One Door Away From Heaven

by Dean Koontz

  Perhaps in the Corvette waits something worse than what he found in the Explorer, in which case he’ll keep his distance, too. Instead, seeking to learn what he can by sharing the dog’s perceptions, Curtis opens himself more completely to their bond, and looks at the ’Vette through her eyes.

  At first his sister-become seems to see nothing more than Curtis sees—but then for just a second, no longer, the moonlit car shimmers like a mirage. Dream car in more ways than one, internal-combustion illusion, it is merely the suggestion of a 1970 Corvette, masking a fearsome reality. The dog blinks, blinks, but the sports car remains apparently solid, so she turns her head away from it, and out of the corner of her eye, for two seconds or three, she glimpses what Curtis can’t perceive from the corner of his: a transport not of this earth, sleeker even than the sharklike Corvette, like a beast born to stalk sharks with a vengeance. So mighty-looking is this vehicle that you can’t think of it in the language of designers or engineers, but must resort to the vocabulary of military architecture, because in spite of its sleekness, it seems to be a fortress on wheels: all compact buttresses, ramparts, terrepleins, scarps, counterscarps, bastions made aerodynamic, condensed and adapted to rolling stock.

  With this evidence before him, no doubt can linger any longer. The worse scalawags have arrived.

  His nerves feel as taut as high-tuned violin strings, and his dark imagination plucks them with dire possibilities.

  Death is here now, as always it is here, but it is not always as engaged and attentive as it is at this moment, waiting for a third course in its supper of bones.

  The hunters must suspect that Curtis is in the motor home. Kind fate and his clever sister-become brought him out of the Fleetwood and around the building to this moonlit killing ground without being detected. He won’t remain undiscovered for long: perhaps two minutes, maybe three if his luck holds.

  The instant that he shows himself, he will be known.

  In his place, therefore, he sends the dog to Polly.

  Fearful but obedient, she trots away, retracing the route along which she led him.

  Curtis has no illusions that he’ll survive this encounter. The enemy is too near, too powerful, too remorseless to be defeated by one as small and defenseless as this motherless boy.

  He harbors some hope, however, that he might be able to warn off Cass and Polly, that they might escape with the dog rather than be slaughtered with him.

  Old Yeller disappears around the corner of the building. Beloved familiar, companion spirit, she walks always with an awareness of her Maker—and she will need Him now as never before.

  Chapter 46

  THE PENITENTIARY WALLS crumbled away from her, but she restacked the stones around herself, and when the bars fell out of the windows, she repaired them with a welder’s torch and fresh mortar.

  From this dream of a self-made prison—not a nightmare, scary only because she labored so cheerfully to rebuild her cell—Micky woke, instantly aware that something was wrong.

  Life had taught her to recognize danger at a distance. Now even in sleep, she’d sensed a threat in the waking world that called her back from that faraway, comfortable incarceration.

  On the living-room sofa, lying on her side, eyes closed, head raised slightly upon a throw pillow, chin tucked down and resting against her clasped hands, she remained perfectly still, breathing softly like a sleeper, listening. Listening.

  The house lay enfolded by a shroud of quiet as deep as that in a mortuary after viewing hours, the mourners gone.

  Deaf to the threat, she was nonetheless able to sense it, feel it, as she could feel the change in atmospheric pressure when the air thickened just before a thunderstorm flashed and cracked and broke.

  Micky had settled on the sofa to read a magazine while waiting for Leilani. The evening waned, and Geneva eventually retreated to her bedroom, leaving instructions to be awakened at once if the girl paid a visit. With Aunt Gen gone, with the contents of the magazine exhausted, Micky stretched out merely to rest her eyes, not to nap. The cumulative weight of the difficult day, the heat, the humidity, and a growing despair had pressed her down into that dream prison.

  Instinctively, she hadn’t opened her eyes when she woke. Now she kept them closed, operating on the theory—so dear to every child and sometimes resurgent in adulthood—that the boogeyman could not hurt her until she looked him in the eye and acknowledged his existence.

  Frequently, in prison, she had learned that a pretense of sleep, of stupidity, of naiveté, of cataleptic indifference, a pretense of deafness to an obscene invitation and of blindness to an insult, were all wiser responses than confrontation. Childhood can be remarkably similar to prison; the theory of the boogeyman’s eye offers guidance to child and inmate alike.

  Someone moved nearby. The soft scuff of shoes on carpet and the creak of floorboards argued against the possibility that the intruder was either a figment of her imagination or a trailer-park ghost.

  The footsteps approached. Stopped.

  She sensed a looming presence. Someone stood over her, watching as she pretended to sleep.

  Not Geneva. Even in one of her movie moments, she wouldn’t be furtive or unnervingly strange like this. Gen remembered being Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey, Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, Goldie Hawn in Foul Play, but she shared no darker experiences than those of Mildred Pierce. Her secondhand lives were romantic, even if sometimes tragic, and you didn’t have to worry that she would ever be in the grip of a Bette Davis psychosis per Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? or Glenn Close per Fatal Attraction.

  Micky’s sense of smell seemed heightened by her meditative stillness and her defensive blindness. She detected the faint astringent scent of strange soap. A crisp after-shave.

  He stirred, betrayed once more by the protesting floorboards. Even over the thump of her bass-drum heart, Micky could tell that he was moving away from her.

  Through a fringe of eyelashes, she sought him, saw him. He passed the low buffet divider that separated the living room from the kitchen.

  One small lamp, the three-way bulb set at the lowest wattage, didn’t reject the shadows in the living room, but romanced them, and in the kitchen, only the small light under the range hood staved off the full embrace of darkness.

  Even seen from behind, and then glimpsed only briefly in profile as he turned in the kitchen gloom to approach the back door, he could be mistaken for no one else. Uninvited, Preston Maddoc had paid a visit.

  Micky had left the back door ajar for Leilani if she came. Now Maddoc left it standing wide open when he departed.

  Warily she got off the sofa and approached the kitchen. She half expected to find him waiting beyond the threshold, facing inside, amused to have caught her faking sleep.

  He wasn’t there.

  She dared to step outside. No one lurked in the backyard. Maddoc had gone home.

  Retreating into the kitchen, she shut out the night. Engaged the dead-bolt lock.

  Fear drained away, leaving a feeling of violation. Before she could work up a proper sense of outrage, however, she thought of Geneva, and fear flooded back.

  She had no idea how long Maddoc was in the house. He might have gone elsewhere before entering the living room to watch her sleep.

  Micky hurried out of the kitchen, into the short hall. As she passed her own room, she noticed light bleeding under the door. She was certain that she hadn’t left a lamp on.

  End of the hall. Last door. Standing ajar.

  The luminous numerals and the lighted tuning bands on the clock radio provided the only relief from a clutching darkness that seemed jagged with menace. When Micky reached the bed, this ghostly radiance revealed only the one thing that she wanted to see: Aunt Gen’s face against a pillow, eyes shut, peaceful in sleep.

  Micky held one trembling hand before Geneva’s face and felt the gentle breath against her palm.

  A knot pulled loose in her breast, freeing her bound breath.

  In the ha
ll once more, she soundlessly drew Geneva’s door shut and went directly to her own room.

  Scattered across the bedspread were her purse and everything it had contained. Her wallet had been emptied, though no money had been stolen; the currency lay discarded with her social-security card, her driver’s license, lipstick, compact, comb, car keys….

  The closet was open. The dresser had been searched, as well, and the contents of each drawer had been left in disarray.

  On the floor lay her prison-discharge papers. She’d left them in the nightstand, under the Bible that Aunt Gen had provided.

  Regardless of the initial purpose of Maddoc’s visit, he’d taken brazen advantage of the situation when he found the kitchen door ajar and Micky asleep on the sofa. From what she’d learned at the library, she knew that he was a calculating man rather than a reckless one, so she attributed his shameless prowling not to impetuosity, but to arrogance.

  Evidently he knew more about her relationship with Leilani than she’d thought he did, perhaps more than Leilani realized, too. The contrived welcome with the plate of cookies either had not fooled him or had sharpened his suspicion.

  Now he’d learned enough about Micky’s recent past and about her weakness to make her uneasy.

  She wondered what he might have done if she’d awakened and found him in her room.

  The Bible lay open on the nightstand, in the lamplight. Maddoc had used the felt-tip pen from her purse to circle a passage. Joel, chapter 1, verse 5: Awake, ye drunkards, and weep.

  She was unnerved that he knew the Bible well enough to recall such an apt but obscure passage. This erudition suggested that he might be an adversary even more clever and resourceful than she’d expected. Also, clearly, she impressed him as being such a negligible threat that he believed he could mock her with impunity.

  Flushed with humiliation, Micky went to the dresser, confirming that Maddoc had turned back the concealing yellow sweater and had found the two bottles of lemon-flavored vodka.

  She removed the bottles from the drawer. One was full, the seal unbroken. The sight of it gave her a sense of power, of control; to an impoverished and improvident spirit, an untapped bottle seemed to be a bottomless fortune, but it was really fortune’s ruin. After her binge the previous night, little remained in the second container.

  In the kitchen, Micky switched on the light above the sink and emptied both bottles into the drain. The fumes—not the lemony aroma, but the quasi-aphrodisiacal scent of alcohol—enflamed more than one appetite: for drink, for oblivion, for self-destruction.

  After she dropped the two empties in the trash can, her hands shook uncontrollably. They were damp, too, with vodka.

  She breathed the evaporating spirits rising from her skin, and then pressed her cool hands to her burning face.

  Into her mind came an image of the brandy that Aunt Gen kept in a kitchen cupboard. Following the image came the taste, as real as if she’d taken a sip from a full snifter.

  “No.”

  She understood too well that the brandy wasn’t what she wanted, nor the vodka; what she really sought was an excuse to fail Leilani, a reason to turn inward, to retreat beyond the familiar drawbridge, up to the ramparts, behind the battlements of her emotional fortress, where her damaged heart wouldn’t be at risk of further wounds, where she could live once more and forever in the comparatively comfortable suffering of isolation. Brandy would give her that excuse and spare her the pain of caring.

  When she turned away from the cupboard where the brandy waited, leaving the door unopened, she went to the refrigerator, hoping to satisfy her thirst with a Coca-Cola. But this was less a thirst than a hunger, a ravenous clawing in the gut, so she plucked a cookie from the ceramic bear whose head was a lid and whose plump body was a jar. On further consideration, she carried the bear and all its contents to the table.

  Sitting down to Coke and cookies, feeling like an eight-year-old girl, confused and afraid as she had so often been back then, seeking solace from the sugar demon, the first unsettling thing she noticed was the plate beside the candleholders. The gift plate that she had piled with cookies and taken next door earlier in the evening. Maddoc had returned it empty, washed.

  Arrogance again. If Micky hadn’t awakened in time to see him leave, she might have guessed who had searched her dresser drawers and turned out the contents of her purse, but she couldn’t have been certain that her guess was correct. By leaving the plate, Maddoc had made it clear that he wanted her to know who the intruder had been. This was a challenge and an act of intimidation.

  More disturbing than the plate returned was the penguin taken. The two-inch figurine, from the collection of a dead woman, had been standing on the kitchen table, among the small colored glasses that held half-melted candles. Maddoc must have seen it when he put down the plate.

  Whatever suspicions he’d harbored about Leilani’s relationships with Micky and with Aunt Gen had been confirmed and had surely grown darker when he’d discovered the penguin.

  The dropping sensation in the stomach, the tightening in the chest, the lightheadedness familiar from the sudden speedy plunge of a roller coaster afflicted her now, as she sat dead still on the kitchen chair.

  Chapter 47

  ALTHOUGH POLLY wasn’t a Pollyanna, she liked most people she met, made friends easily, and seldom made enemies, but when the service-station attendant came up to her, grinning like a jack-in-the-box jester with a ticklish spring up its butt, saying, “Hi, my name’s Earl Bockman and my wife’s Maureen, we own this place, been here twenty years,” she made an immediate judgment that he wasn’t going to be one of the people she liked.

  Tall, pleasant in appearance, his breath smelling of spearmint, looking freshly scrubbed and shaved, in neatly laundered clothes, he possessed many of the fundamentals necessary to make a good first impression, and though a tragic Pagliacci-smiling-through-heartbreak expression might have provided him a certain additional melancholy appeal, this toothy display was classic mad-clown grin from molar to molar.

  “I’m originally from Wyoming,” Earl said, “but Maureen is from around these parts, and now I’ve been here so long, it seems like I’m a native, too. Every last man, woman, and child in the county knows Earl and Maureen Bockman.” He seemed to feel that he had to convince them of his bona fides before they would trust the purity of the fuel that he was selling. “Just say the names Earl and Maureen, and anyone will tell you that’s the folks who own the little pump-and-grocery out at the federal-highway crossroads. And they’ll probably tell you Maureen is a peach, too, because she’s just as sweet as they come, and what I’ll tell you is I’m the luckiest man ever stood before an altar and took the vows, and never regretted it one minute since.”

  He babbled half this astonishing speech through his toothpaste-advertisement smile, wrapping the grin in and around the rest of it when punctuation gave him pause, and Polly was ready to bet ten thousand dollars against a pack of Hostess Cup Cakes that poor Maureen lay dead inside the store, perhaps strangled by Earl’s bare hands, perhaps bludgeoned with an economy-size can of pork and beans, perhaps staked through the heart with a fossilized Slim Jim sausage that had hung neglected on a snack rack for fifteen years.

  The insistent smile and the inappropriate deluge of personal chatter was enough to win Earl a place in Polly’s lethim-vote-but-don’t-let-him-run-for-President file, but there was also the matter of his wristwatch. The face of this unusual timepiece was black and blank: no hour numbers, no minute checks, no hands. It might have been one of those inconvenient digital chronometers that gave you the time in a luminous readout only when you pushed a button on the casing; but she suspected that it wasn’t a watch at all. From the moment that he arrived at the service island, Earl contrived to turn his body and his right arm to direct the numberless black face toward Cass, then toward Polly, and then toward Cass again, back and forth, while further contriving to glance repeatedly and furtively at the gadget in the inadequate light of the red and amb
er Christmas bulbs. If he’d ever taken a home-correspondence course in successful furtive behavior, he had wasted his money. Polly first thought that the thing on his wrist must be a camera, that he must be some brand of pervert who secretly took pictures of women for whatever sick purpose, but though his nervous folksiness definitely screamed PERVERT, she didn’t believe that anyone had yet invented a camera that could see through women’s clothing.

  Cass liked more people than Polly did, and if she had popped out of Mom’s oven with a twin whose personality had been identical to her own, she would have been a Pollyanna, trusting implicitly and equally in nuns and convicted murderers. During the twenty-seven years that they had lived together this side of the placenta, however, Cass’s optimism had been tempered by Polly’s more-reasoned expectations of people and fate. Indeed, Cass had grown so street-smart that by the time Earl had spoken only a single sentence, she cocked an eyebrow and tweaked her mouth in a Freak alert! expression that Polly had no difficulty reading.

  Earl might have chattered at them until either he or one of them fell dead from natural causes, all the while not-so-secretly aiming his curious wristwatch at them—which suddenly seemed reminiscent of the way airport-security personnel sometimes used a handheld metal-detection wand to scan a traveler who had more than once failed to pass through the standard gate without setting off an alarm. But as Earl babbled, Cass examined the antique pump marked DIESEL, and when she found its workings to be more arcane than any she had previously encountered, she asked for assistance.

  When Earl turned to the pump, Polly thought he looked baffled, as though he were no more familiar with its operation than was Cass. Frowning, he stepped to the pump, put one hand on it, stood as if in profound thought, almost as if through some sixth sense he were divining the workings of the machinery, soon broke again into that crackbrained-clown grin, and said cheerily, “Fill ’er up?” Assured that they wanted the tank topped off, he cranked a handle on the pump, disengaged the hose spout from the nozzle boot, and turned toward the Fleetwood, whereupon both he and his smile froze.