by Dean Koontz
When he regained his senses, he was on the floor, weeping softly. Twenty ruined books, thousands of ripped pages, were heaped around him. He sat up, pulled out his handkerchief, wiped his eyes. Got to his knees, stood. He wasn’t shaking anymore. The NEED was gone.
Satan had lost.
Kyle had not surrendered to temptation, and now he knew why God wanted men like him to fight the battle of the Twilight. If God built His army strictly of men who had never sinned, how could He know that they would be able to resist the devil’s entreaties? But by choosing men like me, Kyle thought, men with no resistance to sin, by giving us a second chance at salvation, by making us prove ourselves, God has acquired an army of tempered soldiers.
He looked up at the ceiling but didn’t see it. Instead he saw the sky beyond, saw into the heart of the universe. He said, “I’m worthy. I’ve climbed out of the sewer of sin, and I’ve proved I’ll never sink back down. If what You want is for me to handle the boy for You, I’m worthy now. Give me the boy. Let me have the boy. Let me.”
He felt the NEED surging in him again, the desire to choke and rend and crush, but this time it was a purer emotion, the clean white holy desire to be God’s gladiator.
It occurred to him that God was asking him to do the very thing he most wanted to avoid. He didn’t want to kill again. He didn’t want to harm people anymore. He was finally gaining a small measure of respect for himself, finally saw the dim but real possibility that he might one day live in peace with the rest of the world—and now God wanted him to kill, wanted him to use his rage against selected targets.
Why? he asked in sudden, silent misery. Why do I have to be the one? I used to thrive on the NEED, but now it scares me, and it should scare me. Why must I be used this way; why not in some other way?
That was what Mother Grace called “wrong-thought,” and he tried to wipe it out of his mind. You never challenged God like that. You just accepted what He wanted. God was mysterious. Sometimes He was harsh, and you couldn’t understand why He demanded so much of you. Like why He wanted you to kill . . . or why He’d made you a freak in the first place when He could just as easily have made you handsome.
No. That was more wrong-thought.
Kyle cleaned up the ravaged books. He poured a glass of milk. He sat down by his telephone. He waited for Grace to call and say that it was time for him to be the hammer of God.
PART FOUR
The Chase
Everything that deceives also enchants.
—Plato
There’s no escape
From death’s embrace,
though you lead it on
a merry chase.
The dogs of death
enjoy the chase.
Just see the smile
on each hound’s face.
The chase can’t last;
the dogs must feed.
It will come to pass
with terrifying speed.
—The Book of Counted Sorrows
41
In Ventura, they abandoned the yellow Cadillac. They searched along another residential street until Charlie found a dark blue Ford LTD whose owner had been unwise enough to leave the keys in the ignition. He drove the LTD only two miles before stopping again, in a poorly lit parking lot behind a movie theater, where he removed the license plates and tossed them in the trunk. He took the plates off a Toyota parked nearby and put those on the LTD.
With a little luck, the Toyota’s owner wouldn’t notice that his plates were missing until tomorrow, perhaps later. Once he did notice, he might not bother reporting the incident to the police, at least not immediately. Anyway, the police wouldn’t put stolen plates on the hot sheet the way they would if the entire car was stolen, wouldn’t have every cop in the state looking for just a pair of tags, and wouldn’t be likely to connect this small crime with the bigger theft of the LTD. They’d treat the plate-nabbing report as just a case of vandalism. Meanwhile, the stolen LTD would have new tags and a new identity, and it would, in effect, cease to be a hot car.
They left Ventura, heading north, and reached Santa Barbara at 9:50 Tuesday night.
Santa Barbara was one of Charlie’s favorite getaway places when the pressures of work became overwhelming. He usually stayed at either the Biltmore or the Montecito Inn. This time, however, he chose a slightly shabby motel, The Wile-Away Lodge, at the east end of State Street. Considering his well-known taste for the finer things in life, this was about the last place anyone would look for him.
There was a kitchenette unit available, and Charlie took it for a week, signing the name Enoch Flint to the register and paying cash in advance, so he wouldn’t have to show the clerk a credit card.
The room had turquoise draperies, burnt-orange carpet, and bedspreads in a loud purple and yellow pattern; either the decorator had been limited by a tight budget and had bought whatever was available within a certain price range—or he had been a blind beneficiary of the Equal Opportunity Employment Act. The pair of queen-size beds had mattresses that were too soft and lumpy. A couch converted into a third bed, which looked even less comfortable. The furniture was mismatched and well used. The bathroom had an age-yellowed mirror, lots of cracked floor tiles, and a vent fan that wheezed asthmatically. In the kitchen alcove, out of sight from the bedroom, there were four chairs and a table, a sink with a leaky faucet, a battered refrigerator, a stove, cheap plates and cheaper silverware, and an electric percolator with complimentary packets of coffee, Sanka, sugar, and non-dairy creamer. It wasn’t much, but it was cleaner than they had expected.
While Christine put Joey to bed, Charlie brewed a pot of Sanka.
When she came into the kitchenette a few minutes later, Christine said, “Mmmmm, that smells heavenly.”
He poured two cups for them. “How’s Joey?”
“He was asleep before I finished tucking him in. The dog’s on the bed with him, and I usually don’t allow that, but, what the hell, I figure any day that starts out with a bomb attack and goes downhill from there is a day you should be allowed to have your dog on your bed.”
They sat at the kitchen table, by a window that presented a view of one end of the motel parking lot and a small swimming pool ringed by a wrought-iron fence in need of paint. The wet macadam and the parked cars were splashed with orange neon light from the motel’s sign. The storm was winding down again.
The coffee was good, and the conversation was better. They talked about everything that came to mind—politics, movies, books, favorite vacation spots, work, music, Mexican food—everything but Grace Spivey and the Twilight. They seemed to have an unspoken agreement to ignore their current circumstances. They desperately needed a respite.
But, to Charlie, their conversation was much more than that; it was a chance to learn about Christine. With the obsessive curiosity of a man in love, he wanted to know every detail of her existence, every thought and opinion, no matter how mundane.
Maybe he was only flattering himself, but he suspected that his romantic interest in her was matched by her interest in him. He hoped that was the case. More than anything, he wanted her to want him.
By midnight, he found himself telling her things he had never told anyone before, things he had long wanted to forget. They were events he thought had lost the power to hurt him, but as he spoke of them he realized the pain had been there all the while.
He talked about being poor in Indianapolis, when there wasn’t always enough food or enough heat in the winter because the welfare checks were used first for wine, beer, and whiskey. He spoke of being unable to sleep for fear that the rats infesting their tumbledown shack would get up on the bed with him and start chewing on his face.
He told her about his drunken, violent father, who had beaten his mother as regularly as if that were a husband’s duty. Sometimes the old man had beaten his son, too, usually when he was too drunk and unsteady to do much damage. Charlie’s mother had been weak and foolish, with her own taste for booze; she hadn’t wanted a
child in the first place, and she had never interfered when her husband struck Charlie.
“Are your mother and father still alive?” Christine asked.
“Thank God, no! Now that I’ve done well, they’d be camping on my doorstep, pretending they’d been the best parents a kid ever had. But there was never any love in that house, never any affection.”
“You’ve come a long way up the ladder,” Christine said.
“Yeah. Especially considering I didn’t expect to live long.”
She was looking out at the parking lot and swimming pool. He turned his eyes to the window, too. The world was so quiet and motionless that they might have been the only people in it.
He said, “I always thought my father would kill me sooner or later. The funny thing is, even way back then, I wanted to be a private detective because I saw them on TV—Richard Diamond and Peter Gunn—and I knew they were never afraid of anything. I was always afraid of everything, and more than anything else I wanted not to be afraid.”
“And now, of course, you’re fearless,” she said with irony.
He smiled. “How simple it seems when you’re just a kid.”
A car pulled into the lot, and both of them stared at it until the doors opened and a young couple got out with two small children.
Charlie poured more Sanka for both of them and said, “I used to lie in bed, listening to the rats, praying that both my parents would die before they got a chance to kill me, and I became real angry with God because He didn’t answer that prayer. I couldn’t understand why He would let those two go on victimizing a little kid like me. I couldn’t defend myself. Why wouldn’t God protect the defenseless? Then, when I got a little older, I decided God couldn’t answer my prayers because God was good and wouldn’t ever kill anyone, not even moral rejects like my folks. So I started praying just to get out of that place. ‘Dear God, this is Charlie, and all I want is to someday get out of here and live in a decent house and have money and not be scared all the time.’”
He suddenly recalled a darkly comic episode he hadn’t thought about in years, and he laughed sharply at the bizarre memory.
She said, “How can you laugh about it? Even though I know things turned out pretty well for him, I still feel terrible for that little boy back there in Indianapolis. As if he’s still there.”
“No, no. It’s just . . . I remembered something else, something that is funny in a grim sort of way. After a while, after I’d been praying to God for maybe a year, I got tired of how long it took for a prayer to be answered, and I went over to the other side for a while.”
“Other side?”
Staring out the window as a squall of rain whirled through the darkness, he said, “I read this story about a man who sold his soul to the devil. He just one day wished for something he really needed, said that he’d sell his soul for it, and poof, the devil showed up with a contract to sign. I decided the devil was much more prompt and efficient than God, so I started praying to the devil at night.”
“I assume he never showed up with a contract.”
“Nope. He turned out to be as inefficient as God. But then one night it occurred to me that my parents were sure to wind up in Hell, and if I sold my soul to the devil I’d wind up in Hell, too, right there with my folks, for all eternity, and I was so frightened I got out of bed in the dark, and I prayed with all my might for God to save me. I told Him I understood he had a big backlog of prayers to answer, and I said I realized it might take awhile to get around to mine, and I groveled and begged and pleaded for Him to forgive me for doubting Him. I guess I made some noise because my mother came in my room to see what was up. She was as drunk as I’d ever seen her. When I told her I was talking to God, she said, ‘Yeah? Well, tell God your daddy’s out with a whore somewhere again, and ask Him to make the bastard’s cock fall off.’”
“Good heavens,” Christine said, laughing but shocked. He knew she wasn’t shocked by the word or by his decision to tell her this story; she was shaken, instead, by what his mother’s casual crudity revealed about the house in which he’d been raised.
Charlie said, “Now, I was only ten years old, but I’d lived all my life in the worst part of town, and my parents would never be mistaken for Ozzie and Harriet, so even then I knew what she was talking about, and I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard. Every night after that, when I’d be saying my prayers, sooner or later I’d think of what my mother had wanted God to do to my father, and I’d start to laugh. I couldn’t finish a prayer without laughing. After a while, I just stopped talking to God altogether, and by the time I was twelve or thirteen I knew there probably wasn’t any God or devil and that, even if there was, you have to make your own good fortune in this life.”
She told him more about her mother, the convent, the work that had gone into Wine & Dine. Some of her stories were almost as sad as parts of his youth, and others were funny, and all of them were the most fascinating stories he had ever heard because they were her stories.
Once in a while, one of them would say they ought to be getting some sleep, and they both really were exhausted, but they kept talking anyway, through two pots of Sanka. By 1:30 in the morning, Charlie realized that a compelling desire to know each other better was not the only reason they didn’t want to go to bed. They were also afraid to sleep. They often glanced out the window, and he realized they both expected to see a white Ford van pull into the motel parking lot.
Finally he said, “Look, we can’t stay up all night. They can’t find us here. No way. Let’s go to bed. We need to be rested for what’s ahead.”
She looked out the window. She said, “If we sleep in shifts, one of us will always be awake to keep a guard.”
“It’s not necessary. There’s no way they could have followed us.”
She said, “I’ll take the first shift. You go sleep, and I’ll wake you at . . . say four-thirty.”
He sighed. “No. I’m wide awake. You sleep.”
“You’ll wake me at four-thirty, so I can take over?”
“All right.”
They took their dirty coffee cups to the sink, rinsed them—then were somehow holding each other and kissing gently, softly. His hands moved over her, lightly caressing, and he was stirred by the exquisite shape and texture of her. If Joey had not been in the same room, Charlie would have made love to her, and it would have been the best either of them had ever known. But all they could do was cling to each other in the kitchenette, until at last the frustration outweighed the pleasure. Then she kissed him three times, once deeply and twice lightly on the corners of his mouth, and she went to bed.
When all the lights were out, he sat at the table by the window and watched the parking lot.
He had no intention of waking Christine at four-thirty. Half an hour after she joined Joey in bed, when Charlie was sure she was asleep, he went silently to the other bed.
Waiting for sleep to overtake him, he thought again of what he’d told Christine about his childhood, and for the first time in more than twenty-five years, he said a prayer. As before, he prayed for the safety and deliverance of a little boy, though this time it was not the boy in Indianapolis, who he had once been, but a boy in Santa Barbara who by chance had become the focus of a crazy old woman’s hatred.
Don’t let Grace Spivey do this, God. Don’t let her kill an innocent child in Your name. There can be no greater blasphemy than that. If You really exist, if You really care, then surely this is the time to do one of Your miracles. Send a flock of ravens to pluck out the old woman’s eyes. Send a mighty flood to wash her away. Something. At least a heart attack, a stroke, something to stop her.
As he listened to himself pray, he realized why he had broken the silence between God and himself after all these years. It was because, for the first time in a long time, on the run from the old woman and her fanatics, he felt like a child, unable to cope, in need of help.
42
In Kyle Barlowe’s dream he was being murdered
; a faceless adversary was stabbing him repeatedly, and he knew he was dying, yet it didn’t hurt and he wasn’t afraid. He didn’t fight back, just surrendered, and in that acquiescence he discovered the most profound sense of peace he had ever known. Although he was being killed, it was a pleasant dream, not a nightmare, and a part of him somehow knew that not all of him was being killed, just the bad part of him, just the old Kyle who had hated the world, and when that part of him was finally disposed of, he would be like everyone else, which is the only thing he had ever wanted in life. To be like everyone else . . .
The telephone woke him. He fumbled for it in the darkness.
“Hello?”
“Kyle?” Mother Grace.
“It’s me,” he said, sleep instantly dispelled.
“Much has been happening,” she said.
He looked at the illuminated dial of the clock. It was 4:06 in the morning.
He said, “What? What’s been happening?”
“We’ve been burning out the infidels,” she said cryptically.
“I wanted to be there if anything was going to happen.”
“We’ve burned them out and salted the earth so they can’t return,” she said, her voice rising.
“You promised me. I wanted to be there.”
“I haven’t needed you—until now,” Mother Grace said.
He threw off the covers, sat up on the edge of the bed, grinning at the darkness. “What do you want me to do?”