by Dean Koontz
“If it makes you feel better, Dad, I can guarantee you the saltshaker won’t set your tongue on fire.”
“That’s good to know, son.”
“It won’t freshen your breath, either.”
As we were entering the Los Angeles area, the day wanted to move on toward Japan, and I let it go.
A short while later, the twilight wanted to follow the day, and I let it go.
Letting go of things greatly relaxed me. I felt that at last I was making progress and that one day I would be the same Cubby that I had always been, would hold fast to my best qualities, but would have become a Cubby who could let things go.
We were now drawing very close to the moment when one of the three of us would be shot dead, whereafter life would never be the same.
The Shearman Waxx house looked exactly like it did on Google Earth: cream-colored walls, terra-cotta window surrounds, a handsome Spanish Mediterranean residence set behind forty-foot magnolias that canopied the front yard. At night, romantic landscape lighting made the place magical.
Larger than expected, set on a markedly more expansive property than was customary in crowded Laguna Beach, the Waxx residence suggested an owner who possessed wealth and power. Neither Penny nor I had the stomach to torture information out of Waxx. Here, more than anywhere else, we might find files and other records regarding his mission and the group symbolized by the triskelion.
At some point during the day, Waxx would surely have been missed and a search for him undertaken by his colleagues. But they would be expecting to find him somewhere in that northern county and would not imagine that he’d been kidnapped and taken home in a marathon twelve-hour drive.
Nevertheless, we cruised by the house a few times, looking for the trouble that might be looking for us. All seemed calm.
No lights shone at any of the windows.
Using the fob on his key ring, I opened one of the doors at the pair of double garages, and Penny drove the Hummer inside. I put the door down.
Having expected a security alarm to be triggered when we drove into the garage, I was ready to let myself quickly into the house with Waxx’s keys and enter the disarming code that we had found in his wallet. But no alarm sounded.
The three of us, with dog, stood in the garage for a minute, very still, listening, waiting for someone to appear. No one came.
Waxx remained unconscious in his chains, and we decided to leave him in the Hummer while we completed a tour of the house. Once we had found his files or evidence of a safe, we might need to scare a few answers out of him.
I unlocked the door between garage and house. Penny and I, guns drawn, shepherded Milo along a hallway into a kitchen. We turned on lights as we went.
Evidently designed for frequent use by caterers, the enormous kitchen was not just industrial but also off-putting. The appliances were all stainless steel, as were the counters and the backsplashes and the cabinets. The autopsy theater in a morgue was not as cold-looking as this kitchen.
In room after room, the furniture was stark, the upholstery all in shades of black and silver, the carpets gray, and the artwork so modern that it appeared to have been painted by machines.
We entered a large room that lacked furniture and art. The black-granite floor, gray walls, and indirect cove lighting most likely had been intended to convey a serene mood, but instead the decor made me feel empty. If you were disposed to despair, this place would induce it in but a minute.
As if meditating or in communion with the darkness until we turned on the lights, the woman in Shearman Waxx’s wallet photos stood in the center of the room.
She was older than in the latest photo, at least in her mid-seventies. She remained a handsome woman, although thinner than I had imagined, tall and storklike.
Wearing a well-tailored suit—long black skirt, gray jacket, gray blouse—and a simple but stunning diamond necklace, she took pride in her appearance.
If her eyes had not been open and so watchful, I would have thought she was a mummified corpse, preserved with painstaking care.
“What have you done with my Shearman?” she asked, and her voice was strong, commanding, her diction clipped.
“He’s sedated, chained in a Hummer in the garage,” I told her.
Looking from pistol to pistol, she said, “And have you come here to kill me?”
“We’ve come here for answers,” Penny said. “You’re Mrs. Waxx?”
“Waxx is a name I chose and made my own. It was not imposed on me. I never married. I didn’t need a husband to have a son.”
She began to walk toward us, and the nearer she came, the more that she unnerved me. She seemed to glide rather than take steps, as if she were a motorized automaton, not a real woman.
“When a thing wanes, it diminishes. When a thing waxes, it grows more intense, more powerful. Waxx is my work name, and I fulfill it.”
“You are one weird lady,” Milo said with childlike directness.
“What is that filthy animal doing in my house?”
Milo took offense: “Lassie isn’t filthy. She’s as clean as you are. And she can do things you could never do.”
Lassie did not lower herself to growl at this scarecrow, but regarded her with canine contempt.
“Bite your tongue, boy. You should know to whom you’re speaking. My maiden name is Zazu Wane. In Who’s Who, my long and enviable entry is rich with details of my compassion and my charity. But what I have done that truly matters, I have done as Zazu Waxx, and it’s more than a nation full of your kind could ever hope to achieve.”
“And what achievement would that be?” Penny asked.
“For fifty years, I have pioneered the new science of designing culture. I have shaped American and hence world culture through many billions of dollars of sub-rosa propaganda campaigns but also—and more effectively—through the application of techniques more often employed in espionage and warfare.”
“Sounds like it keeps you busy,” Penny said.
“Oh, terribly busy, my dear.”
“Better stop there,” I said as Zazu came within ten feet of us.
She halted but looked so full of tightly coiled energy that she might have been able to strike as quick as a snake and cross ten feet in an instant.
“Billions of dollars,” Milo said. “Are you that rich?”
Staring down her long straight nose at the boy, as a bird might study a bug before eating it, Zazu Waxx said, “I have the unlimited resources of the federal treasury.”
“Sounds better than my allowance.”
“And unlike our foolish and inept intelligence agencies, I have kept us on an entirely black budget all these years.”
She was clearly proud of her achievements, not to say arrogant, not to say megalomaniacal. But I didn’t think she would tell us about all of this if she expected us to leave the house alive.
Light bloomed in the space beyond this meditation chamber, and a moment later, through a door on the far side of the room came the Maserati monster, unaware of us, mumbling to himself, his big hands worrying at each other. He was Shearman Waxx’s size and physical type, but he shambled more than walked, and he was a hunchback.
Here, without the intervening rain of our first encounter, he struck me as less monstrous than tragic. His mumbling became audible, and revealed a tortured spirit: “Don’t touch, don’t touch the pretty things, you’ll break them, you stupid boy, you clumsy boy, don’t touch the pretty things.”
“You,” Zazu said sharply.
The man halted and looked up, his fearsome face now fearful, his eyes deep pools of dread.
“What have you broken now?” she asked.
His mouth worked, but no words came out. Then he escaped the black-hole gravity with which Zazu commanded his attention, and he noticed us. “Zazu, they don’t belong here, they don’t, they don’t.” He began to wring his hands. “What’s happened? What’s wrong?”
The rough voice was that of the brutal murderer who slit John Cl
itherow’s throat and who, on the phone with me, called himself the brother of all humanity.
He was a creature of two moods: a miscreation with a rotten purpose and a taste for violence; but apparently also an outsider, alone in the world, whose singularity sometimes made him insecure, uncertain, and fainthearted.
“They don’t belong here, we have trouble, we have trouble.”
Clearly perturbed, Zazu said, “Shut up or I will shut you up.”
Her perturbation might mean that the hunchback’s surprise matched her own, which she had striven to conceal. If indeed we surprised her, she was not as in control of the situation as she pretended to be.
She said, “They claim your father is chained in the Hummer in the garage.”
Penny and I exchanged a glance. We both said, “Father?”
“They say,” Zazu continued, “that he’s alive. They may be lying about both issues.” To us, she said, “You have the guns. So I must ask—may he go confirm what you have said before we discuss whatever it is you want?”
Without the key to all the padlocks, freeing Shearman Waxx might easily take half an hour with the proper tools.
“I want him back here in two minutes,” I said, “or I’ll have to shoot you dead.”
Zazu did not like the ticking clock, perhaps because she thought the hunchback unreliable, but she knew there could be no better terms than this.
The stare she turned upon the hunchback made him cringe. His shoulders slumped further, and he hung his head, regarding her meekly from beneath the shelf of his heavy brow.
She said to him, “If you want to be allowed to do those things you so much like to do, be back here in two minutes.”
“Yes, Zazu. I will, I will, Zazu. I understand. Don’t I always do what you say?”
The hunchback hurried from the room, by way of the door through which we had entered.
Suddenly I remembered John Clitherow’s curious last words to me: And now I am in the tower de Paris with—
John had been trying to warn me, without giving away his game, that should a horribly deformed man cross my path, I must not pity him or let him get too close. Victor Hugo’s famous novel Notre-Dame de Paris was in English titled The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and the tower of course was the bell tower of that cathedral.
I directed Zazu to move between us and the door by which the hunchback had departed.
The creature’s big-knuckled, thick-fingered hands would be so clumsy with a gun that he probably always chose a knife, as with Clitherow, but using Zazu as cover seemed right to me.
Returning to the subject of her vaunted achievements, Zazu said, “The problem with culture is that it swings like a pendulum, driven by one theory for a while and then by a countertheory.”
“That’s the same way it is when you’re working on the time-travel problem,” Milo said.
For a moment, Zazu looked as if she might spit a stream of blinding venom at the boy.
But she was too eager to talk about herself to be sidetracked from her favorite subject: “My life’s work is to stop the pendulum from swinging ever again and to maintain it along the arc on which the genius Rousseau set it moving more than two hundred years ago.”
“They say I’m a kind of genius,” Milo told her.
“You are the wrong kind of genius,” Zazu informed him.
“Watch it, bitch,” Penny warned.
“Rousseau was a madman,” I said, “and an absolute monster to people in his personal life.”
“Yes,” said Zazu, “you would think so. Shelley, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Bertrand Russell, Sartre—they were all monsters to the people in their personal lives, but that was of no importance when you consider their contributions to the world.”
“All madmen to one degree or another,” I said. “Geniuses, yes, and some of them fine artists. But madmen. And their contributions to the world were … irrationality, chaos, excuses for mass murder, despair.”
“Not madmen,” she said. “Intellectuals. They form the opinions of the elite ruling classes. Then artists and writers must, with their work, carry the message of their superiors to the masses. Which you have not done, Mr. Greenwich.”
She went on in this vein for another minute, and I began to think she was vamping, stalling for time to think of a way to deal with us. We had indeed surprised her.
When he could get a word in, sweet Milo said, “Don’t put down my dad. He’s the best dad in the world—and soooo patient.”
Ignoring Milo, Zazu Waxx said to me, “With your books, you are pushing the pendulum in the wrong direction, which is why you must be broken, made to renounce your heresy, and purged.”
Gasping as if from exertion and also weeping, the hunchback returned to the room. In his right hand he clutched a butcher knife that dripped bright blood.
As flamboyant melodrama goes, it didn’t get any better than this. But remember, truth is always paradoxical, and always much stranger than fiction.
As tall as she already was, Zazu straightened her shoulders and lifted her head, and became noticeably taller. “What have you done? You idiot, you disgusting lump, what have you done?”
“That was my only chance,” said the son of Shearman. “He’s never been helpless before. He’d never be helpless again. That was my only chance, and I took it, I took it, I took it.”
The death of her son, Shearman, obviously enraged Zazu, but it seemed to be more of an intellectual than an emotional issue. “You cretin. He was a pioneer in the post-humanity movement. The way you were engineered from his sperm cells, you were destined to be the first of a super-race.”
The weeping hunchback regarded her with bafflement. “But I’m not, Zazu.”
“That wasn’t Shearman’s fault.”
“But it wasn’t my fault, Zazu.”
“At least Shearman made the effort.”
Zazu was so slim and her suit so well tailored that I would not have thought she could have been carrying a concealed weapon. Magically, it appeared in her hand. She shot the hunchback in the head and then shot me in the chest.
As I fell, I saw Penny shoot Zazu.
Lying on my right side on the black-granite floor, I could see Zazu’s crumpled form, which seemed to be all sticks and baling wire tangled in haute couture. Her blood looked as black as the granite on which she had fallen.
My vision rapidly faded, and when in seconds full blindness settled upon me, I heard Penny speaking my name. I was not able to reply, not able to say I love you or good-bye. I heard from Milo a terrible cry, and I tried to reach out to him, but I had no strength.
As my vision left me, in the same way so did my hearing, diminishing until the silence of a perfect vacuum took me one step farther from the world of sensual delights. I wanted one more time to hear their voices, her laughter and his giggle, but a veil had fallen between me and them, a veil more imposing than a stone wall.
The last smell I remember was the odor of my blood, which at first seemed repellent but then in some way became so sweet that it moved me to tears.
About then the strange thing began to happen. My sense of smell swiftly returned to me, as did my hearing, and then my vision. I saw Zazu’s black blood spurt into her through her wounds, and she rose off the floor to a regal height once more. Her dropped gun flew back into her hand.
As I had fallen, so I rose to my feet again. The bullets that had torn through me now retreated from my flesh and raveled backward through the air to the muzzle of Zazu’s pistol.
The hunchback, too, had been reborn, standing with the dripping butcher knife displayed as if it were a precious talisman. He spoke his announcement of murder backward, and reversed out of the room.
And then time flowed forward once more.
“Not madmen,” Zazu said. “Intellectuals. They form the opinions of the elite…”
From the way that Penny and Milo looked at me, I knew that we three were the only people in the room who were conscious of what had happened. Even Lassie wa
s clueless.
Because we were carrying the saltshakers that were no longer salt-shakers.
“—carry the message of their superiors to the masses. Which you have not done, Mr. Greenwich.”
Because Zazu went on in this vein for another minute, we had the power to guide events as they best served us.
I had been to the razor’s edge of death, balanced between this world and the next, and now Penny and Milo looked more precious to me than ever before. My heart labored, and I had to struggle against a great tide of sentiment that would have disabled me.
We let Zazu babble until, as before, Milo said, “Don’t put down my dad. He’s the best dad in the world.” This time, instead of adding “and soooo patient,” the boy said, “and nobody’s gonna kill him on my watch.”
Ignoring Milo, Zazu Waxx said to me, “With your books, you are pushing the pendulum in the wrong direction, which is why you must be broken, made to renounce your heresy, and purged.”
Gasping, weeping, the hunchback returned to the room with the dripping knife to announce the murder of Shearman Waxx.
Zazu straightened her shoulders, lifted her head. “What have you done? You idiot, you disgusting lump, what have you done?”
“That was my only chance,” said the hunchback. “He’s never been helpless before. He’d never be helpless again. That was my only chance, and I took it, I took it, I took it.”
Zazu repeated her speech about Shearman being a pioneer in the post-humanity movement.
“Dad,” Milo said. “The thing is, for some reason, you can’t replay the same moment more than once.”
“Okay.”
Zazu finished addressing her grandchild: “You were destined to be the first of a super-race.”
The weeping hunchback regarded her with bafflement. “But I’m not, Zazu.”
“That wasn’t Shearman’s fault.”
“But it wasn’t my fault, Zazu.”
“At least Shearman made the effort.”
This time, expecting it, I saw her draw the pistol from under her beautifully tailored jacket.
She shot the hunchback in the head, and as she turned toward me, Penny and I shot her, oh, maybe twelve times.