Shadowfires

by Dean R. Koontz

  “Later. Right now let's just get the hell out of here.”

  “But—”

  “Later.”

  Their footsteps echoed and reechoed hollowly off the concrete, and she felt as if they were walking not through an ordinary parking garage in Santa Ana but through the chambers of an alien temple, under the eye of an unimaginably strange deity.

  At that late hour, her red 560 SL was one of only three cars parked on the entire floor. It stood alone, gleaming, a hundred feet from the elevator. She walked directly toward it, circled it warily. No one crouched on the far side. Through the windows, she could see that no one was inside, either. She opened the door, got in quickly. As soon as Benny climbed in and closed his door, she hit the master lock switch, started the engine, threw the car in gear, popped the emergency brake, and drove too fast toward the exit ramp.

  As she drove, she engaged the safeties on her pistol and, with one hand, returned it to her purse.

  When they reached the street, Benny said, “Okay, now tell me what this cloak-and-dagger stuff is all about.”

  She hesitated, wishing she had not brought him this far into it. She should have come to the morgue alone. She'd been weak, needed to lean on him, but now if she didn't break her dependency on him, if she drew him further into it, she would without doubt be putting his life in jeopardy. She had no right to endanger him.

  “Rachael?”

  She stopped at a red traffic light at the intersection of Main Street and Fourth, where a hot summer wind blew a few scraps of litter into the center of the crossroads and spun them around for a moment before sweeping them away.

  “Rachael?” Benny persisted.

  A shabbily dressed derelict stood at the corner, only a few feet away. He was filthy, unshaven, and drunk. His nose was gnarled and hideous, half eaten away by melanoma. In his left hand he held a wine bottle imperfectly concealed in a paper bag. In his grubby right paw he gripped a broken alarm clock — no glass covering the face of it, the minute hand missing — as if he thought he possessed a great treasure. He stooped down, peered in at her. His eyes were fevered, blasted.

  Ignoring the derelict, Benny said, “Don't withdraw from me, Rachael. What's wrong? Tell me. I can help.”

  “I don't want to get you involved,” she said.

  “I'm already involved.”

  “No. Right now you don't know anything. And I really think that's best.”

  “You promised—”

  The traffic light changed, and she tramped the accelerator so suddenly that Benny was thrown against his seat belt and cut off in midsentence.

  Behind them, the drunk with the clock shouted: “I'm Father Time!”

  Rachael said, “Listen, Benny, I'll take you back to my place so you can get your car.”

  “Like hell.”

  “Please let me handle this myself.”

  “Handle what? What's going on?”

  “Benny, don't interrogate me. Just please don't do that. I've got a lot to think about, a lot to do…”

  “Sounds like you're going somewhere else tonight.”

  “It doesn't concern you,” she said.

  “Where are you going?”

  “There're things I've got to… check out. Never mind.”

  Getting angry now, he said, “You going to shoot someone?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why're you packing a gun?”

  She didn't answer.

  He said, “You got a permit for a concealed weapon?”

  She shook her head. “A permit, but just for home use.”

  He glanced behind to see if anyone was near them, then leaned over from his seat, grabbed the steering wheel, and jerked it hard to the right.

  The car whipped around with a screech of tires, and she hit the brakes, and they slid sideways six or eight yards, and when she tried to straighten the wheel he grabbed it again, and she shouted at him to stop it, and he let go of the wheel, which spun through her hands for a moment, but then she was firmly in control once more, pulled to the curb, stopped, looked at him, said, “What are you — crazy?”

  “Just angry.”

  “Let it be,” she said, staring out at the street.

  “I want to help you.”

  “You can't.”

  “Try me. Where do you have to go?”

  She sighed. “Just to Eric's place.”

  “His house? In Villa Park? Why?”

  “I can't tell you.”

  “After his house, where?”

  “Geneplan. His office.”

  “Why?”

  “I can't tell you that, either.”

  “Why not?”

  “Benny, it's dangerous. It could get violent.”

  “So what the fuck am I — porcelain? Crystal? Shit, woman, do you think I'm going to fly into a million goddamn pieces at the tap of a goddamn finger?”

  She looked at him. The amber glow of the streetlamp came through only her half of the windshield, leaving him in darkness, but his eyes shone in the shadows. She said, “My God, you're furious. I've never heard you use that kind of language before.”

  He said, “Rachael, do we have something or not? I think we have something. Special, I mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “You really think so?”

  “You know I do.”

  “Then you can't freeze me out of this. You can't keep me from helping you when you need help. Not if we're to go on from here.”

  She looked at him, feeling very tender toward him, wanting more than anything to bring him into her confidence, to have him as her ally, but involving him would be a rotten thing to do. He was right now thinking what kind of trouble she might be in, his mind churning furiously, listing possibilities, but nothing he could imagine would be half as dangerous as the truth. If he knew the truth, he might not be so eager to help, but she dared not tell him.

  He said, “I mean, you know I'm a pretty old-fashioned guy. Not very with it by most standards. Staid in some ways. Hell, half the guys in California real estate wear white cords and pastel blazers when they go to work on a summer day like this, but I don't feel comfortable in less than a three-piece suit and wing tips. I may be the last guy in a real-estate office who even knows what a goddamn vest is. So when someone like me sees the woman he cares about in trouble, he has to help, it's the only thing he can do, the plain old-fashioned thing, the right thing, and if she won't let him help, then that's pretty much a slap in the face, an affront to all his values, a rejection of what he is, and no matter how much he likes her, he's got to walk, it's as simple as that.”

  She said, “I never heard you make a speech before.”

  “I never had to before.”

  Both touched and frustrated by his ultimatum, Rachael closed her eyes and leaned back in the seat, unable to decide what to do. She kept her hands on the steering wheel, gripping it tightly, for if she let go, Benny would be sure to see how badly her hands were shaking.

  He said, “Who are you afraid of, Rachael?”

  She didn't answer.

  He said, “You know what happened to his body, don't you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You know who took it.”

  “Maybe.”

  “And you're afraid of them. Who are they, Rachael? For God's sake, who would do something like that — and why?”

  She opened her eyes, put the car in gear, and pulled away from the curb. “Okay, you can come along with me.”

  “To Eric's house, the office? What're we looking for?”

  “That,” she said, “I'm not prepared to tell you.”

  He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Okay. All right. One step at a time. I can live with that.”

  She drove north on Main Street to Katella Avenue, east on Katella to the expensive community of Villa Park, into the hills toward her dead husband's estate. In the upper reaches of Villa Park, the big houses, many priced well over a million dollars, were less than half visible beyond screens of shrub
bery and the gathered cloaks of night. Eric's house, looming beyond a row of enormous Indian laurels, seemed darker than any other, a cold place even on a June night, the many windows like sheets of some strange obsidian that would not permit the passage of light in either direction.

  6

  THE TRUNK

  The long driveway, made of rust-red Mexican paving tiles, curved past Eric Leben's enormous Spanish-modern house before finally turning out of sight to the garages in back. Rachael parked in front.

  Although Ben Shadway delighted in authentic Spanish buildings with their multiplicity of arches and angles and deep-set leaded windows, he was no fan of Spanish modern. The stark lines, smooth surfaces, big plate-glass windows, and total lack of ornamentation might seem stylish and satisfyingly clean to some, but he found such architecture boring, without character, and perilously close to the cheap-looking stucco boxes of so many southern California neighborhoods.

  Nevertheless, as he got out of the car and followed Rachael down a dark Mexican-tile walkway, across an unlighted veranda where yellow-flowering succulents and bloom-laden white azaleas glowed palely in enormous clay pots, to the front door of the house, Ben was impressed by the place. It was massive — certainly ten thousand square feet of living space — set on expansive, elaborately landscaped grounds. From the property, there was a view of most of Orange County to the west, a vast carpet of light stretching fifteen miles to the pitch-black ocean; in daylight, in clear weather, one could probably see all the way to Catalina. In spite of the spareness of the architecture, the Leben house reeked of wealth. To Ben, the crickets singing in the bushes even sounded different from those that chirruped in more modest neighborhoods, less shrill and more melodious, as if their minuscule brains encompassed awareness of — and respect for — their surroundings.

  Ben had known that Eric Leben was a very rich man, but somehow that knowledge had had no impact until now. Suddenly he sensed what it meant to be worth tens of millions of dollars. Leben's wealth pressed on Ben, like a very real weight.

  Until he was nineteen, Ben Shadway had never given much thought to money. His parents were neither rich enough to be preoccupied with investments nor poor enough to worry about paying next month's bills, nor had they much ambition, so wealth — or lack of it — had not been a topic of conversation in the Shadway household. However, by the time Ben completed two years of military service, his primary interest was money: making it, investing it, accumulating ever-larger piles.

  He did not love money for its own sake. He did not even care all that much for the finer things that money could buy; imported sports cars, pleasure boats, Rolex watches, and two-thousand-dollar suits held no great appeal for him. He was happier with his meticulously restored 1956 Thunderbird than Rachael was with her new Mercedes, and he bought his suits off the rack at Harris & Frank. Some men loved money for the power it gave them, but Ben was no more interested in exercising power over others than he was in learning Swahili.

  To him, money was primarily a time machine that would eventually allow him to do a lot of traveling back through the years to a more appealing age — the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, which held so much interest for him. Thus far, he had worked long hours with a few days off. But he intended to build the company into one of the top real-estate powerhouses in Orange County within the next five years, then sell out and take a capital gain large enough to support him comfortably for most — if not the rest — of his life. Thereafter, he could devote himself almost entirely to swing music, old movies, the hard-boiled detective fiction he loved, and his miniature trains.

  Although the Great Depression extended through more than a third of the period to which Ben was attracted, it seemed to him like a far better time than the present. During the twenties, thirties, and forties, there had been no terrorists, no end-of-the-world atomic threat, no street crime to speak of, no frustrating fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit, no polyester or lite beer. Television, the moron box that is the curse of modern life, was not a major social force by the end of the forties. Currently, the world seemed a cesspool of easy sex, pornography, illiterate fiction, witless and graceless music. The second, third, and fourth decades of the century were so fresh and innocent by comparison with the present that Ben's nostalgia sometimes deepened into a melancholy longing, into a profound desire to have been born before his own time.

  Now, as the respectful crickets offered trilling songs to the otherwise peaceful silence of the Leben estate, as a warm wind scented with star jasmine blew across the sea-facing hills and through the long veranda, Ben could almost believe that he had, in fact, been transported back in time to a more genteel, less hectic age. Only the architecture spoiled the halcyon illusion.

  And Rachael's pistol.

  That spoiled things, too.

  She was an extraordinarily easygoing woman, quick to laugh and slow to anger, too self-confident to be easily frightened. Only a very real and very serious threat could compel her to arm herself.

  Before getting out of the car, she had withdrawn the gun from her purse and had clicked off the safeties. She warned Ben to be alert and cautious, though she refused to say exactly what it was that he should be alert to and cautious of. Her dread was almost palpable, yet she declined to share her worry and thus relieve her mind; she jealously guarded her secret as she had done all evening.

  He suppressed his impatience with her — not because he had the forbearance of a saint but simply because he had no choice but to let her proceed with her revelations at her own pace.

  At the door of the house, she fumbled with her keys, trying to find the lock and keyhole in the gloom. When she had walked out a year ago, she'd kept her house key because she'd thought she would need to return later to collect some of her belongings, a task that had become unnecessary when Eric had everything packed and sent to her along with, she said, an infuriatingly smug note expressing his certainty that she would soon realize how foolish she had been and seek reconciliation.

  The cold, hard scrape of key metal on lock metal gave rise to an unfortunate image in Ben's mind: a pair of murderously sharp and gleaming knives being stropped against each other.

  He noticed a burglar-alarm box with indicator lights by the door, but the system was evidently not engaged because none of the bulbs on the panel was lit.

  While Rachael continued to poke at the lock with the key, Ben said, “Maybe he had the locks changed after you moved out.”

  “I doubt it. He was so confident that I'd move back in with him sooner or later. Eric was a very confident man.”

  She found the keyhole. The key worked. She opened the door, nervously reached inside, snapped on the lights in the foyer, and went into the house with the pistol held out in front of her.

  Ben followed, feeling as if the male and female roles had been wrongly reversed, feeling as if he ought to have the gun, feeling a bit foolish when you came right down to it.

  The house was perfectly still.

  “I think we're alone,” Rachael said.

  “Who did you expect to find?” he asked.

  She did not answer.

  Although she had just expressed the opinion that they were alone, she advanced with her pistol ready.

  They went slowly from room to room, turning on every light, and each new revelation of the interior made the house more imposing. The rooms were large, high-ceilinged, white-walled, airy, with Mexican-tile floors and lots of big windows; some had massive fireplaces of either stone or ceramic tile; a few boasted oak cabinets of superb craftsmanship. A party for two hundred guests would not have strained the capacity of the living room and adjacent library.

  The furniture was as starkly modern and functional as the rather forbidding architecture. The upholstered white sofas and chairs were utterly free of ornamentation. Coffee tables, end tables, and all the occasional tables were also quite plain, finished in mirror-bright high-gloss enamel, some black and some white.

  The only color and drama were provided by an eclec
tic group of paintings, antiques, and objets d'art. The bland decor was intended to serve as an unobtrusive backdrop against which to display those items of surpassing quality and value, each of which was artfully illuminated by indirect lighting or tightly focused overhead minispots. Over one fireplace was a tile panel of birds by William de Morgan, which had been done (Rachael said) for Czar Nicholas I. Here, a blazing Jackson Pollock canvas. There, a Roman torso carved from marble, dating to the first century B.C. The ancient was intermixed with the new in wildly unconventional but striking arrangements. Here, a nineteenth-century Kirman panel recording the lives of the greatest shahs of Persia. Here, a bold Mark Rothko canvas featuring only broad bands of color. There, a pair of Lalique crystal-deer consoles, each holding an exquisite Ming vase. The effect was both breathtaking and jarring — and altogether more like a museum than a real home.

  Although he had known Rachael was married to a wealthy man, and although he had known that she had become a very wealthy widow as of this morning, Ben had given no thought to what her wealth might mean to their relationship. Now her new status impinged upon him like an elbow in his side, making him uncomfortable. Rich. Rachael was very damn rich. For the first time, that thought had meaning for him.

  He realized he'd need to sit down and think about it at length, and he would need to talk with her forthrightly about the influence of so much money, about the changes for better and worse that it might cause between them. However, this was neither the time nor the place to pursue the matter, and he decided to put it out of his mind for the moment. That was not easy. A fortune in tens of millions was a powerful magnet relentlessly drawing the mind regardless of how many other urgent matters required attention.

  “You lived here six years?” he asked disbelievingly as they moved through the cool sterile rooms, past the precisely arranged displays.

  “Yes,” she said, relaxing slightly as they roamed deeper into the house without encountering a threat of any kind. “Six long years.”

  As they inspected the white vaulted chambers, the place began to seem less like a house and more like a great mass of ice in which some primeval catastrophe had embedded scores of gorgeous artifacts from another, earlier civilization.