by Dean Koontz
I had never seen this weapon before.
My father had never owned a gun.
Acting on instinct, I put down the pistol and used a corner of the bedspread to wipe my prints off it. I suspected that I was being set up to take a fall for something I had not done.
Although any television emits ultraviolet radiation, I’ve seen a lot of movies over the years, because I’m safe if I sit far enough from the screen. I know all the great stories of innocent men—from Cary Grant and James Stewart to Harrison Ford—relentlessly hounded for crimes they never committed and incarcerated on trumped-up evidence.
Stepping quickly into the adjacent bathroom, I switched on the low-watt bulb. No dead blonde in the bathtub.
No Orson, either.
In the bedroom once more, I stood very still and listened to the house. If other people were present, they were only ghosts drifting in ectoplasmic silence.
I returned to the bed, hesitated, picked up the pistol, and fumbled with it until I ejected the magazine. It was fully loaded. I slammed the magazine back into the butt. Being inexperienced with handguns, I found the piece heavier than I had expected: It weighed at least a pound and a half.
Next to where I’d found the gun, a white envelope lay on the cream-colored bedspread. I hadn’t noticed it until now.
I withdrew a penlight from a nightstand drawer and focused the tight beam on the envelope. It was blank except for a professionally printed return address in the upper left corner: Thor’s Gun Shop here in Moonlight Bay. The unsealed envelope, which bore neither a stamp nor a postmark, was slightly crumpled and stippled with curious indentations.
When I picked up the envelope, it was faintly damp in spots. The folded papers inside were dry.
I examined these documents in the beam of the penlight. I recognized my father’s careful printing on the carbon copy of the standard application, on which he had attested to the local police that he had no criminal record or history of mental illness that would be grounds to deny him the right to own this firearm. Also included was a carbon copy of the original invoice for the weapon, indicating that it was a 9-millimeter Glock 17 and that my father had purchased it with a check.
The date on the invoice gave me a chill: January 18, two years ago. My father had bought the Glock just three days after my mother had been killed in the car crash on Highway 1. As though he thought he needed protection.
In the study across the hallway from the bedroom, my compact cellular phone was recharging. I unplugged it and clipped it to my belt, at my hip.
Orson was not in the study.
Earlier, Sasha had stopped by the house to feed him. Maybe she had taken him with her when she’d gone. If Orson had been as somber as he’d been when I’d left for the hospital—and especially if he had settled into an even blacker mood—Sasha might not have been able to leave the poor beast here alone, because as much compassion as blood flows through her veins.
Even if Orson had gone with Sasha, who had transferred the 9-millimeter Glock from my father’s room to my bed? Not Sasha. She wouldn’t have known the gun existed, and she wouldn’t have prowled through my dad’s belongings.
The desk phone was connected to an answering machine. Next to the blinking message light, the counter window showed two calls.
According to the machine’s automatic time-and-date voice, the first call had come in only half an hour ago. It lasted nearly two minutes, although the caller spoke not a word.
Initially, he drew slow deep breaths and let them out almost as slowly, as though he possessed the magical power to inhale the myriad scents of my rooms even across a telephone line, and thereby discover if I was home or out. After a while, he began to hum as though he had forgotten that he was being recorded and was merely humming to himself in the manner of a daydreamer lost in thought, humming a tune that seemed to be improvised, with no coherent melody, spiraling and low, eerie and repetitive, like the song a madman might hear when he believes that angels of destruction, in choirs, are singing to him.
I was sure he was a stranger. I believed that I would have been able to recognize the voice of a friend even from nothing more than the humming. I was also sure that he had not reached a wrong number; somehow he was involved with the events following my father’s death.
By the time the first caller disconnected, I discovered that I had tightened my hands into fists. I was holding useless air in my lungs. I exhaled a hot dry gust, inhaled a cool sweet draft, but could not yet unclench my hands.
The second call, which had come in only minutes before I had returned home, was from Angela Ferryman, the nurse who had been at my father’s bedside. She didn’t identify herself, but I recognized her thin yet musical voice: Through her message, it quickened like an increasingly restless bird hopping from picket point to picket point along a fence.
“Chris, I’d like to talk to you. Have to talk. As soon as it’s convenient. Tonight. If you can, tonight. I’m in the car, on my way home now. You know where I live. Come see me. Don’t call. I don’t trust phones. Don’t even like making this call. But I’ve got to see you. Come to the back door. No matter how late you get this, come anyway. I won’t be asleep. Can’t sleep.”
I put a new message tape on the machine. I hid the original cassette under the crumpled sheets of writing paper at the bottom of the wastebasket beside my desk.
These two brief tape recordings wouldn’t convince a cop or a judge of anything. Nevertheless, they were the only scraps of evidence I possessed to indicate that something extraordinary was happening to me—something even more extraordinary than my birth into this tiny sunless caste. More extraordinary than surviving twenty-eight years unscathed by xeroderma pigmentosum.
I had been home less than ten minutes. Nevertheless, I was lingering too long.
As I searched for Orson, I more than half expected to hear a door being forced or glass breaking on the lower floor and then footsteps on the stairs. The house remained quiet, but this was a tremulous silence like the surface tension on a pond.
The dog wasn’t moping in Dad’s bedroom or bathroom. Not in the walk-in closet, either.
Second by second, I grew more worried about the mutt. Whoever had put the 9-millimeter Glock pistol on my bed might also have taken or harmed Orson.
In my room again, I located a spare pair of sunglasses in a bureau drawer. They were in a soft case with a Velcro seal, and I clipped the case in my shirt pocket.
I glanced at my wristwatch, on which the time was displayed by light-emitting diodes.
Quickly, I returned the invoice and the police questionnaire to the envelope from Thor’s Gun Shop. Whether it was more evidence or merely trash, I hid it between the mattress and box springs of my bed.
The date of purchase seemed significant. Suddenly everything seemed significant.
I kept the pistol. Maybe this was a setup, just like in the movies, but I felt safer with a weapon. I wished that I knew how to use it.
The pockets of my leather jacket were deep enough to conceal the gun. It hung in the right pocket not like a weight of dead steel but like a thing alive, like a torpid but not entirely dormant snake. When I moved, it seemed to writhe slowly: fat and sluggish, an oozing tangle of thick coils.
As I was about to go downstairs to search for Orson, I recalled a July night when I had watched him from my bedroom window as he sat in the backyard, his head tilted to lift his snout to the breeze, transfixed by something in the heavens, deep in one of his most puzzling moods. He had not been howling, and in any event the summer sky had been moonless; the sound he made was neither a whine nor a whimper but a mewling of singular and disturbing character.
Now I raised the blind at that same window and saw him in the yard below. He was busily digging a black hole in the moon-silvered lawn. This was peculiar, because he was a well-behaved dog and never a digger.
As I looked on, Orson abandoned the patch of earth at which he had been furiously clawing, moved a few feet to the right, and began to
dig a new hole. A quality of frenzy marked his behavior.
“What’s happened, boy?” I wondered, and in the yard below, the dog dug, dug, dug.
On my way downstairs, with the Glock coiling heavily in my jacket pocket, I remembered that July night when I had gone into the backyard to sit beside the mewling dog….
His cries grew as thin as the whistle-hiss of a glassblower shaping a vase over a flame, so soft that they did not even disturb the nearest of our neighbors, yet there was such wretchedness in the sound that I was shaken by it. With those cries he shaped a misery darker than the darkest glass and stranger in form than anything a blower could blow.
He was uninjured and did not appear to be ill. For all I could tell, the sight of the stars themselves was the thing that filled him with torment. Yet if the vision of dogs is as poor as we are taught, they can’t see the stars well or at all. And why should stars cause Orson such anguish, anyway, or the night that was no deeper than other nights before it? Nevertheless, he gazed skyward and made tortured sounds and didn’t respond to my reassuring voice.
When I put a hand on his head and stroked his back, I felt hard shudders passing through him. He sprang to his feet and padded away, only to turn and stare at me from a distance, and I swear that for a while he hated me. He loved me as always; he was still my dog, after all, and could not escape loving me; but at the same time, he hated me intensely. In the warm July air, I could virtually feel the cold hatred radiating off him. He paced the yard, alternately staring at me—holding my gaze as only he among all dogs is able to hold it—and looking at the sky, now stiff and shaking with rage, now weak and mewling with what seemed despair.
When I’d told Bobby Halloway about this, he’d said that dogs are incapable of hating anyone or of feeling anything as complex as genuine despair, that their emotional lives are as simple as their intellectual lives. When I insisted on my interpretation, Bobby had said, “Listen, Snow, if you’re going to keep coming here to bore my ass off with this New Age crap, why don’t you just buy a shotgun and blow my brains out? That would be more merciful than the excruciatingly slow death you’re dealing out now, bludgeoning me with your tedious little stories and your moronic philosophies. There are limits to human endurance, Saint Francis—even to mine.”
I know what I know, however, and I know Orson hated me that July night, hated me and loved me. And I know that something in the sky tormented him and filled him with despair: the stars, the blackness, or perhaps something he imagined.
Can dogs imagine? Why not?
I know they dream. I’ve watched them sleep, seen their legs kick as they chase dream rabbits, heard them sigh and whimper, heard them growl at dream adversaries.
Orson’s hatred that night did not make me fear him, but I feared for him. I knew his problem was not distemper or any physical ailment that might have made him dangerous to me, but was instead a malady of the soul.
Bobby raves brilliantly at the mention of souls in animals and splutters ultimately into a tremendously entertaining incoherence. I could sell tickets. I prefer to open a bottle of beer, lean back, and have the whole show to myself.
Anyway, throughout that long night, I sat in the yard, keeping Orson company even though he might not have wanted it. He glowered at me, remarked upon the vaulted sky with razor-thin cries, shuddered uncontrollably, circled the yard, circled and circled until near dawn, when at last he came to me, exhausted, and put his head in my lap and did not hate me anymore.
Just before sunrise, I went upstairs to my room, ready for bed hours earlier than usual, and Orson came with me. Most of the time, when he chooses to sleep to my schedule, he curls near my feet, but on this occasion he lay on his side with his back to me, and until he slept, I stroked his burly head and smoothed his fine black coat.
I myself slept not at all that day. I lay thinking about the hot summer morning beyond the blinded windows. The sky like an inverted blue porcelain bowl with birds in flight around its rim. Birds of the day, which I had seen only in pictures. And bees and butterflies. And shadows ink-pure and knife-sharp at the edges as they never can be in the night. Sweet sleep couldn’t pour into me because I was filled to the brim with bitter yearning.
Now, nearly three years later, as I opened the kitchen door and stepped onto the back porch, I hoped that Orson wasn’t in a despondent mood. This night, we had no time for therapy either for him or for me.
My bicycle was on the porch. I walked it down the steps and rolled it toward the busy dog.
In the southwest corner of the yard, he had dug half a dozen holes of various diameters and depths, and I had to be careful not to twist an ankle in one of them. Across that quadrant of the lawn were scattered ragged clumps of uprooted grass and clods of earth torn loose by his claws.
“Orson?”
He did not respond. He didn’t even pause in his frenzied digging.
Giving him a wide berth to avoid the spray of dirt that fanned out behind his excavating forepaws, I went around the current hole to face him.
“Hey, pal,” I said.
The dog kept his head down, his snout in the ground, sniffing inquisitively as he dug.
The breeze had died, and the full moon hung like a child’s lost balloon in the highest branches of the melaleucas.
Overhead, nighthawks dived and soared and barrel-looped, crying peent-peent-peent as they harvested flying ants and early-spring moths from the air.
Watching Orson at work, I said, “Found any good bones lately?”
He stopped digging but still didn’t acknowledge me. Urgently he sniffed the raw earth, the scent of which rose even to me.
“Who let you out here?”
Sasha might have brought him outside to toilet, but I was sure that she would have returned him to the house afterward.
“Sasha?” I asked nevertheless.
If Sasha were the one who had left him loose to wreak havoc on the landscaping, Orson was not going to rat on her. He wouldn’t meet my eyes lest I read the truth in them.
Abandoning the hole he had just dug, he returned to a previous pit, sniffed it, and set to work again, seeking communion with dogs in China.
Maybe he knew that Dad was dead. Animals know things, as Sasha had noted earlier. Maybe this industrious digging was Orson’s way of working off the nervous energy of grief.
I lowered my bicycle to the grass and hunkered down in front of the burrowing fiend. I gripped his collar and gently forced him to pay attention to me.
“What’s wrong with you?”
His eyes had in them the darkness of the ravaged soil, not the brighter glimmering darkness of the starry sky. They were deep and unreadable.
“I’ve got places to go, pal,” I told him. “I want you to come with me.”
He whined and twisted his head to look at the devastation all around him, as though to say that he was loath to leave this great work unfinished.
“Come morning, I’m going to stay at Sasha’s place, and I don’t want to leave you here alone.”
His ears pricked, although not at the mention of Sasha’s name or at anything I had said. He wrenched his powerful body around in my grip to look toward the house.
When I let go of his collar, he raced across the yard but then stopped well short of the back porch. He stood at attention, head raised high, utterly still, alert.
“What is it, fella?” I whispered.
From a distance of fifteen or twenty feet, even with the breeze dead and the night hushed, I could barely hear his low growl.
On my way out of the house, I had dialed the switches all the way off, leaving lightless rooms behind me. Blackness still filled the place, and I could see no ghostly face pressed to any of the panes.
Orson sensed someone, however, because he began to back away from the house. Suddenly he spun around with the agility of a cat and raced toward me.
I raised my bike off its side, onto its wheels.
Tail low but not tucked between his legs, ears flattened again
st his head, Orson shot past me to the back gate.
Trusting in the reliability of canine senses, I joined the dog at the gate without delay. The property is surrounded by a silvered cedar fence as tall as I am, and the gate is cedar, too. The gravity latch was cold under my fingers. Quietly I slipped it open and silently cursed the squeaking hinges.
Beyond the gate is a hard-packed dirt footpath bordered by houses on one side and by a narrow grove of old red-gum eucalyptuses on the other. As we pushed through the gate, I half expected someone to be waiting for us, but the path was deserted.
To the south, beyond the eucalyptus grove, lies a golf course and then the Moonlight Bay Inn and Country Club. At this hour on a Friday night, viewed between the trunks of the tall trees, the golf course was as black and rolling as the sea, and the glittering amber windows of the distant inn were like the portals on a magnificent cruise ship forever bound for far Tahiti.
To the left, the footpath led uphill toward the heart of town, ultimately terminating in the graveyard adjacent to St. Bernadette’s, the Catholic church. To the right, it led downhill toward the flats, the harbor, and the Pacific.
I shifted gears and cycled uphill, toward the graveyard, with the eucalyptus perfume reminding me of the light at a crematorium window and of a beautiful young mother lying dead upon a mortician’s gurney, but with good Orson trotting alongside my bike and with the faint strains of dance music filtering across the golf course from the inn, and with a baby crying in one of our neighbors’ houses to my left, but with the weight of the Glock pistol in my pocket and with nighthawks overhead snapping insects in their sharp beaks: the living and the dead all together in the trap of land and sky.
11
I wanted to talk to Angela Ferryman, because her message on my answering machine had seemed to promise revelations. I was in the mood for revelations.