by Dean Koontz
And if spending too many evenings doing paperwork was better than working as a waitress, it was immeasurably better than the two years of her life that had preceded her jobs at the diner and Chez Lavelle. The Lost Years. That was how she thought of that time, now far in the past: the bleak, miserable, sad and stupid Lost Years.
Compared to that period of her life, paperwork was a pleasure, a delight, a veritable carnival of fun . . .
She had been at her desk more than an hour when she realized that Joey had been exceptionally quiet ever since she’d come into the den. Of course, he was never a noisy child. Often he played by himself for hours, hardly making a sound. But after the unnerving encounter with the old woman this afternoon, Christine was still a little jumpy, and even this perfectly ordinary silence suddenly seemed strange and threatening. She wasn’t exactly frightened. Just anxious. If anything happened to Joey . . .
She put down her pen and switched off the softly humming adding machine. She listened.
Nothing.
In an echo chamber of memory, she could hear the old woman’s voice: He’s got to die, he’s got to die . . .
She rose, left the den, quickly crossed the living room, went down the hall to the boy’s bedroom.
The door was open, the light on, and he was there, safe, playing on the floor with their dog, Brandy, a sweet-faced and infinitely patient golden retriever.
“Hey, Mom, wanna play Star Wars with us? I’m Han Solo, and Brandy’s my buddy, Chewbacca the Wookie. You could be the princess if you want.”
Brandy was sitting in the middle of the floor, between the bed and the sliding closet doors. He was wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with the words RETURN OF THE JEDI, and his long furry ears hung out from the sides of it. Joey had also strapped a bandoleer of plastic bullets around the pooch, plus a holster containing a futuristic-looking plastic gun. Panting, eyes bright, Brandy was taking it all in stride; he even seemed to be smiling.
“He makes a great Wookie,” Christine said.
“Wanna play?”
“Sorry, Skipper, but I’ve got an awful lot of work to do. I just stopped by to see if . . . if you were okay.”
“Well, what happened is that we almost got vaporized by an empire battle cruiser,” Joey said. “But we’re okay now.”
Brandy snuffled in agreement.
She smiled at Joey. “Watch out for Darth Vader.”
“Oh, yeah, sure, always. We’re being super careful ’cause we know he’s in this part of the galaxy somewhere.”
“See you in a little while.”
She took only one step toward the door before Joey said, “Mom? Are you afraid that crazy old lady’s going to show up again?”
Christine turned to him. “No, no,” she said, although that was precisely what had been in her mind. “She can’t possibly know who we are or where we live.”
Joey’s eyes were even a more brilliant shade of blue than usual; they met her own eyes unwaveringly, and there was disquiet in them. “I told her my name, Mom. Remember? She asked me, and so I told her my name.”
“Only your first name.”
He frowned. “Did I?”
“You just said, ‘Joey.’ ”
“Yeah. That’s right.”
“Don’t worry, honey. You’ll never see her again. That’s all over and done with. She was just a sad old woman who—”
“What about our license plate?”
“What about it?”
“Well, see, if she got the number, maybe there’s some way she can use it. To find out who we are. Like they sometimes do on those detective shows on TV.”
That possibility disconcerted her, but she said, “I doubt it. I think only policemen can track down a car’s owner from the license number.”
“But just maybe,” the boy said worriedly.
“We pulled away from her so fast she didn’t have time to memorize the number. Besides, she was hysterical. She wasn’t thinking clearly enough to study the license plate. Like I told you, it’s all over and done with. Really. Okay?”
He hesitated a moment, then said, “Okay. But, Mom, I been thinking . . .”
“What?”
“That crazy old lady . . . could she’ve been . . . a witch?”
Christine almost laughed, but she saw that he was serious. She suppressed all evidence of her amusement, put on a sober expression that matched the grave look on his face, and said, “Oh, I’m sure she wasn’t a witch.”
“I don’t mean like Broom Hilda. I mean a real witch. A real witch wouldn’t need our license number, you know? She wouldn’t need anything. She’d sniff us out. There’s no place in the whole universe where you can hide when there’s a witch after you. Witches have magic powers.”
He was either already certain that the old woman was a witch or was rapidly convincing himself of it. Either way, he was scaring himself unnecessarily because, after all, they really never would see her again.
Christine remembered the way that strange woman had clung to the car, jerking at the handle of the locked door, keeping pace with them as they pulled away, screeching crazy accusations at them. Her eyes and face had radiated both fury and a disturbing power that made it seem as if she might really be able to stop the Firebird with her bare hands. A witch? That a child might think she had supernatural powers was certainly understandable.
“A real witch,” Joey repeated, a tremor in his voice.
Christine was aware that she had to snip this line of thought right away, before he became obsessed with witches. Last year, for almost two months, he had been certain that a magical white snake—like one he’d seen in a movie—was hiding in his room, waiting for him to go to sleep, so that it could slither out and bite him. She’d had to sit with him each evening until he’d fallen asleep. Frequently, when he awakened in the middle of the night, she had to take him into her own bed in order to settle him down. He’d gotten over the snake thing the same day that she’d made up her mind to take him to a child psychologist; later, she’d cancelled the appointment. After a few weeks had passed, when she’d been sure that mentioning the snake wouldn’t get him started on it again, she asked what had happened to it. He looked embarrassed and said, “It was only ’magination, Mom. I sure was acting like a dumb little kid, huh?” He’d never mentioned the white snake again. He possessed a healthy, rampaging imagination, and it was up to her to rein it in when it got out of control. Like now.
Although she had to put an end to this witch stuff, she couldn’t just tell him there was no such thing. If she tried that approach, he would think she was just babying him. She would have to go along with his assumption that witches were real, then use the logic of a child to make him see that the old woman in the parking lot couldn’t possibly have been a witch.
She said, “Well, I can understand how you might wonder about her being a witch. Whew! I mean, she did look a little bit like a witch is supposed to look, didn’t she?”
“More than a little bit.”
“No, no, just a little bit. Let’s be fair to the poor old lady.”
“She looked exactly like a mean witch,” he said. “Exactly. Didn’t she, Brandy?”
The dog snorted as if he understood the question and was in full agreement with his young master.
Christine squatted, scratched the dog behind the ears, and said, “What do you know about it, fur-face? You weren’t even there.”
Brandy yawned.
To Joey, Christine said, “If you really think about it, she didn’t look all that much like a witch.”
“Her eyes were creepy,” the boy insisted, “bugging out of her head like they did. You saw them, sort of wild. Jeez, and her frizzy hair just like a witch’s hair.”
“But she didn’t have a big crooked nose with a wart on the tip of it, did she?”
“No,” Joey admitted.
“And she wasn’t dressed in black, was she?”
“No. But all in green,” Joey said, and from his tone of voice it was clear tha
t the old woman’s outfit had seemed as odd to him as it had to Christine.
“Witches don’t wear green. She wasn’t wearing a tall, pointed black hat, either.”
He shrugged.
“And she didn’t have a cat with her,” Christine said.
“So?”
“A witch never goes anywhere without her cat.”
“She doesn’t?”
“No. It’s her familiar.”
“What’s that mean?”
“The witch’s familiar is her contact with the devil. It’s through the familiar, through the cat, that the devil gives her magic powers. Without the cat, she’s just an ugly old woman.”
“You mean like the cat watches her and makes sure she doesn’t do something the devil wouldn’t like?”
“That’s right.”
“I didn’t see any cat,” Joey said, frowning.
“There wasn’t a cat because she wasn’t a witch. You’ve got nothing to worry about, honey.”
His face brightened. “Boy, that’s a relief! If she’d been a witch, she might’ve turned me into a toad or something.”
“Well, life as a toad might not be so bad,” she teased. “You’d get to sit on a lily pad all day, just taking it easy.”
“Toads eat flies,” he said, grimacing, “and I can’t even stand to eat veal.”
She laughed, leaned forward, and kissed his cheek. “Even if she was a witch,” he said, “I’d probably be okay because I’ve got Brandy, and Brandy wouldn’t let any old cat get anywhere near.”
“You can rely on Brandy,” Christine agreed. She looked at the clown-faced dog and said, “You’re the nemesis of all cats and witches, aren’t you, fur-face?”
To her surprise, Brandy thrust his muzzle forward and licked her under the chin.
“Yuck,” she said. “No offense, fur-face, but I’m not sure whether kissing you is any better than eating flies.”
Joey giggled and hugged the dog.
Christine returned to the den. The mound of paperwork seemed to have grown taller while she was gone.
She had no sooner settled into the chair behind the desk than the telephone rang. She picked it up.
“Hello?”
No one answered.
“Hello?” she said again.
“Wrong number,” a woman said softly and hung up.
Christine put the receiver down and went back to work. She didn’t give the call a second thought.
3
She was awakened by Brandy’s barking, which was unusual because Brandy hardly ever barked. Then she heard Joey’s voice.
“Mom! Come quick! Mommy!”
He wasn’t merely calling her; he was screaming for her.
As she threw back the covers and got out of bed, she saw the glowing red numbers on the digital alarm clock. It was 1:20 A.M.
She plunged across the room, through the open door, into the hall, headed toward Joey’s room, flipping up light switches as she went.
Joey was sitting in bed, pressing back against the headboard as if he were trying to pass through it and slip magically into the wall behind it, where he could hide. His hands were filled with twisted lumps of sheet and blanket. His face was pale.
Brandy was at the window, forepaws up on the sill. He was barking at something in the night beyond the glass. When Christine entered the room, the dog stopped barking, padded to the bed, and looked inquiringly at Joey, as if seeking guidance.
“Someone was out there,” the boy said. “Looking in. It was that crazy old lady.”
Christine went to the window. There wasn’t much light. The yellowish glow of the streetlamp at the corner didn’t reach quite this far. Although a moon ornamented the sky, it wasn’t a full moon, and it cast only a weak, milky light that frosted the sidewalks, silvered the cars parked along the street, but revealed few of the night’s secrets. For the most part, the lawn and shrubbery lay in deep darkness.
“Is she still out there?” Joey asked.
“No,” Christine said.
She turned away from the window, went to him, sat on the edge of his bed.
He was still pale. Shaking.
She said, “Honey, are you sure—”
“She was there!”
“Exactly what did you see?”
“Her face.”
“The old woman?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re sure it was her, not somebody else?”
He nodded. “Her.”
“It’s so dark out there. How could you see well enough to—”
“I saw somebody at the window, just sort of a shadow in the moonlight, and then what I did was I turned on the light, and it was her. I could see. It was her.”
“But, honey, I just don’t think there’s any way she could have followed us. I know she didn’t. And there’s no way she could’ve learned where we live. Not this soon, anyway.”
He said nothing. He just stared down at his fisted hands and slowly let go of the sheet and blanket. His palms were sweaty.
Christine said, “Maybe you were dreaming, huh?”
He shook his head vigorously.
She said, “Sometimes, when you wake up from a nightmare, just a few seconds, you can be sort of confused about what’s real and what’s just part of the dream. You know? It’s all right. It happens to everybody now and then.”
He met her eyes. “It wasn’t like that, Mom. Brandy started barking, and then I woke up, and there was the crazy old lady at the window. If it was just a dream . . . then what was Brandy barking at? He don’t bark just to hear himself. Never does. You know how he is.”
She stared at Brandy, who had plopped down on the floor beside the bed, and she began to feel uneasy again. Finally she got up and went to the window.
Out in the night, there were a lot of places where the grip of darkness was firm, places where a prowler could hide and wait.
“Mom?”
She looked at him.
He said, “This isn’t like before.”
“What do you mean?”
“This isn’t a ’maginary white snake under my bed. This is real stuff. Cross my heart and hope to die.”
A sudden gust of wind soughed through the eaves and rattled a loose rain gutter.
“Come on,” she said, holding out a hand to him.
He scrambled out of bed, and she took him into the kitchen.
Brandy followed. He stood in the doorway for a moment, his bushy tail thumping against both jambs, then came in and curled up in the corner.
Joey sat at the table in his blue pajamas with the words SATURN PATROL, in red, streaking across his chest. He looked anxiously at the windows over the sink, while Christine telephoned the police.
The two police officers stood on the porch and listened politely while Christine, in the open front door with Joey at her side, told them her story—what little there was to tell. The younger of the two men, Officer Statler, was dubious and quick to conclude that the prowler was merely a phantom of Joey’s imagination, but the older man, Officer Templeton, gave them the benefit of the doubt. At Templeton’s insistence, he and Statler spent ten minutes searching the property with their long-handled flashlights, probing the shrubbery, circling the house, checking out the garage, even looking in the neighbors’ yards. They didn’t find anyone.
Returning to the front door where Christine and Joey waited, Templeton seemed somewhat less willing to believe their story than he had been a few minutes ago. “Well, Mrs. Scavello, if that old woman was around here, she’s gone now. Either she wasn’t up to much of anything . . . or maybe she was scared away when she saw the patrol car. Maybe both. She’s probably harmless.”
“Harmless? She sure didn’t seem harmless this afternoon at South Coast Plaza,” Christine said. “She seemed dangerous enough to me.”
“Well . . .” He shrugged. “You know how it is. An old lady . . . maybe a little senile . . . saying things she really didn’t mean.”
“I don’t think that’s t
he case.”
Templeton didn’t meet her eyes. “So . . . if you see her again or if you have any other trouble, be sure to give us a call.”
“You’re leaving?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You’re not going to do anything else?”
He scratched his head. “Don’t see what else we can do. You said you don’t know this woman’s name or where she lives, so we can’t go have a chat with her. Like I said, if she shows up again, you call us soon as you spot her, and we’ll come back.”
With a nod of his head, he turned away and went down the walk, toward the street, where his partner waited.
A minute later, as Christine and Joey stood at the living room windows, watching the patrol car drive away, the boy said, “She was out there, Mom. Really, really. This isn’t like the snake.”
She believed him. What he had seen at the window could have been a figment of his imagination or an image left over from a nightmare—but it hadn’t been that. He had seen what he thought he’d seen: the old woman herself, in the flesh. Christine didn’t know why she was so sure of that, but she was. Dead sure.
She gave him the option of spending the rest of the night in her room, but he was determined to be brave.
“I’ll sleep in my bed,” he said. “Brandy’ll be there. Brandy’ll smell that old witch coming a mile away. But . . . could we sorta leave a lamp on?”
“Sure,” she said, though she had only recently weaned him away from the need for a night-light.
In his room she closed the draperies tight, leaving not even a narrow crack through which someone might be able to see him. She tucked him in, kissed him goodnight, and left him in Brandy’s care.
Back in her own bed once more, with the lights out, she stared at the tenebrous ceiling. She was unable to sleep. She kept expecting a sudden sound—glass shattering, a door being forced—but the night remained peaceful.
Only the February wind, with an occasional violent gust, marred the nocturnal stillness.
In his room Joey switched off the lamp that his mother had left on for him. The darkness was absolute.
Brandy jumped onto the bed, where he was never supposed to be (one of Mom’s rules: no dog in bed), but Joey didn’t push him off. Brandy settled down and was welcome.