by Dean Koontz
Jesus.
It was a prayer, not a curse. Or maybe both.
Holding the Glock in a two-hand grip again, I aimed toward where I thought the big armoire stood. Then I reconsidered and swung the muzzle three inches to the left. Only to swing it immediately back to the right.
I was disoriented in the absolute blackness. Although I was certain that I would hit the armoire, I couldn’t be sure that I would put the round straight through the center of the space above the two drawers. The first shot had to count, because the muzzle flash would give away my position.
I couldn’t risk pumping out rounds indiscriminately. Although a spray of bullets would probably waste the bastard, whoever he might be, there was a chance that I would only wound him—and a smaller but still very real chance that I would merely piss him off.
When the pistol magazine was empty—then what?
Then what?
I sidled to the hallway, risking an encounter there, but it didn’t happen. As I crossed the threshold, I pulled the guest-room door shut behind me, putting it between me and whoever had come out of the armoire—assuming I hadn’t imagined the creaking of the piano hinges.
The ground-floor lights were evidently on their own circuit. A glow rose through the stairwell at the end of the black hall.
Instead of waiting to see who, if anyone, would burst out of the guest room, I ran to the stairs.
I heard a door open behind me.
Gasping, descending two stairs at a time, I was almost to the landing when my head in miniature sailed past. It shattered against the wall in front of me.
Startled, I brought an arm up to shield my eyes. China shrapnel tattooed my face and chest.
My right heel landed on the bullnose edge of a step and skidded off. I nearly fell, pitched forward, slammed into the landing wall, but kept my balance.
On the landing, crunching shards of my glazed face underfoot, I whipped around to confront my assailant.
The decapitated body of the doll, appropriately attired in basic black, hurtled down. I ducked, and it passed over my head, thumping against the wall behind me.
When I looked up and covered the dark top of the stairs with the gun, there was no one to shoot—as if the doll had torn off its own head to throw at me and then had hurled itself into the stairwell.
The downstairs lights went out.
Through the forbidding blackness came the smell of something burning.
15
Groping in the impenetrable gloom, I finally found the handrail. I clutched at the smooth wood with one sweaty hand and started down the lower flight of stairs toward the foyer.
This darkness had a strange sinuosity, seemed to coil and writhe around me as I descended through it. Then I realized that it was the air, not the darkness, that I was feeling: serpentine currents of hot air swarming up the stairwell.
An instant later, tendrils and then tentacles and then a great pulsing mass of foul-smelling smoke poured into the stairwell from below, invisible but palpable, enveloping me as some giant sea anemone might envelop a diver. Coughing, choking, struggling to breathe, I reversed directions, hoping to escape through a second-floor window, although not through the master bathroom where Angela waited.
I returned to the landing and clambered up three or four steps of the second flight before halting. Through smoke-stung eyes flooded with tears—and through the pall of smoke itself—I saw a throbbing light above.
Fire.
Two fires had been set, one above and one below. Those unseen psychotic children were busy in their mad play, and there seemed to be so many of them. I was reminded of the veritable platoon of searchers that appeared to spring from the ground outside the mortuary, as though Sandy Kirk possessed the power to summon the dead from their graves.
Downward, once more and quickly, I plunged toward the only hope of nourishing air. I would find it, if anywhere, at the lowest point of the structure, because smoke and fumes rise while the blaze sucks in cooler air at its base in order to feed itself.
Each inhalation caused a spasm of coughing, increased my feeling of suffocation, and fed my panic, so I held my breath until I reached the foyer. There, I dropped to my knees, stretched out on the floor, and discovered that I could breathe. The air was hot and smelled sour, but all things being relative, I was more thrilled by it than I had ever been by the crisp air coming off the washboard of the Pacific.
I didn’t lie there and surrender to an orgy of respiration. I hesitated just long enough to draw several deep breaths to clear my soiled lungs, and to work up enough saliva to spit some of the soot out of my mouth.
Then I raised my head to test the air and to learn how deep the precious safe zone might be. Not deep. Four to six inches. Nevertheless, this shallow pool ought to be enough to sustain me while I found my way out of the house.
Wherever the carpet was afire, of course, there would be no safe-air zone whatsoever.
The lights were still out, the smoke was blindingly thick, and I squirmed on my stomach, frantically heading toward where I believed I would find the front door, the nearest exit. The first thing I encountered in the murk was a sofa, judging by the feel of it, which meant that I had passed through the archway and into the living room, at least ninety degrees off the course I imagined I’d been following.
Now luminous orange pulses passed through the comparatively clear air near the floor, underlighting the curdled masses of smoke as if they were thunderheads looming over a plain. From my eye-to-the-carpet perspective, the beige nylon fibers stretched away like a vast flat field of dry grass, fitfully brightened by an electrical storm. This narrow, life-sustaining realm under the smoke seemed to be an alternate world into which I had fallen after stepping through a door between dimensions.
The ominous throbs of light were reflections of fire elsewhere in the room, but they didn’t relieve the gloom enough to help me find the way out. The stroboscopic flickering only contributed to my confusion and scared the hell out of me.
As long as I couldn’t see the blaze, I could pretend that it was in a distant corner of the house. Now I no longer had the refuge of pretense. Yet there was no advantage to glimpsing the reflected fire, because I wasn’t able to tell if the flames were inches or feet from me, whether they were burning toward or away from me, so the light increased my anxiety without providing guidance.
Either I was suffering worse effects of smoke inhalation than I realized, including a distorted perception of time, or the fire was spreading with unusual swiftness. The arsonists had probably used an accelerant, maybe gasoline.
Determined to get back into the foyer and then to the front door, I sucked desperately at the increasingly acrid air near the floor and squirmed across the room, digging my elbows into the carpet to pull myself along, ricocheting off furniture, until I cracked my forehead solidly against the raised brick hearth of the fireplace. I was farther than ever from the foyer, and yet I couldn’t picture myself crawling into the fireplace and up the chimney like Santa Claus on his way back to the sleigh.
I was dizzy. A headache split my skull on a diagonal from my left eyebrow to the part in my hair on the right. My eyes stung from the smoke and the salty sweat that poured into them. I wasn’t choking again, but I was gagging on the pungent fumes that flavored even the clearer air near the floor, and I was beginning to think I might not survive.
Trying hard to remember where the fireplace was situated in relationship to the foyer arch, I squirmed along the raised hearth and then angled off into the room again.
It seemed absurd to me that I couldn’t find my way out of this place. This wasn’t a mansion, for God’s sake, not a castle, merely a modest house with seven rooms, none of them large, and 2.5 baths, and not even the cleverest Realtor in the country could have described it in such a way as to give the impression that it had enough rattling-around space to satisfy the Prince of Wales and his retinue.
On the evening news, from time to time, you see stories about people dying i
n house fires, and you can never quite understand why they couldn’t make it to a door or window, when one or the other was surely within a dozen steps. Unless they were, of course, drunk. Or wasted on drugs. Or foolish enough to rush back into the flames to rescue Fluffy, the kitten. Which may sound ungrateful of me after I myself was this same night rescued, in a sense, by a cat. But now I understood how people died in these circumstances: The smoke and the churning darkness were more disorienting than drugs or booze, and the longer you breathed the tainted air, the less nimble your mind became, until your thoughts rambled and even panic couldn’t focus them.
When I had first climbed the stairs to see what had happened to Angela, I had been amazed at how calm and collected I was in spite of the threat of imminent violence. With a fat dollop of male pride as cloying as a cupful of mayonnaise, I had even sensed in my heart a disconcerting enthusiasm for danger.
What a difference ten minutes can make. Now that it was brutally apparent to me that I was never going to acquit myself in these situations with even half the aplomb of Batman, the romance of danger failed to stir me.
Suddenly, creeping out of the dismal blear, something brushed against me and nuzzled my neck, my chin: something alive. In the three-hundred-ring circus of my mind, I pictured Angela Ferryman on her belly, reanimated by some evil voodoo, slithering across the floor to meet me, and planting a cold-lipped, bloody kiss on my throat. The effects of oxygen deprivation were becoming so severe that even this hideous image was not sufficient to shock me into a clearer state of mind, and I reflexively squeezed off a shot.
Thank God, I fired entirely in the wrong direction, because even as the crack of the shot echoed through the living room, I recognized the cold nose at my throat and the warm tongue in my ear as those of my one and only dog, my faithful companion, my Orson.
“Hey, pal,” I said, but it came out as a meaningless croak.
He licked my face. He had dog’s breath, but I couldn’t really blame him for that.
I blinked furiously to clear my vision, and red light pulsed through the room brighter than ever. Still, I got no better than a smeary impression of his furry face pressed to the floor in front of mine.
Then I realized that if he could get into the house and find me, he could show me the way out before we caught fire with a stink of burning denim and fur.
I gathered sufficient strength to rise shakily to my feet. That stubborn eel of nausea swam up my throat again, but as before I choked it down.
Squeezing my eyes shut, trying not to think about the wave of intense heat that abruptly broke over me, I reached down and gripped Orson’s thick leather collar, which was easy to find because he was pressed against my legs.
Orson kept his snout close to the floor, where he could breathe, but I had to hold my breath and ignore the nostril-tickling smoke as the dog led me through the house. He walked me into as few pieces of furniture as he could manage, and I have no suspicion whatever that he was amusing himself in the midst of such tragedy and terror. When I smacked my face into a door frame, I didn’t knock out any teeth. Nevertheless, during that short journey, I thanked God repeatedly for testing me with XP rather than with blindness.
Just when I thought I might pass out if I didn’t drop to the floor to get some air, I felt a cold draft on my face, and when I opened my eyes, I could see. We were in the kitchen, into which the fire had not yet reached. There was no smoke, either, because the breeze coming in the open back door drove it all into the dining room.
On the table were the votive candles in ruby-red holders, the cordial glasses, and the open bottle of apricot brandy. Blinking at this cozy tableau, I could half believe that the events of the past several minutes had been only a monstrous dream and that Angela, still lost in her dead husband’s cardigan, would sit here with me once more, refill her glass, and finish her strange story.
My mouth was so dry and foul that I almost took the bottle of brandy with me. Bobby Halloway would have beer, however, and that would be better.
The dead bolt on the kitchen door was disengaged now. As clever as Orson might be, I doubted that he could have opened a locked door to reach me; for one thing, he didn’t have a key. Evidently the killers had fled by this route.
Outside, wheezing to expel a few final traces of smoke from my lungs, I shoved the Glock in my jacket pocket. I nervously surveyed the backyard for assailants as I blotted my damp hands on my jeans.
Like fishes schooling below the silvered surface of a pond, cloud shadows swam across the moonlit lawn.
Nothing else moved except the wind-shaken vegetation.
Grabbing my bicycle and wheeling it across the patio toward the arbor-covered passageway, I looked up at the house in astonishment, amazed that it was not entirely engulfed in flames. Instead, from the exterior, there were as yet only minor indications of the blaze growing from room to room inside: bright vines of flames twining up the draperies at two upstairs windows, white petals of smoke flowering from attic vent holes in the eaves.
Except for the bluster and grumble of the inconstant wind, the night was preternaturally silent. Moonlight Bay is no city, but it usually has a distinct night voice nonetheless: a few cars on the move, distant music from a cocktail lounge or a kid practicing guitar on a back porch, a barking dog, the whisking sound of the big brushes on the street-cleaning machine, voices of strollers, laughter from the high-school kids gathered outside the Millennium Arcade down on Embarcadero Way, now and then a melancholy whistle as an Amtrak passenger train or a chain of freight cars approaches the Ocean Avenue crossing…. Not at this moment, however, and not on this night. We might as well have been in the deadest neighborhood of a ghost town deep in the Mojave Desert.
Apparently, the crack of the single gunshot that I had fired in the living room had not been loud enough out here to draw anyone’s attention.
Under the lattice arch, through the sweet fragrance of jasmine, walking the bicycle, its wheel bearings clicking softly, my heart thudding not softly at all, I hurried after Orson to the front gate. He leaped up and pawed open the latch, a trick of his that I’d seen before. Together we followed the walkway to the street, moving quickly but not running.
We were in luck: no witnesses. No traffic was either approaching or receding along the street. No one was on foot, either.
If a neighbor saw me running from the house just as it went up in flames, Chief Stevenson might decide to use that as an excuse to come looking for me. To shoot me down when I resisted arrest. Whether I resisted or not.
I swung onto my bike, balancing it by keeping one foot on the pavement, and looked back at the house. The wind trembled the leaves of the huge magnolia trees, and through the branches, I could see fire lapping at several of the downstairs and upstairs windows.
Full of grief and excitement, curiosity and dread, sorrow and dark wonder, I raced along the pavement, heading for a street with fewer lamps. Panting loudly, Orson sprinted at my side.
We had gone nearly a block when I heard the windows begin to explode at the Ferryman house, blown out by the fierce heat.
16
Stars between branches, leaf-filtered moonlight, giant oaks, a nurturing darkness, the peace of gravestones—and, for one of us, the eternally intriguing scent of hidden squirrels: We were back in the cemetery adjacent to St. Bernadette’s Catholic Church.
My bike was propped against a granite marker topped by the haloed head of a granite angel. I was sitting—sans halo—with my back against another stone that featured a cross at its summit.
Blocks away, sirens shrieked into sudden silence as fire-department vehicles arrived at the Ferryman residence.
I hadn’t cycled all the way to Bobby Halloway’s house, because I’d been hit by a persistent fit of coughing that hampered my ability to steer. Orson’s gait had grown wobbly, too, as he expelled the stubborn scent of the fire with a series of violent sneezes.
Now, in the company of a crowd too dead to be offended, I hawked up thick soot-flavor
ed phlegm and spat it among the gnarled surface roots of the nearest oak, with the hope that I wasn’t killing this mighty tree that had survived two centuries of earthquakes, storms, fires, insects, disease, and—more recently—modern America’s passion for erecting a minimall with doughnut shop on every street corner. The taste in my mouth could not have been much different if I had been eating charcoal briquettes in a broth of starter fluid.
Having been in the burning house a shorter time than his more reckless master, Orson recovered faster than I. Before I was half done hawking and spitting, he was padding back and forth among the nearest tombstones, diligently sniffing out arboreal bushy-tailed rodents.
Between spells of hacking and expectorating, I talked to Orson if he was in sight, and sometimes he lifted his noble black head and pretended to listen, occasionally wagging his tail to encourage me, though often he was unable to tear his attention away from squirrel spoor.
“What the hell happened in that house?” I asked. “Who killed her, why were they playing games with me, what was the point of all that business with the dolls, why didn’t they just slit my throat and burn me with her?”
Orson shook his head, and I made a game of interpreting his response. He didn’t know. Shook his head in bafflement. Clueless. He was clueless. He didn’t know why they hadn’t slit my throat.
“I don’t think it was the Glock. I mean, there were more than one of them, at least two, probably three, so they could easily have overpowered me if they’d wanted. And though they slashed her throat, they must have been carrying guns of their own. I mean, these are serious bastards, vicious killers. They cut people’s eyes out for the fun of it. They wouldn’t be squeamish about carrying guns, so they wouldn’t be intimidated by the Glock.”
Orson cocked his head, considering the issue. Maybe it was the Glock. Maybe it wasn’t. Then again, maybe it was. Who knew? What’s a Glock, anyway? And what’s that smell? Such an amazing smell. Such a luxurious fragrance. Is that squirrel piss? Excuse me, Master Snow. Business. Business to attend to here.