The Forbidden Door

by Dean Koontz

  She didn’t call out to him at once, because he might not hear her. Besides, if the individual on the porch was focused on Luther and not yet aware of Jane, no need to shout and precipitate action.

  No one lived in the house. Jessie and Gavin would have stayed there with Travis; but they were dead. They must be dead.

  Jane walked fast but didn’t run. The faster she moved, the more she would call attention to herself in the stranger’s peripheral vision. She was thirty or forty yards from the house when the figure moved out of the doorway, farther onto the porch, and she saw that it was a woman. Not Jessie Washington. A naked woman.

  The presence of the woman was itself a spanner in the works, but her nudity was so bizarre that she represented some greater crisis the nature of which Jane couldn’t comprehend.

  Jane was less than twenty yards from the house when the naked woman saw her, which was also when Luther finished washing off the Suburban, killed the water, and dropped the hose. Running now, Jane saw something bright in the woman’s hand, maybe a knife, and she drew her pistol and called out, “Luther, the porch!”

  Surprised, he turned first to Jane, then pivoted toward the unclothed woman.

  The stranger was indeed holding a butcher knife in her right hand. She backed into the house and closed the door.

  Luther had drawn his pistol by the time Jane reached him. “Who the hell—”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But this means we have to get out of here fast. Change the plates. I’ll go inside.”

  “Shit, no. Not alone.”

  “There’s no time to tag-team her. Change the plates.”

  Ricky de Soto had supplied them with government license plates. Federal departments wore special plates with prefix codes specific to each—EPA for the Environmental Protection Agency, OEO for Office of Economic Opportunity, SAA for the United States Senate—and an FBI vehicle should be wearing the prefix J because the Bureau was under the purview of the Department of Justice. Some Bureau vehicles had FBI emblazoned on doors and roofs, though many did not. Calling attention to the Suburban by block-lettering it ought to let them slide around roadblocks and through chokepoints more easily, but the wrong plates would betray them as surely as would bumper stickers proclaiming COPS SUCK.

  “What if she’s not alone in there?” Luther worried.

  “Seconds count. We don’t just have Travis and the dogs now. We’re taking Cornell.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Change the plates, but watch your back. Then drive to the barn and load up.”

  She hurried toward the porch steps.

  11

  CARTER JERGEN FEELS THAT THE desert—everything and everyone in it—is so alien to normal human experience that it might as well be on a planet in another galaxy. This feeling is further distilled when he and Dubose come across the wrecked vehicles littering the county highway.

  The first is a cherry-red Honda sedan, turned on its starboard flank, its roof smashed against a roadside retaining wall built to prevent an eroding bluff from washing across the road in a flash flood. For maybe sixty feet leading to the Honda, the pavement is littered with pieces of the vehicle and wads of safety glass. The blacktop is scarred and imprinted with red paint, as if something impacted the car, overturned it, and then shoved it sixty feet before ramming it hard into the wall.

  Jergen gets out of the VelociRaptor and goes to have a look at the Honda and comes back and gets into the passenger seat and says, “Dead woman in there.”

  “What kind of dead woman?” Dubose asks.

  “What do you mean, ‘what kind’?”

  “Ethnicity, age, appearance, clothing, nature of injuries. In an investigation as complex as the one we’ve undertaken, Cubby, you just never know what detail may prove to be the little piece of the puzzle that makes sense of the entire picture.”

  “Caucasian, maybe thirty, brunette, shorts and a halter top, all busted up.”

  “Attractive?”

  “What—you’re going to hump a corpse now?”

  “Get real, my friend. If this is a crime scene and if the girl is attractive, her looks could have something to do with why she was murdered. A former husband. A jealous boyfriend.”

  “Who is this jealous boyfriend—King Kong? He grabs a Honda and shuffleboards it sixty feet into a wall?”

  “Sarcasm does not become you, Cubby.”

  “Anyway, we’re not here to investigate murders.”

  “She might have information we need. Are you sure she’s dead?”

  “If she isn’t, she ought to be.”

  “Good enough,” says Dubose.

  They cruise not quite one mile before coming upon a Mini Cooper that has somehow been boosted off the pavement and slammed into an oak with such terrific force that its mangled undercarriage is locked tight around the massive, cracked tree trunk, so that the petite vehicle is suspended about four feet off the ground.

  Although he doesn’t offer a reason, Dubose will not take his turn getting out of the VelociRaptor to have a closer look at the Mini Cooper. Of course he doesn’t want to give Jergen an opportunity to occupy the driver’s seat in his absence.

  Jergen returns from the oak tree. “Mexican, about twenty-five, jeans and a T-shirt. Broken arm, at least one broken leg, probably a major spinal injury. Exceedingly attractive, I think you’d say.”

  “I can read through your pathetic deception, my friend. You didn’t use a pronoun because you’re trying to avoid saying it’s a man, as though I’ll run to have a look based on ‘exceedingly attractive.’ ”

  “Maybe you are a reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes after all.”

  “This Mexican is alive?”

  “Probably not for long. Unconscious and fading.”

  Dubose sighs. “So we can’t question him. And even if he does live and it’s with a major spinal injury, it won’t be a high quality of life. Shall we operate by triage rules and hope the next one, if there is a next, will be more useful to us?”

  “Works for me.”

  Half a mile later, around a turn, they discover a Big Dog Bulldog Bagger, a motorcycle with wide-swept fairing and saddlebags, once a sweet machine with a 111-cubic-inch V-twin motor but now just wrack and ruin. Eighty or a hundred feet beyond the Big Dog, the man who’d been riding it now lies squashed on the pavement as if he’s been put through a giant sandwich press. He’s obviously been run over several times by a persistent motorist.

  The tire tracks of the vehicle used in this homicide are imprinted on the pavement in the victim’s bodily fluids. Although the sun has already mostly dried the tracks, the pattern is clear enough to allow Radley Dubose to declare portentously, “Damn big truck.”

  12

  JANE IN THE KITCHEN. NO cooler here than outside. The old house vaguely scented with dry-rot fungus. Pale panes of porch-door glass. One pane broken out, shards on the floor.

  Hard sunshine slanted through the window above the sink, so precisely defined by the shape of the pane that the light had sharp edges and sliced the shadows at the cut lines so that they were sharp-edged, too. Dust motes turning slowly in the illumining shaft. Shadows billowing in the corners as if monks had here discarded their robes. Black-and-white patterns laid out as though delivering a profound message in geometric forms. The scene reminded her of some old pre-color movie, the title forgotten, in which protagonist and antagonist had faced off in a war-ravaged church. She couldn’t remember who died, who lived, or if perhaps no one survived.

  She stood listening, but there was nothing to hear until she moved, whereupon the old vinyl-tile flooring crackled underfoot. Floorboards creaked beneath the vinyl.

  On the farther side of the kitchen, an open door led to what might be the living room.

  To her right, a door probably connected the kitchen to the single-car garage. It stood maybe e
ight inches ajar.

  Jane needed her left hand for tasks. Her right arm, the gun arm, was straight out in front of her.

  She picked up a shard of glass from the floor, a crescent-moon-shaped fragment about four inches across, and she stood it on its points, the curve propped against the back door.

  Now the nearer of the other two doors. Hinged to swing away from her. Stand on the side opposite the hinges. Through the eight-inch gap, there was gloom beyond. One dirt-glazed window, like a TV turned to a dead channel, admitted barely enough light to suggest the shape of a vehicle, an SUV. It must be Gavin and Jessie’s Range Rover. They’d left it here when they drove Cornell’s Honda to the market in town—and died there. Quiet in the little garage. She held her breath and listened and didn’t know if the silence she heard was perhaps the woman with the knife holding her breath.

  She threw the door open. Its corroded hinges rasped. It slammed against the wall in there, and no one responded. Doorways were bad, the worst. She went through low and fast, head and pistol first, from the half-lit kitchen to the darker garage, moving at once to the right, pressing her back against the wall. There was no good way to die, but she had a particular aversion to being stabbed, to the cold intrusion of steel and the vicious twist of the blade. Her heart knocked hard against her breastbone as she reached up and felt the wall and found the switch near the doorframe and clicked on the overhead fluorescent fixtures.

  No sign of the woman with the knife. A row of cabinets along the front wall, none large enough to be a hiding place for an adult. Drop low for a quick look under the Range Rover. Nothing. No one inside, either. The only exterior door in the garage was the big one that accommodated a vehicle.

  After entering the kitchen with no less caution than she’d left it, she closed the connecting door. She snatched up another fragment of glass, and used it as a telltale; when she returned, if the shards weren’t as she’d left them, she’d know someone had entered the house and waited in the garage for a chance to surprise her.

  Beyond the kitchen lay a living room where the front door was secured with a deadbolt. There were as well two small bedrooms, one bath, and a study. The rooms contained mismatched discount-warehouse furniture that Cornell had left behind when he moved to his library and bunker—and all were deserted.

  The woman couldn’t have gone out the front door and engaged the deadbolt behind her. None of the windows were broken or open, and in fact they all appeared to be painted shut, inoperable.

  The heat was stifling. Even breathing through her mouth, Jane wasn’t as quiet as she wanted to be.

  In a corner of the study, one door remained to be investigated. Maybe a closet. She sheltered against the frame, put her left hand on the knob—and hesitated.

  Her memory worked the image of the naked woman. Medusa mass of hair. Face at once lovely and horrific, empty of everything except ferocity. A face strangely reminiscent of that Goya painting Saturn Devouring His Children, which contained no loveliness whatsoever. The bold nudity, the bloody hands, the knife.

  This was something new in the world. It was surely related to the work of the Arcadians—but how?

  Gun arm across her waist. Muzzle toward whatever might burst out of this last unknown space. Keeping pressure on the trigger. She twisted the doorknob, cast open the door. No response.

  She dared the doorway and saw splintered boards swaybacked with the weight of time: steps leading down into darkness that seemed impenetrable and final. In houses of this age, in country vulnerable to earthquakes, basements were rare.

  Studying the dust on the wide landing for signs that someone had recently descended, Jane startled when a loud crash issued from elsewhere in the house, demanding her immediate attention.

  But there was no lock on the cellar door. And because it opened onto the landing, it couldn’t be braced shut from this side.

  Another crash from the front of the house, the splintering of wood.

  Maybe the woman with the knife wasn’t down there in the dark. Like hell she’s not. Maybe she wouldn’t come up when Jane was busy elsewhere. Like hell she won’t.

  Jane hurried out of the study as a third crash reverberated through the walls of the small house.

  13

  CARTER JERGEN IS NOT ONE to regret his life choices, although now that the revolution has brought him to this desolate ass-end of nowhere, he wonders if he should have taken longer than three minutes to join the Techno Arcadians when his aunt Deirdre had given him an invitation. Charming Aunt Deirdre is his favorite relative, a dazzling intellectual, a self-made businesswoman worth $700 million, childless, and certain to have included him in her will. Now it seems as if he would have been wiser if he had declined her invitation and instead had killed her in some manner that would not have incriminated him.

  Through the windshield, Jergen regards the lightweight Toyota pickup that is on its roof beside the highway, crushed, tires blown, and on fire—although the flames are subsiding. A blackened, partly fleshed skeleton hangs upside down in the driver’s seat like a large, charred, melted campfire marshmallow.

  Radley Dubose places a call to the Desert Flora Study Group. He asks about the Airbus H120 that he earlier ordered into the air to search for Minette Butterworth and for signs of chaos related to the people who were brain-screwed the previous night. He inquires if the flight crew of that aircraft might have noticed anything unusual on this length of county highway.

  Apparently, the helo pilot and copilot have reported in excess of a single disturbance, because Dubose does more listening than talking for perhaps four minutes. He punctuates the Desert Flora Study Group agent’s report with “Huh” and “Really” and “Shit,” and “Not good, compadre, not good.”

  When Dubose terminates the call, Jergen says, “If together we can devise an accidental death for my aunt Deirdre, I would split with you what’s likely to be a minimum hundred-million-dollar inheritance. Maybe a great deal more.”

  Dubose is disapproving, though not of homicide. “Let’s avoid being distracted by such mundane concerns as money. Not with the revolution at stake. Do you recall that one of the fifty people injected last night was a Mr. Arlen Hosteen?”

  “I’ve got enough on my mind without having to remember the names of fifty losers.”

  “Arlen Hosteen,” Dubose says, “is the owner of Valleywide Waste Management, the local trash-collection firm. He sometimes services one of his company’s routes himself when a driver is sick. He seemed a good enlistee in the hunt for the Hawk brat. No one thinks twice about a garbage truck pulling up to house after house, so he has a chance to give each place a lookover, check trash cans at curbside to see if any contents suggest the presence of a small child in a family that doesn’t have kids.”

  “Brilliant,” Jergen says sarcastically.

  “Not as it has turned out, I’m afraid. Hosteen is driving an immense trash-collection truck with front-loading arms that can lift the heaviest dumpster with ease. It’s like a tank.”

  “So he’s gone through the forbidden door, has he? Just like Minette.”

  “He has obviously deteriorated mentally, but evidently not as much as she has. And by all reports, he’s not naked.”

  “That’s something to be thankful for.”

  Dubose drives onto the highway once more. “The Airbus crew saw Hosteen rampaging, but they haven’t stayed on him because other more disturbing incidents require their attention.”

  “More disturbing than Hosteen? How many other incidents?”

  “Six. Not to worry. We’ll find Hosteen and shut him down.”

  “In his garbage-truck tank? That won’t be easy.”

  “You may remember, I met your aunt Deirdre. Killing Hosteen in his truck will be a lot easier than killing that ballbuster.”

  14

  JANE ON THE MOVE. HECKLER in a two-hand grip, just under her line of v
ision. A short, narrow hall served the bedrooms and study.

  When she stepped into the living room, she saw that the old, weathered, desiccated front door had cracked loose of its hinges; it hung askew, fixed to the frame only by its deadbolt. Having kicked in the door, a fortyish man, pale and disheveled and sweating profusely, looking both angry and bewildered, stood just inside the room, maybe fifteen feet from her, holding an iron pry bar that had an angled neck and lug wrench at one end.

  Keeping the Heckler’s front sight on the intruder, positioned so that peripheral vision might alert her to movement in the hallway to her left, Jane said, “Put it down.”

  He was costumed neither in black leather nor in a vest made from human nipples, nor with a necklace fashioned from the teeth of his victims, in neither a leather mask nor a hood imprinted with the face from Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, as movies routinely portrayed existential threats like this. He wore a blue-and-yellow-striped polo shirt, white slacks, and white topsiders without socks, a mundane monster for an insipid age when imagination had gone digital and the true horrors of the world were so disturbing that a lot of people found it easier to fear imaginary threats.

  Ignoring Jane’s command, he said, “Was you? Was you, is you the bitch, bitch? The bitch in my head, you?”

  He must be on one drug or another, maybe an entire apothecary. His blue eyes were wide and lunatic, yet as clear and alert as the eyes of a hunting owl. Anger contorted his face; not anger alone, but also perhaps some neurological disorder. Every muscle from hairline to chin and ear to ear moved not in concert but in disjunctive arrangements, producing a shifting kaleidoscope of grotesque expressions. Although every look was unnatural in the extreme, they all conveyed rage, hatred, and demented lust.