Shadowfires

by Dean R. Koontz

  In his few moments of relative lucidity, when his intellectual capacity was nearly what it once had been, he told himself that the illusions of flames merely resulted from misfiring synapses in his injured brain, electrical pulses shorting through the damaged tissues. And he told himself that the illusions frightened him because, above all else, he was an intellectual, a man whose life had been a life of the mind, so he had every right to be frightened by signs of brain deterioration. The tissues would heal, the shadowfires fade forever, and he would be all right. That was also what he told himself. But in his less lucid moments, when the world turned tenebrous and eerie, when he was gripped by confusion and animal fear, he looked upon the shadowfires with unalloyed horror and was sometimes reduced to paralysis by something he thought he glimpsed within — or beyond — the dancing flames.

  Now, as dawn insistently pressed upon the resistant darkness of the mountains, Eric Leben ascended from stasis, groaned softly for a while, then louder, and finally woke. He sat up on the edge of the bed. His mouth was stale; he tasted ashes. His head was filled with pain. He touched his broken pate. It was no worse; his skull was not coming apart.

  The meager glow of morning entered by two windows, and a small lamp was on — not sufficient illumination to dispel all the shadows in the bedroom, but enough to hurt his extremely sensitive eyes. Watery and hot, his eyes had been less able to adapt to brightness since he had risen from the cold steel gurney in the morgue, as if darkness were his natural habitat now, as if he did not belong in a world subject either to sun or to man-made light.

  For a couple of minutes he concentrated on his breathing, for his rate of respiration was irregular, now too slow and deep, now too fast and shallow. Taking a stethoscope from the nightstand, he listened to his heart as well. It was beating fast enough to assure that he would not soon slip back into a state of suspended animation, though it was unsettlingly arrhythmic.

  In addition to the stethoscope, he had brought other instruments with which to monitor his progress. A sphygmomanometer for measuring his blood pressure. An ophthalmoscope which, in conjunction with a mirror, he could use to study the condition of his retinas and the pupil response. He had a notebook, too, in which he had intended to record his observations of himself, for he was aware — sometimes only dimly aware but always aware — that he was the first man to die and come back from beyond, that he was making history, and that such a journal would be invaluable once he had fully recovered.

  Remember the mice, the mice…

  He shook his head irritably, as if that sudden baffling thought were a bothersome gnat buzzing around his face. Remember the mice, the mice: He had not the slightest idea what it meant, yet it was an annoyingly repetitive and peculiarly urgent thought that had assailed him frequently last night. He vaguely suspected that he did, in fact, know the meaning of the mice and that he was suppressing the knowledge because it frightened him. However, when he tried to focus on the subject and force an understanding, he had no success but became increasingly frustrated, agitated, and confused.

  Returning the stethoscope to the nightstand, he did not pick up the sphygmomanometer because he did not have the patience or the dexterity required to roll up his shirt sleeve, bind the pressure cuff around his arm, operate the bulb-type pump, and simultaneously hold the gauge so he could read it. He had tried last night, and his clumsiness had finally driven him into a rage. He did not pick up the ophthalmoscope, either, for to examine his own eyes he would have to go into the bathroom and use the mirror. He could not bear to see himself as he now appeared: gray-faced, muddy-eyed, with a slackness in his facial muscles that made him look… half dead.

  The pages of his small notebook were mostly blank, and now he did not attempt to add further observations to his recovery journal. For one thing, he had found that he was not capable of the intense and prolonged concentration required to write either intelligibly or legibly. Besides, the sight of his sloppily scrawled handwriting, which previously had been precise and neat, was yet another thing that had the power to excite a vicious rage in him.

  Remember the mice, the mice bashing themselves against the walls of their cages, chasing their tails, the mice, the mice…

  Putting both hands to his head as if to physically suppress that unwanted and mysterious thought, Eric Leben lurched out of bed, onto his feet. He needed to piss, and he was hungry. Those were two good signs, two indications that he was alive, at least more alive than dead, and he took heart from those simple biological needs.

  He started toward the bathroom but stopped suddenly when fire leaped up in a corner of the room. Not real flames but shadowfire. Blood-red tongues with silver edges. Crackling hungrily, consuming the shadows from which they erupted yet in no way reducing that darkness. Squinting his light-stung eyes, Eric found that, as before, he was compelled to peer into the flames, and within them he thought he saw strange forms writhing and… and beckoning to him..

  Though he was unaccountably terrified of these shadowfires, a part of him, perverse beyond his understanding, longed to go within the flames, pass through them as one might pass through a door, and learn what lay beyond.

  No!

  As he felt that longing grow into an acute need, he desperately turned away from the fire and stood swaying in fear and bewilderment, two feelings that, in his current fragile state, quickly metamorphosed into anger, the anger into rage. Everything seemed to lead to rage, as if it were the ultimate and inevitable distillate of all other emotions.

  A brass-and-pewter floor lamp with a frosted crystal shade stood beside an easy chair, within his reach. He seized it with both hands, lifted it high above his head, and threw it across the room. The shade shattered against the wall, and gleaming shards of frosted crystal fell like cracking ice. The metal base and pole hit the edge of the white-lacquered dresser and rebounded with a clang, clattered to the floor.

  The thrill of destruction that shivered through him was of a dark intensity akin to a sadistic sexual urge, and its power was nearly as great as orgasm. Before his death, he had been an obsessive achiever, a builder of empires, a compulsive acquirer of wealth, but following his death he had become an engine of destruction, as fully compelled to smash property as he had once been compelled to acquire it.

  The cabin was decorated in ultramodern with accents of art deco — like the ruined floor lamp — not a style particularly well suited to a five-room mountain cabin but one which satisfied Eric's need for a sense of newness and modernity in all things. In a frenzy, he began to reduce the trendy decor to piles of bright rubble. He picked up the armchair as if it weighed only a pound or two and heaved it at the three-panel mirror on the wall behind the bed. The tripartite mirror exploded, and the armchair fell onto the bed in a rain of silvered glass. Breathing hard, Eric seized the damaged floor lamp, held it by the pole, swung it at a piece of bronze sculpture that stood on the dresser, using the heavy base of the lamp as a huge hammer—bang! — knocking the sculpture to the floor, swung the lamp-hammer twice at the dresser mirror—bang, bang! — smashing, smashing, swung it at a painting hanging on the wall near the door to the bathroom, brought the picture down, hammered the artwork where it lay on the floor. He felt good, so good, never better, alive. As he gave himself entirely and joyfully to his berserker rage, he snarled with animal ferocity or shrieked wordlessly, though he was able/to form one special word with unmistakable clarity, “Rachael,” spoke it with unadulterated hatred, spittle spraying, “Rachael, Rachael.” He pounded the makeshift hammer into a white-lacquered occasional table that had stood beside the armchair, pounded and pounded until the table was reduced to splinters—"Rachael, Rachael" — struck the smaller lamp on the nightstand and knocked it to the floor. Bang! Arteries pounding furiously in his neck and temples, blood singing in his ears, he hammered the nightstand itself until he had broken the handles off the drawers, hammered the wall, “Rachael,” hammered until the pole lamp was too bent to be of any further use, angrily tossed it aside, grabbed the d
rapes and ripped them from their rods, tore another painting from the wall and put his foot through the canvas, “Rachael, Rachael, Rachael.” He staggered wildly now and flailed at the air with his big arms and turned in circles, a crazed bull, and he abruptly found it hard to breathe, felt the insane strength drain out of him, felt the mad destructive urge flowing away, away, and he dropped to the floor, onto his knees, stretched flat out on his chest, head turned to one side, face in the deep-pile carpet, gasping. His confused thoughts were even muddier than the strange and clouded eyes that he could not bear to look at in a mirror, but though he no longer possessed demonic energy, he had the strength to mutter that special name again and again while he lay on the floor: “Rachael… Rachael… Rachael…”

  PART TWO

  DARKER

  Night has patterns that can be read

  less by the living than by the dead.

  — the Book of Counted Sorrows

  17

  PEOPLE ON THE MOVE

  Choppering in from Palm Springs, Anson Sharp had arrived before dawn at Geneplan's bacteriologically secure underground research laboratories near Riverside, where he had been greeted by a contingent of six Defense Security Agency operatives, four U.S. marshals, and eight of the marshals' deputies, who had arrived minutes before him. Under the pretense of a national defense emergency, fully supported by valid court orders and search warrants, they identified themselves to Geneplan's night security guards, entered the premises, applied seals to all research files and computers, and established an operations headquarters in the rather sumptuously appointed offices belonging to Dr. Vincent Baresco, chief of the research staff.

  As dawn dispelled the night and as day took possession of the world above the subterranean laboratories, Anson Sharp slumped in Baresco's enormous leather chair, sipped black coffee, and received reports, by phone, from subordinates throughout southern California, to the effect that Eric Leben's coconspirators in the Wildcard Project were all under house arrest. In Orange County, Dr. Morgan Eugene Lewis, research coordinator of Wildcard, was being detained with his wife at his home in North Tustin. Dr. J. Felix Geffels was being held at his house right there in Riverside. Dr. Vincent Baresco, head of all research for Geneplan, had been found by DSA agents in Geneplan's Newport Beach headquarters, unconscious on the floor of Eric Leben's office, amidst indications of gunplay and a fierce struggle.

  Rather than take Baresco to a public hospital and even partially relinquish control of him, Sharp's men transported the bald and burly scientist to the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro, where he was seen by a Marine physician in the base infirmary. Having received two hard blows to the throat that made it impossible for him to speak, Baresco used a pen and notepad to tell DSA agents that he had been assaulted by Ben Shadway, Rachael Leben's lover, when he had caught them in the act of looting Eric's office safe. He was disgruntled when they refused to believe that was the whole story, and he was downright shocked to discover they knew about Wildcard and were aware of Eric Leben's return from the dead. Using pen and notepad again, Baresco had demanded to be transferred to a civilian hospital, demanded to know what possible charges they could lodge, demanded to see his lawyer. All three demands were, of course, ignored.

  Rupert Knowls and Perry Seitz, the money men who had supplied the large amount of venture capital that had gotten Geneplan off the ground nearly a decade ago, were at Knowls's sprawling ten-acre estate, Havenhurst, in Palm Springs. Three Defense Security Agency operatives had arrived at the estate with arrest warrants for Knowls and Seitz and with a search warrant. They had found an illegally modified Uzi submachine gun, doubtless the weapon with which two Palm Springs policemen had been murdered only a couple of hours earlier.

  Currently and indefinitely under detention at Havenhurst, neither Knowls nor Seitz was raising objections. They knew the score. They would receive an unattractive offer to convey to the government all research, rights, and title to the Wildcard enterprise, without a shred of compensation, and they would be required to remain forever silent about that undertaking and about Eric Leben's resurrection. They would also be required to sign murder confessions which could be used to keep them acquiescent the rest of their lives. Although the offer had no legal basis or force, although the DSA was violating every tenet of democracy and breaking innumerable laws, Knowls and Seitz would accept the terms. They were worldly men, and they knew that failure to cooperate — and especially any attempt to exercise their constitutional rights — would be the death of them.

  Those five were sitting on a secret that was potentially the most powerful in history. The immortality process was currently imperfect, true, but eventually the problems would be solved. Then whoever controlled the secrets of Wildcard would control the world. With so much at stake, the government was not concerned about observing the thin line between moral and immoral behavior, and in this very special case, it had no interest whatsoever in the niceties of due process.

  After receiving the report on Seitz and Knowls, Sharp put down the phone, got up from the leather chair, and paced the windowless subterranean office. He rolled his big shoulders, stretched, and tried to work a kink out of his thick, muscular neck.

  He had begun with eight people to worry about, eight possible leaks to plug, and now five of those eight had been dealt with quickly and smoothly. He felt pretty good about things in general and about himself in particular. He was damned good at his job.

  At times like this, he wished he had someone with whom to share his triumphs, an admiring assistant, but he could not afford to let anyone get close to him. He was the deputy director of the Defense Security Agency, the number two man in the whole outfit, and he was determined to become director by the time he was forty. He intended to secure that position by collecting sufficient damaging material about the current director — Jarrod McClain — to force him out and to blackmail McClain into writing a wholehearted recommendation that Anson Sharp replace him. McClain treated Sharp like a son, making him privy to every secret of the agency, and already Sharp possessed most of what he needed to destroy McClain. But, as he was a careful man, he would not move until there was no possibility whatsoever of his coup failing. And when he ascended to the director's chair, he would not make the mistake of taking a subordinate to his bosom, as McClain had embraced him. It would be lonely at the top, must be lonely if he were to survive up there a long time, so he made himself get used to loneliness now: though he had protégés, he did not have friends.

  Having worked the stiffness out of his thick neck and immense shoulders, Sharp returned to the chair behind the desk, sat down, closed his eyes, and thought about the three people who remained on the loose and who must be apprehended. Eric Leben, Mrs. Leben, Ben Shadway. They would not be offered a deal, as the other five had been. If Leben could be taken “alive,” he would be locked away and studied as if he were a lab animal. Mrs. Leben and Shadway would simply be terminated and their deaths made to look accidental.

  He had several reasons for wanting them dead. For one thing, they were both independent-minded, tough, and honest — a dangerous mixture, volatile. They might blow the Wildcard story wide open for the pure hell of it or out of misguided idealism, thus dealing Sharp a major setback on his climb to the top. The others — Lewis, Geffels, Baresco, Knowls, and Seitz — would knuckle under out of sheer self-interest, but Rachael Leben and Ben Shadway could not be counted on to put their own best interests first. Besides, neither had committed a criminal act, and neither had sold his soul to the government as the men of Geneplan had done, so no swords hung over their heads; there were no credible threats by which they could be controlled.

  But most important of all, Sharp wanted Rachael Leben dead simply because she was Shadway's lover, because Shadway cared for her. He wanted to kill her first, in front of Ben Shadway. And he wanted Shadway dead because he had hated the man for almost seventeen years.

  Alone in that underground office, eyes closed, Sharp smiled. He wondered what Ben Sha
dway would do if he knew that his old nemesis, Anson Sharp, was hunting for him. Sharp was almost painfully eager for the inevitable confrontation, eager to see the astonishment on Shadway's face, eager to waste the son of a bitch.

  * * *

  Jerry Peake, the young DSA agent assigned by Anson Sharp to find Sarah Kiel, carefully searched for a freshly dug grave on Eric Leben's walled property in Palm Springs. Using a high-intensity flashlight, being diligent and utterly thorough, Peake tramped through flower beds, struggled through shrubbery, getting his pant legs damp and his shoes muddy, but he found nothing suspicious.

  He turned on the pool lights, half expecting to find a dead woman either floating there — or weighted to the blue bottom and peering up through chlorine-treated water. When the pool proved to be free of corpses, Peake decided he had been reading too many mystery novels; in mystery novels, swimming pools were always full of bodies, but never in real life.

  A passionate fan of mystery fiction since he was twelve, Jerry Peake had never wanted to be anything other than a detective, and not just an ordinary detective but something special, like a CIA or FBI or DSA man, and not just an ordinary DSA man but an investigative genius of the sort that John Le Carré, William F. Buckley, or Frederick Forsythe might write about. Peake wanted to be a legend in his own time. He was only in his fifth year with the DSA, and his reputation as a whiz was nonexistent, but he was not worried. He had patience. No one became a legend in just five years. First, you had to spend a lot of hours doing dog's work — like tramping through flower beds, snagging your best suits on thorny shrubbery, and peering hopefully into swimming pools in the dead of night.

  When he did not turn up Sarah Kiel's body on the Leben property, Peake made the rounds of the hospitals, hoping to find her name on a patient roster or on a list of recently treated outpatients. He had no luck at his first two stops. Worse, even though he had his DSA credentials, complete with photograph, the nurses and physicians with whom he spoke seemed to regard him with skepticism. They cooperated, but guardedly, as if they thought he might be an imposter with hidden — and none too admirable — intentions.