by Dean Koontz
Silas thought that this killing must be related to the tragedies that occurred here every thirty-eight years. Dime’s murder of Vernon Klick must somehow be a part of the currently pending event that was presaged by rumbling in the earth, the appearance of the late Andrew North Pendleton in the lobby, the voices in the elevator shaft, and other signs. But related how?
More urgently than ever, he needed Padmini Bahrati to find Tom Tran or to trigger the fire alarm herself, if she knew how. He rose to his feet, crossed the room, and was within three steps of the door when something bumped against the farther side of it.
Fielding Udell
After the luminous blue energy sheeted across the ceiling, after the paper clips and other metal objects leaped to the light and then, when the light was extinguished, rained to the floor, Fielding stood transfixed. His mind raced toward a conclusion that he sought to avoid but that seemed inescapable. The Ruling Elite had found him.
They knew that he knew.
He knew. The original scientific consensus connecting residence near power lines with high cancer rates, later refuted and dismissed, was in fact true. Millions of such deaths must be occurring each year, the awful truth hidden by the Political Masters who throttled the free speech of scientists and doctors, and by their Minions who altered medical records and forged death certificates.
He knew. The consensus claiming the chemical alar, used by apple growers, caused malignancies and worse, which had been brilliantly championed by a famous actress but had later been found to be bad science, was in fact also true. Good science, good. Too many apple farmers were destroyed, too many apple-related jobs were lost, so the Ruling Elite and their Minions came down on the side of Commerce rather than on the side of Health. Precious babies were dying from apple juice, toddlers from applesauce, legions of schoolchildren from the reckless consumption of raw apples and apple pies. But the Ruling Elite and their despicable Minions faked evidence to the contrary and mounted a pro-alar campaign. Now uncountable innocent children were dying horribly, perhaps so many that their bodies were secretly bulldozed into mass graves.
When the shimmering blue light did not return, he warily toured the rest of his apartment, prepared to find the phenomenon elsewhere. He suspected it might have been evidence of a mind-reading ray, with which his thoughts had been explored for insurrectionist sentiments. But he wanted to believe it had been something less ominous, perhaps just a census scan, which the Ruling Elite would probably take on a regular basis to determine just how rapidly the earth’s fast-dying population was moving toward extinction.
Fielding Udell knew. The eminent professor Paul Ehrlich, and a consensus of scientists, reported in 1981 that 250,000 species were becoming extinct per annum. Such a catastrophe meant that by 2011—this very year!—Earth would support no life whatsoever. Recently some scientists said only two or three species were lost each year and claimed this had been the case for centuries, which meant they were either corrupt or that their families were being held hostage and tortured by the Ruling Elite. Fielding knew that the 250,000-per-year figure must be correct, that most of the world was now barren, that the images you saw on TV of a world pretty much as it had always been were elaborate special-effects lies, every bit as phony as the moon-landing footage shown to the world in July 1969, which had been staged in the Mojave Desert. The bitter truth: The earth was largely dead except for certain urban-suburban enclaves covered by force-field domes, inside which the brainwashed citizens lived an illusion of plenty and safety.
Finding no shimmering blue light anywhere, Fielding took his empty glass to the kitchen for a refill of his homemade cola.
Sometimes he wondered from where the food came to feed the dome-city residents like him, considering that the farmlands were polluted and unproductive. He remembered an old sci-fi movie, Soylent Green, in which the revolutionary new food that staved off famine in an overpopulated future world proved to be made secretly from cadavers. Charlton Heston shouts, “Soylent Green is people!” Maybe all those apple-poisoned children weren’t bulldozed into mass graves, after all, but were carted off to processing plants.
Now and then Fielding had difficulty eating his dinner, even though it looked like the same food he had dined upon all his life. The only thing that kept him from becoming bulimic was the fact that Soylent Green was set in the year 2022, which meant that more than a decade remained before the Ruling Elite would deceive humankind into embracing cannibalism.
Carrying the glass of cola, he returned to his main workroom and his computer. He resumed his online investigation, probing, probing, on the trail of the identity of the Ruling Elite. He half expected a sharp knock at the door and the arrival of a goon squad armed with a warrant, the results of the blue-light scan of his mind, and some kind of brain-wipe thingy that would erase his memory and leave him unaware of the great work that he had done these past twenty years.
They would fail. He had prepared. In the bedroom, taped to the underside of his sock drawer, were two manila envelopes containing a total of 104 pages of a report on the Case for Prosecution of the Ruling Elite. The report began with these words: The Worst People in the World have erased portions of your memory, but herein is the Great Truth they have stolen from you. If he was robbed of his past, he would eventually find those two envelopes and reclaim his purpose and his destiny.
Logan Spangler
He didn’t know how long he might have stood in the half bath in the senator’s apartment, staring at his black fingernails. They didn’t seem to be mere nails anymore but were like ten little arched windows through which he could look into a perfect darkness within his hands.
Logan remembered a murderer he had apprehended three decades earlier, name of Marsden, a guy in his early thirties, who liked to rape and kill. In his confession, he said he liked to kill so much that sometimes he even forgot to rape his victim first. Marsden had none of the edginess or hyperactivity seen in many psychopaths. He was as calm as sheep grazing in a marijuana meadow and claimed to be equally tranquil during the act of murder. He said his inner landscape was perpetually dark, that he could remember his entire life but could see in his mind’s eye only events that had occurred at night. And when he slept his dreams always unfolded in dark places, sometimes in venues so lightless that he was blind in his dreams. “I am,” he said with some pride, delighting in himself, “so dark inside that I’m certain the blood in my veins runs black.”
Gazing at his black fingernails, Logan was not alarmed, but as calm as Marsden had been. Such a serenity had come over him that he felt above all storm and shadow, imperturbable. He could not recall why he was here in the senator’s half bath or why his nails were black, or what he had intended to do next.
When moments—or hours—later he found himself in the senator’s bedroom, he had no memory of proceeding there. He continued into the master bathroom and opened the glass door to the roomy shower. The stall featured a built-in marble bench that matched the walls, and it doubled as a steam bath. He dialed up the steam, stepped out of the stall, crossed the room, and switched off the lights. In the blind dark, he somehow knew his way, returning to the shower without a single misstep. In the stall, he pulled the door shut behind him. Fully clothed, he sat on the marble bench as warm clouds enveloped him.
He needed darkness, dampness, warmth. Just for a little while. He had nowhere to go, nothing to do. He could rest here for a time. Darkness, dampness, warmth. Pieces of the past came to him, random moments from his life, not in any order, none seemingly related to another, playing out like little movies, and all of them were things that had happened to him at night, just as Marsden had been able to conjure in his mind’s eye only night moments from his past. In the pitch dark of the windowless bathroom, in the lesser darkness of his memories, he sighed softly and inhaled the thick warm mist, which soothed him. Darkness, dampness, warmth. He breathed in all three, filling himself with darkness, dampness, warmth. He was tranquil, peaceful, relaxed, self-possessed. Possessed. T
here was nowhere that he needed to go, nothing that he needed to do. There was no one he needed to be. Soon the memories of night moments from his life faded, and his inner landscape was as lightless as the bathroom in which he sat. For a short time, he searched for one memory or another, any memory, but he was a blind man in a maze of empty rooms. Anyway, there was nowhere he needed to go, nothing he needed to do, no one he needed to be. He relaxed. Stopped exploring the inner blackness. Stopped thinking. He was in the dark and the dark in him. After a while, deep within, he became aware of something blindly feeling its way through him.
Mickey Dime
He guided the hand truck across the raised threshold into the HVAC vault and closed the door behind him. He wheeled dead Jerry beside the body of Klick the Prick.
All around, machinery hummed and purred and whispered. Massed machines, regardless of their purpose, always seemed sexy to Mickey. The power. The efficiency. The unrelenting purpose.
He had toured a decommissioned nuclear-missile silo once. The ICBM and the machinery were long gone. Yet the place still possessed immense erotic impact. The dank air smelled like stale semen.
Now, somewhere in all the runs of pipe, a demand valve opened. He heard water rushing under pressure through a conduit. Very sexy.
On the manhole cover, a big release ring was folded flat. He flipped it up. He slipped his hand through the ring and pulled hard. The seal between the cover and the gasket broke with a sucking sound. The iron disc swung up and aside on underset hinges.
The overhead fluorescents failed to penetrate far into the black hole. No draft rose from the shaft, suggesting that if it connected with deep caverns, they were without any significant opening to the surface. The air below had only a faint lime scent, which probably came from the massive concrete foundation of the Pendleton rather than from the ancient volcanic vent below.
Mickey had learned about the lava pipe from his mother. She heard about it from Gary Dai, the dot-com-video-game-social-website wizard. Gary Dai had read about the lava pipe in a pamphlet about the Pendleton that every owner received upon closing escrow. Mickey’s mother had not read the pamphlet. She read nothing but essays and books that she had written—as well as anything written about her. Mickey didn’t read.
No one knew for sure the length of the lava pipe. Experts said it could extend for a mile or two, perhaps longer. When Andrew North Pendleton built his mansion, an attempt was made to plumb the natural shaft. They lowered a lead weight on a cord for 1,522 feet before it encountered what at first was assumed to be the bottom. When a score of one-inch-diameter steel ball bearings were dropped at once into the hole, however, that bottom proved to be instead a curve in the pipe where the vertical drop led into a sloping tunnel. The bearings rang hard against the curve, then rolled noisily along the slope. They were never heard to come to a halt; the sound of their descent faded until they had traveled to such a distance that the lava pipe no longer echoed with their progress.
If the tunnel didn’t widen beyond five feet just for the turn—which it probably did, according to a volcanologist quoted in the owners’ pamphlet—the two dead men might get hung up there. Mickey was counting on 1,522 feet of momentum to tumble them around the curve and far down the slope beyond it.
For the next month, he’d visit the HVAC vault every few days to open the manhole and smell the air. If the stink of decomposition was present, he would know the cadavers hadn’t made it around the curve. Then he would have to engineer a rupture in one of these big pipes, flood the vault, and wash the dead men to a more distant resting place.
If there was no stench, however, the lava pipe would facilitate his fantasies about Sparkle and Iris Sykes. He could daydream about having them but also about popping them and dumping them, which would be a more fully rounded fantasy than rape alone. He hoped that he might pass them soon in a public hallway. He would try to get close enough to catch their scents, a detail to fire his imagination.
As Mickey was turning away, intending to muscle Vernon Klick’s body into the long drop, a twist of blue light spiraled up the walls of the lava pipe, flashed through the open manhole, and corkscrewed to the ceiling, where it spread out across the concrete, crackling softly, and quickly dissipated.
Iris
Her room is safe. Other rooms in the apartment are less safe. The world beyond the apartment is dangerous, unbearable. So many people. Always changing. She wants to stay in her room.
Nothing changes in her room. Change is scary. She wants to be where change never happens. Her room. Her room.
But her mother calls her to the Bambi way. The Bambi way is to accept things as they are. To trust nature and to love the world.
Loving the world is so hard. Bambi believes the world loves him, was made for him. Iris does not believe the world loves her. She wants to believe it, but she doesn’t, she can’t.
She doesn’t know why she can’t. Not knowing why she can’t love the world is as bad as not loving it. The world in books seems worth loving. But she can’t love it. She fears it.
As a fawn, Bambi is often frightened. Of a ferret. Of blue jays. Of many things. He overcomes his fears. He is a very great and smart deer because he overcomes all his fear. Iris loves him for this. And envies him. But loves him very much.
She is afraid to love anyone but Bambi. Or afraid to show her love. She loves her mother but dares not show it. Loving people draws them close to you. She can’t tolerate being close. She can’t breathe with people close. The lightest touch is a blow. She can’t tolerate being touched.
She doesn’t know why. At night, alone in her bed, she sometimes tries to think why she is this way. Thinking about it only makes her cry. When she’s alone in the dark, crying, she wishes that she lived in a book world, not this one.
She can love Bambi because he doesn’t live in this world. He lives in the book world. A world apart, she can love him desperately and never be too close.
Now her mother calls her to the Bambi way, and Iris steels herself to leave the apartment. There’s the boy, Winny, and the boy’s mother, Twyla, and that’s already bad enough, too many people. But now the four of them are going to leave the apartment, which means too many people and new places, change and more change.
Iris keeps her head down. Keeps her head down and pretends that she is Bambi. To live the Bambi way, it is better to try to be Bambi, to think like he would think.
Iris follows her mother into the hallway because Bambi follows his mother whenever she tells him that he must. They go around the corner to the back door of Twyla’s apartment. Iris has been in the hallway before, but never in these people’s apartment. So now all this is new. Everything is new. New is dangerous, hostile. Now everything is hostile. Everything, everything.
She must make it all familiar and friendly. She must be Bambi, and this must be the forest, for only then will she be both brave and safe. She tries to look directly only at her mother’s back. She sees things from the corners of her eyes, of course, or when she inadvertently glances left or right, but she imagines those things to be what they are not, to be a part of her beloved forest.
Words come to Iris, memorized from so many readings of the precious book: Round about grew hazel bushes, dogwoods, black-thorns and young elders. Tall maples, beeches and oaks wove a green roof over the thicket and from the firm dark-brown earth sprung fern fronds, wood-vetch and sage.…
Her mother and Twyla talk to each other, and the boy talks to both of them, but Iris can’t bear the weight of what they are saying to one another. What they are saying to one another is going to crush her if she listens to it. Crush, crush, crush her. Exterminate, they say. Exterminate means to kill.
Instead, Iris listens to the melody of the woods: The whole forest resounded with myriad voices, was penetrated by them in a joyous agitation. The woodthrush rejoiced incessantly, the doves cooed without stopping, the blackbirds whistled, the tit-mice chirped.…
They go out through the front door of the strange apartment
, into another hallway, where Twyla rings a doorbell. There is a man they call Bailey and another man they call Dr. Ignis. There is yet another new place.
This is too much, the new just coming at her and coming at her, constant change, unbearable.
Desperate, Iris gives herself to the forest, which rises in her mind to embrace her as it always embraces Bambi: Out of the earth came whole troops of flowers, like motley stars, so that the soil of the twilit forest floor shone with a silent, ardent, colorful gladness.…
Martha Cupp
She wasn’t sure which was worse: the unearthly thing that burst out of the sofa and then disappeared, leaving the fabric torn and the horsehair billowing—or Edna’s I-told-you-so expression and her satisfaction that her belief in an invading demonic force seemed to have been substantiated by the bizarre incident. Well, on reflection, Edna’s smug expression was by far the worse of the two, because if the beast in the chesterfield showed up again, Martha could always club it mercilessly, but she couldn’t very well take a fireplace poker to her sister.
Still holding the train of her dinner gown off the floor, Edna said, “I’m sure that if Father Murphy had seen that nasty critter, he wouldn’t care one whit if I believe in Bigfoot or ancient astronauts. He would break out the exorcised water, oil, salt—and begin the Prayer against Malefice immediately and at the top of his voice.”
Martha knew that by continuing to hold the poker at the ready, she would appear to be conceding the point to her sister, but she was damn well not going to put it down, have a glass of warm milk, and go to bed. Even if Edna asked Father Murphy to perform an exorcism of place instead of an exorcism of person, and even if he agreed to do it, Martha would stand ready throughout the ritual to start swinging with that pleasingly heavy length of brass.