea.”
“Idea? What idea?”
“The idea, the idea behind everything. Daddy, it’s the drinking glass with the black stuff in it, the stray dog that healed a guy.”
Stunned that she referred to Peter Abelard, to a conversation she had never heard, John said, “How do you know about that?”
Zach shouted, “Dad, I’ve got the knife again.”
“Stay away from him! Where is he?”
“On his knees but trying to get up,” Zach said.
“How do you know about the glass, the dog?” John asked Minnie.
“I don’t know how, but I know.”
John heard Abelard in memory: I think the divine has taken a few steps back from humankind, perhaps in revulsion, perhaps because we don’t deserve to look directly upon holy beings anymore.… When the divine enters the world these days from outside of time, it manifests discreetly through children and animals.
Whatever it might be, the huge wheel wasn’t exactly discreet, but John said, “What is it, Minnie? Tell me as clear as you can, what is the wheel?”
“It says it’s the power that makes a highway through a sea.”
“What do you mean it says?”
“I hear it now,” Minnie declared. “It’s the power that makes a highway through a sea, and wakes the dead. It’s whatever you need it to be when you need it, and what you need is a door. Isn’t what you need a door, Daddy?”
John had extended an invitation, letting an evil back into the world. Only he could evict it. They wouldn’t send an exorcist. They were embarrassed by the old-fashioned idea of absolute Evil, of Evil personified, but the answer to this wasn’t a food bank, he would not save his family and himself by throwing food at this thing, not by giving it a cot in a homeless shelter, not by social action, what he needed here was some really effective antisocial action or else what was once called a miracle, which these days maybe only a child, like Minnie, had the imagination to envision and the faith to pursue. So be as a child. Put aside pride and vanity. Have the humility of a child who is weak and knows his weakness. Admit fear in the face of the void. Admit ignorance in the presence of the unknowable. A child believes in mysteries within mysteries and seeks wonder, which should be easy, considering that here in this yard, this very moment, John was adrift in a sea of mystery, in a storm of wonder. What the heart knows, the mind has forgotten, and what the heart knows is the truth. “I need a door,” John said, becoming as a child, “I need a door, and I know there must be a door, I believe in a door, please give me a door, God, please, I want a door, please God, please give me a damn door.”
Zach shouted, “Dad! He’s on his feet! He’s coming!”
As the last of the twilight slid westward through the icy sky, as a light arose within the enormous golden wheel, Zach cried out. John leaned his shotgun against the arbor and grabbed the lattice with both hands.
Nicky had seen him try to rip it loose before. He couldn’t do it then, couldn’t do it now.
She knew the shotgun was useless. She wanted to use it anyway, do something, anything. But what?
In the dark arbor, Zach was taunting Sinyavski, trying to keep him—it—away from Minnie. “Over here, bonehead. Over here, you freaking freak.”
Fingers trembling against Nicky’s fingers, with the lattice barrier separating them, Minnie whispered desperately, “It’s gonna kill Zach.”
The luminous wheel changed from gold to red and acquired a greater dimension, revealing within itself numerous spiraling masses reminiscent of the sky-filling whorls in van Gogh’s Starry Night. It began to throb, and in the ominous arterial pulses of swirling light and shadow, the falling crystals of snow glittered like sparks.
John shouted something into the arbor, and Nicky didn’t at first understand what he meant: “Take me. Take me. Take ME!”
Abruptly the wheel flared brighter, projecting galactic spirals of shadow and scarlet light across the rose arbor, across the yard, across the falling snow, which descended so heavily that it curtained the night.
“Take ME!” Breaking off a six-inch piece of lattice, making a hole large enough to thrust his hand through, John shouted, “Here, damn you, here I am, here, take ME!”
He thought he knew what needed to be done, and if he didn’t do it, there would never be an end to the threat. There could be only one reason that some benign force had used Minnie to make the wheel, which was the embodied idea of a portal between time and eternity. The door was for him to use, him and no one else. He started this, he must end it. If a door was provided, he must use it and by using it offer himself as penance.
In the arbor, from out of the shadows, revealed by the whirligig glow of the wheel, the Sinyavski thing loomed, a hulk in a dark suit. The face was familiar yet as John had never seen the professor’s face before: twisted with a soured and festered malignity, almost deformed with rage. His eyes were pools of distilled hatred, glistening with malevolence, sharp with resentment.
“It’s me you really want, just me,” John said. “I’m the one who got away.”
Rising from where she had knelt to confront Minnie, Nicky said, “What’re you doing? John, no, not this.”
“Do you trust me?” he asked her.
“Don’t.” Her misery grew with each repetition: “Oh, don’t, don’t, don’t.”
He said, “I trust Minnie, and I trust whoever … possessed her to make the door. Trust me, Nicky.”
“With everything?” Anguish strained her voice. “Everything?”
“Haven’t you always? For fifteen years?”
“It’s too strong for even you.”
She had once told him that sometimes he was all cop when half cop would be tough enough.
He said, “This isn’t a half-cop night. It’s all-cop or nothing.”
Through the lattice, to the thing using Sinyavski’s body, John said, “Take me. Tear me apart from the inside out. And maybe you can totally control me. Won’t it be fun, using me to kill them? To use them and cut them and kill them? Won’t it be fun, Alton? Ruin?”
He heard Nicky say, “Naomi, get behind me.”
“Why settle for less than using me?” John asked the thing in the dead professor. “You can’t be afraid of me. I killed you, Alton, but you can’t be killed again. I’m flesh and weak. You’re strong and everlasting. Or are you?”
The professor thing smiled at him through the lattice, a sly and venomous sneer. His eyes were iron-dark and not his own.
John’s hand was palm-up, and Sinyavski’s hand pressed upon it palm-down. Something cold and eager squirmed against John’s skin. He almost recoiled. With effort, he relaxed, offered no resistance. He felt a gelid, twitching presence not against his hand any longer but within it, slithering as far as his wrist … but then no farther.
He turned out of his mind any thought of his parents and his sisters, and for the first time in twenty years, he allowed himself to think about Cindy Shooner as he had not dared to think of her since that night. He pictured her naked, her lovely body, her full breasts, and he tried to summon the memory of how she felt under him, the silken rhythms, her deep warmth, the way she rose to meet him, her mouth, her abandon, her insatiable need, her thrilling appetite.
Ruin took him.
Within the arbor, the dead man fell in a heap.
With poltergeist-like power, the lattice at the ends of the arbor unlaced, raveling back into the walls of the structure, freein
g Zach and Minnie. As if from a distance, John heard Nicky urgently calling them to her.
Colder than the night, John’s mind flooded with hideous images of Marnie and Giselle being brutalized before they died. His sanity was assaulted by those eternal memories of Alton Turner Blackwood. Anguish slammed him, grief wrung him with a cruel fist. He tried to scream, but he could not make a sound.
In the whirling crimson snow, John saw himself picking up the 12-gauge. As he turned toward Nicky, he became aware of his finger tightening on the trigger.
He felt as if he were under an immense weight of earth, buried in his living body, buried as surely as his dead family, and his terror swelled.
Nicky held her pistol in a two-hand grip, sighting lower to ensure a chest hit on the upkick.
John moved toward her without hesitation, and she told him to drop the shotgun, but he kept moving until the muzzle of the 12-gauge pressed into her abdomen.
An arm’s length apart, they stared into each other’s eyes, and despairingly he thought that he had surely done the wrong thing again. Twenty years to the day, had he done the very thing that would cost him this family just as his weakness and selfishness then had cost him?
Behind her, the kids were gathered. Judging by their stricken expressions, whatever they saw in John’s face, they saw nothing of their father.
Tears welled in Nicky’s eyes. “I can’t.”
Killing him might be her only chance. He had brought them to a precipice above a longer drop than he had intended.
“I love you,” she said. “I love you. I can’t.”
She lowered the pistol.
“I am Death,” he heard himself say to her. “You’ve never had sex with Death before.”
As his finger tightened on the trigger, John suddenly rose out of his living grave, throwing off the weight of evil that pressed him down. He sensed Ruin begin to realize that its host had hidden his most private thoughts, and enticed it into him with a pretense of weakness. Before the demon understood that John might have sufficient strength to evict it, he threw aside the shotgun, rushed past Nicky and the kids, toward the glowing crimson wheel, which was not a wheel but a portal, as it had always been a portal waiting to be named.
Racing through snow as bright as blood spray, John saw nothing within the portal except wheels of red light in a red haze. As far as he knew, he might fall through eternity forever, but he sprang across the threshold without hesitation—
—and is in the dark bedroom of his boyhood, only an instant after quietly lowering the bottom sash of the window. The smells of Cindy Shooner are still on him—her perfume and the faint musky scent of sex.
He sees his dark form in the mirror above the dresser, but there is something wrong with it. He steps close enough to see his face as he looked at fourteen.
This is neither a dream nor a vision. It has not one quality of hallucination, but affronts him with the grim texture of horrifying reality. This is the real place, the momentous night, the silence heavy with the weight of murder.
He waits, anticipating silvery bells, and the bells ring.
John moves to the door, and the bells ring again.
Eases the door open. Steps into the hall. Light radiates from his parents’ and his sisters’ rooms.
On the floor, the black satchel. Beside it, the pistol fitted with the homemade silencer.
This is not memory. This is the moment. This is the past that made his future.
He doesn’t understand why he is here. The bells suggest that they’re all dead, as before. Therefore, he isn’t here to save them.
And if he could save them, he would change his future, perhaps to one in which he never met Nicky, in which his own children were never born.
More terrified now than then, he stoops, picks up the handgun, removes the silencer.
The open door to his parents’ room. In there—the blood-soaked bed, the empty eggs in pale dead hands.
As the bells ring again, his frantic heart knocks hard against its cage.
He sidles along the hallway, pistol in front of him, his hands sweaty as they had not been on that night. He hesitates a step short of the girls’ room, hears the bells once more.
He steps into the doorway, into the hateful light that reveals the beloved dead.
Blackwood crouches like a feeding raptor, like a sharp-beaked raven over the torn bodies of songbirds. Mouth red and wet and cruel.
The black-hole eyes shift from the tender victims to John in the doorway. The graveyard voice speaks the same words as before: “This little girl said you were gone to Grandma’s for a week.”
John realizes he is here to do something different from what he did the first time that he lived this night. But what? For God’s sake, what?
Like some prehistoric missing link between ancient reptile and humankind, Blackwood rises from the girl, the girl forever lost, and says, “Your lovely sister, your Giselle. She had such pretty little training-bra breasts.”
Heart slamming, pistol sight jumping on the target, hoping to buy time to think, John says in the trembling voice of a boy, “Come out of there, get away from them.”
Blackwood towers over the blessed ruins, humpbacked Death with a bloody grin.
“Get away from them now, you sonofabitch!”
Blackwood takes a step forward, John backs out of the doorway, and Blackwood follows him into the hall.
Without knowing how he knows, John knows that if he dies here at Blackwood’s hands, he dies for real, and all the life he lived hereafter will never have happened. Nicky will marry someone else. Children other than Zach and Naomi and Minnie will be born. All is at risk and there is no room for error.
The dead can’t be resurrected by a mere man. What he’s being offered is not the past undone, but instead a chance to disinvite the spirit whose return he encouraged by his guilt, obsession, and ceaseless worry.
Grinning, Blackwood seems not to fear the gun, but approaches, forcing John to back along the hallway as he tries desperately to imagine what he must do.
“Listen to me, boy. You’ll be a daddy someday,” Blackwood says—
—and John knows in the instant that what he must prevent is the Promise that inflamed his imagination, that haunted him, obsessed him, and made him vulnerable to the undying fury of this implacable spirit and to the thing called Ruin.
He shouts, “Shut up!”
Blackwood steps forward, John backward, Blackwood forward, John backward onto the killer’s satchel. He stumbles, falls. Blackwood rushes, looms.
John fires up, it’s a wild shot that shouldn’t score, but score it does, a gut shot. Blackwood staggers forward and falls atop John, a weight of greasy flesh and deformed bones.
Eye to eye, Blackwood says in a rough whisper, his breath hot on John’s mouth: “You’ll be a daddy someday—”
The pistol is between them, still clutched in John’s hand, he can’t guess which of them will take the bullet, but he squeezes the trigger. The muffled shot widens Alton Blackwood’s fierce eyes, and suddenly he seems twice as heavy as before.
Gasping, making wordless sounds of terror and revulsion, John rolls Blackwood off him, scrambles to his feet, looks down, and in the dim light sees life still shining in those dreadful eyes, and the lips moving to form the next words.
John empties the magazine of the pistol, and Blackwood’s face dissolves from one kind of horror to another.
As John backs away from the corpse, the shade of Alton Turner Blackwood rises from it, a transparent image in a silent rage—which folds in upon itself and is gone. A second entity arises from the corpse, far more abhorrent than Blackwood. Asymmetrical, twisted, crookbacked, yellow-eyed, this abomination named Ruin hovers for an instant—then follows Blackwood’s shade into oblivion.
The Promise was a curse. The curse is lifted now and forever.
The house is hushed. What was lost is still lost, though not forever, and something has been gained. What the heart knows trumps what the night kn
ows.
John drops the gun, turns away, and as on that long-remembered night, he hurries down the stairs. Back then, he was compelled to find another gun, load it, and kill himself. But now … as he comes off the bottom step, he plunges not into the lower hall but through the portal, into a night streaming with crimson snow.
Before him waited his safe and living family. He had done the right thing, after all, sacrificing himself for them, an act of atonement that at last gave meaning to the past twenty years of his life.
Behind him, the eldritch light faded until the portal vanished. The wheel from which it had formed was gone. In days of old, when angels visited or when a bush burned without being consumed, no video cameras existed to record the moments. Likewise, nothing remained to prove the wheel had ever existed—except for the trench through the yard and the cracked flagstones. Machina ex Deo.
A flood of joy swept fear away, and the sight of his precious family blurred before him. He started toward them, and they toward him. At the same time, from out of the night and the cascading snow, in a toboggan hat and a navy peacoat, came Lionel Timmins, wide-eyed and speechless. He found himself at the center of the converging Calvinos, which was at that moment a magical, emotional, freaking perspicacious place to be.
Entering the kitchen with the meat cleaver, with a headache caused by the blow to her head, and with bad intentions, Melody Lane halted when she felt the thread snap. The ethereal line between her and the entity that had once ridden her, that she served even when not ridden, was disconnected. She waited for it to be reestablished, for she was looking forward to drinking life from the dying boy. But after a minute, she put down the cleaver and departed the house by the front door, because without the protection and guidance of the spirit rider, this place was too dangerous.