Other Side of the Woods

by Koontz, Dean

  Doors opened like spaceship portals, and three men stepped down and out of the huge vehicle. Even in the mist, I could see that one of them was Shearman Waxx.

  We were up against an organization, all right, and it was not the National Society of Book and Art Critics.

  Waxx was holding a cell phone to his left ear, and behind me in the hallway, a phone in one of Booth’s pockets played a few bars of Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”

  I turned away from the front door, executed some broken-field running to quick-step through the horror on the hallway floor, and raced toward the back of the house as Booth’s phone rang again.

  In the kitchen, Penny was polishing a coffee mug with a dishtowel, and Milo used a paper towel to buff prints off his juice glass.

  Maybe this was only my perception, subjective and not true, but Milo appeared to have changed in minutes, as if the events in the hallway, which he could imagine without seeing, had been an immersion in a baptistery that bleached out a measure of his innocence and left in him a sediment of experience that could never be washed away.

  When he looked at me, his beautiful blue eyes seemed to contain shadows that had never before veiled them. His face was pale, his lips paler, his hands dove-white, as if all the blood had rushed to his heart, to fortify it after the blow that it had taken as he stood listening to his parents kill and nearly be killed.

  I wanted to sweep him off the floor, hug him tight, kiss him, and talk him through this terrible moment, but to do so would be to ensure his death and mine, so completely had our lives spiraled out of our control.

  “Waxx is here,” I said, “and he’s not alone.”

  Penny dropped the dishtowel, put down the mug, drew her pistol, and I discovered my gun already in my hand, although I did not recall having withdrawn it from the holster as I raced along the hallway.

  The doorbell rang.

  The chimes conflicted with a final burst of “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” before Waxx’s call went to voice mail.

  Snatching open the back door, I said, “Not south across the meadow. They might spot us before we’re hidden by the fog.”

  They preceded me onto the back porch, and I pulled the door shut behind us.

  “Straight east,” I urged, “across the backyard, find the forest. We’ll stay in the trees around the meadow to the Mountaineer.”

  We were at the head of the porch steps when the sudden swelling roar of an engine froze us.

  Around the south side of the house came the Hummer, speeding across the lawn, wide tires unfazed by the wet grass. That it was black like a hearse seemed appropriate.

  Instead of turning right and parking athwart the porch steps, blocking our escape, the Hummer continued east without hesitation. Failing to glance our way, the driver had not seen us.

  The enormous vehicle vanished into the morning fog, and its crisp beams diffused, becoming an unearthly glow, goblin light.

  Apparently, he intended to park beyond view of the house so that if we came visiting, as they hoped, we would think the place deserted. They would move the sedan for the same reason.

  Out in the murk, the Hummer stopped. The driver killed the engine and the lights.

  If he meant to walk back to the house, we could no longer go east toward the woods because we would risk encountering him. The slam of the driver’s door carried clearly in the moist air. He was returning on foot.

  The only route left to us was north, away from the house, then west and across the state route, thereafter south and finally east across the road again to the Mountaineer.

  I indicated north, and Penny nodded, and the three of us took one step off the porch before we heard the voices: two men, coming around the north side of the house, evidently to try the back door.

  We could get out of sight quickly enough only if we retreated to the kitchen.

  Understandably, Penny was averse to going into the house again, and she hesitated. In an instant, however, she realized we couldn’t attempt to take these two men by surprise and shoot them dead because that still left one out front plus the driver, who would be alerted by gunfire. Our luck wouldn’t hold through so many confrontations.

  Besides, here in the open, we couldn’t protect Milo from return fire if we drew any.

  Crossing the porch, I feared the back door had locked when we closed it behind us, but that was not the case. Holding Milo’s hand, Penny ducked inside, and I followed.

  I almost closed the door and engaged the deadbolt. Instead, I left it ajar, suggesting we had successfully escaped by this route.

  The second floor didn’t appeal. We might go through a window, onto a porch roof, drop to a lawn, but doing so quietly and with Milo required the Fates to be in a better mood than lately possessed them.

  When Penny opened an interior door, I glimpsed a steep flight of concrete stairs descending into gloom. This seemed to be the worst of all possible options.

  Voices outside. Footfalls on the back-porch steps.

  The cellar was no longer merely an option. It was the only place we could go.

  I followed Milo and Penny onto the descending stairs and quietly closed the door behind us.

  The chamber below was not a black pit. A pale radiance suggested that part of the cellar was aboveground, with a few narrow windows near the ceiling.

  Nevertheless, darkness dominated. If we tried to proceed in it, inevitably we would blunder into something and make a lot of noise.

  At the top of the stairs, I felt the wall, found the switch, and risked the lights.

  Penny and Milo hurried down the concrete steps.

  As I followed them, I heard voices in the kitchen.

  Stepping away from the bottom of the stairs, I counted three casement windows in the north wall and three in the south, which were the sides of the house lacking porches. Set just under the ceiling, these openings probably measured eighteen inches wide by a foot high. The windows were hinged and were primarily intended to provide periodic ventilation.

  On this foggy morning, they admitted little light; and even Milo would have needed to be a circus contortionist to escape through one of them.

  The fluorescent tubes on the ceiling provided inadequate light, leaving portions of the cellar in gray shadows, and a couple of them continuously blinked.

  From overhead came an exclamation of surprise, followed by hurried footsteps. The bodies had been discovered in the downstairs hallway.

  The open back door would suggest to Waxx and to his fellow booklovers that whoever shot Booth and Oswald had left the premises. But these were pros, and they would search the house to confirm that conclusion.

  There were four of them. The search would go quickly.

  Penny opened one of two doors and turned on a light, revealing an eight-foot-square chamber with a two-foot-square, hinged iron plate on one wall. In this coal room, from the days before the gas furnace, the wall plate had been raised to accommodate the delivery truck’s chute. Black dust, permanently impressed into the walls, lent the air an anthracite odor.

  The rusted iron plate hung on corroded hinges. If it could be opened at all, it would make more noise than rolling back the door on the tomb of a pharaoh dead two thousand years.

  Upstairs, the voices and the footsteps had fallen silent. The cautious but swift search of the house had begun. Most likely, they would start at the top and work down.

  As Penny closed the first door, I disengaged a deadbolt and opened the second. Beyond lay a flight of exterior stairs.

  A pair of rain doors covered the steps, sloping at a twenty-degree angle from the house. They were secured by a hasp. Joining the hinged strap to the swivel eye, the padlock could be opened only with a key.

  No way out.

  As I closed and locked the door, leaving it the way I found it, Milo whispered, “Dad. Take this.”

  When I turned, I found him holding out to me a four-inch-long, cut-crystal bottle with a domed silver cap that lacked holes.

  “Wh
at’s this?”

  “Used to be a saltshaker.”

  “What is it now?”

  “It’s a thing that does something. Don’t try to take the cap off, it’s glued tight. Keep it in a pocket. Don’t lose it, don’t lose it, don’t lose it.”

  From the east end of the cellar, Penny stage-whispered, “Cubby, here.”

  She stood in front of the old coal furnace, which was not in use yet remained, perhaps because the great iron beast would be too much trouble to dismantle and remove, or perhaps because someone had a misguided idea about its historical value.

  To the left of the coal furnace stood the current gas model, smaller but still sizable. To the right were a hulking 100-gallon hot-water tank and a water softener with a large rock-salt tank.

  “The light’s poor here,” Penny said. “Not easy to tell there’s more than two feet of space between this equipment and the wall.”

  One of the two nearest fluorescent bulbs blinked continually, further confusing the eye because the strobe effect made everything seem to quiver.

  “There’s no other hiding place,” Penny said as Milo took another crystal saltshaker from a pocket of his quilted jacket and gave it to her. “Spooky, what’s in this?”

  “Quantum electrodynamic stuff.”

  I said, “Get behind the old furnace. There’s another light switch by the outer door, I’ve got to turn off the fluorescents.”

  As I went to kill the lights, I heard Milo whispering urgently to his mother, “Don’t try to take the cap off, it’s glued tight. Keep it in a pocket. Don’t lose it, don’t lose it, don’t lose it.”

  In the dark, I returned to Penny and Milo by feeling my way along the north wall to the northeast corner of the room, then along the east wall until I encountered the rock-salt tank and the water softener. I found the space behind it sufficiently accommodating, and I eased along until I was in back of the 100-gallon water heater.

  “You there?” I whispered.

  “Here,” Penny replied from behind the old coal furnace.

  As I settled gingerly into a crouch, my back to the wall, my knees against the platform on which the hot-water tank stood, Milo whispered, “Dad, what did you do with the thing?”

  “What thing? Oh, yeah, the quantum thermonuclear saltshaker.”

  “Quantum electrodynamic,” he corrected.

  “It’s in my right pants pocket.”

  “Don’t lose it.”

  “What if it breaks?”

  “It won’t break.”

  “Well, it’s crystal.”

  “Not really. Not anymore.”

  Penny said, “Ssshhhhh.”

  We sat in silence for almost a minute.

  Then I said, “How do I use it?”

  “You don’t,” Milo said.

  “But what’s it do?”

  “Something.”

  “It’s automatic?”

  “My unit is the controller.”

  Sensing that Penny was about to shush us again, I fell silent.

  The longer we waited in the dark, the more it seemed to me that we had done the wrong thing by hiding there.

  I was holding my pistol, and I was sure Penny must be holding hers, but I still felt trapped and helpless.

  If I voiced my doubt, Penny would ask what was Plan B. I didn’t have one. I kept my mouth shut.

  The lights came on.

  By tilting my head to the right, I could peer out through the narrow gap between the old furnace and the hot-water tank. I had a clear view of the coal-room door about thirty-five feet away.

  Farther to my right, Penny and Milo were discernible in the shadows.

  Because the cellar was mostly open and bare, with just a couple of stacks of crates and a line of support columns, the guy appeared at the coal room less than half a minute after the fluorescents came on.

  From this distance and in the inadequate light, I couldn’t see enough of him to provide a credible description. Suffice it to say that in terms of the physical qualities of long-ago movie stars, he was more like Lon Chaney Jr. than like either Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff, and nothing whatsoever like Cary Grant.

  He had a gun. I half expected that from now on everyone I met would have a gun, even if I lived for a hundred years.

  He opened the coal-room door and, like they do in the movies, he went in low and fast, gun arm out, the weapon just below his line of vision, left hand finding the light switch in an instant, as if by instinct.

  When the coal room proved to be deserted, he clicked off the lights in there and came out, noticeably more relaxed than when he had entered my field of vision. He looked as if he had decided that whoever killed Booth and Oswald was no longer in the house.

  Leaning left to peer through the narrow gap between the hot-water tank and the water softener, I watched him as he moved more casually to the exterior door, disengaged the deadbolt, and peered up the steps at the underside of the padlocked rain doors.

  From the farther end of the cellar, someone said, “Brock?”

  “Over here,” our hunter replied as he closed the exterior door.

  Leaning right once more, I saw Brock come face-to-face with Shearman Waxx in front of the coal-room door.

  Waxx had traded his hound’s-tooth sport coat with leather elbow patches for a tan cardigan sweater. He still wore a red bow tie.

  “Two clear bloody shoe prints, part of a third in the hallway,” Waxx said. “Small feet, shape of the shoe—has to have been a woman.”

  “What woman?”

  “It’s got to be Greenwich’s wife, the Boom woman.”

  “They’ve already been here?”

  “And gone. Three mugs in the kitchen. One with warm coffee.”

  “Warm?”

  “Plenty warm. The other two clean, one dry and sitting on a damp dishtowel, the other washed but still wet. They were having coffee with Walbert is what I think, when Rink and Shucker show up to whack him, and after it went down, they’re wiping off any prints they left. And there’s a clean glass on the counter, probably their weird little Einstein, and on the floor a few spilled drops of orange juice.”

  Brock said, “Waxx, you’re telling me a kid’s-book writer took out Rink and Shucker?”

  “Either she did or Greenwich did, or they did it together.”

  Evidently, Rink and Shucker were the real names of Booth and Oswald.

  “Sonofabitch, what kind of writers take down Rink and Shucker? We’ve been going through these people like … like …”

  “Butter through a knife,” Waxx said, heading back toward the stairs.

  Following Waxx, Brock declared, “By now, I know writers, and writers are fun to play with, you do what you want to them, they don’t play back at you.”

  “Her footprints in the hall were the thinnest film of blood,” Waxx said, “should have dried in five minutes, but they’re wet. So they slipped out the back after being here when we pulled up.”

  As their voices grew more difficult to hear, I rose behind the hot-water tank and slipped sideways, past the water softener and the rock-salt tank.

  From behind the furnace, Penny whispered, “Cubby, no!”

  I had to hear as much as possible. In the open, I could see Waxx and Brock more than halfway across the cellar, their backs to me.

  Crouched but visible to them if they turned, I moved quickly past a support column—

  “Where was their car?” Brock asked. “They didn’t come in a car?”

  —and I hid behind the first stack of crates.

  “They came in a car,” Waxx said. “Left it somewhere in the area— then to the house, came on foot. Soon as I realized the shoe prints are wet, I already called the sheriff to cooperate with roadblocks between here and Smokeville, and south before Titus Springs, only seven miles of road between.”

  They were nearly to the foot of the stairs. I risked exposure and followed them.

  “So they’re boxed?” Brock asked.

  “Boxed and bagged.”


  I dropped low behind the second stack of crates.

  Waxx said, “They have maybe a four-minute lead, not enough. The area, it’s quarantined, we’re coming in from both ends.”

  “Just our people or the sheriff’s, too?”

  “The sheriff is for the roadblocks only because he can set them up faster than we can. The rest is none of his business. Our people were killed. Nobody kills our people and gets away. Now it’s war.”

  “How many houses in those seven miles?”

  “Maybe twenty. We’ll sweep them all.”

  They were on the stairs, voices diminishing.

  “What about side roads?” Brock asked.

  “None paved. All the dirt roads are dead ends.”

  I hurried to the bottom of the stairs, staying just out of their line of sight if they should glance back.

  “Any vehicle not obviously one of ours gets stopped,” Waxx said.

  “What about Rink and the other two?”

  “We’ll haul them out later, torch the place so it looks like idiot kids did it. Right now, we need every man for the search.”

  I dared to ease into the stairwell, the better to hear them, as Brock asked, “Still have fun with them—or pop ’em on sight?”

  Stepping off the stairs into the kitchen, Waxx said, “We want them alive. Zazu has taken a special interest in them.”

  Brock had reached the top of the steps. When he switched off the lights, I ascended through the gloom, low and monkeylike in his wake, and heard him say, “Zazu? They’ll wish we’d tortured them and set them on fire.”

  He closed the door, and I was at it a moment later, listening.

  In the kitchen, Waxx said, “I have a plane standing by in Eureka to fly them south.”

  “The fog should lift soon,” Brock said. “That’ll help us.”

  A door opened … closed, and during the few seconds between, I heard a big engine fast approaching the house.

  Assuming both Waxx and Brock had left, I opened the stairhead door two inches and surveyed the kitchen.

  Through the windows, I saw them standing outside, on the back-porch steps, with a third man.