The Servants of Twilight

by Dean Koontz

  “Then how do I make her back off? She’s a flake; there must be an easy way to handle her.”

  “You’re not listening—or you don’t want to hear what I’m telling you. You mustn’t make the mistake of assuming that, just because she’s psychotic, she’s vulnerable. This sort of mental problem carries with it a peculiar strength, an ability to withstand rejection, failure, and all forms of stress. You see, Grace evolved her psychotic fantasy for the sole purpose of protecting herself from those things. It’s a way of armoring herself against the cruelties and disappointments of life, and it’s damned good armor.”

  Charlie said, “Are you telling me she has no weaknesses?”

  “Everyone has weaknesses. I’m just telling you that, in Grace’s case, finding them won’t be easy. I’ll have to look over my file on her, think about it awhile . . . Give me a day at least.”

  “Think fast,” Charlie said, getting to his feet, “I’ve got a few hundred homicidal religious fanatics breathing down my neck.”

  At the door, as they were leaving his office, Boo said, “Charlie, I know you put quite a lot of faith in me sometimes—”

  “Yeah, I’ve got a Messiah complex about you.”

  Ignoring the joke, still unusually somber, Boo said, “I just don’t want you to pin a lot of hope on what I might be able to come up with. In fact, I might not be able to come up with anything. Right now, I’d say there’s only one answer, one way to deal with Grace if you want to save your clients.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Kill her,” Boo said without a smile.

  “You certainly aren’t one of those bleeding-heart psychiatrists who always want to give mass murderers a second chance at life. Where’d you get your degree—Attila the Hun School of Head-Shrinking?”

  He very much wanted Boo to joke with him. The psychiatrist’s grim reaction to the story of his meeting with Grace this morning was so out of character that it unsettled Charlie. He needed a laugh. He needed to be told there was a silver lining somewhere. Boo’s gray-faced sobriety was almost scarier than Grace Spivey’s flamboyant ranting.

  But Boo said, “Charlie, you know me. You know I can find something humorous in anything. I chuckle at dementia praecox in certain situations. I am amused by certain aspects of death, taxes, leprosy, American politics, and cancer. I’ve even been known to smile at reruns of Laverne & Shirley when my grandchildren have insisted I watch with them. But I see nothing to laugh at here. You are a dear friend, Charlie. I’m frightened for you.”

  “You don’t really mean I should kill her.”

  “I know you couldn’t commit cold-blooded murder,” Boothe said. “But I’m afraid Grace’s death is the only thing that might redirect these cultists’ attention away from your clients.”

  “So it’d be helpful if I was capable of cold-blooded murder.”

  “Yes.”

  “Helpful if I had just a little killer in me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus.”

  “A difficult state of affairs,” Boo agreed.

  35

  The house had no garage, just a carport, which meant they had to expose themselves while getting in the green Chevy. Sandy didn’t like it, but there was no other choice except to stay in the house until reinforcements arrived, and his gut instinct told him that would be a mistake.

  He left the house first, by the side door, stepping directly into the open carport. The roof kept the rain from falling straight down on him, and latticework covered with climbing honeysuckle kept it from slanting in through the long side of the stall, but the chilly wind drove sheets of rain through the open end of the structure and threw it in his face.

  Before giving the all-clear signal for Christine and Joey to come outside, he went to the end of the carport, into the driveway, because he wanted to make sure no one was lurking in front of the house. He wore a coat but went without an umbrella in order to keep his hands free, and the rain beat on his bare head, stung his face, trickled under his collar. No one was at the front door or along the walk or crouching by the shrubbery, so he called back to the woman to get into the car with the boy.

  He took a few more steps along the driveway in order to have a look up and down the street, and he saw the blue Dodge van. It was parked a block and a half up the hill, on the other side of the street, facing down toward the house. Even as he spotted it, the van swung away from the curb and headed toward him.

  Sandy glanced back and saw that Christine, lugging two suitcases and accompanied by the dog, had just reached the car, where the boy had opened the rear door for her. “Wait!” he shouted to them.

  He looked back at the street. The van was coming fast now. Too damned fast.

  “Into the house!” Sandy shouted.

  The woman must have been wound up tight because she didn’t even hesitate, didn’t ask what was wrong, just dropped the suitcases, grabbed her son, and headed back the way she’d come, toward the open door in which Max now stood.

  The rest of it happened in a few seconds, but terror distorted Sandy Breckenstein’s time sense, so that it seemed as though minutes passed in an unbearably extended panic.

  First, the van surprised him by angling all the way across the street and entering the driveway of the house that was two doors uphill from this one. But it wasn’t stopping there. It swung out of that driveway almost as soon as it entered, not back into the street but onto the grass. It roared across the lawn in front of that house, coming this way, tearing up grass, casting mud and chunks of sod in its wake, squashing flowers, knocking over a birdbath, engine screaming, tires spinning for a moment but then biting in again, surging forward with maniacal intent.

  What the hell—

  The passenger door of the van flew open, and the man on that side threw himself out, struck the lawn, and rolled.

  Sandy thought of rats deserting a doomed ship.

  The van plowed through the picket fence between the lawn and the next property.

  Behind Sandy, Max yelled, “What’s happening?”

  Now only one house separated the Dodge from this property.

  Chewbacca was barking furiously.

  The driver gave the van more gas. It was coming fast, like an express train, like a rocket.

  The intent was clear. Crazy as it seemed, the van was going to ram the house in which they’d been hiding.

  “Get out!” Sandy shouted back toward Christine and Joey and Max. “Out of the house, away from here, fast!”

  Max plunged out of the house, and the three of them—and the dog—fled toward the backyard, which was the only way they could go.

  Uphill, the Dodge swerved to avoid a jacaranda in the neighboring yard and struck the fence between this property and that one.

  Sandy had already turned away from the van. He was already running back along the side of the house.

  Behind him, the picket fence gave way with a sound like cracking bones.

  Sandy raced through the carport, past the car, leaping over the abandoned suitcases, yelling at the others to hurry, for God’s sake hurry, screaming at them to get out of the way, urging them into the rear lawn, and then toward the back fence, beyond which lay a narrow alley.

  But they didn’t get all the way to the rear of the small lot before the van rammed into the house with a tremendous crash. A split second later, an ear-pulverizing explosion shook the rain-choked day, and for a moment it sounded as if the sky itself was falling, and the earth rose violently, fell.

  The van had been packed full of explosives!

  The blast picked Sandy up and pitched him, and he felt a wave of hot air smash over him, and then he was tumbling across the lawn, through a row of azaleas, into the board fence by the alleyway, jarring his right shoulder, and he saw fire where the house had been, fire and smoke, shooting up in a dazzling column, and there was flying debris, a lot of it—chunks of masonry, splintered boards, roofing shingles, lath and plaster, glass, the padded back of an armchair that was leaking stuff
ing, the cracked lid of a toilet seat, sofa cushions, a piece of carpeting—and he tucked his head down and prayed that he wouldn’t be struck by anything heavy or sharp.

  As debris pummeled him, he wondered if the driver of the van had leaped out as the man on the passenger’s side had done. Had he jumped free at the last moment—or had he been so committed to murdering Joey Scavello that he had remained behind the wheel, piloting the Dodge all the way into the house? Maybe he was now sitting in the rubble, flesh stripped from his bones, his skeletal hands still clutching the fire-blackened steering wheel.

  The explosion was like a giant hand that slammed Christine in the back. Briefly deafened by the blast, she was thrown away from Joey, knocked down. In a temporary but eerie silence, she rolled through a muddy flower bed, crushing dense clusters of bright red and purple impatiens, aware of billowing waves of superheated air that seemed to vaporize the falling rain for a moment. She cracked a knee painfully against the low brick edging that ringed the planting area, tasted dirt, and came to rest against the side of the arbor, which was thickly entwined with bougainvillaea. Still in silence, cedar shingles and shattered pieces of stucco and unidentifiable rubble fell on her and on the garden around her. Then her hearing began to return when the toaster, which she had so recently used when making breakfast, clanged onto the grass and noisily hopped along for some distance, as if it were a living thing, trailing its cord like a tail. An enormously heavy object, perhaps a roof beam or a large chunk of masonry, slammed down into the roof of the ten-foot-long, tunnel-like arbor, collapsing it. The wall against which she was leaning sagged inward, and torn bougainvillaea runners drooped over her, and she realized how close she had come to being killed.

  “Joey!” she shouted.

  He didn’t answer.

  She pushed away from the ruined arbor, onto her hands and knees, then staggered to her feet, swaying.

  “Joey!”

  No answer.

  Foul-smelling smoke poured across the lawn from the demolished house; combined with the lingering fog and the wind-whipped rain, it reduced visibility to a few feet. She couldn’t see her boy, and she didn’t know where to look, so she struck off blindly to her left, finding it difficult to breathe because of the acrid smoke and because of her own panic, which was like a vise squeezing her chest. She came upon the scorched and mangled door of the refrigerator, forced her way between two miniature orange trees, one of which was draped in a tangled bed sheet, and walked across the rear door of the house, which was lying flat on the grass, thirty feet from the frame in which it had once stood. She saw Max Steck. He was alive, trying to extricate himself from the thorny trailers of several rose bushes, among which he had been tossed. She moved past him, still calling Joey, still getting no answer, and then, among all the other rubble, her gaze settled on a strangely unnerving object. It was Joey’s E.T. doll, one of his favorite toys, which had been left behind in the house. The blast had torn off both of the doll’s legs and one of its arms. Its face was scorched. Its round little belly was ripped open, and stuffing bulged out of the rent. It was only a doll, but somehow it seemed like a harbinger of death, a warning of what she would find when she finally located Joey. She began to run, keeping the fence in sight, circling the property, frantically searching for her son, tripping, falling, pushing up again, praying that she would find him whole, alive.

  “Joey!”

  Nothing.

  “Joey!”

  Nothing.

  The smoke stung her eyes. It was hard to see.

  “Joooeeeeey!”

  Then she spotted him. He was lying at the back of the property, near the gate to the alley, facedown on the rain-soaked grass, motionless. Chewbacca was standing over him, nuzzling his neck, trying to get a response out of him, but the boy wouldn’t respond, couldn’t, just lay there, still, so very still.

  36

  She knelt and nudged the dog out of the way.

  She put her hands on Joey’s shoulders.

  For a moment she was afraid to turn him over, afraid that his face had been smashed in or his eyes punctured by flying debris.

  Sobbing, coughing as another tide of smoke lapped out from the burning ruins behind them, she finally rolled him gently onto his back. His face was unmarked. There were smears of dirt but no cuts or visible fractures, and the rain was swiftly washing even the dirt away. She could see no blood. Thank God.

  His eyelids fluttered. Opened. His eyes were unfocused.

  He had merely been knocked unconscious.

  The relief that surged through her was so powerful that it made her feel buoyant, as if she were floating inches off the ground.

  She held him, and when his eyes finally cleared, she checked him for concussion by holding up three fingers in front of his face and asking him how many he saw.

  He blinked and looked confused.

  “How many fingers, honey?” she repeated.

  He wheezed a few times, getting smoke out of his lungs, then said, “Three. Three fingers.”

  “Now how many?”

  “Two.”

  Having freed himself from the thorn-studded rose bushes, Max Steck joined them.

  To Joey, Christine said, “Do you know who I am?”

  He seemed puzzled, not because he had trouble finding the answer but because he couldn’t figure out why she was asking the question. “You’re Mom,” he said.

  “And what’s your name?”

  “Don’t you know my name?”

  “I want to see if you know it,” she said.

  “Well, sure, I know it,” he said. “Joey. Joseph. Joseph Anthony Scavello.”

  No concussion.

  Relieved, she hugged him tight.

  Sandy Breckenstein crouched beside them, coughing smoke out of his lungs. His forehead was cut above his left eye, and blood sheathed one side of his face, but he wasn’t seriously hurt.

  “Can the boy be moved?” Breckenstein asked.

  “He’s fine,” Max Steck said.

  “Then let’s get out of here. They may come nosing around to see if the explosives took care of us.”

  Max unlatched the gate, pushed it open.

  Chewbacca dashed through, into the alleyway, and the rest of them followed.

  It was a narrow alley, with the backyards of houses on both sides of it, as well as a garage here and there, and lots of garbage cans awaiting pickup. There were no gutters or drains, and water streamed down the width of the one-lane passage, rushing toward storm culverts at the bottom of the hill.

  As the four of them sloshed into the middle of the shallow stream, trying to decide which way to go, another gate opened two doors up the hill, and a tall man in a hooded yellow rain slicker came out of another yard. Even in the rain and the gloom, Christine could see that he was carrying a gun.

  Max brought up his revolver, gripping it in both hands, and shouted, “Drop it!”

  But the stranger opened fire.

  Max fired, too, three shots in quick succession, and he was a much better marksman than his enemy. The would-be assassin was hit in the leg and fell even as the sound of the shots roared up the hillside. He rolled, splashing through the rivulet, his yellow rain slicker flapping like the wings of an enormous and brightly colored bird. He collided with two garbage cans, knocked them over, half-disappeared under a spreading mound of refuse. The gun flew out of his hand, spun along the macadam.

  They didn’t even wait to see if the man was dead or alive. There might be other Twilighters nearby.

  “Let’s get out of this neighborhood,” Max said urgently. “Get to a phone, call this in, get a backup team out here.”

  With Sandy and Chewbacca leading the way and Max bringing up the rear, they ran down the hill, slipping and sliding a bit on the slick macadam but avoiding a fall.

  Christine looked back a couple of times.

  The wounded man had not gotten up from the garbage in which he’d landed.

  No one was pursuing them.

  Yet.r />
  They turned right at the first corner, raced along a flat street that ran across the side of the hill, past a startled mailman who jumped out of their way. A ferocious wind sprang up, as if giving chase. As they fled, the wind-shaken trees tossed and shuddered around them, and the brittle branches of palms clattered noisily, and an empty soda can tumbled along at their heels.

  After two blocks, they left the flat street and turned into another steeply sloped avenue. Overhanging trees formed a tunnel across the roadway and added to the gloom of the sunless day, so that it almost seemed like evening rather than morning.

  Breath burned in Christine’s throat. Her eyes still stung from the smoke they had left behind them, and her heart was beating so hard and fast that her chest ached. She didn’t know how much farther she could go at this pace. Not far.

  She was surprised that Joey’s little legs could pump this fast. The rest of them weren’t keeping back much on account of the boy; he could hold his own.

  A car was coming up the hill, headlights stabbing out before it, cutting through the thinning mist and the deep shadows cast by the huge trees.

  Christine was suddenly sure that Grace Spivey’s people were behind those lights. She grabbed Joey by one shoulder, turned him in another direction.

  Sandy shouted at her to stay with him, and Max shouted something she couldn’t make out, and Chewbacca began barking loudly, but she ignored them.

  Didn’t they see death coming?

  She heard the car’s engine growing louder behind her. It sounded feral, hungry.

  Joey stumbled on a canted section of sidewalk, went down, skidding into someone’s front yard.

  She threw herself on him to protect him from the gunfire she expected to hear at any second.

  The car drew even with them. The sound of its laboring engine filled the world.

  She cried out, “No!”

  But the car went by without stopping. It hadn’t been Grace Spivey’s people, after all.

  Christine felt foolish as Max Steck helped her to her feet. The entire world wasn’t after them. It only seemed that way.