by Dean Koontz
In the dream, Ugly Al tried to force Zach to do something so evil and repulsive that even Hell wouldn’t let him in if he did it. When he refused, Ugly Al produced a meat cleaver and chopped once, twice, three times at Zach’s crotch.
Screaming in a dry breathless whisper, he sat up in bed with a lap full of warm blood. After desperately, interminably fumbling for the lamp switch, he discovered that of course he wasn’t emasculated for real, only symbolically: He had wet the stupid bed. He had never been a sleep piddler as a little kid. Now nearly fourteen, he had turned his bed into a freaking lake.
Leaping out of bed as if it were a skillet full of sizzling-hot oil, he peeled out of his saturated underwear and threw them on the bedclothes. He stripped the bed fast, before the mattress sustained damage, and piled everything on his desk after sweeping the blotter and his drawing tablet to the floor. He would have preferred to heap the reeking bundle on his desk chair; but because he had become a godawful paranoid dumb-ass, the chair was bracing shut the closet door.
At 2:20 A.M., in fresh underwear and jeans, operating in super-stealth mode, not daring to turn on the hallway or stairwell lights, he carried the soiled sheets and clothes to the laundry room on the ground floor. There he had to turn on the lights to figure out how to load the stupid washer and get it going.
This being the totally wired twenty-first century when every third-world hellhole had nuclear weapons and your cell phone was able to do everything but read minds, you would think a load of laundry could be washed in a minute and tumbled dry in two, but no. He had to sit on the laundry-room floor forever, waiting to be discovered and humiliated—a thirteen-year-old, would-be-marine bed-wetter.
45
ON THE EVENING OF OCTOBER NINETEENTH, COMPLAINING about recent bouts of insomnia, John revealed that he had called Dr. Neimeyer, their internist, to request a prescription for Lunesta. He took one and retired early.
Recently Nicolette had been worried about him. He seemed to be preoccupied by his current case to an even greater extent than he had been by previous homicides. He didn’t have his usual appetite, either. She was sure he had lost weight, at least five pounds, but he claimed that he felt fit and that his weight was the same as ever.
When he first mentioned having trouble sleeping, she suggested he see Isaac Neimeyer, but for a full checkup, not to obtain pills. Usually he was averse to being medicated. His insomnia must be worse than he had told her.
With John off to bed early and with the kids absorbed in their interests, Nicky returned to her studio. She intended to spend two or three hours with the problematic picture of Naomi, Zach, and Minnie.
As she was laying out her brushes and paints, she realized that the time of year might have something to do with John’s condition. His parents and sisters had been murdered on October twenty-fifth, which was just six days away. Every year, he became pensive around that date, somewhat withdrawn. Although John never marked the dark anniversary by talking about it, Nicky knew it lay heavy on his mind. Perhaps he was more deeply troubled this time because of the twenty-year milestone. Time didn’t, as advertised, heal all wounds. Although the wrenching immediacy of grief eventually passed, the settled sorrow that replaced it might in its own way be even more intense.
As Nicky completed preparations to paint, her younger sister, Stephanie, called from Boston. Stephie had just gotten home early from her sous-chef job at the restaurant. In this economy, business was off, as it had been for some time. Nicky sat on her high stool with the swiveling seat, turned toward the vase of peach-colored humility roses, and worried with her sister about various economic catastrophes in the news, talked about food, and swapped stories about their children.
Neither of them had ever been awkward with the other, but Nicky sensed her sister circling around a subject that she hesitated to raise. This perception proved correct when Stephie finally said, “Maybe you’ll think I’m flaky when I tell you this.…”
“Honey,” Nicky said, “you’ve always seemed as flaky to me as one of your pie crusts. What’s on your mind?”
“The thing is—you do have a really good alarm system there, don’t you?”
“A house alarm? Yes. Surely you remember accidentally setting it off during your last visit.”
“So you didn’t take it out or anything. You’re sure it’s working like it should?”
“The perimeter doors and windows—they’re armed right now. John has a zero-tolerance policy about forgetting the alarm at night. It’s a cop thing.”
“So then I guess—what?—does your alarm company test the system regularly?”
“Stephie, what is this? All the creepy murders here in the news lately?”
“No. Well, maybe. I don’t know. Last night I had this dream about you guys. You and John, and the kids.”
“What dream?”
“It was gross. I’ve never had a dream so gross, and I never want to have another one. I don’t want to repeat the gory details, all right?”
“I can probably do without hearing them.”
“This terrible thing happened, I think partly because your alarm wasn’t working.”
“It’s working.”
“The panic button,” Stephie said. “Your system has one of those panic buttons, doesn’t it?”
“On every keypad and every phone, too.”
“The panic button wasn’t working. Isn’t that a strange detail for a dream? So specific?”
Nicky swiveled on her stool to look at the painting of Naomi, Zach, and Minnie. Their unfinished faces.
Stephanie didn’t know anything about the tragedy John endured twenty years earlier, but after another hesitation, she said, “Is John doing okay?”
“What do you mean?”
“At work, you know. His health. And, like, things between you—everything good?”
“Stephie, things have always been great between us. John is the dearest man.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean anything like that. I love John, I really do. I meant … I don’t know. It’s the damn dream, Nicky. Been thinking about it all day. Trying to make sense of it. You know how dreams are. They don’t make sense, you’re not quite sure what you saw.”
Nicolette looked past all the kids in the painting, to the half-seen mirror in the dark background. She had not included the shadowy figure that appeared in five of the photographic studies; but she half expected to see it in the portrait.
“I’ll call the alarm company first thing in the morning,” she said. “I’ll have them come out and test the system. Will that make you feel better?”
“It will, yeah,” Stephie said. “It’s just a dream. This is so silly. But I’ll feel better.”
“I will, too, now that you’ve dropped this centipede down my blouse.”
“I’m sorry, Nicky. I didn’t mean to spook you. Or I guess maybe I did a little. That dream really walloped me. Don’t be angry with me, will you?”
“I couldn’t be, Stephie. I love you to death.”
“Jeez Louise, don’t put it that way.”
“Sorry. How’s Harry?” He was Stephanie’s husband. “Is he still wearing his mother’s dresses?”
“His what?”
“His mother’s dresses—and then stabbing sexy blondes in their showers?”
“Oh, I get it. Payback for John. I deserve it. No, Harry’s still wearing his mother’s dresses, but at least he’s over the stabbing thing.”
A few minutes later, after they hung up, Nicky sat staring at the unfinished painting of her children. John Singer Sargent was an impossible act to follow. Maybe that was the only problem. She put away her paints and brushes.
In the master bedroom, she stood beside the bed, watching her husband sleep, his face in the penumbra of the lamplight. He looked at peace. The Lunesta had done its job.
They hadn’t made love enough lately. If the mood was wrong, you had to change it.
Using the front stairs, she went down to the second floor. She knocked at Zach’s door,
and then at Naomi and Minnie’s. The kids were safe, doing their homework, though they all seemed more subdued than usual.
Although John would have walked the house, checking doors and the operable windows, Nicky toured the perimeter. She found nothing amiss.
In the living room, she stood for a while in front of the tall mirror in the baroque frame. Her reflection was considerably smaller than the shadowy form in the photographs.
The house had felt odd to her for so long that she had adjusted to the new atmosphere and didn’t feel it as strongly as before. But the difference remained. Nicky couldn’t have described the change to anyone; it was something you simply felt, for which all words were inadequate.
Suddenly she thought the oddest thing of all was that she hadn’t mentioned this sense of wrongness to John, no matter how resistant to description it might be. It was as though the house, employing some strange power that no inanimate object should possess, schemed to isolate them, one from another, within its rooms.
46
THE TWO-STORY YELLOW-BRICK HOUSE STOOD IN A NEIGHBORHOOD once a testimony to middle-class success, now evidence of the stalled dreams of generations, proof of the destructive avarice of a political class that promised prosperity while robbing rich and poor alike. Sidewalks were cracked, canted. Iron lampposts, spotted with rust, were overdue for painting. Street trees, untrimmed for so long that they could never be properly shaped by an arborist, stood leafless and raging at the bleak sky with mutant arms and bristling fists.
The house rose behind a spear-point iron fence from which some weapons had been borrowed. In summer the lawn would be nearly as dead as it was on this October twenty-fifth.
Inside, the rooms and hallways provided narrow passages between cliffs of heavy old furniture. In spite of air stale with years of cigarette smoke, John thought that all seemed scrupulously clean.
Peter Abelard, once a priest, still dressed rather like a cleric: black shoes, black slacks, black shirt, with a dark-gray cardigan. For some reason, he wore a watch on each wrist.
Fifty-six, with a lean ascetic face and ash-gray hair combed back from his pale forehead, he was so thin and dry that it seemed he might subsist entirely on the cigarettes that he lit one after the other, the new from the butt of the old.
The house belonged to his ninety-year-old mother. She was currently in the hospital, dying of terminal cancer. Abelard had lived here since the Church finished with him.
After the meeting with Father Bill on the fourteenth, John spent eight days trying to learn who had been the diocese’s last exorcist and to locate him. The search became complicated because Abelard’s mother lived as Mary Dorn, having remarried after her husband died.
Another three days were required to convince Abelard, by phone and by proxy, to agree to an interview. If he didn’t fear policemen, he at least had developed an aversion to them.
In the kitchen where they conferred, the cabinets were pale green. Yellow Formica counters. The old stove and ovens were heavy, as if inspired by foundry works from the long-gone Soviet Union.
Yellow-and-white-checkered oilcloth covered the table at which they sat. A glass ashtray, a pack of cigarettes, a paperback copy of The Deceiver, by Livio Fanzaga, and a glass mug of dark coffee stood at Abelard’s place. His resting arms had worn the table’s oilcloth where he sat, suggesting he spent little time elsewhere in the house.
He offered John neither coffee nor a smoke. On the phone, he made it clear that this would not be an extended chat.
For the fourth time in less than two months, John told the story of Alton Turner Blackwood. He spared himself nothing, wanting to be certain that Peter Abelard had every fact that might matter.
He spoke also about the recent murders and his investigation, beginning with his first visit to Billy Lucas at the state hospital.
“Blackwood will kill another family in thirteen days. If I can’t stop him, he’ll kill my family December tenth. Twenty years ago this very day, I lost my parents and sisters. Not again. I’ll do anything to save Nicky and the kids. I’ll sell my soul to save them.”
Abelard’s eyes were the same gray as his hair, as if they had once been another color but, like the rest of him, had been steeped in smoke until they paled to this somber shade. They were clouded pools of sorrow and enduring dread.
“Never offer your soul even as a joke or in frustration. You think no one is listening or will make a deal. Someone is—and will.”
“Then you still believe.”
“I failed as a priest and as a man. But even in those days, I believed. Now more than ever. That is the horror of my position.”
He drank some of the inky coffee, drew deeply on his cigarette, and exhaled a cloud of smoke that wreathed his head.
“Father Bill was right about one thing,” Abelard said. “Your true enemy isn’t a ghost. Rarely, a suffering soul in Purgatory might, by divine permission, be allowed to haunt this world to seek an intercession that will shorten his time of purification before he may enter Heaven. But no soul in Hell returns of his own volition.”
Because Abelard’s manner was authoritative but without a trace of pride or pretense, and because his voice seemed to be as haunted by remorse as it was seasoned by tobacco, John offered no argument.
“Blackwood’s ritual tells us by whom you’re truly confronted.”
“There must’ve been a hundred interpretations of the ritual.”
Abelard blew twin plumes from his nose. “Only one interpretation is correct. The rest are the theories of psychologists. The quarters were symbolic payment to Death for ferrying the souls of Blackwood’s victims to Hell, where he intended one day to follow them. The disc of feces was a mockery of the Eucharist, to solicit the favor of his satanic master. Each egg symbolizes the soul of the victim. The eggs contain the Latin word for ‘servant,’ because Blackwood was sending his victims to Hell to serve him there later. They’re supposed to be his retinue, his entourage, his slaves for eternity.”
John’s voice thickened. “My parents and sisters aren’t in Hell.”
“I didn’t say they were. Blackwood’s ritual was his delusion. However, no doubt he was in Hell an instant after you killed him.”
Homicide investigation was a career in madness. Sometimes John wondered if by association with so many murderous mad ones, he might one day come unhinged.
“What about the three bells he carried?”
Abelard said, “They tell us the identity of your true enemy. It has brought Blackwood with it, but it’s the sole entity of power in this game. Do you believe in demons, Mr. Calvino?”
“Three months ago, I probably would have said no.”
“You’ve been one of that ‘wretched generation of enlightened men,’ as Eliot called it. But now?”
“My life is all about evidence—knowing when it’s true and when it’s false, how it will play in court. I’m good at knowing all that. The evidence of Blackwood’s return—I’d take that into court.”
With the dexterity of long habituation, Abelard finessed a new cigarette from the pack one-handed, rolled it across his fingers in the manner of a magician manipulating a coin, brought it to his lips, and lit it from the glowing butt that then he crushed in the ashtray.
“The names of the important demons come from the Bible or have been handed down to us by tradition. Asmodeus, Beelzebub, Belial, Lucifer, Mephisto, Meridian, Zebulun … But often in an exorcism, when the exorcist demands and eventually succeeds in getting the malevolent spirit to identify itself, the name is also its purpose or the sin that it most particularly advocates—names like Discord, Envy, Jealousy or like Perdition, Disease, Ruin.”
“Ruin,” John said. “The word etched on Blackwood’s bells.”
“He sought the intercession of the demon Ruin to ensure that the souls of his victims were received for him in Hell. Most likely, the only soul he sent there was his own, but perhaps Blackwood’s life of murder and nihilism pleased this entity called Ruin, and now perhaps
it wishes to see the killer keep his promise to you.”
“Why?”
“Why not? Evil doesn’t exist to justify itself. It exists for the pleasure of corruption and the destruction of the innocent. Your children are the primary lure. Young and tender.”
John half felt as if he were sinking in the smoky air like a drowner weighed down by lungs full of water. He breathed deeper, more often, to keep his mind clear.
“This thing, this Ruin, is in my house. I know it is. Can it be forced out with an exorcism?”
“Sometimes a residence or other buildings are exorcised, but not often. A demonic presence in a house can do little real harm. Noises in the night. Footsteps. Doors opening, closing. Foul smells. At worst, poltergeist phenomena—levitating furniture and that sort of thing. A demon isn’t long satisfied with such simple play.”
Gesturing, the hand with the cigarette was as pale as a ghost’s hand except for two nicotine-stained fingers that were the singular greenish-yellow hue of the tissue of a corpse in a particular early stage of decomposition.
Peter Abelard said, “When it’s in the flesh, however, the entity can do unlimited damage, both to the one possessed and to others. If this demon has brought Alton Blackwood’s spirit from out of time into time once more, to keep the killer’s promise, then it won’t kill your family using the house, Mr. Calvino. It will kill the family using someone in the house whom it has possessed.”
John wanted to get up from the table and step out of this soiled atmosphere, onto the porch. A cold front as hard as ice itself had come in from the north the day before. Although the sky hung as dark as iron, the air was polished bright, invigorating. But a desperate hope kept him in his chair.
“Who is at risk of possession?” he asked.
“Anyone,” said Abelard. “Perhaps not one who lives in a truly saintly state. Though even if I knew such people, I wouldn’t need all my fingers to count them.”