of the hand that Nella held out to him. It was clammy, cold, and
trembling.
"I'm giving her a tranquilizer," Worthy said.
"She needs to relax, even sleep if she can."
"I don't want to sleep," Nella said.
"I can't sleep. Not after . . . not after this . . . not ever
again after this."
"Easy," Loman said, gently rubbing her hand. He sat on the edge of the
bed.
"Just let Dr. Worthy take care of you. This is for the best, Nella."
For half his life, Loman had loved this woman, his best friend's wife,
though he had never acted upon his feelings. He had always told himself
that it was a strictly platonic attraction. Looking at her now,
however, he knew passion had been a part of it.
The disturbing thing was . . . well, though he knew what he had felt
for her all these years, though he remembered it, he could not feel it
any longer. His love, his passion, his pleasant yet melancholy longing
had faded as had most of his other emotional responses; he was still
aware of his previous feelings for her, but they were like another
aspect of him that had split off and drifted away like a ghost departing
a corpse.
Worthy set the filled syringe on the nightstand. He unbuttoned and
pushed up the loose sleeve on Nelia's blouse, then tied a length of
rubber tubing around her arm, tight enough to make a vein more evident.
As the physician swabbed Nella's arm with an alcohol-soaked cottonball,
she said, "Loman, what are we going to do?"
"Everything will be fine," he said, stroking her hand.
"No. How can you say that? Eddie's dead. He was so sweet, so small
and sweet, and now he's gone. Nothing will be fine again."
"Very soon you'll feel better," Loman assured her.
"Before you know it the hurt will be gone. It won't matter as much as
it does now. I promise it won't."
She blinked and stared at him as if he were talking nonsense, but then
she did not know what was about to happen to her. Worthy slipped the
needle into her arm.
She twitched.
The golden fluid flowed out of the syringe, into her bloodstream.
She closed her eyes and began to cry softly again, not at the pain of
the needle but at the loss of her son.
Maybe it is better not to care so much, not to love so much, Loman
thought.
The syringe was empty.
Worthy withdrew the needle from her vein.
Again Loman met the doctor's gaze.
Nella shuddered.
The Change would require two more injections, and someone would have to
stay with Nella for the next four or five hours, not only to administer
the drugs but to make sure that she did not hurt herself during the
conversion. Becoming a New Person was not a painless process.
Nella shuddered again.
Worthy tilted his head, and the lamplight struck his wirerimmed glasses
at a new angle, transforming the lenses into mirrors that for a moment
hid his eyes, giving him an uncharacteristically menacing appearance.
Shudders, more violent and protracted this time, swept through Nella.
From the doorway George Vaidoski said, "What's going on here?
' - 71 Loman had been so focused on Nella that he had not heard George
coming. He got up at once and let go of Nella's hand. "The doctor
thought she needed-" ,What's that horse needle for?" George said,
referring to the huge syringe. The needle itself was no larger than an
ordinary hypodermic.
"Tranquilizer," Dr. Worthy said.
"She needs to-Tranquilizer?" George interrupted.
"Looks like you gave her enough to knock down a bull."
Loman said, "Now, George, the doctor knows what he's-" On the bed Nella
fell under the thrall of the injection. Her body suddenly stiffened,
her hands curled into tight fists, her teeth clenched, and her jaw
muscles bulged. In her throat and temples, the arteries swelled and
throbbed visibly as her heartbeat drastically accelerated. Her eyes
glazed over, and she passed into the peculiar twilight that was the
Change, neither conscious nor unconscious.
"What's wrong with her?" George demanded.
Between clenched teeth, lips peeled back in a grimace of pain, Nella let
out a strange, low groan. She arched her back until only her shoulders
and heels were in contact with the bed. She appeared to be full of
violent energy, as if she were a boiler straining with excess steam
pressure, and for a moment she seemed about to explode. Then she
collapsed back onto the mattress, shuddered more violently than ever,
and broke out in a copious sweat.
George looked at Worthy, at Loman. He clearly realized that something
was very wrong, though he could not begin to understand the nature of
that wrongness.
"Stop." Loman drew his revolver as George stepped backward toward the
second-floor hall.
"Come all the way in here, George, and lie down on the bed beside
Nella."
In the doorway George Valdoski froze, staring in disbelief and dismay at
the revolver.
"If you try to leave," Loman said, "I'll have to shoot you, and I don't
really want to do that."
"You wouldn't," George said, counting on decades of friendship to
protect him.
"Yes, I would," Loman said coldly.
"I'd kill you if I had to, and we'd cover it with a story you wouldn't
like. We'd say that we caught you in a contradiction, that we found
some evidence that you were the one who killed Eddie, killed your own
boy, some twisted sex thing, and that when we confronted you with the
proof, you grabbed my revolver out of my holster. There was a struggle.
You were shot. Case closed."
Coming from someone who was supposed to be a close and treasured friend,
Loman's threat was so monstrous that at first George was speechless.
Then, as he stepped back into the room, he said, "You'd let everyone
think . . . think I did those terrible things to Eddie? Why? What're
you doing, Loman? What the hell are you doing? Who . . . who are you
protecting?"
"Lie down on the bed," Loman said.
Dr. Worthy was preparing another syringe for George.
On the bed Nella was shivering ceaselessly, twitching, writhing. Sweat
trickled down her face; her hair was damp and tangled. Her eyes were
open, but she seemed unaware that others were in the room. Maybe she
was not even conscious of her whereabouts. She was seeing a place
beyond this room or looking within herself; Loman didn't know which and
could remember nothing of his own conversion except that the pain had
been excruciating.
Reluctantly approaching the bed, George Valdoski said, "What's
happening, Loman? Christ, what is this? What's wrong?
"
"Everything'll be fine," Loman assured him.
"It's for the best, George. It's really for the best."
"What's for the best? What in God's name-Lie down, George.
Everything'll be fine."
"What's happening to Nella?"
"Lie down, George. It's for the best," Loman said.
"It's for the best," Dr. Worthy agreed as he finished filling
the
syringe from a new bottle of the golden fluid.
"It's really for the best," Loman said.
"Trust me." With the revolver he waved George toward the bed and smiled
reassuringly.
Harry Talbot's house was Bauhaus-inspired redwood, with a wealth of
big windows. It was three blocks south of the heart of Moonlight Cove,
on the east side of Conquistador Avenue, a street named for the fact
that Spanish conquerors had bivouacked in that area centuries earlier,
when accompanying the Catholic clergy along the California coast to
establish missions. On rare occasions Harry dreamed of being one of
those ancient soldiers, marching northward into unexplored territory,
and it was always a nice dream because, in that adventure fantasy, he
was never wheelchair-bound.
Most of Moonlight Cove was built on wooded hillsides facing the sea, and
Harry's lot sloped down to Conquistador, providing a perfect perch for a
man whose main activity in life was spying on his fellow townsmen. From
his third-floor bedroom at the northwest corner of the house, he could
see at least portions of all the streets between Conquistador and the
cove-Juniper Lane, Serra Street, Roshmore Way, and Cypress Lane-as well
as the intersecting streets which ran east-west. To the north, he could
glimpse pieces of Ocean Avenue and even beyond. Of course the breadth
and depth of his field of vision would have been drastically limited if
his house hadn't been one story higher than most of those around it and
if he hadn't been equipped with a 60mm f/8 refractor telescope and a
good pair of binoculars.
At 930 Monday night, October 13, Harry was in his custommade stool,
between the enormous west and north windows, bent to the eyepiece of the
telescope. The high stool had arms and a backrest like a chair, four
wide-spread sturdy legs for maximum balance, and a weighted base to
prevent it from tipping over easily when he was levering himself into it
from the wheelchair. It also had a harness, something like that in an
automobile, allowing him to lean forward to the telescope without
slipping off the stool and falling to the floor.
Because he had no use whatsoever of his left leg and left arm, because
his right leg was too weak to support him, because he could rely only on
his right arm-which, thank God, the Viet Cong had spared-even
transferring from the battery-powered wheelchair to a custom-made stool
was a torturous undertaking. But the effort was worthwhile because
every year Harry Talbot lived more through his binoculars and telescope
than he had the year before. Perched on his special stool, he sometimes
almost forgot his handicaps, for in his own way he was participating in
life.
His favorite movie was Rear Window with Jimmy Stewart. He had watched
it probably a hundred times.
At the moment the telescope was focused on the back of CalIan's Funeral
Home, the only mortuary in Moonlight Cove, on the cast side of Juniper
Lane, which ran parallel to Conquistador but was one block closer to the
sea. He was able to see the place by focusing between two houses on the
opposite side of his own street, past the thick trunk of a Big Cone
pine, and across the service alley that ran between Juniper and
Conquistador. The funeral home backed up to that alley, and Harry had a
view that included a corner of the garage in which the hearse was
parked, the rear entrance to the house itself, and the entrance to the
new wing in which the corpses were embalmed and prepared for viewing, or
cremated.
During the past two months he had seen some strange things at Callan's.
Tonight, however, no unusual activity enlivened Harry's patient watch
over the place.
"Moose?"
The dog rose from his resting place in the corner and padded across the
unlighted bedroom to Harry's side. He was a fullgrown black Labrador,
virtually invisible in the darkness. He nuzzled Harry's leg the right
one, in which Harry still had some feeling.
Reaching down, Harry petted Moose.
"Get me a beer, old fella.
Moose was a service dog raised and trained by Canine Companions for
Independence, and he was always happy to be needed. He hurried to the
small refrigerator in the corner, which - 75 was designed for
under-the-counter use in restaurants and could be opened with a foot
pedal.
"None there," Harry said.
"I forgot to bring a six-pack up from the kitchen this afternoon.
" The dog had already discovered that the bedroom fridge contained no
Coors. He padded into the hallway, his claws clicking softly on the
polished wood floor. No room had carpets, for the wheelchair rolled
more efficiently on hard surfaces. In the hall the dog leaped and hit
the elevator button with one paw, and immediately the purr and whine of
the lift machinery filled the house.
Harry returned his attention to the telescope and to the rear of
Callan's Funeral Home. Fog drifted through town in waves, some thick
and blinding, some wispy. But lights brightened the rear of the
mortuary, giving him a clear view; through the telescope, he seemed to
be standing between the twin brick pilasters flanking the driveway that
served the back of the property. If the night had been fogless, he
would have been able to count the rivets in the metal door of the
embalmery-crematorium.
Behind him the elevator doors rolled open. He heard Moose enter the
lift. Then it started down to the first floor.
Bored with Callan's, Harry slowly swiveled the scope to the left, moving
the field of vision southward to the large vacant lot adjacent to the
funeral home. Adjusting the focus, he looked across that empty property
and across the street to the Gosdale house on the west side of Juniper,
drawing in on the dining room window.
With his good hand, he unscrewed the eyepiece and put it on a high metal
table beside his stool, quickly and deftly replacing it with one of
several other eyepieces, thus allowing a clearer focus on the Gosdales.
Because the fog was at that moment in a thinning phase, he could see
into the Gosdale dining room almost as well as if he had been crouched
on their porch with his face to the window. Herman and Louise Gosdale
were playing pinochle with their neighbors, Dan and Vera Kaiser, as they
did every Monday night and on some Fridays.
The elevator reached the ground floor; the motor stopped whining, and
silence returned to the house. Moose was now two floors below, hurrying
along the hallway to the kitchen.
On an unusually clear night, when Dan Kaiser was sitting with his back
to the window and at the correct angle, Harry occasionally could see the
man's pinochle hand. A few times he had been tempted to call Herman
Gosdale and describe his adversary's cards to him, with some advice on
how to play out the trick.
But he dared not let people know he spent much of his day in his
bedroom-darkened at night to avoid being silhouetted at the
window-vicariously participating in their lives. They would n
ot
understand. Those whole of limb were uneasy about a handicapped person
from the start, for they found it too easy to believe that the crippling
twist of legs and arms extended to the mind. They would think he was
nosy; worse, they might mark him as a Peeping Tom, a degenerate voyeur.
That was not the case. Harry Talbot had set down strict rules governing
his use of the telescope and binoculars, and he faithfully abided by
them. For one thing, he would never try to get a glimpse of a woman
undressed.
Amelia Scarlatti lived across the street from him and three doors north,
and he once discovered, by accident, that she spent some evenings in her
bedroom, listening to music or reading in the nude. She turned on only a
small bedside lamp, and gauzy sheers hung between the drapes, and she
always stayed away from the windows, so she saw no need to draw the
drapes on every occasion. In fact she could not be seen by anyone less
prepared to see her than Harry was. Amelia was lovely. Even through
the sheers and in the dim lamplight, her exquisite body had been
revealed to Harry in detail. Astonished by her nakedness, riveted by
surprise and by the sensuous concavities and convexities of her
full-breasted, long-legged body, he had stared for perhaps a minute.
Then, as hot with embarrassment as with desire, he had turned the scope
Dean Koontz - (1989) Page 10