The Forbidden Door

by Dean Koontz

  “From your current location,” the caller says, “the drive to Beaumont will take approximately one hour and twenty-seven minutes if you depart prior to morning traffic.”

  “We’ll be there before seven o’clock,” Gottfrey says.

  “The Medexpress carrier containing the control mechanisms should maintain an appropriate temperature for at least another thirty-six hours.”

  The carrier is on the nightstand. Gottfrey reports the number on the digital readout. “Forty-two degrees.”

  “Good. Now, the clothes you were wearing yesterday have been cleaned and pressed. They’ll be sent up to you by a bellman when you call the front desk.”

  “Another conflicting detail,” Gottfrey says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The hotel’s own directory of services doesn’t offer four-hour laundry and dry cleaning, certainly not late-night.”

  “Yes, but of course we made special arrangements.”

  “A minor rewrite.”

  “A what?”

  “They say it’s good to be the king,” Gottfrey replies, “but the real power is with the author of the play, who can change details, rewrite anything he wants and make it turn out different.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” the caller says. “We’re rewriting the play, and the play is this country, the world, the future.”

  “Well,” Gottfrey says, throwing back the bedclothes, “the script calls for me to take a shower.”

  The caller laughs. “Make it a short one and hit the road. We need to get the in-laws, brain-shag ’em, and find the damn kid. We break Jane’s heart, we’ll also break the bitch’s will.”

  26

  THE SAME NIGHT, THE SAME Texas plain infinite in appearance, the same sky overhead infinite in fact, the same radically hot, bespoke Range Rover by Overfinch North America…

  Yet all is different. Chris Roberts marvels at how everything can change so profoundly in one hour. When he was cruising back and forth on this same highway, looking for the runaway Longrin girl, he’d been thinking about shacking up with Janis for a torrid week, picturing her naked, figuring that even at just thirty-five he might need a bottle of Viagra to keep up with her. Now her body and the jigsaw puzzle that is her head are wrapped in a waterproof tarp provided by Longrin Stables, the ends folded and secured with almost an entire roll of strapping tape, resting in the cargo area behind the backseat. Picturing her naked is neither as easy nor as appealing as it was an hour earlier.

  This is a sobering journey even for Chris, who is neither a pessimist nor a deep thinker. Pessimism is a waste of time, because you can’t forestall disaster by sitting around and brooding about it. Anyway, you can’t be a pessimist and also a fun guy; Chris thinks of himself as a major fun guy.

  As for deep thinkers…Well, the deep thinkers he’s known mostly become alcoholics, and if they don’t become alcoholics, they kill themselves. The few that have neither killed themselves nor become alcoholics are either in mental institutions or ought to be.

  Nevertheless, cruising now through the last hours of the night, on a four-hour drive to the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, Chris has what he believes to be a deep thought. It scares him a little: not just the fact that it’s deep, but the thought itself.

  Because he’s the kind of guy who can get people to talk about themselves, he’s aware that a significant percentage of the Techno Arcadians he knows have come from dysfunctional families. Janis has said little about her folks, except that she not only renounced her parents and sisters and hadn’t seen them in fourteen years, but also wished they would all die of a painful, disfiguring disease. Now, in light of what happened at the Longrin place, Chris wonders if the fact that so many Arcadians come from dysfunctional families might result in the entire Techno Arcadian project becoming dysfunctional in the long run.

  Fortunately, he doesn’t come from a dysfunctional family, and perhaps this gives him a competitive advantage within the ranks of the revolution. His mother and father love each other and never argue. They ran a prosperous business together, and five years ago—at the age of just fifty-eight—they retired to an ocean-view home in Laguna Beach. They shower him with affection, always have, and he has only excellent memories of his childhood, especially when he reached puberty, whereupon many of the girls in his mom and dad’s high-end super-discreet west-side-L.A. escort service thought he was a cute kid, a little blond Tom Cruise, and wanted to please his mother by doing him for free.

  Nostalgic reveries aren’t enough to take his mind off Janis back there in the cargo area. Each time he hits a bump in the road or takes a sharp turn, the tarp slides around a little, and he imagines—hopes he only imagines—that he hears her making sounds within the shroud.

  He has a long drive ahead of him before he can deliver Janis to the owner of a construction company, a fellow Techno Arcadian who builds entire communities in the outlying suburbs of Fort Worth and who will find a nice resting place for her under the concrete-slab foundation of one structure or another. They can’t very well blame her death on Jane Hawk, considering how many people know otherwise, and in the interest of putting the entire Longrin Stables operation behind them as though it never happened, it is best that Janis just disappear. Her name will be purged from the FBI, Homeland, and NSA personnel records; her pensions have not had time to vest, so they can just evaporate; and because her family, whether slowly dying of a disfiguring disease or healthy, have for fourteen years not known her whereabouts, no relative is going to come looking for her.

  That someone as young and hot as Janis should end this way is sad, really sad, epic sad, and Chris Roberts doesn’t like to be sad. Sad is not who he is. He’s a fun guy, and he’s driving a radically hot vehicle, and he needs some bitchin’ music to chase away the sadness.

  Puff Daddy is the right stuff most of the time, but that music doesn’t feel right for driving dead Janis to an unmarked grave. He thinks about it for a couple miles, and then he pops some TLC into the system. “Baby-Baby-Baby” starts to improve his mood, and “Red Light Special” and then—wham!—“Diggin’ on You” hoses away sadness. This was the true wood, back in the day. He was into it even before puberty, cool with the music, sexually precocious, ready for the future yesterday. Tionne Watkins. Lisa Lopes. Rozonda Thomas. Hot, hot, hot. And now their big hit “No Scrubs,” totally top of the charts. The music gets him up and keeps him up as he races through the predawn Texas dark toward a future that is Arcadian, that is inevitable, that belongs to him!

  27

  NO MATTER HOW MUCH SHAMPOO she used or how long she stood under the hot water, Laurie Longrin didn’t feel clean. Although the water was so stinging hot that she turned a boiled-pink color head to foot, she couldn’t melt away the chill in her chest, couldn’t stop shivering.

  Her mother waited with a bath towel when Laurie at last stepped out of the shower stall. Laurie preferred to dry herself. She’d been drying herself for ages and ages. However, she understood that her mother didn’t merely want to do it, but also needed to do it, as if reassuring herself that her oldest daughter was alive and unharmed, so Laurie allowed it.

  Mother kept telling her—promising her—nothing like this would happen again. They were taking steps to defend themselves against the repetition of such a horror. Every adult on their property would henceforth be armed at all times. From now until Jane Hawk was able to produce evidence to expose these power-mad bastards and clear her name, Laurie and her sisters would be homeschooled, where no one could try to get at them.

  Laurie’s mom didn’t get weepy at every sad movie, didn’t get emotional over every little thing, and there were no tears in her eyes now. She was angry, furious, incensed at the people who had invaded her home. At the same time, she was tender and loving. Also at the same time, she was worried and scared and trying hard to hide those feelings.

  Even as rattled as Laurie wa
s, she could recognize all these emotions in her mother because her mom and dad were the two people in the world she most trusted and admired. She was always watching them when they didn’t realize it, not watching them from a hiding place or anything creepy like that, just studying them to figure out how they were who they were. By watching them, she’d learned who she wanted to be and how to become that person, though she wasn’t that person yet; there was a long road ahead.

  Mother didn’t lie. But she couldn’t guarantee that what had happened wouldn’t happen again. She and Daddy were people who got things done, didn’t take crap, and were confident without being arrogant. What Mother meant was that she would die to stop people coming down on her family the way the thugs had done this time.

  Laurie put on pajamas and sat on a vanity bench while her mother brushed and blew dry her hair, and she let herself be tucked in bed because she realized her mother needed to do it. It was also true that Laurie needed to have it done, to have the covers smoothed around her and to be kissed on the brow, the cheek.

  But when Mother wanted to sit bedside to watch over her as she slept, Laurie said, “I love you. Really need you. Always will. But Daphne and Artemis are just little kids. They need you even more.”

  Her mother bent over her and felt her brow, as if Laurie might have a fever. “You’re going to be all right.”

  Those words had not been in the form of a question, but Laurie knew that’s what they were. “Yeah, sure, I’ll be all right. I’ve got you and Daddy and Daphne and Artemis and all the horses. I’d be a totally stupid dink if I wasn’t going to be all right.”

  After Mother left, Daddy came to her and sat on the edge of the bed. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. God, I’m so sorry. But you…you were amazing, what you did.”

  He’d been set upon by a band of vicious goons with guns, maybe FBI, maybe not, but with real-looking FBI badges, and there was nothing he could have done differently and still be law-abiding. Yet he blamed himself for underestimating how wicked even real FBI guys might be if they also were bad hats. He hated having let them get the upper hand to the point that they could do what they wanted, even tie him up. He was a tough guy. She had no doubt her father was a tough guy. But he was also a good guy, and sometimes bad people had an advantage over good guys just because they were good.

  She sat up in bed and put her arms around him and hugged him hard, even though she was as tired as if she’d been walking all night through a hurricane, hugged him harder than she had ever hugged him before. He hadn’t needed to say anything. And she didn’t need to say anything now, because they loved each other and knew the truth of each other—and, besides, being Texans, they didn’t indulge in a lot of useless palaver.

  Daddy used a dimmer switch to turn her lamp low, but he didn’t switch it off. He could have switched it off. She would have been okay in the dark. She wasn’t afraid of the dark. No one should be afraid of the dark. It was the wrong kind of people who might kill you, not the dark. But she was glad that he left the lamp on because when he turned at the door and looked back at her, she could see him better. She liked the way he looked—strong and tough, but so very kind. He could see her better, too, so he could see her smile. Laurie figured he needed to see her smile.

  When he closed the door behind him, she closed her eyes.

  In Laurie’s interior darkness, Janis loomed vividly, face distorted and strange, eyes yellow with an infall of attic light, her whisper as vicious as her poisonous stare, My little pet.

  Laurie opened her eyes.

  She had never been so weary, tired in mind and heart and flesh and bone, but she couldn’t stop thinking.

  Jane Hawk’s mother had supposedly killed herself when Jane was a little girl. Her father was a famous pianist, performing all over the world. He’d been on a TV show Sunday evening, saying his only child was mentally ill or some such horseshit. Laurie’s parents didn’t know, but she’d once overheard them talking about Martin Duroc, how his first wife hadn’t really committed suicide, that he had killed her and gotten away with it, how even as a child Jane knew, heard him or something, but had no proof, which was freaky.

  Janis and Jane.

  How could they both come from basket-case families and turn out so different—one a vicious outlaw, the other doing everything she could to crush the bad hats?

  Laurie and her best friend, Bonnie Jean Haney, both came from good families, so probably they would both turn out good. But was it possible, like Janis and Jane, one would turn out to be a psycho bitch and the other a hero Marine or something?

  And what about Daphne and Artemis, her sisters? Would maybe one of them grow up to rob banks and blow up churches?

  If who you were raised to be and who you most wanted to become didn’t matter, if you could become some monster instead…That was a scary thing to consider.

  If Janis came from a rotten family and didn’t want to be a dirtbag herself but became rotten anyway, that was sad.

  Whether it was sad or not, however, Janis was dead, and that was good. If Laurie was confused about other things right now, she was not confused about the rightness of Janis being dead. Janis alive—not good. Janis dead—hallelujah.

  In spite of being raised right, in spite of wanting to be good, if one day Laurie Longrin became a raging monster, she would want someone to kill her.

  Finally she closed her eyes. She slept. In one of her dreams, Laurie was all grown up, a rotten crazy bitch, and Janis Dern was an innocent little girl who said horseshit too much. They were on the veranda together, trying to encourage the firemen and firewomen to go away so that Laurie could kill little Janis. The sniper in the helicopter shot Laurie, and her head exploded. She kept trying to pick up the pieces and put her head back together, but there was a big chunk of her skull missing and a lot of her brain, and one of her eyes had rolled where she couldn’t find it. She was frantically trying to make herself whole again, desperate to live even though she was a monster, and she kept saying, “I didn’t mean it, I was lying, that was all horseshit, I don’t want to be killed!”

  When she woke, she wasn’t screaming, but she was crying hard. She couldn’t stop crying. She buried her face in a pillow to muffle her sobs, so that no one would hear. She cried as though to use a lifetime of tears in this single terrible sadness, and one thing that kept her crying was the new understanding that there was no using up of all tears, that tears would be as much a part of her life, for the rest of her life, as would be laughter and hope.

  1

  BORREGO VALLEY AT DAWN, FLEECY clouds blazing bright coral against a turquoise eastern sky paling slowly to blue…

  Carter Jergen and Radley Dubose are cruising around, looking for stains on the fabric of normalcy, which might turn out to be indications, signs, manifestations—simply put, clues—to the whereabouts of Travis Hawk.

  More accurately, Dubose is thus engaged, while in the front passenger seat Jergen takes note of a seemingly endless series of things about the desert that disturb him.

  Three ungainly vultures describe a narrowing gyre in the dry air above the golf course at the Borrego Springs Resort, perhaps eyeing the pathetic cadaver of an early golfer who has dropped dead of heat stroke on the third green.

  “Who would want to play golf in a desert?” Jergen wonders.

  “Lots of people,” Dubose says. “It’s pleasant to play in such low humidity.”

  “Well, you’re never going to find me whacking a golf ball around in hundred-ten-degree heat.”

  “I would never look for you there, my friend. I would assume your leisure time is full up with polo, croquet, and fox hunts.”

  Another dig at Jergen’s Boston Brahmin roots. The remark has no effect. By now he’s immune to such ridicule.

  “Anyway,” Dubose continues, “it doesn’t get a hundred ten for at least another month. Predicted high for today is ninety-two.”
/>   Jergen says, “Positively frigid.”

  Ahead, another denizen of the desert is crossing the highway: a six-foot rattlesnake. In awareness of the VelociRaptor, the serpent raises the first three feet of its length off the pavement and turns its head toward them with eerie fluidity.

  Dubose purposefully aims for the viper. The truck hits it at fifty miles an hour, and for a minute or so, the entangled creature slaps noisily against the undercarriage, like a length of cable snared around an axle.

  When quiet returns, Jergen says, “What if you didn’t kill it? If we get out and it’s alive under there somewhere, it’s going to be pissed. They aren’t that easy to kill.”

  “My friend, I think you’re confusing rattlesnakes with the hard-boiled hard-bitten intractable Boston debutantes you remember from your youth.”

  Jergen is spared the need to engage in witless tit for tat when Dubose’s smartphone rings. It’s on the seat, between his thighs, and the pride of West Virginia rubs it against his crotch, as though for luck, before taking the call.

  Tarantulas, vultures, intolerable heat, rattlesnakes, and now the most disturbing thing yet: a thirty-year-old rust-bucket Dodge pickup broken down at the side of the road and, standing next to it, one of those lifelong desert dwellers, a sunbaked sun-withered old woman in red athletic shoes and cargo-pocket khakis and tan-linen shirt and straw hat, with snow-white tangles of hair and a wrinkled face reminiscent of the pinched countenance of a desert tortoise. She vigorously waves a handkerchief to signal a need for assistance. After at least eight decades in the Anza-Borrego, she’s most likely a half-crazed package of bad attitude, stubbornness, and crackpot opinions that she’ll insist on sharing ad nauseam.