by Dean Koontz
in the small office reserved for him at McIlroy.
“I’ve only dreamed of him twice. Nightmares, of course. But all kids have nightmares.”
“You dream about Nina, too. Are those nightmares?”
“Oh, no! Those are lovely dreams.”
He looked surprised. “When you think of Nina, you feel sad?”
“Yes. But also... I remember the fun of shopping with her, trying on dresses and sweaters. I remember her smile and her laugh.”
“And guilt? Do you feel guilty about what happened to Nina?”
“No. Maybe Nina wouldn’t have died if I hadn’t moved in with them and drawn Sheener after me, but I can’t feel guilty about that. I tried hard to be a good foster daughter to them, and they were happy with me. What happened was that life dropped a big custard pie on us, and that’s not my fault; you can never see the custard pies coming. It’s not good slapstick if you see the pie coming.”
“Custard pie?” he asked, perplexed. “You see life as slapstick comedy? Like the Three Stooges?”
“Partly.”
“Life is just a joke then?”
“No. Life is serious and a joke at the same time.”
“But how can that be?”
“If you don’t know,” she said, “maybe I should be the one asking the questions here.”
She filled many pages of her current notebook with observations about Dr. Will Boone. Of her unknown guardian, however, she wrote nothing. She tried not to think of him, either. He had failed her. Laura had come to depend on him; his heroic efforts on her behalf had made her feel special, and feeling special had helped her cope since her father’s death. Now she felt foolish for ever looking beyond herself for survival. She still had the note he had left on her desk after her father’s funeral, but she no longer reread it. And day by day her guardian’s previous efforts on her behalf seemed more like fantasies akin to those of Santa Claus, which must be outgrown.
On Christmas afternoon they returned to their room with the gifts they received from charities and do-gooders. They wound up in a sing-along of holiday songs, and both Laura and the twins were amazed when Tammy joined in. She sang in a low, tentative voice.
Over the next couple of weeks she nearly ceased biting her nails altogether. She was only slightly more outgoing than usual, but she seemed calmer, more content with herself than she had ever been.
“When there’s no perv around to bother her,” Thelma said, “maybe she gradually starts to feel clean again.”
Friday, January 12, 1968, was Laura’s thirteenth birthday, but she did not celebrate it. She could find no joy in the occasion.
On Monday, she was transferred from McIlroy to Caswell Hall, a shelter for older children in Anaheim, five miles away.
Ruth and Thelma helped her carry her belongings downstairs to the front foyer. Laura had never imagined that she would so intensely regret leaving McIlroy.
“We’ll be coming in May,” Thelma assured her. “We turn thirteen on May second, and then we’re out of here. We’ll be together again.”
When the social worker from Caswell arrived, Laura was reluctant to go. But she went.
Caswell Hall was an old high school that had been converted to dormitories, recreational lounges, and offices for social workers. As a result the atmosphere was more institutional than at McIlroy.
Caswell was also more dangerous than McIlroy because the kids were older and because many were borderline juvenile delinquents. Marijuana and pills were available, and fights among the boys—and even among the girls—were not infrequent. Cliques formed, as they had at McIlroy, but at Caswell some of the cliques were perilously close in structure and function to street gangs. Thievery was common.
Within a few weeks Laura realized that there were two types of survivors in life: those, like her, who found the requisite strength in having once been loved with great intensity; and those who, having not been loved, learned to thrive on hatred, suspicion, and the meager rewards of revenge. They were at once scornful of the need for human feeling and envious of the capacity for it.
She lived with great caution at Caswell but never allowed fear to diminish her. The thugs were frightening but also pathetic and, in their posturing and rituals of violence, even funny. She found no one like the Ackersons with whom to share the black humor, so she filled her notebooks with it. In those neatly written monologues, she turned inward while she waited for the Ackersons to be thirteen; that was an intensely rich time of self-discovery and increasing understanding of the slapstick, tragic world into which she had been born.
On Saturday, March 30, she was in her room at Caswell, reading, when she heard one of her roomies—a whiny girl named Fran Wickert—talking to another girl in the hall, discussing a fire in which kids had been killed. Laura was eavesdropping with only half an ear until she heard the word “McIlroy.”
A chill pierced her, freezing her heart, numbing her hands. She dropped the book and raced into the hallway, startling the girls. “When? When was this fire?”
“Yesterday,” Fran said.
“How many were k-killed?”
“Not many, two kids I think, maybe only one, but I heard if you was there you could smell burnin’ meat. Is that the grossest thing—”
Advancing on Fran, Laura said, “What were their names?”
“Hey, let me go.”
“Tell me their names!”
“I don’t know any names. Christ, what’s the matter with you?”
Laura did not remember letting go of Fran, and she did not recall leaving the grounds of the shelter, but suddenly she found herself on Katella Avenue, blocks from Caswell Hall. Katella was a commercial street in that area, and in some places there was no sidewalk, so she ran on the shoulder of the road, heading east, with traffic whizzing by on her right side. Caswell was five miles from McIlroy, and she was not sure she knew the entire route, but trusting to instinct she ran until she was exhausted, then walked until she could run again.
The rational course would have been to go straight to one of the Caswell counselors and ask for the names of those kids killed in the fire at McIlroy. But Laura had the peculiar idea that the Ackerson twins’ fate rested entirely upon her willingness to make the difficult trip to McIlroy to inquire about them, that if she asked about them by phone she would be told they were dead, that if instead she endured the physical punishment of the five-mile run, she’d find the Ackersons were safe. That was superstition, but she succumbed to it anyway.
Twilight descended. The late-March sky was filled with muddy-red and purple light, and the edges of the scattered clouds appeared to be aflame by the time Laura came within sight of the McIlroy Home. With relief she saw that the front of the old mansion was unmarked by fire.
Although she was soaked with sweat and shaking with exhaustion, though she had a throbbing headache, she did not slow when she saw the unscorched mansion but maintained her pace for the final block. She passed six kids in the ground-floor hallways and three more on the stairs, and two of them spoke to her by name. But she did not stop to ask them about the blaze. She had to see.
On the last flight of stairs she caught the scent of a fire’s aftermath: the acrid, tarry stench of burnt things; the lingering, sour smell of smoke. When she went through the door at the top of the stairwell, she saw that the windows were open at each end of the third-floor hall and that electric fans had been set up in the middle of the corridor to blow the tainted air in both directions.
The Ackersons’ room had a new, unpainted door frame and door, but the surrounding wall was scorched and smeared with black soot. A hand-printed sign warned of danger. Like all the doors in McIlroy, this one had no lock, so she ignored the sign and flung open the door and stepped across the threshold and saw what she had been so afraid of seeing: destruction.
The hall lights behind her and the purple glow of twilight at the windows did not adequately illuminate the room, but she saw that the remains of the furniture had been cleaned ou
t; the place was empty but for the reeking ghost of the fire. The floor was blackened by soot and charred, though it looked structurally sound. The walls were smoke-damaged. The closet doors had been reduced to ashes but for a few burnt chunks of wood clinging to the hinges, which had partially melted. Both windows had blown out or been broken by those fleeing the flames; now those gaps were temporarily covered by sections of clear-plastic dropcloths stapled to the walls. Fortunately for the other kids at Mcllroy, the fire had burned upward rather than outward, eating through the ceiling. She looked overhead into the mansion’s attic where massive, blackened beams were dimly visible in the gloom. Apparently the flames had been stopped before they’d broken through to the roof, for she could not see the sky.
She was breathing laboriously, noisily, not only because of the exhausting trip from Caswell but because a vise of panic was squeezing her chest painfully, making it difficult to inhale. And every breath of the bitterly scented air brought the nauseating taste of carbon.
From that moment in her room at Caswell when she had heard of the fire at McIlroy, she had known the cause, though she had not wanted to admit to the knowledge. Tammy Hinsen once had been caught with a can of lighter fluid and matches with which she planned to set herself afire. On hearing of that intended self-immolation, Laura had known that Tammy had been serious about it because immolation seemed such a right form of suicide for her, an externalization of the inner fire that had been consuming her for years.
Please, God, she was alone in the room when she did it, please.
Gagging on the stink and taste of destruction, Laura turned away from the fire-blasted room and stepped into the third-floor corridor.
“Laura?”
She looked up and saw Rebecca Bogner. Laura’s breath came and went in wrenching inhalations, shuddering exhalations, but somehow she croaked their names: “Ruth... Thelma?”
Rebecca’s bleak expression denied the possibility that the twins had escaped unharmed, but Laura repeated the precious names, and in her ragged voice she heard a pathetic, beseeching note.
“Down there,” Rebecca said, pointing toward the north end of the hall. “The next to the last room on the left.”
With a sudden rush of hope, Laura ran to the indicated room. Three beds were empty, but in the fourth, revealed by the light of a reading lamp, was a girl lying on her side, facing the wall.
“Ruth? Thelma?”
The girl on the bed slowly rose—one of the Ackersons, unharmed. She wore a drab, badly wrinkled, gray dress; her hair was in disarray; her face was puffy, her eyes moist with tears. She took a step toward Laura but stopped as if the effort of walking was too great.
Laura rushed to her, hugged her.
With her head on Laura’s shoulder, face against Laura’s neck, she spoke at last in a tortured voice. “Oh, I wish it’d been me, Shane. If it had to be one of us, why couldn’t it have been me?”
Until the girl spoke, Laura had assumed that she was Ruth.
Refusing to accept that horror, Laura said, “Where’s Ruthie?”
“Gone. Ruthie’s gone. I thought you knew, my Ruthie’s dead.”
Laura felt as if something deep within her had torn. Her grief was so powerful that it precluded tears; she was stunned, numb.
For the longest time they just held each other. Twilight faded toward night. They moved to the bed and sat on the edge.
A couple of kids appeared at the door. They evidently shared the room with Thelma, but Laura waved them away.
Looking at the floor, Thelma said, “I woke up to this shrieking, such a horrible shrieking... and all this light so bright it hurt my eyes. And then I realized the room was on fire. Tammy was on fire. Blazing like a torch. Thrashing in her bed, blazing and shrieking...”
Laura put an arm around her and waited.
“... The fire leaped off Tammy—whoosh up the wall, her bed was on fire, and fire was spreading across the floor, the rug was burning...”
Laura remembered how Tammy had sung with them on Christmas and had thereafter been calmer day by day, as if gradually finding inner peace. Now it was obvious that the peace she’d found had been based on the determination to end her torment.
“Tammy’s bed was nearest the door, the door was on fire, so I broke the window over my bed. I called to Ruth, she... s-she said she was coming, there was smoke, I couldn’t see, then Heather Dorning, who was bunking in your old bed, she came to the window, so I helped her get out, and the smoke was sucked out of the window, so the room cleared a little, which was when I saw Ruth was trying to throw her own blanket over Tammy to s-smother the flames, but that blanket had caught f-fire, too, and I saw Ruth... Ruth... Ruth on fire...”
Outside, the last purple light melted into darkness.
The shadows in the corners of the room deepened.
The lingering burnt odor seemed to grow stronger.
“... and I would’ve gone to her, I would’ve gone, but just then the f-fire exploded, it was everywhere in the room, and the smoke was black and so thick, and I couldn’t see Ruth any more or anything... then I heard sirens, loud and close, sirens, so I tried to tell myself they’d get there in time to help Ruth, which was a I-I-lie, a lie I told myself and wanted to believe, and... I left her there, Shane. Oh, God, I went out the window and left Ruthie on f-f-fire, burning...”
“You couldn’t do anything else,” Laura assured her.
“I left Ruthie burning.”
“There was nothing you could do.”
“I left Ruthie.”
“There was no point in you dying too.”
“I left Ruthie burning.”
In May, after her thirteenth birthday, Thelma was transferred to Caswell and assigned to a room with Laura. The social workers agreed to that arrangement because Thelma was suffering from depression and was not responding to therapy. Maybe she would find the succor she needed in her friendship with Laura.
For months Laura despaired of reversing Thelma’s decline. At night Thelma was plagued by dreams, and by day she stewed in self-recrimination. Eventually, time healed her, though her wounds never entirely closed. Her sense of humor gradually returned, and her wit became as sharp as ever, but there was a new melancholy in her.
They shared a room at Caswell Hall for five years, until they left the custody of the state and embarked on lives under no one’s control but their own. They shared many laughs during those years. Life was good again but never the same as it had been before the fire.
11
In the main lab of the institute, the dominant object was the gate through which one could step into other ages. It was a huge, barrel-shaped device, twelve feet long and eight feet in diameter, of highly polished steel on the outside, lined with polished copper on the inside. It rested on copper blocks that held it eighteen inches off the floor. Thick electrical cables trailed from it, and within the barrel strange currents made the air shimmer as if it were water.
Kokoschka returned through time to the gate, materializing inside that enormous cylinder. He had made several trips that day, shadowing Stefan in far times and places, and at last he had learned why the traitor was obsessed with reshaping the life of Laura Shane. He hurried to the mouth of the gate and stepped down onto the lab floor, where two scientists and three of his own men were waiting for him.
“The girl has nothing to do with the bastard’s plots against the government, nothing to do with his attempts to destroy the time-travel project,” Kokoschka said. “She’s an entirely separate matter, just a personal crusade of his.”
“So now we know everything he’s done and why,” said one of the scientists, “and you can eliminate him.”
“Yes,” Kokoschka said, crossing the room to the main programming board. “Now that we’ve uncovered all the traitor’s secrets, we can kill him.”
As he sat down at the programming board, intending to reset the gate to deliver him to yet another time, where he could surprise the traitor, Kokoschka decided to kill Laura, too.
It would be an easy job, something he could handle by himself, for he would have the element of surprise on his side; he preferred to work alone, anyway, whenever possible; he disliked sharing the pleasure. Laura Shane was no danger to the government or to its plans to reshape the future of the world, but he would kill her first and in front of Stefan, merely to break the traitor’s heart before putting a bullet in it. Besides, Kokoschka liked to kill.
Three
A LIGHT IN THE DARK
1
On Laura Shane’s twenty-second birthday, January 12, 1977, she received a toad in the mail. The box in which it came bore no return address, and no note was enclosed. She opened it at the desk by the window in the living room of her apartment, and the clear sunlight of the unusually warm winter day glimmered pleasingly on the charming little figurine. The toad was ceramic, two inches tall, standing on a ceramic lily pad, wearing a top hat and holding a cane.
Two weeks earlier the campus literary magazine had published “Amphibian Epics,” a short story of hers about a girl whose father spun fanciful tales of an imaginary toad, Sir Tommy of England. Only she knew that the piece was as much fact as fiction, though someone apparently intuited at least something of the true importance that the story had for her, because the grinning toad in the top hat was packed with extraordinary care. It was carefully wrapped in a swatch of soft cotton cloth tied with red ribbon, then further wrapped in tissue paper, nestled in a plain white box in a bed of cotton balls, and that box was packed in a nest of shredded newspaper inside a still larger box. No one would go to such trouble to protect a five-dollar, novelty figurine unless the packing was meant to signify the sender’s perception of the depth of her emotional involvement with the events of “Amphibian Epics.”
To afford the rent, she shared her off-campus apartment in Irvine with two juniors at the university, Meg Falcone and Julie Ishimina, and at first she thought perhaps one of them had sent the toad. They seemed unlikely candidates, for Laura was not close to either of them. They were busy with studies and interests of their own; and they had lived with her only since the previous September. They claimed to have no knowledge of the toad, and their denials seemed sincere.
She wondered if Dr. Matlin, the faculty adviser to the literary magazine at UCI, might have sent the figurine. Since her sophomore year, when she had taken Matlin’s course in creative writing, he had encouraged her to pursue her talent and polish her craftsmanship. He had been particularly fond of “Amphibian Epics,” so maybe he had sent the toad to say “well done.” But why no return address, no card? Why the secrecy? No, that was out of character for Harry Matlin.
She had a few casual friends at the university, but she was not truly close to anyone because she had little time to make and sustain deep friendships. Between her studies, her job, and her writing, she used up all the hours of the day not devoted to sleeping or eating. She could think of no one who would have gone out of his way to buy the toad, package it, and mail it anonymously.
A mystery.
The following day her first class was at eight o’clock and her last at two. She returned to her nine-year-old Chevy in the campus parking lot at a quarter till four, unlocked the door, got behind the wheel—and was startled to see another toad on the dashboard.
It was two inches high and four inches long. This one was also ceramic, emerald green, reclining with one arm bent and its head propped on its hand. It was smiling dreamily.
She was sure she had left the car locked, and in fact it had been locked when she returned from class. The enigmatic giver of toads had evidently gone to considerable trouble to open the Chevy without a key—a loid of some kind or a coathanger worked through the top of the window to the lock button—and leave the toad in a dramatic fashion.
Later she put the reclining toad on her nightstand where the top hat-and-cane fellow already stood. She spent the evening in bed, reading. From time to time her attention drifted away from the page to the ceramic figures.
The next morning when she left the apartment, she found a small box on her doorstep. Inside was another meticulously wrapped toad. It was cast in pewter, sitting upon a log, holding a banjo.
The mystery deepened.
In the summer she put in a full shift as a waitress at Hamburger Hamlet in Costa Mesa, but during the school year her course load was so heavy that she could work only three evenings a week. The Hamlet was an upscale hamburger restaurant providing good food for reasonable prices in a moderately plush ambience—crossbeam ceiling, lots of wood paneling, hugely comfortable armchairs—so the customers were usually happier than those in other places where she had waited tables.
Even if the atmosphere had been seedy and the customers surly, she would have kept the job; she needed the money. On her eighteenth birthday, four years ago, she learned that her father had established a trust fund, consisting of the assets liquidated upon his death, and that the trust could not be touched by the state to pay for her care at McIlroy Home and Caswell Hall. At that time the funds had become hers to spend, and she had applied them toward living and college expenses. Her father hadn’t been rich; there was only twelve thousand dollars even after six years of accrued interest, not nearly enough for four years of rent, food, clothing, and tuition, so she depended upon her income as a waitress to make up the difference.
On Sunday evening, January 16, she was halfway through her shift at the Hamlet when the host escorted an older couple, about sixty, to one of the booths in Laura’s station. They asked for two Michelobs while they studied the menu. A