by Dean Koontz
Her name was Cindy Shooner. She lived two blocks away, and he could be at her place three minutes after leaving home.
Mr. and Mrs. Shooner were dysfunctional, Cindy said. They hated their jobs, they hated their relatives, and they weren’t that fond of each other, either. When they didn’t drink, they fought, so because neither of them was a mean drunk, they started drinking early each evening as a way to have some peace in the house. Most nights by ten o’clock, they were either about to pass out, already passed out, or in bed watching wrestling on cable channels because muscle-bound men in brief costumes appealed to both of them.
Their bedroom was on the second floor, and Cindy’s was on the ground floor. She could escape her house even more easily than John could slip out of his.
In early August, when this started, they would take a blanket into a nearby meadow and lie under the stars.
Then Mr. Bellingham, who lived two doors from the Shooner place, was asked by his company to take a nine-month assignment in another state, to help turn around a problem factory there. Mrs. Bellingham decided to go with him. They didn’t want to rent their house, so they closed it up and paid Cindy a little money to look after the place, to do some dusting and vacuuming every couple of weeks.
After that, she and John didn’t need the meadow anymore. They could have candlelight, music, and a real bed.
She was sixteen, a year and a half older than John. She was the first girl he’d been with. He wasn’t her first guy. Although still a girl, Cindy was in some ways a woman by then. She had assurance, attitude, appetite, and birth-control pills that her mother got for her because her mother hated the idea of a grandchild more than she hated her job or her husband.
Cindy was bad for John, though he didn’t think so at that time. In fact, if the wrong person had told him that she was bad for him, he would have had his fists up in an instant.
In truth, he was bad for her, too. He liked her well enough, and he definitely liked being with her, but he didn’t love her. If a girl wasn’t loved a little bit, without the depth of affection that might at least be mistaken for love, she was being used, and no one was the better for being used.
He stayed with her that night from shortly before ten o’clock until later than usual, until three forty-five. After making love, they drifted off to sleep in the Bellingham place.
By the time he said good-bye, hurried home, climbed the tree, and returned to his room, it was four o’clock.
He might have stripped, dropped into bed, and fallen instantly asleep. He might have awakened in the morning, self-satisfied with his secret escapade, only to find that he had been sleeping in the house of the dead.
As he quietly slid shut the lower sash of his window, he heard bells ringing somewhere on the second floor. Silvery, eerie, alien to this place. After a pause, they rang again. In the dark, he moved to his door to listen just as the bells rang a third time.
Easing open the door, he saw light in the hallway. Issuing from his parents’ and his sisters’ rooms.
On the hallway floor stood a black satchel. Beside it lay a pistol.
John knew guns. His father, a good marksman, hunted deer in season and taught his son. This wasn’t his father’s weapon.
A homemade silencer was fitted to the barrel. He removed it.
Odd noises in his sisters’ bedroom told him where the intruder must be.
The noises were not weeping or screaming, and he knew what the silence of the girls had to mean. If he thought about that, he would freeze or he would not have the strength to act, so he focused on the pistol and what he needed to do with it.
Weapon in hand, he eased to the open door to his parents’ room. They were lying in the bloody bed. Shot in their sleep. Something on their eyes. Something in their hands.
His rabbit heart, fast and timid. But no going back.
After a silence, the bells rang again.
John sidled along the hallway, holding the pistol in a two-hand grip. He hesitated a step short of the girls’ room.
Again the bells.
He stepped into the doorway, the light, the bleak future.
Giselle on the floor. Dead. Worse than dead. Marnie. Little Marnie. The suffering. Beyond comprehension. Blindness would be a blessing, to have been born without eyes.
John wanted death. Cover each girl with a blanket, lie down between them, and die.
Crouched over Giselle, the killer rang the bells one more time. Tall, as strange as a cockroach, quivering in his excitement. All bones and hands. Brute bones and greedy hands.
As bell-cry echoes still sang faintly off the walls, the beast raised his head, looking up from Giselle’s body, his freak-show face boiled bright by a hideous rapture, his mouth smeared red from cruel kisses, those black-hole eyes that drew entire worlds to destruction in their crushing depths.
The sinister voice shattered John with words: “This little girl said you were gone to Grandma’s for a week.”
Had he known that John would be coming back, the killer would have been waiting in his dark bedroom. Even in her terror, Giselle had the presence of mind to save her brother with a clever lie. She died that John might live.
Rising from his crouch, folded bones unfolding into pterodactyl ghastliness, the killer said, “Your lovely sister, your Giselle. She had such pretty little training-bra breasts.”
John’s arms were straight in front of him, elbows locked, pistol in a good tight grip, but his slamming heart shook him, and the gun shook with him, the sight jumping, jumping on the target.
Taking a step toward John, the killer said, “You’ll be a daddy someday. Then I’ll come back and use your wife and kids harder than I used your slutty sisters here tonight.”
The sound of the first shot was huge and hammer-hard in that confined space, a cannon blast, concussion waves bouncing wall to wall to wall, and the bullet sucked the splintered cartilage of the nose backward into the fevered brain as the killer staggered, stumbled, fell.
John stepped into the bedroom, stood over the fallen beast, and emptied the pistol’s magazine into the hateful face, obliterating the eyes that had seen his sisters in their agony and despair, shredding the mouth that had profaned them. He heard no shot after the first, but watched, seemingly in silence, as the demented face dissolved from miscreation into chaos.
John had no memory of going downstairs to the den. The next thing he knew, he was loading one of his father’s handguns with the intention of putting a single round through the roof of his mouth, that his shame and grief might be blown out with his brains.
His sister died with no hope but that John might live by virtue of her lie about his visit to a grandmother. He could not repay her love with a coward’s exit. His penance could be nothing less than that he must go on living.
The taste and the weight of cold steel were on his tongue when he heard the sirens that the gunshots had summoned.
They found him on his knees, and sobbing.
In the dayroom, where Walter and Imogene Nash ate their lunch and did their planning, John was lowering the pleated shades when Nicolette located him.
She had been on the computer, reading Alton Turner Blackwood’s journal. Her face was as pale as the white-gesso ground with which she prepared a new canvas before painting.
“Your family shouldn’t have been the fourth. He meant to kill the Calvinos third, the Paxtons fourth.”
He stared at her, not fully comprehending what she said but instinctively alarmed.
“The therapist who read it. He never told you. Yours was the third family on Blackwood’s list. When he came to your house that night, a police patrol car happened to be parked on your street. Two officers in it. Probably just taking a break. Blackwood spooked. He went to the Paxton place instead. Thirty-three days later, he came back for your family.”
John felt targeted. In someone’s gun sight at this very moment. The bullet in the barrel.
“If we’re third,” Nicky said, “we don’t have until December tenth. We have jus
t thirteen days.”
“But why would he revert to the original order?”
“Why not? He wants to do it like it should have been done. But John … my God.”
“What?”
“If he can change the order, why stick with thirty-three days?”
“Serial-killer periodicity. Who knows why? They don’t understand it themselves.”
She shook her head. “But today. Today, John. It was twenty years ago today. If he can change the order, put us third, he can change the day. This day might be sweeter to him than waiting.”
From the journal of Alton Turner Blackwood:
As Melissa flicked the cards facedown across the patio table, Regina gathered up hers not one at a time but only after the full hand had been dealt, and it seemed to the boy, as he stood listening to the story of his mother’s murder, that the beautiful girl had cast his fate in the seven cards and that the beautiful woman held his fate in a fan of numbers and royals.
After giving birth to Melissa, fertile Regina had produced three sons who were now only baby bones in the scattered earth of excavated graves. But after giving birth to the malformed boy, Anita failed to conceive again during the next nine years, though Teejay relentlessly bent her to the task. The old man lost his patience with her, and one night when Anita pressed him too insistently about granting greater privileges to the boy, whom Teejay preferred to keep sequestered, he struck her with the iron poker with which he had been jabbing at the logs in the master-bedroom fireplace. Seeing the damage that he had done to Anita’s face in that moment of unchecked anger, he used the poker to finish her.
So the boy’s mother did not abandon him, after all, and what he had been told about her growing revulsion at his appearance proved to be only another lie in the wilderness of lies that was Crown Hill and the Blackwood family.
With Anita dead and unable to lobby for her child, Teejay might have considered killing the boy at last, but instead he banished his only living son—who in the twisted limbs of the family tree was also his grandson and great-grandson—to the lonely tower room, as a vivid and living reminder to himself that in the quest to refine beauty into perfect beauty by incestuous breeding, the rose can be plucked only at the risk of an occasional thorn.
After drawing a card, Regina took three queens from her hand of eight cards and put them on the table.
“I tell you all this because Melissa and I, each of us, is in her first month with a new child. I’ve come to feel I’ve done enough—more than enough—to earn all that I should have coming to me.”
The awkward boy stood staring at the three queens, and in his mind he saw the cards bearing the faces of his beautiful mother, his beautiful aunt, and his even more beautiful cousin.
Not finished putting meld on the table, Regina revealed two threes that she augmented with a joker.
“While you’re deciding what all this means to you and what if anything you should do about it,” she continued, “you must remember three things. First, that I’m your mother’s sister. Second, that Melissa is not only your mother’s niece but also her half-sister. Third, of everyone at Crown Hill, only I—not even your mother—only I have ever told you the truth.”
Later, the boy understood that she expected him to kill Teejay. Instead, that night, he packed a knapsack that included only what he thought essential—including the photograph of naked Jillian hanging from the rafter. He forced his way into Teejay’s private suite and with a knife demanded money. He had no intention of harming the old man—who was a hardy seventy-three at that time—because to do so would make him a fugitive and ensure that he would be hunted down. He wanted freedom more than revenge. Teejay had twenty-two thousand dollars in a wall safe. The boy also took ten antique coins worth perhaps fifty thousand more.
At midnight, the boy set out along the driveway toward the front gate of Crown Hill. The raven had given him the night, and the night had been his tutor.
The boy now knew everything that the night knew, lessons for the life he would henceforth make for himself. Everyone was born to die. Sex was death. Death was sex. Being a predator was better than being prey. Hell must exist because there was an urgent and abiding need for it. He had no need of Heaven because he would secure a place of honor and privilege in Hell.
Mere minutes after midnight, the boy passed through the main gate, into the world beyond Crown Hill. At that moment, he became me. I am Alton Turner Blackwood, and I am Death.
49
AFTER LEAVING NAOMI IN THE THIRD-FLOOR MASTER SUITE, Melody Lane—talented spinner of tall tales about other worlds and cross-time sleighs with billowing sails, the willing and eager servant of Ruin and therefore a kind of spiritual sister to Alton Turner Blackwood—descends the back stairs to the ground floor. As she opens the door between the stairwell and the kitchen, she hears voices, the anxious mother and the father, coming from the nearby dayroom. She remains in the stairwell, behind the door, which she holds ajar, listening. When John and Nicolette hurry away somewhere, Melody enters the kitchen.
They have many handsome and meticulously sharpened knives to choose from: bread knife, butcher knife, turkey carver, pot-roast slicer.… They are good customers of Williams-Sonoma, and they buy the best quality. Though she admires their purchases, she believes they might be consuming more than their fair share. We all have a responsibility. Well, tonight their consuming ends. When she opens a drawer and sees the cleaver with the flat-grind blade, she picks it up and considers her reflection in the polished steel. For a child a year old or younger, Melody prefers drowning in a bathtub. For a child between two and four, smothering or vigorous strangulation. Blunt objects for any age. But for a fit boy of thirteen, who has been made wary by his recent experiences, an edge weapon wielded aggressively seems more advisable.
After closing the knife drawer, while still gripping the drawer pull, she asks for guidance, because she isn’t now being ridden and therefore does not share Ruin’s omniscient awareness of the family members’ whereabouts. The boy is in his room—and in a moment the youngest girl will join him there. The tender girl must be saved for later, and Melody will receive assistance with Minette’s bloodless detention. The boy is hers, and this reward excites her. He will be the oldest child that she has killed to date, and when she drinks his last exhalation, she will lick every wisp of it from the deep recesses of his ripe mouth.
Holding the LEGO wheel-like thing against her chest with her left arm, Minnie rapped on Zach’s door with her right fist. “It’s me and it’s important.”
He invited her in, and she found him sitting at the slantboard on his desk, just closing the cover on his drawing tablet.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“Something bad is going to happen.”
“What’ve you done? Did you break something?”
“Not me. I haven’t done anything. It’s in the house.”
“Huh? What’s in the house?”
“Ruin. Its name is Ruin.”
“What kind of name is Ruin? What’s the joke?”
“Don’t you feel it in the house? It’s been here for weeks. It hates us, Zach. I’m scared.”
He had risen from his chair as she talked. Now he walked past her to close the door that she had left ajar.
Turning to her, he said, “I’ve had some … experiences.”
Nodding, she said, “Experiences.”
“I thought I was going freaking nuts.”
“It’s been waiting for the right time.”
“What’s been waiting? Who is this Ruin guy?”
“He’s not people like you and me and Naomi. He … it … whatever, it’s a kind of ghost I think, but also something more, I don’t know what.”
“Ghosts. I’m not so big on ghost stuff, you know. The whole idea seems stupid.”
Minnie could see that he didn’t really think ghosts were as stupid an idea as he might have thought they were back in September or August.
“What’ve you got there?” he ask
ed, pointing to the LEGO wheel-thing she had trapped against her chest with her left arm.
“I built it from a dream, except I don’t remember how I could have put it together.”
Frowning, he said, “You can’t lock LEGOS together like that, not everything round and smooth and layered like that.”
“Well, I did. And we’ve got to keep it with us every minute tonight, ’cause we’re gonna need it bad.”
“Need it for what?” Zach asked.
Minnie shook her head. “Damn if I know.”
He stared at her until she shrugged. Then he said, “Sometimes you’re a little spooky yourself.”
“Don’t I know it,” she agreed.
In John’s study, Nicky had not switched off the computer. A page from the hologrammatic journal of Alton Turner Blackwood waited on the screen. John glanced at it, surprised that an apostle of chaos could have recorded his crimes in such neat handwriting. Of course, evil of the most refined variety had a respect for certain kinds of order—enemy lists, gulags, extermination camps.
From a desk drawer, he retrieved the holster and the pistol that he had put there before he had settled in the armchair for a nap.
As he slipped into the rig, he watched Nicky unlock the tall gun cabinet in the corner. She unclipped a 12-gauge, pistol-grip shotgun from its rack braces and passed it to him.
Most of Nicky’s friends in the art world were wary of cops and afraid of guns. They seemed to like John and assumed she married him because he wasn’t much like other cops, when in fact she was at heart as much a cop as an artist. She did her work not only with emotion but also with intellect, not just intuitively but also analytically, considered it a career but also a duty, and felt above all the need to serve Truth even more than art. He had known many good cops whom he would have trusted to cover his back, but none more so than Nicky.
As she grabbed a box of shells from one of the bottom drawers, she said, “Where are the kids?”
“In their rooms, I think.” He accepted a shell from her and loaded it in the breech. “I told the girls not to go outside again.”