Koontz, Dean R. - Mr. Murder

by Dean Koontz

  you wearing?"

  "Mine," he says.

  "But that's the new style varsity jacket."

  "Are Paige and the kids all right?" Dad asks.

  "Yes, they're okay, they haven't been hurt," he says.

  Fingering the jacket, his mother says, "The school only adopted this

  style two years ago."

  "It's mine," he repeats. He takes off the baseball cap before she can

  notice that it is slightly too large for him.

  On one wall is an arrangement of photographs of him, Paige, Charlotte,

  and Emily at different ages. He averts his eyes from that gallery, for

  it affects him too deeply and threatens to wring more tears from him.

  He must recover and maintain control of his emotions in order to convey

  the essentials of this complex and mysterious situation to his parents.

  The three of them have little time to devise a plan of action before the

  imposter arrives.

  His mother sits beside him on the sofa. She holds his right hand in

  both of hers, squeezing gently, encouragingly.

  j - To his left, his father perches on the edge of an armchair, leaning

  . forward, attentive, frowning with worry.

  He has so much to tell them and does not know where to begin.

  He hesitates. For a moment he is afraid he'll never find the right

  first word, fall mute, oppressed by a psychological block even worse

  than the one that afflicted him when he sat at the computer in his

  office and attempted to write the first sentence of a new novel.

  When he suddenly begins to talk, however, the words gush from him as

  storm waters might explode through a bursting barricade. "A man,

  there's a man, he looks like me, exactly like me, even I can't see any

  difference, and he's stolen my life. Paige and the girls think he's me,

  but he's not me, I don't know who he is or how he fools Paige.

  He took my memories, left me with nothing, and I just don't know how,

  don't know how, how he managed to steal so much from me and leave me so

  empty."

  His father appears startled, and well might he be startled by these

  terrifying revelations. But there's something wrong with Dad's

  startlement, some subtle quality that eludes definition.

  Mom's hands tighten on his right hand in a way that seems more reflexive

  than conscious. He dares not look at her.

  He hurries on, aware that they are confused, eager to make them

  understand. "Talks like me, moves and stands like me, seems to be me,

  so I've thought hard about it, trying to understand who he could be,

  where he could've come from, and I keep going back to the same

  explanation, even if it seems incredible, but it must be like in the

  movies, you know, like with Kevin McCarthy, or Donald Sutherland in the

  remake, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, some thing not human, not of

  this world, something that can imitate us perfectly and bleed away our

  memories, become us, except some how he failed to kill me and get rid of

  my body after he took what was in my mind."

  Breathless, he pauses.

  For a moment, neither of his parents speak.

  A look passes between them. He does not like that look. He does not

  like it at all.

  "Marty," Dad says, "maybe you better go back to the beginning, slow

  down, tell us exactly what's happened, step by step."

  "I'm trying to tell you," he says exasperatedly. "I know it's

  incredible, hard to believe, but I am telling you, Dad."

  "I want to help you, Marty. I want to believe. So just calm down, tell

  me everything from the beginning, give me a chance to under stand."

  "We don't have much time. Don't you understand? Paige and the girls

  are coming here with this . . . this creature, this inhuman thing.

  I've got to get them away from it. With your help I've got to kill it

  somehow and get my family back before it's too late."

  His mother is pale, biting her lip. Her eyes blur with nascent tears.

  Her hands have closed so tightly over his that she is almost hurting

  him. He dares to hope that she grasps the urgency and dire nature of

  the threat.

  He says, "It'll be all right, Mom. Somehow we'll handle it. Together

  we have a chance."

  He glances at the front windows. He expects to see the BMW arriving in

  the snowy street, pulling into the driveway. Not yet.

  They still have time, perhaps only minutes, seconds, but time.

  Dad clears his throat and says, "Marty, I don't know what's happening

  here--"

  "I told you what's happening!" he shouts. "Damn it, Dad, you don't

  know what I've been going through." Tears well up again, and he

  struggles to repress them. "I've been in such pain, I've been so

  afraid, for as long as I can remember, so afraid and alone and trying to

  understand."

  His father reaches out, puts a hand on his knee. Dad is troubled but

  not in a way that he should be. He isn't visibly angry that some alien

  entity has stolen his son's life, isn't as frightened as he ought to be

  by the news that an inhuman presence now walks the earth, passing for

  human. Rather, he seems merely worried and . . . sad.

  There is an unmistakable and inappropriate sadness in his face and

  voice. "You're not alone, son. We're always here for you. Surely you

  know that."

  "We'll stand beside you," Mom says. "We'll get you whatever help you

  need."

  "If Paige is coming, like you say," his father adds, "we'll sit down

  together when she gets here, talk this out, try to understand what's

  happening. Their voices are vaguely patronizing, as if they are talking

  to an intelligent and perceptive child but a child nonetheless.

  "Shut up! Just shut up!" He pulls his hand free of his mother's grasp

  and leaps up from the sofa, shaking with frustration.

  The window. Falling snow. The street. No BMW. But soon.

  He turns away from the window, faces his parents.

  His mother sits on the edge of the sofa, her face buried in her hands,

  shoulders hunched, in a posture of grief or despair.

  He needs to make them understand. He is consumed by that need and

  frustrated by his inability to get even the fundamentals of the

  situation across to them.

  His father rises from the chair. Stands indecisively. Arms at his

  sides. "Marty, you came to us for help, and we want to help, God knows

  we do, but we can't help if you won't let us."

  Lowering her hands from her face, with tears on her cheeks now, his

  mother says, "Please, Marty. Please."

  "Everyone makes mistakes now and then," his father says.

  "If it's drugs," his mother says, through tears, speaking as much to his

  father as to him, "we can cope with that, honey, we can handle that, we

  can find treatment for that."

  His glass-encased world--beautiful, peaceful, timeless--in which he's

  been living during the precious minutes since his mother opened her arms

  to him at the front door, now abruptly fractures.

  An ugly, jagged crack scars the smooth curve of crystal. The sweet,

  clean atmosphere of that paradise escapes with a whoosh, admitting the

  poisonous air of the hateful world in which existence requires an

  unending struggle aga
inst hopelessness, loneliness, rejection.

  "Don't do this to me," he pleads. "Don't betray me. How can you do

  this to me? How can you turn against me? I am your child."

  Frustration turns to anger. "Your only child." Anger turns to hatred.

  "I need. I need. Can't you see?" He is trembling with rage. "Don't

  you care? Are you heartless? How can you be so awful to me, so cruel?

  How could you let it come to this?"

  At a service station in Bishop, they stopped long enough to buy snow

  chains and to pay extra to have them buckled to the wheels of the BMW.

  The California Highway Patrol was recommending but not yet requiring

  that all vehicles heading into the Sierra Nevadas be equipped with

  chains.

  Route 395 became a divided highway west of Bishop, and in spite of the

  dramatically rising elevation, they made good time past Rovanna and

  Crowley Lake, past McGee Creek and Convict Lake, exiting 395 onto Route

  203 slightly south of Casa Diablo Hot Springs.

  Casa Diablo. House of the Devil.

  The meaning of the name had never impinged upon Marty before.

  Now everything was an omen.

  Snow began falling before they reached Mammoth Lakes.

  The fat flakes were almost as loosely woven as cheap lace. They fell in

  such plenitude that it seemed more than half the volume of the air

  between land and sky was occupied by snow. It immediately began to

  stick, trimming the landscape in faux ermine.

  Paige drove through Mammoth Lakes without stopping and turned south

  toward Lake Mary. In the back seat, Charlotte and Emily were so

  entranced by the snowfall that, for the time being, they did not need to

  be entertained.

  East of the mountains, the sky had been gray-black and churning.

  Here, in the wintry heart of the Sierras, it was like a Cyclopean eye

  sheathed in a milky cataract.

  The turn-off from Route 203 was marked by a copse of pines in which the

  tallest specimen bore scars from a decade-old lightning strike. The

  bolt had not merely damaged the pine but had encouraged it into mutant

  patterns of growth, until it had become a gnarled and malignant tower.

  The snowflakes were smaller than before, falling harder, driven by the

  northwest wind. After a playful debut, the storm was turning serious.

  Cutting through mountain meadows and forests--increasingly more of the

  latter and fewer of the former--the upsloping road eventually passed a

  chain-link encircled property of over a hundred acres on the right.

  This plot had been purchased eleven years ago by the Prophetic Church of

  the Rapture, a cult that had followed the teachings of the Reverend

  Jonathan Caine and had believed that the faithful would soon be

  levitated from the earth, leaving only the unbaptized and truly wicked

  to endure a thousand years of grueling war and hell on earth before

  final Judgment came to pass.

  As it turned out, Caine had been a child molester who video taped his

  abuse of cult members' children. He had gone to prison, his two

  thousand followers had dispersed on the winds of disillusionment and

  betrayal, and the property with all its buildings had been tied up by

  litigation for almost five years.

  Some fantasies were destructive.

  The chain-link fence, topped with coils of dangerous razor wire, was

  broken down in places. In the distance the spire of their church soared

  high above the trees. Beneath it were the sloped roofs of a warren of

  buildings in which the faithful had slept, taken their meals, and waited

  to be lifted heavenward by the right hand of the Lord Almighty. The

  spire stood untouched. But the buildings under it were missing many

  doors and windows, home to rats and possums and raccoons, shorn of glory

  and hairy with decay. Sometimes the vandals had been human. But wind

  and ice and snow had done the better part of the damage, as if God,

  through weather warped to His whim, had passed a judgment on the Church

  of the Rapture that He had not yet been ready to pass on the rest of

  humankind.

  The cabin was also to the right of the narrow county road, the next

  property after the huge tract owned by the defunct cult. Set back a

  hundred yards from the pavement, at the end of a dirt lane, it was one

  of many similar retreats spread through the surrounding hills, most of

  them on an acre of land or more.

  It was a one-story structure with weather-silvered cedar siding, slate

  roof, screened front porch, and river-rock foundation. Over the years

  his father and mother had expanded the original building until it

  contained two bedrooms, kitchen, living room, and two baths.

  They parked in front of the cabin and got out of the BMW. The

  surrounding firs, sugar pines, and ponderosa pines were ancient and

  huge, and the crisp air was sweet with the scent of them. Drifts of

  dead needles and scores of pinecones littered the property. Snow

  reached the ground only between the trees and through the occasional

  interstices of their thatched boughs.

  Marty went to the woodshed behind the cabin. The door was held shut

  with a hasp and peg. Inside, to the right of the entrance, against the

  wall, a spare key was wrapped tightly in plastic and buried half an inch

  under the dirt floor.

  When Marty returned to the front of the cabin, Emily was circling one of

  the larger trees in a crouch, closely examining the cones that had

  fallen from it. Charlotte was performing a wildly exaggerated ballet in

  an open space between trees, where a wide shaft of snow fell like a

  spotlight on a stage.

  "I am the Snow Queen!" Charlotte announced breathlessly as she twirled

  and leaped. "I have dominion over winter! I can command the snow to

  fall! I can make the world shiny and white and beautiful!"

  As Emily began to gather up an armload of cones, Paige said, "Honey,

  you're not bringing those in the house."

  "I'm going to make some art."

  "They're dirty."

  "They're beautiful."

  "They're beautiful and dirty," Paige said.

  "I'll make art out here."

  "Snow fall! Snow blow! Snow swirl and whirl and caper!" commanded the

  dancing Snow Queen as Marty climbed the wooden steps and opened the

  screen door on the porch.

  That morning the girls had dressed in jeans and wool sweaters, to be

  ready for the Sierras, and they were wearing heavily insulated nylon

  jackets as well as cloth gloves. They wanted to stay outside and play.

  Even if they'd had boots, however, the outdoors would have been off

  limits. This time, the cabin was not simply a vacation getaway but a

  cloistered retreat which they might have to transform into a fortress,

  and the surrounding woods might eventually harbor some thing far more

  dangerous than wolves.

  Inside, the place had a faint musty smell. It actually seemed colder

  than the snowy day beyond its walls.

  Logs were stacked in the fireplace, and additional wood was piled high

  on one side of the broad, deep hearth. Later they would light a fire.

  To warm the cabin quickly, Paige went room to room, switching on the

  electric space hea
ters set in the walls.

  Standing by one of the front windows, looking through the screened porch

  and down the dirt lane toward the county road, Marty used the cellular

  phone, which he'd brought in from the car, to try yet again to reach his

  folks back in Mammoth Lakes.

  "Daddy," Charlotte said as he punched in the number, "I just

  thought--who's going to feed Sheldon and Bob and Fred and the other guys

  back home while we're not there?"

  "I already arranged with Mrs. Sanchez to take care of that," he lied,

  for he hadn't yet found the courage to tell her that all of her pets had

  been killed.

  "Oh, okay. Then it's a good thing it wasn't Mrs. Sanchez who went

  totally berserk."

  "Who you calling, Daddy?" Emily asked as the first ring sounded at the

  far end of the line.

  "Grandma and Grandpa."

  "Tell them I'm gonna make a cone sculpture for them."

  "Boy," Charlotte said, "that'll thrill the puke out of 'em."

  The phone rang a third time.

  "They like my art," Emily insisted.

  Charlotte said, "They have to--they're your grandparents."