by Dean Koontz
I couldn’t get a rise out of him.
Returning to my chair at the table, I tried to use what little I knew to encourage him to believe that I knew even more. Maybe he would open up further if he thought some of his secrets weren’t so secret, after all. “There weren’t only cats and dogs in the labs at Wyvern. There were monkeys.”
Roosevelt didn’t reply, and he still avoided my eyes.
“You do know about the monkeys?” I asked.
“No,” he said, but he glanced from the biscuits to the security-camera monitor in the hutch.
“I suspect it’s because of the monkeys that you got a mooring outside the marina three months ago.”
Realizing that he had betrayed his knowledge by looking at the monitor when I mentioned the monkeys, he returned his attention to the dog biscuits.
Only a hundred moorings were available in the bay waters beyond the marina, and they were nearly as prized as the dock slips, though it was a necessary inconvenience to travel to and from your moored boat in another craft. Roosevelt had subleased a space from Dieter Gessel, a fisherman whose trawler was docked farther out along the northern horn with the rest of the fishing fleet but who had kept a junk dinghy at the mooring against the day when he retired and acquired a pleasure boat. Rumor was that Roosevelt was paying five times what the lease was costing Dieter.
I had never before asked him about it because it wasn’t any of my business unless he brought it up first.
Now I said, “Every night, you move the Nostromo from this slip out to the mooring, and you sleep there. Every night without fail—except tonight, while you’re waiting here for me. Folks thought you were going to buy a second boat, something smaller and fun, just to play with. When you didn’t, when you just went out there every night to bunk down, they figured—‘Well, okay, he’s a little eccentric anyway, old Roosevelt, talking to people’s pets and whatnot.’”
He remained silent.
He and Orson appeared to be so intensely and equally fascinated by those three dog biscuits that I could almost believe either of them might abruptly break discipline and gobble up the treats.
“After tonight,” I said, “I think I know why you go out there to sleep. You figure it’s safer. Because maybe monkeys don’t swim well—or at least they don’t enjoy it.”
As if he hadn’t heard me, he said, “Okay, dog, even if you won’t talk to me, you can have your nibbles.”
Orson risked eye-to-eye contact with his inquisitor, seeking confirmation.
“Go ahead,” Roosevelt urged.
Orson looked dubiously at me, as if asking whether I thought Roosevelt’s permission was a trick.
“He’s the host,” I said.
The dog snatched up the first biscuit and happily crunched it.
Finally turning his attention to me, with that unnerving pity still in his face and eyes, Roosevelt said, “The people behind the project at Wyvern…they might have had good intentions. Some of them, anyway. And I think some good things might’ve come from their work.” He reached out to pet the cat again, which relaxed under his hand, though he never shifted his piercing eyes from me. “But there was also a dark side to this business. A very dark side. From what I’ve been told, the monkeys are only one manifestation of it.”
“Only one?”
Roosevelt held my stare in silence for a long time, long enough for Orson to eat the second biscuit, and when at last he spoke, his voice was softer than ever: “There were more than just cats and dogs and monkeys in those labs.”
I didn’t know what he meant, but I said, “I suspect you aren’t talking about guinea pigs or white mice.”
His eyes shifted away from me, and he appeared to be staring at something far beyond the cabin of this boat. “Lot of change coming.”
“They say change is good.”
“Some is.”
As Orson ate the third biscuit, Roosevelt rose from his chair. Picking up the cat, holding him against his chest, stroking him, he seemed to be considering whether I needed to—or should—know more.
When he finally spoke, he slid once again from a revelatory mood into a secretive one. “I’m tired, son. I should have been in bed hours ago. I was asked to warn you that your friends are in danger if you don’t walk away from this, if you keep probing.”
“The cat asked you to warn me.”
“That’s right.”
As I got to my feet, I became more aware of the wallowing motion of the boat. For a moment I was stricken by a spell of vertigo, and I gripped the back of the chair to steady myself.
This physical symptom was matched by mental turmoil, as well, and my grip on reality seemed increasingly tenuous. I felt as if I were spinning along the upper rim of a whirlpool that would suck me down faster, faster, faster, until I went through the bottom of the funnel—my own version of Dorothy’s tornado—and found myself not in Oz but in Waimea Bay, Hawaii, solemnly discussing the fine points of reincarnation with Pia Klick.
Aware of the extreme flakiness of the question, I nevertheless asked, “And the cat, Mungojerrie…he isn’t in league with these people at Wyvern?”
“He escaped from them.”
Licking his chops to be sure that no precious biscuit crumbs adhered to his lips or to the fur around his muzzle, Orson got off the dinette chair and came to my side.
To Roosevelt, I said, “Earlier tonight, I heard the Wyvern project described in apocalyptic terms…the end of the world.”
“The world as we know it.”
“You actually believe that?”
“It could play out that way, yes. But maybe when it all shakes down, there’ll be more good changes than bad. The end of the world as we know it isn’t necessarily the same as the end of the world.”
“Tell that to the dinosaurs after the comet impact.”
“I have my jumpy moments,” he admitted.
“If you’re frightened enough to go to the mooring to sleep every night and if you really believe that what they were doing at Wyvern was so dangerous, why don’t you get out of Moonlight Bay?”
“I’ve considered it. But my businesses are here. My life’s here. Besides, I wouldn’t be escaping. I’d only be buying a little time. Ultimately, nowhere is safe.”
“That’s a bleak assessment.”
“I guess so.”
“Yet you don’t seem depressed.”
Carrying the cat, Roosevelt led us out of the main cabin and through the aft stateroom. “I’ve always been able to handle whatever the world threw at me, son, both the ups and the downs, as long as it was at least interesting. I’ve had the blessing of a full and varied life, and the only thing I really dread is boredom.” We stepped out of the boat onto the afterdeck, into the clammy embrace of the fog. “Things are liable to get downright hairy here in the Jewel of the Central Coast, but whichever way it goes, for damn sure it won’t be boring.”
Roosevelt had more in common with Bobby Halloway than 1 would have thought.
“Well, sir…thank you for the advice. I guess.” I sat on the coaming and swung off the boat to the dock a couple of feet below, and Orson leaped down to my side.
The big blue heron had departed earlier. The fog eddied around me, the black water purled under the boat slip, and all else was as still as a dream of death.
I had taken only two steps toward the gangway when Roosevelt said, “Son?”
I stopped and looked back.
“The safety of your friends really is at stake here. But your happiness is on the line, too. Believe me, you don’t want to know more about this. You’ve got enough problems…the way you have to live.”
“I don’t have any problems,” I assured him. “Just different advantages and disadvantages from most people.”
His skin was so black that he might have been a mirage in the fog, a trick of shadow. The cat, which he held, was invisible but for his eyes, which appeared to be disembodied, mysterious—bright green orbs floating in midair. “Just different advantages…do
you really believe that?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” I said, although I wasn’t sure whether I believed it because it was, in fact, the truth or because I had spent most of my life convincing myself that it was true. A lot of the time, reality is what you make it.
“I’ll tell you one more thing,” he said. “One more thing because it might convince you to let this go and get on with life.”
I waited.
At last, with sorrow in his voice, he said, “The reason most of them don’t want to harm you, the reason they’d rather try to control you by killing your friends, the reason most of them revere you is because of who your mother was.”
Fear, as death-white and cold as a Jerusalem cricket, crawled up the small of my back, and for a moment my lungs constricted so that I couldn’t draw a breath—although I didn’t know why Roosevelt’s enigmatic statement should affect me so instantly and profoundly. Maybe I understood more than I thought I did. Maybe the truth was already waiting to be acknowledged in the canyons of the subconscious—or in the abyss of the heart.
When I could breathe, I said, “What do you mean?”
“If you think about it for a while,” he said, “really think about it, maybe you’ll realize that you have nothing to gain by pursuing this thing—and so much to lose. Knowledge seldom brings us peace, son. A hundred years ago, we didn’t know about atomic structure or DNA or black holes—but are we any happier and more fulfilled now than people were then?”
As he spoke that final word, fog filled the space where he had stood on the afterdeck. A cabin door closed softly; with a louder sound, a dead bolt was engaged.
24
Around the creaking Nostromo, the fog seethed in slow motion. Nightmare creatures appeared to form out of the mist, loom, and then dissolve.
Inspired by Roosevelt Frost’s final revelation, more fearful things than fog monsters took shape from the mists in my mind, but I was reluctant to concentrate on them and thereby impart to them a greater solidity. Maybe he was right. If I learned everything I wanted to know, I might wish I had remained ignorant of the truth.
Bobby says that truth is sweet but dangerous. He says people couldn’t bear to go on living if they faced every cold truth about themselves.
In that case, I tell him, he’ll never be suicidal.
As Orson preceded me up the gangway from the slip, I considered my options, trying to decide where to go and what to do next. There was a siren singing, and only I could hear her dangerous song; though I was afraid of wrecking on the rocks of truth, this hypnotic melody was one I couldn’t resist.
When we reached the top of the gangway, I said to my dog, “So…anytime you want to start explaining all this to me, I’m ready to listen.”
Even if Orson could have answered me, he didn’t seem to be in a communicative mood.
My bicycle was still leaning against the dock railing. The rubber handlebar grips were cold and slick, wet with condensation.
Behind us, the Nostromo’s engines turned over. When I glanced back, I saw the running lights of the boat diffused and ringed by halos in the fog.
I couldn’t make out Roosevelt at the upper helm station, but I knew he was there. Though only a few hours of darkness remained, he was moving his boat out to his mooring even in this low visibility.
As I walked my bike shoreward through the marina, among the gently rocking boats, I looked back a couple of times, to see if I could spot Mungojerrie in the dim wash of the dock lights. If he was following us, he was being discreet. I suspected that the cat was still aboard the Nostromo.
…the reason most of them revere you is because of who your mother was.
When we turned right onto the main dock pier and headed toward the entrance to the marina, a foul odor rose off the water. Evidently the tide had washed a dead squid or a man-of-war or a fish in among the pilings. The rotting corpse must have gotten caught above the water line on one of the jagged masses of barnacles that encrusted the concrete caissons. The stench became so ripe that the humid air seemed to be not merely scented but flavored with it, as repulsive as a broth from the devil’s dinner table. I held my breath and kept my mouth tightly closed against the disgusting taste that had been imparted to the fog.
The grumble of the Nostromo’s engines had faded as it cruised out to the mooring. Now the muffled rhythmic thumping that came across the water sounded not like engine noise at all but like the ominous beat of a leviathan’s heart, as though a monster of the deep might surface in the marina, sinking all the boats, battering apart the dock, and plunging us into a cold wet grave.
When we reached the midpoint of the main pier, I looked back and saw neither the cat nor a more fearsome pursuer.
Nevertheless, I said to Orson, “Damn, but it’s starting to feel like the end of the world.”
He chuffed in agreement as we left the stench of death behind us and walked toward the glow of the quaint ship lanterns that were mounted on massive teak pilasters at the main pier entrance.
Moving out of an almost liquid gloom beside the marina office, Lewis Stevenson, the chief of police, still in uniform as I had seen him earlier in the night, crossed into the light. He said, “I’m in a mood here.”
For an instant, as he stepped from the shadows, something about him was so peculiar that a chill bored like a corkscrew in my spine. Whatever I had seen—or thought I’d seen—passed in a blink, however, and I found myself shivering and keenly disturbed, overcome by an extraordinary perception of being in the presence of something unearthly and malevolent, without being able to identify the precise cause of this feeling.
Chief Stevenson was holding a formidable-looking pistol in his right hand. Although he was not in a shooting stance, his grip on the weapon wasn’t casual. The muzzle was trained on Orson, who was two steps ahead of me, standing in the outer arc of the lantern light, while I remained in shadows.
“You want to guess what mood I’m in?” Stevenson asked, stopping no more than ten feet from us.
“Not good,” I ventured.
“I’m in a mood not to be screwed with.”
The chief didn’t sound like himself. His voice was familiar, the timbre and the accent unchanged, but there was a hard note when before there had been quiet authority. Usually his speech flowed like a stream, and you found yourself almost floating on it, calm and warm and assured; but now the flow was fast and turbulent, cold and stinging.
“I don’t feel good,” he said. “I don’t feel good at all. In fact, I feel like shit, and I don’t have much patience for anything that makes me feel even worse. You understand me?”
Although I didn’t understand him entirely, I nodded and said, “Yes. Yes, sir, I understand.”
Orson was as still as cast iron, and his eyes never left the muzzle of the chief’s pistol.
I was acutely aware that the marina was a desolate place at this hour. The office and the fueling station were not staffed after six o’clock. Only five boat owners, other than Roosevelt Frost, lived aboard their vessels, and they were no doubt sound asleep. The docks were no less lonely than the granite rows of eternal berths in St. Bernadette’s cemetery.
The fog muffled our voices. No one was likely to hear our conversation and be drawn to it.
Keeping his attention on Orson but addressing me, Stevenson said, “I can’t get what I need, because I don’t even know what it is I need. Isn’t that a bitch?”
I sensed that this was a man at risk of coming apart, perilously holding himself together. He had lost his noble aspect. Even his handsomeness was sliding away as the planes of his face were pulled toward a new configuration by what seemed to be rage and an equally powerful anxiety.
“You ever feel this emptiness, Snow? You ever feel an emptiness so bad, you’ve got to fill it or you’ll die, but you don’t know where the emptiness is or what in the name of God you’re supposed to fill it with?”
Now I didn’t understand him at all, but I didn’t think that he was in a mood to explain hims
elf, so I looked solemn and nodded sympathetically. “Yes, sir. I know the feeling.”
His brow and cheeks were moist but not from the clammy air; he glistened with greasy sweat. His face was so supernaturally white that the mist seemed to pour from him, boiling coldly off his skin, as though he were the father of all fog. “Comes on you bad at night,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Comes on you anytime, but worse at night.” His face twisted with what might have been disgust. “What kind of damn dog is this, anyway?”
His gun arm stiffened, and I thought I saw his finger tighten on the trigger.
Orson bared his teeth but neither moved nor made a sound.
I quickly said, “He’s just a Labrador mix. He’s a good dog, wouldn’t harm a cat.”
His anger swelling for no apparent reason, Stevenson said, “Just a Labrador mix, huh? The hell he is. Nothing’s just anything. Not here. Not now. Not anymore.”
I considered reaching for the Glock in my jacket. I was holding my bike with my left hand. My right hand was free, and the pistol was in my right-hand pocket.
Even as distraught as Stevenson was, however, he was nonetheless a cop, and he was sure to respond with deadly professionalism to any threatening move I made. I didn’t put much faith in Roosevelt’s strange assurance that I was revered. Even if I let the bicycle fall over to distract him, Stevenson would shoot me dead before the Glock cleared my pocket.
Besides, I wasn’t going to pull a gun on the chief of police unless I had no choice but to use it. And if I shot him, that would be the end of my life, a thwarting of the sun.
Abruptly Stevenson snapped his head up, looking away from Orson. He drew a deep breath, then several that were as quick and shallow as those of a hound following the spoor of its quarry. “What’s that?”
He had a keener sense of smell than I did, because I only now realized that an almost imperceptible breeze had brought us a faint hint of the stench from the decomposing sea creature back under the main pier.