by Dean Koontz
He wished his mother were still here. She would know how to dispose of Jerry’s body.
This wasn’t an easy problem to solve. Every hallway in the Pendleton was monitored by security cameras. So were the elevators. So were the garages behind and separate from the main structure. Jerry weighed about 165 pounds. They were on the third floor.
The longer Mickey stood there, staring at the blanket-wrapped corpse, the bigger and heavier it looked.
He returned to his enormous bathroom, where he had received the manicure and the pedicure in his own spa chair. He opened his aromatherapy cabinet. He considered the sixty essences, each in a small glass bottle, racked on the back of the cabinet doors.
Underfoot, the cold marble floor felt sexy. But the chill also sharpened his mind and helped him to make a decision.
The fragrance of limes would further clarify his thinking and aid in the solution of his problem. The vaporizer stood on a roll-out shelf. Using an eyedropper, he distributed five drops of the essence of limes at the designated points on one of the cotton pads that came with the machine.
Fragrant steam billowed forth. Mickey breathed deeply. Any pleasant scent, if concentrated enough, could be intoxicating. He was exhilarated by the intense, astringent clarity of limes.
Smell might be the most erotic of the five senses. Pheromones that men and women produced, of which they were not consciously aware, drew them inexorably to one another more than did appearances or any other qualities they might possess. The nose was aroused before the genitals.
Mickey returned to the study. Dead Jerry waited in the blanket, the ends secured with neckties.
Mickey stood over the bundle. He regarded it with calculation, his mind lime-fresh and ready to get on with business. He paced around the cadaver. He sat in an armchair, pondering it.
He went to a window to peer down at the rain-washed courtyard, which was enclosed on three sides by the Pendleton and on the east end by a fourteen-foot-high limestone wall. An ornate bronze gate in that wall led to an open-air transitional space, which had other gates at its north and south ends. That space connected with the first garage, which had been converted from the carriage house.
Mickey’s parking space lay even farther away, in the second and larger garage, a new structure that stood alone, with three floors, one of them underground.
His attention shifted to the south wing, across the courtyard. On the second floor, someone stood backlighted at a window. If anyone had been trundling a blanket-wrapped stiff past the fountains and the ornamental shrubs below, he would have been seen.
Mickey returned to dead Jerry. A blanket didn’t sufficiently disguise a corpse. When you started hauling it around, anyone who saw it would know it was a dead guy in there.
Sensation was the only reason for living. Sensation stimulated thought and action. In this case, aromatherapy wasn’t potent enough to rev up his mind.
Mickey went to the walk-in closet in his bedroom. From a high shelf, he took down a black carryall. The smell and feel of the leather pleased him.
In the bedroom, he put the carryall on the bed. He pinched the pull tab between thumb and forefinger. He relished the erotic sound of the slider separating the teeth of the zipper.
From the bag he removed panties and lingerie that had belonged to his mother. Silk, satin, lace.
Tactile sensation can be a powerful stimulant.
After a while, he knew how he must dispose of the body. The only problematic part of the plan would be killing the guard currently on duty in the security room.
Murdering the guy would be easy. But that would be two jobs for which nobody was paying Mickey. Not good. The various people who contracted his services must never discover that he was murdering for free. They might decide he was no longer professional enough to be trusted. Then they would put out a contract on him.
In order to enjoy the most intense sensations that this world offered, you had to earn entrance into the right circles, to be one of those with a license to do anything you wanted and the wealth to ensure you could fulfill your most exotic desires. His mother had taught him that to be certain of achieving such a rarefied position, far beyond the reach of ordinary law, you had to make yourself useful to the Anointed, which was the class to which she belonged.
Like his mother, he exterminated people to make himself useful. She hadn’t used guns or garrotes, but words—theories and analyses and well-crafted lies. His mom killed reputations. She destroyed people intellectually, emotionally. She was always happy to see them dead if later they committed suicide or if eventually disease got them, but she never actually pulled a trigger, slid in a shiv, or set the timer on a bomb.
Mickey would dispose of the guard in the same place he dropped Jerry. By the time they were found, if they ever were, too little of them would remain to be identified, and no one would know how they had died.
With that decision made, to his surprise a vivid series of erotic images teased his mind’s eye. There was another resident of the Pendleton whom he found incredibly hot. But he couldn’t buy sex with Sparkle Sykes, because she didn’t need the money. He liked her daughter, too. They reminded him of Mallory, the cocktail waitress, and her younger sister, two of his first three murders. A nostalgic yearning overcame him. He would never again have sex with someone before killing her. Too risky. But if disposing of dead Jerry and the guard proved as simple as he expected, there was no harm in a little fantasizing about someday doing the Sykes girls and disposing of them in the same manner. Everybody liked to daydream.
Inspired, he put away the panties and lingerie. He returned the carryall to the closet.
He pulled on a pair of socks. They were a cashmere blend. His newly manicured toes were snug and warm in them.
One
In your wisdom, you once observed: “What need have we of gods if we become gods ourselves?”
I am sure, however, that you will come to understand that a world populated by gods would be as disordered as a world crowded with ordinary human beings in all their mad variety. The Greeks imagined a panoply of gods and demigods; consider the jealousies and rivalries that ensued among those residents of Mount Olympus. Men as gods would make of the world one vast Olympus, in a constant turmoil of supernatural events.
I am the One. I have no need for either humankind or godkind. In destroying the former, I destroy the latter.
Consider the one who kills for a living and who murdered his brother, as Cain murdered Abel. He allows for no god who will condemn him. He says that sensation is everything, that it is the only thing, and he is correct. He understands the truth of life better than do any of the other residents of the Pendleton. If there were a human being to whom I might grant a measure of mercy, it would be he. But mercy is a concept embraced by the weak, and I am not weak.
Tremors rumble under the building, then and now.
The current crop of Pendleton residents will soon stand before me like stalks of wheat waiting for the scythe. If blood ran in my veins, I might thrill to the prospect of this impending harvest, but I am bloodless and not subject to blood passions.
I will inflict pain upon them, I will lead them into despair, I will administer death unto them without the ecstasy that the hit man might experience when he murders, but with an efficiency and a prudent self-interest that ensures I will become and will remain the One until the sun dies and the world goes dark.
21
Here and There
Witness
Cold rain streamed down the tall chimney stacks, which were whetstones against which the wind whistled thinly as it sharpened itself, and even here, where few would ever see them, the grand architectural details did not relent. Every chimney was capped by a fascia of carved acanthus leaves, and each of its four tall walls was decorated with an oval medallion of limestone in which were engraved the letters BV, for Belle Vista.
The glazed ceramic-tile roof of the great house appeared flat, but it was slightly sloped from the center point to all
four walls of the waist-high balustrade that defined the parapet. The rain streamed away into copper scuppers that carried it to embedded downspouts in the corners of the structure.
Through the downpour, weaving among the chimneys and the vent stacks, which were as familiar to him as the patterns of his long-enduring melancholy, Witness approached the western parapet. He wore boots, jeans, a sweater, and an insulated jacket, but not a raincoat. He had come from a night where there was no rain; and he didn’t expect it here.
He stood at the high balustrade, gazing down upon the bustling traffic on the avenue and then at the sparkling sweep of the city spreading out upon the plain below. This was the fourth time he had seen the metropolis from this vantage point, and it was both brighter and larger than on the three previous occasions. If the lights of the streets and buildings hadn’t deliquesced into the shroud of rain, the city would have been even more impressive than it was.
Witness waited for sudden dryness, for darkness deep and vast.
Silas Kinsley
Returning from his informative meeting with Perry Kyser in the bar at Topper’s, approaching the main entrance of the Pendleton, Silas hesitated because the lighting was dimmer and more yellow than it should have been, obscuring the transition from the first to the second step. The first step was as wide as two, and the second was actually a broad stoop, so people who were tipsy (which Silas was not) or elderly (which he certainly was) sometimes stumbled there.
Surrounded by an architrave of limestone carved in an ivy motif, the arched bronze-and-glass doors were recessed under a bubblelike glass-and-bronze canopy by Louis Comfort Tiffany. Tucked discreetly under the canopy, the lights shone down on the steps and doors. None was burned out, but the entrance appeared half as well illuminated as usual.
Pushing open one of the doors and stepping into the lobby, Silas discovered that the lights here were also dimmer than usual. Drawing back the hood of his raincoat, he realized that the lighting was the least of the changes the space had undergone. Bewildered, he found himself not in the familiar carpetless lobby but in a reconfigured room with a fine antique Tabriz carpet over part of the marble floor and two divans where arriving guests might wait to be received. To his left, the concierge counter was gone, replaced by a solid and handsomely paneled wall inset with a single arched door. The evening concierge, Padmini Bahrati, was nowhere to be seen. On the right, instead of two sets of double French doors leading to a large banquet room that residents used for parties too big to be accommodated in their apartments, another solid arched door was set in a paneled wall. Directly ahead, the pair of French doors to the ground-floor public hall had been replaced by a formidable arched doorway with an intricately carved surround; the double doors were closed to any view of the space beyond. Rather than indirect cove lighting and recessed can lights in the ceiling, there were a grand crystal chandelier and floor lamps with pleated-silk shades and tassels.
He knew this place from old photographs. This was not the lobby of the Pendleton in 2011, but instead the reception hall of Belle Vista in a distant age, the apartment building gone, the private home returned. Back in the late nineteenth century, Shadow Street had been the first in the city to receive electric service, and Belle Vista had been the first new house to be built here without gas lamps. The lighting was dimmer than usual because these bulbs were primitive Edison products from the early days of the illumination revolution.
Sometimes, under stress or in the grip of strong emotion, Silas suffered from familial tremors of the jaw, which caused his mouth to quiver, and of the right hand. He began to tremble now, not with fear but with wonder. Time past and time present seemed to meet here, as if all the yesterdays of history were just a door, a threshold, a step away.
Directly ahead, a door opened, and the haunting began. The man who entered had died decades before Silas Kinsley’s birth. Andrew Pendleton. Billionaire of the Gilded Age. The first owner of this residence. He was no ghost, no rattler of chains looking to torment Ebenezer Scrooge, but rather a traveler out of time. He was dressed for another era: wide cuffs on his pants, narrow lapels on his suit coat, a high yoke on his vest, and a hand-knotted bow tie.
Startled, Pendleton said, “Who are you?”
Before Silas could respond, Belle Vista rippled away, as if it must have been a mirage, and the long-dead businessman shimmered out of sight with the reception room. Silas found himself standing in the brightly lighted lobby of the Pendleton, everything as it should be.
Beyond the concierge’s counter was an entrance to a walk-in coat closet used during parties in the nearby banquet room. Through that door came Padmini Bahrati, a slender beauty with enormous dark eyes, who reminded Silas of his own lost Nora.
“Mr. Kinsley,” said the concierge, “how are you this evening?”
Blinking, trembling, Silas remained speechless for a moment, and then he said, “Did you see him?”
Adjusting the cuffs of her blouse, she said, “Who?”
Judging by her demeanor, the transformation of the lobby had not extended to the coat closet. She was unaware of what had happened.
Silas strove to keep his voice steady. “A man. Leaving. Dressed as though he stepped out of the late eighteen hundreds.”
“Perhaps that’s a new fashion trend,” Padmini said, “which would be lovely, considering what you see people wearing these days.”
Twyla Trahern
As she slammed the door to Winny’s room, hoping to contain whatever malign force had tried to manifest in there, and as she hurried with the boy along the hallway toward the master suite, Twyla first thought that she would throw some essentials into a suitcase before leaving the Pendleton. By the time she reached the threshold of her bedroom, she decided it would be foolish to delay one minute longer than necessary. Reality had changed before her eyes and then had changed again. She didn’t know what was happening here, but she needed to react to it as she would have reacted if she’d seen the ghost of a decapitated man who spoke to her from the head that he carried in the crook of his arm: She needed to get the hell out.
All she required was her purse. It contained her car keys, her checkbook, her credit cards. They could buy new clothes and anything else they needed.
“Stay close,” she urged Winny as she crossed the living room toward the wing of the apartment that included her study, where she had left her purse.
She wasn’t as much of a churchgoer as maybe she ought to be, but Twyla was a believer, raised in a house with a well-read Bible, where they prayed every evening before dinner and again at bedtime. In the small town where she was brought up, as in her immediate family, most people lived as best they could with the conviction that this life was preparation for another. When her daddy, Winston, died in the coal-cracker explosion, lots of people at his funeral said, “He’s in a better place now,” and meant it. There was this world and the world after, and Twyla once wrote a song about the need for humility in the light of our mortality and another about the mystery of grace, both hits.
Whatever the next world might be like, however, she knew for certain that the walls of Heaven weren’t crumbling and stained and greasy and crawling with black mold, like the wall that changed in Winny’s bedroom. If television existed in Heaven—which was about as likely as cancer wards existing in Heaven—there wouldn’t be either spyware that made every TV a surveillance device or deadpan computer voices ordering people exterminated. That didn’t even sound like Hell, but more like a hell on earth, maybe North Korea or Iran or some other place run by madmen.
In the study, as she snatched her purse from the piano bench and turned to leave, her attention was drawn to the windows by a flash of lightning, and she remembered the brief illusion that the storm and the rain-washed panes had earlier presented to her: the city gone, replaced by an empty landscape, a sea of grass, strange trees—craggy and black—clawing at the sky. That had been part of this, not an illusion, but a glimpse of a different reality.
The knot of fear
in her breast tightened.
As acutely perceptive as ever, Winny said, “What? What is it?”
“I don’t know. It’s crazy. Come on, sweetie. You go ahead of me, I don’t want you out of my sight. We need coats, umbrellas.”
Theirs was the largest apartment on the second floor, twice the size of the next biggest, and the only one with two entrances. The front doors opened into a short length of hallway, near the north elevator, and the service door opened near the south elevator. Their winter coats and rain gear were in a closet in the laundry room, near the back door.
As they crossed the kitchen, Twyla said, “Winny, wait a sec,” and snatched the handset from the wall phone. She pressed O, which in the Pendleton’s customized telecom system would ring the phones in both the concierge’s office and at the lobby reception counter.
A woman said, “Operator,” which wasn’t the standard greeting, and she didn’t sound like Padmini Bahrati, who was the only female concierge on the staff.
Confused, Twyla said, “Is this the concierge?”
“The what? Excuse me. No, ma’am. This is the operator.”
Perhaps she was some new employee who didn’t know the protocols.
“This is Twyla Trahern in 2-A. Will you please have my Escalade brought around from the garage right away?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. You’ve dialed the operator. If you’ve got a number for this concierge person, I’ll be happy to place the call for you.”
Dialed? Place the call?
Watching his mother, Winny raised his eyebrows.
To the operator, Twyla said, “Aren’t you at the front desk?”
“No ma’am. I’m at City Bell, the central exchange. Whom do you wish to call?”
Twyla had never heard of City Bell. She said, “I’m trying to reach the front desk of the Pendleton.”