Other Side of the Woods

by Koontz, Dean

  If microsoldering was required, neither Milo nor I would be permitted to do it. Such work must be left to Penny. She has, after all, the steady hands of an artist, the emotional maturity that Milo lacks, and a mechanical competence of which I can only dream.

  The ever-changing forms on the monitor, like a churning mass of blue protoplasm, had begun to seem ominous to me, as if this were a living thing that, by applying pressure, might crack the screen and surge into the room. I wanted to switch off the computer, but I did not. Milo had left it on not inadvertently but for some reason.

  At the bed once more, I gazed at him for a while in the low lamplight. A beautiful child.

  Although blessed with a vivid imagination, I could not begin to envision the topography of Milo’s mindscape.

  I worried about him a lot.

  He had no friends his age because kids bored him. Penny, Lassie, Vivian Norby, Clotilda, Grimbald, and I were his social universe.

  I hoped he could live as normally as his gifts would allow, but I felt inadequate to show him the way. I wanted my son to know much laughter and more love, to appreciate the grace of this world and the abiding mystery of it, to know the pleasure of small achievements, of trifles and of follies, to be always aware of the million wonderful little pictures in the big one, to be a humble master of his gift and not the servant of it. Because I could not imagine what it must be like to be him, I could not lead on every issue; much of the time, we would have to find our way together.

  I loved him enough to endure any horror for him and to die that he might be spared.

  No matter how much you care for another person, however, you can’t guarantee him a happy life, not with love or money, not with sacrifice. You can only do your best—and pray for him.

  I kissed Milo on the forehead without disturbing his sleep. Impulsively, I kissed Lassie on the head, as well. She seemed to be pleased by this affection, but I got some fur on my lips.

  The bedside clock read 5:00 A.M. In seven and a half hours, the dog would be sitting in the living-room window seat, watching the street and wondering when I would return with her cherished companion— and Milo and I would be having lunch at Roxie’s Bistro, spying on the nation’s premier literary critic.

  At 12:10, the lunch crowd in Roxie’s Bistro was slightly noisier than the dinner customers, but the ambience remained relaxing and conducive to quiet conversation.

  Hamal Sarkissian seated us at a table for two at the back of the long rectangular room. He provided a booster pillow for Milo.

  “Will you want wine with lunch?” Hamal asked the boy.

  “A glass or two,” Milo confirmed.

  “I will have it for you in fifteen years,” Hamal said.

  I had told Penny that I was taking Milo to the library, to an electronics store to buy items he needed for his current project, and finally to lunch at Roxie’s. All this was true. I don’t lie to Penny.

  I neglected, however, to tell her that at lunch I would get a glimpse of the elusive Shearman Waxx. This is deception by omission, and it is not admirable behavior.

  Considering that I had no intention of either approaching the critic or speaking to him, I saw no harm in this small deception, no need to concern Penny or to have to listen to her admonition to “Let it go.”

  Only once before had I deceived her by omission. That previous instance involved an issue more serious than this one. At the start of our courtship, and now for ten years, I had carefully avoided revealing to her the key fact about myself, the most formative experience of my life, for it seemed to be a weight she should not have to carry.

  Because Milo and I arrived before Waxx, I was not at risk of running a variation of my garage-door stunt, accidentally driving through the restaurant, killing the critic at his lunch, and thus being wrongly suspected of premeditated murder.

  Having conspired with me earlier on the phone, Hamal pointed to a table at the midpoint of the restaurant. “He will be seated there, by the window. He always reads a book while he dines. You will know him. He is a strange man.”

  Earlier, on the Internet, I sought out the only known photograph of Shearman Waxx, which proved to be of no use. The image was as blurry as all those snapshots of Big Foot striding through woods and meadows.

  When Hamal left us alone, Milo said, “What strange man?”

  “Just a guy. A customer. Hamal thinks he’s strange.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s got a third eye in his forehead.”

  Milo scoffed: “Nobody has an eye in his forehead.”

  “This guy does. And four nostrils in his nose.”

  “Yeah?” He was as gimlet-eyed as a homicide detective. “What kind of pet does he have—a flying furnal?”

  “Two of them,” I said. “He’s taught them stunt flying.”

  While we studied our menus and enjoyed our lemony iced tea, in no hurry to order food, Milo and I discussed our favorite cookies, Saturday-morning cartoon shows, and whether extraterrestrials are more likely to visit Earth to enlighten us or to eat us. We talked about dogs in general, Lassie in particular, and anomalies of current flow in electromagnetic fields.

  With the last subject, my half of the conversation consisted of so many grunts and snorts that I might have been the aforementioned Sasquatch.

  Promptly at 12:30, a stumpy man carrying an attaché case entered the restaurant. Hamal escorted him to the previously specified window table.

  To be fair, the guy appeared less stumpy than solid. Although perhaps half as wide as he was tall, Waxx was not overweight. He seemed to have the density of a lead brick.

  His neck looked thick enough to support the stone head of an Aztec-temple god. His face was so at odds with the rest of the man that it might have been grafted to him by a clever surgeon: a wide smooth brow, bold and noble features, a strong chin—a face suitable for a coin from the Roman Empire.

  He was about forty, certainly not 140, as the online encyclopedia claimed. His leonine hair had turned prematurely white.

  In charcoal-gray slacks, an ash-gray hound’s-tooth sport coat with leather elbow patches, a white shirt, and a red bow tie, he seemed to be part college professor and part professional wrestler, as though two men of those occupations had shared a teleportation chamber and— à la the movie The Fly—had discovered their atoms intermingled at the end of their trip.

  From his attaché case, he withdrew a hardcover book and what appeared to be a stainless-steel torture device. He opened the book and fitted it into the jaws of this contraption, which held the volume open and at a slant for comfortable hands-free reading.

  Evidently, the critic was a man of reliable habits. A waiter came to his table with a glass of white wine that he hadn’t ordered.

  Waxx nodded, seemed to utter a word or two, but did not glance up at his server, who at once departed.

  He put on half-lens, horn-rimmed reading glasses and, after a sip of wine, turned his attention to the steel-entrapped book.

  Because I did not want to be caught staring, I continued my conversation with Milo. I focused mostly on my son and glanced only occasionally toward the critic.

  Before long, my spy mission began to seem absurd. Shearman Waxx might be a somewhat odd-looking package, but after the mystery of his appearance had been solved, nothing about him was compelling.

  I did not intend to approach him or speak to him. Penny, Olivia Cosima, and even Hud Jacklight had been right to say that responding to an unfair review was generally a bad idea.

  As the tables between ours and Waxx’s filled with customers, my view of him became obstructed. By the time we finished our main course and ordered dessert, I lost interest in him.

  After I paid the bill and tipped the waiter, as we were rising from the table to leave, Milo said, “I gotta pee, Dad.”

  The restrooms were at our end of the premises, off a short hall, and as we crossed the room, I glanced toward Waxx. I couldn’t see his table clearly through the throng, but his chair stood empty.
He must have finished lunch and left.

  The sparkling-clean men’s room featured one stall wide enough for a wheelchair, two urinals, and two sinks. Redolent of astringent pine-scented disinfectant, the air burned in my nostrils.

  Someone occupied the stall, but Milo wasn’t tall enough to use one of the urinals unassisted. After he unzipped his pants, fumbled in his fly, and produced himself, I clamped my hands around his waist and lifted him above the porcelain bowl.

  “Ready,” he said.

  “Aim,” I said.

  “Fire,” he said, and loosed a stream.

  When Milo was more than half drained, the toilet flushed and the stall door opened.

  I glanced sideways, saw Shearman Waxx not six feet from me, and as if my throat were the pinched neck of a balloon, I let out a thin “Eeee” in surprise.

  In the restaurant, his table had been at such a distance from ours that I had not been able to see the color of his eyes. They were maroon.

  Although I have thought about that moment often in the days since, I still do not know whether, startled, I turned toward the critic or whether Milo, held aloft in my hands, twisted around to see what had made me gasp. I suspect it was a little of both.

  The boy’s stream arced to the tile floor.

  For a man as solid as a concrete battlement, Waxx proved to be agile. He danced adroitly backward, out of the splash zone, and his gray Hush Puppies remained entirely dry.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I chanted, and turned Milo toward the urinal.

  Without a word, Waxx stepped over the puddle, went to one of the sinks, and began to wash his hands.

  “He’s a little guy,” I said. “I have to lift him up.”

  Although Waxx did not respond, I imagined I could feel his gaze boring into my back as he watched me in the mirror above the sinks.

  I knew that the more I apologized, the more it might seem that I had intended to use Milo like a squirt gun, but I couldn’t shut up.

  “Nothing like that ever happened before. If he’d nailed you, I would have paid the dry-cleaning bill.”

  Waxx pulled paper towels from the dispenser.

  As he finished peeing, Milo giggled.

  “He’s a good kid,” I assured Waxx. “He saved a dog from being euthanized.”

  The only sound was the rustle of paper as the critic dried his hands.

  Although Milo could read at a college level, he was nonetheless a six-year-old boy. Six-year-old boys find nothing funnier than pee and fart jokes.

  After giggling again, Milo said, “I shook and zipped, Dad. You can put me down.”

  A squeak of hinges revealed that Waxx had opened the door to the hallway.

  Putting Milo on his feet, I turned toward the exit.

  My hope was that Waxx had not recognized me from my book-jacket photograph.

  The eminent critic was staring at me. He said one word, and then he departed.

  He had recognized me, all right.

  After using paper towels to mop up Milo’s small puddle, I washed my hands at a sink. Then I lifted Milo so he could wash up, too.

  “Almost sprinkled him,” Milo said.

  “That’s nothing to be proud of. Stop giggling.”

  When we returned to the restaurant, Shearman Waxx sat once more at his table. The waiter was just serving the entrée.

  Waxx did not look our way. He seemed determined to ignore us.

  As we passed his table, I saw the device that imprisoned the book was clever but wicked-looking, as though the critic were holding the work—and its author—in bondage.

  Outside, the November afternoon waited: mild, still, expectant. The unblemished sky curved to every horizon like an encompassing sphere of glass, containing not a single cloud or bird, or aircraft.

  Along the street, the trees stood as motionless as the fake foliage in an airless diorama. No limb trembled, no leaf whispered.

  No traffic passed. Milo and I were the only people in sight.

  We might have been figures in a snow-globe paperweight, sans snow.

  I wanted to look back at the restaurant, to see if Shearman Waxx watched us from his window seat. Restraining myself, I didn’t turn, but instead walked Milo to the car.

  During the drive home, I could not stop brooding about the single word the critic had spoken before he stepped out of the men’s room. He transfixed me with those terrible maroon eyes and in a solemn baritone said, “Doom.”

  That afternoon, while Penny finished a painting for her next children’s book, while Milo and Lassie worked on a time machine or a death ray, or whatever it might be, I sat in an armchair in my study, reading “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor, a short story that I much admired.

  One of the most disturbing pieces of fiction ever written, it remains as affecting on the tenth pass as on the first. This might have been my twentieth reading, but Miss O’Connor inspired in me a greater dread than ever before.

  I did not understand why phantom spiders crawled the nape of my neck, why chills shivered through my bowels and stomach, why my palms grew damp and my fingers sometimes trembled when I turned a page—all to a degree that I had never experienced previously with this work of fiction or any other. Later, I figured it out.

  After I finished the story and as I sat staring at the page, where the words blurred out of focus, a disquiet rose in me that had nothing to do with “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” I told myself that my uneasiness related to my career, to concern about what Waxx would write in his review of my next novel, which he seemed to have promised to savage when he spoke the word doom in a portentous tone.

  But surely that could not be the entire cause of the nameless worry that crawled my mind. I had not yet finished my next novel. It would not be published for a year. At my request, my publisher would withhold an advance review copy from Waxx. We had time to devise a strategy to thwart him. Yet my current uneasiness seemed to anticipate a more immediate jeopardy.

  Peripheral vision alerted me to movement. I raised my eyes from the page, turned my head toward the open study door, and saw Shearman Waxx pass by in the downstairs hall.

  I do not recall rising from the armchair or letting the book of short stories fall from my hands. I seemed to have imagined myself onto my feet in a thousandth of a second.

  Now erect, I couldn’t imagine myself moving. Shock paralyzed me.

  My heart continued to beat at the pace of a man reading in an armchair. Disbelief forestalled a sense of jeopardy.

  O’Connor’s story had cast over me a pall of apprehension. In that altered state, my mind must have played a trick on me, must have conjured an intruder where none existed.

  This phantom Waxx had not even glanced at me, as certainly he would have if he had been real and had come here to confront me for whatever reason. Perhaps Penny passed by in the hall, and the limber imagination of a novelist remade her into the critic.

  The possibility that I could mistake my luminous and slender Penny for the dour hulk of Shearman Waxx was so absurd that my disbelief dissolved. I broke my paralysis.

  Suddenly my heart mimicked iron on turf, the frantic thud of racing horses’ heels. I hurried to the open door, hesitated at the threshold, but then crossed it. The hallway was deserted.

  Waxx had been headed toward the back of the house. I followed the shorter length of the hall to the kitchen, half expecting to find him selecting a blade from the knife drawer beside the cooktop.

  Even as that image crossed my mind, I was embarrassed by my near hysteria. Shearman Waxx would surely disdain such melodrama in real life as much as he scorned it in fiction.

  He lurked neither in the kitchen nor in the adjacent family room that flowed from it. One of the French doors to the back patio stood open, suggesting that he had departed by that exit.

  Standing in the doorway, I surveyed the patio, the swimming pool, and the backyard. No sign of Waxx.

  That eerie stillness had befallen the world again. The water in the pool la
y as smooth as a sheet of glass.

  While I had been reading, gunmetal clouds had armored the sky. They did not billow, neither did they churn, but looked as flat and motionless as a coat of paint.

  Because we lived in the safest neighborhood of a low-crime community, we were in the habit of leaving our most-used doors unlocked during the day. That would change.

  Bewildered by Waxx’s intrusion, I closed the French door and engaged the deadbolt.

  Abruptly, I realized that the critic might have done more than pass through the house. If he had left by the family room, he could have entered elsewhere—and could have done some kind of damage.

  Engaged in strange science, Milo was upstairs in his bedroom with Lassie.

  In her second-floor studio, Penny painted the wide-eyed, sharp-beaked owl that hunted the band of heroic mice in her current book.

  Although the dog had not barked and though no one had cried out in pain or terror, my mind insisted on the most unlikely scenario, on bludgeoned heads and cut throats. Our modern world is, after all, full of flamboyant violence; as often as not, the evening news is as disturbing as any slasher film.

  I climbed the back stairs two at a time.

  Milo’s bedroom door stood open, and he sat at his desk, alive and beguiled by electronic gizmos that meant less to me than would ancient tablets of stone carved with runes.

  On the desk, watching her master at work, sat Lassie. She looked up as I entered, but Milo did not.

  “Did you see him?” I asked.

  Milo, who can multitask better than a Cray supercomputer, stayed focused on the gizmos but said, “See who?”

  “The man … a guy wearing a red bow tie. Did he come in here?”

  “You mean the man with three eyes and four nostrils?” he asked, revealing that perhaps he had been more aware of my spy game at the restaurant than I had realized.

  “Yes, him,” I confirmed. “Did he come in here?”