by Dean Koontz
Our stalker couldn’t have slipped around us unseen. Besides, there was no reason for him to have done so instead of assaulting us directly.
Nevertheless, with every step I took, the tension increased in the cords of muscle at the back of my neck, until they felt as tight as key-wound clock springs.
From the corner of my eye, I glimpsed movement past the altar, twitched toward it, and drew Stormy closer to my side. Her hand clutched mine tighter than before.
The crucified bronze Christ moved, as if metal miraculously had become flesh, as if He would pull loose from the cross and step down to resume the earthly mantle of messiah.
A large scallop-winged moth flew away from the hot lens of the overhead spotlight. The illusion of movement—which the insect’s exaggerated, fluttering shadow had imparted to the bronze figure—was at once dispelled.
Stormy’s tower-door key would also unlock the door at the back of the sanctuary. Beyond waited the sacristy, in which the priest readied himself before every Mass.
I glanced back at the sanctuary, the nave. Silence. Stillness but for the moth’s shadow play.
After using and returning Stormy’s key, I pushed the paneled door inward with some trepidation.
This particular fear had no rational basis whatsoever. Robertson wasn’t a magician able to appear by legerdemain inside a locked room.
Nevertheless, my heart played knock-and-rattle with my ribs.
When I felt for the light switch, my hand was not pinned to the wall by either a stiletto or a hatchet. The overhead light revealed a small, plain room but no large psychopath with yellow yeast-mold hair.
To the left stood the prie-dieu, where the priest knelt to offer his private devotions before saying Mass. To the right were cabinets containing the sacred vessels and the vestments, and a vesting bench.
Stormy closed the sanctuary door behind us and with a thumb-turn engaged the deadbolt.
We quickly crossed the room to the outer sacristy door. I knew that beyond lay the east churchyard, the one without tombstones, and a flagstone path leading to the rectory where her uncle lived.
This door also was locked.
From within the sacristy, the lock could be released without a key. I gripped the thumb-turn … but hesitated.
Perhaps we had not heard or seen Robertson enter the nave from the narthex for the simple reason that he’d never come into the front of the church after I had glimpsed him ascending the steps.
And perhaps, anticipating that we would try to flee from the back of the church, he had circled the building to wait for us outside the sacristy. This might explain why I had sensed that we were moving toward danger rather than away from it.
“What’s wrong?” Stormy asked.
I shushed her—a fatal mistake in any circumstances but these—and listened at the crack between the door and the jamb. The thinnest breath of a warm draft tickled my ear, but with it came no sounds from outside.
I waited. I listened. I grew increasingly uneasy.
Stepping away from the outer door, I whispered to Stormy, “Let’s go back the way we came.”
We returned to the door between the sacristy and the sanctuary, which she had locked behind us. But I hesitated again with my fingers on the deadbolt release.
Putting my ear against the crack between this door and jamb, I listened to the church beyond. No teasing draft spiraled down my auditory canal, but no telltale stealthy sounds came to me, either.
Both sacristy doors had been locked from the inside. To get at us, Robertson would need a key, which he didn’t possess.
“We’re not going to wait here till morning Mass,” Stormy said, as though she could scroll through my thoughts as easily as through a document on her computer.
My cell phone was clipped to my belt. I could have used it to call Chief Porter and explain the situation to him.
The possibility existed, however, that Bob Robertson had been overcome by second thoughts about the wisdom of assaulting me in such a public place as the church, even though at this moment there were no worshipers or witnesses present. Having reined in his rampant anger, he might have gone away.
If the chief dispatched a patrol car to St. Bart’s or if he came himself, only to find no smiley psychopath, my credibility would take a hit. Over the years, I had banked enough good will with Wyatt Porter to afford to make a withdrawal or two from my account, but I was reluctant to do so.
It is human nature to want to believe in the wizardry of the magician—but also to turn against him and to scorn him the moment that he commits the slightest error that reveals his trickery. Those in the audience are embarrassed to have been so easily astonished, and they blame the performer for their gullibility.
Although I employ no sleight of hand, though what I offer is truth glimpsed by supernatural means, I am aware not only of the magician’s vulnerability but also of the danger of being the boy who cried wolf—or in this case, the boy who cried Fungus Man.
Most people desperately desire to believe that they are part of a great mystery, that Creation is a work of grace and glory, not merely the result of random forces colliding. Yet each time that they are given but one reason to doubt, a worm in the apple of the heart makes them turn away from a thousand proofs of the miraculous, whereupon they have a drunkard’s thirst for cynicism, and they feed upon despair as a starving man upon a loaf of bread.
As a miracle worker of sorts, I walk a wire, too high to make one misstep and survive.
Chief Porter is a good man, but he is human. He would be slow to turn against me, but if he was made to feel foolish and gullible more than once, that turn would surely occur.
I could have used my cell phone to call Stormy’s uncle, Father Sean, in the rectory. He would come to our aid without delay and without too many awkward questions.
Robertson, however, was a human monster, not one of supernatural origin. If he was lurking in the churchyard, he would not be deterred from violence by the sight of a Roman collar or by the brandishing of a crucifix.
Having put Stormy in jeopardy, I shrank at once from the idea of endangering her uncle, as well.
Two sacristy doors. The outer led to the churchyard. The inner led to the sanctuary.
Having heard nothing at either exit, I had to rely on intuition. I chose the door to the sanctuary.
Apparently the bouncing ball of Stormy’s intuition hadn’t yet rattled to a stop on any number. She put her hand atop mine as I took hold of the lock.
Our eyes met for a moment. Then we turned our heads to stare at the outer door.
This was an instance when the card that we had drawn from that carnival fortune-telling machine and our matching birthmarks seemed indisputably to be meaningful.
Without exchanging a word, we arrived at a plan that we both understood. I remained at the door to the sanctuary. Stormy returned to the churchyard door.
If when I unlocked my door, Robertson lunged for me, Stormy would throw open the outer door and bolt from the sanctuary, shouting for help. I would attempt to follow her—and stay alive.
CHAPTER 20
That moment in the sacristy distilled the essence of my entire existence: always between two doors, between a life with the living and a life with the dead, between transcendence and terror.
Across the room, Stormy nodded.
On the prie-dieu, a small book of prayers waited for a kneeling priest.
No doubt bottles of sacramental wine were stored in one of the cabinets. I could have used a little spiritual fortification.
I leaned hard against the sanctuary door to brace it. When I disengaged the lock, the bolt made a thin sound reminiscent of a razor sharpening against a strop.
Had Robertson been poised to burst in upon me, he ought to have reacted to the deadbolt retracting from the striker plate in the door frame. Of course he might be less of a hothead and more cunning than he had appeared to be when he’d stood in the graveyard, flipping us the finger.
Perhaps he sus
pected that I was wedging the door shut with my body and that I would snap the lock in place the instant that he tried to shove into the sacristy. Insane as he might be, he would nonetheless have some intuition of his own.
The Bob Robertson who left his kitchen strewn with dirty dishes, banana peels, and crumbs was too sloppy to be a wise strategist. The Robertson who kept the neat study and maintained the meticulous files in those cabinets of dread was, however, a different man from the one whose living room had featured drifts of sleazy magazines and well-read paperback romances.
I couldn’t know which Bob Robertson might be, at this moment, beyond the door.
When I glanced at Stormy, she made a gesture that meant either “get on with it” or “up yours.”
Leaning against the door with undiminished purpose, I turned the knob all the way to the left. It squeaked. I would have been amazed if it hadn’t.
I shifted my weight and let the door ease open half an inch … an inch … and all the way.
If Robertson waited at either entrance to the sacristy, he was outside in the churchyard. Standing in the ruddy reduction of the last red light, he must have looked like something that belonged under a granite headstone.
Stormy stepped away from her station. Together we quickly returned to the sanctuary from which we had been so eager to flee only two minutes ago.
The moth danced across the light, and again Christ seemed to twist upon the cross.
The lingering incense smelled not sweet, as before, but had a new astringency, and the votive flames throbbed with the urgency of arterial aneurysms about to burst.
Down the ambulatory, past the choir enclosure, through the gate in the communion railing, I half expected Robertson to spring at us from unlikely cover. He had grown into such a menacing figure in my mind that I would not have been surprised if he had dropped upon us from the vaulted ceiling, suddenly having sprouted wings, a furious dark angel with death upon his breath.
We were in the main aisle when a great crash and shattering of glass shook away the churchly silence behind us. We spun, we looked, but saw no wreckage.
The sacristy had been windowless, and there’d been no glass in the door to the churchyard. Nevertheless, that chamber, which we’d just left, seemed to be the source of these sounds of destruction. They rose again, louder than before.
I heard what might have been the vesting bench slamming against the vestment closets, heard wine bottles smashing, heard the silver chalice and other sacred vessels ricocheting off walls and cabinets with a reverberant metallic clatter.
In our haste to escape, we had left the light on in that room. Now, through the open door, secondhand movement was visible: a farrago of leaping shadows and flares of shimmery light.
I didn’t know what was happening, and I didn’t intend to return to the sacristy for a look. Holding Stormy’s hand again, I ran with her along the center aisle, the length of the nave, and through a door into the narthex.
Out of the church, down the steps, we fled into a twilight that had nearly bled to death, had little red left to give, and had begun to pull purple shrouds over the streets of Pico Mundo.
For a moment I couldn’t fit the trembling key in the Mustang’s ignition. Stormy urged me to hurry, as if hurrying weren’t already my intention, and finally the key mated as it should, and the engine roared to life.
Leaving a significant offering of rubber in front of St. Bart’s, we traveled a block and a half on smoking tires, so fast that we almost seemed to have teleported, before I had the breath to say, “Call the chief.”
She had a cell phone of her own, and she entered Wyatt Porter’s home number as I gave it to her. She waited as it rang, said, “Chief, it’s Stormy,” listened, and said, “Yeah, it does sound like a weather report, doesn’t it. Odd needs to speak to you.”
I took the phone and blurted, “Sir, if you send a car to St. Bart’s real quick, you might catch that Robertson guy trashing the sacristy, maybe more than the sacristy, maybe the whole church.”
He put me on hold and made a call on another line.
Three blocks from St. Bartholomew’s, I pulled the Mustang off the street, into a Mexican fast-food franchise.
“Dinner?” I asked Stormy.
“After all that in the church?”
I shrugged. “The entire rest of our lives will be after all that in the church. Personally, I intend to eat again, and the sooner the better.”
“It’s not going to be the equal of my tower feast.”
“What could be?”
“I am starved.”
Holding the phone to my ear and driving with one hand as if that were still legal, I swung the Mustang into the line of vehicles waiting to get to the drive-up service window.
When Chief Porter came back, he said, “Why is he vandalizing St. Bart’s?”
“Don’t have a clue, sir. He tried to trap me and Stormy in the church belfry—”
“What were you doing in the belfry?”
“Having a picnic, sir.”
“I suppose that makes sense to you.”
“Yes, sir. It’s nice. We have dinner up there a couple times a month.”
“Son, I don’t ever want to catch you having dinner on the courthouse flagpole.”
“Maybe just hors d’oeuvres, sir, but never dinner.”
“If you want to come by here, we can still feed you two from the barbecue. Bring Elvis.”
“I left him at the Baptist church, sir. I’m with Stormy—in line to have some tacos, but thanks just the same.”
“Tell me about Robertson. I have a man watching his house in Camp’s End, but he hasn’t gone home yet.”
I said, “He was down in the graveyard, saw us up in the belfry. He gave us the rude number one with lots of emphasis and then came after us.”
“You think he knows you were in his house?” the chief asked.
“If he hasn’t been home since I was there, I don’t see how he could know, but he must. Excuse me a second, sir.”
We had reached the menu board.
“Swordfish tacos with extra salsa, fried corn fritters, and a large Coke, please,” I told the sombrero-wearing donkey that holds the order microphone in its mouth. I looked at Stormy. She nodded. “Make that two of everything.”
“Are you at Mexicali Rose?” the chief asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“They have fantastic churros. You should try some.”
I took his advice and placed a double order with the donkey, which, as before, thanked me in the voice of a teenage girl.
As the line of cars crept forward, I said, “When we gave Robertson the slip in the church, he must’ve been angry. But why he decided to take it out on the building, I don’t know.”
“Two cars are on the way to St. Bart’s, no sirens. They might even be there now. But vandalism—that doesn’t measure up to the horrors you said he’s going to commit.”
“No, sir. Not close. And there’s less than three hours till August fifteenth.”
“If we can park his butt in jail overnight for vandalism, we’ll have an excuse to poke around in his life. Maybe that’ll give us a chance to figure out the bigger thing he’s up to.”
After wishing the chief luck, I pressed END and returned the phone to Stormy.
I checked my watch. Midnight—and August 15—seemed like a tsunami, building height and power, racing toward us with silent but deadly force.
CHAPTER 21
Waiting to hear from the chief that they had nailed Robertson in the act of vandalism, Stormy and I ate dinner in the Mexicali Rose parking lot, with the windows of the Mustang rolled down, hoping to catch a breeze. The food was tasty, but the hot night air smelled of exhaust fumes.
“So you broke into Fungus Man’s house,” Stormy said.
“Didn’t smash any glass. Just used my driver’s license.”
“Does he keep severed heads in his refrigerator?”
“I didn’t open his refrigerator.”
&
nbsp; “Where else would you expect to find severed heads?”
“I wasn’t looking for any.”
She said, “That creepy smile of his, those weird gray eyes … First thing I’d look for is a collection of knickknacks with ears. These tacos are fabulous.”
I agreed. “And I like all the colors in the salsa. Yellow and green chiles, the red of the chopped tomatoes, the little purple flecks of onion … sort of looks like confetti. You should do it this way when you make salsa.”
“What—you were bitten by Martha Stewart, now you’re a walking-dead lifestyle guru? So tell me what you found if you didn’t find heads?”
I told her about the black room.
Licking corn-fritter crumbs off her elegant fingers, she said, “Listen to me, odd one.”
“I’m all ears.”
“They’re big, but they’re not all of you. Open them wide now and hear this: Don’t go in that black room again.”
“It doesn’t exist anymore.”
“Don’t even go looking for it, hoping it’ll come back.”
“That never even crossed my mind.”
“Yes, it did,” she said.
“Yes, it did,” I admitted. “I mean, I’d like to understand it—what it is, how it works.”
To emphasize her objection, she poked a corn fritter in my direction. “It’s the gate to Hell, and you’re not meant for that neighborhood.”
“I don’t think it’s the gate to Hell.”
“Then what is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s the gate to Hell. If you go looking for it, and you find it, and you wind up in Hell, I’m not going to go down there looking for you and pull your ass out of the fire.”
“Your warning is duly noted.”
“It’s hard enough being married to a guy who sees dead people and goes chasing after them every day, and just too hard if he goes on some quest to find the gate to Hell.”
“I don’t go chasing after them,” I said, “and since when are we married?”
“We will be,” she said, and finished her final fritter.
On more than one occasion, I have asked her to marry me. Though we both agree that we are soul mates and that we will be together forever, she has always shied from my proposals with something like, I love you madly, desperately, Oddie, so madly that I would cut off my right hand for you, if that made any sense as a proof of love. But as for this marriage thing—let’s put a pin in it.