Other Side of the Woods

by Koontz, Dean

  Their bedroom was traditionally furnished, and the walls were brightened by poster-size photos of huge buildings in mid-collapse, structures that Grim and Clo had been paid to implode. The space was cozy, if claustrophobic due to the lack of windows.

  They did not live in the stronghold 24/7. Above ground, they had a comfortable hacienda-style residence where they spent most of their time, except for those occasions when they flew off to far cities with their demolition team to create massive piles of rubble for substantial fees, which they referred to as having a blast, as in “We’re having a blast in Dallas next Thursday.”

  They owned this above-ground house under a false name. They lived in it under another false name. A serious survivalist could disappear from the all-seeing eye of the state and move about like smoke, if he had to, before finally going underground.

  Their official address was the small combination office and apartment in Anaheim, where a secretary who resembled the actress Judi Dench screened job offers to be sure the people who wanted a building blown up had both the authority and a legitimate reason to contract for the demolition.

  Here in the canyon, they never spoke to their neighbors, which was no loss, considering that the nearest were at a distance and were an uncommunicative couple who, believing they had been twice taken against their will into spacecraft from a distant star, were hiding out from evil extraterrestrials.

  Although they lived largely above ground, Grimbald and Clotilda went subterranean two or three days every month—what they called “in lockdown”—to stay in practice for the End of Days.

  Because they seemed always to be finding excuses to go into emergency lockdowns in addition to the regularly scheduled ones—a scary declaration by the insane leader of Iran, a scary declaration by the benighted leader of the United States, and in this instance the destruction of our house—I suspected they preferred the bunker to the sunlit world but would feel too eccentric if they admitted it.

  The main chamber, a combination living room and kitchen, offered armchairs, a sofa, wonderful stained-glass lamps, fantasy art that Penny—a homeschooled girl herself—had drawn as a teenager, and a sturdy knotty-pine dining table.

  Their stronghold enjoyed an effective exhaust system that could separate a single source of smoke into seven wispy streams, dispersing them to different corners of the woods above, to avoid detection by roving bands of post-catastrophe barbarians or genetic-plague zombies, or whatever hellish beings might one day stalk the ruins of the world.

  Consequently, Clotilda had the convenience of a wood-burning stove, on which she was cooking when we arrived. The fragrant air smelled of home fries, onions, and pot roast.

  “Cupcake!” Grim called to her. “I didn’t have to kill anyone, it was really the kids ringing the bell.”

  Clotilda Boom—born Nancy, maiden name Farnham—was an Amazon: six feet three, broad shoulders, full bosom, strong arms, a spine as straight as a plumb line. Her thick mane of midnight hair, without a touch of gray, usually lay in intricate braids down her back, but now hung loose, great black curtains billowing around a striking face surprisingly beautiful considering that her features were bold enough for an Eskimo totem pole or the prow of a Viking longboat.

  She wore laced boots that probably went to her knees, a long skirt of coarse gray material, a belt with a fang-bared serpent’s head for a buckle, a man’s blue denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a silver pendant, an amulet in which she kept a lock of hair from the mane of a horse that had trampled to death a man who had tried but failed to rape her when she was fourteen.

  Turning away from the stove, her face bright with sweat and with happiness at the sight of us, Clotilda said, “I knew you would come tonight when I saw the strange vein patterns in one of the basil leaves I put in the soup this afternoon.”

  I’ve known Clotilda for a decade, yet I can’t say with certitude if her claim to the perceptions of a Gypsy seer is serious or tongue-in-cheek. Penny, who has known her mother longer than she has known anyone, is likewise unsure, which argues that Clo is playing a sly game, testing our gullibility, tolerance, and commitment to reason.

  The name Clotilda comes from the Old German word that means “renowned in battle.”

  Clo threw her arms around Penny, lifted her off the floor, and kissed her two, three, four times. “Punkin’, you’re a slip of a thing, you aren’t eating, you’re going to wither away.”

  “I eat well, Mom,” Penny assured her, waiting to be put down.

  “You’ve gone off meat!” Clo declared. “Oh, girl, you’ve become a grazer!”

  “No, Mom. I could never do that.”

  “Vegetarianism kills,” Clo warned. “Your vital organs shrivel, your brain dims. Look in a mirror at your teeth. You have central incisors, lateral incisors, canines—all for the purpose of chewing meat. Vegetarianism is unnatural, it’s not right, it’s creepy.”

  “I eat plenty of meat,” Penny assured her. “I eat it every chance I get. I live for meat.”

  “Eating it often isn’t enough if you’re eating small portions,” Clo said, finally returning my wife to her feet.

  Sometimes I find it hard to believe that Grimbald and Clotilda produced a daughter as petite, lithe, and comparatively demure as Penny. Two of the three proofs that she is their offspring—her hair as black as Clotilda’s, her blue eyes the same shade as Grimbald’s—do not convince. For me, the case is made by the fact that, in spite of her size, Penny is as tough and just as indomitable as the Booms.

  Clotilda came to me as if she were a Valkyrie swooping down on a dying warrior to take possession of his soul, and I half feared she would sweep me off the floor and hold me in the crook of her arm.

  She kissed my cheek. “Seeing you lifts my heart, Hildebrand.”

  “Likewise, Nancy.”

  “Ah, yes, yes, I forgot—you prefer Cubby.”

  “Since it’s my name. You look wonderful, Clotilda.”

  “Every night before going to bed, I put a small silk bag full of thyme leaves under my pillow. You look very fit yourself.”

  To please her and forestall a lecture, I said, “I ate the better part of a cow last month.”

  “There is no lesser part of a cow. They are entirely delicious.”

  Turning from me, she descended upon Milo and clasped his head with both hands. Speaking in Gaelic between kisses, she smooched his brow, his eyes, his nose, his cheeks, each corner of his mouth, his chin. I believe it was some kind of blessing.

  Next she plucked Lassie from the boy’s embrace. Holding the dog at arm’s length, laughing with delight, she turned rapidly in circles, her skirt flaring.

  Were I to do anything of that kind, Lassie would either whimper with fear or bare her teeth and growl me to a stop. In Clotilda’s hands, she grinned not with anxiety but with obvious pleasure, and her tail wagged, wagged, wagged.

  Put on the floor, the dog tottered dizzily, but Clo remained in full control of herself and rushed back to the woodstove to tend to her cooking before anything burned.

  “You’ll stay for dinner,” Grimbald declared.

  Before we could reply, Clo said, “They already had dinner. I saw it in the basil leaf.”

  “Then while we’re having dinner,” Grimbald said, “you’ll tell us more about the house blowing up, what you know of the method, how it looked as it fell, the debris pattern.”

  “They came for guns,” Clo told him.

  “Did you see that in the basil leaf?” I asked.

  Pointing to the stone floor, Penny said, “I think she’ll tell you that she read the pattern of the water drops that fell from Milo’s raincoat.”

  “Exactly right, dear,” said Clotilda, pointing a wooden spatula at her for emphasis. “So—you finally admit I have at least a little of the soothsayer’s gift.”

  “What you have, Mom, is a gift for drama, for being enigmatical, and for caring.”

  “My daughter the skeptic. But I love you, too, dear.”

 
; At last putting down Milo, dropping to one knee, and helping the boy out of his raincoat, Grim said, “Guns? But I thought, Cub, you were against guns.”

  “I’m not against them for other people, Grim. But for me … I’ve just always had an aversion to them.”

  “And now?”

  “I’m getting over it.”

  From the main room of the stronghold, on your way to the armory, you pass through Penny’s old bedroom. For fifteen years, since she moved out, her folks have left it exactly as it was throughout her childhood and most of her teen years, when she spent the monthly lockdowns underground with them.

  Partly for sentimental reasons, they have not expanded the armory into her old quarters. They also hope that Penny and I will recognize the signs of impending Armageddon and will join them in this citadel of survivalism before a politician or a mad mullah, or a crazed dictator, or a group of angry utopians, or just the grinding work of the federal bureaucracy destroys civilization.

  I don’t rule out the possibility of one day taking shelter with them. Before I move in, however, I will insist that they remove from Penny’s room the poster of Jon Bon Jovi naked to the waist, as I do not want to remind her that she has settled for much less than her teenage dreams.

  The armory is next to the last major room in their subterranean complex. It contains a breathtaking array of weapons, as well as a supply of ammunition that would have lasted the defenders of the Alamo at least five years.

  Of course, back when Penny was Brunhild, she was raised with guns. Although she had thus far deferred to my disinclination to own one, since our marriage she accompanied her parents twice a year to a shooting range, where they kept their marksmanship sharp.

  I would have preferred to stay in the kitchen with Clotilda and Milo. But in defense of my family, if I truly did intend to overcome my aversion to firearms, I would have to look at one and even touch one sooner or later.

  Penny and her father engaged in such technical discussions of the choices of weaponry available to us that although I tried hard to listen to them and to learn, I finally could make no more sense of their conversation than I could of the Gaelic with which Clotilda had blessed my son. Soon they managed to do what I would have thought impossible: They made guns seem less scary than boring.

  I wandered out of the armory, into the final and largest chamber in the stronghold. Here lay the proof, if I had needed it, that Grim and Clo were not insane, that they were no worse than eccentric to the max.

  Their survivalism was not just about the preservation of their lives in the event of universal destruction. They hoped as well to preserve the fundamental works of Western thought and art that had given the world—for a while—the only societies that believed every individual was born with a dignity and a God-given right to freedom that no one had the authority to deny or to abridge.

  Books.

  The classic works of Greek philosophy: Aristophanes … Aristotle, Plato …

  The plays of Euripides. Plutarch on the lives of legendary and real Grecians and Romans. Herodotus on ancient history. Hippocrates on medicine. Euclid and Archimedes on geometry and math.

  The masterpieces of the Middle Ages: Dante … Chaucer … Saint Thomas Aquinas …

  From Shakespeare to Boswell’s Life of Johnson, from Dickens to Dostoyevsky …

  Of works published in the twentieth century, which produced more books than any other, they preserved fewer than a hundred titles. Conrad, bridging centuries with Heart of Darkness. Bellow … Churchill … Orwell … O’Connor … Pasternak … Waugh …

  They kept three copies of each book. Two were carefully vacuum-sealed in plastic, using a kitchen appliance designed to package leftovers for the freezer, but the third copy remained accessible for their use.

  I am led to believe that the rumored other family strongholds have libraries of their own, that perhaps some have collections of reproductions of the great art produced before the decline of the West, when the purposes of art were celebration and reflection instead of transgression and negation.

  There are times when even extreme eccentricity is not abnormal but merely irregular, and there are even times when it is wisdom. All that seemed obsessive about the Booms’ stronghold might on reconsideration be seen as prudent, and all that appeared selfish might be noble.

  When I returned to the armory, Penny and Grimbald were closing a pair of metal attaché cases that contained the weapons and the ammunition that they had chosen for us.

  Handing one of the cases to me, Grim said, “Penny can teach you gun safety and how to shoot. If I believed in reincarnation, I’d say she was Annie Oakley in a previous life.”

  My wife, the adorable gun nut.

  Grim snapped thumb and middle finger. “Oh, right! And I’ve got those items Milo called me about.”

  For a disconcerting moment, I thought he meant that our boy had requested weapons of his own.

  “No, no,” said Grimbald. “A month ago he called me with a list of electronic items and highly specialized microchips.”

  “But I always get him what he wants.”

  Turning from us and lumbering deeper into the armory, like Thor trying to remember where he stored his latest batch of thunderbolts, Grim said, “Oh, you could never have gotten these things. They’re embargoed.”

  “Embargoed by whom?”

  “Government.” He withdrew a small suitcase from a cabinet. “You have to have contacts in the black market.”

  “Why?”

  Returning with the suitcase, Grimbald grinned and winked. “Well, let’s just say these items have … military applications.”

  Penny and I exchanged ten thousand words of concern in just a glance.

  Grimbald wondered, “What’s the nipper up to, anyway?”

  “Something very different from an interstellar communications device,” I said. “That’s all we know.”

  “He’s going to do something spectacular one day,” Grimbald declared.

  “We’re half afraid of that,” I said.

  When we returned to the kitchen, Milo was sitting on a stool while Clotilda, furiously cooking at the wood-burning stove, regaled him with what she had learned about the future from that morning’s coffee grounds.

  When Grim told Milo that the suitcase contained the forbidden electronics, Penny said, “I’m surprised you’d coerce your grandfather into committing a crime.”

  “Now, punkin’,” Grim admonished, “I’ve been buying illegal weapons most of my life. This stuff isn’t weaponry. This is just a little favor for my only grandchild.”

  Clearly embarrassed, Milo said, “It’s not that much of a crime, Mom. Besides, I’m not going to do anything wrong with the stuff.”

  “What are you going to do with it?” I asked.

  “This cool thing.”

  “What thing?”

  “It’s the kind of thing you can’t describe.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  “It’s the kind of thing you’ve got to experience,” said Milo.

  “When are we going to experience it?”

  The boy shrugged. “Sometime.”

  Clotilda made a pitch to keep Milo with them in lockdown. “Your house blew up, you need guns. It’s none of our business what’s going on, but obviously you’ve got some problems, and he’ll be safer here.”

  “Of course, it’s your business, Mom,” Penny said. “And I gave Dad a cut-to-the-chase version while we were in the armory.” To me, she added, “Maybe we should leave Milo here.”

  Before I could respond, Milo spoke in a whisper that carried like a shout: “If you don’t take me, you’ll both be killed.”

  His blue eyes were even more compelling than his mother’s. He stared at me, and then at Penny.

  “You need me,” he told his mother. “You don’t know why yet, but you’ll find out.”

  Again he turned his attention to me. His sweet face was that of a child, but his eyes were those of a grown man who had peered into the
abyss and who was not afraid to gaze into it again.

  Still in that remarkable hushed voice, he said, “I’m small, I’m young—and I’m so different. You’ve always respected that difference, and you’ve always trusted it. Trust me now. There’s a reason I am the way I am, and there’s a reason I was born to you. There’s always a reason. We belong together.”

  Never had the nickname Spooky been better suited to him.

  “All right?” I asked Penny.

  She nodded. “All right.”

  When Milo smiled, I found his smile contagious.

  Clotilda took one egg from a thatched-reed basket full of them and threw it on the floor. For a moment, she studied the splatter of white, yolk, and shell. “He’s right. If you don’t take him with you, we’ll never see either of you again.”

  From his perch upon the stool, Milo surveyed the ruined egg, then grinned up at his grandfather. “Grandma’s a hoot.”

  “She’s a hoot and a half,” Grimbald confirmed, and beamed with great affection at his bride. “I remember when I first saw her—such a radiant vision in the woods, on her knees, arms up to the elbows in a deer carcass.”

  A girlish blush suffused Clo’s face as she was swept away by this romantic memory. “After you shoot it, gutting it in the woods saves a mess at home later. But there’s always some danger that the blood smell will draw hungry critters. Your grandfather was standing in tree shadows, and when I looked up, I thought he must be a bear.”

  “She moved so fast, from carcass to rifle,” Grim remembered, “that I almost became her second kill of the day.”

  Both he and Clo laughed, and she said, “But then he blurts out ‘I have seen Diana, Roman goddess of the hunt and of the moon, here abroad in daylight and brighter than the sun.’”

  “Grimpa really said that?” Milo asked.

  “He really did. So I knew right then I either had to shoot him or marry him.”

  Having heard this story countless times before, Penny was less enchanted than Milo. “We’ve got a long way to go. Better get moving. Where’s Lassie?”