Dean Koontz - (1994)

by Winter Moon(Lit)

  " "For the love of God." Crawford laughed softly. "Yeah, for the love of God. And the fiancee, mother of the heir-to-be, she says this movie's going to put Anson Oliver's controversial career and his death in historical perspective." "What historical perspective? He made movies, he wasn't the leader of the Western world--he just made movies." Crawford shrugged. "Well, by the time they're done building him up, I suspect he'll have been an antidrug crusader, a tireless advocate for the homeless--" Jack picked it up: "A devout Christian who once considered dedicating his life to missionary work--" until Mother Teresa told him to make movies instead--" "--and because of his effective efforts on behalf of justice, he was killed by a conspiracy involving the CIA, the FBI--" "--the British royal family, the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers and Pipe Fitters--" "--the late Joseph Stalin--" "--Kermit the Frog--" "--and a cabal of pill-popping rabbis in New Jersey," Jack finished. They laughed because the situation was too ridiculous to respond to with anything but laughter--and because, if they didn't laugh at it, they were admitting the power of these people to hurt them. "They better not put me in this damn movie of theirs," Jack said after his laughter had devolved into a fit of coughing. "I'll sue their asses." "They'll change your name, make you an Asian cop named Wong, ten years older and six inches shorter, married to a redhead named Bertha, and you won't be able to sue for spit." "People are still gonna know it was me in real life." "Real life? What's that? This is Lala Land."."Jesus, how can they make a hero out of this guy?" Crawford said, "They made heroes out of Bonnie and Clyde." "Antiheroes." "Okay, then, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." "Still." i "They made heroes out of Jimmy Hoffa and Bugsy Siegel. Anson Oliver's a snap." That night, long after Lyle Crawford had gone, when Jack tried to ignore his thousand discomforts and get some sleep, he couldn't stop thinking about the movie, the million dollars, the harassment Toby had taken at school, the vile graffiti with which their house had been covered, the inadequacy of their savings, his disability checks, Luther in the grave, Alma alone with her arsenal, and Anson Oliver portrayed on-screen by some young actor with chiseled features and melancholy eyes, radiating an aura of saintly compassion and noble purpose exceeded only by his sex appeal. Jack was overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness far worse than anything he had felt before. The cause of it was only partly the claustrophobic confinement of the body cast and the bed. It arose, as well, from the fact that he was tied to this City of Angels by a house that had declined in value and was currently hard to sell in a recessionary market, from the fact that he was a good cop in an age when the heroes were gangsters, and from the fact that he was unable to imagine either earning a living or finding meaning in life as anything but a cop. He was as trapped as a rat in a giant laboratory maze. Unlike the rat, he didn't even have the illusion of freedom. On June sixth the body cast came off. The spinal fracture was entirely healed. He had full feeling in both legs. Undoubtedly he would learn to walk again. Initially, however, he couldn't stand without the assistance of either two nurses or one nurse and a wheeled walker. His thighs had withered. Though his calf muscles had received some passive exercise, they were atrophied to a degree. For the first time in his life, he was sore and flabby in the middle, which was the only place he'd gained weight. A single trip around the room, assisted by nurses and a walker, broke him out in a sweat and made his stomach muscles flutter as if he had attempted to benchpress five hundred pounds. Nevertheless, it was a day of celebration. Life went on. He felt reborn. He paused by the window that framed the crown of the tall palm tree, and as if by the grace of an aware and benign universe, a trio of sea gulls appeared in the sky, having strayed inland from the Santa Monica.shoreline. They hovered on rising thermals for half a minute or so, like three white kites. Suddenly the birds wheeled across the blue in an aerial ballet of freedom and disappeared to the west. Jack watched them until they were gone, his vision blurring, and he turned away from the window without once lowering his gaze to the city beyond and below him. Heather and Toby visited that evening and brought Baskin-Robbins peanut-butter-and-chocolate ice cream. In spite of the flab around his waist, Jack ate his share. That night he dreamed of sea gulls. Three. With gloriously wide wingspans. As white and luminous as angels. They flew steadily westward, soaring and diving, spiraling and looping spiritedly, but always westward, and he ran through fields below, trying to keep pace with them. He was a boy again, spreading his arms as if they were wings, zooming up hills, down grassy slopes, wildflowers lashing his legs, easily imagining himself taking to the air at any moment, free of the bonds of gravity, high in the company of the gulls. Then the fields ended while he was gazing up at the gulls, and he found himself pumping his legs in thin air, over the edge of a bluff, with pointed and bladed rocks a few hundred feet below, powerful waves exploding among them, white spray cast high into the air, and he was falling, falling. He knew, then, that it was only a dream, but he couldn't wake up when he tried. Falling and falling, always closer to death but never quite there, falling and falling toward the jagged black maw of the rocks, toward the cold deep gullet of the hungry sea, falling, falling . After four days of increasingly arduous therapy at Westside General, Jack was transferred to Phoenix Rehabilitation Hospital on the eleventh of June. Although the spinal fracture had healed, he had sustained some nerve damage. Nevertheless, his prognosis was excellent. His room might have been in a motel. Carpet instead of a vinyl-tile floor, green-and-white-striped wallpaper, nicely framed prints of bucolic landscapes, garishly patterned but cheerful drapes at the window. The two hospital beds, however, belied the Holiday Inn image. The physical therapy room, where he was taken in a wheelchair for the first time at six-thirty in the morning, June twelfth, was well equipped with exercise machines. It smelled more like a hospital than like a gym, which wasn't bad. And perhaps because he had at least an idea of what lay ahead of him, he thought the place looked less like a gym than like a torture chamber. His physical therapist, Moshe Bloom, was in his late twenties, six feet four, with a body so pumped and well carved that he looked as if he was in training to go one-on-one with an army tank. He had curly black hair, brown eyes flecked with gold, and a dark complexion enhanced by the California sun to a lustrous bronze shade. In white sneakers, white cotton slacks, white T-shirt, and skullcap, he was like a radiant.apparition, floating a fraction of an inch above the floor, come to deliver a message from God, which turned out to be, "No pain, no gain." "Doesn't sound like advice, the way you say it," Jack told him. "Oh?" "Sounds like a threat." "You'll cry like a baby after the first several sessions." "If that's what you want, I can cry like a baby right now, and we can both go home." "You'll fear the pain to start with." "I've had some therapy at Westside General." "That was just a game of patty-cake. Nothing like the hell I'm going to put you through." "You're so comforting." Bloom shrugged his immense shoulders. "You've got to have no illusions about any easy rehabilitation." "I'm the original illusionless man." "Good. You'll fear the pain at first, dread it, cower from it, beg to be sent home half crippled rather than finish the program--" "Gee, I can hardly wait to start." "--but I'll teach you to hate the pain instead of fear it--" "Maybe I should just go to some UCLA extension classes, learn Spanish instead." "--and then I'll teach you to love the pain, because it's a sure sign that you're making progress." "You need a refresher course in how to inspire your patients." "You've got to inspire yourself, Mcgarvey. My main job is to challenge you." "Call me Jack." The therapist shook his head. "No. To start, I'll call you Mcgarvey, you call me Bloom. This relationship is always adversarial at first. You'll need to hate me, to have a focus for your anger. When that time comes, it'll be easier to hate me if we aren't using first names."."I hate you already." Bloom smiled. "You'll do all right, Mcgarvey." CHAPTER TWELVE. After the night of June tenth, Eduardo lived in denial. For the first time in his life, he was unwilling to face reality, although he knew it had never been more important to do so. It would have been healthier for him to visit the one place on the ranch where he would find--or fail to find-
-evidence to support his darkest suspicions about the nature of the intruder who had come into the house when he had been at Travis Potter's office in Eagle's Roost. Instead, it was the one place he assiduously avoided. He didn't even look toward that knoll. He drank too much and didn't care. For seventy years he had lived by the motto "Moderation in all things," and that prescription for life had led him only to this point of humbling loneliness and horror. He wished the been-which he occasionally spiked with good bourbon--would have a greater numbing effect on him. He seemed to have an uncanny tolerance for alcohol. And even when he had poured down enough to turn his legs and his spine to rubber, his mind remained far too clear to suit him. He escaped into books, reading exclusively in the genre for which he'd recently developed an appreciation. Heinlein, Clarke, Bradbury, Sturgeon, Benford, Clement, Wyndham, Christopher, Niven, Zelazny. Whereas he had first found, to his surprise, that fiction of the fantastic could be challenging and meaningful, he now found it could also be narcotizing, a better drug than any volume of beer and less taxing on the bladder. The effect it her enlightenment and wonder or intellectual and emotional anesthesia--was strictly at the discretion of the reader. Spaceships, time machines, teleportation cubicles, alien worlds, colonized moons, extraterrestrials, mutants, intelligent plants, robots, androids, clones, computers alive with artificial intelligence, telepathy, starship war fleets engaged in battles in far reaches of the galaxy, the collapse of the universe, time running backward, the end of all things! He lost himself in a fog of the fantastic, in a tomorrow that would never be, to avoid thinking about the unthinkable. The traveler from the doorway became quiescent, holed up in the woods, and days passed without new developments. Eduardo didn't understand why it would have come across billions of miles of space or thousands of years of time, only to proceed with the conquest of the earth at a turtle's pace. Of course, the very essence of something truly and deeply alien was that its motivations and actions would be mysterious and perhaps even incomprehensible to a human being. The conquest of earth might be of no interest whatsoever to the thing that had come through the doorway, and its concept of time might be so radically different from Eduardo's that days were like minutes to it..In science fiction novels, there were essentially three kinds of aliens. The good ones generally wanted to help humanity reach its full potential as an intelligent species and thereafter coexist in fellowship and share adventures for eternity. The bad ones wanted to enslave human beings, feed on them, plant eggs in them, hunt them for sport, or eradicate them because of a tragic misunderstanding or out of sheer viciousness. The third--and least encountered--type of extraterrestrial was neither good nor bad but so utterly alien that its purpose and destiny were as enigmatic to human beings as was the mind of God, this third type usually did the human race a great good service or a terrible evil merely by passing through on its way to the galactic rim, like a bus running across a column of busy ants on a highway, and was never even aware of the encounter, let alone that it had impacted the lives of intelligent beings. Eduardo hadn't a clue as to the larger intentions of the watcher in the woods, but he knew instinctively that, on a personal level, it didn't wish him well. It wasn't seeking eternal fellowship and shared adventures. It wasn't blissfully unaware of him, either, so it was not one of the third type. It was strange and malevolent, and sooner or later it would kill him. In the novels, good aliens outnumbered bad. Science fiction was basically a literature of hope. As the warm June days passed, hope was in far shorter supply on Quartermass Ranch than in the pages of those books. On the afternoon of June seventeenth, while Eduardo was sitting in a living-room armchair, drinking beer and reading Walter M. Miller, the telephone rang. He put down the book but not the beer, and went into the kitchen to take the call. Travis Potter said, "Mr. Fernandez, you don't have to worry." "Don't I?" "I got a fax from the state lab, results of the tests on the tissue samples from those raccoons, and they aren't infected." "They sure are dead," Eduardo said. "But not from rabies. Not from plague, either. Nothing that appears to be infectious, or communicable by bite or fleas." "You do an autopsy?" "Yes, sir, I did." "So was it boredom that killed them, or what?" Potter hesitated. "The only thing I could find was severe brain inflammation and swelling."."Thought you said there was no infection?" "There isn't. No lesions, no abscesses or pus, just inflammation and extreme swelling. Extreme." "Maybe the state lab ought to test that brain tissue." "Brain tissue was part of what I sent them in the first place." "I see." "I've never encountered anything like it," Potter told him. Eduardo said nothing. "Very odd," Potter said. "Have there been more of them?" "More dead raccoons? No. Just the three." "I'm going to run some toxicological studies, see if maybe we're dealing with a poison here." "I haven't put out any poisons." "Could be an industrial toxin." "It could? There's no damned industry around here." "Well ... a natural toxin, then." Eduardo said, "When you dissected them ..." "Yes?" "... opened the skull, saw the brain inflamed and swollen . . ." "So much pressure, even after death, blood and spinal fluid squirted out the instant the bone saw cut through the cranium." "Vivid image." "Sorry. But that's why their eyes were bulging." "Did you just take samples of the brain tissue or . . ." "Yes?" ". .. did you actually dissect the brain?" "I performed complete cerebrotomies on two of them." "Opened their brains all the way up?" "Yes." "And you didn't find anything?"."Just what I told you." "Nothing ... unusual?" The puzzlement in Potter's silence was almost audible. Then: "What would you have expected me to find, Mr. Fernandez?" Eduardo did not respond. "Mr. Fernandez?" "What about their spines?" Eduardo asked. "Did you examine their spines, the whole length of their spines?" "Yes, I did." "You find anything ... attached?" "Attached?" Potter said. "Yes." "What do you mean, attached'?" "Might have . .. might have looked like a tumor." "Looked like a tumor?" "Say a tumor ... something like that?" "No. Nothing like that. Nothing at all." Eduardo took the telephone handset away from his head long enough to swallow some beer. When he put the phone to his ear again, he heard Travis Potter saying, "--know something you haven't told me?" "Not that I'm aware of," Eduardo lied. The veterinarian was silent this time. Maybe he was sucking on a beer of his own. Then: "If you come across any more animals like this, will you call me?" "Yes." "Not just raccoons." "All right." "Any animals at all." "Sure." "Don't move them," Potter said. "I won't."."I want to see them in situ, just where they fell." "Whatever you say." "Well . . ." "Goodbye, Doctor." Eduardo hung up and went to the sink. He stared out the window at the forest at the top of the sloped backyard, west of the house. He wondered how long he would have to wait. He was sick to death of waiting. "Come on," he said softly to the hidden watcher in the woods. He was ready. Ready for hell or heaven or eternal nothingness, whatever came. He wasn't afraid of dying. What frightened him was the how of dying. What he might have to endure. What might be done to him in the final minutes or hours of his life. What he might see. On the morning of June twenty-first, as he was eating breakfast and listening to the world news on the radio, he looked up and saw a squirrel at the window in the north wall of the kitchen. It was perched on the window stool, gazing through the glass at him. Very still. Intense. As the raccoons had been. He watched it for a while, then concentrated on his breakfast again. Each time he looked up, it was on duty. After he wash ed the dishes, he went to the window, crouched, and came face-to-face with the squirrel. Only the pane of glass was between them. The animal seemed unfazed by this close inspection. He snapped one fingernail against the glass directly in front of its face. The squirrel didn't flinch. He rose, twisted the thumb-turn latch, and started to lift the lower half of the double-hung window. The squirrel leaped down from the stool and fled to the side yard, where it turned and regarded him intently once more. He closed and locked the window and went out to sit on the front porch. Two squirrels were already out there on the grass, waiting for him. When Eduardo sat in the hickory rocking chair, one of the small beasts.remained in the grass, but the other climbed to the top porch step and kept a watch on him from that angle. That night, abed in his barricaded roo
m again, seeking sleep, he heard squirrels scampering on the roof. Small claws scratching at the shingles. When he finally slept, he dreamed of rodents. The following day, June twenty-second, the squirrels remained with him. At windows. In the yard. On the porches. When he went for a walk, they trailed him at a distance. The twenty-third was the same, but on the morning of the twenty-fourth, he found a dead squirrel on the back porch. Clots of blood in its ears. Dried blood in its nostrils. Eyes protruding from the sockets. He found two more squirrels in the yard and a fourth on the front-porch steps, all in the same condition. They had survived control longer than the raccoons. Apparently the traveler was learning. Eduardo considered calling Dr. Potter. Instead, he gathered up the four bodies and carried them to the center of the eastern meadow. He dropped them in the grass, where scavengers could find and deal with them. He thought, also, of the imagined child in the faraway ranch who might have been watching the Cherokee's headlights on the way back from the vet's two weeks earlier. He told himself that he owed it to that child--or to other children, who really existed--to tell Potter the whole story. He should try to involve the authorities in the matter as well, even though getting anyone to believe him would be a frustrating and humiliating ordeal. Maybe it was the beer he still drank from morning until bedtime, but he could no longer summon the sense of community he had felt that night. He'd spent his whole life avoiding people. He couldn't suddenly find it within himself to embrace them. Besides, everything had changed for him when he'd come home and found the evidence of the intruder: the crumbling clumps of soil, the dead beetles, the earthworm, the scrap of blue cloth caught in the frame of the oven door. He was waiting in dread for the next move in that part of the game, yet refusing to speculate about it, instantly blocking every forbidden thought that started to rise in his tortured mind. When that fearful confrontation occurred, at last, he could not possibly share it with strangers. The horror was too personal, for him alone to witness and endure..He still maintained the diary of these events, and in that yellow tablet he wrote about the squirrels. He hadn't the will or the energy to record his experiences in as much detail as he had done at first. He wrote as succinctly as possible without leaving out any pertinent information. After a lifetime of finding journal-keeping too burdensome, he was now unable to stop keeping this one. He was seeking to understand the traveler by writing about it. The traveler ... and himself. On the last day of June, he decided to drive into Eagle's Roost to buy groceries and other supplies. Considering that he now lived deep in the shadow of the unknown and the fantastic, every mundane act-cooking a meal, making his bed every morning, shopping--seemed to be a pointless waste of time and energy, an absurd attempt to paint a facade of normality over an existence that was now twisted and strange. But life went on. As Eduardo backed the Cherokee out of the garage, into the driveway, a large crow sprang off the front-porch railing and flew across the hood of the wagon with a great flapping of wings. He jammed on the brakes and stalled the engine. The bird soared high into a mottled-gray sky. Later, in town, when Eduardo walked out of the supermarket, pushing a cart filled with supplies, a crow was perched on the hood ornament of the station wagon. He assumed it was the same creature that had startled him less than two hours before. It remained on the hood, watching him through the windshield, as he went around to the back of the Cherokee and opened the cargo hatch. As he loaded the bags into the space behind the rear seat, the crow never looked away from him. It continued to watch him as he pushed the empty cart back to the front of the store, returned, and got in behind the steering wheel. The bird took flight only when he started the engine. Across sixteen miles of Montana countryside, the crow tracked him from on high. He could keep it in view either by leaning forward over the wheel to peer through the upper part of the windshield or simply by looking out his side window, depending on the position from which the creature chose to monitor him. Sometimes it flew parallel to the Cherokee, keeping pace, and sometimes it rocketed ahead so far that it became only a speck, nearly vanished into the clouds, only to double back and take up a parallel course once more. It was with him all the way home. While Eduardo ate dinner, the bird perched on the exterior stool of the window in the north wall of the kitchen, where he had first seen one of the sentinel squirrels. When he got up from his meal to raise the bottom half of the window, the crow scrammed, as the squirrel had. He left the window open while he finished dinner. A refreshing breeze skimmed in off the twilight meadows. Before Eduardo had eaten his last bite, the crow returned..The bird remained in the open window while Eduardo washed the dishes, dried them, and put them away. It followed his every move with its bright black eyes. He got another beer from the refrigerator and returned to the table. He settled in a different chair from the one in which he'd sat before, closer to the crow. Only an arm's length separated them. "What do you want?" he asked, surprised that he didn't feel at all foolish talking to a damned bird. Of course, he wasn't talking to the bird. He was addressing whatever controlled the bird. The traveler. "Do you just want to watch me?" he asked. The bird stared. "Would you like to communicate?" The bird lifted one wing, tucked its head underneath, and pecked at its feathers as if plucking out lice. After another swallow of beer, Eduardo said, "Or would you like to control me the way you do these animals?" The crow shifted back and forth from foot to foot, shook itself, cocked its head to peer at him with one eye. "You can act like a damned bird all you want, but I know that's not what you are, not all you are." The crow grew still again. Beyond the window, twilight had given way to night. "Can you control me? Maybe you're limited to simpler creatures, less complex neurological systems." Black eyes glittering. Sharp orange beak parted slightly. "Or maybe you're learning the ecology here, the flora and fauna, figuring out how it works in this place, honing your skills. Hmmm? Maybe you're working your way up to me. Is that it?" Watching. "I know there's nothing of you in the bird, nothing physical. Just like you weren't in the raccoons. An autopsy established that much. Thought you might have to insert something into an animal to control it, something electronic, I don't know, maybe even something biological. Thought maybe there were a lot of you out in the woods, a hive, a nest, and maybe one of you actually had to enter an animal to control it. Half expected Potter would find some strange slug living.in the raccoon's brain, some damned centipede thing hooked to its spine. A seed, an unearthly-looking spider, something. But you don't work that way, huh?" He took a swallow of Corona. "Ahhh. Tastes good." He held the beer out to the crow. It stared at him over the top of the bottle. "Teetotaler, huh? I keep learning things about you. We're an inquisitive bunch, we human beings. We learn fast and we're good at applying what we learn, good at meeting challenges. Does that worry you any?" The crow raised its tail feather and crapped. "Was that a comment," Eduardo wondered, "or just part of doing a good bird imitation?" The sharp beak opened and closed, opened and closed, but no sound issued from the bird. "Somehow you control these animals from a distance. Telepathy, something like that? From quite a distance, in the case of this bird. Sixteen miles into Eagle's Roost. Well, maybe fourteen miles as the crow flies." If the traveler knew that Eduardo had made a lame pun, it gave no indication through the bird. "Pretty clever, whether it's telepathy or something else. But it sure as hell takes a toll on the subject, doesn't it? You're getting better, though, learning the limitations of the local slave population." The crow pecked for more lice. "Have you made any attempts to control me? Because if you have, I don't think I was aware of it. Didn't feel any probing at my mind, didn't see alien images behind my eyes, none of the stuff you read about in novels." Peck, peck, peck. Eduardo chugged the rest of the Corona. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. Having nailed the lice, the bird watched him serenely, as though it would sit there all night and listen to him ramble, if that was what he wanted. "I think you're going slow, feeling your way, experimenting. This.world seems normal enough to those of us born here, but maybe to you it's one of the weirdest places you've ever seen. Could be you 're not too sure of yourself here." H
e had not begun the conversation with any expectation that the crow would answer him. He wasn't in a damned Disney movie. Yet its continued silence was beginning to frustrate and annoy him, probably because the day had sailed by on a tide of beer and he was full of drunkard's anger. "Come on. Let's stop farting around. Let's do it." The crow just stared. "Come here yourself, pay me a visit, the real you, not in a bird or squirrel or raccoon. Come as yourself. No costumes. Let's do it. Let's get it over with." The bird flapped its wings once, half unfurling them, but that was all. "You're worse than Poe's raven. You don't even say a single word, you just sit there. What good are you?" Staring, staring. And the Raven, never Jutting, still is sitting, still is sitting . Though Poe had never been one of his favorites, only a writer he had read while discovering what he really admired, he began quoting aloud to the feathered sentry, infusing the words with the vehemence of the troubled narrator that the poet had created: " And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming, And the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor--" Abruptly he realized, too late, that the bird and the poem and his own treacherous mind had brought him to a confrontation with the horrific thought that he'd repressed ever since cleaning up the soil and other leavings on June tenth. At the heart of Poe's "The Raven" was a lost maiden, young Lenore, lost to death, and a narrator with a morbid belief that Lenore had come back from-Eduardo slammed down a mental door on the rest of that thought. With a snarl of rage, he threw the empty beer bottle. It hit the crow. Bird and bottle tumbled into the night. He leaped off his chair and to the window. The bird fluttered on the lawn, then sprang into the air with a furious flapping of wings, up into the dark sky..Eduardo closed the window so hard he nearly shattered the glass, locked it, and clasped both hands to his head, as if he would tear out the fearful thought if it would not be repressed again. He got very drunk that night. The sleep he finally found was as good an approximation of death as any he had known. If the bird came to his bedroom window while he slept, or walked the edges of the roof above him, he did not hear it. He didn't wake until ten minutes past noon on July first. For the rest of that day, coping with his hangover and trying to cure it preoccupied him and kept his mind off the morbid verses of a long-dead poet. The crow was with him July first, second, and third, from morning through night, without surcease, but he tried to ignore it. No more staring matches as with the other sentries. No more one-sided conversations. Eduardo did not sit on the porches. When he was inside, he did not look toward the windows. His narrow life became more constricted than ever. At three o'clock on the afternoon of the fourth, suffering a bout of claustrophobia from being too long within four walls, he planned a cautious itinerary and, taking the shotgun, went for a walk. He did not look at the sky above him, only toward distant horizons. Twice, however, he saw a swift shadow flash over the ground ahead of him, and he knew that he did not walk alone. He was returning to the house, only twenty yards from the front porch, when the crow plummeted out of the sky. Its wings flapped uselessly, as if it had forgotten how to fly, and it met the earth with only slightly more grace than a stone dropped from a similar height. It flopped and shrieked on the grass but was dead by the time he reached it. Without looking closely at the crow, he picked it up by the tip of one wing. He carried it into the meadow, to throw it where he had tossed the four squirrels on the twenty-fourth of June. He expected to find a macabre pile of remains, well plucked and dismembered by carrion eaters, but the squirrels were gone. He would not have been surprised if one or even two of the carcasses had been dragged off to be devoured elsewhere. But most carrion eaters would strip the squirrels where they were found, leaving at least several bones, the inedible feet, scraps of fur-covered hide, a well-gnawed and pecked-at skull. The lack of any remains whatsoever could only mean the squirrels had been removed by the traveler. Or by its sorcerously controlled surrogates. Perhaps, having tested them to destruction, the traveler wanted to examine them to determine why they failed--which it had not been able to do with the raccoons because Eduardo had intervened and taken them to the veterinarian. Or it might feel that they were, like the.raccoons, evidence of its presence. It might prefer to leave as few loose ends as possible until its position on this world was more firmly established. He stood in the meadow, staring at the place where the dead squirrels had been. Thinking. He raised his left hand, from which dangled the broken crow, and stared at the now sightless eyes. As shiny as polished ebony and bulging from the sockets. "Come on," he whispered. Finally he took the crow into the house. He had a use for it. A plan. The wire-mesh colander was held together by sturdy stainless-steel rings at top and bottom, and stood on three short steel legs. It was the size of a two- or three-quart bowl. He used it to drain pasta when he cooked large quantities to make salads or to ensure that there would be plenty of leftovers. Two steel-loop handles were fixed to the top ring, by which to shake it when it was filled with steaming pasta that needed encouragement to fully drain. Turning the colander over and over in his hands, Eduardo thought through his plan one more time--then began to put it into action. Standing at a kitchen counter, he folded the wings of the dead crow. He tucked the whole bird into the colander. With needle and thread, he fixed the crow to the wire mesh in three places. That would prevent the limp body from slipping out when he tilted the colander. As he put the needle and thread aside, the bird rolled its head loosely and shuddered. Eduardo recoiled from it and took a step back from the counter in surprise. The crow issued a feeble, quavery cry. He knew it had been dead. Stone dead. For one thing, its neck had been broken. Its swollen eyes had been virtually hanging out of the sockets. Apparently it had died in mid-flight of a massive brain seizure like those that had killed the raccoons and the squirrels. Dropping from a great height, it had hit the ground with sickening force, sustaining yet more physical damage. Stone dead. Now, stitched to the wire mesh of the colander, the reanimated bird was unable to lift its head off its breast, not because it was hampered by the threads with which he'd secured it but because its neck was still broken. Smashed legs flopped uselessly. Crippled wings tried to flutter and were hampered more by the damage to them than by the entangling threads. Overcoming his fear and revulsion, Eduardo pressed one hand against the crow's breast. He couldn't feel a heartbeat. The heart of any small bird pounded extremely fast, much faster than the heart of any mammal, a racing little engine, putta-putta-putta-putta-putta. It was always easy to detect because the whole body reverberated with the rapid beats. The crow's heart was definitely not beating. As far as he was able to.tell, the bird wasn't breathing, either. And its neck was broken. He had hoped that he was witnessing the traveler's ability to bring a dead creature back to life, a miracle of sorts. But the truth was darker than that. The crow was dead. Yet it moved. Trembling with disgust, Eduardo lifted his hand from the small squirming corpse. The traveler could reestablish control of a carcass without resuscitating the animal. To some extent, it had power over the inanimate as well as the animate. Eduardo desperately wanted to avoid thinking about that. But he couldn't turn his mind off. Couldn't avoid that dreaded line of inquiry any longer. If he had not taken the raccoons away at once to the vet, would they eventually have shuddered and pulled themselves to their feet again, cold but moving, dead but animated? In the colander, the crow's head wobbled loosely on its broken neck, and its beak opened and closed with a faint clicking. Perhaps nothing had carried the four dead squirrels out of the meadow, after all. Maybe those carcasses, stiff with rigor mortis, had responded to the insistent call of the puppetmaster on their own, cold muscles flexing and contracting awkwardly, rigid joints cracking and snapping as demands were put upon them. Even as their bodies had entered the early stages of decomposition, perhaps they twitched and lifted their heads, crawled and hitched and dragged themselves out of the meadow, into the woods, to the lair of the thing that commanded them. Don't think about it. Stop. Think about something else, for Christ's sake. Anything else. Not this, not this. If he released the crow from the colander and
took it outside, would it flop and flutter along the ground on its broken wings, all the way up the sloped backyard, making a nightmarish pilgrimage into the shadows of the higher woods? Did he dare follow it into that heart of darkness? No. No, if there was to be an ultimate confrontation, it had to happen here on his own territory, not in whatever strange nest the traveler had made for itself. Eduardo was stricken by the blood-freezing suspicion that the traveler was alien to such an extreme degree that it didn't share humanity's perception of life and death, didn't draw the line between the two in the same place at all. Perhaps its kind never died. Or they died in a true biological sense yet were reborn in a different form out of their own rotting remains--and expected the same to be true of creatures on this world. In fact, the nature of their species--especially its relationship with death--might be unimaginably more bizarre, perverse, and repellent than anything his imagination could conceive. In an infinite universe, the potential number of intelligent life-forms was also infinite--as he had discovered from the books he'd been.reading lately. Theoretically, anything that could be imagined must exist in an infinite realm. When referring to extraterrestrial life-forms, alien meant alien, maximum strange, one weirdness wrapped in another, beyond easy understanding and possibly beyond all hope of comprehension. He had brooded about this issue before, but only now did he fully grasp that he had about as much chance of understanding this traveler, really understanding it, as a mouse had of understanding the intricacies of the human experience, the workings of the human mind. The dead crow shuddered, twitched its broken legs. From its twisted throat came a wet cawing sound that was a grotesque parody of the cry of a living crow. A spiritual darkness filled Eduardo, because he could no longer deny, to any extent whatsoever, the identity of the intruder who had left a vile trail through the house on the night of June tenth. He had known all along what he was repressing. Even as he had drunk himself into oblivion, he had known. Even as he had pretended not to know, he had known. And he knew now. He knew. Dear sweet Jesus, he knew. Eduardo had not been afraid to die. He'd almost welcomed death. Now he was again afraid to die. Beyond fright. Physically ill with terror. Trembling, sweating. Though the traveler had shown no signs of being able to control the body of a living human being, what would happen when he was dead? He picked up the shotgun from the table, snatched the keys to the Cherokee off the pegboard, went to the connecting door between the kitchen and the garage. He had to leave at once, no time to waste, get out and far away. To hell with learning more about the traveler. To hell with forcing a confrontation. He should just get in the Cherokee, jam the accelerator to the floorboards, run down anything that got in his way, and put a lot of distance between himself and whatever had come out of the black doorway into the Montana night. He jerked the door open but halted on the threshold between the kitchen and the garage. He had nowhere to go. No family left. No friends. He was too old to begin another life. And no matter where he went, the traveler would still be here, learning its way in this world, performing its perverse experiments, befouling what was sacred, committing unspeakable outrages against everything that Eduardo had ever cherished. He could not run from this. He had never run from anything in his life, however, it was not pride that stopped him before he had taken one full step into the garage. The only thing preventing him from leaving was his sense of what was right and wrong, the basic values that had gotten him through a long life..If he turned his back on those values and ran like a gutless wonder, he wouldn't be able to look at himself in a mirror any more. He was old and alone, which was bad enough. To be old, alone, and eaten by self-loathing would be intolerable. He wanted desperately to run from this, but that option was not open to him. He stepped back from the threshold, closed the door to the garage, and returned the shotgun to the table. He knew a bleakness of the soul that perhaps no one outside of hell had ever known before him. The dead crow thrashed, trying to tear loose of the colander. Eduardo had used heavy thread and tied secure knots, and the bird's muscles and bones were too badly damaged for it to exert enough force to break free. His plan seemed foolish now. An act of meaningless bravado--and insanity. He proceeded with it, anyway, preferring to act rather than wait meekly for the end. On the back porch, he held the colander against the outside of the kitchen door. The imprisoned crow scratched and thumped. With a pencil, Eduardo marked the wood where the openings in the handles met it. He hammered two standard nails into those marks and hung the colander on them. The crow, still struggling weakly, was visible through the wire mesh, trapped against the door. But the colander could be too easily lifted off the nails. Using two U-shaped nails on each side, he fixed both handles securely to the solid oak door. The hammering carried up the long slope of the yard and echoed back to him from the pine walls of the western forest. To remove the colander and get at the crow, the traveler or its surrogate would have to pry loose the U-shaped nails to free at least one of the handles. The only alternative was to cut the mesh with heavy shears and pull out the feathered prize. Either way, the dead bird could not be snatched up quickly or silently. Eduardo would have plenty of warning that something was after the contents of the colander--especially as he intended to spend the entire night in the kitchen if necessary. He could not be sure the traveler would covet the dead crow. Perhaps he was wrong, and it had no interest in the failed surrogate. However, the bird had lasted longer than the squirrels, which had lasted longer than the raccoons, and the puppetmaster might find it instructive to examine the carcass to help it discover why. It wouldn't be working through a squirrel this time. Or even a clever raccoon. Greater strength and dexterity were required for the task as Eduardo had arranged it. He prayed that the traveler itself would rise to the challenge and put in its first appearance. Come on. However, if it sent the other thing, the unspeakable thing, the lost Lenore, that terror could be faced. Amazing, what a human being could endure. Amazing, the strength of a man even in the shadow of oppressive terror, even in the grip of horror, even filled with.bleakest despair. The crow was motionless once more. Silent. Stone dead. Eduardo turned to look at the high woods. Come on. Come on, you bastard. Show me your face, show me your stinking ugly face. Come on, crawl out where I can see you. Don't be so gutless, you fucking freak. Eduardo went inside. He shut the door but didn't lock it. After closing the blinds at the windows, so nothing could look in at him without his knowledge, he sat at the kitchen table to bring his diary up-to-date. Filling three more pages with his neat script, he concluded what he supposed might be his final entry. In case something happened to him, he wanted the yellow tablet to be found-- but not too easily. He inserted it in a large Ziplock plastic bag, sealed it against moisture, and put it in the freezer half of the refrigerator, among packages of frozen foods. Twilight had arrived. The time of truth was fast approaching. He had not expected the entity in the woods to put in an appearance in daylight. He sensed it was a creature of nocturnal habits and preferences, spawned in darkness. He got a beer from the refrigerator. What the hell. It was his first in several hours. Although he wanted to be sober for the confrontation to come, he didn't want to be entirely clearheaded. Some things could be faced and dealt with better by a man whose sensibilities had been mildly numbed. Nightfall had barely settled all the way into the west, and he had not finished that first beer, when he heard movement on the back porch. A soft thud and a scrape and a thud again. Definitely not the crow stirring. Heavier noises than that. It was a clumsy sound made by something awkwardly but determinedly climbing the three wooden steps from the lawn. Eduardo got to his feet and picked up the shotgun. His palms were slick with sweat, but he could still handle the weapon. Another thud and a gritty scraping. His heart was beating bird-fast, faster than the crow's had ever beaten when it had been alive. The visitor--whatever its world of origin, whatever its name, whether dead or alive--reached the top of the steps and moved across the porch toward the door. No thudding any longer. All dragging and shuffling, sliding and scraping. Because of the type of reading he had been doing these past few m
onths, in but an instant Eduardo conjured image after image of different unearthly creatures that might produce such a sound instead of ordinary footsteps, each more malevolent in appearance than the one before it, until his mind swam with monsters. One monster among them was not unearthly, belonged more to Poe than to Heinlein or Sturgeon or Bradbury, gothic rather than futuristic, not only from Earth but from the earth. It drew nearer the door, nearer.still, and finally it was at the door. The unlocked door. Silence. Eduardo had only to take three steps, grab the doorknob, pull inward, and he would stand face-to-face with the visitor. He could not move. He was as rooted to the floor as any tree was rooted to the hills that rose behind the house. Though he had devised the plan that had precipitated the confrontation, though he had not run when he'd had the chance, though he had convinced himself that his sanity depended on facing this ultimate terror forthrightly and putting it behind him, he was paralyzed and suddenly not so sure that running would have been wrong. The thing was silent. It was there but silent. Inches from the far side of the door. Doing what? Waiting for Eduardo to move first? Or studying the crow in the colander? The porch was dark, and only a little kitchen light was emitted by the covered windows, so could it really see the crow? Yes. Oh, yes, it could see in the dark, bet on that, it could see in the dark better than any damned cat could see, because it was of the dark. He could hear the kitchen clock ticking. Though it had been there all along, he hadn't heard it in years, it had become part of the background noise, but he heard it now, louder than it had ever been, like a softened stick striking a slow measured beat on a snare drum at a state funeral. come on lets do it. This time he was urging the traveler to come out of hiding. He was goading himself. Come on, you bastard, you coward, you id Id ignorant fool, come on, come on, He moved to the door and stood slightly to one side of it, so he could open it past himself. To grasp the knob, he would have to let go of the with one hand, but he couldn't do that was knocking painfully against him. He could feel the pulse in his temples, pounding, pounding. He smelled the thing through the closed door. A nauseating odor, sour and putrescent, beyond anything in his long lifetime of experience. The doorknob in front of him, the knob that he could of bring himself to grasp, round a p and gleaming, began to turn. Scintillant light, a reflection of the kitchen fluorescents, trickled along the curve of the knoll as it slowly l The free-moving latch bolt eased notch in the striker plate with the faintest rasp of brass on brass. pounding in his temples, booming his chest so swollen and leaping that his lungs and made breathing difficult, painful And now the knob slipped back the other way, and the door remained unopened. The latch bolt eased into its catch once more. The moment of revelation was delayed, perhaps slipping away forever as the visitor withdrew.... With an anguished cry that surprised him, Eduardo seized the knob and yanked the door open in one convulsively violent movement, bringing himself face-to-face with his worst fear. The lost maiden, three years in the grave and now released: a wiry and tangled mass of gray hair matted with filth, eyeless sockets, flesh hideously corrupted and dark in spite of the preserving influence of.embalming fluid, glimpses of clean bone in the desiccated and reeking tissues, lips withered back from teeth to reveal a wide but humorless grin. The lost maiden stood in her ragged and worm-eaten burial dress, the blue-on-blue fabric grossly stained with the fluids of decomposition, risen and returned to him, reaching for him with one hand. The sight of her filled him not merely with terror and revulsion but with despair, oh God, he was sinking in a sea of cold black despair that Margaret should have come to this, reduced to the unspeakable fate of all living things-- It's not Margaret, not this thing, unclean thing, Margarite's in a better place, heaven, sits with God, must be a God, Margaret deserves a God, not just this, not an ending like this, sits with God, sits with God, long gone from this body and sits with God. -- and after the first instant of confrontation, he thought he was going to be all right, thought he was going to be able to hold on to his sanity and bring up the shotgun and blast the hateful thing backward off the porch, pump round after round into it until it no longer bore the vaguest resemblance to his Margaret, until it was nothing but a pile of bone fragments and organic ruins with no power to plunge him into despondency. Then he saw that he hadn't been visited only by this heinous surrogate but by the traveler itself, two confrontations in one. The alien was entwined with the corpse, hanging upon its back but also intruding within the cavities of it, riding on and in the dead woman. Its own body appeared to be soft and poorly designed for gravity as heavy as that it had encountered here, so perhaps it needed support to permit locomotion in these conditions. Black, it was, black and slick, irregularly stippled with red, and seemed to be constituted only of a mass of entwined and writhing appendages that one moment appeared as fluid and smooth as snakes but the next moment seemed as spiky and jointed as the legs of a crab. Not muscular like the coils of snakes or armored like crabs but oozing and jellid. He saw no head or orifice, no familiar feature that could help him tell the top of it from the bottom, but he had only a few seconds to absorb what he was seeing, merely the briefest glimpse. The sight of those shiny black tentacles slithering in and out of the cadaver's rib cage brought him to the realization that less flesh remained on the three-year-old corpse than he had at first believed and that the bulk of the apparition before him was the rider on the bones. Its tangled appendages bulged where her heart and lungs had once been, twined like vines around clavicles and scapulae, around humerus and radius and ulna, around femur and tibia, even filled the empty skull and churned frenziedly just behind the rims of the hollow sockets. This was more than he could tolerate and more than his books had prepared him for, beyond alien, an obscenity he couldn't bear. He heard himself screaming, heard it but was unable to stop, could not lift the gun because all his strength was in the scream. Although it seemed like an eternity, only five seconds elapsed from the moment he yanked open the door until his heart was wrenched by fatal spasms. In spite of the thing that loomed on the threshold of the kitchen, in spite of the thoughts and terrors that exploded through his mind in that sliver of time, Eduardo knew the number of seconds was precisely five because a part of him continued to be aware of the ticking of the.clock, the funereal cadence, five ticks, five seconds. Then a searing pain blazed through him, the mother of all pain, not from an assault by the traveler but arising from within, accompanied by white light as bright as the eye of a nuclear explosion might be, an all-obliterating whiteness that erased the traveler from his view and all the cares of the world from his consideration. Peace. CHAPTER THIRTEEN. Because he had suffered some nerve damage in addition to the spinal fracture, Jack required a longer course of therapy at Phoenix Rehabilitation Hospital than he had anticipated. As promised, Moshe Bloom taught him to make a friend of pain, to see it as evidence of rebuilding and recovery. By early July, four months from the day he had been shot down, gradually diminishing pain had been a constant companion for so long that it was not just a friend but a brother. On July seventeenth, when he was discharged from Phoenix, he was able to walk again, although he still required the assurance of not one but two canes. He seldom actually used both, sometimes neither, but was fearful of falling without them, especially on a staircase. Although slow, he was for the most part steady on his feet, however, influenced by an occasional vagrant nerve impulse, either leg could go entirely limp without warning, causing his knee to buckle. Those unpleasant surprises became less frequent by the week. He hoped to be rid of one cane by August and the other by September. Moshe Bloom, as solid as sculpted rock but still pearing to drift along as if propelled on a thin cushion of air, accompanied Jack to the front entrance, while Heather brought the car from the parking lot. The therapist was dressed all in white, as usual, but his skullcap was crocheted and colorful. "Listen, you be sure to keep up those daily exercises." "All right." "Even after you're able to give up the canes." "I will." "The tendency is to slack off. Sometimes when the patient gets most of the function back, regains his confidence, he decides he doesn't
have to work at it any more. But the healing is still going on even if he doesn't realize it." "I hear you." Holding open the front door for Jack, Moshe said, "Next thing you know, he has problems, has to come back here on an outpatient basis to gain back the ground he's lost." "Not me," Jack assured him, glancing outside into the gloriously hot summer day. "Take your medication when you need it." "I will." "Don't try to tough it out." "I won't." "Hot baths with Epsom salts when you're sore." Jack nodded solemnly.."And I swear to God, every day I'll eat my chicken soup." Laughing, Moshe said, "I don't mean to mother you." "Yes you do." "No, not really." "You've been mothering me for weeks." "Have I? Yes, all right, I do mean to do it." Jack hooked one cane over his wrist so he could shake hands. "Thank you, Moshe." The therapist shook hands, then hugged him. "You've made a hell of a comeback. I'm proud of you." "You're damned good at this job, my friend." As Heather and Toby pulled up in the car, Moshe grinned. "Of course I'm good at it. We Jews know all about suffering." For a few days, just being in his own home and sleeping in his own bed was such a delight that Jack needed to make no effort to sustain optimism. Sitting in his favorite armchair, eating meals whenever he wanted rather than when a rigid institutional schedule said he must, helping Heather to cook dinner, reading to Toby before bedtime, watching television after ten o'clock in the evening without having to wear headphones--these things were more satisfying to him than all the luxuries and pleasures to which a Saudi Arabian prince might be entitled. He remained concerned about family finances, but he had hope on that front too. He expected to be back at work in some capacity by August, at last earning a paycheck again. Before he could return to duty on the street, however, he would be required to pass a rigorous department physical and a psychological evaluation to determine if he had been traumatized in any way that would affect his performance, consequently, for a number of weeks, he would have to serve at a desk. As the recession dragged on with few signs of a recovery, as every initiative by the government seemed devised solely to destroy more jobs, Heather stopped waiting for her widely seeded applications to bear fruit. While Jack had been in the rehab hospital, Heather had become an entrepreneur--"Howard Hughes without the insanity," she joked--doing business as Mcgar vey Associates. Ten years with IBM as a software designer gave her credibility. By the time Jack came home, Heather had signed a contract to design custom inventory-control and bookkeeping programs for the owner of a chain of eight taverns, one of the few enterprises thriving in the current economy was selling booze and a companionable atmosphere in which to drink it, and her client had lost the ability to monitor his increasingly busy saloons. Profit from her first contract wouldn't come close to replacing the salary she had stopped receiving the previous October. However, she seemed confident that good word of mouth would bring her more work if she did a first-rate job for the tavern owner. Jack was pleased to see her contentedly at work, her computers set up on a pair of large folding tables in the spare bedroom, where the mattress and springs of the bed now stood on end against one wall. She had always been happiest when busy, and his respect for her intelligence and industriousness was such that he wouldn't have been surprised to see the humble office of Mcgarvey.Associates grow, in time, to rival the corporate headquarters of Microsoft. On his fourth day at home, when he told her as much, she leaned back in her office chair and puffed out her chest as if swelling with pride. "Yep, that's me. Bill Gates without the nerd reputation." Leaning against the doorway, already using only one cane, he said, "I prefer to think of you as Bill Gates with terrific legs." "Sexist." "Guilty." "Besides, how do you know Bill Gates doesn't have better legs than mine? Have you seen his?" "Okay, I take back everything. I should have said, As far as I'm concerned, you are every bit as much of a nerd as people think Bill Gates is." "Thank you." "You're welcome," he said. "Are they really terrific?" "What?" "My legs." "You have legs?" Although he doubted that good word of mouth was going to boost her business fast enough to pay the bills and meet the mortgage, Jack didn't worry unduly about much of anything--until the twenty-fourth of July, when he had been home for a week and when his mood began to slide. When his characteristic optimism started to go, it didn't just crumble slowly but cracked all the way down the middle and soon thereafter shattered altogether. He couldn't sleep without dreams, which grew increasingly bloody night by night. He routinely woke in the middle of a panic attack three or four hours after he went to bed, and he was unable to doze off again no matter how desperately tired he was. A general malaise quickly set in. Food seemed to lose much of its flavor. He stayed indoors because the summer sun became annoyingly bright, and the dry California heat that he had always loved now parched him and made him irritable. Though he had always been a reader and owned an extensive book collection, he could find no writer--even among his old favorites-- who appealed to him any more, every story, regardless of how liberally festooned with the praises of the critics, was uninvolving, and he often had to reread a paragraph three or even four times until the meaning penetrated his mental haze. He advanced from malaise to flat-out depression by the twenty-eighth, only eleven days out of rehabilitation. He found himself thinking about the future more than had ever been his habitand he could find no possible version of it that appealed to him. Once an exuberant swimmer in an ocean of optimism, he became a huddled.and frightened creature in a backwater of despair. He was reading the daily newspaper too closely, brooding about current events too deeply, and spending far too much time watching television news. Wars, genocide, riots, terrorist attacks, political bombings, gang wars, drive-by shootings, child molestations, serial killers on the loose, carjackings, ecological doomsday scenarios, a young convenience-store clerk shot in the head for the lousy fifty bucks and change in his cashregister drawer, rapes and stabbings and strangulations. He knew modern life was more than this. Goodwill still existed, and good deeds were still done. But the media focused on the grimmest aspects of every issue, and so Though he tried to leave the the TV off, he was drawn to of the latest tragedies and outrage the hottle or a compulsive yambl citement of the racetrack The despair inspired by the news was a down escalator from which he seemed unable to escape. And it was picking up speed When Heather casually mentioned that Toby would be entering third grade in a month, Jack began to worry h drug dealing and violence surrounding A les schools He became convinced they ing to be killed unless they could find a way, in spite of his financial problems to pay private sc h t such a once-safe place as a classr d ngerous as a battlefield led him in f I t the conclusion that nowhere was son. If Toby could be killed in school, why not on his t playing in his Own front yard? Ia overly protective parent, which he had never been before, reluctant to let the boy out of his sight. h fifth of August, with his return to d way and the restoration of a møre t hand he shouldhave experienced p d but the Opposite was the case. ting to the division for reassignme eat even though he was at least a ving off a desk job and back on the li d he had concealed his fears and P sions from everyone That night he learned differently In bed, after he turned off the lamp, he worked up the courage to say in the darkness what he would have been embarrassed to say in the light: "I'm not going back on the street." "I know," Heather said from her side of the bed. "I don't mean not just right away. I mean never." "I know, baby," she said tenderly, and reached out to find and hold his hand. "Is it that obvious?" "It's been a bad couple of weeks." "I'm sorry." "You had to go through it." "I thought I'd be on the street until I retired. It's all I ever wanted to do." "Things change," she said. "I can't risk it now. I've lost my confidence." "You'll get it back." "Maybe." "You will," she insisted. "But you still won't go back on the street..You can't. You've done your part, you've pushed your luck as far as any cop could be expected to push it. Let someone else save the world." "I feel ..." "I know." "... empty ..." "It'll get better. Everything does." "... like a sorry-ass quitter." "You're no quitter." She slid against his side and put her hand on his chest. "You're a good man and you're brave--too damn brave, as far as I'm concerned. If you hadn't decided to get
off the street, I'd have decided it for you. One way or another, I'd have made you do it, because the odds are, next time, I'll be Alma Bryson and your partner's wife will be coming to sit at my side, hold my hand. I'll be damned to hell before I'll let that happen. You've had two partners shot down beside you in one year, and there's been seven cops killed here since January. Seven. I'm not going to lose you, Jack." He put his arm around her, held her close, profoundly grateful to have found her in a hard world where so much seemed to depend on random chance. For a while he couldn't speak, his voice would have been too thick with emotion. At last he said, "So I guess from here on out, I'll park my butt in a chair and be a desk jockey of one kind or another." "I'll buy you a whole case of hemorrhoid cream" "I'll have to get a coffee mug with my name on It." "And a supply of notepads that say From the Desk of Jack Mcgarvey." " He said, "It's going to mean a salary cut. Won't pay as much as being on the street." "We'll be all right." "Will we? I'm not so sure. It's going to be tight." She said, "You're forgetting Mcgarvey Associates. Inventive and flexible custom programs. Tailored to your needs. Reasonable rates. Timely delivery. Better legs than Bill Gates." And that night, in the darkness of their bedroom, it did seem that finding security and happiness again in the City of Angels might be possible, after all. During the next ten days, however, they were confronted by a series of reality checks that made it impossible to sustain the old L.A..fantasy. Yet another city budget shortfall was rectified in part by reducing the compensation of street cops by five percent and that of the deskbound in the department by twelve percent, a job that already paid less than Jack's previous position now paid markedly less. A day later, government statistics showed the economy slipping again, and a new client, on the verge of signing a contract with Mcgarvey Associates, was so unnerved by those numbers that he decided against investing in new computer programs for a few months. Inflation was up. Taxes were way up. The debt-strapped utility company was granted a rate increase to prevent bankruptcy, which meant electricity rates were going to climb. Water rates had already risen, natural-gas prices were next. They were clobbered with a car-repair bill of six hundred forty dollars on the same day that Anson Oliver's first film, which had not enjoyed a wide or successful theatrical run in its initial release, was reissued by Paramount, reigniting media interest in the shootout and in Jack. And Richie Tendero, husband to the flamboyant and unshakable Gina Tendero of the black leather clothes and red-pepper Mace, was hit by a shotgun blast while answering a domestic-dispute call, resulting in the amputation of his left arm and plastic surgery to the left side of his face. On August fifteenth, an eleven-year-old girl was caught in gang crossfire one block from the elementary school that Toby would soon be attending. She was killed instantly. Events unfold in uncanny sequences. Long-forgotten acquaintances turn up again with news that changes lives. A stranger appears and speaks a few words of wisdom, solving a previously insoluble problem, or something in a recent dream transpires in reality. Suddenly the existence of God seems confirmed. On the afternoon of August eighteenth, as Heather stood in the kitchen, waiting for the Mr. Coffee machine to brew a fresh pot and sorting through mail that had just arrived, she came across a letter from Paul Youngblood, an attorney-at-law from Eagle's Roost, Montana. The envelope was heavy, as if it contained not merely a letter but a document. According to the postmark, it had been sent on the sixth of the month, which led her to wonder about the gypseian route by which the postal service had chosen to deliver it. She knew she'd heard of Eagle's Roost. She could not recall when or why. Because she shared a nearly universal aversion to attorneys and associated all correspondence from law firms with trouble, she put the letter on the bottom of the stack, choosing to deal with it last. After throwing away advertisements, she found that the four other remaining items were bills. When she finally read the letter from Paul Youngblood, it proved to be so utterly different from the bad news she had expected--and so astonishing--that immediately after finishing it, she sat down at the kitchen table and read it again from the top. Eduardo Fernandez, a client of Youngblood's, had died on the fourth or fifth of July. He had been the father of Sometimes, life seems to have a higher meaning. lthe late Thomas Fernandez. That was Tommy--murdered at Jack's side eleven months before the events at Hassam Arkadian's service station. Eduardo Fernandez had named Jack Mcgarvey of Los Angeles, California, as his sole heir. Serving as executor of Mr. Fernandez's estate, Youngblood had tried to notify Jack by phone, only to discover that his number was no longer listed..The estate included an insurance policy that would cover the fifty-five percent federal inheritance tax, leaving Jack the unencumbered six-hundred-acre Quartermass Ranch, the four-bedroom main house with furnishings, the caretaker's house, the ten-horse stable, various tools and equipment, and "a substantial amount of cash." Instead of a legal document, six photographs were included with the single-page letter. With shaky hands, Heather spread them in two rows on the table in front of her. The modified-Victorian main house was charming, with just enough decorative millwork to enchant without descending into Gothic oppressiveness. It appeared to be twice as large as the house in which they now lived. The mountain and valley views in every direction were breathtaking. Heather had never been filled with such mixed emotions as she experienced at that moment. In their hour of desperation, they had been given salvation, a way out of darkness, escape from despair. She had no idea what a Montana attorney would regard as a "substantial amount of cash," but she figured the ranch alone, if liquidated, must be worth enough to pay off all their bills and their current mortgage, with money left hadn't known since she had been a small child and had still believed in fairy tales, miracles. On the other hand, their good fortune would have been Tommy Fernandez's good fortune if he had not been murdered. That dark and inescapable fact tainted the gift and dampened her pleasure in it. For a while she brooded, torn between delight and guilt, and at last decided she was responding too much -. like a Beckerman and too little like a Mcgarvey. She would have done anything to bring Tommy Fernandez back to life, even if it meant that this inheritance would never have been hers and Jack's, but the cold truth was that Tommy was dead, in the ground over sixteen months now, and beyond the help of anyone. Fate was too often malicious, too seldom generous. She would be a fool to greet this staggering beneficence with a frown. Her first thought was to call Jack at work. She went to the wall phone, dialed part of the number, then hung up. This was once-in-a-lifetime news. She would never have another opportunity to spring something this deliriously wonderful on him, and she must not screw it up. For one thing, she wanted to see his face when he heard about the inheritance. She took the notepad and pencil from the holder beside the phone and returned to the table, where she read the letter again. She wrote out a list of questions for Paul Youngblood, then returned to the phone and called him in Eagle's Roost, Montana. When Heather identified herself to the attorney's secretary and then to the man himself, her voice was tremil she was half afraid he would tell her there had been a mistake. Maybe someone had contested the will. Or maybe a more recent will had been found, which negated the one naming Jack as the sole heir. A thousand maybes. Rush-hour traffic was even worse than usual. Dinner was delayed because Jack got home more than half an hour late, tired and frazzled but putting on a good act as a man in love with his new job and happy with his life. The instant Toby was finished eating, he asked to be excused to watch a favorite television program, and Heather let him go..She wanted to share the news with Jack first, just the two of them, and tell Toby later. As usual, Jack helped her clean the table and load the dishwasher. When they were finished, he said, "Think I'll go for a walk, exercise these legs." "You having any pain?" "Just a little crdmping." Though he had stopped using a cane, she worried that he wouldn't tell her if he was having strength or balance problems. "You sure you're okay?" "Positive." He kissed her cheek. "You and Moshe Bloom could never be married. You'd always be fighting over whose job it was to do the mothering." "Sit down a minute," she said, leading him to the table and encou
raging him into a chair. "There's something we have to talk about." "If Toby needs more dental work, I'll do it myself." "No dental work." "You see the size of that last bill?" "Yes, I saw it." "Who needs teeth, anyway? Clams don't have teeth, and they get along just fine. Oysters don't have teeth. Worms don't have teeth. Lots of things don't have teeth, and they're perfectly happy." "Forget about teeth," she said, fetching Youngblood's letter and the photographs from the top of the refrigerator. He took the envelope when she offered it. "What're you grinning about? What's this?" "Read it." Heather sat across from him, her elbows on the table, her face cupped in her hands, watching him intently, trying to guess where he was in the letter by the expressions that crossed his face. The sight of him absorbing the news gladdened her as nothing had in a long time. "This is . . .I. . . but why on earth . . ." He looked up from the letter and gaped at her. "Is this true?" She giggled. She hadn't giggled in ages. "Yes. Yes! It's true, every incredible word of it. I called Paul Youngblood. He sounds like a very nice man. He was Eduardo's neighbor as well as his attorney. His nearest neighbor but still two miles away. He confirms everything in the letter, all of it. Ask me how much a substantial amount of cash' might be." Jack blinked at her stupidly, as if the news had been a blunt instrument with which he'd.been stunned. "How much?" "He can't be sure yet, not until he has the final tax figure, but after everything's said and done . . . it's going to be between three hundred fifty thousand and four hundred thousand dollars." Jack paled. "That can't be right." "That's what he told me." "Plus the ranch?" "Plus the ranch." "Tommy talked about the place in Montana, said his dad loved it but he hated it. Dull, Tommy said, nothing ever happening, the ass-end of nowhere. He loved his dad, told funny stories about him, but he never said he was rich." Again he picked up the letter, which rattled in his hand. "Why would Tommy's dad leave everything to me, for God's sake?" "That was one of the questions I asked Paul Youngblood. He says Tommy used to write to his dad about you, what a great guy you were. Talked about you like a brother. So with Tommy gone, his dad wanted you to have everything." "What do the other relatives have to say about that?" "There aren't any relatives." Jack shook his head. "But I never even met"--he consulted the letter-- "Eduardo. This is crazy. I mean, Jesus, it's wonderful, but it's crazy. He gives everything to someone he hasn't even met?" Unable to remain seated, bursting with excitement, Heather got up and went to the refrigerator. "Paul Youngblood says the idea appealed to Eduardo because he inherited it eight years ago from his former boss, which was a total surprise to him too." "I'll be damned," he said wonderingly. She removed a bottle of champagne that she had hidden in the vegetable drawer, where Jack wouldn't see it before he heard the news and knew what they were celebrating. "According to Youngblood, Eduardo thought that surprising you with it . . . well, he seemed to see it as the only way he'd ever be able to repay his boss's kindness." When she returned to the table, Jack frowned at the bottle of champagne. "I'm like a balloon, I'm floating, bouncing off the ceiling, but . . at the same time . . ." "Tommy," she said. He nodded..Peeling the foil off the champagne bottle, she said, "We can't bring him back." "No, but ..." "He'd want us to be happy about this." "Yeah, I know. Tommy was a great guy." "So let's be happy." He said nothing. Untwisting the wire cage that restrained the cork, she said, "We'd be idiots if we weren't." know" "It's a miracle, and just when we need one." He stared at the champagne. She said, "It's not just our future. It's Toby's too." "He can keep his teeth now." Laughing, Heather said, "It's a wonderful thing, Jack." At last his smile was broad and without reservation. "You're damn right it's a wonderful thing--now we won't have to listen to him gumming his food." Removing the wire from the cork, she said, "Even if we don't deserve so much good fortune, Toby does." "We all deserve it." He got up, went to a nearby cabinet, and removed a clean dish towel from a drawer. "Here, let me." He took the bottle from Heather, draped the cloth over it. "Might explode." He twisted the cork, it popped, but the champagne did not foam out of the neck of the bottle. She brought a couple of glasses, and he filled them. "To Eduardo Fernandez," she said by way of a toast. "To Tommy." They drank, standing beside the table, and then he kissed her lightly. His quick tongue was sweet with champagne. "My God, Heather, do you know what this meanst' They sat down again as she said, "When we go out to dinner the next time, it can be someplace that serves the food on real plates instead of in paper containers." His eyes were shining, and she was thrilled to see him so happy. "We can pay the mortgage, all the bills, put money away for Toby to go to college one day, maybe even take a vacation--and that's just from the cash. If we sell the farm--" "Look at the photographs," she urged, grabbing them, spreading them on the table in front of him. "Very nice," he said. "Better than very nice. It's gorgeous, Jack. Look at those mountains! And look at this one--look, from this angle, standing in front of the house, you can see forever!" He looked up from the snapshots and met her eyes. "What am I hearing?" "We don't have to sell it." "Live there?" "Why not?" "We're city people." . n: . ^: "And we hate it."."Angelenos all our lives." "Isn't what it once was." She could see that the idea intrigued him, and her own excitement grew as he began to come around to her point of view. "We've wanted change for a long time," he said. "But I was never thinking this much change." "Look at the photographs." "Okay, yeah, it's gorgeous. But what would we do there? It's a lot of money but not enough to last forever. Besides, we're young--we can't vegetate, we need to do something." "Maybe we can start a business in Eagle's Roost." "What sort of business?" "I don't know. Anything," she said. "We can go, see what it's like, and maybe we'll spot an opportunity right off the bat. And if not . . well, we don't have to live there forever. A year, two years, and if we don't like it, we can sell." He finished his champagne, poured refreshers for both of them. "Toby starts school in two weeks...." "They have schools in Montana," she said, though she knew that was not what concerned him. He was no doubt thinking about the eleven-year-old girl who'd been shot to death one block from the elementary school that Toby would be attending. She nudged him: "He'll have six hundred acres to play on, Jack. How long has he wanted a dog, a golden retriever, and it just seemed like this place was too small for one?" Staring at one of the snapshots, Jack said, "At work today, we were talking about all the names this city has, more than other places. Like New York is the Big Apple, and that's it. But L.A. has lots of names--and none of them fit any more, none of them mean anything. Like the Big Orange. But there aren't any orange groves any more, all gone to tract houses and mini-malls and car lots. You can call it the City of Angels, but not much angelic happens here any more, not the way it once did, too many devils on the streets." "The City Where Stars Are Born," she said. "And nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand kids who come here to be movie stars--what happens to them? Wind up used, abused, broke, and hooked on drugs." "The City Where the Sun Goes Down." "Well, it still does set in the west," he acknowledged, picking up.another photo from Montana. "City Where the Sun Goes Down ... That makes you think of the thirties and forties, swing music, men tipping their hats to one another and holding doors open for ladies in black cocktail dresses, elegant nightclubs overlooking the ocean, Bogart and Bacall, Gable and Lombard, people sipping martinis and watching golden sunsets. All gone. Mostly gone. These days, call it the City of the Dying Day." He fell silent. Shuming the photographs, studying them. She waited. At last he looked up and said, "Let's do it." PART TWO The Land of the Winter Moon Under the winter moon's pale light, across the cold and starry night, from snowy mountains soaring high to ocean shores echoes the cry. From barren sands to verdant fields, from city streets to lonely wealds, cries the tortured human heart, seeking solace, wisdom, a chart by which to understand its plight under the winter moon's pale light. Dawn is unable to fade the night. Must we live ever in the blight under the winter moon's cold light, lost in loneliness, hate, and fright, last night, tonight, tomorrow night under the winter moon's bleak light? The Book of Counted Sorrows CHAPTER FOURTEEN. In the distant age of the dinosaurs, fearful creatures as mighty as
the Tyrannosaurus rex had perished in treacherous tar pits upon which the visionary builders of Los Angeles later erected freeways, shopping centers, houses, office buildings, theaters, topless bars, restaurants shaped like hot dogs and derby hats, churches, automated car washes, and so much more. Deep beneath parts of the metropolis, those fossilized monsters lay in eternal sleep. Through September and October, Jack felt the city was still a pit in which he was mired. He believed he was obligated to give Lyle Crawford a thirty-day notice. And at the advice of their Realtor, before listing the house for sale, they painted it inside and out, installed new carpet, and made minor repairs. The moment Jack made the decision to leave the city, he'd mentally packed and decamped. Now his heart was in the Montana highlands east of the Rockies, while he was still trying to pull his feet out of the L.A. tar. Because they no longer needed every dollar of equity in the house, they priced it below market value. In spite of poor economic conditions, it moved quickly. By the twenty-eighth of October, they were in a sixty-day escrow with a buyer who appeared qualified, and they felt reasonably confident about embarking upon a new life and leaving the finalization of the sale to their Realtor. On November fourth, they set out for their new home in a Ford Explorer purchased with some of their inheritance. Jack insisted on leaving at six in the morning, determined that his last day in the city would not include the frustrating crawl of rush-hour traffic. They took only suitcases and a few boxes of personal effects, and shipped little more than books. Additional photographs sent by Paul Youngblood had.revealed that their new house was already furnished in a style to which they could easily adjust. They might have to replace a few upholstered pieces, but many items were antiques of high quality and considerable beauty. Departing the city on Interstate 5, they never looked back as they crested the Hollywood Hills and went north past Burbank, San Fernando, Valencia, Castaic far out of the suburbs, into the Angeles National Forest across Pyramid Lake, and up through the Tejon Pass between the Sierra Madre and the Tehachapi Mountains. Mile by mile, Jack felt himself rising out of an emotional and mental darkness. He was like a swimmer who had been weighed down with iron shackles and blocks, drowning in oceanic depths, now freed and soaring toward the surface, light, air. Toby was amazed by the vast farmlands flanking the highway, so Heather quoted figures from a travel book. The San Joaquin Valley was more than a hundred fifty miles long, defined by the Diablo Range on the west and Sierra foothills to the distant east. Those thousands of square miles were the most fertile in the world, producing eighty percent of the entire country's fresh vegetables and melons, half its fresh fruit and almonds, and much more. They stopped at a roadside produce stand and bought a one-pound bag of roasted almonds for a quarter of what the cost would have been in a supermarket. Jack stood beside the Explorer, eating a handful of nuts, staring at vistas of productive fields and orchards. The day was blessedly quiet, and the air was clean. ..- Residing in the city, it was easy to forget there were other ways to live, worlds beyond the teeming streets of the human hive. He was a sleeper waking to a real world more diverse and interesting than the dream he had mistaken for reality. In pursuit of their new life, they reached Reno that night, Salt Lake City the next, and Eagle's Roost, Montana, at three o'clock in the afternoon on the sixth of .. November. To Kill a Mockingbird was one of Jack's favorite novels, and Atticus Finch, the courageous lawyer of that book, would have been at home in Paul Youngblood's office on the top floor of the only three-story building in Eagle's Roost. The wooden blinds surely dated from mid-century. The mahogany wainscoting, bookshelves, and cabinets were glass-smooth from decades of hand polishing. The room had an air of gentility, a learned quietude, and the shelves held volumes of history and philosophy as well as lawbooks. The attorney actually greeted them with, "Howdy, neighbors! What a pleasure this is, a genuine pleasure." He had a firm handshake and a smile like soft sunshine on mountain crags. Paul Youngblood would never have been recognized as a lawyer in L.A. and he might have been removed discreetly but forcefully if he had ever visited the swanky offices of the powerhouse firms quartered in Century City. He was fifty, tall, lanky, with closecropped iron-gray hair. His face was creased and ruddy from years spent outdoors, and his big, leathery hands were scarred by physical labor. He wore scuffed boots, tan jeans, a white shirt, and a bolo tie with a silver clasp in the form of a bucking bronco. In L.A. people in similar outfits were dentists or accountants or.executives, costumed for an evening at a Countr y-Western bar, and could not disguise their true nature. But Youngblood looked as if he had been born in Western garb, birthed between a cactus and a campfire, and raised on horseback. Although he appeared to be rough enough to walk into a biker bar and take on a mob of machine wranglers, the attorney was soft-spoken and so polite that Jack was aware of how badly his own manners had deteriorated under the constant abrasion of daily life in the city. Youngblood won Toby's heart by calling him "Scout" and offering to teach him horseback riding "come spring, starting with a pony, of course . . . and assuming that's okay with your folks." When the lawyer put on a suede jacket and a cowboy hat before leading them out to Quartermass Ranch, Toby regarded him with wide-eyed awe. They followed Youngblood's white Bronco across sixteen miles of country more beautiful than it had appeared to be in photographs. Two stone columns, surmounted by a weathered wooden arch, marked the entrance to their property. Burned into the arch, rustic lettering spelled QUARTERMASS RANCH. They turned off the county route, under the sign, and headed uphill. Wow! This all belongs to us?" Toby asked from the back seat, enraptured by the sprawl of fields and forests. Before either Jack or Heather could answer him, he posed the question that he no doubt had been wanting to ask for weeks: "Can I have a dog?" "Just a dog?" Jack asked. "Huh?" "With this much land, you could have a pet cow." Toby laughed. "Cows aren't pets." "You're wrong," Jack said, striving for a serious tone. "They're darned good pets." "Cows!" Toby said incredulously. "No, really. You can teach a cow to fetch, roll over, beg for its dinner, shake hands, all the usual dog stuff-- plus they make milk for your breakfast cereal." "You're putting me on. Mom, is he serious?" "The only problem is," Heather said, "you might get a cow that likes to chase cars--in which case it can do a lot more damage than a dog." "That's silly," the boy said, and giggled. "Not if you're in the car being chased," Heather assured him. "Then it's terrifying," Jack agreed. "I'll stick with a dog." "Well, if that's what you want," Jack said. "You mean it? I can have a dog?" Heather said, "I don't see why not." Toby whooped with delight. The private lane led to the main residence, which overlooked a meadow.of golden-brown grass. In the last hour of its journey toward the western mountains, the sun backlit the property, and the house cast a long purple shadow. They parked in that shade behind Paul Youngblood's Bronco. They began their tour in the basement. Although windowless and entirely beneath ground level, it was cold. The first room contained a washer, a dryer, a double sink, and a set of pine cabinets. The corners of the ceiling were enlivened by the architecture of spiders and a few cocooning moths. In the second room stood an electric forced-air furnace and a water heater. A Japanese-made electric generator, as large as a washing machine, was also provided. It looked capable of producing enough power to light a small town. "Why do we need this?" Jack wondered, indicating the generator. Paul Youngblood said, "Bad storm can knock out the public power supply for a couple of days in some of these rural areas. Since we don't have natural-gas service, and the price of being supplied by a fuel-oil company in this territory can be high, we have to rely on electricity for heating, cooking, everything. It goes out, we have fireplaces, but that's not ideal. And Stan Quartermass was a man who never wanted to be without the comforts of civilization." "But this is a monster," Jack said, patting the dustsheathed generator. "Supplies the main house, caretaker's house, and the stables. Doesn't just provide backup power to run a few lights, either. As long as you've got gasoline, you can go on living with all the amenities, just as if you were still on public power." "Might be fun to rough it a couple of days now and then," Jack suggested.
The attorney frowned and shook his head. "Not when the real temperature is below zero and the windchill factor pushes it down to minus thirty or forty degrees." "Ouch," Heather said. She hugged herself at the very thought of such arctic cold. "I'd call that more than roughing it," " Youngblood Jack agreed. "I'd call it suicide." I'll make sure we have a good gasoline supply. The thermostat had been set low in the two main floors of the untenanted house. A stubborn chill pooled everywhere, like the icy remnant of a flood tide. It surrendered gradually to the electric heat, which Paul switched on after they ascended from the basement and inspected half the ground floor. In spite of her insulated ski jacket, Heather shivered through the entire tour. The house had both character and every convenience, and would be even easier to settle into than they'd expected. Eduardo Fernandez's personal effects and clothing had not been disposed of, so they would need to empty closets to make room for their own things. In the four months since the old man's sudden death, the place had been closed and unattended, a thin layer of dust coated every surface. However, Eduardo had led a neat and orderly life, there was no great mess with which to deal..In the final bedroom on the second floor, at the back of the house, coppery late-afternoon sunlight slanted through west-facing windows, and the air glowed like that in front of an open furnace door. It was light without heat, and still Heather shivered. Toby said, "This is great, this is terrific!" The room was more than twice the size of the one in which the boy had slept in Los Angeles, but Heather knew he was less excited by the dimensions than by the almost whimsical architecture, which would have sparked the imagination of any child. The twelve-foot-high ceiling was composed of four groin vaults, and the shadows that lay across those concave surfaces were complex and intriguing. "Neat," Toby said, staring up at the ceiling. "Like hanging under a parachute." In the wall to the left of the hall door was a four-footdeep, six-foot-long, arched niche into which a custom-built bed had been fitted. Behind the headboard on the left and in the back wall of the niche were recessed bookshelves and deep cabinets for the storage of model spaceships, action figures, games, and the other possessions that a young boy cherished. Curtains were drawn back from both sides of the niche and, when closed, could seal it off like a berth on an old-fashioned railroad sleeping car. "Can this be my room, can it, please?" Toby asked. "Looks to me like it was made for you," Jack said. "Great!" Opening one of the two other doors in the room, Paul said, "This walk-in closet is so deep you could almost say it's a room itself." The last door revealed the head of an uncarpeted staircase as tightly curved as that in a lighthouse. The wooden treads squeaked as the four of them descended. Heather instantly disliked the stairs. Perhaps she was somewhat claustrophobic in that cramped and windowless space, following Paul Youngblood and Toby, with Jack close behind. Perhaps the inadequate lighting--two widely spaced, bare bulbs in the ceiling--made her uneasy. A mustiness and a vague underlying odor of decay didn't add any charm. Neither did spiderwebs hung with dead moths and beetles. Whatever the reason, her heart began to pound as if they were climbing rather than descending. She was overcome by the bizarre fear-- similar to the nameless dread in a nightmare--that something hostile and infinitely strange was waiting for them below. The last step brought them into a windowless vestibule, where Paul had to use a key to unlock the first of two lower doors. "Kitchen," he said. Nothing fearful waited beyond, merely the room he had indicated. "We'll go this way," he said, turning to the second door, which didn't require a key from the inside. When the thumb-turn on the dead-bolt lock proved stiff from lack of use, the few seconds of delay were almost more than Heather could tolerate. Now she was convinced that something was coming down the steps behind them, the murderous phantom of a bad dream. She wanted out of that narrow place immediately, desperately..The door creaked open. They followed Paul through the second exit onto the back porch. They were twelve feet to the left of the house's main rear entrance, which led into the kitchen. Heather took several deep breaths, purging her lungs of the contaminated air from the stairwell. Her fear swiftly abated and her racing heart regained a normal pace. She looked back into the vestibule where the steps curved upward out of sight. Of course no denizen of a nightmare appeared, and her moment of panic seemed more foolish and inexplicable by the second. Jack, unaware of Heather's inner turmoil, put one hand on Toby's head and said, "Well, if that's going to be your room, I don't want to catch you sneaking girls up the back steps." "Girls?" Toby was astonished. "Yuck. Why would l want to have anything to do with girls?" "I suspect you figure that one out all on your own, given a little time," the attorney said, amused. "And too fast," Jack said. "Five years from now, we'll have to fill those stairs with concrete, seal them off forever." Heather found the will to turn her back on the door as the attorney closed it. She was baffled by the episode, and relieved that no one had been aware of her odd reaction. Los Angeles jitters. She hadn't shed the city. She was in rural Montana, where there probably hadn't been a murder in a decade, where most people left doors unlocked day and night-- but psychologically, she remained in the shadow of the Big Orange, living conscious anticipation of sudden, senseless violence. Just a delayed case of Los Angeles jitters. "Better show you the rest of the property ," Paul said." "We don't have much more than half an hour of day- light left." They followed him down the porch steps and up the sloping rear lawn toward a smaller, stone house tucked among the evergreens at the edge of the forest. Heather recognized it from the photographs Paul had sent: the caretaker's residence. As twilight stealthily approached, the sky far to the - east was a deep sapphire. It faded to a lighter blue in the west, where the sun hastened toward the mountains. The temperature had slipped out of the fifties. Heather walked with her hands jammed in jacket pockets and her shoulders hunched. She was pleased to see that Jack took the hill with vigor, not limping at all. Occasionally his left leg ached and he favored it, but not today. She found it hard to believe that only eight months ago, their lives seemed to have been changed for the worse, forever. No wonder she was still jumpy. Such a terrible eight months. But everything was fine now..Really fine. The rear lawn hadn't been maintained after Eduardo's death. The grass had grown six or eight inches before the aridity of late summer and the chill of early autumn had turned it brown and pinched off its growth until spring. It crackled faintly under their feet. "Ed and Margaret moved out of the caretaker's house when they inherited the ranch eight years ago," Paul said as they drew near the stone bungalow. "Sold the contents, nailed plywood over the windows. Don't think anyone's been in there since. Unless you plan to have a caretaker yourself, you probably won't have a use for it, either. But you ought to take a look just the same." Pine trees crowded three sides of the smaller house. The forest was so primeval that darkness dwelt in much of it even before the sun had set. The bristling green of heavy boughs, enfolded with purple-black shadows, was a lovely sight--but those wooded realms had an air of mystery that Heather found disturbing, even a little menacing. For the first time she wondered what animals might from time to time venture out of those wilds into the yard. Wolves? Bears? Mountain lions? Was Toby safe here? Oh, for God's sake, Heather She was thinking like a city dweller, always wary of danger, perceiving threats everywhere. In fact, wild animals avoided people and ran if approached. What do you expect? she asked herself sarcastically. That you'll be barricaded in the house while gangs of bears hammer on the doors and packs of snarling wolves throw themselves through windows like something out of a bad TV movie about ecological disaster? Instead of a porch, the caretaker's house had a large flagstone-paved area in front of the entrance. They stood there while Paul found the right key on the ring he carried. The north-east-south panorama from the perimeter of the high woods was stunning, better even than from the main house. Like a landscape in a Maxfield Parrish painting, the descending fields and forests receded into a distant violet haze under a darkly luminous sapphire sky. The fading afternoon was windless, and the silence was so deep she might have thought she'd gone deaf-- except for the clinking of the attorney's keys. Af
ter a life in the city, such quiet was eerie. The door opened with much cracking and scraping, as if an ancient seal had been broken. Paul stepped across the threshold, into the dark living room, and flicked the light switch. Heather heard it click several times, but the lights didn't come on. Stepping outside again, Paul said, "Figures. Ed must've shut off all the power at the breaker box. I know where it is. You wait here, I'll be right back." They stood at the front door, staring at the gloom beyond the threshold, while the attorney disappeared around the corner of the house. His departure made Heather apprehensive, though she wasn't sure why. Perhaps because he had gone alone. "When I get a dog, can he sleep in my room?" Toby asked. "Sure," Jack.said, "but not on the bed." "Not on the bed? Then where would he sleep?" "Dogs usually make do with the floor." "That's not fair." "You'll never hear a dog complain." "But why not on the bed?" "Fleas." "I'll take good care of him. He won't have fleas." "Dog hairs in the sheets." "That won't be a problem, Dad." "What--you're going to shave him, have a bald dog?" "I'll just brush him every day." Listening to her husband and son, Heather watched the corner of the house, increasingly certain that Paul Youngblood was never going to return. Something terrible had happened to him. Something-- He reappeared. "All the breakers were off. We should be in business now." What's wrong with me? Heather wondered. Got to shake this damn L.A. attitude. Standing inside the front door, Paul flipped the wall switch repeatedly, without success. The dimly visible ceiling fixture in the empty living room remained dark. The carriage lamp outside, next to the door, didn't come on, either. "Maybe he had electric service discontinued," Jack suggested. The attorney shook his head. "Don't see how that could be. This is on the same line as the main house and the stable." "Bulbs might be dead, sockets corroded after all this me." '- Pushing his cowboy hat back on his head, scratching his brow, frowning, Paul said, "Not like Ed to let things deteriorate. I'd expect him to do routine maintenance, keep the place in good working order in case the next owner had a need for it. That's just how he was. Good man, Ed. Not much of a socializer, but a good man." "Well," Heather said, "we can investigate the problem in a couple of days, once we're settled down at the main place." Paul retreated from the house, pulled the door shut, and locked it. "You might want to have an electrician out to check the wiring." Instead of returning the way they had come, they angled across the sloping yard toward the stable, which stood on more level land to the south of the main house. Toby ran ahead, arms out at his sides, making a brrrrrrrrrrr noise with his lips, pretending to be an airplane..Heather glanced back at the caretaker's bungalow a couple of times, and at the woods on both sides of it. She had a peculiar tingly feeling on the back of her neck. "Pretty cold for the beginning of November," Jack said. The attorney laughed. "This isn't southern California, I'm afraid. Actually, it's been a mild day. Temperature's probably going to drop well below freezing tonight." "You get much snow up here?" "Does hell get many sinners?" "When can we expect the first snow--before Christmas?" "Way before Christmas, Jack. If we had a big storm tomorrow, nobody'd think it was an early season." "That's why we got the Explorer," Heather said. "Four-wheel drive. That should get us around all winter, shouldn't it?" "Mostly, yeah," Paul said, pulling down on the brim of his hat, which he had pushed up earlier to scratch his forehead. Toby had reached the stable. Short legs pumping, he vanished around the side before Heather could call out to him to wait. Paul said, "But every winter there's one or two times where you're going to be snowbound a day or three, drifts half over the house sometimes." "Snowbound? Half over the house?" Jack said, sounding a little like a kid himself. "Really?" "Get one of those blizzards coming down out of the Rockies, it can drop two or three feet of snow in twenty-four hours. Winds like to peel your skin off. County crews can't keep the roads open all at once. You have chains for that Explorer?" "A couple of sets," Jack said. Heather walked faster toward the stable, hoping the men would pick up their pace to accompany her, which they did. Toby was still out of sight. "What you should also get," Paul told them, "soon as you can, is a good plow for the front of it. Even if county crews get the roads open, you have half a mile of private lane to take care of." If the boy was just "flying" around the stable, with his arms spread like wings, he should have reappeared -by now. "Lex Parker's garage," Paul continued, "in town, can fit your truck with the armatures, attach the plow, hydraulic arms to raise and lower it, a real fine rig. Just.- leave it on all winter, remove it in the spring, and you'll be ready for however much butt kicking Mother Nature has in store for us." No sign of Toby. Heather's heart was pounding again. The sun was about to set. If Toby ... if he got lost or ... or something ... they would have a harder time finding him at night. She restrained herself from breaking into a run. "Now, last winter," Paul continued smoothly, unaware of her trepidation, "was on the dry side, which probably means we're going to take a shellacking this year." As they reached the stable and as Heather was about to cry out for Toby, he reappeared. He was no longer playing airplane. He sprinted to her side through the unmown grass, grinning and excited. "Mom, this place is neat, really neat. Maybe I can really have a pony, huh?" "Maybe," Heather said, swallowing hard before she could get the word out. "Don't go running off like that, okay?" "Why not?" "Just don't." "Sure, okay," Toby said. He was a good boy. She glanced back toward the caretaker's house and the wilderness beyond. Perched on the jagged peaks of the mountains, the sun seemed to quiver like a raw egg yolk just before dissolving around the tines of a prodding fork. The highest pinnacles of rock were gray and black and pink in the fiery light of day's end. Miles of serried forests shelved down to the fieldstone bungalow. All was still and peaceful. The stable was a single-story fieldstone building with a slate roof. The long side walls had no exterior stall doors, only small windows high under the eaves. There was a white barn door on the end, which rolled open easily when Paul tried it, and the electric lights came on with the first flip of a switch. "As you can see," the attorney said as he led them inside, "it was every inch a gentleman's ranch, not a spread that had to show a profit in any way." Beyond the concrete threshold, which was flush with the ground, the stable floor was composed of soft, tamped earth, as pale as sand. Five empty stalls with half-doors stood to each side of the wide center promenade, more spacious than ordinary barn stalls. On the twelve-inch wooden posts between stalls were castbronze sconces that threw amber light toward both the ceiling and the floor, they were needed because the high-set windows were too small--each about eight inches high by eighteen long--to admit much sunlight even at high noon. "Stan Quartermass kept this place heated in winter, cooled in the summer," Paul Youngblood said. He pointed to vent grilles set in the suspended tongue-and-groove ceiling. "Seldom smelled like a stable, either, because he vented it continuously, pumped fresh air in. And all the ductwork is heavily insulated, so the sound of the fans is too low to.bother horses." On the left, beyond the final stall, was a large tackroom, where saddles, bridles, and other equipment had been kept. It was empty except for a built-in sink as - long and deep as a trough. To the right, opposite the tackroom, were top-access bins where oats, apples, and other feed had been stored, but they were now all empty as well. On the wall near the bins, several tools were racked business end up: a pitchfork, two shovels, and a rake. "Smoke alarm," Paul said, pointing to a device attached to the header above the big door that was opposite the one by which they had entered. "Wired into the electrical system. You can't make the mistake of letting batteries go dead. It sounds in the house, so Stan wouldn't have to worry about not hearing it." "The guy sure loved his horses," Jack said. "Oh, he sure did, and he had more Hollywood money than he knew what to do with. After Stan died, Ed took special pains to be sure the people who bought all the animals would treat them well. Stan was a nice man. Seemed only right." the lights. "Name's Lester Steer, and he owns the Main itreet Diner in town." "He's a man!" "Well, of course he's a man," Paul said, rolling the door shut. "Never said he wasn't." The attorney winked at Heather, and she realized how much she had come to like him in such a short
time. "Oh, you're tricky," Toby told Paul. "Dad, he's tricky" "Not me," Paul said. "I only told you the truth, Scout. You tricked yourself." -"Paul is an attorney, son," Jack said. "You've always of to be careful of attorneys, or you'll end up with no ponies or cows." Paul laughed. "Listen to your dad. He's wise. Very wise." Only an orange rind of sun remained in view, and in seconds, the irregular blade of mountain peaks peeled it away. Shadows spread toward one another. The somber twilight, all deep blues and funereal purples, hinted at "I could have ten ponies," Toby said. "Wrong," Heather said. "Whatever business we decide to get into, it won't be a manure factory." "Well, I just mean, there's room," the boy said. "A dog, ten ponies," Jack said. "You're turning into a real farm boy. What's next? Chickens?"."A cow," Toby said. "I been thinking what you said about cows, and you talked me into it." "Wiseass," Jack said, taking a playful swipe at the boy. Dodging successfully, laughing, Toby said, "Like father, like son. Mr. Youngblood, did you know my dad says cows can do any tricks dogs can do--roll over and play dead and all that?" "Well," the attorney replied, leading them back through the stable toward the door by which they'd entered, "I know a steer that can walk on his hind feet." "Really?" "More than that. He can do math as well as you or me." The claim was made with such calm conviction that the boy looked up wide-eyed at Youngblood. "You mean, like you ask him a problem, he can pound out the answer with his hoof?" "He could do that, sure. Or just tell you the answer." "Huh?" "This steer, he can talk." "No way," Toby said, following Jack and Heather outside. "Sure. He can talk, dance, drive a car, and he goes to church every Sunday," Paul said, switching off the stae unrelenting darkness of night in that largely unplowed vastness. Looking directly upslope from the stable, toward a knoll at the terminus of the western woods, Paul said, "No point showing you the cemetery in this poor light. Not that much to see even at noon." "Cemetery?" Jack said, frowning. "You've got a state-certified private cemetery on your grounds," the attorney said. "Twelve plots, though only four have been used." Staring toward the knoll, where she could vaguely see part of what might have been a low stone wall and a pair of gateposts in the plum-dark light, Heather said, "Who's buried there?" "Stan Quartermass, Ed Fernandez, Margaret, and Tommy." "Tommy, my old partner, he's buried up there?" Jack asked. "Private cemetery," Heather said. She told herself that the only reason she shivered was because the air was growing colder by the minute. "That's a little macabre." "Not so strange around here," Paul assured her. "A lot of these ranches, the same family has been on the land for generations. It's not only their home, it's their hometown, the only place they love. Eagle's Roost is JUST somewhere to shop. When it comes to being put to eternal rest, they want to be part of the land they've given their lives to."."Wow," Toby said. "How cool can you get? We live in a graveyard." "Hardly that," Paul said. "My grandfolks and my parents are buried over to our place, and there's really nothing creepy about it. Comforting. Gives you a sense of hentage, continuity. Carolyn and I figure to be put to rest there too, though I can't say what our kids want to do, now they're off in medical school and law school making new lives that don't have anything to do with the ranch." "Darn it, we just missed Halloween," Toby said, more to himself than to them. He stared toward the cemetery, caught up in a personal fantasy that no doubt involved the challenge of walking through a graveyard on All Hallows' Eve. They stood quietly for a moment. The dusk was heavy, silent, still. Uphill, the cemetery seemed to cast off the fading light and pull the night down like a shroud, covering it-self with darkness faster than any of the land around it. Heather glanced at Jack to see if he showed any sign of being troubled by having Tommy Fernandez's remains buried nearby. Tommy had died at his side, after 11, eleven months before Luther Bryson had been shot. With Tommy's grave so close, Jack couldn't help but recall, perhaps too vividly, violent events best condemmed forever to the deeper vaults of memory. As if sensing her concern, Jack smiled. "Makes me feel better to know Tommy found rest in a place as beautiful as this." As they walked back to the house, the attorney invited them to dinner and to stay overnight with him and his wife. "One, you arrived too late today to get the place cleaned and livable. Two, you don't have any fresh food here, only what might be in the freezer. And three, you don't want to have to cook after putting in a long day on the road. Why not relax this evening, get a start on it first thing in the morning, when you're rested?" Heather was grateful for the invitation, not merely for the reasons Paul had enumerated but because she remained uneasy about the house and the isolation in which it stood. She had decided that her jumpiness was nothing other than a city person's initial response to more wide open spaces than she'd ever seen or contemplated before. A mild phobic reaction. Temporary agoraphobia. It would pass. She simply needed a day or two--perhaps only a few hours--to acclimate herself to this new landscape and way of life. An evening with Paul Youngblood and his wife might be just the right medicine. After setting the thermostats throughout the house, even in the basement, to be sure it would be warm in the morning, they locked up, got in the Explorer, and followed Paul's Bronco to the county road. He turned east toward town, and so did they. The brief twilight had vanished under the falling wall of night. The moon had not yet risen. The darkness on all sides was so deep that it seemed as if it could never be banished again even by the ascension of the sun. The Youngblood ranch was named after the predominant tree.within its boundaries. Spotlights at each end of the overhead entrance sign were directed inward to reveal green letters on a white background: PONDEROSA PINES. Under those two words, in small letters: Paul and Carolyn Youngblood. The attorney's spread, a working ranch, was considerably larger than their own. On both sides of the entrance lane, which was even longer than the one at Quartermass Ranch, lay extensive complexes of whitetrimmed red stables, riding rings, exercise yards, and fenced pastures. The buildings were illuminated by the pearly glow of low-voltage night-lights. White fences divided the rising meadows: dimly phosphorescent geometric patterns that dwindled into the darkness, like lines of inscrutable hieroglyphics on tomb walls. The main house, in front of which they parked, was a large, low ranch-style building of river rock and darkly stained pine. It seemed to be an almost organic extension of the land. As he walked with them to the house, Paul answered Jack's question about the business of Ponderosa Pines. "We have two basic enterprises, actually. We raise and race quarter horses, which is a popular sport throughout the West, from New Mexico to the Canadian border. Then we also breed and sell several types of show horses that never go out of style, mostly Arabians. We have one of the finest Arabian bloodlines in the country, specimens so perfect and pretty they can break your heart--or make you pull out your wallet if you're obsessed with the breed ." "No cows?" Toby said as they reached the foot of the steps that led up to the long, deep veranda at the front of the house. "Sorry, Scout, no cows," the attorney said. "Lots of ranches round here have cattle, but not us. However, we do have our share of cowboys." He pointed to a cluster of lighted bungalows approximately a hundred twenty yards to the east of the house. "Eighteen wranglers currently live here on the ranch, with their wives if they're married. A little town of our own, sort of." "Cowboys," Toby said in the awed tone of voice with which he had spoken of the private graveyard and of the prospect of having a pony. Montana was proving to be as exotic to him as any distant planet in the comic books and science fiction movies he liked. "Real cowboys." Carolyn Youngblood greeted them at the door and warmly welcomed them. To be the mother of Paul's children, she must have been his age, fifty, but she looked and acted younger. She wore tight jeans and a decoratively stitched red-and-white Western shirt, revealing the lean, limber figure of an athletic thirty-year-old. Her snowy hair--cut short in an easy-care gamine style--wasn't brittle, as white hair often was, but thick and soft and lustrous. Her face was far less lined than Paul's, and her skin was silk-smooth. Heather decided that if this was what life in the ranch country of Montana could do for a woman, she could overcome any aversion to the unnervingly large open spaces, to the immensity of the night, to
the.spookiness of the woods, and even to the novel experience of having four corpses interred in a far corner of her backyard. After dinner, when Jack and Paul were alone for a few minutes in the study, each of them with a glass of port, looking at the many framed photographs of prize-winning horses that nearly covered one of the knottypine walls, the attorney suddenly changed the subject from equestrian bloodlines and quarter-horse champions to Quatermass Ranch. "I'm sure you folks are going to be happy there, Jack." "I think so too." "It's a great place for a boy like Toby to grow up." "A dog, a pony--it's like a dream come true for him." "Beautiful land." "So peaceful compared to L.A. Hell, there's no comparison." Paul opened his mouth to say something, hesitated, and looked instead at the horse photo with which he'd inoken off his colorful account of Ponderosa Pines' racng triumphs. When the attorney did speak, Jack had the feeling that what he said was not what he had been out to say before the hesitation. "And though we aren't spitting-distance neighbors, Jack, I hope we'll be close in other ways, get to know each other well." "I'd like that." The attorney hesitated again, sipping from his glass of port to cover his indecision. After tasting his own port, Jack said, "Something wrong, Paul?" "No, not wrong ... just ... What makes you say that?" "I was a cop for a long time. I have a sort of sixth sense about people holding back something." "Guess you do. You'll probably be a good businessman when you decide what it is you want to get into." "So what's up?" Sighing, Paul sat on a corner of his large desk. "Didn't even know if I should mention this, cause I don't want you to be concerned about it, don't think there's really any reason to be." "Yes?" "It was a heart attack killed Ed Fernandez, like I told you. Massive heart attack took him down as sudden and complete as a bullet in the head. Coroner couldn't find anything else, only the heart." "Coroner? Are you saying an autopsy was performed?" "Yeah, sure was," Paul said, and sipped his port. Jack was certain that in Montana, as in California, autopsies were not performed every.time someone died especially not when the decedent was a man of Eduardo Fernandez's age and all but certain to have expired of natural causes. The old man would have been cut open only under special circumstances, primarily if visible trauma indicated the possibility of death at the hands of another. "But you said the coroner couldn't find anything but a damaged heart, no wounds." Staring at the glimmering surface of the port in his glass, the attorney said, "Ed's body was found across the tbreshold between his kitchen and the back porch, lying on his right side, blocking the door open. He was clutching a shotgun with both hands." "Ah. Could be suspicious enough circumstances to justify an autopsy. Or it could be he was just going out to do some hunting." "Wasn't hunting season." "You telling me a little poaching is unheard of in these parts, especially when a man's hunting out of season on his own land?" The attorney shook his head. "Not at all. But Ed wasn't a hunter. Never had been." "You sure?" "Yeah. Stan Quartermass was the hunter, and Ed just -inherited the guns. And another odd thing--wasn't just a full magazine in that shotgun. He'd also pumped an extra round into the breach. No hunter with half a brain would traipse around with a shell ready to go. He trips nd falls, he might blow off his own head." "Doesn't make sense to carry it in the house that way, either." "Unless," Paul said, "there was some immediate threat." "You mean, like an intruder or prowler." "Maybe. Though that's rarer than steak tartare in these parts." "Any signs of burglary, house ransacked?" "No. Nothing at all like that." "Who found the body?" "Travis Potter, veterinarian from Eagle's Roost. Which brings up another oddity. June tenth, more than three weeks before he died, Ed took some dead raccoons to Travis, asked him to examine them." The attorney told Jack as much about the raccoons as Eduardo had told Potter, then explained Potter's findings. "Brain swelling?" Jack asked uneasily. "But no sign of infection, no.disease," Paul reassured him. "Travis asked Ed to keep a lookout for other animals acting peculiar. Then . . . when they talked again, on June seventeenth, he had the feeling Ed had seen something more but was holding out on him." "Why would he hold out on Potter? Fernandez was the one who got Potter involved in the first place." The attorney shrugged. "Anyway, on the morning of July sixth, Travis was still curious, so he went out to Quartermass Ranch to talk to Ed--and found his body instead. Coroner says Ed had been dead no less than twenty-four hours, probably no more than thirty-six." Jack paced along the wall of horse photographs and along another wall of bookshelves and then back again. slowly turning the glass of port around in his hand. "So you think--what? Fernandez saw some animal behaving really strangely, doing something that spooked him enough to go load up the shotgun?" "Maybe." "Could he have been going outside to shoot this animal because it was acting rabid or crazy in some other way?" "That's occurred to us, yes. And maybe he was so worked up, so excited, that's what brought on the heart attack." At the study window, Jack stared at the lights of the cowboys' bungalows, which were unable to press back the densely clotted night. He finished the port. "I assume, from what you've said, Fernandez wasn't a particularly excitable man, not an hysteric." "The opposite. Ed was about as excitable as a tree stump." Turning away from the window, Jack said, "So then what could he have seen that would've gotten his heart pumping so hard? How bizarre would an animal have had to be acting--how much of a threat would it have to be seemed--before Fernandez would have worked himself up to a heart attack?" "There you put your finger on it," the attorney said, finishing his own port. "Just doesn't make sense." "Seems like we have a mystery here." "Fortunate that you were a detective." "Not me. I was a patrol officer." "Well, now you've been promoted by circumstances." Paul got up from the corner of his desk. "Listen, I'm sure there's nothing to be worried about. We know those raccoons weren't diseased..And there's probably a reasonable explanation for what Ed was going to do with that gun. This is peaceful country. Damned if I can see what kind of danger could be out there." "I suspect you're right," Jack agreed. "I brought it up only because . . well, it seemed odd. I thought if you did see something peculiar, you ought to know not just to dismiss it. Call Travis. Or me." Jack put his empty glass on the desk beside Paul's. Y'll do that. Meanwhile . . . I'd appreciate if you didn't - mention this to Heather. We've had a real bad year down there in L.A. This is a new start for us in a lot of ways, and I don't want a shadow on it. We're a little shaky. We need this to work, need to stay positive." That's why I chose this moment to tell you." "Thanks, Paul." "And don't you worry about it." "I won't." ""Cause I'm sure there's nothing to it. Just one of life's many little mysteries. People new to this country sometimes get the heebie jeebies cause of all the ope space, the wilderness. I don't mean to get you on edge "Don't worry," Jack assured him. "After you've played bullet billiards with some of the crazies loose in L A there's nothing any raccoon can do to spoil your CHAPTER FIFTEEN. During their first four days at Quartermass Ranch-- Tuesday through Friday-Heather, Jack, and Toby cleaned the house from top to bottom. They wiped down walls and woodwork, polished furniture, vacuumed upholstery and carpets, washed all the dishes and utensils, put new shelf paper in the kitchen cabinets, disposed of Eduardo's clothes through a church in town that distributed to the needy, and in general made the place their own. They didn't intend to register Toby for school until the following week, giving him time to adjust to their new life. He was thrilled to be free while other boys his age were trapped in third-grade classrooms. On Wednesday the moving company arrived with the small shipment from Los Angeles: the rest of their clothes, their books, Heather's computers and rel ated equipment, Toby's toys and games, and the other items they hadn't been willing to give away or sell. The presence of a greater number of their familiar possessions made the new house seem more like home. Although the days became chillier and more overcast as the week waned, Heather's mood remained bright and cheerful. She was not troubled by anxiety attacks like the one she'd experienced when Paul Youngblood had first shown them around the property Monday evening, day by day that paranoid episode faded from her thoughts..She swept away spiderwebs and desiccated insect prey in the back stairs, washed the spiraling treads with pungent ammonia water, and
rid that space of mustiness and the faint odor of decay. No uncanny feelings overcame her, and it was hard to believe that she'd felt a superstitious dread of the stairs when she'd first descended them behind Paul and Toby. From a few second-floor windows, she could see the graveyard on the knoll. It didn't strike her as macabre any longer, because of what Paul had said about ranchers' attachment to the land that had sustained their families for generations. In the dysfunctional family in which she'd been raised, and in Los Angeles, there had been so little tradition and such a weak sense of belonging anywhere or to anything that these ranchers' love of home seemed touching--even spiritually uplifting-- rather than morbid or strange. Heather cleaned out the refrigerator too, and they filled it with healthy foods for quick breakfasts and lunches. The freezer compartment was already half filled with packaged dinners, but she delayed doing an inventory because more important tasks awaited her. Four evenings in a row, too weary from their chores to cook, they drove into Eagle's Roost to eat at the Main Street Diner, owned and operated by the steer that could drive a car and do math and dance. The food was first-rate country cooking. The sixteen-mile journey was insignificant. In southern California, a trip had been measured not by distance but by the length of time needed to complete it, and even a quick jaunt to the market, in city traffic, had required half an hour. A sixteen-mile drive from one point in L.A. to another could take an hour, two hours, or eternity, depending on traffic and the violent tendencies of other motorists. Who knew? However, they could routinely drive to Eagle's Roost in twenty or twenty-five minutes, which seemed like nothing. The perpetually uncrowded highways were exhilarating. Friday night, as on every night since they'd arrived in Montana, Heather fell asleep without difficulty. For the first time, however, her sleep was troubled.... in her dream, she was in a cold place blacker than a moonless and overcast night, blacker than a windowless room. She was feeling her way forward, as if she had been stricken blind, curious but at first unafraid. She was actually smiling, because she was convinced that something wonderful awaited her in a warm, welllighted place beyond the darkness. Treasure. Pleasure. Enlightenment, peace, joy, and transcendence waiting for her, if she could find her way. Sweet peace, freedom from fear, freedom forever, enlightenment, joy, pleasure more intense than any she had ever known, waiting, waiting. But she fumbled through the impenetrable darkness, feeling with hands extended in front of her, always moving in the wrong direction, turning this way and that, that way and this. Curiosity became overpowering desire. She wanted whatever lay beyond the wall of night, wanted it as badly as she had ever wanted anything in her life, more than food or.love or wealth or happiness, for it was all those things and more. Find the door, the door and the light beyond, the wonderful door, beautiful light, peace and joy, freedom and pleasure, release from sorrow. transformation, so close, achingly close, reach out, reach. Want became need, compulsion became obsession. She had to have whatever awaited hen -joy, peace, freedom--so she ran into the cloying blackness, heedless of danger, plunged forward, frantic to find the way, the path, the truth, the door, joy forever, no more fear of death, no fear of anything, paradise, sought it with increasing desperation, but ran always away from it instead. Now a voice called to her, strange and wordless, frightening but alluring, trying to show her the way, joy and peace and an end to all sadness. Just accept. Accept. It was reaching out for her, if only she would turn the right way, find it, touch it, embrace it. She stopped running. Abruptly she realized that she didn't have to seek the gift after all, for she was standing in Its presence, in the house of joy, the palace of peace, the kingdom of enlightenment. All that she had to do was let it in, open a door within herself and let it in, let it in, open herself to inconceivable joy, paradise, paradise, paradise, surrender to pleasure and happiness. She wanted it, she really did oh-so-eagerly want it, because life was hard when it didn't have to be But some stubborn part of her resisted the gift, some teful and proud part of her complex self. She sensed frustration of him who wished to give this gift, the iver in the darkness, felt frustration and maybe anger, she said, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. Now the gift--joy, peace, love, pleasure--was thrust on her with tremendous force, brutal and unrelenting ressure, until she felt she would be crushed by it. The darkness around her acquired weight, as if she lay deep in a fathomless sea, though it was far heavier and thicker than water, surrounding her, smothing, crushing. Must submit, useless to resist, let it in, submission was peace, submission was joy, paradise, paradise. Refusal to submit would mean pain beyond anything she could imagine, despair and agony as only hose in hell knew it, so she must submit, open the door within herself, let it in, accept, be at peace. Hammering Dn her soul, ramming and pounding, fierce and irresistible hammering, hammering: Let it in, let it in, in, In. ... IT ... IN. Suddenly she found the secret door within herself, pathway to joy, gate to peace eternal. She seized the knob, twisted, heard the latch click, pulled inward, shaking with anticipation. Through the slowly widening crack: a glimpse of the Giver. Glistening and dark. Writhing and quick. Hiss of triumph. Coldness at the threshold. Slam the door, slam the door, slam the door, slamthedoor-- .. Heather exploded from sleep, cast back the covers, rolled out of bed onto her feet in one fluid and frantic movement. Her booming heart kept knocking the breath out of her as she tried to inhale. A dream..Only a dream. But no dream in her experience had ever been so intense. Maybe the thing beyond the door had followed her out of sleep into the real world. Crazy thought. Couldn't shake it. Wheezing thinly, she fumbled with the nightstand lamp, found the switch. The light revealed no nightmare creatures. Just Jack. Asleep on his stomach, head turned away from her, snoring softly. She managed to draw a breath, though her heart continued to pound. She was damp with sweat and couldn't stop shivering. Jesus. Not wanting to wake Jack, Heather switched off the lamp--and twitched as darkness fell around her. She sat on the edge of the bed, intending to perch there until her heart stopped racing and the shakes passed, then pull a robe over her pajamas and go downstairs to read until morning. According to the luminous green numbers on the digital alarm clock, it was 3:09 A.M but she was not going to be able to get back to sleep. No way. She might be unable to sleep even tomorrow night. She remembered the glistening, writhing, half-seen presence on the threshold and the bitter cold that flowed from it. The touch of it was still within her, a lingering chill. Disgusting. She felt contaminated, dirty inside, where she could never wash the corruption away. Deciding that she needed a hot shower, she got up from the bed. Disgust swiftly ripened into nausea. In the dark bathroom she was racked by dry heaves at left a bitter taste. After turning on the light only enough to find the bottle of mouthwash, she rinsed away the bitterness. In the dark again, she repeatedly bathed her face in handfuls of cold water. She sat on the edge of the tub. She dried her face on a towel. As she waited for calm to return, she tried to figure out why a mere dream could have had such a powerful effect on her, but there was no understanding. In a few minutes, when she'd regained her composure, she quietly returned to the bedroom. Jack was still snoring softly. Her robe was draped over the back of a Queen Anne chair. She picked it up, slipped out of the room, and eased the door shut behind her. In the hall, she pulled on the robe and belted it. Although she'd intended to go downstairs, brew a pot of coffee, and read, she turned instead toward Toby's room at the end of the hall. Try as she might, Heather was unable to extinguish completely the fear from the nightmare, and her simmering anxiety began to focus on her son. Toby's door was ajar, and his room was not entirely - dark Since moving to the ranch, he had chosen to sleep with a night-light again, although he had given up that security a year ago. Heather and Jack were surprised but not particularly concerned by the boy's loss of confidence. They assumed, once he adjusted to his surroundings he would again prefer darkness to the red glow of the low-wattage bulb that was plugged into a wall socket near the floor. Toby was tucked under his covers, only his head exposed on the.pillow. His breathing was so shallow that to hear it, Heather had to bend close to him. Nothin
g in the room was other than it ought to have been, but she hesitated to leave. Mild apprehension continued to tug at her. Finally, as Heather reluctantly retreated to the open hall door, she heard a soft scrape that halted her. She turned to the bed, where Toby had not awakened, had not moved. Even as she glanced at her son, however, she realized that the noise had come from the back stairs. It had been the sly, stealthy scrape of something hard, perhaps a boot heel, dragged across a wooden step-recognizable because of the air space under each stair tread, which lent the sound a distinctive hollow quality. She was instantly afflicted by the same distress that she'd not felt while cleaning the stairs but that had plagued her on Monday when she'd followed Paul Youngblood and Toby down that curving well. The sweaty paranoid conviction that somebody-- something?--was waiting around the next turn. Or descending behind them. An enemy possessed by a singular rage and capable of extreme violence. She stared at the closed door at the head of those stairs. It was painted white, but it reflected the red glow of the night-light and seemed almost to shimmer like a portal of fire. She waited for another sound. Toby sighed in his sleep. Just a sigh. Nothing more. Silence again. Heather supposed she could have been wrong, could have heard an innocent sound from outside--perhaps a night bird settling onto the roof with a rustle of feathers and a scratching of claws against shingles--and could have mistakenly transposed the noise to the stairwell. She was jumpy because of the nightmare. Her perceptions might not be entirely trustworthy. She certainly wanted to believe she had been wrong. Creak-creak. No mistaking it this time. The new sound was quieter than the first, but it definitely came from behind the door at the head of the back stairs. She remembered how some of the wooden treads creaked when she had first descended to the ground floor during the tour on Monday and how they groaned and complained when she had been cleaning them on Wednesday. She wanted to snatch Toby from the bed, take him out of the room, go quickly down the hall to the master bedroom, and wake Jack. However, she had never run from anything in her life. During the crises of the past eight months, she'd developed considerably more inner strength and self-confidence than ever before. Although the skin on the back of her neck tingled as if alive with crawling hairy spiders, she actually blushed at the mental image of herself fleeing like the frail-hearted damsel of a bad gothic-romance novel, spooked out of her wits by nothing more menacing than a strange sound. Instead, she went to the stairwell door. The dead-bolt lock was securely engaged. She put her left ear to the crack between door and.jamb. The faintest draft of cold air seeped through from the far side, but no sound came with it. As she listened, she suspected that the intruder was on the upper landing of the stairwell, inches from her with only the door between them. She could easily imagine him there, a dark and strange figure, his head against the door just as hers was, his ear pressed to the crack, listening for a sound from her. Nonsense. The scraping and creaking had been nothing more than settling noises. Even old houses continued to settle under the unending press of gravity. That damned dream had really spooked her. Toby muttered wordlessly in his sleep. She turned her head to look at him. He didn't move, and after a few seconds his murmuring subsided. Heather backed up one step and considered the door for a moment. She didn't want to endanger Toby, but she was beginning to feel more ridiculous than afraid. Just a door. Just a staircase at the back of the house. Just an ordinary night, a dream, a bad case of jumpy nerves. She put one hand on the knob, the other on the thumb-turn of the dead-bolt lock. The brass hardware was cool under her fingers. She remembered the urgent need that had possessed her in the dream: Let it in, let it in, let it in. That had been a dream. This was reality. People who couldn't tell them apart were housed in rooms with padded walls, tended by nurses with fixed smiles and soft voices. Let it in. She disengaged the lock, turned the knob, hesitated. Let it in. Exasperated with herself, she yanked open the door. She'd forgotten the stairwell lights would be off. That narrow shaft was windowless, no ambient light leached into it from outside. The red radiance in the bedroom was too weak to cross the threshold. She stood face-to-face with perfect darkness, unable to tell if anything loomed on the upper steps or even on the landing immediately before her. Out of the gloom wafted the repulsive odor that she'd eradicated two days before with hard work and ammonia water, not strong but not as faint as before, either: the vile aroma of rotting meat. Maybe she had only dreamed that she'd awakened but was still in the grip of the nightmare. Her heart slammed against her breastbone, her breath caught in her throat, and she groped for the light switch, which was on her side of the door. If it had been on the other side, she might not have had the courage to reach into that coiled blackness to feel for it. She missed it on the first and second tries, dared not look away from the darkness before her, felt blindly where she recalled having seen it, almost shouted at Toby to wake up and run, at last found the switch--thank God-clicked it. Light. The deserted landing. Nothing.there. Of course. What else? Empty steps curving down and out of sight. A stair tread creaked below. Oh, Jesus. She stepped onto the landing. She wasn't wearing slippers. The wood was cool and rough under her bare feet. Another creak, softer than before. Settling noises. Maybe. She moved off the landing, keeping her left hand against the concave curve of the outer wall to steady herself. Each step that she descended brought a new step into view ahead of her. At the first glimpse of anyone, she would turn and run back up the stairs, into Toby's room, throw the door shut, snap the dead bolt in place. The lock couldn't be opened from the stairwell, only from inside the house, so they would be safe. From below came a furtive click, a faint thud--as of a door being pulled shut as quietly as possible. Suddenly she was less disturbed by the prospect of confrontation than by the possibility that the episode would end inconclusively. Needing to know, one way or the other, Heather shook off timidity. She ran down the stairs, making more than enough noise to reveal her presence, along the convex curve of the inner wall, around, around, into the vestibule at the bottom. Deserted. She tried the door to the kitchen. It was locked and required a key to be opened from this side. She had no key. Presumably, an intruder would not have one, either. The other door led to the back porch. On this side, the dead bolt operated with a thumb-turn. It was locked. She disengaged it, pulled open the door, stepped onto the porch. Deserted. And as far as she could see, no one was sprinting away across the backyard. Besides, although an intruder would not have needed a key to exit by that door, he would have needed one to lock it behind him, for it operated only with a key from the outside. Somewhere an owl issued a mournful interrogative. Windless, cold, and humid, the night air seemed not like that of the outdoors but like the dank and ever so slightly fetid atmosphere of a cellar. She was alone. But she didn't feel alone. She felt . . . watched. . "For God's sake, Heth," she said, "what the hell's the matter with you?" She retreated into the vestibule and locked the door. She stared at the gleaming brass thumb-turn, wondering if her imagination had seized on a few perfectly natural noises to conjure a threat that had even less substance than a ghost. The rotten smell lingered. Yes, well, perhaps the ammonia water had not been able to banish the odor for more than a day or two. A rat or another small animal might be dead and decomposing inside the wall. As she turned toward the stairs, she stepped in something. She lifted her left foot and studied the floor. A clod of dry earth about as large as.a plum had partially crumbled under her bare heel. Climbing to the second floor, she noticed dry crumbs of earth scattered on a few of the treads, which she'd failed to notice in her swift descent. The dirt hadn't been there when she finished cleaning the stairwell on Wednesday. She wanted to believe it was proof the intruder existed. More likely, Toby had tracked a little mud in from the backyard. He was usually a considerate kid, and he was neat by nature, but he was, after all, only eight years old. Heather returned to Toby's room, locked the door, and snapped off the stairwell light. Her son was sound asleep. Feeling no less foolish than confused, she went down the front stairs, directly to the kitchen. If the repulsive smell was a sign of the intruder's recen
t presence, and if the slightest trace of that stink hung in the kitchen, it would mean he had a key with which he'd entered from the back stairs. In that case she intended to wake Jack and insist they search the house top to bottom--with loaded guns. The kitchen smelled fresh and clean. No crumbles of dry soil on the floor, either. She was almost disappointed. She was loath to think that she'd imagined everything, but the facts justified no other interpretation. Imagination or not, she couldn't rid herself of the feeling that she was under observation. She closed the blinds over the kitchen windows. Get a grip, Heather thought. You're fifteen years away from the change of life, lady, no excuse for these weird mood swings. She had intended to spend the rest of the night reading, but she was too agitated to concentrate on a book. She needed to keep busy. While she brewed a pot of coffee, she inventoried the contents of the freezer compartment in the side-by-side refrigerator. There were half a dozen frozen din ners, a package of frankfurters, two boxes of Green Giant white corn, one box of green beans, two of carrots, and a package of Oregon blueberries, none of which Eduardo Fernandez had opened and all of which they could use. On a lower shelf, under a box of Eggo waffles and a pound of bacon, she found a Ziploc bag that appeared to contain a legal-size tablet of yellow paper. The plastic was opaque with frost, but she could vaguely see that lines of handwriting filled the first page. She popped the pressure seal on the bag--but then hesitated. Storing the tablet in such a peculiar place was tantamount to hiding it. Fernandez must have considered the contents to be important and extremely personal, and Heather was reluctant to invade his privacy. Though dead and gone, he was the benefactor who had radically changed their lives, he deserved her respect and discretion. She read the first few words on the top page--My name is Eduardo Fernandez-- and thumbed through the tablet, confirming it had been written by Fernandez and was a lengthy document. More than two thirds of the long yellow pages were filled with neat handwriting. Stifling her curiosity, Heather put the tablet on top of the refrigerator, intending to give it to Paul Youngblood the next time she saw him. The attorney was the.closest thing to a friend that Fernandez had known and, in his professional capacity, was privy to all the old man's affairs. If the contents of the tablet were important and private, only Paul had any right to read them. Finished with the inventory of frozen foods, she poured a cup of fresh coffee, sat at the kitchen table, and began to make a list of needed groceries and household supplies. Come morning, they would drive to the supermarket in Eagle's Roost and stock not only the refrigerator but the half-empty shelves of the pantry. She wanted to be well prepared if they were cut off by deep snow for any length of time during the winter. She paused in her listmaking to scribble a note, reminding Jack to schedule an appointment next week with Parker's Garage for the installation of a plow on the front of the Explorer. Initially, as she sipped her coffee and composed her list, she was alert for any peculiar sound. However, the task before her was so mundane that it was calming, after a while, she could not sustain a sense of the uncanny. In his sleep, Toby moaned softly. He said, "Go away ... go ... go away ..." After falling silent for a while, he pushed back the covers and got out of bed. In the ruddy glow of the night-light, his pale-yellow pajamas appeared to be streaked with blood. He stood beside the bed, swaying as if keeping time to music that only he could hear. "No," he whispered, not with alarm but in a flat voice devoid of emotion. "No . .. no .. . no . . ." Lapsing into silence again, he walked to the window and gazed into the night. At the top of the yard, nestled among the pines at the edge of the forest, the caretaker's house was no longer dark and deserted. Strange light, as purely blue as a gas flame, shot into the night from cracks around the edges of the plywood rectangles that covered the windows, from under the front door, and even from the top of the replace chimney. "Ah," Toby said. The light was not of constant intensity but sometimes flickered, sometimes throbbed. Periodically, even the narrowest of the escaping beams were so bright that staring at them was painful, although occasionally they grew so dim they seemed about to be extinguished. Even at its brightest, it was a cold light, giving no impression whatsoever of heat. Toby watched for a long time. Eventually the light faded. The caretaker's house became dark once more. The boy returned to the bed. The night passed. CHAPTER SIXTEEN. Saturday morning began with sunshine. A cold breeze swept out of the northwest, and periodic flocks of dark birds wheeled across the sky from the forested Rockies toward the descending land in the east, as if fleeing a predator. The radio weatherman on a station in Butte--to which Heather and Jack listened as they showered and dressed--predicted.snow by nightfall. This was, he said, one of the earliest storms in years, and the total accumulation might reach ten inches. Judging by the tone of the report, a ten-inch snowfall was not regarded as a blizzard in these northern climes. There was no talk of anticipated road closures, no references to rural areas that might be snowbound. A second storm was rolling toward them in the wake of the first, though expected to arrive early Monday, it was apparently a weaker front than the one that would hit by evening. Sitting on the edge of the bed, bending forward to tie the laces of her Nikes, Heather said, "Hey, we've gotta get a couple of sleds." Jack was at his open closet, removing a red-and brown-checkered flannel shirt from a hanger. "You sound like a little kid." "Well, it is my first snow." "That's right. I forgot." In Los Angeles in the winter, when the smog cleared enough to expose them, white-capped mountains served s a distant backdrop to the city, and that was the closest she had ever gotten to snow. She wasn't a skier. She'd never been to Arrowhead or Big Bear except in the summer, and she was as excited as a kid about the oncoming storm. Finishing with her shoelaces, she said, "We've got to make an appointment with Parker's Garage to get that plow on the Explorer before the real winter gets here." "Already did," Jack said. "Ten o'clock Thursday morning." As he buttoned his shirt, he moved to the bedroom window to look out at the eastern woods and southern lowlands. "This view keeps hypnotizing me. I'm doing something, very busy, then I look up, catch a glimpse of it through a window, from the porch, and I just stand and stare." Heather moved behind him, put her arms around him, and looked past him at the striking panorama of woods and fields and wide blue sky. "Is it going to be good?" she asked after a while. "It's going to be great. This is where we belong. Don't you feel that way?" -- "Yes," she said, with only the briefest hesitation. In daylight, the events of the previous night seemed immeasurably less threatening and more surely the work of an overactive imagination. She had seen nothing, after all, and didn't even know quite what she had expected to see. Lingering city jitters complicated by a nightmare. Nothing more. "This is where we belong." He turned, embraced her, and they kissed. She moved her hands in lazy circles on his back, gently massaging his muscles, which his exercise program had toned and rebuilt. He felt so good. Exhausted from traveling and from settling in, they had not made.love since the night before they'd left Los Angeles. As soon as they made the house their own in that way, it would be theirs in every way, and her peculiar uneasiness would probably disappear. He slid his strong hands down her sides to her hips. He pulled her against him. Punctuating his whispered words with soft kisses to her throat, cheeks, eyes, and the corners of her mouth, he said, "How about tonight ... when the snow's falling ... after we've had . . . a glass of wine or two . . . by the fire . .. romantic music ... on the radio ... when we're feeling relaxed . .