by Dean Koontz
This meant that Earth did not have many nations each with its own interests, that it was instead a police state with a well-hidden dictatorial class that operated through puppet governments to conceal the true nature of the world. All news and entertainment media were co-opted, and people who said they traveled to Canada recently must be either lying or brainwashed, and the same for those claiming to have had a lovely vacation in Peru or Chile.
The biggest remaining mystery was the identity of the Ruling Elite. They were not merely elusive and secretive. They were as invisible as ghosts, all-powerful malevolent spirits, everywhere at once and yet never showing their faces. Over the years, Fielding considered all kinds of possibilities and ruled out none. Well, he ruled out the Masons and the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei and the Jews because, as supposed villains, they were so clichéd that they could be nothing but red herrings, and because everyone who hated them to the point of organizing against them proved to be babbling lunatics with whom Fielding wanted no association. He inclined toward the belief that survivors from the lost continent of Atlantis, living now in an undersea supercivilization, might be at work behind the scenes, or else extraterrestrials, or maybe the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, whom no one ever suspected of being involved in conspiracies, which was exactly what made them seem suspicious to Fielding Udell.
As he set aside his glass of cola and returned his attention to the computer, a low and portentous voice arose at a distance, muffled and yet close. The speaker sounded like a TV-news anchor reporting some horrendous event involving hundreds of deaths. Fielding could almost but not quite make out what was being said.
He rolled his wheeled chair back from the computer and turned slowly in a full circle, cocking his head this way and that, trying to get a fix on the source. The voice seemed to originate from all around him, not from one point more than from any other. He decided it must be coming from the apartment below, although the thick concrete-and-steel floors seldom allowed sound to translate from one level of the Pendleton to another.
On the second floor, two apartments were directly below his. One was currently without a resident and up for sale. The other belonged to the Shellbrooks, who were away on vacation. Fielding remained certain that the voice came from below, not from the attic, where the slithering noise had arisen.
He slowly swiveled in his office chair again, and by the time he came around 360 degrees, he was pretty sure that the TV anchor—if that’s who he heard—was speaking in a foreign language, though not one that he could identify. Moment by moment, the voice changed, grew more urgent, more insistent, as if broadcasting a warning.
No, not a warning. A threat.
Fielding was self-aware enough to know he might be paranoid, as the bed-worthy girl had accused him of being. That didn’t mean he was wrong about the Secret World Order and the Ruling Elite or that his Case for Prosecution was in any way misguided. He could be dead right and paranoid. The two things weren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, being right made paranoia a requisite for survival.
The speaker, definitely spouting something other than English, suddenly seemed to be not one voice but many, a gang of muttering conspirators urging one another to act, to strike, to commit some monstrous deed, now, right now, immediately.
Alarmed, convinced that he was correctly interpreting the tone and intent of the speakers, Fielding rose from his office chair.
A deep rumbling rolled through the building, and he felt subtle vibrations in the floor. Something like this had happened earlier, a few times, but he had been too absorbed in his online investigation to pay much attention.
What had not happened earlier was the shimmering sheets of blue light that crackled across the ceiling. Every small metal object on the desk—pens, paper clips, scissors—became airborne, shot to the ceiling, quivered there in the sparkling blueness, and rained to the floor when the strange luminosity sputtered out.
In this unstable cosmos, characterized by unending calamities, anything could happen at any time. That was not just Fielding’s philosophy but also part of the truth he had discovered. And now it seemed that something outrageous was about to be demonstrated.
One
Fear is the engine that drives the human animal. Humanity sees the world as a place of uncountable threats, and so the world becomes what humanity imagines it to be. They not only live in fear but use fear to control one another. Fearmongering is their true religion.
In my perfect kingdom, there is no fear. No human beings live here to compete with one another, to build empires, to start wars. Here, there is no permanent loss and no lasting death. Here, what is killed is reborn. I feed on everything imperfect that comes before me, which is not exploitation but purification, and I feed as well on myself, devouring myself in order to live anew.
The enemy of the Ruling Elite fears everything, though he doesn’t realize that the object of his greatest fear is himself. He fears living more than dying. He fears his money almost as much as he fears not having it. If he were to discover proof that his conspiracy theories are true, that the world is exactly as he imagines it, he would not have the courage to act upon that evidence. He thinks himself a potential hero, but he does not have the stuff of heroes. He is to the boy as a mouse is to a lion. Fittingly, such a man may play an important role in the history of the One.
24
Here and There
Vernon Klick
Displeased by Bailey Hawks’s intrusion into his domain, Vernon slumped in his chair and called up the video record from the cameras outside the north stairs on the ground floor and in the basement. Watching the plasma screen, he fast-forwarded through the few minutes in question, but no one came out of the stairwell on either level except Mr. Big War Hero himself, Bailey Hawks, just a minute earlier.
Vernon said, “If she really went down past you when you were on the second-floor landing—”
“I was, she did,” Hawks said impatiently, like you weren’t supposed to doubt anything he said because he won a bunch of medals for croaking maybe five hundred unarmed old Muslim dames and setting their grandchildren on fire.
“What did this woman look like?” Vernon asked.
“She was a girl. Seven or eight years old.”
Vernon raised his eyebrows. “You were following some little girl around the building?”
“I wasn’t following her. She was dressed strangely. Like in a costume. She went down past me on the stairs.”
“Well, the cameras say she didn’t. Unless she’s still in the stairwell, dead or not, or something.”
Hawks tried to look baffled, but Vernon was pretty sure he saw guilt in those shifty money-manager eyes. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“Doesn’t mean anything,” Vernon said. “Just that we’ve already got ourselves a twenty-three-second mystery from last night, maybe a heist, a Pink Panther kind of thing, but most likely worse. And now this girl’s gone missing.”
“She said her name was Sophia Pendleton and her father was the master of the house.”
“That’s some story,” Vernon said, needling Hawks with the hope of getting a reaction that would make good copy in his tell-all book.
A rumbling rose from the earth under the building, swiftly built, then slowly waned.
“The damn fools,” Vernon said. “Nobody gets a permit to blast this late in the day.”
“It’s not blasting. The shock waves last far too long for that.”
Vernon wanted to ask if this was something Hawks learned when he was a big war hero blowing up hospitals and nursery schools, or if maybe he was just born knowing everything. To maintain his cover, to ensure that his book wouldn’t attract lawsuits and restraining orders before it was published, Vernon kept his mouth shut.
“Something’s happening here. Something’s wrong,” Hawks said, and hurried out of the security room.
“He waltzes in here like he owns the place,” Vernon said aloud to himself, “disrupts the security schedule, wants me t
o help him stalk some pretty little girl, for God’s sake, and then breezes out with not so much as a thank-you. Moneygrubbing, gun-sucking, self-important, arrogant, phony, clueless, pervert bastard.”
He returned his attention to the north hall on the third floor. Still no sign of Logan Spangler. Of course maybe the old fart left the idiot senator’s apartment while Vernon was distracted by Hawks.
“Self-righteous, warmongering, devious, greedy sicko,” Vernon fumed. “Twisted, ignorant, syphilitic, swindling, conceited, stupid, baby-killing, racist son of a pig!”
Silas Kinsley
On the ground floor, at the south elevator, Silas was desperate to get to the security room and convince the guard that the Pendleton needed to be evacuated immediately. Considering that the crisis wasn’t a fire or a bomb threat, was instead the perception that something seemed to be going badly wrong with the fundamental mechanism of time within the building, he would need all of his persuasive powers.
As anxious as he was to sound the alarm, he hesitated to press the elevator-call button because of the voices that abruptly arose in the shaft behind the sliding doors. Scores of them, all talking at once. He could not begin to identify the language, though he spoke four and was passingly familiar with two others. The phonemes and morphemes of this strange speech sounded not merely primitive but also savage, a limited language evolved by a culture void of mercy, by a people quick to violence and capable of great cruelty, a people whose beliefs and purposes were utterly alien from human ways of thinking. Intuition was always a quiet voice, the faintest whisper at the back of the mind, but this time it wailed as loud as a siren, and Silas drew his hand back from the call button just as blue light glimmered through the paper-thin crack between the elevator doors, as if the walls of the entire shaft were aglow.
Martha Cupp
As Martha probed under the chesterfield with the brass poker from the fireplace-tool set, Edna lifted the lace-trimmed train of her long dinner gown, revealing her shoes. Evidently she expected something to skitter from beneath the sofa, not necessarily a Gila monster in the tradition of Cobain, maybe just a mouse, but something unpleasant that might seek shelter under the train and climb one of her legs.
“Please, dear, don’t poke at it so aggressively,” Edna said.
“All I seem to be poking is empty air.”
“But if you do jab it, be gentle. Don’t enrage it.”
“Whatever it is, Sis, it won’t thank us for our hospitality and tip its hat on the way out.” She stopped poking. “There’s nothing under here.”
High on the étagère, Smoke and Ashes hissed, suggesting that the object of their disgust and fear remained in the living room.
Martha turned from the chesterfield and went exploring through the canyons of bulky Victorian furniture that offered innumerable places for a mouse to hide—or a Gila monster, for that matter.
“If it’s something supernatural,” Edna said, “it’s not going to be afraid of a brass poker.”
“It’s not supernatural.”
“You didn’t see it clearly. That’s the way supernatural entities are. Quick, vaguely glimpsed, enigmatic.”
“ ‘Quick, vaguely glimpsed, and enigmatic’ describes my first husband’s performance in the bedroom, and he wasn’t supernatural.”
“No, but he was cute,” Edna said.
From their elevated perch, the cats squalled and hissed with greater agitation.
Edna said, “Dear—the chesterfield!”
Turning to the plump sofa once more, Martha saw something moving inside of it. The horsehair-stuffed seat, with no removable cushions, was a single upholstered mass featuring a waterfall front edge. Under the striped fabric, stretching it out of shape, a creature that might have been about the size of one of the cats burrowed back and forth through the stuffing, seemingly frenzied but silent. Evidently it had chewed its way through the underside of the chesterfield and into the guts of the piece.
Martha stepped in front of the sofa, planted her feet wide, and raised the poker overhead.
“It might be a spirit,” Edna said. “Don’t strike a spirit.”
“It’s not a spirit,” Martha assured her.
“If it’s a good spirit, striking it is sacrilegious.”
Waiting for the thing in the sofa to slow down or pause so that she could be certain of clubbing it solidly on her first try, Martha said sarcastically, “What if it’s a demonic spirit?”
“Then, dear, you’ll just piss it off. Please let’s call Mr. Tran and have him deal with this.”
Martha said, “You’re the cake-recipe genius. I’m the business genius. What I have here is a business decision. Go bake something while I handle this.”
On the seat of the chesterfield, the upholstery split and the burrowing intruder erupted in a shower of horsehair.
Mickey Dime
While Mickey waited on the third floor for the north elevator, tremors shuddered through the Pendleton again. He wasn’t the least bit worried about them.
In the Philippines, he had once tracked two men to the lip of a volcano. He needed to kill them to fulfill a contract. As he was about to pull the trigger, an unanticipated minor eruption convulsed the mountain. A gout of white-hot lava spewed over the two men, all but vaporizing their flesh and reducing their bones to char. Though Mickey stood only fifteen feet from them, not a drop touched him. He walked away with the equivalent of a light sunburn on his face.
He had liked the smell of molten rock. Metallic, crisp, sexy.
A day later, the volcano blew in a big way. But by then he was ensconced in a Hong Kong hotel suite with a young prostitute and a can of whipped cream. She had been delicious.
If a volcano couldn’t get him, nothing would.
Now he rode the elevator to the basement. The doors slid open. Mickey stepped into the corridor.
Diagonally to his right and on the farther side of the hallway, the stairwell door was swinging shut behind someone. He watched it close. He liked the sound of the latch clacking into place. A solid, final sound.
He was reminded of the sound of the heavy latches on the steamer trunks in which he had packed the remains of the cocktail waitress named Mallory, her little sister, and her girlfriend. Fifteen years had passed since he’d disposed of those bodies, but that exhilarating night remained as crisp in memory as if those events had occurred earlier this very day. With his enormous willpower, he restricted himself to professional murder, though in his heart still lived the amateur who would have done the same work for the love of it.
Enjoying the faint scent of chlorine, he waited to see if anyone would come back through the door. Maybe the ding of the elevator arriving on station would engage that person’s curiosity. He couldn’t risk a witness who could place him here at this hour.
After maybe half a minute, Mickey turned left and walked to the security room. He opened the door and went inside.
The prick was on duty. Klick the Prick. Even though they were ex-cops, the other guards were all right. This Klick was a smug little prick who always seemed to be scheming at something.
Swiveling in his chair, Klick said, “Suddenly I’m as popular as Justin Timberlake or somebody. What brings you here, Mr. Dime?”
Mickey drew the pistol with the sound suppressor from his shoulder holster.
Eyes wide in terror as Mickey approached, Klick said, “I’ll never tell about the lingerie.”
Mickey shot him point-blank through the heart, twice. When you right away stop the heart pumping, there’s less blood to clean up.
He left the security room and went to the basement equipment room where he had earlier gotten the hand truck. This time, he fetched a thick moving blanket and two of the furniture straps that dangled from a wall rack.
Only when he returned to the security room did he stop to think about what Vernon Klick had said: I’ll never tell about the lingerie.
From the time Mickey had been a little boy, his mother warned him never to trust a man
in a uniform. How right she had been.
Dr. Kirby Ignis
In his raincoat, carrying an umbrella, soon to be late meeting his colleague for dinner at Topper’s, Kirby locked his second-floor apartment just as shock waves rolled through the rock on which the Pendleton stood. The blasting contractors on the farther side of Shadow Hill were excavating later than usual. He wondered that anyone would want to pay overtime to build a high-rise in this dreadful economy, but he supposed they anticipated a turnaround a few years down the road.
As he walked briskly toward the west end of the north hall, strains of Chinese opera still lingered in his mind’s ear. Kirby hummed a few bars of a favorite aria.
The neighbors in 2-E, Cheryl and Henry Cordovan, in Europe since the previous Saturday and not scheduled to return for another twelve days, had left their springer spaniel, Biscuit, with their son and his family. Kirby missed the dog. A couple of times a week, when the Cordovans went out to dinner and Kirby intended to eat at home, they left Biscuit with him for a few hours. The spaniel was as cute as a dog could be and excellent company.
Three years previously, he’d had a companion of his own, a black Labrador retriever named Lucy, but cancer had taken her. The loss so devastated Kirby that only recently had he begun to think he might bring a new dog into his life, risking the grief again. Tropical fish were pretty to look at, but they weren’t great company.
Sitting on a comfy sofa with a dog’s head in his lap, rubbing its ears and stroking its head, Kirby could achieve a greater clarity of thought and more breakthroughs in the theory and the technology that made the Ignis Institute a success. A good dog brought with it a profound peace that made the mind soar and encouraged problem solving even more than did music or the graceful spectacle of swimming fish.