by Dean Koontz
On the other hand, everyone who worked with him knew the risks, even though they usually expected better odds than these. And what kind of detective agency would they be, what kind of bodyguards would they be if they walked away from the first really nasty case they handled? And how could he back down on his word to Christine Scavello? He wouldn’t be able to face himself in the morning if he left her defenseless. Besides, he was more certain than ever that he was, with irrational but not entirely involuntary haste, falling in love with her.
In spite of the rain booming on the roof and the thumping of the windshield wipers, the night was unbearably silent in the oppressively humid car; there was a dearth of meaningful sound, just the random noises of the storm which, by their very randomness, reminded him of the chasm of chaos above which his life and all other lives unfolded. That was a thought on which he preferred not to dwell at the moment.
He pulled back onto the road, accelerated, and sent up twin plumes of spray from a deep puddle, heading toward the hills, and home.
29
Christine hadn’t expected to be able to sleep. She stretched out on the bed where Joey lay like a stone, but she figured she would just wait there with her eyes closed, resting, until he woke. She must have dropped off instantly.
She came around once during the night and realized the rain had stopped. The silence was profound.
George Swarthout was sitting in a chair in the corner, reading a magazine in the soft glow of a table lamp with a mother-of-pearl shade. She wanted to speak to him, wanted to know if everything was all right, but she hadn’t the strength to sit up or even talk. She closed her eyes and drifted down into darkness again.
She came fully awake before seven o’clock, feeling fuzzyheaded after only four and a half hours of sleep. Joey was snoring softly. She left George watching over her son, went into the bathroom, and took a long, hot shower, wincing when water got under the bandage on her hip and elicited a stinging pain from her still-healing wound.
She finally stepped out of the shower, toweled dry, applied a new bandage, and was pulling on her clothes when she sensed that Joey was in trouble, right now, terrible trouble; she felt it in her bones. She thought she heard him scream above the rumbling of the bathroom’s exhaust fan. Oh Jesus no. He was being slaughtered out there in the bedroom, hacked to pieces by some Bible-thumping maniac. Her stomach tightened, and her skin goose-pimpled, and in spite of the moaning bathroom fan she thought she heard something else, a thump, a clubbing sound. They must be beating him, too, stabbing and beating him, and her lungs blocked up, and she knew it, knew Joey was dead, my God, and in a wild panic she pulled up the zipper on her jeans, didn’t even finish buttoning her blouse, stumbled out of the bathroom, shoeless, with her wet hair hanging in glossy clumps.
She had imagined everything.
The boy was safe.
He was awake, sitting up in bed, listening wide-eyed as George Swarthout told him a story about a magic parrot and the King of Siam.
Later, worried that her mother would hear about their problems on the news or read about them in the papers, she called, but then wished she hadn’t. Evelyn listened to all the details, was properly shocked, but instead of offering much sympathy, she launched into an interrogation that surprised and angered Christine.
“What did you do to these people?” Evelyn wanted to know.
“What people?”
“The people at this church.”
“I didn’t do anything to them, Mother. They’re trying to do it to us. Didn’t you hear what I said?”
“They wouldn’t pick on you for no reason,” Evelyn said.
“They’re crazy, Mother.”
“Can’t all of them be crazy, a whole churchful of people.”
“Well, they are. They’re bad people, Mother, real bad people.”
“Can’t all of them be bad. Not religious people like that. Can’t all of them be after you just for the fun of it.”
“I told you why they’re after us. They’ve got this crazy idea that Joey—”
“That’s what you told me,” Evelyn said, “but that can’t be it. Not really. There must be something else. Must be something you did that made them angry. But even if they’re angry, I’m sure they’re not trying to kill anybody.”
“Mother, I told you, they came with guns, and men were killed—”
“Then the people who had guns weren’t these church people,” Evelyn said. “You’ve got it all wrong. It’s someone else.”
“Mother, I haven’t got it all wrong. I—”
“Church people don’t use guns, Christine.”
“These church people do.”
“It’s someone else,” Evelyn insisted.
“But—”
“You have a grudge against religion,” Evelyn said. “Always have. A grudge against the Church.”
“Mother, I don’t hold any grudges—”
“That’s why you’re so quick to blame this on religious people when it’s plainly the work of someone else, maybe political terrorists like on the news all the time, or maybe you’re involved in something you shouldn’t be and now it’s getting out of hand, which wouldn’t surprise me. Are you involved in something, Christine, like drugs, which they’re always killing themselves over, like you see on TV, dealers shooting each other all the time—is it anything like that, Christine?”
She imagined she could hear the grandfather clock ticking monotonously in the background. Suddenly, she couldn’t breathe well.
The conversation progressed in that fashion until Christine couldn’t stand any more. She said she had to go, and she hung up before her mother could protest. Evelyn hadn’t even said, “I love you,” or “be careful,” or “I’m worried about you,” or “I’ll do anything I can to help.”
Her mother might as well be dead; their relationship certainly was.
At seven-thirty, Christine made breakfast for George, Vince, Joey, and herself. She was buttering toast when the rain began to fall again.
The morning was so drab, the clouds so low, the light so dim and gray that it might have been the end rather than the beginning of the day, and the rain came out of that somber sky with gutter-flooding force. Fog still churned outside, and without any sun it probably would hang on all day, barely dissipate, and get blindingly thick tonight. This was the time of year when relentless trains of storms could assault California, moving in from the Pacific, pounding the coastal areas until creeks swelled over their banks and reservoirs topped out and hillsides began to slide, carrying houses into the bottoms of the canyons with deadly swiftness. From the look of it, they were probably in the process of being run over by one of those storm trains right now.
The prospect of a long stretch of bad weather made the threat from the Church of the Twilight even more frightening. When winter rains closed in like this, streets were flooded, and freeways jammed up beyond belief, and mobility was curtailed, and California seemed to shrink, the mountains contracting toward the coast, squeezing the land in between. When the rainy season was at its worst, California acquired a claustrophobic aspect that you never read about in tourist brochures or see on postcards. In weather like this, Christine always felt a little trapped, even when she wasn’t being hounded by well-armed lunatics.
When she took a plate of bacon and eggs to Vince Fields, where he was stationed by the front door, she said, “You guys must be tired. How long can you keep this up?”
He thanked her for the food, glanced at his watch, and said, “We only have about an hour to go. The replacement team will be here by then.”
Of course. A replacement team. A new shift. That should have been obvious to her, but it hadn’t been. She had grown accustomed to Vince and George, had learned to trust them. If either of them had been a member of the Church of the Twilight, she and Joey would have been dead by now. She wanted them to stay, but they couldn’t remain awake and on guard forever. Foolish of her not to have understood that.
Now she had to wor
ry about the new men. One of them might have sold his soul to Grace Spivey.
She returned to the kitchen. Joey and George Swarthout were having breakfast at the semicircular pine table which could accommodate only three chairs. She sat down in front of her own plate, but suddenly she wasn’t hungry anymore. She picked at her food and said, “George, the next shift of bodyguards—”
“Be here soon,” he said around a mouthful of eggs and toast.
“Do you know who Charlie . . . who Mr. Harrison is sending?”
“You mean their names?”
“Yes, their names.”
“Nope. Could be any of several fellas. Why?”
She didn’t know why she would feel better if she knew their names. She wasn’t familiar with Charlie’s staff. Their names would mean nothing to her. She wouldn’t be able to tell that they were Grace Spivey’s people just by their names. She wasn’t being rational.
“If you know any of our people and would prefer to have them work a shift here, you should tell Mr. Harrison,” George said.
“No. I don’t know anybody. I just . . . well . . . never mind. It wasn’t important.”
Joey seemed to sense the nature of her fear. He stopped teasing Chewbacca with a piece of bacon, put one small hand on Christine’s arm, as if to reassure her the way he’d seen Charlie do, and said, “Don’t worry, Mom. They’ll be good guys. Whoever Charlie sends, they’ll be real good.”
“The best,” George agreed.
To George, Joey said, “Hey, tell Mom the story about the talking giraffe and the princess who didn’t have a horse.”
“I doubt if it’s exactly your mother’s kind of story,” George said, smiling.
“Then tell me again,” Joey said. “Please?”
As George told the fairytale—which seemed to be of his own creation—Christine’s attention drifted to the rainy day beyond the window. Somewhere out there, two of Charlie’s men were coming, and she was increasingly certain that at least one of them would be a disciple of the Spivey creature.
Paranoia. She knew that half her problem was psychological. She was worrying unnecessarily. Charlie had warned her not to go off the deep end. She wouldn’t be much good to either Joey or herself if she started seeing boogeymen in every shadow. It was just the damned lousy weather, closing in on them, the rain and the morning fog, weaving a shroud around them. She felt trapped, suffocated, and her imagination was working overtime.
She was aware of all that.
It didn’t matter.
She couldn’t talk herself out of her fear. She knew that something bad was going to happen when the two men showed up.
30
At eight o’clock Tuesday morning, Charlie met Henry Rankin in front of the Church of the Twilight: a Spanish-style structure with stained-glass windows, red tile roof, two bell towers, and a broad expanse of steps leading up to six massive carved oak doors. Rain slanted at the doors, streamed off the steps, making oily puddles on the cracked and canted sidewalk. The doors needed to be refinished, and the building needed new stucco; it was shabby and neglected, but that was in keeping with the neighborhood, which had been deteriorating for decades. The church had once been the home of a Presbyterian congregation, which had fled ten blocks north, to a new site, where there weren’t so many abandoned stores, adult bookshops, failing businesses, and crumbling houses.
“You look wiped out,” Henry said. He stood at the foot of the church steps, holding a big black umbrella, frowning as Charlie approached under an umbrella of his own.
“Didn’t get to bed until three-thirty,” Charlie said.
“I tried to make this appointment for later,” Henry said. “This was the only time she would see us.”
“It’s all right. If I’d had more time, I’d have just lain there, staring at the ceiling. Did the police talk to her last night?”
Henry nodded. “I spoke with Lieutenant Carella this morning early. They questioned Spivey, and she denied everything.”
“They believe her?”
“They’re suspicious, if only because they’ve had their own problems with more than a few of these cults.”
Each time a car passed in the street, its tires hissed on the wet pavement with what sounded like serpentine anger.
“Have they been able to put a name to any of those three dead men?”
“Not yet. As for the guns, the serial numbers are from a shipment that was sent from the wholesaler in New York to a chain of retail sporting goods outlets in the Southwest, two years ago. The shipment never arrived. Hijacked. So these guns were bought on the black market. No way to trace who sold or purchased them.”
“They cover their tracks well,” Charlie said.
It was time to talk to Grace Spivey. He wasn’t looking forward to it. He had little patience for the psychotic babble in which these cult types frequently spoke. Besides, after last night, anything was possible; they might even risk committing murder on their own doorstep.
He looked at his car, by the curb, where one of his men, Carter Rilbeck, was waiting behind the wheel. Carter would wait for them and send for help if they weren’t out in half an hour. In addition, both Charlie and Henry were packing revolvers in shoulder holsters.
The rectory was to the left of the church, set back from the street, beyond an unkempt lawn, between two coral trees in need of trimming, ringed by shrubbery that hadn’t been thinned or shaped in months. Like the church, the rectory was in ill-repair. Charlie supposed that if you really believed the end of the world was imminent—as these Twilighters claimed to believe—then you didn’t waste time on such niceties as gardening and house painting.
The rectory porch had a creaking floor, and the doorbell made a thin, harsh, irregular sound, more animal than mechanical.
The curtain covering the window in the center of the door was abruptly drawn aside. A florid-faced, overweight woman with protuberant green eyes stared at them for a long moment, then let the curtain fall into place, unlocked the door, and ushered them into a drab entry hall.
When the door was closed and the susurrous voice of the storm faded somewhat, Charlie said, “My name is—”
“I know who you are,” the woman replied curtly. She led them back down the hall to a chamber on the right, where the door was ajar. She opened the door all the way and indicated that they were to enter. She didn’t come with them, didn’t announce them, just closed the door after them, leaving them to their own introductions. Evidently, common courtesy was not an ingredient in the bizarre stew of Christianity and doomsday prophecy that Spivey’s followers had cooked up for themselves.
Charlie and Henry were in a room twenty feet long and fifteen feet wide, sparsely and cheaply furnished. Filing cabinets lined one wall. In the center were a simple metal table on which lay a woman’s purse and an ashtray, one metal folding chair behind the table, and two chairs in front of it. Nothing else. No draperies at the windows. No tables or cabinets or knickknacks. There were no lamps, either, just the ceiling fixture, which cast a yellowish glow that, blending with the gray storm light coming through the tall windows, gave the room a muddy look.
Perhaps the oddest thing of all was the complete lack of religious objects: no paintings portraying Christ, no plastic statues of Biblical figures or angels, no needlepoint samplers bearing religious messages, none of the sacred objects—or kitsch, depending on your point of view—that you expected to find among cult fanatics. There had been none in the hallway, either, or in any of the rooms they had passed.
Grace Spivey was standing at the far end of the room, at a window, her back to them, staring out at the rain.
Henry cleared his throat.
She didn’t move.
Charlie said, “Mrs. Spivey?”
Finally she turned away from the window and faced them. She was dressed all in yellow: pale yellow blouse, a gay yellow polka-dot scarf knotted at her neck, deep yellow skirt, yellow shoes. She was wearing yellow bracelets on each wrist and half a dozen rings set
with yellow stones. The effect was ludicrous. The brightness of her outfit only accentuated the paleness of her puffy face, the withered dullness of her age-spotted skin. She looked as if she were possessed by senile whimsy and thought of herself as a twelve-year-old girl on the way to a friend’s birthday party.
Her gray hair was wild, but her eyes were wilder. Even from across the room, those eyes were riveting and strange.
She was curiously rigid, shoulders drawn up tight, arms straight down at her sides, hands curled into tight fists.
“I’m Charles Harrison,” Charlie said because he’d never actually met the woman before, “and this is my associate, Mr. Rankin.”
As unsteady as a drunkard, she took two steps away from the window. Her face twisted, and her white skin became even whiter. She cried out in pain, almost fell, caught herself in time, and stood swaying as if the floor were rolling under her.
“Is something wrong?” Charlie asked.
“You’ll have to help me,” she said.
He hadn’t figured on anything like this. He had expected her to be a strong woman with a vital, magnetic personality, a take-charge type who would keep them off balance from the start. Instead it was she who was off balance, and quite literally.
She was standing in a partial crouch now, as if pain were bending her in half. She was still stiff, and her hands were still fisted.
Charlie and Henry went to her.
“Help me to that chair before I fall,” she said weakly. “It’s my feet.”
Charlie looked down at her feet and was shocked to see blood on them. He took her left arm, and Henry took her right, and they half carried her to the chair that stood behind the metal table. As she sat down, Charlie realized there was a bleeding wound on the bridge of each foot, just above the tongue of each shoe, twin holes, as if she had been stabbed, not by a knife but by something with a very narrow blade—perhaps an ice pick.