I stopped under the portico of the funeral home, hesitating because I couldn't assess the danger into which I was about to leap.
The massive two-story Georgian house-red brick with white wood trim-would have been the loveliest house in town, were the town not Moonlight Bay. A spaceship from another galaxy, perched here, would have looked no more alien to our coastline than did Kirk's handsome pile. This house needed elms, not pepper trees, drear heavens rather than the clear skies of California, and periodic lashings with rains far colder than those that would drench it here.
The second floor, where Sandy lived, was dark.
The viewing rooms were on the ground floor. Through beveled, leaded panes that flanked the front door, I saw a weak light at the back of the house.
I rang the bell.
A man entered the far end of the hallway and approached the door.
Although he was only a silhouette, I recognized Sandy Kirk by his easy walk. He moved with a grace that enhanced his good looks.
He reached the foyer and switched on both the interior lights and the porch lights. When he opened the door, he seemed surprised to see me squinting at him from under the bill of my cap.
"Christopher?"
"Evening, Mr. Kirk."
"I'm so very sorry about your father. He was a wonderful man."
"Yes. Yes, he was."
"We've already collected him from the hospital. We're treating him just like family, Christopher, with the utmost respect-You can be sure of that. I took his course in twentieth-century poetry at Ashdon. Did You know that?"
"Yes, of course."
"From him I learned to love Eliot and Pound. Auden and Plath. Beckett and Ashbery. Robert Bly. Yeats. All of them.
Couldn't tolerate poetry when I started the course-couldn't live without it by the end."
"Wallace Stevens. Donald justice. Louise Ghick. They were his personal favorites."
Sandy smiled and nodded. Then: "Oh, excuse me, I forgot."
Out of consideration for my condition, he extinguished both the foyer and porch lights.
Standing on the dark threshold, he said, "This must be terrible for You, but at least he isn't suffering anymore."
Sandy's eyes were green, but in the pale landscape lighting, they looked as smooth-black as certain beetles' shells.
Studying his eyes, I said, "Could I see him?"
"What-your father?"
"I didn't turn the sheet back from his face before they took him out of his room. Didn't have the heart for it, didn't think I needed to. Now ... I'd really like just one last look."
Sandy Kirk's eyes were like a placid night sea. Below the unremarkable surface were great teeming depths.
His voice remained that of a compassionate courtier to the bereaved.
"Oh, Christopher I'm sorry, but the process has begun."
"You've already put him in the furnace?"
Having grown up in a business conducted with a richness of euphemisms, Sandy winced at my bluntness. "The deceased is in the cremator, yes."
"Wasn't that terribly quick?"
"In our work, there's no wisdom in delay. If only I'd known You were coming. ..
I wondered if his beetle-shell eyes would be able to meet mine so boldly if there had been enough light for me to see their true green color.
Into my silence, he said, "Christopher, I'm so distressed by this, seeing You in this pain, knowing I could have helped."
In my odd life, I have had much experience of some things and little of others. Although I am a foreigner to the day, I know the night as no one else can know it. Although I have been the object on which ignorant fools have sometimes spent their cruelty, most of my understanding of the human heart comes from my relationships with my parents and with those good friends who, like me, live primarily between sunset and dawn; consequently, I have seldom encountered hurtful deception.
I was embarrassed by Sandy's deceit, as though it shamed not merely him but also me, and I couldn't meet his obsidian stare any longer. I lowered my head and gazed at the porch floor.
Mistaking my embarrassment for tongue-binding grief, he stepped onto the porch and put one hand on my shoulder.
I managed not to recoil.
"My business is comforting folks, Christopher, and I'm good at it. But truthfully! I have no words that make sense of death or make it easier to bear."
I wanted to kick his ass.
"I'll be okay," I said, realizing that I had to get away from him before I did something rash.
"What I hear myself saying to most folks is all the platitudes You'd never find in the poetry your dad loved, so I'm not going to repeat them to You, not to You of all people."
Keeping my head down, nodding, I eased backward, out from under his hand. "Thanks, Mr. Kirk. I'm sorry to've bothered You."
"You didn't bother me. Of course You didn't. I only wish You'd called ahead. I'd have been able to. .. delay."
"Not your fault. It's all right. Really."
Having backed off the stepless brick porch onto the blacktop under the portico, I turned away from Sandy.
Retreating once more to that doorway between two darknesses, he said, "Have You given any thought to the service-when You want to hold it, how You want it conducted?"
"No. No, not yet. I'll let You know tomorrow."
As I walked away, Sandy said, "Christopher, are You all right'," FAcing him from a little distance this time, I spoke in a numb, inflectionless voice that was only half calculated: "Yeah. I'm all right. I'll be okay. Thanks, Mr. Kirk."
"I wish You had called ahead."
Shrugging, I jammed my hands in my jacket pockets, turned from the house once more, and walked past the Madona.
Flecks of mica were in the mix from which the replica had been poured, and the big moon glimmered in those tiny chips, so that tears appeared to shimmer on the cheeks of Our Lady of Cast Concrete.
I resisted the urge to glance back at the undertaker. I was certain he was still watching me.
I continued down the lane between the forlorn, whispering trees. The temperature had fallen only into the low sixties. The onshore breeze was pure after its journey across thousands of miles of ocean, bearing nothing but the faintest whiff of brine.
Long after the slope of the driveway had taken me out of Sandy's line of sight, I looked back. I could see just the steeply pitched roof and chimneys, somber forms against the star-salted sky.
I moved off the blacktop onto grass, and I headed uphill again, this time in the sheltering shadows of foliage. The pepper trees braided the moon in their long tresses.
The funeral-home turnaround came into sight again. The Pietd.
The portico.
Sandy had gone inside. The front door was closed.
Staying on the lawn, using trees and shrubs for cover, I circled to the back of the house. A deep porch stepped down to a seventyfoot lap pool, an enormous brick patio, and formal rose gardensnone of which could be seen from the public rooms of the funeral home.
A town the size of ours welcomes nearly two hundred newborns each year while losing a hundred citizens to death. There were only two funeral homes, and Kirk's probably received over 70 percent of this business-plus half that from the smaller towns in the county. Death was a good living for Sandy.
The view from the patio must have been breathtaking in daylight: unpopulated hills rising in gentle folds as far to the east as the eye could see, graced by scattered oaks with gnarled black trunks.
Now the shrouded hills lay like sleeping giants under pale sheets.
When I saw no one at the lighted rear windows, I quickly crossed the patio. The moon, white as a rose petal, floated on the inky waters of the swimming pool.
The house adjoined a spacious L-shaped garage, which embraced a motor court that could be entered only from the front.
The garage accommodated two hearses and Sandy's personal vehicles-but also, at the end of the wing farthest from the residence, the crematorium.
; I slipped around the corner of the garage, along the back of the second arm of the L, where immense eucalyptus trees blocked most of the moonlight. The air was redolent of their medicinal fragrance, and a carpet of dead leaves crunched underfoot.
No corner of Moonlight Bay is unknown to me-especially not this one.
Most of my nights have been spent in the exploration of our special town, which has resulted in some macabre discoveries.
Ahead, on my left, frosty light marked the crematorium window. I approached it with the conviction-correct, as it turned out-that I was about to see something stranger and far worse than what Bobby Halloway and I had seen on an October night when we were thirteen. ...
A decade and a half ago, I'd had as morbid a streak as any boy my age, was as fascinated as all boys are by the mystery and lurid glamour of death. Bobby Halloway and I, friends even then, thought it was daring to prowl the undertaker's property in search of the repulsive, the ghoulish, the shocking.
I can't recall what we expected-or hoped-to find. A collection of human skulls? A porch swing made of bones? A secret laboratory where the deceptively normal-looking Frank Kirk and his deceptively normal-looking son Sandy called down lightning bolts from storm clouds to reaniniate our dead neighbors and use them as slaves to do the cooking and housecleaning?
Perhaps we expected to stumble upon a shrine to the evil gods Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth in some sinister bramble-festooned end of the rose garden. Bobby and I were reading a lot of H. P.
Lovecraft in those days.
Bobby says we were a couple of weird kids. I say we were weird, for sure, but neither more nor less weird than other boys.
Bobby says maybe so, but the other boys gradually grew out of their weirdness while we've grown further into ours.
I don't agree with Bobby on ' this one. I don't believe that I'm any more weird than anyone else I've ever met. In fact, I'm a damn sight less weird than some.
Which is true of Bobby, too. But because he treasures his weirdness, he wants me to believe in and treasure mine.
He insists on his weirdness. He says that by acknowledging and embracing our weirdness, we are in greater harmony with nature because nature is deeply weird.
Anyway, one October night, behind the funeral-home garage, Bobby Halloway and I found the crematorium window. We were attracted to it by an eldritch light that throbbed against the glass.
Because the window was set high, we were not tall enough to peer inside.
With the stealth of commandos scouting an enemy encampment, we snatched a teak bench from the patio and carried it behind the garage, where we positioned it under the glimmering window.
Side by side on the bench, we were able to reconnoiter the scene together. The interior of the window was covered by a Levolor blind; but someone had forgotten to close the slats, giving us a clear view of Frank Kirk and an assistant at work.
One remove from the room, the light was not bright enough to cause me harm. At least that was what I told myself as I pressed my nose to the pane.
Even though I had learned to be a singularly cautious boy, I was nonetheless a boy and, therefore, love with adventure and camaraderie, so I might knowingly have risked blindness to share that moment with Bobby Halloway.
On a stainless-steel gurney near the window was the body of an elderly man. It was cloaked in a sheet, with only the ravaged face exposed.
His yellow-white hair, matted and tangled, made him look as though he had died in a high wind. judging by his waxy gray skin, sunken cheeks, and severely cracked lips, however, he had succumbed not to a storm but to a prolonged illness.
If Bobby and I had been acquainted with the man in life, we didn't recognize him in this ashen and emaciated condition. If he'd been someone we knew even casually, he would have been no less grisly but perhaps less an object of boyish fascination and dark delight.
To us, because we were just thirteen and proud of it, the most compelling and remarkable and wonderful thing about the cadaver was also, of course, the grossest thing about it. One eye was closed, but the other was wide open and staring, occluded by a bright red starburst hemorrhage.
How that eye mesmerized us.
As death-blind as the painted eye of a doll, it nevertheless saw through us to the core.
Sometimes in a silent rapture of dread and sometimes whispering urgently to each other like a pair of deranged sportscasters doing color commentary, we watched as Frank and his assistant readied the creniator in one corner of the chamber. The room must have been warm, for the men slipped off their ties and rolled up their shirtsleeves, and tiny drops of perspiration wove beaded veils on their faces.
Outside, the October night was mild. Yet Bobby and I shivered and compared gooseflesh and wondered that our breath didn't plume from us in white wintry clouds.
The morticians folded the sheet back from the cadaver, and we boys gasped at the horrors of advanced age and murderous disease.
But we gasped with the same sweet thrill of terror that we had felt while gleefully watching videos like Night of the Living Dead.
As the corpse was moved into a cardboard case and eased into the blue flames of the cremator, I clutched Bobby's arm, and he clamped one damp hand to the back of my neck, and we held fast to each other, as though a supernatural magnetic power might pull us inexorably forward, shattering the window, and sweep us into the room, into the fire with the dead man.
Frank Kirk shut the cremator.
Even through the closed window, the clank of the door was loud enough, final enough, to echo in the hollows of our bones.
Later, after we had returned the teak bench to the patio and had fled the undertaker's property, we repaired to the bleachers at the football field behind the high school. With no game in progress, that place was unlighted and safe for me. We guzzled Cokes and munched potato chips that Bobby had gotten enroute at a 7-Eleven.
"That was cool, that was so cool," Bobby declared excitedly.
"It was the coolest thing ever," I agreed.
"Cooler than Ned's cards."
Ned was a friend who had moved to San Francisco with his parents just that previous August. He had obtained a deck of playing cards-how, he would never reveal-that featured color photographs of really hot-looking nude women, fifty-two different beauties.
"Definitely cooler than the cards," I agreed. "Cooler than when that humongous tanker truck overturned and blew up out on the highway."
"Jeez, yeah, megadegrees cooler than that. Cooler than when Zach Blenheim got chewed up by that pit bull and had to have twenty-eight stitches in his arm."
"Unquestionably quantum arctics cooler than that," I confirmed.
"His eye!" Bobby said, remembering the starburst hemorrhage.
"Oh, God, his eye!"
"Gag-o-rama!"
We swilled down Cokes and talked and laughed more than we had ever laughed before in one night.
What amazing creatures we are when we're thirteen.
There on the athletic-field bleachers, I knew that this macabre adventure had tied a knot in our friendship that nothing and no one would ever loosen By then we had been friends for two years; but during this night, our friendship became stronger, more complex than it had been at the start of the evening. We had shared a powerfully formative experience-and we sensed that this event was more profound than it seemed to be on the surface, more profound than boys our age could grasp. In my eyes, Bobby had acquired a new mystique, as I had acquired in his eyes, because we had done this daring thing.
Subsequently, I would discover that this moment was merely prelude.
Our real bonding came the second week of Decemberwhen we saw something infinitely more disturbing than the corpse with the blood-red eye.
Now, fifteen years later, I would have thought that I was too old for these adventures and too ridden by conscience to prowl other people's property as casually as thirteen-year-old boys seem able to do.
Yet here I was, treading cautiously on layers of dead euca
lyptus leaves, putting my face to the fateful window one more time.
The Levolor blind, though yellowed with age, appeared to be the same one through which Bobby and I had peered so long ago. The slats were adjusted at an angle, but the gaps between them were wide enough to allow a view of the entire crematorium-into which I was tall enough to see without the aid of a patio bench.
Sandy Kirk and an assistant were at work near the Power Pak Cremation System. They wore surgeons' masks, latex gloves, and disposable plastic aprons.
Dean Koontz - Fear Nothing Page 5