Other Side of the Woods

by Koontz, Dean

  Vivian suffered a broken fingernail.

  The second thug, who fared worse than the first, developed such a disabling fear of fifty-something women who wore pink that in court, when the prosecutor showed up one day wearing a neck scarf of that fateful color, the accused began to sob uncontrollably and had to be carried out of the courthouse on a stretcher, by paramedics.

  In the living room, Vivian let go of me and put her cloth carryall beside the armchair in which she would spend the evening.

  “Your book is wonderful, Cubby.” She had read an advance copy. “I may not be as educated as a certain hoity-toity critic, but I know truth when I see it. Your book is full of truth.”

  “Thank you, Vivian.”

  “Now where is Prince Milo?”

  “In his room, building some kind of radio to communicate with extraterrestrials.”

  “The time machine didn’t work out?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Is Lassie with him?”

  “She’s never anywhere else,” I said.

  “I’ll go give him a tickle.”

  “Penny and I are having dinner at Roxie’s. If Milo makes contact with space aliens, it’s okay to call us.”

  I followed Vivian out of the living room and watched as she ascended the stairs with a majesty only slightly less awesome than the looming presence of the mother ship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

  When I entered the kitchen, Penny was fixing a Post-it to the refrigerator door, providing heating instructions for the lasagna that would be Milo’s dinner.

  “Vivian,” I reported, “has assumed command of the premises.” Penny said, “Thank God we found her. I never worry about Milo when Vivian’s here.”

  “Me neither. But I’m worried about her. Milo’s tinkering again.”

  “Vivian will be fine. Milo only blew something up that once, and it was an accident.”

  “He could accidentally blow something up again.” She frowned at me, a disapproving expression with which I was familiar. Even then she looked scrumptious enough that I would have eaten her alive had we been in a country that mandated compassionate tolerance for cannibals.

  “Never,” she said. “Milo learns from his mistakes.” As I followed her through the connecting door between the kitchen and the garage, I said, “Is that a slighting remark about my experiences with fireworks?”

  “How many times have you burned off your eyebrows?”

  “Once. The other three times, I just singed them.” Regarding me over the roof of the car, she raised her eyebrows. Their pristine condition mocked me.

  “You singed them so well,” she said, “the smell of burning hair blanketed the entire neighborhood.”

  “Anyway, the last time was more than five years ago.”

  “So you’re overdue for a repeat performance,” she said, and got into the car.

  Settling behind the steering wheel, I protested: “On the contrary. As any behavioral psychologist will tell you, if you can go five years without repeating the same mistake, you’ll never make it again.”

  “I wish I had a behavioral psychologist here right now.”

  “You think he’d contradict me, but he wouldn’t. They call it the five-year rule.”

  As I started the engine, Penny used the remote control to raise the garage door. “Wait until it’s all the way up before you drive through it.”

  “I never drove forward through a garage door,” I reminded her. “I reversed through it once, which is a whole different thing.”

  “Maybe. But considering it happened less than five years ago, I’m not taking any chances.”

  “You know, for someone whose parents call themselves Clotilda and Grimbald, you’re remarkably funny.”

  “I would have to be, wouldn’t I? Don’t run down the mailbox.”

  “I will if I want.”

  We were having a fine time. The evening ahead was full of promise: good food, wine, laughter, and love.

  Soon, however, Fate would bring me to a cliff. Although I would see the precipice before me, I would nevertheless step into thin air, taking not merely a pratfall but a plunge.

  In Newport Beach, on Balboa Peninsula, in a building near one of the town’s two piers, Roxie’s Bistro has low lighting, medium-Deco decor, and high culinary standards.

  Most restaurants these days are as noisy as a drum-and-cymbal factory invaded by two hundred chimpanzees intent on committing percussion. Those establishments eschew sound-suppressing designs and materials under the pretense that cacophony gives the patrons a sense of being in a hip, happening place.

  In truth, such restaurants seek and attract a type of customer whose very existence, in such numbers, proves our civilization is dying: boisterous and free-spending egotists taught since infancy that self-esteem matters more than knowledge, that manners and etiquette are merely tools of oppression. They like the sound of their own braying, and they seem to be convinced that the louder they are, the more desperately every onlooker wants to be in their clique.

  Roxie’s Bistro offered, instead, quiet intimacy. The murmur of conversation sometimes rose, though never became distracting. Combined with the soft silvery clink of flatware and an occasional surge of laughter, these voices made a pleasing music from the news of the day, gossip, and stories of times past.

  Penny and I talked about publishing, politics, pickles, art, Milo, dogs in general, Lassie in particular, fleas, Flaubert, Florida, alliteration, ice dancing, Scrooge McDuck, the role of dark matter in the universe, and tofu, among other things.

  In the golden glow of recessed lighting and in the flicker of candles in faceted amber-glass cups, radiant Penny looked like a beautiful queen, and I probably resembled Rumpelstiltskin scheming to take her next-born child. At least my ugly feet were hidden in socks and shoes.

  After we finished our entrées but before we ordered dessert, Penny went to the lavatory.

  Seeing me alone at the table, Hamal Sarkissian stopped by to keep me company.

  Roxie Sarkissian had established the restaurant fifteen years earlier and was the award-winning chef. Although charming, she seldom ventured out from the kitchen.

  Hamal, her husband, was the ideal frontman. He liked people, had an irresistible smile, and was diplomatic enough to soothe and win over the most unreasonable customer.

  Standing by the table, he regarded me not with his trademark smile but instead with grave concern. “Is everything okay, Cubby?”

  “Fabulous dinner,” I assured him. “Perfect. As always.”

  Still solemn, he said, “Are you going on tour for the new book?”

  “No. I needed a break this time.”

  “Don’t worry about him, what he says.”

  Perplexed, I asked, “Worry about who, what?”

  “He’s a strange man, the critic.”

  “Oh. So … you saw the Shearman Waxx review, huh?”

  “Two paragraphs. Then I spit on his column and turned the page.”

  “It doesn’t faze me. I’ve already let it go.”

  “He’s a strange man. He always makes his reservation in the name Edmund Wilson.”

  Surprised, surveying the room, I said, “He comes here?”

  “Seldom dinner. More often lunch.”

  “How about that.”

  “He’s always alone, pays cash.”

  “You’re sure it’s him? Nobody seems to know what he looks like.”

  “Twice he was short of cash,” Hamal said. “He used a credit card. Shearman Waxx. He’s a very strange man.”

  “Well, rest assured, if he had a reservation for tonight and I were to run into him, there wouldn’t be a scene. Criticism doesn’t bother me.”

  “In fact, he has a twelve-thirty lunch reservation tomorrow,” said Hamal.

  “Criticism comes with the territory.”

  “He’s a damned strange man.”

  “A review is only one person’s opinion.”

  Hamal said, “He creeps me out a little.�
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  “I’ve already let it go. You know what it’s like. The restaurant gets a bad review—c’est la vie. You just keep on keepin’ on.”

  “We’ve never had a bad review,” Hamal said.

  Embarrassed by the assumption I had made, I said, “Why would you? This place is perfection.”

  “Do you get many bad reviews?”

  “I don’t keep track. Maybe ten percent aren’t good. Maybe twelve percent. My third book—that was like fourteen percent. I don’t dwell on the negative. Ninety percent good reviews is gratifying.”

  “Eighty-six percent,” said Hamal.

  “That was only for my third book. Some critics didn’t think the dwarf was necessary.”

  “I like dwarfs. I have a cousin in Armenia, he’s a dwarf.”

  “Even if you use a dwarf as your hero, you have to call him a ‘little person.’ The word dwarf just incenses some critics.”

  “This critic of yours, he always reminds me of my cousin.”

  “You mean Shearman Waxx is a dwarf?”

  “No. He’s about five feet eight. But he’s stumpy.”

  The front door opened, a party of four entered, and Hamal went to greet them.

  A moment later, Penny returned from the lavatory. Settling in her chair, she said, “I’m going to finish this delightful wine before deciding on dessert.”

  “That reminds me—Hud wants to buy our wine this evening. He says send him the receipt.”

  “That would be wasting a perfectly good stamp.”

  “He might pay for half the bottle. He sent us champagne that time.”

  “It wasn’t champagne. It was sparkling cider. Anyway, why would he suddenly want to buy our wine?”

  “To celebrate the Waxx review.”

  “The man is criminally obtuse.”

  “He’s not that bad. Just clueless.”

  “I don’t like how he’s always pushing to be my agent, too.”

  “He negotiates killer deals,” I said.

  “But he doesn’t know squat about children’s books.”

  “He has to know something. He was a child at one time.”

  “I doubt that very much. I said something about Dr. Seuss once, and Hud thought I was talking about a physician.”

  “A misunderstanding. He was concerned about you.”

  “I mention Dr. Seuss and somehow Hud gets the idea I’ve got a terminal disease.”

  Being defense attorney for Hud Jacklight is a thankless job. I gave it up.

  Penny said, “He happened to have lunch in the same restaurant as my editor, so he asked her—does she know how long I’ve got to live. The man is a total—”

  “Flying furnal?” I suggested.

  “I wish a furnal would fly up his—”

  “Buckaboody?” I suggested, inventing a word of my own.

  “Exactly,” Penny said. “This wine is lovely. I’m not going to ruin the memory of it by having to pester Hud for reimbursement.”

  As far as I can remember, in ten years I had never kept secret from Penny anything that occurred in my daily life. At that moment, I could not have explained why I failed to share with her that Shearman Waxx sometimes ate at Roxie’s Bistro. Later, I figured it out.

  “Are you thinking about the Waxx review again?” she asked.

  “No. Not exactly. Maybe a little. Sort of.”

  “Let it go,” she said.

  “I am. I’m letting it go.”

  “No. You’re dwelling on it. Distract yourself.”

  “With what?”

  “With life. Take me home and make love to me.”

  “I thought we were getting dessert.”

  “Aren’t I sweet enough for you?”

  “There it is,” I said.

  “What?”

  “That crooked little smile you get sometimes. I love that crooked little smile.”

  “Then take me home and do something with it, big boy.”

  Having gotten up at three in the morning to do thirty radio interviews, I had no difficulty falling asleep that Tuesday night.

  I endured one of my lost-and-alone dreams. Sometimes it is set in a deserted department store, sometimes in a vacant amusement park or in a train terminal where no trains depart and none arrive.

  This time, I roamed a vast and dimly lighted library, where the shelves soared high overhead. The intersecting aisles were not perpendicular to one another, but serpentine, as if reflecting the manner in which one area of knowledge can lead circuitously and unexpectedly to a seemingly unrelated field of inquiry.

  This library of the slumbering mind was buried in a silence as solid and as sinuous as the drifted sands of Egypt. No step I took produced a sound.

  The wandering passageways were catacombs without the mummified remains, harboring instead lives and the work of lifetimes set down on paper, bound with glue and signature thread.

  As always in a lost-and-alone dream, I remained anxious but not afraid. I proceeded in expectation of a momentous discovery, a thing of wonder and delight, although the possibility of terror remained.

  When the dream is in a labyrinthine train station, the silence is sometimes broken by footsteps that lure me before they fade. In a department store, I hear a faraway feminine laugh that draws me from kitchenware through bed-and-bath and down a frozen escalator.

  In this library, the thrall of silence allowed a single crisp sound now and then, as if someone in an adjacent aisle was paging through a book. Searching, I found neither a patron nor a librarian.

  An urgency gripped me. I walked faster, ran, turned a corner into what might have been a reading alcove. Instead of armchairs, the space offered a bed, and in it slept Penny, alone. The covers on my side of the bed were undisturbed, as though I had never rested there.

  Alarmed at the sight of her alone, I sensed in her solitude an omen of some event that I dared not contemplate.

  I approached the bed—and woke in it, beside her, where I had not been lying in the dream. Gone were the nautilus spirals of books, replaced by darkness and the pale geometry of curtained windows.

  Penny’s soft rhythmic breathing was a mooring to which I could tether myself in the gloom; her respiration should have settled me but did not. I continued to feel adrift, and anxious.

  Wanting something, not knowing what I wanted, I eased out of bed and, barefoot in pajamas, left the master suite.

  Moonlight through skylights frosted the longer run of the L-shaped upstairs hallway. Passing a thus twice-silvered mirror, I glanced at my reflection, which appeared as diaphanous as a ghost.

  I was awake but felt still dreambound. This venue, though it was my own house, seemed more sinister than the deserted library or than the department store haunted by an elusive laughing spirit.

  My rising anxiety focused on Milo. I hurried the length of the main hall and turned right into the darker short arm.

  From the gap between the threshold and the bottom of Milo’s bedroom door, a fan of radiance continuously fluttered between a sapphire-blue intensity and an icy gunmetal blue, not the light of fire or television but suggesting mortal danger nonetheless.

  We have a policy of knocking, but I opened the door without announcing myself—and was relieved to find Milo safe and asleep.

  The dimmer switch on the bedside lamp had been dialed down to an approximation of candlelight. He lay supine, head raised on a pillow. Behind his closed eyelids, rapid eye movement signified dream sleep.

  With him lay Lassie, her chin resting on his abdomen. She was as awake as any guardian charged with a sacred task. She rolled her eyes to watch me without moving her head.

  On the U-shaped desk, intermingling clouds of color—each a shade of blue—billowed in slow motion across the computer monitor, like a kaleidoscope with amorphous forms instead of geometric shapes.

  I had never seen such a screen saver. Because Milo’s computer had no Internet access, this couldn’t have been downloaded from the Web.

  The Internet is more a forc
e for evil than for good. It offers the worst of humankind absolute license and anonymity—and numerous addictive pursuits over which to become obsessive. Kids are having innocence and willpower—if not free will itself—stolen from them.

  When Milo wanted to go online, he had to use my computer or Penny’s. We have installed serious site-blocking software.

  The wing of the desk to the left of the computer was covered with circuit boards, carefully labeled microchips in small plastic bags, a disassembled alphanumeric keypad, a disassembled radio, dozens of arcane items I had purchased for him at RadioShack and elsewhere, and a scattering of miniature tools.

  I had no idea what my boy might be creating with any of those things. However, I trusted him to obey the rules and to avoid doing anything that might electrocute him, burn down the house, or transport him to the Jurassic Era with no way of getting back to us.

  In movies, raising a prodigy is always an exhilarating and uplifting journey to triumphant accomplishment. In reality, it is also exhausting and even sometimes terrifying.

  I suppose that would not be true if his genius expressed itself as a talent for the piano and for musical composition. Even Mozart couldn’t play the piano with such brilliance that it would explode and kill bystanders with ivory shrapnel.

  Unfortunately—or fortunately, as only time would tell—Milo’s talent was for theoretical and applied mathematics, also theoretical and applied physics, with a deep intuitive understanding of magnetic and electromagnetic fields.

  This we were told by the experts who studied and tested Milo for two weeks. I have only a dim idea of what their assessment means.

  For a while we hired graduate students to tutor him, but they tended only to inhibit his learning. He is a classic autodidact, self-motivated, and already in possession of his high-school GED.

  I am as proud of the little guy as I am intimidated. Given his brainpower, he’ll probably never be interested in having me teach him a pastime as boring as baseball. Which is all right, I guess, because I’ve always been rotten at sports.

  The wing of the desk to the right of the computer held a large tablet open to a working drawing of some device requiring an array of microprocessors, instruction caches, data caches, bus connections, and other more mysterious items—all linked by a bewildering maze of circuit traces.