by Dean Koontz
miles an hour. Desolate plains. Hills of sand, shale.
Volcanic rock. Many-armed Joshua trees standing sentinel.
As a pilgrim to a holy place, as a lemming to the sea, as a comet on its
eternal course, westward, westward, trying to out-race the ocean-seeking
sun.
Marty owned five guns.
He was not a hunter or collector. He didn't shoot skeet or take target
practice for the fun of it. Unlike several people he knew, he hadn't
armed himself out of fear of social collapse though sometimes he saw
signs of it everywhere. He could not even say that he liked guns, but
he recognized the need for them in a troubled world.
He had purchased the weapons one by one for research purposes. As a
mystery novelist, writing about cops and killers, he believed he had a
was not a gun hobbyist and had a finite amount of time to research all
of the many backgrounds and subjects upon which each novel touched,
minor mistakes were inevitable now and then, but he felt more
comfortable writing about a weapon if he had fired it.
In his nightstand he kept an unloaded Korth .38 revolver and a box of
cartridges. The Korth was a handmade weapon of the highest quality,
produced in Germany. After learning to use it for a novel titled The
Deadly Twilight, he had kept it for home defense.
Several times, he and Paige had taken the girls to an indoor shooting
range to witness target practice, instilling in them a deep respect for
the revolver. When Charlotte and Emily were old enough, he would teach
them to use a gun, though one less powerful and with less recoil than
the Korth. Firearm accidents virtually always resulted from ignorance.
In Switzerland, where every male citizen was required to own a firearm
to defend the country in times of trouble, gun instruction was universal
and tragic accidents extremely rare.
He removed the .38 from the nightstand, loaded it, and took it to the
garage, where he tucked it in the glove compartment of their second car,
a green Ford Taurus. He wanted it for protection to and from his
one-o'clock appointment with Dr. Guthridge.
A Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun, a Colt M16 A2 rifle, and two pistols--a
Beretta Model 92 and a Smith & Wesson 5904--were stored in their
original boxes inside a locked metal cabinet in one corner of the
garage. There were also boxes of ammunition in every caliber required.
He unpacked each weapon, which had been cleaned and oiled before being
put away, and loaded it.
He put the Beretta in the kitchen, in an upper cabinet beside the stove,
in front of a pair of ceramic casserole dishes. The girls would not
happen upon it there before he called a family conference to explain the
reasons for his extraordinary precautions--if he could explain.
The M16 went on an upper shelf in the foyer closet just inside the front
door. He put the Smith & Wesson in his office desk, in the second
drawer of the right-hand drawer bank, and slipped the Mossberg under the
bed in the master bedroom.
Throughout his preparations, he worried that he was deranged, arming
himself against a threat that did not exist. Considering the
seven-minute fugue he had experienced on Saturday, messing around with
weapons was the last thing he should be doing.
He had no proof of impending danger. He was operating sheerly on
instinct, a soldier ant mindlessly constructing fortifications.
Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. By nature he was a
thinker, a planner, a brooder, and only last of all a man of action.
But this was a good of instinctual response, and he was swept away by
it.
Then, just as he finished hiding the shotgun in the master bedroom,
worries about his mental condition were abruptly outweighed by another
consideration. The oppressive atmosphere of his recent dream was with
him again, the feeling that some terrible weight was bearing down on him
at a murderous speed. The air seemed to thicken. It was almost as bad
as in the nightmare. And getting worse.
God help me, he thought--and was not sure if he was asking for
protection from some unknown enemy or from dark impulses in himself.
"I need . .."
Dust devils. Dancing on the high desert.
Sunlight sparkling in broken bottles along the highway.
Fastest thing on the road. Passing cars, trucks. The landscape a blur.
Scattered towns, all blurs.
Faster. Faster. As if being sucked into a black hole.
Past Victorville.
Past Apple Valley.
Through the Cajon Pass at forty-two hundred feet above sea level.
Then descending. Past San Bernardino. Onto the Riverside Free
Riverside. Carona.
Through the Santa Ana Mountains.
"I need to be . .."
South. The Costa Mesa Freeway.
The City of Orange. Tustin. In the southern California suburban maze.
Such powerful magnetism, pulling, pulling ruthlessly.
More than magnetism. Gravity. Down into the vortex of the black hole.
Switch to the Santa Ana Freeway.
Mouth dry. A bitter metallic taste. Heart pounding fiercely, pulse
throbbing in his temples.
"I need to be someone."
Faster. As if tied to a massive anchor on an endless chain, plummeting
into the lightless fathoms of a bottomless ocean trench.
Past Irvine, Laguna Hills, El Toro.
Into the dark heart of the mystery.
". . . need. . . need. . . need. . . need. . . need. .."
Mission Viejo. This exit. Yes.
Off the freeway.
Seeking the magnet. The enigmatic attractant.
All the way from Kansas City to find the unknown, to discover his
strange and wondrous future. Home. Identity. Meaning.
Turn left here, two blocks, turn right. Unfamiliar streets. But to
find the way, he needs only to give himself to the power that pulls him.
Mediterranean houses. Neatly trimmed lawns. Palm shadows on
pale-yellow stucco walls.
Here.
That house.
To the curb. Stop. Half a block away.
Just a house like the others. Except. Something inside. Whatever he
first sensed in faraway Kansas. Whatever draws him. Some The
attraction Inside.
Waiting.
A wordless cry of triumph escapes him, and he shudders violently with
relief. He no longer needs to seek his destiny.
Although he does not yet know what it may be, he is certain that he's
found it, and he sags in his seat, his sweaty hands slipping off the
steering wheel, pleased to be at the end of the long journey.
He is more excited than he has ever been, filled with curiosity,
however, released at last from the iron grip of compulsion, he loses his
sense of urgency. His trip-hammering heart decelerates to a more normal
number of beats per minute. His ears stop ringing, and he is able to
breathe more deeply and evenly than he has for at least fifty miles. In
startlingly short order, he is as outwardly calm and selfcontained as he
was in the big house in Kansas City, where he gratefully shared the
tender intimacies of death with the man and woman in the antique
Georgian bed.
By the time Marty took the keys to the Taurus off the kitchen pegboard,
stepped into the garage, locked the door to the house, and pushed the
button to raise the automatic garage door, his awareness of impending
danger was so acute and harrowing that he was on the edge of blind
panic. In the feverish thrall of paranoia, he was convinced that he was
being hunted by an uncanny enemy who employed not merely crazy notion,
for God's sake, straight out of the National Enquirer, crazy yet
inescapable because he actually could feel a presence . .
. a violent stalking presence that was conscious of him, pressing him,
probing. He felt as if a viscous fluid was squirting into his skull
under tremendous pressure, compressing his brain, squeezing
consciousness out of him. A very real physical effect was part of it,
too, because he was as weighed down as a deep-sea diver under a crushing
tonnage of water, joints aching, muscles burning, lungs reluctant to
expand and accept new breath. Extreme sensitivity to every stimulant
nearly incapacitated him, the hard clatter of the rising garage door was
ear-splitting, intruding sunlight seared his eyes, and a musty
odor-ordinarily too faint to be detected exploded like a poisonous cloud
of spores out of a corner of the garage, so pungent that it made him
nauseous.
In an instant, the seizure passed, and he was in full control of
himself. Although it had seemed as if his skull would burst, the
internal pressure relented as abruptly as it had grown, and he no longer
teetered on the brink of unconsciousness. The pain in his joints and
muscles was gone, and the sunlight didn't sting his eyes.
It was like snapping out of a nightmare except he was awake on both
sides of the snap.
Marty leaned against the Taurus. He was hesitant to believe that the
worst was past, waiting tensely for another inexplicable wave of
paranoid terror to batter him.
He looked out from the shadowy garage at the street, which was
simultaneously familiar and strange, half expecting some monstrous
phantasm to rise out of the pavement or descend through the sundrenched
air, a creature inhuman and merciless, ferocious and bent upon his
destruction, the invisible specter of his nightmare now made flesh.
His confidence didn't return, and he couldn't stop shaking, but his
apprehension gradually diminished to a tolerable level, until he was
able to consider whether he dared to drive. What if a similarly
disorienting spasm of fear hit him while he was behind the wheel?
He would be virtually oblivious of stop signs, oncoming traffic, and
hazards of all kinds.
More than ever, he needed to see Dr. Guthridge.
He wondered if he should go back into the house and call a taxi.
But this wasn't New York City, streets as warm with cabs, in southern
California, the words "taxi service" were, more often than not, an
oxymoron. By the time he could reach Guthridge's office by taxi, he
might have missed his appointment.
He got in the car, started the engine. With wary concentration, he
backed out of the garage and into the street, handling the wheel as
stiffly as a ninety-year-old man acutely aware of the brittleness of his
bones and the tenuous thread of his existence.
All the way to the doctor's office in Irvine, Marty Stillwater thought
about Paige and Charlotte and Emily. By the treachery of his own weak
flesh, he could be denied the satisfaction of seeing the girls become
women, the pleasure of growing old at his wife's side. Although he
believed in a world beyond death where eventually he might be reunited
with those he loved, life was so precious that even the promise of a
blissful eternity would not compensate for the loss of a few years on
this side of the veil.
From half a block away, the killer watches the car slowly back out of
the garage.
As the Ford turns away from him and gradually recedes through the
vinegar-gold autumn sunshine, he realizes the magnet which drew him from
Kansas is in that car. Perhaps it is the dimly seen man behind the
steering wheel--though it might not be a person at all but a talisman
hidden elsewhere in the vehicle, a magical object beyond his
understanding and to which his destiny is linked for reasons yet
unclear.
The killer almost starts the Honda to follow the attractant, but decides
the stranger in the Ford will return sooner or later.
He puts on his shoulder holster, slips the pistol into it, and shrugs
into the leather jacket.
From the glove compartment, he removes the zippered leather case that
contains his set of burglary tools. It includes seven springsteel
picks, an L-shaped tension tool, and a miniature aerosol can of graphite
lubricant.
He gets out of the car and proceeds boldly along the sidewalk toward the
house.
At the end of the driveway stands a white mailbox on which is stenciled
a single name--STILLWATER. Those ten black letters seem to possess
symbolic power. Still water. Calm. Peace. He has found still water.
He has come through much turbulence, violent rapids and whirlpools, and
now he has found a place where he can rest, where his soul will be
soothed.
Between the garage and the property-line fence, he opens the gravity
latch on a wrought-iron gate. He follows a walkway flanked by the
garage on his left and a head-high eugenia hedge on his right, all the
way to the rear of the house.
The shallow backyard is lushly planted. It boasts mature ficus trees
and a continuation of the sideyard eugenia hedge, which screen him from
the prying eyes of neighbors.
The patio is sheltered by an open-beam redwood cover through which
thorny trailers of bougainvillea are densely intertwined.
Even on this last day of November, clusters of blood-red flowers fringe
the patio roof. The concrete floor is spattered with fallen petals, as
though a hard-fought battle was waged here.
A kitchen door and large sliding glass door provide two possible
entrances from the patio. Both are locked.
The sliding door, beyond which he can see a deserted family room with
comfortable furniture and a large television, is further secured by a
wooden pole wedged into the interior track. If he gets through the
lock, he nevertheless will need to break the glass to reach inside and
remove the pole.
He knocks sharply on the other door, although the window beside it
reveals that no one is in the kitchen. When there is no response, he
knocks again with the same result.
From his compact kit of burglary tools, he withdraws the can of
graphite. Crouching before the door, he sprays the lubricant into the
lock. Dirt, rust, or other contamination can bind the pin tumblers.
He trades the graphite spray for the tension tool and that pick known as
a "rake." He inserts the L-shaped wrench first to maintain the
necessary tension on the lock core. He pushes the rake into the key
channel as deep as it will go, then brings i
t up until he feels it press
against the pins. Squinting into the lock, he rapidly draws the rake
out, but it does not raise all of the pin tumblers to their shear point,
so he tries again, and again, and finally on the sixth try the channel
seems to be clear.
He turns the knob.
The door opens.
He half expects an alarm to go off, but there is no siren. A quick scan
of the header and jamb fails to reveal magnetic switches, so there must
not be a silent alarm, either.
After he puts the tools away and zippers shut the leather case, he steps
across the threshold and softly closes the door behind him.
He stands for a while in the cool, shadowy kitchen, absorbing the
vibrations, which are good. This house welcomes him. Here, his future
begins, and it will be immeasurably brighter than his confused and
amnesia-riddled past.
As he moves out of the kitchen to explore the premises, he does not draw
the P7 from his shoulder holster. He is sure that no one is at home. He
senses no danger, only opportunity.
"I need to be someone," he tells the house, as if it is a living entity
with the power to grant his wishes.
The ground floor offers nothing of interest. The usual rooms are filled