by Dean Koontz
At the time, she had taken five other shots that she deemed less desirable than the one she used at the easel. She retrieved printouts of them from her desk and brought them to the draftsman’s table to study each under the big magnifying lens.
In four of the five photos, the figure appeared as a shadow in the mirror. It could not be a reflection of an inanimate object that happened to resemble the silhouette of a tall man, because from shot to shot it subtly changed position.
Nicky thought back to the imagined murky presence in the master bathroom and the shattering mirror that hadn’t really shattered, the hallucination that she persisted in attributing to an adverse reaction to Vicodin. She sensed that the first figure and this one in the living-room mirror must be related, but she could not see how. The first had been a moment of delirium, but this one could be seen in five of six photographs, as real in its way as any of the three children, yet no one had been there.
After reviewing the photos again under the magnifier, Nicolette remained baffled, but her intuition bored with a sharper bit, drilled deep, and worry welled up.
31
BRENDA SALSETTO WOBURN SAT WITH HER TWELVE-YEAR-OLD son, Lenny, on the living-room sofa, watching TV. Lenny liked being with his mom more than he liked being anywhere else, and with Brenda the feeling was mutual. He was her Down syndrome boy, as sweet and true as anyone she had ever known, wise in his way, always surprising her with his observations, which were as clear and thought-provoking as they were uncomplicated.
Davinia, seventeen, was studying in her room, and Jack, Brenda’s husband, worked in the kitchen, testing a recipe for veggie lasagne that, if it turned out well, would be the next night’s dinner. Jack was a parks-department supervisor, a good man who had become a fan of the Food Network. He discovered that he possessed a previously unrecognized culinary talent.
The family movie on TV featured talking dogs, and Lenny giggled frequently. Brenda should have been relaxed; but she was not. For the past five days, she had been preoccupied with how to respond to something her brother had done and something unspeakable that he might have intended to do.
Brenda feared her younger brother, Reese. She knew that after she left home when she was eighteen, Reese molested their sister, Jean, from the time the timid girl was seven years old until she committed suicide at eleven. Brenda had no proof, only something Jean said to her on the phone a few hours before she hung herself, so long ago. She had more reasons to despise her brother than to fear him, but her fear of him was great.
She tried with some success to minimize their contact over the years. But she knew that if she rejected him outright for any reason or without expressing a reason, her repudiation would be a boil in his mind, festering over weeks or months until bitter resentment darkened into anger, anger into rage, rage into fury, and he would be swept to a violent reaction. He wanted everything that he didn’t have and wanted it with a frightening vehemence, not just material possessions but also admiration and respect, which he believed could be gotten with intimidation and brute force as surely as could money.
A few days earlier, Reese came to visit in the early afternoon of a school holiday, when Jack and Brenda were at work. Only Davinia and Lenny were home. He came with comic books and candy for Lenny, a wristwatch set with diamonds for Davinia. Never before had he been alone with the kids and never had he brought them anything. Davinia knew the wristwatch was an inappropriate gift, too expensive, its very value an improper insinuation. Reese played at being a loving uncle, which he had never been before, and found every excuse to press close to Davinia. He held her hand, his touch lingered over her bare arms, admiringly he smoothed her hair away from her face. Instead of kissing her chastely on the cheek, he kissed the corner of her mouth, and his lips would have brushed across hers if she had not pulled away.
Davinia was a bright but inexperienced girl who dated little and then only boys as innocent as she. Her beauty was enchanting, especially because it was a beauty equally of body, mind, and soul—and because in her humility she didn’t understand the power of her appearance. She was capable of finding joy in small things, in the flight of a bird or a cup of tea, and she had told her parents that she might choose a religious life in one sisterhood or another.
Brenda wondered what horror might have occurred during Reese’s unannounced visit if, shortly after his arrival, Jack’s sister Lois had not stopped by unexpectedly. Davinia was his niece, but that relationship meant nothing to a man who considered his little sister to be fair game and drove her to self-destruction. Brenda had seen him watch Davinia with lascivious interest, but she had been in denial of the possibility that he might act on his desire. Davinia was not as delicate as she looked, not emotionally fragile; but rape might do more than devastate her, might destroy her. Brenda was at times physically ill with the thought of it.
She and Jack were currently deciding whether she should give up her job to be sure the kids were never alone in the house. They had taken other steps to prevent the unthinkable. But Reese was clever, cunning, bold, without moral constraints, and unpredictable.
A slight draft motivated Brenda to get another afghan from a chair across the room. As she passed a window, Reese’s Mercedes pulled in to their driveway. He drove too fast, stopping with a bark of brakes.
At once, Brenda suspected her brother intended to cause some kind of trouble. If he didn’t intend it, he would foment it anyway. She shouted toward the kitchen, “Jack, Reese is here!”
She hurried Lenny to his sister’s room and told them to lock the door. Maybe she was overreacting. Maybe Reese had come back only to get the diamond wristwatch that he refused to take when Davinia tried to return it to him.
Reese Salsetto—more accurately, the rider that owns him now—raps lightly on one of the four windowpanes in the back door, and waves at Jack, who is doing women’s work in the kitchen, preparing something for the oven. Wiping his hands on his apron, Jack frowns as he approaches the door, but Reese gives him a sheepish grin and tries to look as if he has come to apologize for something, because Jack and Brenda are the kind of self-righteous prigs who at any one time have a thousand reasons why they should receive apologies.
Jack opens the door and says, “Reese, we’ve got to talk about some things,” and Reese says, “No, we don’t,” and shoots him twice with the silencer-equipped pistol. As if the muffled shots require an equally discreet response, Jack drops as quietly as a sack of laundry, and Reese steps over the body, closing the door behind him. This is the Sollenburgs redux, husband and wife and son shot dead, and then the daughter used in ways that she has never comprehended that she might be used. Although the assault begins on the evening of the thirty-second day after the Lucas murders, Reese and his rider will not be done with Davinia Woburn until well into the morning of October fifth, six or eight hours from now.
Brenda, succulent mother of the much-desired piglet, hurries into the kitchen, and Reese, speaking for himself and for his ventriloquist, says, “When I’m done with her, she’ll hang herself like Jean.” But his taunt comes at an unexpected cost when Brenda raises a .38 revolver in a two-hand grip and pops him three times, the third time in the throat. The mount dies under the rider.
Brenda is a good woman who would have rescued her sister, Jean, if she had known what Reese intended, but her failure to save her sister has left her with a settled anger that has simmered in her for all these years. The bitter anger is the stirrup that might allow her to be mounted, and because she curses Reese as she kills him, the way into her is through the mouth.
She feels the rider enter and struggles fiercely to resist, reeling backward against a bank of cabinets, door pulls gouging at her back and buttocks. The rider encourages her anger, for if anger can be raised to fury, and if fury and terror crowd out all other feelings, she can be taken. Unlike many others who do not fully understand the nature of their rider, this woman knows it, not by name but for what it is. She sees at once the consequences of being taken, that i
t will ride her to her children and force her to abuse, torture, and murder them, and last of all to degrade herself in as many ways as its rich imagination can invent.
Just as her spine begins to feel like an accommodating saddle, she finds another emotion besides rage and terror, and she recalls the prayer of Saint Michael, which she hasn’t said since adolescence.
This sudden vomitous spew of pious words will not repel her new master, because it now rules her spine and will soon have control of her bones down to the marrow. The rider is moments away from using her voice for a cry of triumph when she turns the revolver on herself and squeezes off a round that punches through her chest, past her heart, ricochets off her sternum, off a clavicle, and lodges under her left scapular. White-hot pain magnifies her terror but entirely evaporates her rage. And as she falls to the floor, in the humble recognition of her mortality, she casts off her rider.
Recklessly, the son and the exquisitely ripe daughter respond to the shots, as though even weaponless they can halt the violence, perhaps with—what?—his guileless tears and with her pure heart. They are naive, helpless, the colt and filly, thinking meat machines that think too little. The rider wants the boy, for with the boy, the juicy piglet can still be reduced to a ferociously used, broken, despairing thing. But the boy is only twelve and, more to the point, he has a condition that renders him the next thing to a perpetual innocent, with no corruptions adequate to serve as grips for a mounting. The weeping girl cannot be saddled, either. The rider can only watch with escalating fury as Davinia directs the boy to call 911 and as she kneels beside the fallen mother, competent in spite of her tears, gently elevating the mother’s head to improve her breathing.
No ride exists here, nothing to be taken but the house itself, its fleshless bones a poor substitute for a living host. A haunt is never a fraction as sweet as a possession, but soon other possible hosts will arrive, and there is no danger that this house will become a prison. Furious, the spirit takes the house with such force that a loud boom passes through the walls, windowpanes rattle, draperies flap on rods, glasses and dishes clink and clatter on the kitchen shelves, and two oven doors fall open like gaping mouths.
32
DETECTIVE LIONEL TIMMINS KNEW THAT SOME IN THE DEPARTMENT, among themselves, called him the Walking Chest, and still others called him the Dog, because he had a bulldog face and he was difficult to shake loose when he got his teeth in a case. He had his teeth in this one, and he didn’t like the taste of it.
Because this was Homicide South, within the Lake District and only two blocks from his home, he caught the call and arrived behind the ambulance as its siren wound down to silence and the paramedics threw open their doors, the earliest he had ever arrived at a crime scene.
The medics stabilized the wounded—the husband critical, the wife less serious but not good—and took them away as four uniforms arrived to secure the scene. Lionel managed to ask a few questions and get answers from the woman before they carried her out.
The girl, Davinia, had called an aunt to take her and Lenny to the hospital. Lionel waited with them in the living room.
Wrenched with grief but determined to be brave, the boy held fast to his sister’s hand, so innocent of evil until now that his sudden education was a painful thing to see.
The girl was remarkable, a delicate rock. Although slender and only about five feet four, she seemed tall, strong, sure. Although her eyes, like her brother’s, glistened with tears, hers didn’t spill as his did. Lionel well knew that beauty was power, but her power had a deeper source.
Davinia provided the identity of the dead man in the kitchen and spoke frankly but not angrily about his visit five days earlier. She produced the unwanted diamond wristwatch, which looked like a year’s wages.
“I want to be rid of it,” she said. “It’s a terrible thing.”
“This isn’t evidence, I can’t take it,” Lionel said. “Your mother shot him in self-defense. There won’t be any trial of anyone.”
“Can’t you put it with his body?”
“No. Some charity might be the place for it.”
Neither Davinia nor Lenny had seen events unfold in the kitchen, but from the time line they could provide, Lionel deduced the order in which the shootings occurred.
The aunt appeared, the children went with her to the hospital, and the criminalists arrived to sift the scene.
A flash report on Reese Salsetto revealed one conviction and much suspicion. He had served a year in prison when, if all were known, he might have deserved a century.
The criminalists came quickly to the determination that Reese shot Jack Woburn with the 9-mm pistol fitted with a sound suppressor and that Brenda Woburn killed Reese with her .38 revolver.
According to Brenda, she stumbled, fell against some cabinets, and shot herself after killing her brother. Lionel and the lab boys found it difficult to believe that a woman proficient enough with a handgun to put three centralized rounds in a man at a distance of even just fifteen feet would accidentally shoot herself in the chest.
Furthermore, though Reese might be a hothead, he had managed to conduct more than a decade of criminal enterprise with only one arrest and one conviction. Even if, as Brenda had said, he molested their younger sister, Jean, when he was a teenager, reason argued that he would have tried to get to his niece in a way that was as circumspect as his behavior with Jean—and more in accord with the weasely business with the wristwatch. Reese cared too much about Reese to try to kidnap the niece by launching a reckless assault on the entire Woburn family.
Leaving the kitchen to the techs, the uniforms outside chasing away curious neighbors and swapping bullshit stories, Lionel walked the rest of the downstairs, touching nothing, studying everything. He was troubled that the facts of the shooting scenario were beads on a string of irrationality and therefore, though facts, were worth no more than the weak filament on which they were strung.
Something else bothered him, too, but he couldn’t identify the source of his uneasiness until, standing in the dining room, he saw movement from the corner of his eye. He turned to watch the pendant crystals swaying on the simple chandelier above the table. In the absence of a draft, with no vibration to be felt or heard, the easy pendulum motion of the crystals seemed inexplicable. Perhaps more curious was the lack of uniformity in their arcs: some swung north-south, some east-west, others to different points of the compass. The crystals slowed and stopped as he watched—and then he turned toward a noise behind him. It was a mere rustle, it could have been anything or nothing, but some quality of it caused his neck hairs to prickle. He realized that in addition to the weaknesses in the crime scenario, the other thing that bothered him was the house.
He did not know what he meant by that.
Some houses had a history that colored your feeling about them: murder houses, for instance, in which innocents had been tortured and slaughtered. The shootings in the kitchen didn’t qualify because they were too clean, insufficiently perverse. Lionel knew nothing about the history of this house, and based on the impression that Lenny and Davinia made on him, he doubted this was a family with dark secrets.
A house could subtly abrade your nerves if the proportions of its rooms were wrong, if the colors were harsh, if items of furniture clashed with one another. But this architecture was harmonious, the colors pleasant, the furniture homey and of a kind.
Waiting for the rustle to repeat, Lionel knew what bothered him about the house: a feeling of being watched. In spite of having been railroaded for murder and having spent six years in prison, he wasn’t prone to paranoia. In his work, he relied on a sober instinct for danger, and the only thing that plucked his fear wire was the thought of losing his mom or one of the aunts who lived with him.
Overhead, floorboards creaked as someone crossed an upstairs room. The family was at the hospital. The criminalists were in the kitchen and had no reason to venture to the second floor.
He returned to the hallway and stood at the
foot of the stairs, looking up, listening. A soft thump might have been a door closing above or only a settling noise. Another thump.
Lionel ascended to the second floor and conducted a casual but thorough search. The room doors were all open or ajar, and he toed or elbowed them wider, to pass through. Light switches chased darkness but nothing else, no intruder.
The final room at the end of the hall seemed to be Davinia’s. The decor was feminine but not frilly, almost austere. Her books proved to be of a more serious nature than he might have expected.
She had been doing homework at a table that served as her desk. Her computer remained on.
The screen saver consisted of ceaselessly shifting shapes in gold, red, and a variety of blues. He had never seen anything quite like it, and in fact it was beautiful, worth watching for a minute, almost mesmerizing.
Although he expected the shapes to remain mysterious, fluid and continuously changing, the blues and golds suddenly coalesced into a handprint on a purling red background, as though someone flattened a palm against the inner face of the screen.
Lionel found himself in the desk chair without realizing that he had sat down. He watched, almost as an observer of someone else’s action, as his right hand moved forward to match itself to the handprint on the screen.
On contact, Lionel felt a cold quivering against his palm and spread fingers, merely an odd vibration at first, but quickly growing into a vigorous squirming sensation, as if his hand were pressed against a mass of newborn snakes. Just as his curiosity gave way to alarm, something nipped lightly at the pad of his thumb, a fang prick but not a full bite, as if one of the imagined serpents were testing his susceptibility to their venom. He snatched his hand away from the screen and shot up from the chair.