by Dean Koontz
Which left her with the conspiracy theory.
That wasn’t much of a theory, either. She didn’t have the slightest idea who, how, or why.
As she puzzled over those three essential questions, her thoughts were briefly disturbed by a wave of laughter that swept the theater. Although it came in reaction to a very funny scene in Arthur and wasn’t at all out of place, there was something about the laughter which seemed distinctly odd to Susan.
Of course, the volume of laughter indicated that there were quite a few people in the theater, at least a hundred, maybe more, and that was certainly a surprise, considering the fact that there were only two cars in the parking lot. But that wasn’t what was odd about it.
Something else.
Something about the sound of it.
The laughter subsided, and Susan’s thoughts returned to her escape plans.
When had it begun to go wrong?
As soon as she had left the hospital—or, rather, as soon as she’d left Milestone—that was when it had begun to go wrong. The keys in the Pontiac. Too easy. Which meant they had known she would try to escape, and they had actually wanted her to try. The Pontiac had been left there expressly for her use.
But how had they known that she would think to look in the car for the keys? And how could they have been so certain that she would stop at the sheriff’s station?
How could they have known she would go to the Shipstat house for help? Willawauk contained hundreds of other houses, other people to whom she might have turned. Why had the Harch look-alike been waiting with such perfect confidence at the Shipstat place?
She knew the most likely answer to her own question, but she didn’t want to believe it. Didn’t even want to consider it. Maybe they always knew where she was going to go next because they had programmed her to go there. Maybe they had planted a few crucial directives in her subconscious while she’d been in the coma. That would explain why they never seriously pursued her when she ran from them; they knew she would walk into their arms later, at a prearranged place.
Maybe she had no free will whatsoever. That possibility made her feel sick to her stomach—and in her soul, as well.
Who were these shadowy manipulators with godlike power over her?
Her train of thought was derailed by another wave of loud laughter that rolled through the theater, and this time she realized what was odd about the sound. It was the laughter of young people: higher pitched than that of a general audience, quicker and more eager and more shrill than the laughter of adults.
Her eyes had adapted somewhat to the darkness in the theater, and she raised her head, looked around. At least two hundred people were present. No, it was more like three hundred. Of those nearest to Susan, of those she could see, all appeared to be kids. Not young children. Teenagers. Thirteen to eighteen, or thereabouts. High school and junior high kids. As far as she could tell, she was the only adult in the crowd.
Why had three hundred kids walked through a fierce storm to see a movie that was almost six months old? And what kind of uncaring parents would have permitted them to risk pneumonia and possibly even electrocution by lightning just to come to a movie?
She thought of the dozen children at the Shipstat house, their faces glazed by the bluish light from the TV.
Willawauk seemed to have more than its share of children.
And what the devil did all these children have to do with her own situation?
Something. There was some connection, but she couldn’t figure it out.
While Susan was puzzling over the oddity of Willawauk’s youthful population, she saw a door open at the front of the theater, to the left of the screen. A pale blue light shone in a room beyond the door. A tall man came out into the auditorium and closed the door behind him. He switched on a flashlight, one with a very narrow beam, and pointed it at the floor immediately in front of him.
An usher?
He started up the aisle.
Toward Susan.
The theater was fairly large, three times longer than it was wide. The usher took at least half a dozen steps up the sloping aisle before Susan became aware, through some sixth sense, that he was a threat to her.
She stood up. Her wet clothes stuck to her. She had been in the theater only fifteen minutes, not nearly long enough to dry out, and she was reluctant to leave.
The usher kept coming.
The narrow flashlight beam bobbled up and down a bit with each step the man took.
Susan edged away from her seat, into the aisle. She squinted into the gloom ahead, trying to perceive the usher’s face.
He was forty feet away, coming slowly toward her, invisible behind his flashlight, suddenly silhouetted but unrevealed by a bright scene on the movie screen.
Dudley Moore said something funny.
The audience laughed.
Susan began to shake.
John Gielgud said something funny, and Liza Minnelli said something funny right back at him, and the audience laughed again.
If I was programmed to steal the Pontiac, Susan thought, and if I was programmed to go to the sheriff’s station and to the Shipstat house, then perhaps I was also programmed to come here instead of going up the street to the Plenty Good Coffee Shop or somewhere else.
The usher was no more than thirty feet away now.
Susan took three sliding steps backwards to the padded doors that opened onto the lobby. She reached behind her and put one hand against the door.
The usher raised the flashlight, no longer directing it toward the sloping floor in front of him, and shone it straight into Susan’s face.
The beam wasn’t terribly bright, but it blinded her because her eyes had adjusted to the darkness.
He’s one of them, she thought. One of the dead men. Probably Quince because Quince hasn’t yet put in an appearance tonight.
Or maybe it was Jerry Stein, his face rotting away from his bones, pus oozing from his swollen, purple lips. Jerry Stein, all dressed up in a neat usher’s uniform, coming to say hello, coming to get a kiss.
There’s nothing supernatural about this, she told herself in a desperate attempt to stave off panic.
But maybe it was Jerry, his face gray, a little green around the eyes, with brown-black blisters of corruption extending from his nostrils. Maybe it was Jerry, coming to give her a hug, coming to take her in his arms. Maybe he would lower his face to hers and put his lips to hers and thrust his cold, slimy tongue into her mouth in a grotesque kiss of graveyard passion.
For you, for a little while, this is Hell.
Susan flung open the door and raced out of the theater, into the lobby, across the plush carpeting, through the outer doors, not daring to look back. She turned right at the corner of the building, into the parking lot, and headed toward the dark alley. She sucked the humid air deep into her heaving lungs, and she felt as if she were breathing wet cotton.
In seconds, her clothes were as thoroughly soaked as they had been when she’d gone into the theater.
Hot flashes of pain shot through her legs, but she tried to ignore them. She told herself she could run all night if that was necessary.
But she knew she was lying to herself. She was quickly using up what little strength she had managed to store away during the past five days. Not much was left. Dregs.
The Arco service station was closed for the night. Rain lashed the gasoline pumps and rattled against the big windows and drummed on the metal garage doors.
Beside the station, a public telephone booth stood in shadows. Susan stepped into it but didn’t close the door because closing it would turn on the booth light.
She had gotten change for a dollar from a change machine in a coin-operated laundromat. She dropped a dime in the phone and dialed the operator.
She was shivering uncontrollably now, miserably cold and exhausted.
“Operator.”
“Operator, I’d like to place a long-distance call and charge it to my home number.”
; “And what is the number you’re calling, please?”
Susan gave her Sam Walker’s number in Newport Beach. She had dated Sam for over a year, and he had been more serious about their relationship than she had been. They had broken off last spring, not without pain, but they were still friends; they talked once in a while on the phone, and they occasionally encountered each other by accident at restaurants they both favored, in which case they weren’t so estranged that they couldn’t have dinner together.
It was perhaps a condemnation of her excessively solitary, self-reliant, go-it-alone nature that she had no really close girl friends from whom she could seek help. She had no one closer than Sam, and she had last seen him nearly five weeks before she had left on her vacation to Oregon.
“What is the number to which you wish to bill the call?” the operator asked.
Susan recited her home number in Newport Beach.
After fleeing from the Main Street Cinema, she had decided that she couldn’t be sure of escaping from Willawauk unless she had help from someone outside of town. She didn’t know if she could convince Sam that she was in danger and that the Willawauk police couldn’t be trusted. Even though he knew she didn’t take drugs or drink to excess, he’d have to wonder if she was stoned. She could not possibly tell him the whole story or even most of it; for sure, he’d think she had slipped a mental gear. The trick was to tell him only enough to make him come running or to convince him to call the FBI for her.
The FBI, for God’s sake! It all sounded so ludicrous. But who else did you call when you couldn’t trust the local police? Who else did you turn to? Besides, there was kidnapping involved here, and that was a federal offense, within the FBI’s jurisdiction.
She would have called the Bureau’s Oregon office herself, except she didn’t think she’d be able to convince a total stranger that she was really in trouble. She wasn’t even certain that she could convince Sam, who knew her very well.
Down in Newport Beach, Sam’s phone began to ring.
Please be there, please, she thought.
A gust of icy wind rammed through the open door of the phone booth. It pummeled her back with hard-driven rain.
Sam’s phone rang three times.
Four times.
Please, please, please...
A fifth time.
Then someone picked it up. “Hello?”
“Sam?”
“Hello?”
There was a lot of static on the line.
“Sam?”
“Yeah. Who’s this?”
His voice was faint.
“Sam, it’s me, Susan.”
A hesitation. Then: “Suzie?”
“Yes.”
“Suzie Thorton?”
“Yes,” she said, relieved that at last she had touched someone beyond Willawauk.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Willawauk, Oregon.”
“Will who walk to Oregon?”
“No, no. Willawauk.” She spelled it.
“Sounds like you’re calling from Tahiti or something,” he said as the static temporarily abated.
Listening to him, Susan felt a terrible suspicion uncoiling like a snake in her mind. A new chill slithered through her, tongue of ice flickering on her spine.
She said, “I can hardly hear you.”
“I said, it sounds like you’re calling from Tahiti or something.”
Susan pressed the receiver tightly to her ear, put her hand over her other ear, and said, “Sam, you don’t...”
“What? Suzie, are you there?”
“Sam... you don’t... sound like yourself.”
“Suzie, what’s this all about?”
She opened her mouth, but she couldn’t bring herself to speak the dreadful truth.
“Suzie?”
Even the goddamned telephone company couldn’t be trusted in Willawauk.
“Suzie, are you there?”
Her voice cracked with fury and anger, but she spat out the unthinkable thought: “You aren’t Sam Walker.”
Static.
Silence.
More static.
At last he giggled and said, “Of course I’m not Walker, you stupid bitch.”
It was Carl Jellicoe’s giggle.
Susan felt a thousand years old, older than that, ancient, wasted, shriveled, hollow.
The wind changed direction, slammed against the side of the phone booth, rattled the glass.
Jellicoe said, “Why do you insist on thinking it’s going to be easy to get away from us?”
Susan said nothing.
“There’s no place to hide. Nowhere to run.”
“Bastard,” she said.
“You’re finished. You’re through,” Jellicoe said. “Welcome to Hell, you dumb slut.”
She slammed the phone down.
Susan stepped out of the booth and looked around at the rain-drenched service station and at the street beyond. Nothing moved. There was no one in sight. No one was coming after her. Yet.
She was still free.
No, not free. She was still on a very long leash, but she was not free. On a leash—and she had the strong feeling that they were about to begin reeling it in.
For a little while, she walked, hardly aware of the rain and the cold wind any more, stubbornly disregarding the pain in her legs, unable to formulate any new escape plans. She was merely passing time now, waiting for them to come for her.
She paused in front of St. John’s Lutheran Church.
There was a light inside. It filtered out through the large, arched, stained-glass windows; it colored the rain red, blue, green, and yellow for a distance of three or four feet, and it imparted a rainbow glow to the thin veil of wind-whirled fog.
A parsonage was attached to the church, a Victorian-style structure: two full stories plus a gabled attic, bay windows on the second floor. The neatly tended lawn was illuminated by an ornate iron lamppost at the outer end of the walk, and two smaller, matching iron lamps on the porch posts, one on each side of the steps. A sign on the gate read, REV. POTTER B. KINFIELD.
Susan stood in front of Reverend Kinfield’s house for a couple of minutes, one hand on the gate, leaning against it. She was too weary to go on, but she was too proud to lie down in the street and just give up as if she were a whipped dog.
Without hope, but also without anything else to do and without anywhere else to go, she finally went up the walk and climbed the steps to the parsonage porch. You were supposed to be able to count on clergymen. You were supposed to be able to go to them with any kind of problem and get help. Would that be true of clergymen in Willawauk? Probably not.
She rang the bell.
Although the outside lights were burning brightly, the house itself was dark. That didn’t necessarily mean the preacher wasn’t home. He might have gone to bed. It was late, after all. She didn’t know exactly how late it was; she had lost track of time. But it must be somewhere between eleven o’clock and midnight.
She rang the bell again.
And again.
No lights came on inside. No one answered.
In anticipation of the minister’s response to the bell, Susan had summoned up images of warmth and comfort: a toasty parlor; a big, soft easy chair; pajamas, a heavy robe, and slippers borrowed from the preacher’s wife; maybe some nice buttered toast and hot chocolate; sympathy; outrage at what had been done to her; promises of protection and assistance; a bed with a firm mattress; crisp, clean sheets and heavy woolen blankets; two pillows; and a lovely, lovely feeling of being safe.
Now, when no one answered the door, Susan couldn’t get those images out of her mind. She simply could not forget them and just walk away. The loss hurt too much, even though it was the loss of something she’d never really possessed in the first place. She stood on the porch, quivering on the verge of tears, desperately wanting those damned dry pajamas and that hot chocolate, wanting them with such fierce intensity that the wanting drove out all other emotions, i
ncluding all fear of Ernest Harch and the walking dead men and the people behind Milestone.
She tried the door. It was locked.
She moved along the porch, trying the dash-hung windows. The three to the left of the door were all locked. The first one to the right was also locked, but the second one was not. It was swollen by the damp air, and it didn’t move easily, but finally she raised it far enough to squeeze through, into the parsonage.
She had just committed an illegal act. But she was a desperate woman, and the Reverend Kinfield would surely understand once he heard all the facts. Besides, this was Willawauk, Oregon, where the normal rules of society didn’t apply.
The interior of the house was utterly black. She couldn’t see more than two or three inches in front of her face.
Curiously, the house wasn’t warm, either. It seemed almost as cold as the night outside.
Susan felt her way along the wall, moving left, past the first window on that side of the door, then to the door itself. She located the switch on the wall, flicked it.
She blinked at the sudden flood of light—then blinked in surprise when she saw that the Lutheran parsonage was not what it appeared to be from the outside. It wasn’t a gracious old Victorian house. It was a warehouse: one room as large as a barn, more than two stories high, with no partitions, and a bare concrete floor. Life-size papier-mâché figures for a nativity scene, plus a large red sleigh complete with reindeer were suspended from the ceiling on wires, stored away until the holidays. The room itself was filled with cardboard cartons, hundreds upon hundreds of them stacked four and five high; there were also trunks, chests, enormous wooden crates, and a couple of dozen metal cabinets each about seven feet high, four feet deep and eight feet long. Everything was arranged in neat rows that extended the length of the building, with access aisles in between.
Baffled, Susan ventured away from the wall and went exploring through the stacks. In the first couple of cabinets, she found black choir robes hanging from metal bars, each robe sealed tightly in a clear plastic bag. In the third cabinet, she uncovered several Santa Claus outfits, two Easter Bunny costumes, and four sets of Pilgrims’ clothes that apparently were used in Thanksgiving celebrations. The first of the cardboard cartons—according to the labels on them—contained religious pamphlets, Bibles, and church songbooks.