by Dean Koontz
grew increasingly reluctant to talk about it.
For one thing, the subject depressed her. Recalling her queer behavior, she felt helpless, as though she had been cast back to the powerless and dependent condition of early childhood.
In addition, she was troubled by an irrational but nonetheless firm conviction that talking about the panic attack would induce another one. She felt as if she were sitting on a trapdoor, and the longer she talked, the more likely she was to speak the trigger word that would release the hinges and drop her into an abyss below.
She asked about his day, and he recited a list of business errands that he usually attended to when the weather didn’t favor housepainting.
Although Dusty never lied, Martie sensed that he wasn’t giving her the full story. Of course, in her current condition, she was too paranoid to trust her feelings.
Pushing aside his plate, he said, “You keep avoiding my eyes.”
She didn’t deny it. “I hate for you to see me like this.”
“Like what?”
“Weak.”
“You aren’t weak.”
“This lasagna has more spine than I do.”
“It’s two days old. For lasagna…hell, that’s eighty-five in human years.”
“I feel eighty-five.”
He said, “Well, I’m here to testify, you look way better than that damn lasagna.”
“Gee, mister, you sure can charm a girl.”
“You know what they say about housepainters.”
“What do they say?”
“We know how to roll it on thick.”
She met his eyes.
He smiled and said, “It’s going to be all right, Martie.”
“Not unless your jokes get better.”
“Weak, my ass.”
Walking the battlements of her four-room fortress, Susan Jagger satisfied herself that all the windows were locked.
The only apartment door opening to the outside world was in the kitchen. It was protected by two dead bolts and a security chain.
Finished checking the locks, she tipped a kitchen chair onto its back legs and wedged it under the doorknob. Even if Eric somehow had obtained a key, the chair would prevent the door from being opened.
Of course, she had tried the chair trick before. It hadn’t foiled the intruder.
After hiding the camcorder and testing the view angle, she had removed the battery pack to plug it into a bathroom outlet once more. Now it was fully charged.
She inserted the battery and hid the camcorder in the ivy under the potted ming tree. She would switch it on just before she got into bed, and then would have three hours of tape—in extended mode—on which to catch Eric in the act.
All the synchronized clocks agreed on the hour: 9:40
P.M. Martie had promised to call before eleven o’clock.
Susan remained eager to hear what analysis and advice her friend might offer, but she wasn’t going to tell Martie about the camcorder. Because maybe her phone was tapped. Maybe Eric was listening.
Oh, how lovely it was here on the dance floor at the Paranoia Cotillion, gliding around and around in the fearsome embrace of a malevolent stranger, while the orchestra played a threnody and she grimly worked up the courage to look into the face of the dancer whose lead she followed.
29
Two glasses of Scotch, a brick of lasagna, and the events of this terrible day left Martie half numb with exhaustion. As Dusty cleaned up the dinner dishes, she sat at the table, watching him from under heavy eyelids.
She had expected to lie awake until dawn, racked by anxiety, dreading the future. But now her mind rebelled at assuming an even heavier burden of worry; it was shutting down for the night.
A new fear of sleepwalking was the only thing preventing her from nodding off here at the kitchen table. Somnambulism had never previously afflicted her, but then she had never suffered a panic attack until this morning, either, and now all things were possible.
If she walked in her sleep, perhaps that Other Martie would control her body. Slipping out of bed, leaving Dusty to dream on, the Other might descend barefoot through the house, as comfortable as the blind in darkness, to extract a clean knife from the utensils basket in the dishwasher.
Dusty took her hand and led her through the downstairs, turning off lights as they went. Valet padded after them, his eyes red and shining in the gloom.
Having brought Martie’s raincoat from the kitchen, Dusty paused to hang it in the foyer closet.
Sensing a weight in one of the coat pockets, he fished out the paperback book. “Are you still reading this?” he asked.
“It’s a real thriller.”
“But you’ve been taking it to Susan’s sessions forever.”
“Not all that long.” She yawned. “The writing’s good.”
“A real thriller—but you can’t get through it in six months?”
“It hasn’t been six months, has it? No. Can’t be. The plot is entertaining. The characters are colorful. I’m enjoying it.”
He was frowning at her. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Plenty. But, right now, mostly I’m just so damn tired.”
Handing the book to her, he said, “Well, if you have trouble going to sleep, obviously a page of this is better than Nembutal.”
To sleep: perchance to walk, to knife, to burn.
Valet preceded them up the stairs.
As Martie ascended with one hand on the banister and Dusty’s supportive arm around her waist, she took some comfort from the realization that the dog might wake her if she went sleepwalking. Good Valet would lick her bare feet, slap his handsome tail against her legs as she went down the stairs, and certainly bark at her if she withdrew a butcher knife from the dishwasher without using it to carve a snack for him from the brisket in the refrigerator.
Susan dressed for bed in simple white cotton panties—no embroidery or lace, no adornment of any kind—and a white T-shirt.
Prior to the past few months, she had favored colorful lingerie with frills. She had enjoyed feeling sexy. No more.
She understood the psychology behind her change in sleepwear. Sexiness was now linked in her mind to rape. Appliquéd lace, fimbria, furbelow, plicated selvage, bargello stitchery, point de gaze, and the like might offer encouragement to her mysterious postmidnight visitor; he might interpret frills as an invitation to further abuse.
For a while she had gone to bed in men’s pajamas, loose and ugly, and then in baggy exercise cottons. The creep hadn’t been turned off by either.
In fact, after undressing her and brutally using her, he took the time to re-dress her with attention to detail that was obvious mockery. If she had buttoned every button on her pajama top before going to bed, he buttoned each; but if she had left one unbuttoned, the same remained unbuttoned when she woke. He retied the waistband drawstring in precisely the bow knot that she had used.
These days, simple white cotton. An assertion of her innocence. A refusal to be degraded or soiled, regardless of what he did to her.
Dusty was worried about Martie’s sudden torpor. She pleaded bone-deep weariness, but judging by her demeanor, she was succumbing less to exhaustion than to profound depression.
She moved sluggishly, not with the loose-limbed awkwardness of exhaustion, but with the grim and determined plodding of one who labored under a crushing burden. Her face was tight, pinched at the corners of the mouth and eyes, rather than slack with fatigue.
Martie was only a half step down the ladder from fanaticism when it came to dental hygiene, but this evening she didn’t want to bother brushing her teeth. In three years of marriage, this was a first.
On every night in Dusty’s memory, Martie washed her face and applied a moisturizing lotion. Brushed her hair. Not this time.
Forgoing her nightly rituals, she went to bed fully dressed.
When Dusty realized she was not going to take off her clothes, he untied her laces and removed her shoes. Her socks. Sk
inned off her jeans. She didn’t resist, but she didn’t cooperate, either.
Getting Martie out of her blouse was too difficult, especially as she lay on her side, knees drawn up, arms crossed on her breasts. Leaving her partially dressed, Dusty pulled the covers over her shoulders, smoothed her hair back from her face, kissed her brow.
Her eyelids drooped, but in her eyes was something more stark and sharp-edged than weariness.
“Don’t leave me,” she said thickly.
“I won’t.”
“Don’t trust me.”
“But I do.”
“Don’t sleep.”
“Martie—”
“Promise me. Don’t sleep.”
“All right.”
“Promise.”
“I promise.”
“Because I might kill you in your sleep,” she said, and closed her eyes, which seemed to change from cornflower-blue to cyanine and then to purple madder just as her eyelids slipped shut.
He stood watching her, frightened not by her warning, not for himself, but for her.
She mumbled, “Susan.”
“What about her?”
“Just remembered. Didn’t tell you about Susan. Strange stuff. Supposed to call her.”
“You can call her in the morning.”
“What sort of friend am I?” she muttered.
“She’ll understand. Just rest now. Just rest.”
In seconds, Martie appeared to be asleep, lips parted, breathing through her mouth. The pinched lines of anxiety were gone from the corners of her eyes.
Twenty minutes later, Dusty was sitting up in bed, combing back through the tangled story that Martie had told him, trying to pull the burs out and smooth it into a fully intelligible narrative, when the telephone rang. In the interest of uninterrupted sleep, they kept the ringer switched off in the bedroom, and what he heard now was the phone in Martie’s office down the hall; the answering machine picked up after the second ring.
He assumed Susan was calling, though it might have been Skeet or one of the staff at New Life. Ordinarily, he would have gone to Martie’s office to monitor the incoming message, but he didn’t want her to wake up while he was out of the room and discover that he had broken his promise to remain with her. Skeet was safe in good hands, and whatever “strange stuff” was going on with Susan, it couldn’t be any stranger or more important than what had transpired right here this evening. It could wait until morning.
Dusty turned his attention once more to what Martie had told him of her day. As he worried at each bizarre event and quirky detail, he was overcome by the peculiar conviction that what had happened to his wife was somehow associated with what happened to his brother. He sensed parallel oddities in both events, though the precise nature of the connections eluded him. Undeniably, this was the strangest day of his life, and instinct told him that Skeet and Martie had not unraveled simultaneously by mere coincidence.
In one corner of the room, Valet was curled on his bed, a large skeepskin-covered pillow, but he remained awake. He lay with his chin propped on one paw, intently watching his mistress sleeping in the golden lamplight.
Because Martie had never failed to keep a commitment and thus had banked a lot of moral capital, Susan didn’t feel aggrieved when the promised phone call failed to come in by eleven o’clock; however, she was uneasy. She placed her own call, got an answering machine, and grew worried.
No doubt Martie had been rocked and mystified by Susan’s claim of a phantom rapist to whom locked doors were no impediment. She’d asked to be given some time to think. But Martie wasn’t prone either to waffle or to be unnecessarily diplomatic. By now she would have arrived at some considered advice—or would have called to say she needed more convincing if she were to believe this tall, tall story.
“It’s me,” Susan told the answering machine. “What’s wrong? You okay? You think I’m nuts? It’s all right if you do. Call me.”
She waited a few seconds, then hung up.
Most likely, Martie would not have suggested a course of action with more potential for success than the camcorder sting, so Susan went forward with her preparations.
She placed a half-full glass of wine on the nightstand, not to be drunk, but as a prop.
She settled into bed with a book, sitting up against a pile of pillows. She was too nervous to read.
For a while she watched an old movie on TV, Dark Passage, but she couldn’t concentrate on the story. Her mind wandered down darker and more frightening alleyways than any that Bogart and Bacall had ever traveled.
Although Susan was preternaturally alert, she recalled other nights when apparent insomnia had abruptly given way to unnaturally deep sleep—and to victimization. If she was secretly being drugged, she couldn’t predict when the chemicals might kick in, and she did not want to wake up to discover that she had been violated and that she had failed to activate the camcorder.
At midnight, she went to the Biedermeier pedestal, slipped one finger into the ivy under the little ming tree, started the videotape rolling, and returned to bed. If she was still awake at one o’clock, she would rewind the cassette and start recording from the beginning, and again at two and three o’clock, so in the event that she slept, there would be less of a chance that the tape would run out before the creep entered the room.
She switched off the television, the better to support the fell-asleep-while-reading scenario, but also because it might mask sounds arising elsewhere in the apartment.
After less than a minute of silence, as she was about to pick up the book, the telephone rang. Assuming that Martie was calling, Susan answered. “Hello?”
“This is Ben Marco.”
As though Ben Marco were a magic mason whose very voice could conjure stone and mortar, sudden walls of granite seemed to enclose Susan’s heart, confining it, pressing upon auricles and ventricles. Even as her heart rapped frantically against its prison, her mind opened as if it were a house from which the roof had been torn away by a cyclone; suddenly as wispy as dust and cobwebs, her thoughts dispersed on an updraft, and into her head, from the black infinity above, sifted a whispering darkness, an irresistible Presence that glided, as invisible and cold as a haunting spirit, first through the attic of her mind and then down, down into deeper regions.
“I’m listening,” Susan told Ben Marco.
At once her racing heart began to settle, and in her blood, the insectile twitching of fear subsided.
And now the rules.
He said, “The winter storm—”
“The storm is you,” she replied.
“—hid in the bamboo grove—”
“The grove is me.”
“—and quieted away.”
“In the quiet, I will learn what is wanted,” Susan said.
The winter storm hid in the bamboo grove and quieted away.
Beautiful, really.
With the litany of the rules completed, Susan Jagger was awash in a sea of quiet: the apartment profoundly silent around her, all hushed within her, as soundless as the lifeless void must have been only an instant before Creation, when God had not yet said, Let there be light.
When the winter storm spoke again, his soft deep voice seemed not to come from the telephone but from within Susan. “Tell me where you are.”
“In bed.”
“I believe you’re alone. Tell me if I’m correct.”
“You are.”
“Let me in.”
“Yes.”
“Quickly.”
Susan put down the phone, got out of bed, and hurried through the dark apartment.
In spite of her quickened pace, her heartbeat continued to grow slower: strong, steady, calm.
In the kitchen, the only light was green and pale, issuing from the numerals on the digital clocks in the microwave and in the oven. The inky shadows didn’t hinder her. For too many months, this small apartment had been her world; and she was as intimately familiar with it as if she’d been raised here b
lind since birth.
A chair was wedged firmly under the doorknob. She removed it and slid it aside, and the wooden legs squeaked faintly on the tile floor.
The slide bolt at the end of the brass security chain rasped out of the slot in the latch plate. When she let go, the links rattled against the door casing.
She disengaged the first dead bolt. The second.
She opened the door.
A storm he was, and wintry, too, waiting on the landing at the head of the stairs, quiet now but filled with the rage of hurricanes, a fury usually well hidden from the world but always churning in him, revealed in his most private moments, and as he crossed the threshold into the kitchen, forcing her backward, shoving the door shut behind him, he clamped one strong hand around her slender throat.
30
The left and right common carotid arteries, providing the principal blood supply to the neck and head, arise directly from the aorta, which itself arises from the upper surface of the left ventricle. Having so recently departed the heart, the blood surging through both vessels is particularly rich in oxygen and is driven with force.
Hand cupped around the front of Susan’s throat, fingers spread along the left side of her neck, the pad of his thumb pressed just under her jawbone and over her right carotid, Dr. Mark Ahriman held her thus for perhaps a minute, enjoying the strong, steady throb of her pulse. She was so wonderfully full of life.
If he’d wanted to strangle her to death, he could have done so without fear of resistance. In this altered state of consciousness, she would stand, docile and unprotesting, while he choked the life out of her. She would ease to her knees when she could no longer stand, and then fold quietly into a graceful mound on the floor as her heart stuttered to a stop, apologizing with her eyes for being unable to die on her feet and, therefore, requiring him to kneel with her as he finished the job.