by Dean Koontz
Although Stevenson was already acting strangely enough to make my scalp crinkle into faux corduroy, he grew markedly stranger. He tensed, hunched his shoulders, stretched his neck, and raised his face to the fog, as though savoring the putrescent scent. His eyes were feverish in his pale face, and he spoke not with the measured inquisitiveness of a cop but with an eager, nervous curiosity that seemed perverse: “What is that? You smell that? Something dead, isn’t it?”
“Something back under the pier,” I confirmed. “Some kind of fish, I guess.”
“Dead. Dead and rotting. Something…It’s got an edge to it, doesn’t it?” He seemed about to lick his lips. “Yeah. Yeah. Sure does have an interesting edge to it.”
Either he heard the eerie current crackling through his voice or he sensed my alarm, because he glanced worriedly at me and struggled to compose himself. It was a struggle. He was teetering on a crumbling ledge of emotion.
Finally the chief found his normal voice—or something that approximated it. “I need to talk to you, reach an understanding. Now. Tonight. Why don’t you come with me, Snow.”
“Come where?”
“My patrol car’s out front.”
“But my bicycle—”
“I’m not arresting you. Just a quick chat. Let’s make sure we understand each other.”
The last thing I wanted to do was get in a patrol car with Stevenson. If I refused, however, he might make his invitation more formal by taking me into custody.
Then, if I tried to resist arrest, if I climbed on my bicycle and pumped the pedals hard enough to make the crank axle smoke—where would I go? With dawn only a few hours away, I had no time to flee as far as the next town on this lonely stretch of coast. Even if I had ample time, XP limited my world to the boundaries of Moonlight Bay, where I could return home by sunrise or find an understanding friend to take me in and give me darkness.
“I’m in a mood here,” Lewis Stevenson said again, through half-clenched teeth, the hardness returning to his voice. “I’m in a real mood. You coming with me?”
“Yes, sir. I’m cool with that.”
Motioning with his pistol, he indicated that Orson and I were to precede him.
I walked my bike toward the end of the entrance pier, loath to have the chief behind me with the gun. I didn’t need to be an animal communicator to know that Orson was nervous, too.
The pier planks ended in a concrete sidewalk flanked by flower beds full of ice plant, the blooms of which open wide in sunshine and close at night. In the low landscape lighting, snails were crossing the walkway, antennae glistening, leaving silvery trails of slime, some creeping from the right-hand bed of ice plant to the identical bed on the left, others laboriously making their way in the opposite direction, as if these humble mollusks shared humanity’s restlessness and dissatisfaction with the terms of existence.
I weaved with the bike to avoid the snails, and although Orson sniffed them in passing, he stepped over them.
From behind us rose the crunching of crushed shells, the squish of jellied bodies tramped underfoot. Stevenson was stepping on not only those snails directly in his path but on every hapless gastropod in sight. Some were dispatched with a quick snap, but he stomped on others, came down on them with such force that the slap of shoe sole against concrete rang like a hammer strike.
I didn’t turn to look.
I was afraid of seeing the cruel glee that I remembered too well from the faces of the young bullies who had tormented me throughout childhood, before I’d been wise enough and big enough to fight back. Although that expression was unnerving when a child wore it, the same look—the beady eyes that seemed perfectly reptilian even without elliptical pupils, the hate-reddened cheeks, the bloodless lips drawn back in a sneer from spittle-shined teeth—would be immeasurably more disturbing on the face of an adult, especially when the adult had a gun in his hand and wore a badge.
Stevenson’s black-and-white was parked at a red curb thirty feet to the left of the marina entrance, beyond the reach of the landscape lights, in deep night shade under the spreading limbs of an enormous Indian laurel.
I leaned my bike against the trunk of the tree, on which the fog hung like Spanish moss. At last I turned warily to the chief as he opened the back door on the passenger side of the patrol car.
Even in the murk, I recognized the expression on his face that I had dreaded seeing: the hatred, the irrational but unassuageable anger that makes some human beings more deadly than any other beast on the planet.
Never before had Stevenson disclosed this malevolent aspect of himself. He hadn’t seemed capable of unkindness, let alone senseless hatred. If suddenly he had revealed that he wasn’t the real Lewis Stevenson but an alien life-form mimicking the chief, I would have believed him.
Gesturing with the gun, Stevenson spoke to Orson: “Get in the car, fella.”
“He’ll be all right out here,” I said.
“Get in,” he urged the dog.
Orson peered suspiciously at the open car door and whined with distrust.
“He’ll wait here,” I said. “He never runs off.”
“I want him in the car,” Stevenson said icily. “There’s a leash law in this town, Snow. We never enforce it with you. We always turn our heads, pretend not to see, because of…because a dog is exempted if he belongs to a disabled person.”
I didn’t antagonize Stevenson by rejecting the term disabled. Anyway, I was interested less in that one word than in the six words I was sure he had almost said before catching himself: because of who your mother was.
“But this time,” he said, “I’m not going to sit here while the damn dog trots around loose, crapping on the sidewalk, flaunting that he isn’t on a leash.”
Although I could have noted the contradiction between the fact that the dog of a disabled person was exempt from the leash law and the assertion that Orson was flaunting his leashlessness, I remained silent. I couldn’t win any argument with Stevenson while he was in this hostile state.
“If he won’t get in the car when I tell him to,” Stevenson said, “you make him get in.”
I hesitated, searching for a credible alternative to meek cooperation. Second by second, our situation seemed more perilous. I’d felt safer than this when we had been in the blinding fog on the peninsula, stalked by the troop.
“Get the goddamn dog in the goddamn car now!” Stevenson ordered, and the venom in this command was so potent that he could have killed snails without stepping on them, sheerly with his voice.
Because his gun was in his hand, I remained at a disadvantage, but I took some thin comfort from the fact that he apparently didn’t know that I was armed. For the time being, I had no choice but to cooperate.
“In the car, pal,” I told Orson, trying not to sound fearful, trying not to let my hammering heart pound a tremor into my voice.
Reluctantly the dog obeyed.
Lewis Stevenson slammed the rear door and then opened the front. “Now you, Snow.”
I settled into the passenger seat while Stevenson walked around the black-and-white to the driver’s side and got in behind the wheel. He pulled his door shut and told me to close mine, which I had hoped to avoid doing.
Usually I don’t suffer from claustrophobia in tight spaces, but no coffin could have been more cramped than this patrol car. The fog pressing at the windows was as psychologically suffocating as a dream about premature burial.
The interior of the car seemed chillier and damper than the night outside. Stevenson started the engine in order to be able to switch on the heater.
The police radio crackled, and a dispatcher’s static-filled voice croaked like frog song. Stevenson clicked it off.
Orson stood on the floor in front of the backseat, forepaws on the steel grid that separated him from us, peering worriedly through that security barrier. When the chief pressed a console button with the barrel of his gun, the power locks on the rear doors engaged with a hard sound no less final than the t
hunk of a guillotine blade.
I had hoped that Stevenson would holster his pistol when he got into the car, but he kept a grip on it. He rested the weapon on his leg, the muzzle pointed at the dashboard. In the dim green light from the instrument panel, I thought I saw that his forefinger was now curled around the trigger guard rather than around the trigger itself, but this didn’t lessen his advantage to any appreciable degree.
For a moment he lowered his head and closed his eyes, as though praying or gathering his thoughts.
Fog condensed on the Indian laurel, and drops of water dripped from the points of the leaves, snapping with an unrhythmical ponk-pank-ping against the roof and hood of the car.
Casually, quietly, I tucked both hands into my jacket pockets. I closed my right hand around the Glock.
I told myself that, because of my overripe imagination, I was exaggerating the threat. Stevenson was in a foul mood, yes, and from what I had seen behind the police station, I knew that he was not the righteous arm of justice that he had long pretended to be. But this didn’t mean that he had any violent intentions. He might, indeed, want only to talk, and having said his piece, he might turn us loose unharmed.
When at last Stevenson raised his head, his eyes were servings of bitter brew in cups of bone. As his gaze flowed to me, I was again chilled by an impression of inhuman malevolence, as I had been when he’d first stepped out of the gloom beside the marina office, but this time I knew why my harp-string nerves thrummed with fear. Briefly, at a certain angle, his liquid stare rippled with a yellow luminance similar to the eyeshine that many animals exhibit at night, a cold and mysterious inner light like nothing I had ever seen before in the eyes of man or woman.
25
The electric and electrifying radiance passed through Chief Stevenson’s eyes so fleetingly, as he turned to face me, that on any night before this one, I might have dismissed the phenomenon as merely a queer reflection of the instrument-panel lights. But since sundown, I had seen monkeys that were not merely monkeys, a cat that was somehow more than a cat, and I had waded through mysteries that flowed like rivers along the streets of Moonlight Bay, and I had learned to expect significance in the seemingly insignificant.
His eyes were inky again, glimmerless. The anger in his voice was now an undertow, while the surface current was gray despair and grief. “It’s all changed now, all changed, and no going back.”
“What’s changed?”
“I’m not who I used to be. I can hardly remember what I used to be like, the kind of man I was. It’s lost.”
I felt he was talking as much to himself as to me, grieving aloud for this loss of self that he imagined.
“I don’t have anything to lose. Everything that matters has been taken from me. I’m a dead man walking, Snow. That’s all I am. Can you imagine how that feels?”
“No.”
“Because even you, with your shitty life, hiding from the day, coming out only at night like some slug crawling out from under a rock—even you have reasons to live.”
Although the chief of police was an elected official in our town, Lewis Stevenson didn’t seem to be concerned about winning my vote.
I wanted to tell him to go copulate with himself. But there is a difference between showing no fear and begging for a bullet in the head.
As he turned his face away from me to gaze at the white sludge of fog sliding thickly across the windshield, that cold fire throbbed in his eyes again, a briefer and fainter flicker than before yet more disturbing because it could no longer be dismissed as imaginary.
Lowering his voice as though afraid of being overheard, he said, “I have terrible nightmares, terrible, full of sex and blood.”
I had not known exactly what to expect from this conversation; but revelations of personal torment would not have been high on my list of probable subjects.
“They started well over a year ago,” he continued. “At first they came only once a week, but then with increasing frequency. And at the start, for a while, the women in the nightmares were no one I’d ever seen in life, just pure fantasy figures. They were like those dreams you have during puberty, silken girls so ripe and eager to surrender…except that in these dreams, I didn’t just have sex with them….”
His thoughts seemed to drift with the bilious fog into darker territory.
Only his profile was presented to me, dimly lit and glistening with sour sweat, yet I glimpsed a savagery that made me hope that he would not favor me with a full-face view.
Lowering his voice further still, he said, “In these dreams, I beat them, too, punch them in the face, punch and punch and punch them until there’s nothing left of their faces, choke them until their tongues swell out of their mouths….”
As he had begun to describe his nightmares, his voice had been marked by dread. Now, in addition to this fear, an unmistakable perverse excitement rose in him, evident not only in his husky voice but also in the new tension that gripped his body.
“…and when they cry out in pain, I love their screams, the agony on their faces, the sight of their blood. So delicious. So exciting. I wake shivering with pleasure, swollen with need. And sometimes…though I’m fifty-two, for God’s sake, I climax in my sleep or just as I’m waking.”
Orson dropped away from the security grille and retreated to the backseat.
I wished that I, too, could put more distance between myself and Lewis Stevenson. The cramped patrol car seemed to close around us, as though it were being squashed in one of those salvage-yard hydraulic crushers.
“Then Louisa, my wife, began to appear in the dreams…and my two…my two daughters. Janine. Kyra. They’re afraid of me in these dreams, and I give them every reason to be, because their terror excites me. I’m disgusted but…but also thrilled at what I’m doing with them, to them….”
The anger, the despair, and the perverse excitement were still to be detected in his voice, in his slow heavy breathing, in the hunch of his shoulders—and in the subtle but ghastly reconstruction of his face, obvious even in profile. But among those powerfully conflicted desires that were at war for control of his mind, there was also a desperate hope that he could avoid plunging into the abyss of madness and savagery on the brink of which he appeared to be so precariously balanced, and this hope was clearly expressed in the anguish that now became as evident in his voice and demeanor as were his anger, despair, and depraved need.
“The nightmares got so bad, the things I did in them so sick and filthy, so repulsive, that I was afraid to go to sleep. I’d stay awake until I was exhausted, until no amount of caffeine could keep me on my feet, until even an ice cube held against the back of my neck couldn’t stop my burning eyes from slipping shut. Then when I finally slept, my dreams would be more intense than ever, as though exhaustion drove me into sounder sleep, into a deeper darkness inside me where worse monsters lived. Rutting and slaughter, ceaseless and vivid, the first dreams I ever had in color, such intense colors, and sounds as well, their pleading voices and my pitiless replies, their screams and weeping, their convulsions and death rattles when I tore their throats out with my teeth even as I thrust into them.”
Lewis Stevenson seemed to see these hideous images where I could see only the lazily churning fog, as if the windshield before him were a screen on which his demented fantasies were projected.
“And after a while…I no longer fought sleep. For a time, I just endured it. Then somewhere along the way—I can’t remember the precise night—the dreams ceased to hold any terror for me and became purely enjoyable, when previously they inspired far more guilt than pleasure. Although at first I couldn’t admit it to myself, I began to look forward to bedtime. These women were so precious to me when I was awake, but when I slept…then…then I thrilled at the chance to debase them, humiliate them, torture them in the most imaginative ways. I no longer woke in fear from these nightmares…but in a strange bliss. And I’d lie in the dark, wondering how much better it might feel to commit these atrocities for
real than just to dream of them. Merely thinking about acting out my dreams, I became aware of this awesome power flowing into me, and I felt so free, utterly free, as never before. In fact, it seemed as if I’d lived my life in huge iron manacles, wrapped in chains, weighted down by blocks of stone. It seemed that giving in to these desires wouldn’t be criminal, would have no moral dimension whatsoever. Neither right nor wrong. Neither good nor bad. But tremendously liberating.”
Either the air in the patrol car was growing increasingly stale or I was sickened by the thought of inhaling the same vapors that the chief exhaled: I’m not sure which. My mouth filled with a metallic taste, as if I had been sucking on a penny, my stomach cramped around a lump of something as cold as arctic rock, and my heart was sheathed in ice.
I couldn’t understand why Stevenson would lay bare his troubled soul to me, but I had a premonition that these confessions were only a prelude to a hateful revelation that I would wish I’d never heard. I wanted to silence him before he sprang that ultimate secret on me, but I could see he was powerfully compelled to relate these horrific fantasies—perhaps because I was the first to whom he had dared to unburden himself. There was no way to shut him up short of killing him.
“Lately,” he continued in a hungry whisper that would haunt my sleep for the rest of my life, “these dreams all focus on my granddaughter. Brandy. She’s ten. A pretty girl. A very pretty girl. So slim and pretty. The things I do to her in dreams. Ah, the things I do. You can’t imagine such merciless brutality. Such exquisitely vicious inventiveness. And when I wake up, I’m beyond exhilaration. Transcendent. In a rapture. I lie in bed, beside my wife, who sleeps on without guessing what strange thoughts obsess me, who can’t possibly ever know, and I thrum with power, with the awareness that absolute freedom is available to me any time I want to seize it. Any time. Next week. Tomorrow. Now.”
Overhead, the silent laurel spoke as, in quick succession, at least a double score of its pointed green tongues trembled with too great a weight of condensed fog. Each loosed its single watery note, and I twitched at the sudden rataplan of fat droplets beating on the car, half surprised that what streamed down the windshield and across the hood was not blood.