Final Hour (Novella)

by Dean Koontz

But not for long.

  Greedy Undine wants everything that is Ursula’s, wants to grow fat at Ursula’s expense. Therefore, she has been starved thin.

  Ursula hopes to break Undine. To force her admission of her true intentions.

  But she grows weary waiting for her evil twin’s confession.

  Four days previous, Undine almost went too far, tried to sell one lie that was too outrageous to be borne. Infuriated, Ursula had plucked the more deadly pistol from the cooler, had almost shot her in the face.

  Since then, Undine has dialed back her performance.

  Currently she seems to think that silence will save her.

  Daddy knew the ugly truth of Undine. Daddy left everything to Ursula, requiring only that Undine receive a fair annual allowance.

  Although Ursula is more than fair, Undine isn’t satisfied. She says the wretched economy has impacted the sale of her paintings. Oh, dear impoverished poet! Oh, great artist reduced to penury!

  Undine claims only to be seeking an increase in her allowance, a payoff of the mortgage on her “cottage.”

  What she calls a cottage would be called a palace by the poor multitudes of the world.

  In truth, the greedy pig, frustrated by Daddy’s will, is eager to get at the trough. She came to kill Ursula.

  She will never confess. She is incapable of giving Ursula the satisfaction of groveling, confessing, and begging for her life.

  Undine is a mistake of nature. A freak, born fifty seconds after the true and rightful heir to the Liddon fortune.

  From the cooler, Ursula withdraws the lethal firearm.

  * * *

  The once prosperous district was a reminder of California’s golden past, but also a preview of a possible future of blight, decay, and disorder. Empty lots where shifts of workers had once parked. Peeling stucco. Crumbling masonry. Some windows broken, others boarded. Block after block, the buildings in which working people had once built dignified lives now seemed to stand subtly askew, as though tweaked slightly but repeatedly, repeatedly, by earthquakes that no one felt, in preparation for a quick collapse when the Big One came. Everywhere, the torqued and slightly canted architecture was testament to bad ideas enforced with all the best intentions. Here where working people had once thrived, the ideas of their self-appointed betters came to die, an idea graveyard that reminded Pogo why he had never wanted to presume to tell others how they should live or what was best for them.

  As in the backseat Bob yawned, Pogo pulled the Honda to a stop in front of a chain-link gate, and robogirl spoke from the phone: “You have arrived. Please remember that Simon Says is your only reliable resource in times of crisis.”

  Fifty yards beyond the fence, between two large buildings, stood a silver Mercedes convertible.

  Makani said, “She’s here, all right. Does this feel like a place where someone would imprison a sister in a windowless room?”

  “The whole neighborhood looks like it was built just for that purpose,” Pogo said.

  * * *

  The pistol contains ten rounds.

  Ursula sits with it on her taut, perfectly smooth, perfectly proportioned bare thighs, watching her twin lying upon the mattress, hag-ugly, filthy, defeated, but still scheming.

  She likes the feel of the gun.

  She has never killed with one before. She has never needed a gun for that.

  Now she needs the pistol, needs it so much that the desire to use it fills her with exquisite tremors of erotic pleasure.

  Undine opens her eyes. She watches Ursula, the gun, watches with animal cunning and desperate hope.

  “Do you really forgive me?” Ursula asks.

  She wants to induce her evil twin to proceed from the absurd claims of absolution to the bigger lie that almost got her killed four days earlier. When Undine says those words again, Ursula will shoot the bitch in her lying mouth.

  “Do you really, really forgive me, Undine?”

  * * *

  Pogo said, “O’Brien, would you open the glove box and hand me the knife?”

  “What knife?” Makani asked as she pressed the button-style latch release, but then she saw the Swiss Army Knife as the lid dropped open.

  “I don’t carry it everywhere anymore,” he said. “But I try to keep it handy. Never know when someone might be thrown off a bridge. Wait here.”

  He got out of the car, scaled the gate, landed on his feet on the other side, as agile as he was good-looking. He knelt next to the metal housing that protected the motor and the two wheels of the chain drive that operated the gate.

  She didn’t know which of the twenty-six functions provided by the seventeen small tools he might have used. But in two minutes, he removed part of the housing; he must have crossed the right wires, because the big gate shuddered and then began to roll aside.

  To Bob, Makani said, “I don’t know how that man and I are going to make it work between us, what with this witchy power of mine and with him having no privacy every time I touch him. But one way or another, Bobby, that fella out there is going to be your papa someday.”

  Bob whined happily, as if he understood.

  * * *

  Although she sits quite still, Ursula has an acute awareness of her potential for speed. In a T-shirt and short shorts and running shoes, she is a hurricane wind waiting for the storm to gather itself. She is lightning waiting to flash.

  The gun bridges her thighs, and her hands flank the gun.

  Her thighs feel so warm under the palms of her hands.

  Her ceaselessly moving hands feel so strong on her thighs.

  She is the master of her world, this world. She needs no one but herself. She certainly doesn’t need another Ursula named Undine.

  “Do you, Undine? Do you really, really forgive me?”

  As Ursula repeats the question insistently, Undine raises her head from the mattress.

  The wicked twin knows which of the two handguns lies across her sister’s thighs. And yet perhaps she dares to hope.

  Ursula says, “When you started racing through high school, one year ahead of me, then suddenly two, I went to bed every damn night wishing you’d have a stroke or a brain hemorrhage, anything to make you stupid.”

  Undine has never heard of this before. Interested, perhaps wondering where this confession will lead, she sits up.

  “I’d lie there in bed for an hour, longer, just seething at the injustice, wishing you brain damage. You had no right to be smarter than me. We’re supposed to be identical.”

  Sitting with her legs splayed, as a child might sit, Undine plants one hand to each side, flat against the mattress, as though she might swoon backward if she didn’t brace herself.

  “You never did anything to earn your smarts. I envied you, envied your intelligence. Why shouldn’t I? Greedy people have what they don’t deserve. I have always—always—despised people who have what they don’t deserve.”

  Undine’s dirty, tangled hair has fallen across her face. She glares between those greasy, golden strands, her evil manifest in her blue eyes. Such a fierce blue.

  “When you flew through college and went off to live on your own and write and paint, and I remained under Daddy’s roof, under his thumb, I no longer wished you’d have a stroke and be struck stupid. I wished you dead. I wished you dead a thousand times. A thousand times a thousand.”

  Resorting once more to the strategy that previously had failed her, Undine speaks in a voice marked as much by compassion as by the pain of starvation and by weariness. “It’s all right. I understand. I really do. I love you. Why wouldn’t I? My sister. My only sister. I forgive you.”

  This is what Ursula wants.

  This false kindness.

  This insincere clemency.

  This thickly poured syrup, this treacle of phony mercy.

  It infuriates her. It justifies her. It brings them toward the most outrageous of all Undine’s lies from four days ago, the lie that, if she repeats it, will be her final deception, the last words s
he ever speaks.

  Ursula goads her. “I’ve done such cruel things. Look at you, what I’ve done to you, what a mess you are now. And I’ve enjoyed it, Undine. I’ve enjoyed every sweet minute of it.”

  * * *

  Pogo parked the Honda just inside the property, facing the street, and closed the gate.

  Makani thought perhaps they should leave Bob safely in the car, but Pogo wanted him with them. There was a bond between the Labrador and this special woman that seemed greater than that of just a dog and master, which might have something to do with her paranormal talent, even if she couldn’t read animals at a touch. Pogo sensed that Bob wouldn’t go full-on dog at the wrong moment, wouldn’t bark and give them away or scamper off after a scent of interest to him but unrelated to their purpose here. As a surfer who had long been able to intuit which wave in a set would be worth standing for the ride, he had learned to trust his hunches.

  They hurried to the Mercedes, which was parked in the deep-purple shadow of a large building, within ten feet of a man-size door. When Pogo tried the door, it proved to be unlocked. Beyond, revealed by banks of overhead lamps, lay a vast vacant room, as dreary as an abandoned bunker from a long-ago lost war.

  With the canister of pepper spray clutched in his right hand, forefinger under the flip-up guard, he was prepared to press the firing mechanism. Makani was ready with her canister, too.

  Pogo felt a little foolish, as if they were taking water pistols to a firefight. In retrospect, he realized that he should at least have armed himself with the fisherman’s gaff from the yacht on which he had earlier been lounging, or the tire iron from the Honda.

  Armed with dog breath and a lot of teeth, Bob squirmed between them, past Pogo, and went first into the building.

  * * *

  “You haven’t forgiven me,” Ursula says. “We were carried in the same womb, fed the same mother’s milk, grew up at the knee of the same father. You aren’t capable of forgiveness any more than I am.”

  “I know you won’t let me go,” Undine says. “I’ve resigned myself to that.”

  She sits there splay-legged, defeated, a ragged broken doll.

  “I’ve resigned myself to death,” she says softly.

  “You’ve resigned yourself to nothing, Undine. You’re always scheming. That’s how you’ve always been. I know you.”

  “I’m resigned,” Undine repeats. “So it’s either anger or pity, bitterness or forgiveness. I don’t want to die angry and bitter.”

  The bitch is going to go there again, go for the big lie that will earn her a bullet through the teeth and out the back of her head.

  From a pocket of her shorts, Ursula fishes out the little key that will unlock the manacle binding Undine’s ankle. There is an opportunity for one last delicious bit of torment.

  With the pistol in her right hand, she rises from the chair.

  Undine is a vain creature. As she gazes up at her radiant sister, Ursula’s unblemished perfection must be a choking grief to her now, a piercing reminder of the repulsive wretch she has become.

  “The only difference between us,” Ursula says, “is that you’re driven by greed that you conceal behind all your poet bullshit, all your sensitive-artist bullshit. I despise greed, especially yours, when I’ve done everything to earn what I have, and you’ve done nothing.”

  This rant inspires Undine to rise shakily to her feet.

  The moment approaches.

  This is the final minute of the final hour.

  Behind filthy ropes of hair, Undine’s haggard face contorts with a pretense of having been offended—more than offended, deeply wounded—by having her virtue questioned, her motivations impugned.

  “Admit the truth about yourself, Undine.” She holds up the manacle key between thumb and forefinger. “Admit the truth, and I will set you free.”

  Undine stares at the key so hungrily that it might be food.

  “Admit the truth. It’s just that easy.”

  But Undine knows she will never be set free. Besides, Ursula is such a pathological liar that the taste of truth is too repulsive for her to speak a word of it.

  Instead, Undine says, “I forgive you.”

  “Liar.”

  She pretends sadness and compassion with conviction. “You’re sick, Little Bear.”

  That is a nickname from their childhood, given to her by this deceitful sibling. The name Ursula is from the Latin ursa, meaning she-bear.

  “It’s not your fault, Little Bear. You’re very sick.”

  Little Bear raises the pistol.

  She points it at her hateful sister’s face.

  Undine does not flinch or even blink.

  “Am I very sick?” Little Bear asks.

  “Yes, love. You are. You really are.”

  “What are you going to do about it?” Little Bear asks.

  “There’s nothing I can do. Not now.”

  “There’s one thing,” says Little Bear, tightening her finger on the trigger.

  * * *

  Bob the dog could see and hear and feel and taste, of course, but most of his extensive knowledge of the world came to him courtesy of his fine nose, which had twenty muscles more than the pathetic four-muscle human nose, and which provided him with a sense of smell many thousands of times greater than Pogo’s. By that one sense, he took in more data than all five human senses combined.

  No sooner had Bob crossed the threshold into the abandoned factory than he caught a scent that interested him, perhaps one he recognized, possibly that of the bold woman who, in the supermarket parking lot, had earlier displaced him from the front seat of Makani’s Chevy and in the process damaged his pride. He padded to the north end of building, nose to the floor, following a trail of spoor undetectable by his two companions.

  Pogo was impressed by the silence with which Bob set out upon the search. He seemed to have a cat’s ability to retract his claws, so that they did not click on the concrete, though this was not a trick that a dog should be able to perform. In spite of the physical exertion and excitement, Bob didn’t pant, either, or express his opinion of the quarry by vocalizing—with growl and grumble—as he closed on her.

  They came to a door. Beyond the door were steps descending.

  Below lay a maze of corridors and rooms.

  Voices ahead.

  * * *

  Undine does not once fix her eyes upon the fearsome bore of the pistol, from the darkness of which her death will issue in a spurt of flame.

  She meets Little Bear’s eyes and does not look away, as if her last best hope might be to mesmerize her executioner.

  Little Bear says, “Tell me the one thing you’ll do for your big sister, the one thing in addition to forgiving me.”

  Although physically damaged, Undine remains mentally sharp. She knows what Little Bear is daring her to say.

  “Tell me what you told me four days ago, the lie that almost got you killed then. End your agony and tell me.”

  “It’s not a lie.”

  “So tell me.”

  Undine hesitates. “I forgive you…I’ll pray for you.”

  “Liar. Neither you nor I, nor anyone in this freakin’ family, has ever prayed for anyone or ever will.”

  At such close range, she intends to blow off Undine’s hateful face, but the dog leaps upon her back, knocking her to the floor.

  * * *

  The pistol discharged, and the bullet ricocheted through the room, drawing no blood, clanging off one of the metal shades that directed the light of the ceiling-mounted lamps toward the floor, shattering a distant fluorescent tube.

  Bob bounded off Ursula as she scrambled on hands and knees toward the gun that, knocked from her hand, clattered across the concrete.

  Makani moved fast and kicked the pistol farther from the woman’s reach.

  When the blonde looked up, her expression was demented in a most peculiar way, so that she appeared almost to be a child again, furious that her dignity had been assaulted and that s
he had been denied something she wanted, as if she had never been denied before.

  Makani pressed the firing mechanism on the canister of pepper spray, and the one-second stream spattered Ursula’s eyes, her nose, eliciting from her a shriek of pain and fury.

  When in an instant her pupils contracted, when at once her vision blurred, when the cold fluorescent light became a blinding whiteness, when she could not draw a breath that didn’t burn, Ursula should have collapsed in defeat, but she did not. Her rage was that of a wounded boar, her energy demonic, and she scrambled toward the pistol with an uncanny instinct for its location.

  Makani dropped upon the crazed woman, pinning her against the floor, reading in her a desire to kill, kill, kill. She seized a fistful of thick golden hair, twisted it ruthlessly. Into Ursula’s screams of outrage, Makani shouted, “Be still, damn you!” Cursing, spitting, the blonde tried to heave her off, thrashed and squirmed.

  Riding the widow of Proctor Norquist as if taking on a storm wave, Makani amazed herself as she pushed the woman’s face to the floor and twisted the fistful of hair again, twisted and pulled with brutal intent, with the consequence that her adversary’s power to resist quickly diminished. From her earliest days on Oahu, she had been a tomboy; until this moment, however, she hadn’t known that, confronted by a wild and evil hellcat, she could play a game of tough cop with some authority.

  * * *

  The brave dog leaped, Makani followed through as if she’d taken down a thousand nasty perps before, and Pogo stood astonished for a moment, feeling as if he were a useless goob, one of those gutless ducks, one of those wish-was surfers who floated in the lineup with everyone else but never rose on his board to ride a wave.

  He saw the gun fly out of Ursula’s grasp. He saw light winking off the little key as it arced onto the dirty mattress, and saw the starving sister break into tears at the sight of it.

  “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” she exclaimed, snatching up the key with hands shaking so badly that she kept dropping it.

  Pogo bent down, seized Ursula by one arm, and held her cruelly tight, giving Makani a chance to climb off the woman. The blonde wheezed and coughed, choked on the air that she so urgently inhaled. Even secondhand, he found the super-hot pepper fumes distressing. She probably felt as if she were suffocating, though she wasn’t. Every effect of pepper spray was temporary; there would be no permanent damage from it.