by Dean Koontz
A foul odor assaulted him, and he immediately knew the cause of it, knew he would have to deal with it, but first he went to the fuse box and pushed all the breakers from OFF to ON. That done, the wall switch by the door brought light to the two long fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling. The light revealed three dead, decaying mice, one in the middle of the room, the other two in the corner by the first battery bench.
It was necessary to leave tins of poisoned bait here, especially during the winter when mice were most likely to come seeking shelter, for if the rodents were left to their own devices they would eat the insulation from all the cables and wires, leaving a ruined electrical system by the time spring arrived.
The mouse in the middle of the small chamber had been dead a long time. The process of decomposition had pretty much run its course in the tiny corpse. There were bones, fur, scraps of leathery skin, little else.
The two in the corner were more recent casualties. The small bodies were bloated and putrescent. Their eye sockets were alive with squirming maggots. They had been dead only a few days.
Queasy, Charlie went outside, got the shovel, returned, scooped up all three of the creatures, took them out to the woods behind the mill, and pitched them off into the trees. Even when he had disposed of them, even though a blustery wind was huffing up the mountainside and scrubbing the world clean as it passed, Charlie couldn’t get the stink of death out of his nostrils. Oddly, the smell stayed with him all the way back to the battery room, where, of course, it still hung on the damp musty air.
He didn’t have time for a really thorough inspection of the equipment, but he wanted to give it a quick once-over to be sure the mice had died before they had done any serious damage. The wires and cables were lightly nibbled in a few places, but there didn’t seem to be any reason to worry that they’d lose their lights to rodent sabotage.
He had almost satisfied himself as to the system’s integrity when he heard a strange, threatening noise behind him.
51
The day was melting into darkness. Color was seeping out of the landscape through which they drove, leaving the trees and hills and everything else as gray as the surface of the highway.
Kyle Barlowe switched on the headlights and hunched over the steering wheel of the Oldsmobile, grinning.
Now. Now they had something real to go on. Now they had a solid lead. Information. A logical plan. They weren’t just going on a hunch and a prayer anymore. They were no longer driving blind, heading north merely because it seemed like a good idea. They knew where the boy was, where he must be. Now they had a destination, and now Barlowe was beginning to believe in Mother Grace’s leadership again.
She was in the seat beside him, slumped against the door, briefly lost in one of those short but mile-deep sleeps that came to her with decreasing frequency. Good. She needed her rest. The confrontation was coming. The showdown. When they were face to face with the devil, she would need all the energy she could muster.
And if Grace wasn’t God’s messenger, why had this vital information been conveyed to them? This proved she was right, meant well, told the truth, and should be obeyed.
For the moment his doubts had receded.
Barlowe looked in the rearview mirror. The two vans were still behind him. Crusaders. Crusaders on wheels instead of horseback.
52
When Charlie heard the strange noises behind him, he dropped into a defensive crouch as he turned. He expected to see Grace Spivey standing in the doorway to the battery room, but the disturbance had no human source. It was a rat.
The filthy thing was between him and the doorway, but he was sure it hadn’t come in from the snow because part of what he had heard was the thump it made as it scurried out from under some machinery. It was hissing, squeaking, glaring at him with bloody eyes, as if threatening to prevent his escape.
It was a damned big rat, but in spite of its size, which indicated that it had once been well fed, it didn’t look healthy now. Its pelt wasn’t smooth, but oily and matted and dull. There was something dark and crusted at its ears, probably blood, and there was bloody foam dripping from its mouth. It had been the poison. Now, pain-wracked and delirious, it might be a bold and vicious opponent.
And there was another, even less pleasant possibility to consider. Maybe it hadn’t been the poison. Maybe the foam at its mouth was an indication of rabies. Could rodents carry rabies just as easily as dogs and cats? Every year in the California mountains, the state’s vector control officers turned up a few rabid animals. Sometimes, portions of state parks were even put off limits until it could be ascertained whether there was a rabies epidemic.
This rat was most likely affected by the poison, not rabies. But if he was wrong, and if the rat bit him . . .
He wished he had brought the shovel back into the battery room after disposing of the three dead mice. He had no weapon except his revolver, and that was too powerful for this small job, like going hunting for pheasant with a cannon.
He straightened up from his crouch, and his movement agitated the rat. It came at him.
He jumped back against the wall.
It was coming fast, screeching. If it ran up his leg—
He kicked, catching it squarely with the reinforced toe of his boot. The kick threw it across the room, and it struck the wall, shrieking, and dropped to the floor on its back.
Charlie reached the door and was through it before the rat got on its feet. He climbed the stairs, picked up the shovel that was leaning against the base of the mill, and went back down.
The rat was just inside the open door to the battery room. It was making a continuous racket, a wailing-hissingwhining noise that Charlie found bone-chilling. It rushed him again.
He swung the shovel like a mallet, struck the rat, again, a third time, until it stopped making noise, then looked at it, saw it quivering, struck it again, harder, and then it was still and silent, obviously dead, and he slowly lowered the shovel, breathing hard.
How could a rat that size have gotten into the closed battery room?
Mice, yes, that was understandable, because mice needed only the smallest chink or crevice to get inside. But this rat was bigger than a dozen mice; it would require a hole at least three or four inches in diameter, and because the ceiling of the small room was of reinforced concrete, the walls of cinder block and mortar, there was no way the beast could have chewed open an entrance. And the door to the room was metal, inviolable and unviolated.
Could it have been locked in this past autumn, when the last vacationers closed up the place, or when the real estate management firm had come up to “winterize” the cabin? No. It would have eaten the poison bait and would have been dead months ago. It had been poisoned recently; therefore, it had only recently gotten into the battery room.
He circled the chamber, searching for the rat’s passage, but all he found were a couple of small chinks in the mortar where a mouse—but never anything larger—might have squirmed through after first gaining access to the air space between the double-thick block walls.
It was a mystery, and as he stood staring at the dead rat, he had the creepy feeling that the brief and violent encounter between him and this disgusting creature was more than it appeared to be, that it meant something, that the rat was a symbol of something. Of course, he had grown up with the terror of rats, which had infested the shack in which he had spent his childhood, so they would always have a powerful effect on him. And he couldn’t help thinking of old horror comics and horror movies in which there’d been scenes in ancient graveyards with rats skulking about. Death. That’s what rats usually symbolized. Death, decay, the revenge of the tomb. So maybe this was an omen. Maybe it was a warning that death—in the form of Grace Spivey—was going to come after them up here on the mountain, a warning to be prepared.
He shook himself. No. He was letting his imagination run away with him. Like in his office, on Monday, when he’d looked at Joey and thought he had seen only a bare skull where the
boy’s face should have been. That had been imagination—and this, too. He didn’t believe in such things as omens. Death wouldn’t find them here. Grace Spivey wouldn’t discover where they had gone. Couldn’t. Not in a thousand years.
Joey was not going to die.
The boy was safe.
They were all safe.
Christine didn’t want to leave Joey alone in the cabin while she and Charlie returned to the Jeep for more of their supplies. She knew Grace Spivey wasn’t near. She knew the cabin was safe, that nothing would happen in the short time she was gone. Nevertheless, she was terrified that they would find her little boy dead when they got back.
But Charlie couldn’t carry everything by himself; it was wrong of her to expect him to do it. And Joey couldn’t come along because he would slow them down too much now that the last of the daylight was rapidly fading and the storm was getting dangerously fierce. She had to go, and Joey had to stay. No choice.
She told herself it might even be good for him to be left alone with Chewbacca for a while, for it would be a demonstration of her and Charlie’s confidence in the safety of their chosen hiding place. He might regain some self-assurance and hope from the experience.
Yet, after she hugged him, kissed him, reassured him, and left him on the green sofa in front of the fireplace, she almost could not find the strength to turn and leave. When she closed the cabin door and watched as Charlie locked it, she was nearly overcome by fear so strong it made her sick to her stomach. Moving off the porch, descending the snow-covered steps, she felt an aching weakness in her legs that was almost incapacitating. Each step away from the cabin was like a step taken on a planet with five times the gravity of this world.
The weather had deteriorated dramatically since they had come up the mountain from where they had parked the Jeep, and the extreme hostility of the elements gradually began to occupy her thoughts and push her fear toward the back of her mind. The wind was a steady twenty to thirty miles an hour, gusting to at least fifty at times, racing across the mountain with a banshee shriek, shaking the enormous trees. The snowflakes were no longer large and fluffy, but small, hard-driven by the wind, mounting up on the ground at a startling rate. They had not worn ski masks earlier, on the way up to the cabin, but Charlie had insisted they wear them on the way down. And although she initially objected because the mask felt smothering, she was glad she had it, for the temperature had fallen drastically and now must be around zero or lower, even without taking into account the wind-chill factor. With the protection of the mask, icy needles of wind still managed to prick and numb her face; without it, she would surely have suffered frostbite.
When they reached the station wagon, daylight was fading as if the world was in a pot onto which a giant lid was being lowered. Snow was already drifted around the Jeep’s tires, and the lock was half frozen and stubborn when Charlie tried the key in it.
They stuffed their backpacks full of cans and boxes of food, canned matches, ammunition for the guns, and other things. Charlie strung the three tightly rolled sleeping bags on a length of clothesline and tied one end of the line around his waist so he could drag the bags behind him; they were lightweight, made of a cold-resistant vinyl that would slide well on the snow, and he said he was sure they wouldn’t give him much trouble. She carried the rifle, which was equipped with a shoulder strap, and Charlie carried the shotgun. Neither of them could handle a single additional item without buckling under the load, yet there was still more in the station wagon.
“We’ll come back for it,” Charlie said, shouting to be heard above the roaring wind.
“It’s almost dark,” she protested, having realized how easily you could become lost at night, in a blinding snowstorm.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll come back tomorrow.”
She nodded, and he locked the Jeep, although the foul weather was surely a sufficient deterrent to thieves. No selfrespecting criminal, in the habit of living an easy life off the labors of others, would be out on a night like this.
They headed back toward the cabin, moving with considerably less speed than they had on the way down, slowed by the weight of what they carried, by the wind that hammered at them, and by the fact that they were now climbing instead of descending. Walking in snowshoes had been surprisingly easy—until now. As they made their way up the first meadow, the muscles in Christine’s thighs began to pull, then those in her calves, and she knew that she would be stiff and sore in the morning.
The wind whipped up the snow that was already on the ground, dressed itself in crystalline cloaks and robes that flapped and swirled, formed whirling funnels that danced through the twilight. In the swiftly dying light, the snow devils seemed like spirits, cold ghosts roaming the lonely reaches of the top of the world.
The hills felt steeper than when she and Charlie had first made this trip with Joey and the dog. Her snowshoes were certainly twice as large as they had been then . . . and ten times heavier.
Darkness fell when they were in the woods, before they even reached the upper meadow. They were in no danger of getting lost because the snow-covered ground had a vague natural luminosity, and the clear swath of the road provided an unmistakable route through the otherwise densely packed trees.
However, by the time they reached the upper meadow, the storm’s fury eliminated the advantage of the snow’s slight phosphorescence. New snow was falling so heavily, and the wind was kicking up such thick clouds of old snow that, had there not been lights on at the cabin, they would without doubt have become disoriented and would have been in serious risk of wandering aimlessly, back and forth, around in circles, until they collapsed and died, less than four hundred yards from safety. The dim, diffuse, amber glow at the cabin windows was a welcome beacon. On those occasions when the gale-driven snow temporarily blocked that beacon, Christine had to resist panic, stop and wait until she glimpsed her target again, for when she kept on without being able to see the lights, she always headed off in the wrong direction within a few steps. Although she stayed close to Charlie, she frequently could not see him, either; visibility sometimes declined to no more than two or three feet.
The aching in her leg muscles grew worse, and the throbbing in her shoulders and back became unbearable, and the night’s chill somehow found its way through all her layers of clothes, but though she cursed the storm she also welcomed it. For the first time in days, she was beginning to feel safe. This wasn’t just a storm; it was a damned blizzard ! They were shut off from the world now. Isolated. By morning they would be snowbound. The storm was the best security they could have. At least for the next day or so, Grace Spivey would not be able to reach them even if, by some miracle, she learned their whereabouts.
When they finally reached the cabin, they found Joey in a better mood than when they’d left. There was color in his face again. He was energetic and talkative for the first time in a couple of days. He even smiled. The change in him was startling and, for a moment, mysterious, but then it became clear that he took the same comfort from the storm as Christine did. He said, “We’ll be okay now, huh, Mom? A witch can’t fly a broom in a blizzard, can she, huh?”
“Nope,” Christine assured him as she took off the backpack she’d been carrying. “All the witches are grounded tonight.”
“FWA rules,” Charlie said.
Joey looked at him quizzically. “What’s . . . FWA?”
“Federal Witch Administration,” Charlie said, pulling off his boots. “That’s the government agency that licenses witches.”
“You gotta have a license to be a witch?” the boy asked.
Charlie feigned surprise. “Oh, sure, what’d you think—just anybody can be a witch? First, when a girl wants to be a witch, she’s got to prove she has a mean streak in her. For instance, your mom would never qualify. Then a would-be witch has got to be ugly because witches are always ugly, and if a pretty lady like your mom wants to be a witch she’s got to go have plastic surgery to make herself ugly.”
“But that’s not the worst of it,” Charlie said. “The hardest thing if you want to be a witch is finding those tall, pointy black hats.”
“It is?”
“Well, just think about it once. You’ve gone shopping with your mom when she was buying clothes. You ever see any of those tall, pointy black hats in any stores you were ever in?”
The boy frowned, thinking about it.
“No, you haven’t,” Charlie said as he carried one of the heavy backpacks into the kitchen. “Nobody sells those hats because nobody wants witches coming in their stores all the time. Witches smell like the wings of bats and tails of newts and salamander tongue and all those other weird things they’re always cooking in their cauldrons. Nothing will chase off a storekeeper’s customers faster than a witch who reeks of boiled pig’s snout.”
“Yuck,” Joey said.
“Exactly,” Charlie said.
Christine was so happy and relieved to see Joey acting like a six-year-old again that she had trouble holding back tears. She wanted to put her arms around Charlie, squeeze him tight, and thank him for his strength, for his way with children, for just being the man he was.
Outside, the wind howled and huffed and wailed and whistled.
Night hugged the cabin. Snow dressed it.
In the living room fireplace, the big logs sputtered and crackled.
They worked together to make dinner. Afterward, they sat on the floor in the living room, where they played Old Maid and Tic-Tac-Toe, and Charlie told knock-knock jokes that Joey found highly amusing.