by Dean Koontz
Ferrante’s hands pressed over his heart looked melodramatic and foolish, but the esteem in which he held her was genuine, not at all diminished by her refusal to be what he imagined her to be. He said, “If I had been there in the fifteenth century, at the coronation of Charles the Seventh, I would have asked her for what I’m asking of you, the only thing I want from you.”
“Ferrante, listen, I can’t play something I’m not. I’m no saint in the making. The things I’ve done. Damn it, listen, I’m no good at make-believe. I’ve got both feet in the mud of reality. I slog from here to there. I don’t fly. I screw up. Both feet in mud and blood.”
He would not be deterred. “All I want is your blessing. Touch my head and bless my life.”
If she did as he asked, just as a kindness, with no illusion that her blessing had any power, Ferrante would nonetheless receive it as a sanctification of his heart, as a hallowing of his life. Knowing what false value he would place on it, if she still did as he wanted, she would to some degree be a fraud. She should do it anyway, do it for Travis, to avoid risking this man’s displeasure. After all, she would kill for Travis, lie for him, commit any sin to save him. So she should be able, just for a moment, to pretend to be a conduit for divine grace. Yet she couldn’t move toward him or bring herself to speak a benediction. She didn’t understand her reluctance, nor was she able to put a name to the particular fault in herself that brought her to this impasse.
She looked beyond Ferrante to the four grotesque paintings, and she thought about what Enrique had said. He’s a weird duck….He’s got this blood obsession. You meet him, you’ll see.
Yes, but it turned out not to be the blood of violence and vengeance and hatred that enthralled Ferrante Escobar, but instead the blood of sacrifice, the concept of redemption through suffering. To some extent, that was an obsession that Jane, with both feet in the mud of life, could understand.
Her gaze traveled from the paintings to the acrylic plinth on the desk, on which rested the bristling sculpture that had seemed strange and abstract when she’d first noticed it. She realized it was intricately braided brambles fashioned into a crown of thorns.
If for whatever reason she could not bring herself to give him what he wanted, she could give him an alternative that might not leave him alienated. She stepped to the desk and, not with her gun hand but with her left, firmly gripped the sculpture and lifted it from the display pedestal, clutched it. She clenched her teeth to bite off any expression of pain and met his eyes for a moment before returning the sculpture to the acrylic.
The thorns had dimpled her flesh in a dozen places, but blood bloomed only in tiny blossoms from three points on two fingers and from four punctures in her palm.
Ferrante Escobar stared at her hand for a long moment, his face solemn, his dark eyes unreadable. Without another word, he picked up the box containing the pistol, went to the door, led her down the hallway to the client lounge, and left her there with the new gun.
An adjacent restroom served the lounge. She cranked on the water and pumped soap from the dispenser and washed her hands. After she dried off, she clenched her left fist around a wad of paper towels, applying pressure to stop the thorn pricks from bleeding.
She wondered if Ferrante would blot the drops of blood from the floors of his office and the hallway—and what he might do with the rag that absorbed them. She decided that she would rather not know.
In the client lounge once more, she sat on a sofa. She looked at the box containing the pistol. She raised her head and stared at the frosted windows, which were set as high as those in Ferrante’s office, and she thought about how strange her life had become and about how many moments of it were resonant with cryptic meaning that would remain forever beyond her powers of interpretation.
7
A WARM BREEZE, BLADE SHADOWS SCALPING the barren earth, the ceaseless slish-slish-slish of carved air, perhaps one of the two windmills pumping water from a well in addition to cleaving energy from the breath of Nature…
As Jergen and Dubose step out of their truck and approach the Corrigan house, the front door opens, and an Arcadian named Damon Ainsley descends two steps to a concrete pad that serves as a stoop. He is a robust man with a rosy complexion that has, in this case, paled from ear to ear and gone a little gray around the eyes.
“We’ve got a situation,” Ainsley says. A thin and bitter laugh escapes him. “Situation. Hell’s bells, I’ve become a jackass, more bureaucrat than lawman, politically correct and full of newspeak. The situation, gentlemen, is a shitstorm.”
According to Dubose, Dr. Bertold Shenneck, cuckolded husband of the fabulous Inga, had foreseen two types of sudden psychological collapse that might rarely ensue following the activation of a brain implant, the least dramatic being the disintegration of the ego and the id upon the recognition of being possessed and enslaved. In this case, the subject’s sense of self dissolves. He loses all identity, all memory. He ceases to understand the environment around him and has no capacity for ordered thought. His mind becomes a shrieking bedlam. This is the more benign of the two possibilities.
In the worse scenario, the ego disintegrates but not the id, leaving the latter in charge. What remains in this case is a sense of self, a kind of situational and pattern-recognition memory rather than recollection of personal experience, and a capacity for ordered but primitive thought. However, the id is the aspect of the mind that seeks pleasure at any cost. Without the moderating influence of the ego, which mediates between the primal desires of the id and the social environment in which we live, there is no Dr. Jekyll anymore, nor even Mr. Hyde—but only a pleasure-seeking thing.
Damon Ainsley heads toward one of the Jeep Cherokees. “Got to smoke some weed to float away the nausea. Better prepare yourselves before you go in there.”
“I was born prepared,” Dubose says.
As Carter Jergen learned during his years at Harvard, there are two explanations for what is called the reptile consciousness within the human id, supposing that it exists. A scientist might say human beings are not evolved from apes so much as from all the species that constitute the history of life on Earth’s land masses, which means that the first lizard to venture from sea to shore has left its genetic trace in us. On the other hand, a priest might say our reptilian impulses are the curse bestowed by the father of serpents in the Garden of Eden. In either case, the reptile consciousness has no capacity for love, compassion, mercy, or any other virtues prized by civil societies. It is driven solely by its hunger for pleasure, and one of those pleasures is the thrill of violence.
As Dubose opens the door of the Corrigan house, he pauses and pretends to be profound, a pose he finds appealing now and then. “This is a moment to remember, my friend. Dr. Shenneck thought there was a one-in-ten-thousand chance of a psychological collapse. More than sixteen thousand have been adjusted with implants, and this is the first instance of what he predicted. For you and me, it’s like being there when Edison tested the first successful light bulb.”
Such grandiose declarations, coming from the hillbilly sage, grate on Jergen. “How the hell is it like Edison’s light bulb?”
“It’s an historic moment.”
“Damon Ainsley just called it a shitstorm. A shitstorm isn’t my idea of an historic moment.”
The big man favors Jergen with an expression like that of a patient adult speaking to an amusing but clueless child. “History isn’t just an endless series of triumphs, Carter. History is about the ups and downs. It was an historic moment when the Titanic sank.”
They step into the house.
8
THE RAT-COAT-GRAY TORN-RAG SKY OVER the Gulf of Mexico creeping across blackening waters, the morning sun steadily retreating from the shore, the coastal plain just twenty feet above sea level, the maze of oil refineries looking flat in the shadowless light of an oncoming storm, like a pencil drawing hung o
n a wall…
To Egon Gottfrey, on the trail of Ancel and Clare Hawk, the city of Beaumont, Texas, appears to be more detailed than Worstead, where all this began. But the Unknown Playwright is still sketching the locale rather than painting it in fullest depth and color.
Behind the wheel of his Rhino GX, Gottfrey follows Tucker Treadmont’s GMC Terrain through the outskirts of the city into open country, Rupert and Vince close behind in their Jeep Wrangler. This solemn train of black vehicles feels like a funeral procession sans corpse, though it’s easy enough to make a corpse if one is needed.
Along a two-lane blacktop, they come into fields of coarse matted grass and tortured weeds from some of which depend clusters of pale bladders the size of thumbs. At certain times of the year, perhaps portions of this land become marshes from which, at dusk, clouds of mosquitoes rise in such great numbers that they blacken the sky even before the last light has gone from it.
The GMC Terrain slows, signals a right turn, leaves the pavement for the wide shoulder of the road, and comes to a stop. Gottfrey parks behind it, Rupert Baldwin behind Gottfrey.
Treadmont waits in front of his vehicle, frowning at the grim sky, drawing deep breaths and snorting them out, as though he is part hound and can assess the potential of the storm by the scent that it imparts to the air. For whatever reason, the nipples of his man breasts have stiffened against his pale-blue polo shirt, a sight about as erotic as a squashed cockroach.
“Why have we stopped?” Gottfrey asks.
“This is where I left them, the cowboy dude and his woman. This is where they wanted to go.”
Gottfrey and his men survey their surroundings with puzzlement.
Vince Penn says, “This is like the middle of nowhere. There’s nothing. There’s no place they could go. It’s just fields. Just empty fields is all it is.”
Pointing ahead and to the right, toward a narrow dirt lane that branches off the blacktop, Treadmont says, “The last I saw them, they were walkin’ that way.”
In the distance, what might be a house and two outbuildings—or a mirage—imprint their small dark shapes on the landscape.
“Did they say who lives there?” Gottfrey asks.
“I didn’t ask, they didn’t say, and I don’t care.”
“Why didn’t they want you to drive them over there? Didn’t that seem odd to you?”
“Mister, maybe half of everythin’ that happens in life seems odd as hell to me, most of it stranger than this. Now I got a livin’ to make.”
When Treadmont drives away, Rupert Baldwin squints at the distant buildings. “If we drive in, they’ll for sure hear us coming. What do you say we walk it?”
Like Rupert and Vince, Gottfrey is carrying a pistol on his right hip. He also has a snub-nosed revolver in an ankle holster. The three of them set out on foot.
9
THE LIVING ROOM AT THE Corrigan house is furnished for comfort, with a deep sofa of no particular style and three massive recliners, everything aimed at a big-screen television. Otherwise, the theme of the décor is nautical. The reproduced paintings of sailing ships in calm and stormy seas are the quality that big hotel chains purchase by the thousands. One lamp base is sheathed in artfully arranged seashells; another features a porcelain mermaid topped by a painted shade on which porpoises cavort.
Someone in this desert home yearns for the romance of the sea.
A young DHS agent whose name Carter Jergen doesn’t know—one of the Arcadian backup brigade that streamed into the valley during the past thirty-six hours—sits on the edge of one of the recliners. He smokes a cigarette, tapping the ashes into a conch shell, his hands shaking as if he’s a palsied retiree.
Radley Dubose says, “Harry, is it?”
“Yeah,” the agent says. “Harry Oliver.”
“On the phone, you called it a slaughterhouse. To me it looks like Mayberry, U.S.A.”
A tremor ages Harry’s voice to match his trembling hands. “The kitchen, the back porch. That’s where…”
Filtered through the roof and walls of the house, the sound of the windmills is not as it is outside, not like giant swords slicing the air, but rather a low, rhythmic hum. To Jergen it sounds as if some hive fills the attic, a teeming population busy wax-laying and honey-making and brewing a potent venom to ensure a lethal sting.
He follows Dubose into a shadowy hallway where one of two bulbs is burned out in the ceiling light. Beyond open doors to each side, rooms are little revealed by sunshine leaking around the edges of closed draperies. On the walls between the doors, rough seas roll without motion, and tumultuous skies storm without sound.
The first victim is just past the kitchen threshold. Homeland Security ID clipped to the breast pocket of his suit coat. On his back. Face torn and puckered and hollowed by several bite marks. As eyeless as Samson in Gaza.
The father, Rooney Corrigan, lies to the right of a chrome-legged dining table with a yellow Formica top. He’s also faceup, though head and body are not joined.
Dubose steps cautiously to avoid the biological debris that slathers the floor, and Jergen follows with equal care.
Rooney’s younger of two teenage sons is sprawled beyond the table. The condition of the corpse is so appalling that Jergen must look away.
“It’s the remaining son,” Dubose says, “who’s suffered the psychological collapse. His name’s Ramsey. From the Old English, meaning ‘male sheep.’ Ironic, huh? He might have been a lamb once, but not anymore.”
The mother had tried to flee. She’d made it out the back door and onto the screened porch.
Blouse ripped away. Bra torn off. Face wrenched in terror. Lips cruelly bitten, mouth agape in a silent scream. The wide-open eyes suggest that the last thing she’d seen was an abomination worse than her oncoming death. Her neck is broken.
Here on the screened porch, the sound of the windmills has yet a different character. The fine mesh that bars flying insects also seines the crisp edges from the slashing-sword noise, so that the porch seems to be a way station between life and afterlife, where a host of spirit voices softly whisper secrets about what lies beyond death.
Dubose says, “Let’s go have a look at Ramsey.”
10
THE DIRT LANE IS ELEVATED a foot or two above the flanking fields. It is hardpan in which Egon Gottfrey and his men leave no tracks, nor are there any bootprints impressed by Ancel and Clare Hawk the previous day.
Seen closer than from the paved road, the flourishing weeds are even stranger than they had seemed before, riotous thickets in great variety, many of the species unknown to Gottfrey. His attention is drawn to certain gnarled bushes with needled leaves and wiry stems from which are suspended clusters of pale sacs. From the highway, he’d thought the sacs were thumbsize, bladderlike. But they are larger and more like cocoons than bladders, but not cocoons, either, vaguely reminiscent of something that eludes him.
Perhaps because the eerie fields appear to be hostile, like some alien landscape that harbors unknown lethal life forms, Gottfrey thinks of Judge Sheila Draper-Cruxton and the angry dressing-down she meted out to him in their most recent phone conversation. You better stop wasting your testosterone, Gottfrey. Keep your pants zipped, man up, start breaking heads, and get the job done.
The dark clouds race north, harried by some high-altitude wind not felt at ground level. The sky lowers, and birds shriek overhead as they flee toward what few roosts of refuge this flat territory contains.
As Gottfrey and his men continue along the hardpan, they come to a place where the creepy bushes grow within a foot of the lane. He stops to peer more closely at them. The clustered and slightly wrinkled sacs are moist and milky but not opaque. In fact, they are semitranslucent, and dark shapes are coddled within them, as if things wait therein to be born. But these are definitely not cocoons.
“What is it, what’re you doing?”
Rupert Baldwin asks.
Rupert and Vince have halted twenty feet ahead of him and are watching him inspect the plant.
“I just thought…” Gottfrey shakes his head. “Nothing. It’s nothing.”
As they continue toward the buildings, he stares at the bushes, fascinated beyond all reason. He wonders if the sacs are actually part of the plant. Although they aren’t spun-silk cocoons, perhaps they’re extruded in another fashion by an insect unknown to him, the fields infested by some pestilence. Abruptly he stops again when he realizes of what the sacs remind him. Pale, yes. Semitranslucent, yes. But they nonetheless resemble testicles.
“Egon?” Rupert says.
“Yes, all right,” he responds, and again he proceeds with them toward the buildings.
He has no doubt now that the Unknown Playwright is endorsing Judge Draper-Cruxton’s instructions to break heads and get the job done. Recently, the author of all this has set the scenes with too little detail. These fields, however, are so vividly and intricately presented that they are meant to be a sign to guide him back to the proper performance of his role. Fields of testicle-bearing plants never seen before, they are put here to remind him of what Judge Draper-Cruxton has demanded—and of what she has threatened should he fail to perform as expected.
He has been under great stress, and this revelation has not relieved any of the pressure on him. But at least he now knows what he must do to avoid suffering the pain that the Unknown Playwright is so capable of doling out. Fulfill the dream he’s had of Jane’s in-laws. Shoot Ancel. Slit Clare’s throat.
Yes, they must first be captured, injected, and interrogated after being enslaved. But once they reveal the whereabouts of young Travis, they will be Gottfrey’s to dispose of as he wishes.