by Dean Koontz
danger, me, their father, because of what I do for a living."
Vic looks baffled. "You write books."
"Vic, you know what an obsessive fan is?"
Vic's eyes widen, then narrow as a gust of wind flings raindrops in his
face. "Like that woman and Michael J. Fox a few years ago."
"That's it, that's right, like Michael J. Fox." The girls are both in
the car. He slams the door. "Only it's a guy bothering us, not some
crazy woman, and tonight he goes too far, breaks in the house, he's
violent, I had to hurt him. Me. You imagine me having to hurt any
body, Vic? Now I'm afraid he'll be back, and I've got to get the girls
away from here."
"My God," Vic says, totally suckered by the tale.
"Now that's all I have time to tell you, Vic, more than I have time to
tell you, so you just . . . you just . . . you go back inside there
before you catch your death of pneumonia. I'll call you in a few days,
I'll tell you the rest."
Vic hesitates. "If we can do anything to help--"
"Go on now, go on, I appreciate what you've done already, but the only
thing more you can do to help is get out of this rain.
Look at you, you're drenched, for heaven's sake. Go get out of this
rain, so I don't have to worry about you comin' down with pneumonia on
account of me."
Joining Marty at the back of the BMW, where he had dropped the bags,
Paige put down the third suitcase and the Mossberg. When he unlocked
and raised the trunk lid, she saw the three boxes inside.
"What're those?"
He said, "Stuff we might need."
"Like what?"
"I'll explain later." He heaved the suitcases into the trunk.
When only two of the three would fit, she said, "The stuff I've packed
is all bare necessities. At least one box has to go."
"No. I'll put the smallest suitcase in the back seat, on the floor,
under Emily's feet. Her feet don't reach the floor anyway."
Halfway to the house, Vic looks back toward the Buick.
Still playing Jimmy Stewart, "Go on, Vic, go on now. There's Kathy on
the stoop, gonna catch her death, too, if you don't get inside, the both
of you."
He turns away, rounds the back of the Buick, and only looks at the house
again when he reaches the driver's door.
Vic is on the stoop with Kathy, too far away now to prevent his escape,
with or without a gun.
He waves at the Delorios, and they wave back. He gets into the Buick,
behind the steering wheel, the oversize raincoat bunching up around him.
He pulls the door shut.
Across the street, in his own house, lights are aglow upstairs and down.
The imposter is in there with Paige. His beautiful Paige. He can't do
anything about that, not yet, not without a gun.
When he turns to look into the back seat, he sees that Charlotte and
Emily have already buckled themselves into the safety harnesses.
They are good girls. And so cute in their yellow raincoats and matching
vinyl hats. Even in their picture, they are not this cute.
They both start talking, Charlotte first, "Where're we going, Daddy,
where'd we get this car?"
Emily says, "Where's Mommy?"
Before he can answer them, they launch an unmerciful salvo of questions,
"What happened, who'd you shoot, did you kill anybody?"
"Was it Mrs. Sanchez?"
"Did she go berserk like Hannibal the Cannibal, Daddy, was she really
whacko?" Charlotte asked.
Peering through the passenger-side window, he sees the De lorios go into
their house together and close the front door.
Emily says, "Daddy, is it true?"
"Yeah, Daddy, is it true, what you told Mr. Delorio, like with Michael
J. Fox, is it true? He's cute."
"Just be quiet," he tells them impatiently. He shifts the Buick into
gear, tramps the accelerator. The car bucks in place because he's
forgotten to release the handbrake, which he does, but then the car
jolts forward and stalls.
"Why isn't Mom with you?" Emily asks.
Charlotte's excitement is growing, and the sound of her voice is making
him dizzy, "Boy, you had blood all over your shirt, you sure must've
shot somebody, it was really disgusting, maximum gross."
The craving for food is intense. His hands are shaking so badly that
the keys jangle noisily when he tries to restart the engine.
Although the hunger won't be nearly as bad this time as previously,
he'll be able to go only a few blocks before he'll be overwhelmed with a
need for those candy bars.
"Where's Mommy?"
"He must've tried to shoot you first, did he try to shoot you first, did
he have a knife, that would've been scary, a knife, what did he have,
Daddy?"
The starter grinds, the car chugs, but the engine won't turn over, as if
he has flooded it.
"Where's Mommy?"
"Did you actually fight him with your bare hands, take a knife away from
him or something, Daddy, how could you do that, do you know karate, do
you?"
"Where's Mommy? I want to know where Mommy is."
Rain thumps off the car roof. Pongs off the hood. The flooded engine
is maddeningly unresponsive, ruuurrrrr-ruuurrrrr-ruuurrrrr.
Windshield wipers thudding, thudding. Back and forth. Back and forth.
Pounding incessantly. Girlish voices in the back seat, increasingly
shrill. Like the strident buzzing of bees. Buzz-buzz-buzz.
Has to concentrate to keep his trembling hand firmly on the key.
Sweaty, spastic fingers keep slipping off. Afraid of overcompensating,
maybe snap the key off in the ignition. Ruuurrrrr-ruuurrrrr.
Starving.
Need to eat. Need to get away from here. Thump. Pong. Incessant
pounding. Pain revives in his nearly healed wounds. Hurts to breathe.
Damn engine. Ruuurrrrr. Won't start. Ruuurrrrr-ruuurrrrr.
Daddy-Daddy Daddy-Daddy-Daddy, buzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Frustration to anger, anger to hatred, hatred to violence.
Violence sometimes soothes.
Itching to hit something, anything, he turns in his seat, glares back at
the girls, screams at them, "Shut up, shut, up, shut up!"
They are stunned. As if he has never spoken to them like this before.
The little one bites her lip, can't bear to look at him, turns her face
to the side window.
"Quiet, for Christ's sake, be quiet!"
When he faces forward again and tries to start the car, the older girl
bursts into tears as if she's a baby. Wipers thudding, starter
grinding, engine wallowing, the steady thump of rain, and now her whiny
weeping, so piercing, grating, just too much to bear. He screams
wordlessly at her, loud enough to drown out her crying and all the other
sounds for a moment. He considers climbing into the back seat with the
damn shrieking little thing, make it stop, hit it, shake it, clamp one
hand over its nose and mouth until it can't make a sound of any kind,
until it finally stops crying, stops struggling, just stops, stops --and
abruptly the engine chugs, turns over, purrs sweetly.
"I'll be right back," Paige said as Marty put the suitcase on the floor
behind the driver's seat of
the BMW.
He looked up in time to see that she was heading into the house.
"Wait, what're you doing?"
"Got to turn off all the lights."
"To hell with that. Don't go back in there."
It was a moment from fiction, straight out of a novel or movie, and
Marty recognized it as such. Having packed, having gotten as far as the
car, that close to escaping unscathed, they would return to the house to
complete an inessential task, confident of their safety, and somehow the
psychopath would be in there, either because he had returned while they
were in the garage or because he had successfully hidden in some
cleverly concealed niche throughout the police search of the premises.
They would move from room to room, switching off the lights, letting
darkness spill through the house where upon the look-alike would
materialize, a shadow out of shadows, wielding a large butcher's knife
taken from the rack of implements in their own kitchen, slashing,
stabbing, killing one or both of them.
Marty knew real life was neither as extravagantly colorful as the most
eventful fiction nor half as drab as the average academic novel--and
less predictable than either. His fear of returning to the house to
switch off the lights was irrational, the product of a too-fertile
imagination and a novelist's predilection to anticipate drama,
malevolence , and tragedy in every turn of human affairs, in every
change of weather, plan, dream, hope, or roll of dice.
Nevertheless, they weren't going back into the damn house. No way in
hell.
"Leave the lights on," he said. "Lock up, raise the garage door, let's
get the kids and get out of here."
Maybe Paige had lived with a novelist long enough for her own
imagination to be corrupted, or maybe she remembered all of the blood in
the upstairs hall. For whatever reason, she didn't protest that leaving
so many lights on would be a waste of electricity. She thumbed the
button to activate the Genie lift, and shut the door to the kitchen with
her other hand.
As Marty closed and locked the trunk of the BMW, the garage door
finished rising. With a final clatter it settled into the full-open
position.
He looked out at the rainy night, his right hand straying to the butt of
the Beretta at his waistband. His imagination was still churning, and
he was prepared to see the indomitable look-alike coming up the
driveway.
What he saw, instead, was worse than any image conjured by his
imagination. A car was parked across the street in front of the De
lorios' house. It wasn't the Delorios' car. Marty had never seen it
before. The headlights were on, though the driver was having difficulty
getting the engine to turn over, it cranked and cranked. Although the
driver was only a dark shape, the small pale oval of a child's face was
visible at the rear window, staring out from the back seat. Even at a
distance, Marty was sure that the little girl in the Buick was Emily.
At the connecting door to the kitchen, Paige was fumbling for house keys
in the pockets of her corduroy jacket.
Marty was in the grip of paralytic shock. He couldn't call out to
Paige, couldn't move.
Across the street, the engine of the Buick caught, chugged
consumptively, then roared fully to life. Clouds of crystallized fumes
billowed from the exhaust pipe.
Marty didn't realize he'd shattered the paralysis and begun to move
until he was out of the garage, in the middle of the driveway, sprinting
through the cold rain toward the street. He felt as though he had
teleported thirty feet in a tiny fraction of a second, but it was just
that, operating on instinct and sheer animal terror, his body was ahead
of his mind.
The Beretta was in his hand. He didn't recall drawing it out of his
waistband.
The Buick pulled away from the curb and Marty turned left to follow it.
The car was moving slowly because the driver had not yet realized that
he was being pursued.
Emily was still visible. Her frightened face was now pressed tightly to
the glass. She was staring directly at her father.
Marty was closing on the car, ten feet from the rear bumper.
Then it accelerated smoothly away from him, much faster than he could
run. Its tires parted the puddles with a percolative burble and plash.
Like a passenger on Charon's gondola, Emily was being ferried not just
along a street but across the river Styx, into the land of the dead.
A black wave of despair washed over Marty, but his heart began to pound
even more fiercely than before, and he found a strength he had not
imagined he possessed. He ran harder than ever, splashing through
puddles, feet hammering the blacktop with what seemed like jackhammer
force, pumping his arms, head tucked down, eyes always on the prize.
At the end of the block the Buick slowed. It came to a full stop at the
intersection.
Gasping, Marty caught up with it. Back bumper. Rear fender.
Rear door.
Emily's face was at the window.
She was looking up at him now.
His senses were as heightened by terror as if he'd taken mind altering
drugs. He was hallucinogenically aware of every detail of the scores of
raindrops on the glass between himself and his daughter their curved and
pendulous shapes, the bleak whorls and shards of light from the street
lamps reflected in their quivering surfaces--as if each of those
droplets was equal in importance to anything else in the world.
Likewise, he saw the interior of the car not just as a dark blur but as
an elaborate dimensional tapestry of shadows in countless hues of gray,
blue, black. Beyond Emily's pale face, in that intricate needlework of
dusk and gloom, was another figure, a second child, Charlotte.
Just as he drew even with the driver's door and reached for the handle,
the car began to move again. It swung right, through the intersection.
Marty slipped and almost fell on the wet pavement. He regained his
balance, held on to the gun, and scrambled after the Buick as it turned
into the cross street.
The driver was looking to the right, unaware of Marty on his left.
He was wearing a black coat. Only the back of his head was visible
through the rain-streaked side window. His hair was darker than Vic
Delorio's.
Because the car was still moving slowly as it completed the turn, MR.
Marty caught up with it again, breathing strenuously, ears filled with
the hard drumming of his heart. He didn't reach for the door this time
because maybe it was locked. He would squander the element of surprise
by trying it. Raising the Beretta, he aimed at the back of the man's
head.
The kids could be hit by a ricochet, flying glass. He had to risk it.
Otherwise, they were lost forever.
Though there was little chance the driver was Vic Delorio or another
innocent person, Marty couldn't squeeze the trigger without knowing for
sure at whom he was shooting. Still moving, paralleling the car, he
shouted, "Hey, hey, hey!"
<
br /> The driver snapped his head around to look out the side window.
Along the barrel of the pistol, Marty stared at his own face.
The Other. The glass before him seemed like a cursed mirror in which
his reflection was not confined to precise mimicry but was free to
reveal more vicious emotions than anyone would ever want the world to
see, as it confronted him, that looking-glass face clenched with hatred
and fury.
Startled, the driver had let his foot slip off the accelerator.
For the briefest moment the Buick slowed.
No more than four feet from the window, Marty squeezed off two rounds.
In the instant before the resonant thunder of the first gunshot echoed
off an infinitude of wet surfaces across the rainswept night, he thought
he saw the driver drop to the side and down, still holding the steering
wheel with at least one hand but trying to get his head out of the line
of fire. The muzzle flashed, and shattering glass obscured the
bastard's fate.