by Dean Koontz
As Penny stood aside from Waxx, covering him with her gun, I told her, “If you see some guy coming, he’s barefoot and buck-toothed and carrying a banjo, wound him first and ask questions later.”
“This place isn’t all that Deliverance.”
“Yeah? You didn’t meet Uncle Frank’s nephew, he’s got the best sense of humor in the family.”
With a length of chain and two padlocks, I fitted Shearman Waxx with shackles, allowing enough slack for him to shuffle but not to run.
Next, I shackled his hands together in front of him, not behind, and left a comfortable but cautious foot of chain between his wrists.
Previously, I transferred our gear from the cargo space to the backseat. Waxx’s black suitcase stood on the ground by the Hummer.
Chained, he had some difficulty getting to his feet.
At last I assisted him, and he glared at me as if my assistance might be another reason to mutilate and murder me.
I made him lie faceup in the Hummer’s cargo space, head toward the backseat.
Penny stood at the open tailgate, her pistol aimed at Waxx’s crotch. As I worked, they got into a staring contest that neither of them would break.
Flip-up metal rings were recessed in the carpeted floor of the Hummer. Items could be secured to the rings to prevent them from shifting during transit.
With additional lengths of chain, I padlocked Waxx’s wrist shackles to one of those anchors, his ankle shackles to another.
When that task was completed, Penny put her pistol away, and we opened the black bag with the stainless-steel fixtures.
In an aluminum case within the suitcase, we found a formidable pistol with two spare magazines, a screw-on sound suppressor, and a shoulder rig.
Penny fitted the silencer to the barrel, stepped away from the Hummer, and fired two shots at one of the boarded-up windows of the church. The cracking plywood made a lot more noise than the weapon.
“I’ll take this,” Penny said.
“You were made for each other.”
The suitcase also contained a Taser and what we assumed must be instruments of torture: a scalpel, four nasty little thumbscrew clamps, a pair of needle-nose pliers, a culinary torch of the kind used to glaze crème brûlée, and an array of other toys for sadists, including a thick rubber bite guard to prevent the subject from chewing his tongue while convulsed with pain.
A pharmacy kit was stocked with a variety of drugs, several individually packaged hypodermic syringes, cotton balls, a bottle of isopropyl alcohol, and a length of rubber tubing to be used as a tourniquet.
After examining the drugs, Penny selected a sedative.
“This is going to make the drive a lot more pleasant for us.”
She leaned in the back of the Hummer and asked Waxx how much of the sleeping drug she could safely administer to him, and how often.
“You could accidentally give me an embolism if you inject an air bubble with the sedative,” he said.
“You mean like you did intentionally to John Clitherow’s father on that boat?”
“You are so dead,” he said.
Penny said, “If the time comes to kill you, I won’t make it as easy as a needle.”
Waxx hesitated, but then told her the proper dosage.
She crawled into the cargo space with him, used the tourniquet to help clarify a vein in his right arm, and swabbed the injection site with alcohol.
For the first time, Waxx showed a trace of anxiety. “Where are you taking me?”
From the open tailgate, I said, “Home.”
“Before you do anything that goes … a step too far,” Waxx said, “there’s time to reach an understanding.”
“We understand enough about you already,” I said. “And you’ll never understand us.”
“But this isn’t right.”
“It’s not a fair world.”
“You’ve committed numerous felonies,” Waxx said.
My laugh had a bitter quality that didn’t sound like me. I said, “Freak.”
His face flushed, and he said, “Hack.”
Penny put him to sleep less permanently than she might have liked.
We spent the long day driving south, Milo and Lassie in the backseat, Penny and I up front, spelling each other at the wheel. The Hummer rode well, and we made good time.
Waxx remained supine in the cargo space, covered in a blanket except for his face. When you couldn’t see the chains, he looked as if he were having, by choice, a pleasant snooze.
When we got hungry, we stopped for take-out and ate while on the road.
Each time that Waxx came around enough to tell us how totally dead we were, Penny administered additional sedative.
Among the items taken from his pockets were a set of what most likely were house keys. From the key ring hung a remote-control fob much like the one that we had used to open the garage doors at the peninsula house.
In his wallet, Penny found a card with the house alarm-system codes and the phone number to call in the event of a false alarm.
More interesting were the four photos of the woman, portraits. In one, she appeared to be in her forties; another two might have been taken about a decade later; and in the fourth, she most likely had been sixty-something.
She was a handsome woman but not pretty. At first her face seemed severe, but after studying her long enough, you realized that her features were generous enough and that the impression of severity came from the way she presented herself.
Pulled back from her face, her hair was worn in a chignon, a tight roll that lay at the nape of her neck. It had been dark in her forties and fifties, later gray.
In all four photos, her lips were pressed together as though someone were trying to force a spoonful of bitter medicine upon her. The corners of her mouth puckered with tension. She appeared to be incapable of a smile.
Her wide-set eyes were blue but not warm like Penny’s, tempered by striations of gray. In every instance, she glared at the camera as if she loathed posing for photographs, and I suspected that in her presence you could almost feel the iciness of that stare.
In the wallet, Penny also found a folded index card with a typed bit of commemorative verse titled “To Mother on Her 60th Birthday.”
While I drove, she read it aloud with the lack of feeling that it merited: “Mother of life, Mother of death. Mother of all, you take my breath. Mother of all our tomorrows. Give us a world without sorrows. Love is the illusion of fools. Wisdom is the power that rules. Mother bring us all together. Change this world now and forever.”
“Doesn’t seem like it comes from a Hallmark card,” I said.
Penny said, “It’s signed—‘Your obedient son, Shearman.’”
From the backseat, Milo piped: “I might have blown something up that one time, but I’ve never dropped a poetry bomb like that on you.”
“And I’m grateful, Milo,” Penny said.
“Is Mother the woman in the four photos?” I wondered.
“I’d bet both kidneys and a lung on it,” Penny said.
After we had eaten a late lunch of cheeseburgers while rolling steadily south, with Penny at the wheel, I said, “I’m not sure why we’re afraid to talk about it.”
“I’m not sure, either,” Penny said.
“I mean, with all the horrible things we’ve learned and seen and been forced to do these last few days, this doesn’t seem scary by comparison.”
“And yet,” Penny said, “I’m so afraid to bring it up that I’d almost rather talk about what these crazy red-arm bastards did to Henry Casas and Tom Landulf and the others.”
“I know what you mean. I’d almost rather read Waxx’s idiotic poem a hundred times than open the door on this.”
“And yet what could we learn that would be terrible? For some time, she’s been doing strange things, but she’s still just a dog.”
“And such a very cute dog,” I said.
“An adorable dog. Remember the day we rescued her from the
shelter? She stole our hearts in a minute.”
“In an instant,” I said. “On first sight.”
Penny blotted her left palm on her jacket, then her right, and took a firmer grip on the steering wheel. “All right, here goes.”
I closed my eyes and drew a deep breath. “Here goes.”
To Milo in the backseat, Penny said, “Honey, Spooky, remember when we were in the trunk of the car with Lassie?”
“That was interesting, riding in the trunk,” Milo said, “but I wouldn’t want to do it again.”
Penny said, “I had my arm around Lassie to keep her calm.”
“You didn’t need to do that, Mom. She’s a supercalm dog by nature.”
“The thing is, honey, one second Lassie was cuddled with me, and the next second she was … gone.”
The boy said, “Well, it was dark in the trunk, so you don’t know, like maybe she crawled off in a corner.”
“The way we were crammed in that trunk, there was nowhere to crawl, Milo.”
“Besides,” I said, “suddenly she was in the backseat of the sedan.”
Cagey Milo said, “You saw her?”
“She growled, and I looked back, and there she was.”
“You’re sure that was when she was supposed to be in the trunk and not earlier?”
“Milo,” I said. “You and your mom were in the trunk at the time. I’m not confused about the circumstances.”
“I see,” said Milo.
“Furthermore,” I pressed, “the next thing I know, she’s in the front seat, beside me.”
“Maybe you asked her to come up with you.”
In as stern a voice as we ever took with him, Penny and I simultaneously said, “Milo.”
“This isn’t easy,” the boy said.
After a silence, Penny said, “We’re listening.”
“Mom, Dad, I don’t want you to think I’m a screwup.”
“We don’t think you’re a screwup,” I assured him.
“Not yet maybe. But I did blow up that one thing, and now this.”
“This what?”
“This thing with Lassie.”
“And the thing would be—what?”
“Well, here’s the way it is,” Milo said. “You know I was working on the time-travel thing.”
“Yes,” Penny said, “and you decided time travel is impossible.”
“That was after I made the vest.”
“What vest?” Penny asked.
“The time vest. The time vest for Lassie. I was trying to send her one minute into the future.”
“You were experimenting with Lassie?” Penny asked with a clear note of disapproval.
“She loves working with me. It couldn’t hurt her.”
“What if it accidentally sent her a billion years into the future and we never saw her again?”
“Couldn’t happen. Time travel is impossible.”
Penny said, “You didn’t know that when you pushed the button.”
“What button?”
“The dog time-vest button.”
“It doesn’t have a button. It’s a sliding switch.”
“Milo.”
“Okay, okay, what happened was she didn’t disappear one minute into the future, instead she teleported from one side of my room to the other, so when I thought I made a time vest, I actually made a teleportation vest.”
I opened my eyes.
Penny blotted her hands on her jacket again.
I cleared my throat.
Penny said, “You haven’t used this teleportation vest yourself, have you?”
“No. There seems to be a weight limit for teleportation. It’s a thing Lassie can do, but I’m like ten pounds too heavy.”
“Don’t you ever try to teleport yourself anywhere,” Penny said adamantly. “Don’t you ever.”
“Milo,” I said, “for God’s sake, you’ve seen Vincent Price in The Fly.”
“Well, that couldn’t happen in real life, only the movies,” he said defensively.
A quibble occurred to me. “Wait a minute. When Lassie was in the trunk of the car, she wasn’t wearing any vest.”
“Well, see, that’s the thing.”
“That’s what thing?”
“The funny thing I can’t figure.”
“Milo.”
“After Lassie teleported a few times in the vest, she like didn’t need the vest anymore to do it.”
Penny realized that she had been pressing on the accelerator during the latter part of this conversation, and we were rocketing along the freeway at just over a hundred miles an hour. She allowed our speed to fall back to the posted limit.
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “Lassie is now a dog who can teleport herself at will, anywhere she wants.”
“Not anywhere,” Milo said. “There seems to be a distance limit. She can teleport across the room. Or like from the car trunk to the backseat. Or like from the backseat to the front seat. Or like into a drawer or to the top of a cabinet. But she can’t go more than maybe ten feet, fifteen feet, maybe twenty. She travels point to point instantaneously, but they’re just little trips.”
Penny and I were both silent for a while, but there must have been an unusual quality about my silence, because she said, “Cubby?”
“Huh?”
“What is it?”
“I think she can teleport farther than twenty feet.”
“Where do you think she went? Did she bring a souvenir back from Hong Kong?”
Remembering how the pursuing Explorer had abruptly gone out of control, as if the driver had been attacked by a swarm of bees, I said, “She ported from the sedan to the Explorer that was pursuing us. Those guys are chasing us, gaining, and suddenly a dog that was never in the vehicle is all over them, maybe in the driver’s face, then on his back, then in the other guy’s lap, growling and snarling and biting—”
“Lassie would never bite anyone,” Penny said.
“Never,” Milo agreed.
“She might have bitten these guys. They looked like people who needed to be bitten.”
Penny said, “So did she realize the thugs in the Explorer were a threat to us, and she basically took them out—is that what you’re telling me? Is that really what you’re telling me?”
“Dogs,” Milo said, “have been very protective of their human companions for thousands of years.”
Lassie growled in agreement.
After a long period of thoughtful silence, with Penny still behind the wheel of the Hummer, I said, “Milo?”
“Yeah, Dad.”
“The saltshakers.”
“What saltshakers?”
“The ones you gave us in the cellar of the Landulf house.”
“Oh, those aren’t saltshakers anymore.”
Penny said, “I’m not sure I’m prepared for this right now. We killed two men this morning, we’ve got Waxx chained to the floor in back, we’ve got a teleporting dog, so it’s like, you know, enough is enough for one day.”
Quite reasonably, I explained my position to her: “To avoid any unpleasant surprises, I’d just like to know if the saltshakers will send me to Mars or turn me into a wolf, or throw me into a parallel dimension where dinosaurs still rule the earth. I’m not asking the hour of my death or whether I’m going to spend the rest of my life in a people-of-the-red-arms prison, I don’t want information that would make living unbearable. I just want to know what the saltshakers will do.”
Penny Boom said, “Let it go.”
“It’s defensive knowledge. It’s like, what if you were walking around with a butane lighter in your pocket, and you didn’t know what it was, you thought maybe it was a breath freshener, so you stuck it in your mouth to get a squirt of mint, and you clicked it, and you set your tongue on fire.”
“Let it go.”
“Milo,” I said.
“Yeah, Dad.”
“Will the saltshaker send me to Mars?”
“It’s not a saltshaker anymore.”<
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“Whatever it is, will it send me to Mars?”
“No, that’s not possible.”
“Will it turn me into a wolf?”
“That’s kind of a silly question.”
“But will it turn me into a wolf?”
“Of course not.”
“Will it throw me into a parallel dimension where dinosaurs still rule the earth?”
“I don’t mean to be rude, Dad, but that’s stupid. Won’t happen even with the pepper shakers.”
“You’ve got pepper shakers, too?”
“Let it go,” said Penny.
“Let’s stay with the saltshakers, Spooky.”
“That’s all we’ve got,” he said, “except they aren’t saltshakers anymore, like I keep saying.”
“What are they supposed to do?”
“You mean when they were saltshakers or now?”
“Now. What will they do now?”
“This thing that’s like nothing anyone would think could happen. You have to experience it to understand.”
Penny said, “Cubby, if you don’t let it go, I’m going to start screaming.”
“You won’t start screaming,” I said.
“Yes, I will, and I’ll want to stop, I really will want to stop, but I won’t be able to stop, I’ll scream insane things like ‘butane breath freshener,’ all day, all night, and then what are you going to do with me, are you going to take me back to Titus Springs and ask Frank the hardware guy’s geeky nephew to lock me in his basement?”
Suddenly it seemed to me that I had been hectoring Milo and Penny much as Hud Jacklight often hectored me.
Mortified, I said, “You’re right.”
She regarded me with suspicion.
“No,” I said, “you are, you’re right. Sometimes it’s best to just let it go. We’ve been through a lot today, and it’s not over yet. We still have to deal with Waxx, and that’s enough. Dealing with Waxx is all by itself too much.”
In the backseat, Lassie yawned loudly, and Milo said, “Dad, it’s just that if I tried to explain the science, it would sound like gobbledygook to you.”
“I’ve let it go, Milo.”