by Dean Koontz
“Damn! ”
She slipped into the car, behind the steering wheel, and quickly closed the door, not concerned about the sound it made, just worried about shutting off that damned light.
“Stupid,” she said, cursing herself.
She scanned the parking lot through the blurry, water-spotted windshield. She saw no one. She looked at the lighted windows of the four-story hospital; there was no one standing in any of them, no one watching her.
She sighed with relief and took a deep breath. The car reeked of stale tobacco smoke. Susan wasn’t a smoker herself and was usually offended and sometimes even sickened by such odors. But this time the stench seemed like a sweet perfume to her, for at least it was not a hospital odor.
Increasingly confident that she was going to make good her escape, Susan leaned forward, thrusting one hand under the seat, feeling along the floor for the car keys—
—and froze.
The keys were in the ignition.
They glinted in the yellowish sodium-vapor glow that came through the car windows.
The sight of them rocked Susan. She stared at them with a mixture of elation and apprehension, and she found herself arguing with herself.
-Something’s wrong.
—No, things are just finally going my way for a change.
—It’s too easy.
—This is what I hoped to find.
—And it’s too easy.
—In small towns, some people do leave keys in their cars.
-In the very fzrst car you checked?
—What’s it matter whether it’s the first or the fourth or the three hundredth car?
—It matters because it’s too easy.
—Just luck. I’m overdue for some good luck.
—It’s too easy.
Sharp ax blades of lightning chopped up the pitch-black sky, and there was a bellow of thunder. Rain fell in spurts at first, then in a sudden, terrible flood.
Susan listened to the rain pounding on the car, watched it streaming down the windshield in rippling ribbons of sodium light, watched it as it continuously shattered the mirrored surfaces of the puddles on the pavement, and she knew that she wasn’t going to walk all the way into town, which was as much as a mile away, longer if she went in a roundabout fashion. Why struggle through a cloudburst when she had a perfectly good automobile at her disposal? Okay, so maybe it was a little too easy—all right, so there wasn’t any “maybe” about it; too easy by far—but there wasn’t any law against things going smoothly and easily now and then. It was easy, this finding a key straight off, but it was also just a stroke of good fortune, nothing more than that.
What else could it be?
She twisted the key in the ignition. The engine came to life instantly.
She switched on the headlights and the windshield wipers, put the car in gear, and released the emergency brake. She drove out of the parking lot and around to the front of the hospital. She came to a one-lane, one-way drive, and turned the wrong way into it because the right way out would first take her beneath the brightly lit portico, where someone at the front doors might spot her. She reached the end of the short accessway without encountering any oncoming traffic, and she paused where the drive intersected the two-lane county road.
Glancing back at the four-story building from which she had just escaped, she saw a large sign on the well-manicured, rolling lawn. It was eight feet long and four or five feet high, set on a stone base, flanked by low shrubbery. Four small floodlights were evenly spaced along the top of the sign, their beams directed down upon the bold white lettering, which was set against a royal-blue background. Even through the heavy, wind-driven rain, Susan could read that sign without any difficulty:
THE MILESTONE CORPORATION
Susan stared at those three words in disbelief.
Then she raised her eyes to the building again, regarding it with confusion, cold fear, and anger. It wasn’t a hospital at all.
But what in God’s name was it?
And wasn’t the Milestone Corporation supposed to be located in Newport Beach, California? That was where she lived. That was where she was supposed to work.
Get the hell out of here, she told herself urgently.
She turned left and drove downhill, away from the Milestone Corporation.
Through the rain and through the thin fog that blanketed the lowlands, Willawauk was visible as a collection of soft, fuzzy lights, none of which had clear points of origin, many of which bled together into yellow and white and pale pink blobs.
Susan remembered that Dr. Viteski had said the town boasted a population of eight thousand. It had to be exactly that: a boast. It just didn’t look that big. At best, it appeared to be half that size.
Past the midpoint of the long hill, leaning over the steering wheel while she drove, squinting between the thumping windshield wipers, Susan watched a change come over the lights of Willawauk. Now they seemed to shimmer and wink and ripple and blink as if the entire town was an enormous, intricate neon sign. Of course that was only an effect of the weather.
One thing that did not change was the impression of size that the lights imparted. The town still appeared to be considerably smaller than eight thousand souls. Maybe even smaller than four thousand.
The county road took a hard turn to the right and descended a last slope, past the first houses in town. In some of them, lights shone at the windows; others were dark; all were obscured by the rain and by the eddying fog.
The county road became Main Street. They couldn’t have picked a more bland or more apt name for their primary avenue. The heart of Willawauk was like ten thousand other towns scattered across the country. There was a pocket-size park with a war memorial statue at the entrance of it. There was a bar and grill named the Dew Drop Inn; its sign was fashioned out of orange neon, and the D in Drop was flickering on the edge of burnout; the windows were decorated with other neon advertisements, all for various brands of beer. The town supported a lot of small businesses, some local enterprises, some minor outlets of major national chains: Jenkin’s Hardware; Laura Lee’s Flowers; a Sears storefront that dealt solely in catalogue orders; the Plenty Good Coffee Shop, where Susan could see about a dozen customers seated in booths beyond the huge plate-glass windows; two dress shops; a men’s store; the First National Bank of Willawauk; the Main Street Cinema, which was currently playing a double feature comprised of two of last summer’s comedies, Arthur and Continental Divide; Thrift Savings and Loan, with its big electronic time-and-temperature sign; an intersection with three service stations—Arco, Union 76, and Mobii—and with a computer games arcade, Rocketblast, on the fourth corner; Giullini Brothers, TV and Appliances; a small bookstore and another bar and grill on the left; a drugstore and a G. C. Murphy’s five-and-dime on the right; a funeral home, Hathaway and Sons, set back from the street on a big chunk of property; an empty storefront, a hamburger joint, a furniture store...
Although Willawauk was like ten thousand other towns in so many details, a couple of things seemed... wrong. It seemed to Susan that everything in town was too neat. Every one of the stores looked as if it had been painted within the last month. Even the Arco, Union 76, and Mobil stations sparkled pristinely in the rain, gasoline pumps gleaming, service bay doors raised to proudly reveal brightly lighted, neatly ordered garages. There was not a single piece of litter in the gutters. Trees were planted in regularly spaced cutouts in the sidewalks on both sides of the street, and these were not merely well pruned, but meticulously shaped into two long lines of perfect clones. In all of the many street lamps, not one bulb was burned out. Not one. The only advertising sign with a fluttering neon letter was the one at the Dew Drop Inn, and that seemed to be the town’s worst example of blight.
Perhaps Willawauk had an exceptionally strong and widely shared civic pride and an especially energetic citizenry. Or perhaps the rain and the thin veil of fog were softening the scene, concealing the frayed and tattered edges of everything. Except
that rain usually made a town look drearier and shabbier than it actually was, not better. And could civic pride really explain a town that looked almost as if robots inhabited it?
Another strange thing was the small number of cars in view. In three blocks, she had passed only three cars and a camper van parked at the curb. In the lot beside the Main Street Cinema, there had been only two cars, and at the Dew Drop Inn, there had been only one other and one pickup truck. So far, she hadn’t passed another car in motion; she was the only one driving tonight.
Well, the weather was wretched. People were wise to stay home on a night like this.
On the other hand, how many people did she know who usually did the wise thing?
Not very damned many.
Not this many.
The Dew Drop Inn was the kind of place that did good business in the middle of a blizzard. A simple rain wouldn’t stop the serious drinkers from making their way to their favorite hangout, and most of them would come in cars, the better to kill each other as they weaved blearily home at two o’clock in the morning.
Keep driving, Susan told herself. Drive all the way through this burg and keep on going. Don’t stop here. Something is wrong with this place.
But she didn’t have a map, and she wasn’t familiar with the countryside around these parts, and she didn’t know how far it was to the nearest town, and she was also afraid that what had happened to her in the hospital—in Milestone—was turning her into a paranoid after all. Then, at the beginning of the fourth block, she saw a place where she was sure to find help, and she pulled her car into the parking lot.
WILLAWAUK COUNTY SHERIFF
HEADQUARTERS
WILLAWAUK, OREGON
It was a squat, stone building with a slate roof and all-glass front doors, just south of the considerably more stately county courthouse.
Susan parked the stolen Pontiac near the entrance. She was glad to be getting out of the car; already, the odor of stale tobacco smoke had ceased to be the least bit appealing, even if it didn’t remind her of the hospital.
She ran through the hammering rain. She ducked under a mammoth spruce tree, through which the cold wind soughed in an enormous chorus of whispers. From there she dashed to the shelter of a white aluminum awning, and thus to the glass doors, through which she pushed.
She found herself in a typically drab, institutional room with gray walls, fluorescent lights and a speckled, multicolored Armstrong tile floor designed to conceal wear. A U-shaped counter separated the largest part of the main room from a waiting area just inside the doors. Susan walked past several uncomfortable-looking metal chairs, past two small tables on which were stacked a variety of public service pamphlets, and went straight to the counter.
On the other side, there were several desks, file cabinets, a large work table, a bottled-water dispenser, a photocopier, a giant wall map of the county, and a huge bulletin board that was covered with tacked-on bulletins and photographs and wanted notices and odd scraps of paper.
In an adjacent alcove, out of sight, a woman dispatcher was talking to a patrol officer on a shortwave radio. The storm was throwing in bursts of static.
In the main room, there was only one man. He was sitting at a desk, typing on an IBM Selectric, his back turned to the counter and to Susan.
“Excuse me,” Susan said, brushing at her rain-beaded eyelashes with the back of one hand. “Can you help me?”
He swung around on his swivel chair, smiled, and said, “I’m Officer Whitlock. What can I do for you?”
He was young, perhaps twenty or twenty-one.
He was a bit on the pudgy side.
He had dirty blond hair, a round face, a dimpled chin, a pug nose, and the small quick eyes of a pig.
He had a twisted, nasty smile.
He was Carl Jellicoe.
Susan sucked in a breath that seemed to pierce her lungs as if it were a nail, and she wasn’t able to expel it.
When he had been wearing a hospital orderly’s uniform, he had called himself Dennis Bradley. Now he was wearing a brown uniform with the County Sheriff’s Department seal stitched to his left sleeve and to the breast pocket of his shirt, and he carried a .45-caliber revolver in a black leather holster on his hip, and he called himself Officer Whitlock.
Susan couldn’t speak. Shock had seared her vocal cords as thoroughly as a gas flame could have; her throat was parched, cracking; her mouth was suddenly hot, dry, and filled with a burnt-out taste.
She couldn’t move.
She finally let out her breath with a sob, and she gasped for more air, but she still couldn’t move.
“Surprise, surprise,” Jellicoe said, giggling, getting up from his swivel chair.
Susan shook her head, slowly at first, then vehemently, trying to deny his existence.
“Did you really think you could get away from us that easily? Did you really?” he asked, standing with his legs spread, hitching up his holster.
Susan stared at him, transfixed, her feet fused to the floor. Her hands were clenched tightly around the edge of the wooden counter, as if that were her only grip on reality.
Not taking his piggish little eyes off Susan, Jellicoe called out to someone in an adjoining room. “Hey, come look at what we’ve got here!”
Another deputy appeared. He was twenty or twenty-one, tall, with red hair and hazel eyes and a fair complexion that was spattered with freckles. In his hospital orderly’s uniform, he had called himself Patrick O’Hara. Susan didn’t know what he called himself now, but she knew what he had called himself thirteen years ago, when he had been a student at Briarstead College, when he had helped kill Jerry Stein in the House of Thunder: Herbert Parker.
“My, my,” Parker said. “The lady looks distressed.”
“Well, you see, the poor thing thought she’d gotten away from us,” Jellicoe said.
“Did she really?” Parker said.
“Really.”
“Doesn’t she know she can never get away from us? Doesn’t she know we’re dead?”
Jellicoe grinned at her. “Don’t you know we’re dead, you silly little bitch?”
“You read about it in the newspapers,” Parker reminded her. “Don’t you recall?”
“The car accident?” Jellicoe prodded.
“About eleven years ago, it was.”
In the communications alcove, the unseen dispatcher continued to talk with cruising patrol officers over the shortwave radio, as if nothing unusual were happening out here in the main room. But the woman must know.
“We rolled that damned car over like it was just a little toy,” Jellicoe said.
“Rolled it twice,” Parker said.
“What a mess it was.”
“What a mess we were.”
“All because of this slut.”
They both started toward the counter, neither of them in a hurry, ambling between the desks, smiling.
“And now she thinks it’ll be easy to run away from us,” Carl Jellicoe said.
Parker said, “We’re dead, you stupid bitch. Don’t you understand what that means? You can’t hide from dead men.”
“Because we can be anywhere—”
“—everywhere—”
“—all at the same time.”
“That’s one of the advantages of being dead.”
“Which doesn’t have many advantages.”
Jellicoe giggled again.
They were almost to the counter.
Susan was gasping now, breathing as frantically as a pumping bellows in a blazing forge.
“You aren’t dead, damn you,” she said, abruptly finding her voice.
“Oh, yes. We’re dead—”
“—and buried—”
“—and gone to Hell—”
“—and come back again.”
“And now this place is Hell.”
“For you, it is, Susan. For you, for a little while, this is Hell.”
Jellicoe was moving around to the gate, where a section
of the countertop lifted to allow passage between the waiting area and the bullpen.
A heavy glass ashtray was on the counter, within Susan’s reach. She finally moved, snatched up the ashtray, and threw it at Jellicoe’s head.
He didn’t just stand there and let the missile pass magically through his body to prove that he was, indeed, a ghost. For a dead man, Jellicoe exhibited a surprisingly healthy fear of being hurt. He ducked behind the counter.
The ashtray missed him, struck the metal desk, cracked apart, and clattered in pieces to the floor.
A long-handled, police-issue flashlight also stood on the counter, and Susan seized that, too. She swung it back over her shoulder, prepared to let it fly at Jellicoe, but out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Herbert Parker was drawing his revolver, so she fled across the waiting area, through the glass doors, into the night.
The boughs of the giant spruce flailed at one another, and the tree’s tens of thousands of green needles were briefly colored silver by a flash of lightning.
Susan ran to the stolen Pontiac and jerked open the door. She got in and reached for the keys, which she had left dangling in the ignition.
The keys were gone.
For you, for a little while, this is Hell.
She glanced toward the glass doors.
Jellicoe and Parker were just coming out of the slumpstone building. They weren’t in a hurry.
Susan slid across the seat, frantically pushed open the door on the passenger’s side, and got out of the car, putting it between her and the two men.
She looked around, determining the best route of escape, hoping that her legs would hold up. Thank God for those physical therapy sessions with Mrs. Atkinson! Otherwise, she wouldn’t have gotten this far. But four days of exercise and good food didn’t mean she was back to full power. Eventually, she would collapse, and that moment would come for her long before it would come for either Jellicoe or Parker.
Above the roar of the rain, above the trumpeting of the wind, Jellicoe called to her. “There’s no use running, Susan.”