by Dean Koontz
In the next-to-last drawer, he found what he apparently wanted. Scissors. He held them by the handles, the blades shut, as if he were gripping a knife to plunge it into something.
Clutching the scissors, he returned along the counter, staring at his reflection in the mirror as if furious with himself—“I’m Roger HODD of the Daily POST, I’m Roger HODD of the Daily POST”—slamming shut the drawers that he previously opened. At the end of the counter, near Naomi again, he picked up a rectangular box that she hadn’t noticed before because it was dark green, sitting on the black granite, against the black backsplash. He took off the lid and set it aside. From the box he withdrew a silvery something that she could not immediately identify until they tinkled, and then she saw they were three bells. Three bells shaped like flowers.
Leonid Sinyavski is in chains, not his body but his mind, imprisoned. For the last forty years, he has tried to live a good life, to redeem himself for certain things he did in the old Soviet Union before he fled to the West. As a young mathematician working on military projects in a time of deep restiveness among Russian intellectuals, he informed on some of his colleagues who wanted to see Communism fall. They went to gulags, and some most likely never returned. Now his own body is a gulag, and as he carries Minnie toward the arbor, he is shocked by the things he says to her, the threats he makes, and is sickened by the images that flash from his rider’s mind through his, the cruelties and indignities that he is intended to perpetrate, the mutilation and murder. The chambers of his heart slam, slam against one another, slam like doors, and though his rider tries to calm him, Leonid can’t be calmed when he knows for what he is being used. He tries to rebel, to rear up, and the chains around his mind stretch taut, as if the links might break, and again he rears, resists, and his rider bears down harder upon him as they reach the entrance to the arbor. Entering, he gathers all his mental strength, his courage, his righteousness hard-won over forty years, and says within, No, never, no, no, never! And on the second never, his slamming heart slams one last time and stilled blood pools in its chambers even as he collapses.
As he examined the calla-lily bells, Roger Hodd abruptly stopped hectoring himself about his name and occupation. For a moment, Naomi was relieved, but then the silence seemed worse than the chanting, especially when she shifted her attention from the silver bells to his reflection in the mirror and saw that he was watching her. A few times, she had seen men look at women this way when they didn’t know Naomi saw them, but no man ever before turned such eyes on her, and no man ever should watch a young girl her age like this. It was a hungry look, starving, and furious, and violent.
Grinning at her reflection in the mirror, Hodd rang the bells loudly once, twice, three times. “You ignorant little bitch. Are you ready? Are you ready to meet your aunts, Marnie and Giselle? You don’t even know about them, but they’re waiting for you. They’re waiting for you in Hell.”
He put the bells in the box from which he had taken them, and he turned to her, the scissors in his fist.
Naomi yanked at the bathroom door again, but it was as immovable as before. With a cry of terror, she dodged past Hodd, darted to the farther end of the bathroom. There was nowhere to go except into the shower stall, pulling the door shut behind her. A glass door. Even if she could hold it shut, which she wouldn’t be able to do because he was stronger than she was, but even if she could hold it shut, it was only a glass door.
Bells. Elsewhere in the house. Eerie, silvery bells.
John and Nicky were entering the front stairs at the second floor, not sure whether to search upstairs or down first, when they heard the bells. Upstairs.
The horror of the past was now the horror of the moment, and John was in two places at once, in his house now and in his parents’ house that night, racing up the stairs to the third floor but also following the shadowy hallway toward his parents’ bedroom, pushing through the door to this master suite but also peering through another door at his murdered parents in a bed of blood, hearing the killer ringing the bells in his dead sisters’ room but also hearing Naomi cry out in the master bath.
The bathroom door was locked. Nicky shouted, “Shotgun, shotgun!” He was bringing the weapon to bear on the lock even as she urged him to blow it out. Two shells dissolved the lock and the wood around it, but the door wouldn’t open. It didn’t even rattle in the frame, it was as solid as a concrete block in a wall of concrete blocks. More than a lock held it in place: the fury of Blackwood, the power of Ruin. In the bathroom, Naomi screamed, the worst sound John had ever heard, ever, and here in the hallway, Nicky screamed, too, an even more terrible sound, as much grief as terror, and she clawed at the blasted hole in the door, clawed so ferociously that her fingernails tore and bled.
Zach reached the entrance to the lattice arbor as old Sinyavski staggered three or four steps inside and fell, trapping Minnie under him. Zach had the butcher knife, but when he hurried to the fallen professor, he saw that he wouldn’t need it. Last year’s roses had been cut back to stumps, the trailers removed from the structure, so even in the fading light and shadows, he could see the staring eyes and the slackness in the face. Whatever had killed him, maybe a heart attack, Sinyavski was no longer a danger to anyone.
Minnie struggled, half under the heavy body, and when Zach freed her, she threw her arms around him and held him very tight. “I love you, Zach, I love you.” He told her that he loved her, too. With one hand flattened on her back, he could feel her heart pounding hard as a bass drum, and it was the most wonderful thing he’d ever felt, the thud-thud, thud-thud of her heart.
A dry-as-bone, rasping-crackling-snapping noise drew their attention to opposite ends of the arbor, where the lattice appeared to come alive, like scores of flat white snakes, undulating to some music only they could hear. In maybe four seconds the lattice wove shut both exits from the structure, imprisoning Zach and Minnie with the corpse of Professor Sinyavski.
In the second-floor hallway, the wheel stands on edge. Once made of a child’s building blocks, it is now something entirely different, transformed, as ordinary things are always transubstantiated when the supernatural enters them from outside of time, in the way that bread and wine become body and blood—or, less exaltedly, in the way that Frodo’s Ring of Power is not just a ring made in Mordor, the way that the Ark of the Covenant is not just a wooden box. Making the wheel, Minnie was in the thrall of a higher power, just as the Light ensured that Frodo should be the one Ring-bearer. Minnie is the Frodo in this family, the innocent who sees what others don’t, loves others always more than self, and can be a bush that burns without being consumed, a conduit. Here and now, the moment of transubstantiation arrives. The wheel is white, but as it rolls along the second-floor hallway, it becomes golden, so heavy that it leaves a lasting impression in the carpet. Descending the stairs, it makes a more solid sound than might a two-hundred-pound man leaping downward. Along the lower hallway, wood flooring creaks and cracks under it.
Driven to the edge of madness by Naomi’s screams, John threw himself against the door once, twice, without effect, and he knew he could break his shoulder without gaining entrance. Beyond rage, beyond fury, in the iron grip of wrath, he flattened his hands on the door and shouted, “This is my house, you degenerate sonofabitch, you worm, you filth, this is my house, not yours, THIS IS MY HOUSE!” The door rattled in the frame, and suddenly he was able to push it open.
He grabbed his shotgun and crossed the threshold as the clear safety-glass door of the shower stall shattered into frosted veils and shimmered to the floor. A man was stepping into the shower stall with scissors held high to stab. John got him by the belt and yanked him off the raised threshold. The guy turned, slashing wildly with the scissors, and it was Roger Hodd, a reporter to whom John had given interviews, regarding homicide cases, on several occasions. He was Hodd, but his eyes were not Hodd’s eyes, they were deep pits of implacable hatred. John dodged the scissors, shoved Hodd against the wall to the left of the shower st
all, shouted to Naomi—“Don’t look!”—jammed the shotgun into the possessed man’s abdomen, and scrambled his internal organs with buckshot.
Zach hooked his fingers through the new-grown lattice and pulled hard, but it was as firm a part of the structure as the walls and the arched roof. The twisted tines of the meat fork no longer seemed like a big deal, not compared to this, and he wondered if next the arbor would sprout spiky wooden teeth on all sides and chew them up as if it were a shark and they were chum.
As though she could read his thoughts, Minnie said, “It can’t hurt us with things like the arbor, it can only confuse us and scare us with things. It needs to have a person it can use to hurt us.”
Zach heard something move behind them, and when he turned, he saw Professor Sinyavski’s dead body roll onto its back and sit up in the gloom. “Pretty piggy,” old Sinyavski said in a voice as hard as gravel and as thick as mud. “My pretty Minnie pig.”
To Minnie, Zach said, “A dead body is a thing. It’s not a person anymore. It’s a thing just like lattice is a thing.”
The professor clutched the lattice wall with one hand, trying to pull himself to his feet. “Pretty piggy, I’m gonna chew your sweet tongue out of your mouth.”
Clutching her mother’s arm, shaken and tearful but recovering her emotional equilibrium quicker than John would have predicted, Naomi came with them, down through the house, as he called out to Minnie and Zach, neither of whom answered.
Earlier, he had thought that perhaps he’d drawn Blackwood—and his master, Ruin—back into the world by worrying, especially since Minnie’s illness, that the killer’s promise would be kept. Had he, by his obsession, invited the spirit to haunt him? Had he felt that he deserved to be haunted, to be hell-hounded unto death for having been the sole survivor of his murdered family? After the incident at the bathroom door, when he gained entrance merely by the assertion of his ownership, he suspected that indeed he was only as vulnerable as he allowed himself to be, which suggested that if a door had been opened between this world and another, he himself might have swung it wide, even if unwittingly. If he opened a door to the twined entities of demon and ghost, he could close it, close it once and for all. The one thing that scared him now was that he would close it too late, only after a devastating loss—Minnie, Zachary, maybe both of them, maybe still all of them.
At the foot of the stairs, where the front hall met the foyer, he experienced again the sensation of a phantom presence brushing against his legs, eager and ebullient. This was what he had felt a few weeks before in the backyard, at night, when the fallen leaves of the scarlet oak whirled and tumbled as though a dog were at play in them. Willard.
“He wants us to go this way,” John said, leading them along the hall toward the kitchen.
“Who wants?” Nicky asked.
“I’ll explain later. Zach and Minnie must be this way.”
The three of them hurried across the kitchen and through the open door onto the terrace, where they encountered a strange sight; and considering recent events, John’s threshold for determining anything to be strange was far higher than it had been two months earlier.
In the snowy half-light, a golden wheel, mysteriously powered and as large as that from a Peterbilt, rolled slowly across the snow-covered terrace, leaving a wake of clear dry flagstones. Rolling with a deep rumble more ominous than an earthquake, as though it weighed far more than its size suggested, the wheel seemed to charge the air merely by its presence, and the snow crackled around it as if the flakes became electric particles under its influence. The flagstones cracked and splintered under the wheel, and through the soles of his shoes, John could feel the vibrations from its progress shuddering through the concrete slab on which the stones were laid.
The golden enigma held their attention only until they heard Zach and Minnie shouting for help.
The dead horse offers the rider a clumsy weapon more difficult to use with each degree of heat lost from the cooling brain. But it is a human cadaver and thus still has some capacity for the extreme violence that is one of the key signifiers of the species. It might be an instrument of considerable destruction even for as long as an hour or two, until early rigor mortis sets in, stiffening it beyond easy function. The rider spurs the corpse to drag itself erect by clawing at the lattice wall. The boy steps forward, between the professor and his sister, knife ready, but he will find that the knife is useless, for a corpse cannot be killed with either a slash across the carotid artery or a hundred stab wounds.
In Zachary’s room, the securing pivot pins rise out of the barrel hinges on the closet door and tumble to the floor.
By contact with the door, Melody knows what has been done to assist her, and she strains against that barrier until the knuckles of the hinge barrels separate from one another. One side of the door sags an inch away from the jamb, and now there is enough play in it to work it until the bracing chair slides out from under the knob.
The door falls, and Melody enters the boy’s room. She goes to his desk, opens the drawer where he put the cleaver, and recovers that fine piece of cutlery.
The wheel rolled to a stop on the snow-mantled lawn, near the arbor, having grown as immense as the tire on a giant earthmoving machine, maybe seven feet in diameter. Its weight must have been enormous, because it pressed an eight- or ten-inch-deep trench in the frozen yard.
The new-woven straps of wood on the ends of the arbor would not unweave at John’s declaration of his ownership, which had caused the bathroom door to relent. Judging by the look of the lattice, he would need a chainsaw to cut through, assuming wood didn’t magically heal behind the wound made by a high-speed chain. If he wasn’t in downtown Twilight Zone anymore, he was still in the suburbs.
Fingers hooked in the gaps, Minnie pressed her sweet face to the lattice and screamed, “The professor died, but he’s still after us!”
Spirit-ridden, the dead professor lumbers forward, the boy lunges, the knife goes deep, but hands that once signed declarations of treason against several young men of promise serve just as well to grab the boy’s knife hand and force him to drop the blade. He also grabs the boy’s throat to lift him and slam him backward into the farther wall of lattice so hard that the entire arbor clatters, and the girl screams. The dead man is strong but with poor coordination, while the boy is clever and agile and fiercely determined. The boy wrenches his right hand out of Sinyavski’s grip, kicks and squirms, thrashes furiously, breaks loose. The dead man turns, grabbing at him, stumbles, almost falls, and lurches two steps into the wall. The lattice cracks, the structure shudders, Sinyavski drops to his knees.
Heart in his throat, breath so hot it didn’t just plume from him but gushed out like pressurized steam from a leak in a boiler, John ran back and forth along the structure, trying to understand what was happening in there, as the bad light rapidly got worse. When he thought he saw Zach escape Sinyavski, John thrust the barrel of the shotgun through one of the two-inch-square gaps in the arbor, but the bracketing lattice allowed no lateral shift, he could only shoot straight ahead. No way to take down Sinyavski unless the professor stepped directly in front of the muzzle. And where was Zach? Gloom, moving shadows, chaos, too much risk of hitting Zach.
Minnie shouted, “He’s already dead! He can’t be killed twice!”
“He’s clumsy, Dad,” Zach said. “Dead-guy clumsy. But there’s not much room in here.”
“Use the thing!” Minnie urged.
On their knees in the snow, face-to-face with Minnie, Nicky and Naomi held fast to the small fingers that the girl hooked through the lattice, Naomi crying. Nicky said, “What thing, baby? What thing?”
“The wheel-thing.”
John pleaded: “What is it, Minnie, how do I use it?”
“It’s an idea.”
“Idea? What idea?”
“The idea, the idea behind everything. Daddy, it’s the drinking glass with the black stuff in it, the stray dog that healed a guy.”
Stunned t
hat she referred to Peter Abelard, to a conversation she had never heard, John said, “How do you know about that?”
Zach shouted, “Dad, I’ve got the knife again.”
“Stay away from him! Where is he?”
“On his knees but trying to get up,” Zach said.
“How do you know about the glass, the dog?” John asked Minnie.
“I don’t know how, but I know.”
John heard Abelard in memory: I think the divine has taken a few steps back from humankind, perhaps in revulsion, perhaps because we don’t deserve to look directly upon holy beings anymore.… When the divine enters the world these days from outside of time, it manifests discreetly through children and animals.
Whatever it might be, the huge wheel wasn’t exactly discreet, but John said, “What is it, Minnie? Tell me as clear as you can, what is the wheel?”
“It says it’s the power that makes a highway through a sea.”
“What do you mean it says?”
“I hear it now,” Minnie declared. “It’s the power that makes a highway through a sea, and wakes the dead. It’s whatever you need it to be when you need it, and what you need is a door. Isn’t what you need a door, Daddy?”
John had extended an invitation, letting an evil back into the world. Only he could evict it. They wouldn’t send an exorcist. They were embarrassed by the old-fashioned idea of absolute Evil, of Evil personified, but the answer to this wasn’t a food bank, he would not save his family and himself by throwing food at this thing, not by giving it a cot in a homeless shelter, not by social action, what he needed here was some really effective antisocial action or else what was once called a miracle, which these days maybe only a child, like Minnie, had the imagination to envision and the faith to pursue. So be as a child. Put aside pride and vanity. Have the humility of a child who is weak and knows his weakness. Admit fear in the face of the void. Admit ignorance in the presence of the unknowable. A child believes in mysteries within mysteries and seeks wonder, which should be easy, considering that here in this yard, this very moment, John was adrift in a sea of mystery, in a storm of wonder. What the heart knows, the mind has forgotten, and what the heart knows is the truth. “I need a door,” John said, becoming as a child, “I need a door, and I know there must be a door, I believe in a door, please give me a door, God, please, I want a door, please God, please give me a damn door.”