Other Side of the Woods

by Koontz, Dean

  “No, Grim, it isn’t.”

  “You say precautions. Do we look out for anyone in particular?”

  “He’s about forty-one, white hair, stands five feet eight, built like a tank, may or may not be wearing a bow tie.”

  “He tries to come in here, he’s toast. You should come here and hide out with us.”

  “I don’t want to draw him to you guys.”

  “Hell, let’s draw him, Cub. Let’s lure him in and squash him like a bug.”

  “Maybe we will, Grim. When I know more about him. When I have a better handle on him than I do now.”

  “I like the way you sound, Cub. You sound together.”

  “Well, I might not be as together as I sound.”

  “Cupcake, she’s always worried in a crisis you’d be useless.”

  “I won’t hold that against her, Grim. I can see where she might get that idea.”

  “But me,” he said, “I always suspected there’s a secret you, and the secret you has the right stuff.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “More than once, I’ve said to Cupcake, he can’t be the milksop he seems to be, ’cause his books have a toughness in them.”

  “One more thing, Grim. You can’t reach me by phone. I’m using a disposable, and it’s probably the first of a series, until this thing is done. But Penny or I will check in from time to time.”

  “We won’t miss a call. We’ll be right here. I think for the duration, we’ll go into lockdown. You know what that means?”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Remember what the Lord said.”

  “He said a lot of things, Grim.”

  “He doesn’t want us harming the innocent, but he gave us ‘the power to tread on serpents.’ This man blows up your house, he sounds like a serpent to me. What do you think?”

  “Definitely a serpent,” I agreed.

  “Then don’t you hesitate to tread on him if you get a chance.”

  In the glass table, the image of my face was like a reflection in a pool of cloudy water, disturbing because its character remained indeterminate. It might have been the face of an earnest pilgrim or that of a fetal demon not yet born to his potential.

  Olivia Cosima, my editor in New York City, was still at lunch when I phoned. I left a voice mail preparing her for the news of our exploding home.

  I also dictated a statement for Olivia to give to my publisher’s publicity department, with which to respond to media inquiries.

  Thankfully, Penny’s editor was also at lunch, so I didn’t have to answer any questions, and I left her a similar voice mail.

  When I returned to the family room, Milo had taken a break from whatever arcane project he pursued on his computer. He stood at the glass wall, staring at the harbor.

  Lassie had emerged from the cabinet. She stood at Milo’s side, also gazing out of the floor-to-ceiling window.

  Neither of them responded when I said that lunch would be in thirty minutes. They seemed to be entranced by the vista of harbor and hills.

  In the kitchen, Penny remained at the secretary with her laptop.

  “I made a complete list of the phrases Waxx used in your review and in John Clitherow’s.”

  The list lay on the kitchen island. I picked it up from the black granite countertop.

  Before I could begin to read, Penny said, “And I found another review … another novelist he savaged in a similar way, not exactly the same language but the same criticisms, and extremely vicious.”

  “Who’s the writer?”

  “Thomas Landulf.”

  “Vaguely familiar. But I’ve never read him.”

  “He published his first novel just fourteen months ago. The Falconer and the Monk.” She consulted a notepad. “Waxx called it ‘a triumphant example of idiot logic, an incandescent work of puerile nonsense that will be a shining beacon to perpetual juveniles and the terminally sentimental for generations to come.’”

  “Better syntax than usual,” I said, “but ouch.”

  “I wondered if Landulf wrote anything since, so I googled him.”

  Penny turned, glanced toward Milo at the family-room windows, then rose from her chair and came close to me.

  Lowering her voice, she continued: “Eleven months ago, three months after the publication of his book, Tom Landulf tortured and killed his wife, tortured and killed his three-year-old daughter, and committed suicide.”

  Her piercing blue gaze had never been more compelling, and I was constrained to meet her eyes as long as she required.

  “That’s why the name rang a bell,” I said. “Must have been a two-day sensation on the news, so I heard a little about it.”

  Because I am squeamish, my custom is to avoid watching or reading news about mass murders. More than a custom, it is a rule.

  Penny said, “His wife, Jeanette, loved to play the piano. He cut off her ears. Then her fingers, one at a time.”

  The history of literature is replete with colorful monsters that come from netherworlds and other worlds and laboratories.

  Penny said, “Photos he took while he dismembered her prove she was alive and conscious when he began. When eventually she passed out, it was from blood loss.”

  Vampires, werewolves, zombies, ravenous extraterrestrials, murderous poltergeists, abominations of nature, hideous creatures born of experiments gone wrong: None are real, all are projections, metaphors, an externalization of what lies within us.

  “What he did to Melanie, the three-year-old, was unspeakable. I will never talk to you about it. Never. You’ll have to read it yourself if you want to know. She was alive, too, through most of it.”

  The only monsters in this world are those who pass for human, who cast shadows and are reflected in mirrors, who smile and speak of compassion and shed convincing tears.

  “When the wife and daughter were dead,” Penny continued, “he drenched himself in gasoline and set himself on fire.”

  Eye to eye with her, I could not hear either of us breathing or a single motor in any of the three refrigerators, or a whisper of wind at any window, as if we were not as real as we supposed we were, but existed only on a plasma screen, characters in a film, watched by someone who, on a remote control, pressed the MUTE button.

  Finally, Penny said, “The official conclusion of the police—two homicides and a suicide. What do you think?”

  Because of the extreme sadistic nature of those crimes, I wanted to believe that the authorities had reached the correct conclusion, that Thomas Landulf had killed his wife and child, that the monster who could do such things no longer walked the world.

  Penny’s stare allowed no retreat from the truth.

  “Most likely … not a suicide,” I said. “And not two murders, but three.”

  “Most likely,” she agreed. “And you know what I think? I think before the murders happened, Waxx must have been tormenting Landulf, like he’s done with us.”

  “It’s a good bet.”

  “So when he and his family are killed, why wouldn’t the cops have wondered about Waxx?”

  I reminded her, “Clitherow said funny things happen when you go to the cops about Waxx.”

  “When I first turned up Landulf, I thought this is what we go to the cops with. But then I realized …”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “… we really are alone. Who is he that he can’t be touched?”

  “Something as sadistic as the Landulfs … I have to wonder what is he?”

  The slaughter of the Landulf family required reconsideration of Waxx and of the threat that he posed to us. By the hour, he appeared less professorial and more predatory, his refinement only a cloak to conceal deformities, his civilized demeanor a mask.

  Lacking an appetite, I nevertheless ate lunch. With the story of the Landulf murders so fresh in my mind, I should have found the food to be without taste, but it was delicious.

  Perhaps even in Hell, the damned experience moments of grace, if only as a reminder
that Hell is not the be-all.

  After lunch, pleading exhaustion, Penny took a nap. Because she did not want to be in a bedroom, apart from us, she curled in the fetal position on a family-room sofa, facing the harbor, hoping the movement of the water and the gliding boats would lull her to sleep.

  Milo returned to his computer and other gear on the coffee table. He sat with his back to the harbor.

  By his side again, Lassie lay on her belly but with her head lifted, ears pricked, facing the windows. Perhaps the kiting seagulls and the occasional formations of brown pelicans intrigued her.

  At the kitchen secretary, I used Penny’s laptop to go online. I needed to learn more about how John Clitherow’s family had died.

  I dreaded discovering another multiple murder with details to freeze the marrow. What my search string led me to instead was a story without blood but no less disturbing.

  According to press reports, Tony and Cora Clitherow, John’s parents, had lived lakeside in Michigan. They rented a slip at a nearby marina, where they kept the Time Out, a Bluewater 563.

  Exploring the company’s website, I found photos of a craft like theirs. The low-profile, double-deck cruiser featured an upper helm station enclosed by a hard top and canvas walls. This sleek, handsome boat included a main cabin with galley and two staterooms with baths.

  On that Thursday in late June, three summers previous, Tony and Cora had taken the Time Out for a day trip. With its amenities and range, the boat could overnight on water. But they had told the owner of the marina, Michael Hanrahan, they intended to return before dusk.

  When they didn’t dock by nightfall, Hanrahan was not concerned enough to report them missing. On a couple of prior occasions, they had made impromptu changes to their trip plans.

  The next day, when the Coast Guard could not raise the Time Out by radio, a search was launched. At 4:10 in the afternoon, by its transponder signal, they found the boat adrift, five miles offshore.

  Tony Clitherow sat belted in the chair at the upper helm station, naked and dead. The cause of death was not apparent.

  A search of the vessel did not turn up Cora.

  At the stern of the boat, a taut cable stretched from the gin pole into the water. With the windlass, they reeled in the line.

  They pulled Cora from the lake as if she were a fish. She wore nothing but handcuffs. The windlass line entwined the chain between the cuffs and encircled her waist, secured to itself with carabiners.

  She had been dragged through the water for many miles, no doubt at night when people aboard passing vessels would not see her.

  Cora’s challenge had been to avoid drowning as she cleaved facedown through the Bluewater’s wake. Secured in such a way that she was unable to turn onto her back, she would have been repeatedly pulled under by turbulence, would have repeatedly broken the surface, striving always to keep her head up, gasping for breath.

  Exhaustion defeated her. Although not a speedboat, the Time Out was capable of enough knots to make being towed through choppy water a punishing experience. Feathery bruises covered her body.

  The continuous impact of the water or abrasive debris in it wore away her left eyelid. Both eyes were as frosted as etched glass.

  An assessment of Tony’s guilt would ordinarily depend on the coroner’s report. But the autopsy proved inconclusive.

  The quantity of alcohol in Tony’s stomach and the percentage in his blood suggested that he could have died from alcohol poisoning. If he had been that drunk, however, he surely would have at some point vomited on the deck or on himself, which he had not done.

  The homicide detective on the case, Warren Knowles, had resisted a determination that Clitherow killed his wife. Knowles argued that a tear at the corner of Tony’s right nostril and a facial bruise raised the possibility he’d been restrained while a tube was fed through his nose and into his throat for the administration of alcohol by force.

  In the opinion of the medical examiner, those injuries had more likely been sustained in a drunken fall or when Cora tried to fend off her husband as he sought to handcuff her.

  Knowles also raised the possibility that the alcohol had been administered to cloak the true cause of death and that Tony might have been killed by an air embolism, a bubble that, injected into his bloodstream, traveled eventually to his brain. At a hearing, the detective spoke of a suspected needle puncture.

  The medical examiner felt that associated injuries around the puncture, arguably sustained in an altercation with Cora, did not allow him to say with certainty that this was an injection site.

  No determination of guilt had been made. The case file remained open, perhaps largely through the efforts of Detective Knowles.

  Although John Clitherow claimed his wife, Margaret, and their two daughters, were also killed, I could find no mention of their deaths, by murder or otherwise. If John told me the truth—and I believed he did—he withheld something that would explain why their murders had gone unreported.

  Reading about Tony and Cora further unnerved me. Grim scenarios played through my mind.

  Agitated, I got up from the laptop and went to the glass wall in the family room, hoping the harbor panorama would soothe me.

  The view had worked its magic on Penny. She slept soundly on the sofa, in what gray light the pregnant sky allowed.

  Imagine that Tony had been entirely sober, with a gun to his head, and had been forced to pilot the boat while aware that his wife was being dragged and drowned in its wake.

  Imagine that only after Cora’s death was alcohol administered to Tony and an air bubble injected. Imagine his horror, his anguish, and the relief with which he might have accepted his own murder.

  Imagination can be either a feathered or a scaly thing, flying to castles in the air or slithering down into a gelid darkness that suffocates all hope.

  Many questions remained. How did Waxx board the boat and how did he depart? How did he overpower them and manage the awkward details of Cora’s attachment to the windlass cable?

  If even a thousand questions occurred to me, I would not begin to doubt that Waxx killed them, just as he mutilated Jeanette and Melanie Landulf while Thomas Landulf, their husband and father, was forced to watch before being set afire.

  The signature of the murderer was the same for each crime: a singular cruelty, an incapacity for pity, a desire to humiliate as well as to kill the victims, and in each instance a determination to make the ultimate victim witness the suffering and degradation of whoever was murdered before him.

  In a sudden flare of great dark wings, an immense blue heron, tall as a man, flew up from the nearer shore, glided low over water mottled taupe-zinc-cinder-slate, turning fully 360 degrees across the width of the nearer and smaller channel, before passing between the hulls of the vessels at the public moorings and dwindling across the farther channel toward the mainland.

  Although I needed only an instant to identify the bird, my heart knocked as if I stood witness to something unearthly, to a creature as dark in its intentions as in its coloration.

  My point of focus pulled back from the receding heron to the craft at the moorings. The standing rigging on the sailboats quivered in a light breeze. A man worked at some task on the deck of a sloop. Cabin lights glowed at the windows of a few of the motor cruisers.

  The scene was a maritime pastoral, picturesque and potentially tranquilizing—and yet I felt uneasy.

  My cell phone rang—not the disposable one that I had left on a kitchen counter, but the one in my shirt pocket, which was listed in my name. For reasons I did not fully understand, John Clitherow had warned me not to use it. I brought it with me, however, because it was the only number at which he could reach me if he decided he must speak to me again.

  I answered the call, and Hud Jacklight said worriedly, “Cubby?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Are you alive?”

  “Yes, I am, Hud.”

  “Your house. It blew up. You know?”

 
“I know. Listen, let me call you right back on another line.”

  I didn’t wait for his reply, but terminated the call.

  Because I did not want to wake Penny, who looked so peaceful on the nearby sofa, I left her and Milo in the family room with Lassie and retreated through the dining room to the living room, where the floor-to-ceiling glass presented a slightly different view of the harbor.

  Gazing at a picturesque and tranquil harborscape while talking to Hud Jacklight did not make his conversation seem more eloquent, more enlightened, or less absurd.

  “You’re alive? Really?” he asked.

  “No. I’m speaking to you from”—I quoted Longfellow—“‘the great world of light, that lies behind all human destinies.’”

  After a moment of silence, he said, “You’re scaring me, Cubbo.”

  “I don’t want to do that, Hud. I’m fine. Penny and Milo and Lassie are fine. When the house blew, we were on the road.”

  “What road?”

  “The open road, traveling.”

  “You were home. Yesterday.”

  “Now we’re on the road doing book research. If anyone in the media calls you, don’t talk to him. Refer him to my publisher’s publicity department. I gave them a statement.”

  Beyond the window, in the dying breeze, queen palms trembled as if in delicious anticipation of rain. The moored boats rocked gently in the harbor’s tamed swells. So lovely yet in some way … troubling.

  “What about Penny?” Hud asked.

  “I gave her publisher a statement, too.”

  “How’s her agent?”

  “Alma wasn’t in the house when it blew, Hud. She’s in New York.”

  “I mean the trauma. To Penny. Losing a house. Makes a woman think. For Penny, a turning point. Maybe it’s time. For change.”

  Although he was in his seventh marriage, this might have been the first occasion in his life when Hud Jacklight tried to imagine what a woman thought about anything.

  I punctured his swelling hope: “Penny thinks losing a house is enough change for a while.”