by Dean Koontz
the pustulant Lampton family themselves—the insufferable Derek, his slut of a wife, and their deranged son—and use them as puppets. Unfortunately, they were too aware of him and were sure to regard him with suspicion; he stood little or no chance of getting close enough to them to administer the requisite drugs and to conduct three long programming sessions.
Nevertheless, he was ebullient. Triumph was within reach.
Black cherry soda. Dead fool out in Malibu. Learn to love yourself.
Perfection. The doctor raised a toast to his poetic genius.
73
On Cape Cod or Martha’s Vineyard, this house would have looked like the place that was central to the American Dream, the place you crossed over the river and went through the woods to reach on a cool Thanksgiving dawn, the place where Santa Claus seemed to be real even to adults on a snowy Christmas morning, the quintessential house for the idealized grandmother. Although a perfect house—and indeed a faultless grandmother—had never existed in real life, this nation of passionate sentimentalists believed this was the way grandmothers’ houses universally ought to be. Slate roof with a widow’s walk. Silvered cedar-shingle siding. Window frames and shutters glossy with white marine-finish paint. A deep porch with white wicker rocking chairs and a bench swing, and a manicured yard with foot-high white picket fences surrounding each lush flower bed. On Cape Cod or Martha’s Vineyard, in a certain moment of the past, you might have found Norman Rockwell sitting at an easel in the front yard, painting two adorable children as they chased a goose with a red ribbon tied in a half-finished bow around its neck, while a happy dog frolicked in the background.
Here in Malibu, even in the middle of a coastal winter, on a low bluff above the Pacific, with steps leading down to the beach, with palm trees aplenty, the house looked misplaced. Beautiful, graceful, well designed, and well constructed, but misplaced nonetheless. If anyone’s grand-mother lived herein, she would have had electric-blue fingernails, bleached-blond hair, lips sensuously recon-toured with injections of collagen, and surgically enlarged breasts. The house was a shining fiction, harboring darker truths within, and the sight of it on this visit—only the fifth Dusty had paid since leaving almost twelve years ago, at the age of eighteen—affected him as it always had before, sending a chill through his heart rather than up his spine.
The house, of course, was not to blame. It was only a house.
Nevertheless, after he and Martie parked in the driveway, as they were ascending the front-porch steps, he said, “The Tower of Cirith Ungol.”
He dared not think about their little house in Corona Del Mar. If it was really burned to the ground, as Ahriman had claimed, Dusty wasn’t ready to deal with the emotional impact. A house is just a house, sure, and property is replaceable, but if you have lived well and loved in a house, if you have made good memories there, then you can’t help but grieve over the loss of it.
He dared not think, either, about Skeet and Fig. If Ahriman was telling the truth, if he had killed them, both this world and Dusty’s heart were darker places than they had been yesterday, and they were certain to remain darker for the rest of his life. The possible loss of his troubled but much-loved brother had left him half-numb, as he might have expected, but he was a little surprised at how profoundly disturbed he was, as well, by the thought of Fig’s death; the quietly diligent painter had been peculiar indeed, but also kind and good-natured, and the hole he left in Dusty’s life was the size and the shape of an odd but meaningful friendship.
His mother, Claudette, answered the bell, and as always Dusty was startled and disarmed by her beauty. At fifty-two, she could pass for thirty-five; and at thirty-five she’d had the power to rivet everyone in a crowded room merely by entering, a power that she no doubt would still have at eighty-five. His father, her second of four husbands, once said, “Since birth, Claudette has looked good enough to eat. Every day the world looks on her, and its mouth waters.” This was so correct and so succinct that it was probably something Trevor, his father, had read somewhere rather than anything he had thought himself, and though it seemed at first crude, it was not, and it was true. Trevor hadn’t been commenting on her sexuality. He had meant beauty as a thing apart from sexual desire, beauty as an ideal, beauty so striking that it spoke to the soul. Women and men, babies and centenarians alike, were drawn to Claudette, wanted to be near her, and deep in their eyes when they gazed at her was something like pure hope and something like rapture, but different and mysterious. The love so many brought to her was love unearned—and unreciprocated. Her eyes were similar to Dusty’s, gray-blue, but with less blue than his; and in them he had never seen what any son longs to see in his mother’s eyes, nor had he ever seen a reason to believe that she wanted or would accept the love that—more as a boy than now, but still now—he would have lavished on her.
“Sherwood,” she said, offering neither a kiss nor a welcoming hand, “do all young people come unannounced these days?”
“Mother, you know my name’s not Sherwood—”
“Sherwood Penn Rhodes. It’s on your birth certificate.”
“You know perfectly well that I had it legally changed—”
“Yes, when you were eighteen, rebellious, and even more foolish than you are now,” she said.
“Dusty is what all my friends called me since I was a kid.”
“Your friends were always the class losers, Sherwood. You’ve always associated with the wrong type, so routinely it almost seems willful. Dustin Rhodes. What were you thinking? How could we keep a straight face, introducing you to cultured people as Dusty Rhodes?”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking.”
“Hello, Claudette,” Martie said, having been ignored thus far.
“Dear,” Claudette said, “please use your good influence with the boy and insist he revert to a grown-up name.”
Martie smiled. “I like Dusty—the name and the boy.”
“Martine,” Claudette said. “That’s a real person’s name, dear.”
“I like people to call me Martie.”
“I know, yes. How unfortunate. You’re not setting a very good example for Sherwood.”
“Dustin,” Dusty insisted.
“Not in my house,” Claudette demurred.
Always, upon arrival here, no matter how much time had passed since his previous visit, Dusty was greeted in this distant fashion, not routinely with a debate about his name, sometimes with lengthy comments on his blue-collar dress or his unstylish haircut, or with probing queries about whether he had yet pursued “real” work or was still painting houses. Once, she kept him on the porch, discussing the political crisis in China, for at least five minutes, though it had seemed like an hour. She always eventually invited him inside, but he was never sure that she would let him cross the threshold.
Skeet had once been enormously excited when he’d seen a movie about angels, with Nicholas Cage starring as one of the winged. The premise of the film was that guardian angels aren’t permitted to know romantic love or other strong feelings; they must remain strictly intellectual beings in order to serve humanity without becoming too emotionally involved. To Skeet, this explained their mother, whose beauty even the angels might envy, but who could be cooler than a pitcher of unsweetened lemonade in midsummer.
Finally, having extracted whatever psychic toll she sought from these delays, Claudette stepped back, inviting them in without word or gesture. “One son shows up with a…guest at almost midnight, the other with a wife, and neither calls first. I know both took classes in manners and deportment, but apparently the money was wasted.”
Dusty assumed that the other son was Junior, who was fifteen and lived here, but when he and Martie stepped past Claudette, Skeet bounded down the stairs to greet them. He appeared to be paler than when they had last seen him, thinner as well, with darker circles under his eyes, but he was alive.
When Dusty hugged him, Skeet said, “Ouch, ouch, ouch,” and then said it again when he hu
gged Martie.
Astonished, Dusty said, “We thought you were—”
“We were told,” Martie said, “that you were—”
Before either of them could finish the thought, Skeet hiked up his pullover and his undershirt, eliciting a wince of distaste from his mother, and displayed his bare torso. “Bullet wounds!” he announced with amazement and a curious pride.
Four wicked bruises with ugly dark centers and overlapping aureoles marked his wasted chest and stomach.
Relieved to see Skeet alive, joyous, but puzzled, Dusty said, “Bullet wounds?”
“Well,” Skeet amended, “they would have been bullet wounds if me and Fig—”
“Fig and I,” his mother corrected.
“Yeah, if Fig and I hadn’t been wearing Kevlar vests.”
Dusty felt the need to sit down. Martie was shaky, too. But they had come here with a sense of urgency, and it might be a mortal mistake to lose it now. “What were you doing in Kevlar vests?”
“Good thing you didn’t want them for New Mexico,” said Skeet. “Me and Fig—” A quick, guilty glance at his mother. “Fig and I figured we might as well make ourselves useful, so we decided to tail Dr. Ahriman.”
“You what?”
“We followed him in Fig’s truck—”
“Which I made them park in the garage,” said Claudette. “I do not wish that vehicle to be seen in my driveway.”
“It’s a cool truck,” Skeet said. “Anyway, we put on vests just to be safe, and we followed him, and somehow he turned the tables on us. We thought we lost him, and we were out on the beach, trying to make contact with one of the mother ships, and he just walked up and shot us both four times.”
“Good God,” Martie said.
Dusty was trembling, overcome by more emotions then he could name or sort out. Nevertheless, he noticed that Skeet’s eyes were brighter and clearer than they had been since that celebratory day, over fifteen years ago, when the two of them had packaged a box of dog droppings and mailed it off to Holden Caulfield, the elder, after Claudette had thrown him out in favor of Derek.
“He was wearing a ski mask, so we couldn’t positively identify him to the police. We didn’t even go to the police. Didn’t seem like we’d get anywhere with them. But we knew it was him, all right. He didn’t fool us.” Skeet was beaming, as if they had pulled one over on the psychiatrist. “He shoots Fig twice, then me four times, and it’s like being slammed in the gut with a hammer, knocks all the breath out of me, and I’m almost unconscious, too, and I want to suck air, but I don’t because even with the wind howling, he might hear me and know I’m not really dead. Fig’s playing dead, too. So then before he turns back to Fig and shoots him two more times, the guy says to me, ‘Your mother’s a whore, and your father’s a fraud, and your stepfather—he’s got shit for brains.’”
Icily, Claudette said, “I’ve never even met this purveyor of pop-psych drivel.”
“Then both me and Fig, Fig and I, we knew Ahriman went away in a hurry, but we laid there, ’cause we were scared. And for a while we couldn’t move. Like we were stunned. You know? And then when we could move, we came here to find out why he thinks Mother’s a whore.”
“Have you been to a hospital?” Martie worried.
“Nah, I’m fine,” Skeet said, finally lowering his sweater.
“You could have a cracked rib, internal injuries.”
“I’ve made the same argument,” Claudette said, “to no avail. You know what Holden’s like, Sherwood. He’s always had more enthusiasm than common sense.”
“It’s still a good idea to go to a hospital, be examined while the injuries are visible,” Dusty advised Skeet. “That’s admissible evidence if we’re ever able to get this shithead into court.”
“Bastard,” Claudette admonished, “or sonofabitch. Either is adequate, Sherwood. Pointless vulgarities don’t impress me. If you think shithead will shock me, better think again. But in this house we’ve never thought William Burroughs is literature, and we’re not going to start thinking so now.”
“I love your mother,” Martie told Dusty.
Claudette’s eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly.
“How was New Mexico?” Skeet asked.
“A land of enchantment,” Dusty said.
At the end of the hall, the swinging door to the kitchen swung, and through it came Derek Lampton. He approached with his shoulders back, spine ramrod-straight, chest out, and although his bearing was military, he nevertheless seemed to slink toward them.
Skeet and Dusty had secretly called him Lizard virtually from the day he arrived, but Lampton was more accurately a mink of a man, compact and sleek and sinuous, hair as thick and shiny as fur, with the quick, black, watchful eyes of something that would raid a chicken coop the moment the farmer’s back was turned. His hands, neither of which he offered to Dusty or Martie, featured slender fingers with wider than normal webbing and with slightly pointy nails, like clever paws. The mink is a member of the weasel family.
“Has someone died and are we having a reading of the will?” Lampton asked, which was his idea of humor and the closest thing to a greeting he would ever offer.
He looked Martie up and down, his attention lingering on the swell of her breasts against her sweater, as he always forthrightly examined attractive women. When at last he met her eyes, he bared his small, sharp, white-white teeth. This passed for his smile—and perhaps even for what he believed to be a seductive smile.
“Sherwood and Martine actually were in New Mexico,” Claudette told her husband.
“Really?” Lampton said, raising his eyebrows.
“I told you,” Skeet said.
“That’s true,” Lampton confirmed, addressing Dusty rather than Skeet. “He told us, but with such flamboyant detail, we assumed that it was less reality than just one of his dissociative fantasies.”
“I don’t have dissociative fantasies,” Skeet objected, managing to put some iron in his voice, although he couldn’t meet Lampton’s eyes—and instead stared at the floor when he raised his objection.
“Now, Holden, don’t be defensive,” Lampton soothed. “I’m not judging you when I mention your dissociative fantasies, any more than I would be judging Dusty if I were to mention his pathological aversion to authority.”
“I don’t have a pathological aversion to authority,” Dusty said, angry with himself for feeling the need to respond, striving to keep his voice calm, even friendly. “I have a legitimate aversion to the notion that a bunch of elitists should tell everyone else what to do and what to think. I have an aversion to self-appointed experts.”
“Sherwood,” said Claudette, “you don’t advance your argument whatsoever when you use unintentional oxymorons like self-appointed experts.”
With a remarkably straight face and measured tone, Martie said, “Actually, Claudette, it wasn’t an oxymoron. It was a metonymy in which he was substituting self-appointed for the more vulgar if more accurate arrogant asshole experts.”
If he’d ever had the slightest doubt that he would love Martie forever, Dusty knew now that they would be bonded through eternity.
As if she had not heard her daughter-in-law, Claudette said to Skeet, “Derek is absolutely correct, Holden, as to both issues. He wasn’t judging you. He’s not that kind of person. And you do, of course, have dissociative fantasies. Until you acknowledge your condition, you’re never going to heal.”
Getting across the threshold, although difficult, was always less of a challenge than moving beyond the foyer.
“Holden has stopped taking his medications,” Derek Lampton told Dusty, while his gaze slid down and lingered again on the shape of Martie’s breasts.
“You had me on seven prescriptions,” Skeet said. “By the time I took all of them in the morning, I didn’t have room for breakfast.”
“You will never be able to realize your potential,” Claudette admonished, “until you acknowledge your condition and address it.”
�
�I think he should have stopped taking his medications a long time ago,” Dusty said.
Looking up from Martie’s breasts, Lampton said, “Holden’s recovery isn’t facilitated when he’s confused by uneducated advice.”
“His father facilitated his recovery until he was nine, and you’ve facilitated it since.” Dusty forced a smile and a light tone that he knew fooled no one. “And so far all I’ve seen is a lot of facilitating and no recovery.”
Brightening, Skeet said, “Mother, did you know my father’s name isn’t really Holden Caulfield? It was Sam Farner before he had it legally changed.”
Claudette’s eyes pinched. “You’re fantasizing again, Holden.”
“No, it’s true. I’ve got the proof at home. Maybe that’s what Ahriman meant, after he shot me, when he called him a fraud.”
Claudette pointed a finger at Dusty. “You encourage him to go off his medications, and this is where it leads.” To Skeet, she said, “This Ahriman person called me a whore. Am I to assume, Holden, you think that word fits me as well as you think fraud fits your father?”
Dusty’s head was filled with that ominous buzzing that usually didn’t afflict him until he had been in this house for at least half an hour. Desperate to get back to the urgent issue, he said, “Derek, why would Mark Ahriman harbor such animosity toward you?”
“Because I’ve exposed him for what he is.”
“And what is he?”
“A charlatan.”
“And when did you expose him?”
“Every chance I get,” Lampton said, his mink eyes gleaming with dark glee.
Moving to her husband’s side, slipping an arm around his waist, giving him a playful hug, Claudette said, “When foolish men like this Mark Ahriman get stung by my Derek’s wit, they don’t forget it.”
“How?” Martie pressed. “How did you expose him?”
“Analytical essays in two of the better journals,” Lampton said, “putting his empty theories and his jejune prose under a spotlight.”
“Why?”
“I was appalled by how many psychologists were beginning to take him seriously. The man’s not an intellectual. He’s the worst kind of poseur.”
“And that’s it?” Martie asked. “A couple of essays?”
Lampton’s pointy teeth flashed. The corners of his eyes crinkled. Although this was an expression of mirth, he looked as though he had just spotted a mouse that he intended to snare and rip to bits. “Oh, lawdy, Miss Claudy, they don’t understand what it means to be on the receiving end of a Lampton blitz, do they?”
“I think I do,” Skeet said, but neither his mother nor his stepfather appeared to hear him.
As if Lampton had been witty or naughty, or both, Claudette let out a brief girlish giggle, as full of genuine humor as the rattle of a diamondback.
“Oh, lawdy, Miss Claudy,” Lampton repeated, doing a jive wiggle and snapping his fingers, as if he thought he was making with the latest of street vernacular. “Essays in two journals. Some quite clever guerrilla warfare. And a parody of his style for ‘Bookend,’ the last page in The New York Times Book Review—”
“Wickedly funny,” Claudette assured them.
“—plus I reviewed his latest for a major syndicate, and the review ended up in seventy-eight newspapers nationwide. I have all the clippings. Can you believe that dreadful book has been on the Times list for seventy-eight weeks?”
“You mean Learn to Love Yourself?” Martie asked.
“Pop-psych slush,” Lampton declared. “It’s probably done more damage to the American psyche than any book published in a decade.”
“Seventy-eight weeks,” Dusty said. “Is that a long time to be on the list?”
“For a book in this category, it’s forever,” said Lampton
“How long was your last book on the list?”
Suddenly taking the high road, Lampton said, “I really don’t count. Popular success isn’t the issue. The quality of the work is the issue, how much impact it has on society, how many people it helps.”
“Seems to me it was twelve or fourteen weeks,” Dusty said.
“Oh, no, it was more than that,” Lampton said.
“Fifteen, then.”
Squirming with the need to have his accomplishment properly reported, but now in a trap of his own devising, Lampton looked at Claudette for help, and she said, “Twenty-two weeks it was on the list. Derek never cares about these things, but I do. I’m proud of him. Twenty-two weeks is a very good run, very good indeed for a work of substance.”
“Well, there you have the problem, of course,” Lampton lamented. “Pop-psych slush will always do better than solid work. It might not help anyone worth a damn, but it’s easy to read.”
“And the American public,” Claudette said, “is as lazy and as poorly educated as it is in need of sound psychological counseling.”
Looking at Martie, Dusty said, “We’re talking about Derek’s Dare to Be Your Own Best Friend.”
“I couldn’t get through it,” Skeet said.
“You’re certainly bright enough to,” Claudette told him. “But when you don’t take your medication, your learning disability roars right back, and you can’t read your name. ‘Medicate to educate.’”
Glancing toward the living room, Dusty wondered what percentage of visitors ever made it farther than the foyer.
Skeet found a little more courage. “I don’t have any trouble reading my fantasy novels, with or without medication.”
“Your fantasy novels,” said Lampton, “are part of the problem, Holden, not part of the cure.”
“What about the guerrilla warfare?” Dusty asked.
Everyone regarded him with puzzlement.