by Dean Koontz
Some people, given the Gift, would have doubted it, would have wondered if they were wrong or even crazy. But Grace never doubted herself or questioned her sanity. Never. She knew she was special, and she knew she was always right in these matters because God had told her that she was right.
The day was rapidly coming when she would finally call upon Kyle (and upon some of the others) to strike down many of those disciples of Satan. She would point to the evil ones, and Kyle would destroy them. He would be the hammer of God. How wonderful that day would be! Sitting in the basement of her church, on the hard oak chair, in front of her innermost circle of believers, Grace shivered with anticipatory pleasure. It would be so fine, so satisfying to watch the big man’s hard muscles bunch and flex and bunch again as he brought the wrath of God to the infidels and Satanists.
Soon. The time was coming. The Twilight.
Now, the candlelight flickered, and Kyle said softly, “Are you ready, Mother Grace?”
“Yes,” she said.
She closed her eyes. For a moment she saw nothing, only darkness, but then she quickly established contact with the spirit world, and lights appeared behind her eyes, bursts and squiggles and fountains and spots and shifting-heaving-writhing shapes of light, some brilliant and some dim, all shades of red, naturally, because they were spirits and spectral energies, and this was a red day in their plane of existence. It was the reddest day Grace had ever known.
The spirits swarmed on all sides of her, and she moved off among them as if she were drifting away into a world that was painted on the backs of her own eyelids. At first she drifted slowly. She felt her mind and spirit separating from her body, gradually leaving the flesh behind. She was still aware of the temporal plane in which her body existed—the odor of burning candles, the hard oak chair beneath her, an occasional rustle or murmur from one of her disciples—but eventually all that faded. She accelerated until she was rushing, then flying, then rocketing through the light-spotted void, faster and faster, with exhilarating, now sickening, now terrifying speed—
Sudden stillness.
She was deep in the spirit world, hanging motionless, as if she were an asteroid suspended in a distant corner of space. She was no longer able to see, hear, smell, or feel the world she had left behind. Across an infinite night, redhued spirits of all descriptions moved in every direction, some fast and some slow, some purposefully and some erratically, on adventures and holy errands that Grace could not begin to comprehend.
Grace thought about the boy, Joey Scavello. She knew what he really was, and she knew he had to die. But she didn’t know if the time had come to dispose of him. She had made this journey into the spirit world for the sole purpose of inquiring as to when and how she should deal with the boy.
She hoped she would be told to kill him. She wanted so much to kill him.
9
The double shot of Chivas Regal seemed to have calmed Christine Scavello, although not entirely. She finally leaned back in her chair, and her hands were no longer knotted together, but she was still tense and noticeably shaky.
Charlie continued to sit on the edge of his desk with one foot on the floor. “At least until we know who this old woman is and what kind of person we’re dealing with, I think we should put two armed bodyguards with Joey around the clock.”
“All right. Do it.”
“Does the boy go to school?”
“Preschool. He starts regular school next fall.”
“We’ll keep him out of preschool until this blows over.”
“It won’t just blow over,” she said edgily.
“Well, of course, I didn’t mean we were just going to wait it out. I meant to say that we’ll keep him out of preschool until we put a stop to this thing.”
“Will two bodyguards be enough?”
“Actually, it’ll be six. Three pairs working in eight-hour shifts.”
“Still, it’ll only be two men during any one shift, and I—”
“Two can handle it. They’re well trained. However, this can all get pretty expensive. If—”
“I can afford it,” she said.
“My secretary can give you a fee sheet—”
“Whatever’s needed. I can pay.”
“What about your husband?”
“What about him?”
“Well, what’s he think about all this?”
“I don’t have a husband.”
“Oh. I’m sorry if—”
“No need for sympathy. I’m not a widow, and I wasn’t divorced, either.” Here was the forthrightness he had seen in her; this refusal to be evasive was refreshing. “I’ve never been married.”
“Ah,” he said.
Although Charlie was sure his voice contained not the slightest note of disapproval, Christine stiffened as if he had insulted her. With a sudden, irrational, quiet yet steel-hard anger that startled him, she said, “What’re you trying to tell me? That you’ve got to approve of your client’s morality before you accept a case?”
He gaped at her, astonished and confused by her abrupt change of attitude. “Well of course not! I only—”
“Because I’m not about to sit here like a criminal on trial—”
“Wait, wait, wait. What’s wrong? Huh? What’d I say? Good heavens, why should I care if you’ve been married or not?”
“Fine. Glad you feel that way. Now, how are you going to track down that old woman?”
Anger, like a smouldering fire, remained in her eyes and voice.
Charlie couldn’t understand why she was so sensitive and defensive about her son’s lack of a legal father. It was unfortunate, yes, and she probably wished the situation were otherwise. But it really wasn’t a terrible social stigma these days. She acted as if she were living in the 1940s instead of the ’80s.
“I really mean it,” he said. “I don’t care.”
“Terrific. Congratulations on your open-mindedness. If it was up to me, you’d get a Nobel Prize for humanitarianism. Now can we drop the subject?”
What the hell is wrong with her? he wondered. He was glad there was no husband. Couldn’t she sense his interest in her? Couldn’t she see through his tissue-thin professional demeanor? Couldn’t she see how she got to him? Most women had a sixth sense for that sort of thing.
He said, “If I rub you the wrong way or something, I can turn this case over to one of my junior men—”
“No, I—”
“They’re all quite reliable, capable. But I assure you I didn’t mean to disparage or ridicule you—or whatever the heck you think I did. I’m not like that cop this morning, the one who chewed you out about using four-letter words.”
“Officer Wilford.”
“I’m not like Wilford. I’m easy. Okay? Truce?”
She hesitated, then nodded. The stiffness left her. The anger faded and was replaced by embarrassment.
She said, “Sorry I snapped at you, Mr. Harrison—”
“Call me Charlie. And you can snap at me anytime.” He smiled. “But we have to talk about Joey’s father because maybe he’s connected with this.”
“With the old woman?”
“Maybe.”
“Oh, I doubt it.”
“Maybe he wants custody of his son.”
“Then why not just come and ask?”
Charlie shrugged. “People don’t always approach a problem from a logical point of view.”
She shook her head. “No. It’s not Joey’s . . . father. As far as I know, he isn’t even aware that Joey exists. Besides, that old woman was saying Joey had to die.”
“I still think we have to consider the possibility and talk about his father, even if that’s painful for you. We can’t leave any possibility unexplored.”
She nodded. “It’s just that . . . when I got pregnant with Joey, it nearly destroyed Evelyn . . . my mother. She had expected so much of me . . . She made me feel terribly guilty, made me wallow in guilt.” She sighed. “I guess, because of the way my mother treated me,
I’m still overly sensitive about Joey’s . . . illegitimacy.”
“I understand.”
“No. You don’t. You can’t.”
He waited and listened. He was a good and patient listener. It was part of his job.
She said, “Evelyn . . . Mother . . . doesn’t like Joey much. Won’t have much to do with him. She blames him for his illegitimacy. She sometimes even treats him as if . . . as if he’s wicked or evil or something. It’s wrong, it’s sick, it doesn’t make sense, but it’s so much like Mother to blame him because my life didn’t turn out exactly the way she planned it for me.”
“If she actively dislikes Joey, is it possible that your mother might be behind this thing with the old woman?” he asked.
That thought clearly startled her. But she shook her head. “No. Surely not. It isn’t Evelyn’s style. She’s direct. She tells you what she thinks, even if she knows she’s going to hurt you, even if she knows every word she speaks is going to be like a nail going into you. She wouldn’t be asking her friends to harass my boy. That’s ludicrous.”
“She might not be involved directly. But maybe she’s talked about you and Joey to other people, and maybe this old woman at the mall was one of those people. Maybe your mother said intemperate things about the boy, not realizing this old woman was unbalanced, not realizing the old woman would take what your mother said the wrong way, take it too literally and actually act upon it.”
Scowling, Christine said, “Maybe . . .”
“I know it’s far-fetched, but it is possible.”
“Okay. Yeah. I suppose so.”
“So tell me about your mother.”
“I assure you, she couldn’t be involved with this.”
“Tell me anyway,” he coaxed.
She sighed and said, “She’s a dragon lady, my mother. You can’t understand, and I can’t really make you understand, because you had to live with her to know what she’s like. She kept me under her thumb . . . intimidated . . . browbeaten . . . all those years . . .”
. . . all those years.
Her mind drifted back, against her will, and she became aware of a pressure on her chest and began to have some difficulty drawing her breath, for the predominant feeling associated with her childhood was one of suffocation.
She saw the rambling Victorian house in Pomona that had been passed from her Grandma Giavetti to Evelyn, where they had lived from the time Christine was a year old, where Evelyn still lived, and the memory of it was an unwelcome weight. Although she knew it to be a white house with pale yellow trim and awnings, with charming gingerbread ornamentation and many windows to admit the sun, in her mind’s eye she always saw it crouched in shadows, with Halloween-bare trees crowding close to it, beneath a threatening gray-black sky. She could hear the grandfather clock ticking monotonously in the parlor, an ever-present sound that in those days had seemed always to be mocking her with its constant reminder that the misery of her childhood stretched almost to eternity and would be counted out in millions and millions of leaden seconds. She could see again, in every room, heavy overstuffed pieces of furniture pressed too close to one another, and she supposed that her memory made the ticking clock louder and more maddeningly intrusive than it had actually been, and that in reality the furniture hadn’t been quite so large and clunky and ugly and dark as it was in recollection.
Her father, Vincent Scavello, had found that house, that life, as oppressive as it was in Christine’s memory, and he had left them when she was four and her brother, Tony, was eleven. He never came back, and she never saw him again. He was a weak man with an inferiority complex, and Evelyn made him feel even more inadequate because she set such high standards for everyone. Nothing he did could satisfy her. Nothing anyone did—especially not Christine or Tony—was half as good as Evelyn expected of them. Because he couldn’t measure up to her expectations, Vincent developed a drinking problem, and that only made her nag him more, and finally he just left. Two years later, he was dead. In a way he committed suicide, though not with a gun—nothing so dramatic as that; it was just a case of drunken driving; he ran head-on into a bridge abutment at seventy miles an hour.
Evelyn went to work the day after Vincent walked out, not only supported her family but did a good job of it, living up to her own high standards. That made things even worse for Christine and Tony. “You’ve got to be the best at what you do, and if you aren’t the best there’s no use doing it at all,” Evelyn said—at least a thousand times.
Christine had one especially clear memory of an entire, tense evening spent at the kitchen table, after Tony brought home a report card with a D in math, a failure that, in Evelyn’s eyes, was in no way mitigated by the fact that he had received an A in every other subject. This would have been bad enough, but that same day he had been mildly reprimanded by the school principal for smoking in the boys’ washroom. It was the first time he tried a cigarette, and he didn’t like it and didn’t intend to smoke again; it was just an experiment, hardly unusual for a fourteen-year-old boy, but Evelyn was furious. That night the lecture had gone on for almost three hours, with Evelyn alternately pacing, sitting at the table with her head in her hands, shouting, weeping, pleading, pounding the table. “You’re a Giavetti, Tony, more of a Giavetti than a Scavello. You might carry your father’s name, but by God, there’s more of my blood in you; there must be. I couldn’t bear to think half your blood is poor weak Vincent’s, because if that was true, God knows what would become of you. I won’t have it! I won’t! I work my fingers to the bone to give you every chance, every opportunity, and I won’t have you spitting in my face, which is what this is, goofing off in school, goofing off in math class—it’s just the same as spitting in my face!” The anger gave way to tears, and she got up from the table, pulled a handful of Kleenex from the box on the kitchen counter, noisily blew her nose. “What good does it do for me to worry about you, to care what happens to you? You don’t care. There’s that few drops of your father’s blood in you, that loafer’s blood, and it only takes a few drops to contaminate you. Like a disease. Scavello Disease. But you’re also a Giavetti, and Giavettis always work harder and study harder, which is only right, only fitting, because God didn’t intend for us to loaf and drink our lives away, like some I could mention. You’ve got to get As in school, and even if you don’t like math, you’ve got to just work harder until you’re perfect in it, because you need math in this world, and your father, God pity him, was lousy with figures, and I won’t have you being like poor weak Vincent; that scares me. I don’t want my son being a bum, and I’m afraid I see a bum in you, just like your father, weakness in you. Now, you’re also a Giavetti, and don’t you forget it. Giavettis always do their best, and their best is always as good as anyone could do, and don’t you tell me that you’re already spending most of your time studying, and don’t tell me about your weekend job at the grocery store. Work is good for you. I got you that job because you show me a teenage boy who doesn’t have a part-time job and I’ll show you a future bum. Why, even with your job and your studying and the things you do around here, you should still have plenty of free time, too much, way too much. You should maybe even be working a night or two during the week at the market. There’s always more time if you want to find it; God made the whole world in six days, and don’t tell me you aren’t God because if you listened to your catechism lessons you’d know you were made in His image, and remember you’re a Giavetti, which means you were made in His image just a little more than some other people I could name, like Vincent Scavello, but I won’t. Look at me! I work all day, but I cook good meals for you, too, and with Christine I keep this big house immaculate, absolutely immaculate, God as my witness, and though I may be tired sometimes and feel like I just can’t go on, I do go on, for you, for you I go on, and your clothes are always nicely pressed—Aren’t they?—and your socks are always mended—Tell me once you ever had to wear a sock with a hole in it!—so if I do all this and not drop dead and not even complain,
then you can be the kind of son to make me proud, and by God you’re going to be! And as for you, Christine . . .”
Evelyn never ceased lecturing them. Always, every day, holidays, birthdays—there was no day free of her lectures. Christine and Tony sat captive, not daring to answer back because that brought the most withering scorn and the worst punishment—and encouraged even more lecturing. She pushed them relentlessly, demanded the greatest possible accomplishments in everything they did, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing; it might even have been good for them. However, when they did achieve the best grade possible, win the highest award being given, move up to the first seats in their sections of the school orchestra, when they did all that and more, much more, it never satisfied their mother. The best wasn’t good enough for Evelyn. When they achieved the best, reached the pinnacle, she chastised them for not having gotten there sooner, set new goals for them, and suggested they were trying her patience and running out of time in which to make her proud of them.
When she felt lecturing wasn’t sufficient, she used her ultimate weapon—tears. She wept and blamed herself for their failures. “Both of you are going to come to a bad end, and it’ll be my fault, all my fault, because I didn’t know how to reach you, how to make you see what was important. I didn’t do enough for you, I didn’t know how to help you overcome the Scavello blood that’s in you, and I should have known, should have done better. What good am I as a mother? No good, no mother at all.”
. . . all those years ago . . .
But it seemed like yesterday.
Christine couldn’t tell Charlie Harrison everything about her mother and that claustrophobic childhood of shadowy rooms and heavy Victorian furniture and heavy Victorian guilt, for she would have needed hours to explain. Besides, she wasn’t looking for pity, and she was not by nature the kind of person given to sharing the intimate details of her life with others—not even with friends, let alone strangers like this man, nice as he might be. She only alluded to her past with a few sentences, but from his expression, she thought he sensed and understood more than she told him; perhaps the pain of it was in her eyes and face, more easily read than she supposed.