by Dean Koontz
Each time fear rose in Henry Lorimar, a voice separate from that of the ranter counseled him to remain calm. There was nothing to be concerned about. If he just did what was expected of him, if he searched for the missing boy according to his instructions, all would be well. He would be happy, content, at peace.
Nevertheless, unable to concentrate on his driving, he pulled off the road. Shifted into park. Engaged the emergency brake. He left the engine running to maintain the air-conditioning.
The one voice ranted, loud and increasingly animalistic, but the other voice spoke so softly that it wasn’t a voice as much as it was like a conscience, an inner source of moral guidance telling him that he needed to do what he had been tasked to do, that if he did the right thing, he would be happy, content, and at peace. This conscience-like counselor was authoritative, irresistible, therefore not at all like a conscience, which could be ignored, but more like a…controller. Yet as much as Henry wanted to obey, he remained paralyzed because the louder voice bored into him, tore at him, though in a strangely thrilling way, drilling down until it struck nerves in him that didn’t flash with pain when touched but instead flared with pleasure, desires so deeply buried and so beyond his experience that he didn’t have words to describe them.
For a while, the outer world did not press upon his senses, and he lived entirely in his head, in the assault of words and wordless cries counterpointed by the quiet but insistent instruction of his controller. Soon, the ranter’s vocal transmissions were accompanied by fierce emotions—hatred, fury, lust—so scalding that they seemed to peel away layers of Henry’s identity, as superheated steam might peel away skin. With the sounds and emotions came images of extreme violence that seemed beautiful to him and sexual congress so intense that, in its way, it was another kind of violence.
At one point, Henry Lorimar became aware of the sound of the idling car engine, the cold air blowing from the dashboard vents, and the stink of human waste. The last of those sensations turned his head to the right, where his partner, Nelson Luft, no longer writhed in agony.
White-faced and frail, Nelson slumped in his safety harness, head turned toward Henry, mouth agape, blood dripping from the cups of his ears. He had soiled himself. He was alive, softly inhaling and exhaling, his gaze moving slowly over the interior of the Lexus, as if everything on which his eyes alighted was mysterious to him. When he met Henry’s stare, Nelson appeared not to recognize his partner of fifteen years, regarding him with the same puzzlement inspired by the steering wheel, the radio, and the cup holders in the console.
Cold horror and grief iced Henry’s heart, and he began to surface from the thrall of the hateful rant. But the conscience that was not a conscience pressed him to put the Lexus in gear and get on with the search for the kidnapped boy, as he had agreed to do, as he had been instructed. Everything else meant nothing. Nelson Luft meant nothing. Nelson could be dealt with later. Nelson could wait. Nelson would be fine. Henry needed only to do what he had been told to do, what urgently needed to be done, and then he would be very happy, content, and at peace.
As horror and grief melted out of him, however, Henry didn’t release the emergency brake or put the car in gear. Like the sea to the moon, he succumbed to the tidal pull of the rant. The interior of the Lexus faded from his awareness as the exquisite images of violence and thrilling fornication flooded in upon him, accompanied by raw emotions and the tsunami of words that darkled his mind.
How much time passed, Henry could not say, but eventually the ranter stopped transmitting. Gradually, Henry became aware of the vehicle in which he sat, although at first he could not identify it or recall its purpose.
The whispering room was quiet, no communications incoming, but another strange sound in his head troubled him: sputtering-sizzling, subtle but persistent. When his eyes were closed, he could see—or perhaps he imagined—a darkness in his head across which the radials and spirals of a web pulsed irregularly with light, as if a current of varying power coursed through those filaments.
Degree by degree, knowledge and functionality returned to him. He sat up straighter. He adjusted his shirt collar. He remembered the remaining places he and Nelson needed to visit in their low-key search for the kidnapped boy, and he realized that he had better get on with the task.
In the passenger seat, Nelson Luft no longer breathed. His stare was as fixed as that of a mannequin. Blood had stopped seeping from his ears.
This was nothing to be concerned about. Nothing important. Nothing that mattered at all. Nelson could be dealt with later.
The important thing was to get on with the urgent hunt for the missing and endangered boy. It was misguided and selfish to think that anything mattered other than finding the boy.
The vehicle reeked of feces, but that was a mere inconvenience. Henry could get used to it. He was already getting used to it. Soon he wouldn’t smell it at all.
He released the emergency brake and put the Lexus in gear and drove back onto the highway. He could drive, but he wasn’t at ease behind the wheel like he’d been before. Everything seemed unfamiliar to him, almost as if he were a young teenager again, just learning to handle a motor vehicle.
Something had changed in him. He couldn’t focus on what he was doing as well as he once had. His mind kept drifting. Fear without cause came and went, as did sharp spasms of anger. Dramatic images of violence and brutal sex, none from Henry’s personal experience, quivered through his mind as vividly as if they were things that he had done.
He’d driven only a mile when a new voice rose in the whispering room, this one female. Simultaneously furious and frightened, ridden by hungers she could name and others for which she knew no words, she transmitted incoherent chains of words, hatred and desire, a threat and a challenge. Images, too. A blue stucco house with a white metal roof. Shaded by shabby palm trees. She wanted sex and blood, wanted to quell her fear by instilling terror in others, wanted the thrill of exercising her power and inflicting pain, wanted to scream into the void that she sensed yawning beneath her and, by sheer ferocity, prevent it from enfolding her into oblivion.
She was like a siren on night reefs, singing ships to their wreckage, and her enticing song appealed to some part of Henry that he didn’t understand, to a secret second heart that beat a tempo different from his first and that held within its throbbing chambers a blackness darker than death.
He knew the blue stucco house with the white metal roof. And even in his current condition, he knew how to get there.
For now, he had forgotten the boy, and the conscience that wasn’t a conscience could no longer control him.
The female voice was irresistibly alluring, calling to some self-destructive aspect of Henry Lorimar, but it was also savage and so venomous that he might need a weapon. He pulled the car off the road long enough to get a combination long-handled lug wrench/pry bar from the SUV’s tool kit.
3
TWO DIRT RUTS, STUBBLED WITH dead weeds, led past the abandoned blue stucco house and the ragged queen palms, past the yard of pea gravel and specimen cacti. Luther drove around behind the place and parked beside the attached one-car garage, which shielded the Chevy Suburban from the sight of anyone passing on the county highway.
“Come civilian, leave official,” Luther said. “Still the plan?”
“I don’t see any reason to change it. It’s been smooth so far, but maybe not much longer. You know what to do.”
“I know what to do,” he agreed. “Go to your boy.”
She walked along the weedy driveway for about seventy or eighty yards, to a turnaround in front of the dilapidated barn, which she knew was not only what it appeared to be.
The hot desert air vibrated with the sawing of insects that busied their bowstring legs, cars buzzing past on the distant county road, and an airplane whisking the day with turboprop blades. An aircraft had droned past when they were unhitching the S
uburban from the motor home. Maybe this was the same one, seeking to seine her voice and location from the sky when she used a burner phone.
She stood before the weathered man-size door with its worm-eaten sun-split boards and rusted hinges, looking up where Gavin Washington had told her a concealed camera would be focused on her.
Hidden motion detectors had alerted Cornell Jasperson to her presence. The electronic lock opened with a buzz and a clunk.
Jane stepped into a white-walled vestibule where a camera surmounted a metal door. The door behind her closed automatically, and the one before her opened.
Lamplit in jewel tones, shadowy in places, lined with thousands of colorful spines, before her lay the fabled library for the end of the world, as magical as Gavin had described it.
At some distance stood Cornell: almost seven feet tall, knob-jointed like a mechanical construct, misshapen, a figure of fright on a dark street, but with the face of an angel, awkward and clearly shy.
Nearer stood Travis, utterly still, as if he thirsted for the sight of her and could not move until his thirst was slaked.
She saw in this precious boy not just her child, but the best of herself and the best of her beloved husband. She saw the most cherished part of her past, too, all the years of happiness with Nick, and her future in its entirety, for there could be no future worth having if Travis wasn’t in it. When they weren’t together, she thought of him as bigger than he was, perhaps because she had all of her heart and hope invested in this boy, and in spite of her dire situation, her hope was no little thing. Now he seemed so much smaller and more fragile than she remembered, vulnerable and as easily taken from her as Nick had been, as her mother had been.
She approached him and dropped to her knees, and he flew into her arms, clutching her with something like desperation.
The dogs whined, seemed to debate the proper protocol, and settled on the floor to comfort each other.
Just then, neither Jane nor Travis felt a need to speak. The substance of him, the warmth of him, the sweetness of his breath, the rabbit thump of his heart as he pressed against her were worth more than all the words in this vast library. She kissed the top of his head, kissed his brow, and when he put one small hand to her face, she kissed the fingers, the palm.
The words love you passed between them, the only words that seemed important enough to speak, though by speaking them, Travis lost his composure. Tears flooded his eyes, and he revealed that, even at his age, he held no illusions about the fate of his former guardians, the Washingtons, though he had concealed his certainty until now. “They’re gone. Aunt Jess and Uncle Gavin, we’re never gonna see them again. They woulda come back by now. They’re dead, aren’t they dead, Mommy?”
When they had gone on the run from their house in Virginia, he’d begun calling her Mom, as if aware that he needed to grow up faster than nature intended. Sunday night, when she took a call from him on her burner phone, he’d reverted to Mommy. Now again.
She had many reasons to hate the people aligned against her, these arrogant self-named Techno Arcadians, not least of all because they took her boy’s father from him, but also because they stole his innocence. They forced on him an awareness of the darkness of this world that he otherwise would have discovered slowly over the years, with his parents’ guidance, in a manner that would have made it easier for him to come to terms with the harder truths of life.
On Sunday, speaking with him on the phone, she’d thought Travis feared that Jessie and Gavin had been killed, but she had seen no compelling reason to confirm his fear. Not while he was feeling so vulnerable. Not while she was hundreds of miles away from him and could not take him in her arms.
He was in her arms now, and among the many things she owed him was the truth. She knew from hard experience that too little truth in any family led to enduring pain. If her mother had not concealed the serious marital problems between her and Jane’s father, if the great pianist Martin Duroc had known his daughter was aware of his affair and might testify to her mother’s distress, perhaps he would not have dared to kill one wife to get another.
“Yes, sweetie, Jessie and Gavin are gone. They were very brave. They were very brave all their lives. And they loved you as if you were their own child.”
His voice was thick, tremulous, choked with tears. “What can we do? What can we do?”
She held him tight and rocked with him there on the floor. “We can remember them always, sweetheart, never forget how brave they were, how wonderful and kind and giving and funny. We can love them always, and every night in our prayers we can say thanks for having had them in our lives.”
He spoke into her throat, which was wet with his tears. “It’s not enough. They won’t know.”
“But they will know, honey. They will know every night. They will hear you every night, and they will know you loved them as much as they loved you.”
Her grief was now doubled by his grief. She wondered how many heartbreaks a child so young could endure.
4
CORNELL STOOD BY ONE OF his favorite armchairs, in the warm golden light of his prettiest stained-glass floor lamp, surrounded by the consolation of his books, and he knew no comfort, only misery.
He could not bear the boy’s grief, the tears. He wanted to do something to soothe this child, comfort him, but there was nothing he could do. He dared not hug Travis as the mother did. A mere hug would plummet Cornell into an anxiety attack, and he would be no good to anyone, a big strange ugly man curled in the fetal position and shaking with fear, unable to stand, hardly able to speak, a burden to them, not a comfort.
He stood wringing his large hands, ceaselessly shifting his weight from one foot to the other, as if he needed to go someplace at once but didn’t know where. He had long been at peace with his limitations, at peace with the hard road that was his only route through life, but he was not at peace now. He did not remember ever having wept before, but he was weeping.
5
THE DESERT WAS NEW TO Luther Tillman, and he liked it about as much as he might like being forked onto a barbecue and broiled over charcoal. He had known hotter days than this, even in his home state of Minnesota, but there was something about the pale sky and the dry air and the dusty trees and the mostly barren earth that intensified the effect of the heat and, for him anyway, made ninety degrees significantly more oppressive here than it would have been in a different landscape.
He shrugged out of his black-denim jacket. He considered taking off his shoulder rig, but under the current circumstances, he would feel more naked without the pistol than if he stripped out of all his clothes.
The gear in the back of the Chevy Suburban included a forty-foot garden hose with a special nozzle and two identical one-quart bottle-like attachments, each filled with a custom-mixed solvent, that fed their contents into the water stream in a continuous measured flow.
He found the hose bib at the corner of the garage where Jane had been told it would be, tested the water pressure, and hooked up the hose.
The white paint was a special blend that Enrique de Soto had concocted and applied in Nogales. The solvent turned the paint to something like chalk, and the water washed it off, leaving the factory-applied black paint intact. There were also three large, white block letters on the roof of the vehicle, the same three repeated on the front doors—FBI—and these letters likewise were impervious to the solvent.
Come civilian, leave official. Once they had the boy, they didn’t want to risk being stopped by authorities between here and the motor home in the RV park. If a roadblock was encountered, an FBI vehicle could more likely be driven around it without being forced to stop.
Like some alchemist of ages long past, Luther washed the white Suburban to black while the sun, in a far less magical fashion, beat on his shaved head and glazed his face with sweat.
6
IN THE CORNE
R WHERE SHADOWS drift around and over you, there is no passage of time, for you know not time, but only the eternal now.
There is hunger in the now. Fear. Hatred. Hatred of all that is not you. Anything that is not you is a potential threat.
You are awake, eyes open, but dreaming. Dark dreams darkle down into ever deeper darkness.
In the now is desire, but only of the most primitive kind. For food. For prey. For violence that conquers threat and fills your mouth with the nourishing blood of the Other.
Within your head, whispers come, whispers go, words as meaningless as wind in dry grass or rats’ feet over broken glass.
Emotions come, sent by Others. Their fear and hatred inspire greater fear and hatred of your own.
Images of violence occurring elsewhere in the now, prey being slashed, beheaded, gutted. The rutting frenzy of Others mounting their prey before they kill it.
Such images stir passions of your own, passions as cold as they are intense, but always fear endures even in passion. I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
A sudden sound injects new fear into the now. A familiar sound, yet you cannot name it or imagine its source. The word engine passes repeatedly through your mind but means nothing to you, and by its very meaninglessness further irritates.
You uncoil from the corner, weave upright in shadows, stand listening.
Move through shadowy spaces into a space with more light. To a clear shape through which light falls.
Others are here. A female moves away through dead weeds, toward a big place shaped dark against the day.