Relentless

by Dean Koontz

  Never had the nickname Spooky been better suited to him.

  “All right?” I asked Penny.

  She nodded. “All right.”

  When Milo smiled, I found his smile contagious.

  Clotilda took one egg from a thatched-reed basket full of them and threw it on the floor. For a moment, she studied the splatter of white, yolk, and shell. “He’s right. If you don’t take him with you, we’ll never see either of you again.”

  From his perch upon the stool, Milo surveyed the ruined egg, then grinned up at his grandfather. “Grandma’s a hoot.”

  “She’s a hoot and a half,” Grimbald confirmed, and beamed with great affection at his bride. “I remember when I first saw her—such a radiant vision in the woods, on her knees, arms up to the elbows in a deer carcass.”

  A girlish blush suffused Clo’s face as she was swept away by this romantic memory. “After you shoot it, gutting it in the woods saves a mess at home later. But there’s always some danger that the blood smell will draw hungry critters. Your grandfather was standing in tree shadows, and when I looked up, I thought he must be a bear.”

  “She moved so fast, from carcass to rifle,” Grim remembered, “that I almost became her second kill of the day.”

  Both he and Clo laughed, and she said, “But then he blurts out ‘I have seen Diana, Roman goddess of the hunt and of the moon, here abroad in daylight and brighter than the sun.’”

  “Grimpa really said that?” Milo asked.

  “He really did. So I knew right then I either had to shoot him or marry him.”

  Having heard this story countless times before, Penny was less enchanted than Milo. “We’ve got a long way to go. Better get moving. Where’s Lassie?”

  “Probably in the potato bin,” Milo guessed.

  “I told you, sweetness, the bin’s empty,” Clotilda reminded him. “I forgot to fill it last month, and I used up the last for these home fries.”

  “That’s why she’ll be there, Grandma. It’s a cool, dark, quiet place, and it smells good. Sometimes Lassie needs cool, dark, and quiet.”

  In the northwest corner of the kitchen, two bins were recessed in the stone floor, a pair of small concrete-walled vaults, one for potatoes and the other for onions.

  Clotilda, Penny, and I gathered around as Grimbald lifted the hinged wooden lid from the potato bin.

  In the four-by-five-foot space, four feet below us, comfortably curled on a bed of empty potato sacks, Lassie looked up and yawned.

  “The lid’s heavy. How did she get in there?” Clotilda asked.

  “The usual way,” I said.

  “And how is that?”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  With a destination that required a long drive, we set out from the Boom stronghold into a world of dark and rain and trouble.

  I found the visit with Grim and Clo to be energizing, but the refreshment of mind and spirit faded soon after we were on the road.

  Because Penny had gotten a two-hour nap at the peninsula house, she somewhat recovered from the sleep lost the previous night when Shearman Waxx Tasered us. Giving me the opportunity to have a snooze, she drove the first leg of our journey northward.

  In the backseat, using a flashlight, Milo examined the items that his grandfather secured on the black market, while Lassie noisily sniffed them. He muttered excitedly to himself or perhaps to the dog.

  The windshield wipers should have been as effective as the shiny pendant of a hypnotist. By the time we were on the freeway, the thrum of tires should have been a sedative.

  In the best circumstances, however, I have difficulty sleeping in a moving vehicle. Arguably the primary shaping force of my life has been a curiosity about where I am going, not in a day or a week, but a curiosity about where ultimately I might be going. The forward motion of a car stirs in me this lifelong inquisitiveness, which is as much a yearning as it is a need to know, and mile by mile I grow more restless for revelation.

  Eyes closed, I said to Penny, “Sometimes I worry about Milo. At the stronghold, I realized you had a childhood like his. Homeschooled. No friends your age. Your world limited to family, a kind of isolation. What were the negatives of a childhood like that?”

  “None,” she said without hesitation. “Growing up in a loving family, with parents who have a sense of humor and common sense and a sense of wonder—that’s not isolation, that’s a wonderful haven.”

  I loved the sound of her voice as much as the sight of her face. Eyes closed, I couldn’t see her beauty, but I could hear it.

  “More than a haven,” she said. “It’s a sanctuary, where you can decide who you are, what you think about the world, before the world tells you who you are and what you ought to think of it.”

  “You had your talent, writing and drawing, just like Milo has a talent for … something. Don’t you wonder if less isolation and more experience in the early years might’ve made you a different artist?”

  “One I wouldn’t want to be. By the time I went to art school, all I wanted was better technique. I already had my own theories of art, so those of the most opinionated professors didn’t corrupt me.”

  We rode in silence. Then I said, “What a magical world it is—folks like yours, living like they do, raising a wonder like you.”

  “I’m no more a wonder than anyone. And that’s what makes the world magical. Every baby’s a seed of wonder—that gets watered or it doesn’t. As a kid, I loved going down into the stronghold. It was like something out of Tolkien, a hobbit’s home.”

  I opened my eyes. The bracketing hills and the six-lane highway seemed not to await illumination by the headlights but to dissolve before those beams could reveal more. The pavement, other traffic, the guardrails, the landscape deliquesced into the solvent rain, and we appeared to be rushing always toward a brink and an abyss.

  “Seventy percent of people in prison were raised without a dad in the home,” she said. “I was lucky—I had a father and a half.”

  When I closed my eyes, the image of the melting world stayed with me, and carried me into sleep.

  In my lost-and-alone dream, I walked a deserted highway that led through featureless salt flats, and not a single cloud graced the sky, and no currents moved the air nor did a single bird move through it, and no lines divided the blacktop into lanes, and the only salient detail was the blood trail that led toward a horizon that could not be clearly discerned.

  The ringing of my cell phone woke me. It was my regular phone, not the disposable.

  As I fished it from my shirt pocket, Penny said, “Should you?”

  I hesitated, but then took the call.

  John Clitherow—author of the Waxx-savaged Mr. Bluebird and writer on the run—said, “Cullen, I have to tell you how my wife and daughters died.”

  “I have to tell you,” John Clitherow repeated. “I have to.” Having slumped in sleep, I sat up straighter in the passenger seat, and saw that we were on a lonely stretch of highway with few lights visible on the flanking hills. Into the phone, I said, “I’m sorry for your losses. I did some research, I know about your folks. It’s all so … it’s horrible.” The torment in his voice was thin, yet no less affecting for its thinness, just as the stropped edge of a knife is thin but cuts.

  “Right after the Michigan police phoned me to say my parents’ bodies had been found—the condition, such brutality—I told them about Waxx, the review, my dead cat. They did nothing with that, Cullen. Nothing. Why? And then Waxx called again. He just said ‘Next?’ and hung up. He was insane—and serious. He’d said ‘doom,’ now my folks were dead. But who’s going to believe it … fast enough to save the rest of my family? Not the cops. So I took Margaret, my wife, the two girls, we ran. I wanted them someplace secure before I went to the police again. We weren’t followed. I know we weren’t.”

  I heard him swallow hard, then swallow again.

  When I glanced at Penny, she glanced at me. “Clitherow?” she asked, and I nodded.

  �
�We drove over a hundred miles,” he continued, “no destination, getting away from where he expected to find us. It was worse than fear, Cullen, it had nothing to do with intellect or imagination, it was undiluted fright, raw nerves. Fear can be controlled by an act of will, but I couldn’t control what I was feeling. Then … a hundred miles made me feel better. God help me, I felt kind of safe.”

  The rain grew heavier and seemed to rush at us more urgently than before. Penny adjusted the wiper speed, and the blades arced faster, thumped louder.

  John said, “We stopped at this nothing motel. A room with two queen-size beds. Not the kind of place we would have stayed before— which made it seem even safer, so anonymous. Margie and I could think things through there, decide what next. Emily and Sarah, our girls, only six and seven, didn’t know their grandparents were murdered, but they were sensitive kids, they knew something was wrong.”

  The previous thin edge of pain in his voice had grown sharper, past distress now, short of anguish, but cutting ever deeper as he approached the recollection of his next loss.

  “For the girls, Margie and I tried to pass the trip off as a vacation. Took them to a kid-friendly restaurant. Back at the motel, the girls went fast asleep in one of the beds, in spite of TV-news chatter. Margie wanted a hot shower. Closed the bathroom door so she wouldn’t disturb the girls. I watched … I watched … the news.”

  A Peterbilt roared past the Mountaineer, traveling too fast for road conditions, flinging up a sheet of water from the puddled pavement. Cascades overwhelmed the wipers, and for too long we were blinded. All that might lie ahead vanished from view.

  “I thought I’d see something on the news about my folks, but nothing. Then … Margie was a long time in the bathroom. I knocked, she didn’t answer. I went in to see if she was okay, but she … she wasn’t there.”

  John paused. His breathing was quick and shallow. Before it quickened further, he worked to control it.

  Ordinarily, in weather this foul, I might have suggested to Penny that she pull off the highway and wait for the torrents to diminish. But stopping in this lonely night seemed like an invitation to Death, and I preferred hurtling half-blind into the downpour.

  John continued: “The shower was running, stall door open. Her underwear, her robe on the floor. There was a double-hung frosted window. Bottom sash was up, curtains billowing. How could he have taken her so quietly, no struggle? I went out through the window. Behind the motel was a field, an endless field, far away a line of trees, all visible under a full moon, nobody out there, nobody.”

  Penny whispered my name, wanting to know something of what John was saying. I glanced at her but shook my head.

  The sight of her flooded me with apprehension—that she would vanish like Margaret Clitherow, that she would turn a corner and not be there when an instant later I rounded the same corner, that she would walk from one room into another and be gone forever.

  “The motel had three wings. I found my way around to the front,” John recalled, “sure I’d see her being forced into a car. But the night was quiet. No one in sight. Only the desk clerk in the motel office, watching TV. Then I saw the door of our room standing open. I thought … I knew… I left the girls alone, now they were gone, too.”

  Another massive truck began to pass the Mountaineer, its array of running lights blurring as it cast up blinding sheets of water. Penny eased up on the accelerator to let the rig get past us more quickly, and I almost urged her to keep the pedal down.

  “But in the motel room, the girls were asleep, just as I’d left them.

  But on the second bed … sparkling on the bedspread … Margie’s engagement ring, wedding band. I knew then she was dead or as good as dead. He wouldn’t taunt me with the rings if she were nearby where I might find her. Explaining this to cops in a strange town—no chance. They’d think she walked out on me. The returned rings proved it. No abductor would return her rings. Waxx did it once, he could do it twice, the girls would be next. I had to think only of the girls.”

  Guilt twisted his voice. He believed he failed Margaret. Even if that was not true, he would always believe it.

  I said, “Take your time. If it’s too much now, you can call me later. Or not at all.”

  “No. I have to tell you. You don’t understand. I have to tell you.” He took a deep breath. “So I threw into the suitcases what little we’d taken out of them. Emily and Sarah were so sound asleep, they hardly stirred when I carried them out to our SUV and belted them in the backseat. When I drove away, no one followed us. But no one had followed us from home to the motel, not for a hundred miles.”

  “Credit card,” I said, remembering the warnings he had given me.

  “Yeah. I thought—the American Express I used at the motel. You see in movies, they can track you like that. But this wasn’t the FBI. This was a half-baked book critic with no more resources for tracking someone than I have. So maybe he planted something on our SUV.”

  I said, “Some kind of transponder or something.”

  “So I found a residential neighborhood, cars parked at the curb, in driveways. I went looking for keys behind sun visors, under seats. Couldn’t believe the risk I was taking. I was crazy with terror for the girls. I stole a Chrysler PT Cruiser, put our bags in it, moved the girls from our car. Emily grumbled, but I shushed her to sleep.”

  As Penny squinted through the smeary windshield, rain persisted, but suddenly the traffic washed away. Mirrors reflected the emptiness behind the Mountaineer. Ahead, no taillights were visible. Beyond the reach of headlights, the highway became a hidden vein in the wet flesh of the night, and we raced forward like an air-bubble embolism toward an unknown but inevitable moment of destruction.

  “This was back east,” John said. “We lived in New York State, but the hundred miles took us into Pennsylvania. In the PT Cruiser, I kept going south. My agent, Jerry Simons, lived in Manhattan but owned a four-acre retreat in Bucks County, spent weekends there in summer. Margie and I stayed once, for a week. Now, late September, I didn’t know if Jerry was using the place. I called his cell phone, got him in New York, made up a story about needing isolation to finish my novel. The house was available. I knew where the spare key was hidden. The girls and I were there in three hours.”

  To this point, the tightly controlled emotion with which John Clitherow recounted these events suggested that I was the first to whom he had told the story in almost three years and that his need to unburden himself was acute. The urgency with which he spoke seemed to arise from a determination to share information that might spare me from losses like those he suffered.

  When he arrived in memory at the house in Bucks County, however, his manner and his tone changed. His urgency abated, as did the note of guilt in his account. The distress that had been swelling toward anguish now shrank to a chilling insensibility, and his voice became flat, his cadence slow.

  “I couldn’t sleep that night in Bucks County. Sat in a bedroom armchair, watching over the girls, torn by grief and guilt and fear. I loathed myself, my helplessness. Self-hatred is exhausting. After dawn, I fell asleep in the chair. Woke and saw the girls were gone. Stumbled like a drunkard through the house, hunting them. Just before I found them in the family room, I heard them screaming.”

  The seeming indifference in Clitherow’s voice didn’t sound like stoicism, not like an intentional suppression of feeling. It was apathy, the consequence of reaching a tipping point. Having felt too much for too long, he was drained of feeling, of the desire to feel.

  “In the living room, Emily and Sarah, still in their pajamas, ran toward me, weeping, screaming. I opened my arms, but they pushed away, eluded me. They ran into the kitchen, up the back stairs. And I saw they’d been watching television. And I saw on the screen … my wife, naked and chained to a wall. And she was still alive. And a man, face concealed by a hood, he was … he was … cutting her.”

  As I listened to John Clitherow, the cell phone grew damp and slippery in my hand. I he
ld it tighter.

  “And I didn’t hear the girls screaming anymore,” he continued. “I went upstairs to find them. And they weren’t in the bedroom where they had slept, where I’d watched over them. And they weren’t in the next room or the next. And they weren’t downstairs. And they weren’t in the backyard. They were gone. And I never found them.”

  Suddenly I wanted Penny to take the next exit, turn away from the place to which we were headed. We weren’t detectives, we didn’t know how to gather evidence and build a case. Besides, if we went where Waxx had been, if we probed his past, he was more likely to find us. The shadow of the predator is no place for the prey to hide.

  John Clitherow droned through a nightmare that was no less terrifying for the flat tone of his voice: “And I went back into the family room where my wife was still on the TV. And he was still doing things to her. And on the floor in front of the TV were the pajamas my daughters were wearing when they ran screaming from the room, returned to me like my wife’s rings were returned. I tried to take the DVD out of the player, there was no DVD. I changed channels. She was dying on all of them. And something happened to me then, I don’t remember clearly, and I think I smashed the TV screen with a lamp. And I knew Jerry kept a gun in the house. And I searched and found it and loaded it with one round. I was going to kill myself.”

  I had not said anything to Clitherow in a while. Nothing I could say would make any difference. He didn’t need to hear me speak to know that I was listening.

  His voice sounded more lifeless than ever: “Maybe I didn’t have the courage for suicide, or all the years I believed in the sanctity of life made suicide impossible. And gradually I started wanting to kill Waxx more than I wanted to die. So I put nine more cartridges in the gun. And I waited for him. And three days passed. And the phone rang. Waxx said just ‘Porch.’ And on the back porch I found a DVD.”