by Dean Koontz
the sign from the first house, and he put it down there.
Linda watched him without asking a question or making a comment, watched not with a puzzled expression but with the analytical frown of a good student studying equations on a blackboard.
Tim figured that he could easily end up in love with her. Maybe he already was.
Even before he asked for the gun, she held it out to him.
“Come on,” he said, and she hurried with him to the house that he believed to be vacant.
The sky, a well-stocked armory, cast down bright spears, and the air smelled seared, and concussions rocked the night.
They went to a gate at the side of the house. It was held shut by only a gravity latch.
A serviceway led between the house and the property wall, and they followed it. At the back, a covered patio gave relief from the rain.
At what might have been the kitchen and breakfast-room windows, pleated shades were lowered to the sills. Other windows were draped.
Farther along, a pair of French doors lacked coverings of any kind. Linda directed the flashlight inside, revealing an unfurnished family room.
Tim gripped the pistol by the barrel, waited for the storm to bare its white teeth again, and timed the breaking of the glass to the subsequent roar of thunder. He reached inside, found the thumb-turn deadbolt, and opened the door.
She followed him into the house and closed the door, and they stood listening, but the lack of furnishings told the true story. No one lived here.
“A place like this,” he said, “there’s an alarm system. But because there’s nothing in the house and because the alarm would be an annoyance for the real-estate agents, they’ve left it off.”
Looking through the French doors, past the patio, past the dark swimming pool, past the property fence, past the black hole of the canyon, toward the regimented streetlamps on the lower hills and toward the up-coast view of city lights shimmering in the rain, Linda said, “How can this be happening to us here, all these multimillion-dollar houses, that glittering riviera spread out below….”
“Didn’t you say civilization is as fragile as glass?”
“Maybe it’s worse than that,” she said. “Maybe it’s a mirage.”
“There are always those who’d like to turn out the lights. So far we’ve been lucky. They’ve always just been shy of a majority.”
She turned from the view as if it pained her. “Are we safe here?”
“No.”
“I mean for just a little while?”
“No. Not even for a little while.”
Twenty-Seven
Krait drove past the abandoned Explorer. Instead of parking at the curb, he stopped beside the landscaped island in the center of the turnaround, where parking was not permitted.
The rain annoyed him. His clothes would be a mess.
Well, he could do nothing about the storm. Some time ago, he had reluctantly concluded that he had no control over the weather.
For a while, he had suspected that he might be able to influence the elements. His suspicions had been aroused because so frequently he received precisely the weather that he needed in order to set up and commit a murder.
He read several books about psychokinesis, the power of mind over matter. Some people could bend spoons without touching them. Experts in the paranormal said you could move objects from one place to another merely by thinking about transferring them.
Once, Krait had bent a spoon, but not with the power of his mind, just in frustration. He had tied the damn thing in a knot.
He had considered paying a visit to the author who had written the book about how to develop your psychokinetic talent. He wanted to make the guy swallow the knotted spoon.
Krait liked to make people swallow things that no one would want to swallow. He didn’t know why this delighted him, but for as long as he could remember, nothing had given him greater pleasure.
Because of the unlikely shapes and sizes of some of the objects, the people to whom he force-fed them often perished while swallowing. Therefore, he found it best not to begin an evening together with this best bit of fun, but instead to save it for later.
Once people were dead, there wasn’t anything more you could do with them.
The author who wrote about psychokinesis had also written books about foretelling the future. Maybe they were more helpful than the spoon-bending text, but Krait had no interest in them.
Already he knew the future. He was making it.
Most people were not going to like the future, but Krait was impatient to get there. He knew that he would love the way things were going to be.
He got out of the car and stood in the rain. He thought about clear skies, about stars, and the rain kept falling, as he had known it would, but a little hopeful effort now and then didn’t cost him anything.
Human beings, not spoons and the weather, were his subjects. He could do anything to human beings that he wanted, and right now he wanted to kill two of them.
On his electronic-map display, the Explorer had come to a stop about a minute and forty seconds before Krait had turned left at the T intersection, onto this street. They couldn’t have gotten far in a minute and forty seconds.
They wouldn’t have gone past the houses, into the canyon, not in the rain and the dark.
If they had run south toward the intersection, he would have seen them as he came up the last of the hill.
Krait stood on the turnaround island, under the limbs of the big coral tree, and he surveyed the five houses. Not a single window was brightened by lamplight.
No sane person these days would answer a doorbell and take in two strangers at 4:10 in the morning.
At each house were gates leading to the backyard. He hoped that he wouldn’t have to scout all five residences.
With the silencer-fitted Glock machine pistol held at his side, muzzle toward the pavement, he stepped off the island. Walking in the street, he followed the turnaround, studying each property, looking for any telltale irregularity.
Imprisoned light escaped the sky and fled along the glistening blacktop.
Krait had long wanted to see someone struck by lightning, well struck and hard. If he were able to control the weather, he would arrange a number of spectacular incinerations.
He had once electrocuted a businessman bathing in a tub, but that was not the same thing at all. The man’s eyeballs had not melted, and his hair had not caught on fire, or anything.
The flickering light brought Krait’s attention to a FOR SALE sign in the front yard of a Tuscan house that wasn’t simple enough for his taste. The sign had not been properly placed. It didn’t directly face the street, and it was cocked, one side higher than the other.
The second-floor windows were shielded by draperies, but some of the ground-floor windows were uncovered. In those absolute-black rooms, he saw no pale faces peering out at him.
Next door stood a contemporary house that he liked. He might even spend a weekend there when the owners were out of town, getting to know them, to know their dreams and their hopes and their secrets. Assuming they were clean people.
On the lawn lay a bicycle. This did not bode well for the condition of the interior. If the child had not been taught to pick up after himself, the parents were most likely slobs.
Yet Krait felt strongly that people who appreciated architecture with lines as clean as those of this house could not be disordered in their private lives.
All the windows on both floors were covered by shades.
Beside the front door stood an elegant limestone planter that should have contained perhaps a specimen dwarf tree of some species, with seasonal flowers at the base. The planter stood empty.
Krait regarded the windows, the planter. He lowered his gaze to the bicycle. He looked from the bicycle to the FOR SALE sign in the yard of the neighboring house.
The rain had ruined his wardrobe; but it calmed him and washed the cobwebs from his mind. He felt remarkably clea
r-headed.
With his left hand, he seized the bicycle by the handlebars and dragged it aside.
On the lawn where the bicycle had rested were two pale spots. When he crouched for a closer look, he saw circles of dead grass three or four inches in diameter.
At the center of each circle lay a darker spot. Probing with his fingers, he discovered holes in the earth. They were approximately as far apart as were the staves on the FOR SALE sign in the neighboring yard.
Timothy Carrier had known that if this house had been obviously vacant, Krait would have gone to it at once. For a bricklayer, he had unusually sharp instincts.
As Krait retreated from the lawn, back to the sidewalk, he stepped on something that tried to roll under his shoe.
The jagged light in the heavens rippled lambently through the film of running water on the sidewalk, caressing a brass object that it briefly turned silver.
When he bent to pick it up, the lightning showed him a second identical item near the first. Two 9-mm cartridges.
Here came upon him one of those moments when he knew that he stood apart from humanity and ranked superior to it. He was a secret prince, indeed, and fate acknowledged his royalty by delivering unto him these unspent cartridges, proof that his quarry had gone to ground here.
He supposed it was even possible that these two dropped rounds might have been the bullets that, once Carrier expended all his other ammunition, would have wounded Krait or even killed him. Fate might not merely be pointing the way to the successful conclusion of this mission but might also be assuring him that, at least for this night, he was invulnerable and possibly even that, in the long run, he would prove to be immortal.
The lightning and thunder seemed to celebrate him.
He put the bullets in a pants pocket.
If everything went smoothly and he had sufficient time, he would make the woman swallow the bullets before he shoved the reproduction art down her throat.
He could not risk trying to take Carrier alive. The mason was too big, and dangerous in unexpected ways.
If he got lucky and severely disabled Carrier with a spine shot, however, he would enjoy forcing him to swallow something, as well. Perhaps a choice piece of the bricklayer’s anatomy, severed, could be served to him on a fork.
Twenty-Eight
With little time and no sophisticated burglary tools, Carrier and the woman would have gone to the back of the house, out of sight of the street, to break a window or the glass in a door.
Once inside, they might have climbed to the second floor, expecting to defend the staircase from the superior position of the upper hallway.
Or they might be covering the window or door by which they had entered, hoping to shoot him down when he followed in their steps. As if he ever would be that direct.
At the side garage door, Krait quietly employed his beloved lock-release gun.
Inside, he switched on the lights. The garage could accommodate three vehicles, but none was present.
Quality laminate cabinetry made for an orderly space. He opened a few doors. All the shelves were bare.
Proof enough. No one lived here.
The door between the garage and the house probably opened into a laundry room or a service hall. Carrier and the woman were not likely to have taken shelter in either.
Krait used the LockAid. The snaps and clicks were lost in the drums of the storm. He returned the device to its holster.
The in-spill of light from the garage revealed a laundry room so generously proportioned that it included a sewing center and a gift-wrapping station with wall-mounted rolls of fancy wrapping papers.
The farther door was closed.
When he entered the laundry, he discovered a Crestron touch panel embedded in the wall. As befitted a property of this caliber, the house was computerized.
He touched the panel, and the screen brightened, offering him a choice of system controls that included SECURITY, LIGHTING, MUSIC….
He pressed LIGHTING, and the screen listed indoor rooms and outdoor zones. He could control the lights everywhere from this entry point or from any other Crestron panels in the house.
Among the last options were ALL INTERIOR ON and ALL EXTERIOR ON. His quarry would expect him to come in the dark, so they would have a plan to use darkness to their advantage, as well. Because Krait tried never to do what an adversary expected, he pressed ALL INTERIOR ON, at once bringing light to every room in the residence.
The inner laundry-room door opened to a service hall. With the Glock in both hands and his arms locked straight in front of him, he followed the hallway.
Krait entered an unfurnished family room where an immense plasma-screen TV had been crafted into a wall-wide entertainment center. The granite bar was handsome.
A pane had been broken out of one of the French doors. Fragments of glass littered the limestone floor.
Like Krait, Carrier and the woman had been soaked to the skin. They had shed considerable rain on the pale limestone, which had darkened where it absorbed the water.
Tense, sweeping left with the Glock, sweeping right, alert for peripheral movement, Krait proceeded into the big kitchen, which was open to the family room. More limestone, more water.
The dining room also lacked furniture, but it featured wall-to-wall white carpet. Dirt on the carpet drew his attention.
Apparently, two steps inside the dining room, the couple had vigorously wiped their feet on the pristine carpet, staining it. He wondered why they had so aggressively soiled such excellent wool.
By the time he passed through an archway and proceeded to the center of the likewise carpeted living room, he realized that they had cleaned their shoes in order to leave less of a trail. Water alone could not be easily seen on the textured white carpet; and it did not change the color of the fibers. He could no longer discern the route that they had taken through the house.
To the right of the living room, through another archway, lay the entry hall. Rooms waited beyond. Stairs led to the second floor.
Left, at the north end of the living room, double doors served another chamber.
Krait felt certain that his quarry had gone upstairs. Reluctant to leave an unexplored space behind him, however, he eased open one of the doors. He rushed through fast and low, behind the gun, into a library that contained neither books nor intruders.
He went to the entry hall. Drops of water shimmered on the wood floor. They were too widely distributed to indicate an obvious trail.
Another door opened into a home gym large enough to accept an array of exercise machines that would allow circuit training. No machines were present, but three entire walls had been paneled with floor-to-ceiling mirrors.
Such vast mirrored surfaces brought Krait to a halt.
By their subtle reversal of all images, mirrors seemed to be windows to another world in opposition to this one, a world where everything appeared familiar but was in fact profoundly different.
All that was considered evil on this side of the glass might be judged good on the other side. Truth here might be lies there, and the future might precede the past.
This panoramic mirror excited him more than any he had seen before, because the cross-reflections revealed not just one strange world but many, each contained in the others, each promising the absolute power that he yearned to have but could not quite acquire on this side of the looking glass.
He stood before numerous Kraits, each with his own Glock, and they seemed not like reflections but like replications, each as aware as he himself was, separate consciousness in other dimensions. He had become an army, and he felt the power of being many, the ferocity of the pack, the viciousness of the stinging swarm, and his heart was lifted, and his mind thrilled.
A sudden awareness of his appearance deflated him. Rain had washed all shape from his clothes. You couldn’t see that they had been garments of quality. His hair was plastered to his head.
Anyone might have mistaken him for a homeless person, adrift
and penniless. He mortified himself, the way he looked.
This mortification turned his memory back to the embarrassment at the hotel, where he had been outfoxed by Carrier’s room switch.
Every Krait in every world within the mirrors spoke as one, but they could be heard only in their separate realms. The single voice of a single Krait spoke aloud the words that the others silently mouthed: “He’s done it again.”
Krait stepped out of the gym into the entry hall.
He didn’t go to the stairs. He didn’t care about the stairs. The bricklayer and the bitch weren’t on the second floor, ready to defend the staircase from the superior position of the upper hallway. They never had been.
They had left when the lights came on.
The front door was unlocked. No surprise. They didn’t have a key with which to lock it from the outside.
He opened the door, and rain blew in.
Leaving the house open behind him, he walked down the front path, into the street.
The Explorer was gone.
The wind drove the rain harder than before. It stung his face.
Although the sky had quieted, a sword of light ripped the night, and Krait flinched. He thought he was going to be struck.
He looked at the bicycle. The FOR SALE sign.
From a pants pocket, he withdrew the two 9-mm cartridges. This one extra detail had been too pat. The bullets had not been dropped. They had been placed on the sidewalk.
He returned them to his pocket. He had a use for them.
He went to the island in the center of the turnaround. The dark-blue Chevrolet waited where he had parked it.
After circling the vehicle and finding the tires intact, he got in the driver’s seat and shut out the storm.
With the first twist of the key, the engine turned over. He had not expected it to start.
The instrument panel brightened, but not as fully as before. Carrier had shot the electronic-map display.
Krait could send a coded text message explaining his situation, and his tech-support team would track the Explorer for him, allowing him a somewhat delayed pursuit.
Wasted effort. Carrier had used the SUV only to get out of the neighborhood. He would abandon it within minutes, and would switch to whatever vehicle he could find.
This did not mean that Krait had failed in his mission. He had only begun.
A lesser man might have become emotional, surrendering himself to rage or despair, or fear. Krait allowed himself none of that.
Already, he had overcome the twinge of mortification that he had felt when he’d realized what had happened. Anyway, mortification was not the correct word. He had felt nothing worse than mild chagrin.
He drove around the island and out of the cul-de-sac.
In truth, the word chagrin was too strong to describe what he felt at the moment of realization in the mirrored gym. Discomfiture was more accurate. He had been discomfited to think that he had been deceived by the two dropped cartridges.
A psychologically mature person looks for the positive in every situation, for no experience is entirely negative.
These recent events had given him time to reflect on the lessons of the past nine hours. Reflection was a positive thing.
Having turned right at the T intersection, descending now from the ridge line toward the lower hills and the coast, he decided that discomfiture was not the word that he needed, either.
He had been disappointed. Indeed, that was the word. He had not been disappointed in himself so much as in the universe that still, from time to time,