by Dean Koontz
As the parking lot’s sodium-vapor lamps came on, casting yellowish light into the deepening twilight, she went to her son and stooped beside him.
The dog snuffled at her, checking her out, cocked its head, looked at her as if it was trying to figure how she fit in, and finally put one paw on her leg, as if seeking her assurance that she would love it as much as its new young master did.
Sensing that she was already too late to take the dog back and get another breed, unhappily aware that Joey was already attached to the animal, she decided at least to stop him from calling the dog Brandy. “Honey, I think it’d be a good idea to come up with another name.”
“I like Brandy,” he said.
“But using that name again . . . it’s like an insult to the first Brandy.”
“It is?”
“Like you’re trying to forget our Brandy.”
“No!” he said fiercely. “I couldn’t ever forget.” Tears came to his eyes again.
“This dog should have his own name,” she insisted gently.
“I really like the name Brandy.”
“Come on. Think of another name.”
“Well . . .”
“How about . . . Prince.”
“Yuck. But maybe . . . Randy.”
She frowned and shook her head. “No, honey. Think of something else. Something totally different. How about . . . something from Star Wars? Wouldn’t it be neat to have a dog named Chewbacca?”
His face brightened. “Yeah! Chewbacca! That’d be great.”
As if it had understood every word, as if voicing approval, the dog barked once and licked Christine’s hand.
Charlie said, “Okay, let’s put Chewbacca in your Firebird. I want to get out of here. You and Joey and I will ride in the Chevy, and Frank will drive. Pete’ll follow us in your car, with Chewbacca. And by the way, we still have company.”
Christine looked in the direction that Charlie indicated. The white van was at the far end of the parking lot, half in the yellowish light from the tall lampposts, half in shadow. The driver wasn’t visible beyond the black windshield, but she knew he was in there, watching.
17
Night had fallen.
The storm clouds were still rolling in from the west. They were blacker than the night itself. They rapidly blotted out the stars.
In the white Chrysler, O’Hara and Baumberg cruised slowly, studying the well-maintained, expensive houses on both sides of the street. O’Hara was driving, and his hands kept slipping on the steering wheel because he was plagued by a cold sweat. He knew he was an agent of God in this matter because Mother Grace had told him so. He knew that what he was doing was good and right and absolutely necessary, but he still couldn’t picture himself as an assassin, holy or otherwise. He knew that Baumberg felt the same way because the ex-jeweler was breathing too fast for a man who hadn’t yet exerted himself. The few times that Baumberg had spoken, his voice had been shaky and higher-pitched than usual.
They weren’t having doubts about their mission or about Mother Grace. Both of them had a deep and abiding faith in the old woman. Both of them would do what they were told. O’Hara knew the boy must die, and he knew why, and he believed in the reason. Murdering this particular child did not disturb him. He knew Baumberg felt the same way. They were sweat-damp and nervous merely because they were scared.
Along the tree-shrouded street, several houses were dark, and one of those might serve their purpose. But it was early in the evening, and a lot of people were still on their way back from work. O’Hara and Baumberg didn’t want to select a house, break in, and then be discovered and perhaps trapped by some guy coming home with a briefcase in one hand and Chinese takeout in the other.
O’Hara was prepared to kill the boy and the boy’s mother and any bodyguards hired to protect the boy, for all of them were in the service of Lucifer. Grace had convinced him of that. But O’Hara wasn’t prepared to kill just any innocent bystander who happened to get in his way. Therefore, they would have to choose the house carefully.
What they were looking for was a place where a few days’ worth of newspapers were piled up on the porch, or where the mailbox was overflowing, or where there was some other sign that the occupants were away from home. It had to be in this block, and they probably wouldn’t find what they were looking for. In that case they’d have to shift to another plan of attack.
They had almost reached the north end of the block when Baumberg said, “There. What about that place?”
It was a two-story Spanish house, light beige stucco with a tile roof, half hidden by large trees, banks of veronica, and rows of azaleas. The streetlight shone on a real estate company’s sign that stood on the lawn, near the sidewalk. The house was for sale, and no lights glowed in any of its rooms.
“Maybe it’s unoccupied,” Baumberg said.
“No such luck,” O’Hara said.
“It’s worth taking a look.”
“I guess so.”
O’Hara drove to the next block and parked at the curb. Carrying an airline flight bag that he had packed at the church, he got out of the car, accompanied Baumberg to the Spanish house, hurried up a walkway bordered by flourishing begonias, and stopped at a gated atrium entrance. Here they were in deep shadow. O’Hara was confident they wouldn’t be spotted from the street.
A cold wind soughed in the branches of the benjaminas and rustled the shiny-leafed veronicas, and it seemed to O’Hara that the night itself was watching them with hostile intent. Could it be that some demonic entity had followed them and was with them now, at home in these shadows, an emissary of Satan, waiting to catch them off guard and tear them to pieces?
Mother Grace had said Satan would do anything he could to wreck their mission. Grace saw these things. Grace knew. Grace spoke the truth. Grace was the truth.
His heart hammering, Pat O’Hara gazed blindly into the most impenetrable pockets of darkness, expecting to catch a glimpse of some lurking monstrosity. But he saw nothing out of the ordinary.
Baumberg stepped away from the wrought-iron atrium gate, onto the lawn, then into a planting bed filled with azaleas and dark-leafed begonias that, in the gloom, appeared to be utterly black. He peered in a window and said softly, “No drapes . . . and I don’t think there’s any furniture, either.”
O’Hara went to another window, put his face to the pane, squinted, and found the same signs of vacancy.
“Bingo,” Baumberg said.
They had found what they were looking for.
At the side of the house, the entrance to the rear lawn was also gated, but that gate wasn’t locked. As Baumberg pushed it open, the wrought-iron barrier squealed on unoiled hinges.
“I’ll go back to the car and get the laundry bags,” Baumberg said, and he slipped away through the night’s black curtains.
O’Hara didn’t think it was a good idea to split up, but Baumberg was gone before he could protest. Alone, it was more difficult to hold fear at bay, and fear was the food of the devil. Fear drew the Beast. O’Hara looked around at the throbbing darkness and told himself to remember that his faith was his armor. Nothing could harm him as long as he trusted the armor of his belief in Grace and God. But it wasn’t easy.
Sometimes he longed for the days before his conversion, when he hadn’t known about the approach of Twilight, when he hadn’t realized that Satan was loose upon the earth and that the Antichrist had been born. He had been blissfully ignorant. The only things he had feared were cops, doing time in prison, and cancer because cancer had killed his old man. Now he was afraid of everything between sunset and dawn, for it was in the dark hours that evil was boldest. These days, his life was shaped by fear, and at times the burden of Mother Grace’s truth was almost too much to bear.
Still carrying the airline flight bag, O’Hara continued to the rear of the house, deciding not to wait for Baumberg. He’d show the devil that he was not intimidated.
18
Joey wanted to ride up front with
Pete Lockburn, to whom he chattered ceaselessly and enthusiastically all the way home.
Christine sat in back with Charlie, who occasionally turned to look through the rear window. Frank Reuther followed in Christine’s Pontiac Firebird, and a few cars back of Reuther, the white van continued to trail them, easily identified even at night because one of its headlights was slightly brighter than the other.
Charlie said, “I can’t figure that guy out. Is he so dumb he thinks we don’t notice him? Does he really think he’s being discreet?”
“Maybe he doesn’t care if we see him,” Christine said. “They seem so . . . arrogant.”
Charlie turned away from the rear window and sighed. “You’re probably right.”
“What’ve you found out about the printing company—The True Word?” Christine asked.
“Like I suspected, The True Word prints religious material—booklets, pamphlets, tracts of all kinds. It’s owned by the Church of the Twilight.”
“Never heard of them,” Christine said. “Some crackpot cult?”
“As far as I’m concerned, yeah. Totally fruitcake.”
“Mustn’t be a big group, or I’d probably have heard of them.”
“Not big, but rich,” Charlie said. “Maybe a thousand of them.”
“Dangerous?”
“They haven’t been involved in any big trouble. But the potential is there, the fanaticism. We’ve had a run-in with them on behalf of another client. About seven months ago. This guy’s wife ran off, joined the cult, took their two kids with her—a three- and a four-year-old. These Twilight weirdos wouldn’t tell him where his wife was, wouldn’t let him see his kids. The police weren’t too much help. Never are in these cases. Everyone’s so worried about treading on religious liberties. Besides, the kids hadn’t been kidnapped; they were with their mother. A mother can take her kids anywhere she pleases, as long as she’s not violating a custody agreement in a divorce situation, which wasn’t the case here. Anyway, we found the kids, snatched them away, returned them to the father. We couldn’t do anything about the wife. She was staying with the cult voluntarily.”
“They live communally? Like those people at Jonestown a few years ago?”
“Some of them do. Others have their own homes and apartments—but only if Mother Grace allows them that privilege.”
“Who’s Mother Grace?”
He opened a briefcase, took an envelope and a penlight from it. He handed her the envelope, switched on the light, and said, “Have a look.”
The envelope contained an eight-by-ten glossy. It was a picture of the old woman who had harassed them in the parking lot. Even in a black-and-white photograph, even in two dimensions, the old woman’s eyes were scary; there was a mad gleam in them. Christine shivered.
19
Along the back of the house were windows to the dining room, kitchen, breakfast nook, and family room. A pair of French doors led into the family room. O’Hara tried them, even though he was sure they’d be locked; they were.
The patio was bare. No flowerpots. No lawn furniture. The swimming pool had been drained, perhaps for repainting.
Standing by the French doors, O’Hara looked at the house to the north of this one. A six-foot cinder block wall separated this property from the next; therefore, he could see only the second story of that other house. It was dark. To the south, beyond another wall, the second story of another house was visible, but this one was filled with light. At least no one was looking out any of the windows.
The rear of the property was walled, also, but the house in that direction was evidently a single-story model, for it couldn’t be seen from the patio on which O’Hara stood.
He took a flashlight from the airline flight bag and used it to examine the panes of glass in the French doors and in one of the windows. He moved quickly, afraid of being seen. He was looking for wires, conductive alarm tape, and photoelectric cells—anything that would indicate the house was equipped with a burglar alarm. It was the kind of neighborhood where about a third of the houses would be wired. He found no indication that this place was part of that onethird.
He switched the flashlight off, fumbled in the flight bag, and withdrew a compact, battery-powered electronic device the size of a small transistor radio. An eighteen-inch length of wire extended from one end of it, terminating in a suction cup as large as the lid of a mayonnaise jar. He fixed the suction cup to a pane in one of the French doors.
Again, he had the creepy feeling that something dangerous was moving in on him, and a chill quivered down his spine as he turned to peer into the shadow-draped rear yard. The wind clattered through the thick, somewhat brittle leaves of a huge ficus, hissed in the fronds of two palms, and caused smaller shrubs to sway and flutter as if they were alive. But it was the empty swimming pool that drew O’Hara’s attention and became the focus of his fear. He suddenly got the idea that something large and hideous was hiding in the pool, crouched down in that concrete pit, listening to him, waiting for the opportune moment in which to make its move. Something that had coalesced out of the darkness. Something that had risen up from the pits of Hell. Something sent to stop them from killing the boy. Underlying the myriad sounds produced by the wind, he thought he could hear a sinister, wet, slithering sound coming from the pool, and he was suddenly cold clear through to his bones.
Baumberg returned with the two laundry bags, startling O’Hara.
“Do you feel it, too?” Baumberg asked.
“Yes,” O’Hara said.
“It’s out there. The Beast himself. Or one of his messengers.”
“In the pool,” O’Hara said.
Baumberg stared at the black pit in the center of the lawn. Finally he nodded. “Yeah. I feel it. Down there in the pool.”
It can only hurt us if we begin to doubt Mother Grace’s power to protect us, O’Hara told himself. It can only stop us if we lose our faith or if we let our fear of it overwhelm us.
That was what Mother Grace had told them.
Mother Grace was never wrong.
O’Hara turned to the French doors again. The suction cup was still firmly affixed to one of the panes. He switched on the small device to which the suction cup was connected, and a glass-covered dial lit up in the center of the instrument case. The device was a sonic-wave detector that would tell them if the house was equipped with a wireless alarm system that protected the premises by detecting motion. The lighted dial did not move, which meant there was no radio wave activity of any kind within the family room, beyond the French doors.
Before Mother Grace had converted him, O’Hara had been a busy and professional burglar, and he had been damned good at his trade. Because Grace had a propensity for seeking converts from among those who had fallen the furthest from God, the Church of the Twilight could tap a wealth of skills and knowledge not available to the average church whose members were from the law-abiding segments of the population. Sometimes that was a blessing.
He popped the suction cup off the glass, switched off the wave detector, and returned it to the flight bag. He withdrew a roll of strapping tape and a pair of scissors. He cut several strips of tape and applied them to the pane of glass nearest the door handle. When the glass was completely covered, he struck it hard with one fist. The pane shattered, but with little sound, and the fragments all stuck to the tape. He pulled the pieces out of the frame, put them aside, reached through, fumbled for the deadbolt, unlocked it, opened the door.
He was now pretty sure there was no alarm, but he had one last thing to check for. He got down on his knees on the patio, reached across the threshold, and pulled up the carpet from the tack strip. There was no alarm mat under the carpet, just ordinary quilted padding.
He put the carpet back in place. He and Baumberg went into the house, taking the laundry bags and the flight bag with them.
O’Hara closed and locked the French doors.
He looked out at the rear lawn. It was peaceful now.
“It isn’t out t
here anymore,” Baumberg said.
“No,” O’Hara said.
Baumberg peered across the unlighted family room, into the breakfast area and the dark kitchen beyond. He said, “Now it’s inside with us.”
“Yes,” O’Hara said. He had felt the hostile presence within the house the moment they’d crossed the threshold.
“I wish we could turn on some lights,” Baumberg said uneasily.
“The house is supposed to be deserted. The neighbors would notice lights and maybe call the cops.”
Overhead, from an upstairs room, a floorboard creaked.
Before converting to Mother Grace’s faith, in the days when he had been a thief, stealing his way along the road to Hell, O’Hara would have figured the creaking was merely a settling noise, one of the many meaningless sounds that an empty house produced as joints expanded and contracted in response to the humidity—or lack of it—in the air. But tonight he knew it was no settling sound.
O’Hara’s old friends and some in his family said that he had become paranoid since joining the Church of the Twilight. They just didn’t understand. His behavior seemed paranoid only because he had seen the truth as Mother Grace taught it, and his old friends and family had not been saved. His eyes had been opened; their eyes were still blind.
More creaking noise overhead.
“Our faith is a shield,” Baumberg said shakily. “We don’t dare doubt that.”
“Mother has provided us with armor,” O’Hara said.
Creeeeeaaak.
“We’re doing God’s work,” Baumberg said, challenging the darkness that filled the house.
O’Hara switched on the flashlight, shielding it with one hand to provide just enough light to guide them but not enough to be seen from outside.
Baumberg followed him to the stairs and up to the second floor.
20
“Her name’s Grace Spivey,” Charlie said as their car moved through the increasingly blustery February night.
Christine couldn’t take her eyes from the photograph. The old woman’s black-and-white gaze was strangely hypnotic, and a cold radiation seemed to emanate from it.