by Dean Koontz
Joey was screaming.
Christine was shouting, looking for something to throw, a weapon no matter how crude, but she could find nothing. The pain in her wounded leg was like a bolt fastening her to the stone, and she could only beat her hand on the floor in frustration.
The old woman moved in on Joey, holding the rifle awkwardly though with evident determination to finish the job this time. But something was wrong. She was either out of ammunition or the gun had jammed, for she began to struggle with the weapon angrily.
As the echoes of the second shot faded, a mysterious sound arose from deeper in the mountain, adding to the confusion, rising up from other caverns, a strange and frightening racket that Christine could almost but not quite identify.
The gun had jammed. Spivey managed to eject an expended cartridge that had been wedged in the chamber. The brass cylinder popped into the air, reflecting the firelight, and hit the floor with a faint clink and ping.
Wicka-wicka-wicka-wicka: The strange, leathery, flapping sound drew nearer, approaching from deeper in the mountain. The cool air vibrated with it.
Spivey half turned away from Joey to look at the entrance to the adjoining cave, through which she and the giant had entered a few minutes ago. “No!” she said, and she seemed to know what was coming.
And in that instant Christine knew, too.
Bats.
A thunderous, flapping, whirling tornado of bats.
An instant later they swarmed out of the adjoining caverns and into this room, a hundred of them, two hundred, more, rising to the vaulted ceiling, screeching, industriously working their leathery wings, darting back and forth, a seething multitude of frenziedly whirling shadows at the upper reaches of the firelight.
The old woman stared at them. She was speaking, but her words were lost in the drumlike roar of the swarm.
As one, the bats stopped shrieking. Only the rustling-fluttering-hissing of wings sounded now. Their silence was so unnatural that it seemed worse than their screams.
No, Christine thought. Oh, no!
In the pall of this frightening assemblage, Spivey’s maniacal self-confidence shattered. She fired two rounds at the nightmare flock, a senseless and, in fact, dangerous assault.
Whether provoked by the gunfire or otherwise motivated, the bats swooped down as if they were a single creature, a cloud of tiny black killing machines, all claws and teeth, and fell upon Grace Spivey. They slashed at her insulated ski suit, got tangled in her hair, sank their claws into her and hung on. She staggered across the cavern, flailing her arms and whirling about, as if performing a macabre dance, or as if she thought she could take flight with them. Squealing, gagging, retching, she collided with one wall, rebounded from it, and still the beasts clung to her, darted, nipped.
Kyle Barlowe took two tentative steps toward her, halted, looking not so much afraid as bewildered.
Christine did not want to look, but she could not help it. She was transfixed by the horrible battle.
Spivey appeared to be wearing a garment composed of hundreds of flapping black rags. Her face vanished entirely beneath that tattered cloth. But for the flutter and scrape and tick of their wings, the bats maintained their eerie silence, though they moved even more frantically now, with malign intent. They tore her to pieces.
72
At last the bats were still.
Spivey was motionless, too.
For perhaps a minute, the bats were a living, black funeral shroud covering the body, quivering slightly like windrustled cloth. By the second, their unnatural silence grew more remarkable and unnerving. They did not quite look, behave, or seem like ordinary bats. Besides the astonishing timeliness of their appearance and the purposefulness of their attack, they had a quality—an air—that was indefinably strange. Christine saw some of the small, dark, evil heads lift up, turn left and right and left again, crimson eyes blinking, and it seemed as if they were awaiting an order from the leader of their flock. Then, as if the order came in a voice only they could hear, they rose as one, in a sudden fluttering cloud, and flew back into other caverns.
Kyle Barlowe and Charlie were silent, stunned.
Christine would not look at the dead woman.
And she could not look away from her son. He was alive—unbelievably, amazingly, miraculously alive. After all the terror and pain they had been through, after death had seemed inevitable, she had difficulty believing this lastminute reprieve was real. Irrationally, she felt that if she looked away from Joey, even for a moment, he would be dead when she looked back again, and their extraordinary salvation would prove to be a delusion, a dream.
More than anything, she wanted to hold him, touch his hair, his face, hug him tight, feel the beat of his heart and the warmth of his breath on her neck. But her injuries prevented her from going to him, and he appeared to be in a state of shock that rendered him temporarily oblivious of her.
Far away in other caves, the bats must have begun to resume their familiar perches, for they squeaked again as if contesting with one another for favored positions. The eerie sound of them, which soon faded into silence once more, sent a chill through Christine, a chill that intensified when she saw her half-mesmerized son cock his head as if in understanding of the shrill language of those nightmare creatures. He was disturbingly pale. His mouth curved into what appeared to be a vague smile, but then Christine decided it was actually a grimace of disgust or horror engendered by the scene that he had just witnessed and that had left him in this semiparalytic stupor.
As the renewed cries of the bats gradually faded, fear uncoiled in Christine, though not because of what had happened to Grace Spivey. And she was not afraid that the bats would return and kill again. In fact, somehow, she knew they would not, and it was precisely that impossible knowledge that frightened her. She did not want to consider where it came from, to ponder just how she knew. She did not want to think about what it might mean.
Joey was alive. Nothing else mattered. The sound of the gun had drawn the bats, and by a stroke of luck—or through God’s mercy—they had limited their attack to Grace Spivey. Joey was alive. Alive. She felt tears of joy suddenly burning in her eyes. Joey was alive. She must concentrate on that wonderful twist of fate, for it was from here that their future began, and she was determined that it would be a bright future full of love and happiness, with no sadness, no fear, and above all no doubts.
Doubt could eat at you, destroy happiness, turn love to bitterness. Doubt could even come between a mother and her much-loved son, producing an unbridgeable chasm, and she simply could not allow that to happen.
Nevertheless, unbidden and unwanted, a memory came to her: Tuesday, Laguna Beach, the Arco station service bay where they had waited for Charlie after barely escaping the bomb that destroyed Miriam Rankin’s house; she and Joey and the two bodyguards standing by the stacks of tires, with the world outside caught in a fierce electrical storm so powerful that it seemed to signal the end of the world; Joey moving to the open garage doors, fascinated by the lightning, one devastating bolt after another, unlike anything Christine had seen before, especially in southern California where lightning was uncommon; Joey regarding it without fear, as if it were only fireworks, as if . . . as if he knew it could not harm him. As if it were a sign? As if the preternatural ferocity of the storm was somehow a message that he understood and took hope from?
No. Nonsense.
She had to push such stupid thoughts out of her mind. That was just the kind of craziness that could infect you merely from association with the likes of Grace Spivey. My God, the old woman had been like a plague carrier, spreading irrationality, infecting everyone with her paranoid fantasies.
But what about the bats? Why had they come at exactly the right moment? Why had they attacked only Grace Spivey?
Stop it, she told herself. You’re just . . . making something out of nothing. The bats came because they were frightened by the first two shots that the old woman fired. The sound was so loud it scare
d them, brought them out. And then . . . when they got here . . . well, she shot at them and made them angry. Yes. Of course. That was it.
Except . . . If the first pair of shots scared the bats, why didn’t the third and fourth shots scare them again? Why didn’t they fly away? Why did they attack her and dispose of her so . . . conveniently?
No.
Nonsense.
Joey was staring at the floor, still anemically pale, but he was beginning to emerge from his semicatatonic state. He was nervously chewing on one finger, very much like a little boy who knew he had done something that would upset his mother. After a few seconds, he raised his head, and his eyes met Christine’s. He tried to smile through his tears, but his mouth was still soft and loose with shock, with fear. He had never looked sweeter or more in need of a mother’s love, and his weakness and vulnerability gave her heart a twist.
His vision clouded by pain, weak from infection and loss of blood, Charlie wondered if everything that had happened in the cave had actually transpired only in his fevered imagination.
But the bats were real. Their bloody handiwork lay only a few feet away, undeniable.
He assured himself that the bizarre attack on Grace Spivey had a rational, natural explanation, but he was not entirely convinced by his own assurances. Maybe the bats were rabid; that might explain why they had not fled from the sound of the gun but had, instead, been drawn to it, for all rabid animals were especially sensitive to—and easily angered by—bright lights and loud noises. But why had they bitten and clawed only Grace, leaving Joey, Christine, Barlowe, and Charlie himself untouched?
He looked at Joey.
The boy had come out of his quasi-autistic trance. He had moved to Chewbacca. He was kneeling by the dog, sobbing, wanting to touch the motionless animal, but afraid, making little gestures of helplessness with his hands.
Charlie remembered when, last Monday in his office, he had looked at Joey and had seen a fleshless skull instead of a face. It had been a brief vision, lasting only the blink of an eye, and he had shoved the memory of it to the back of his mind. If he had worried about it at all, it was because he had thought it might mean Joey was going to die; but he hadn’t really believed in visions or clairvoyant revelations, so he hadn’t worried much. Now he wondered if the vision had been real. Maybe it had not meant that Joey would die; maybe it had meant that Joey was death.
Surely such thoughts were proof only of the seriousness of his fever. Joey was Joey—nothing more, nothing worse, nothing strange.
But Charlie remembered the rat in the battery cellar, too, and the dream he had later that same night, in which rats—messengers of death—had poured forth from the boy’s chest.
This is nuts, he told himself. I’ve been a detective too long. I don’t trust anyone anymore. Now I’m looking for deception and corruption in even the most innocent hearts.
Petting the dog, Joey began to speak, the words coming in groups, in breathless rushes, between sobs: “Mom, is he dead? Is Chewbacca dead? Did . . . that bad man . . . did he kill Chewbacca?”
Charlie looked at Christine. Her face was wet with tears, and her eyes brimmed with a new flood. She seemed temporarily speechless. Contrasting emotions fought for possession of her lovely face: horror over the bloodiness of Spivey’s death, surprise at their own survival, and joy at the sight of her unharmed child.
Seeing her joy, Charlie was ashamed that he had regarded the boy with suspicion. Yet . . . he was a detective, and it was a detective’s job to be suspicious.
He watched Joey closely, but he didn’t detect the radiant evil of which Spivey spoke, didn’t feel that he was in the presence of something monstrous. Joey was still a six-year-old boy. Still a good-looking kid with a sweet smile. Still able to laugh and cry and worry and hope. Charlie had seen what had happened to Grace Spivey, yet he was not in the least afraid of Joey because, dammit, he could not just suddenly start believing in devils, demons, and the Antichrist. He’d always had a layman’s interest in science, and he’d been an advocate of the space program from the time he was a kid himself; he always had believed that logic, reason, and science—the secular equivalent of Christianity’s Holy Trinity—would one day solve all of mankind’s problems and all the mysteries of existence, including the source and meaning of life. And science could probably explain what had happened here, too; a biologist or zoologist, with special knowledge of bats, would most likely find their behavior well within the range of normality.
As Joey continued to crouch over Chewbacca, petting him, weeping, the dog’s tail stirred, then swished across the floor.
Joey cried, “Mom, look! He’s alive!”
Christine saw Chewbacca roll off his side, get to his feet, shake himself. He had appeared to be dead. Now he was not even dizzy. He pranced up onto his hind feet, put his forepaws up on his young master’s shoulders, and began licking Joey’s face.
The boy giggled, ruffled the dog’s fur. “How ya doin’, Chewbacca? Good dog. Good old Chewbacca.”
Chewbacca? Christine wondered. Or Brandy?
Brandy had been decapitated by Spivey’s people, had been buried with honors in a nice pet cemetery in Anaheim. But if they went back to that cemetery now and opened the grave, what would they find? Nothing? An empty wooden box? Had Brandy been resurrected and had he found his way to the pound just in time for Charlie and Joey to adopt him again?
Garbage, Christine told herself angrily. Junk thought. Stupid.
But she could not get those sick thoughts out of her head, and they led to other irrational considerations.
Seven years ago . . . the man on the cruise ship . . . Lucius Under . . . Luke.
Who had he really been?
What had he been?
No, no, no. Impossible.
She squeezed her eyes shut and put one hand to her head. She was so tired. Exhausted. She did not have the strength to resist those fevered speculations. She felt contaminated by Spivey’s craziness, dizzy, disconnected, sort of the way victims of malaria must feel.
Luke. For years she had tried to forget him; now she tried to remember. He’d been about thirty, lean, well muscled. Blond hair streak-bleached by the sun. Clear blue eyes. A bronze tan. White, perfectly even teeth. An ingratiating smile, an easy manner. He had been a charming but not particularly original mix of sophistication and simplicity, worldliness and innocence, a smooth talker who knew how to get what he wanted from women. She’d thought of him as a surfer, for God’s sake; that’s what he had seemed like, the epitome of the young California surfer.
Even with her strength draining away through her wound and leaving her increasingly light-headed, even though her exhaustion and loss of blood had put her in a feeble state of mind that left her highly susceptible to Spivey’s insane accusations, she could not believe that Luke had been Satan. The devil in the guise of a surfer boy? It was too banal to be believable. If Satan were real, if he wanted a son, if he wanted her to bear that son, why wouldn’t he simply have come to her in the night in his real form? She could not have resisted him. Why wouldn’t he have taken her forthrightly, with much flapping of his wings and lashing of his tail?
Luke had drunk beer, and he’d had a passion for potato chips. He had urinated and showered and brushed his teeth like any other human being. Sometimes his conversation had been downright tedious, dumb. Wouldn’t the devil at least have been unfailingly witty?
Surely, Luke had been Luke, nothing more, nothing less.
She opened her eyes.
Joey was giggling and hugging Chewbacca, so happy. So ordinary.
Of course, she thought, the devil might take a perverse pleasure in using me, particularly me, to carry his child.
After all, she was a former nun. Her brother had been a priest—and a martyr. She had fallen away from her faith. She had been a virgin when she’d given herself to the man on the cruise ship. Wasn’t she a perfect means by which the devil could make a mockery of the first virgin birth?
Madness. She h
ated herself for doubting her child, for giving any credence whatsoever to Spivey’s babbling.
And yet . . . hadn’t her whole life changed for the better as soon as she had become pregnant with the boy? She had been uncommonly healthy—no colds, no headaches—and happy and successful in business. As if she were . . . blessed.
Finally satisfied that his dog was all right, Joey disentangled himself from Chewbacca and came to Christine. Rubbing at his red eyes, sniffling, he said, “Mom, is it over? Are we going to be okay? I’m still scared.”
She didn’t want to look into his eyes, but to her surprise she found nothing frightening in them, nothing to make her blood run cold.
Brandy . . . no, Chewbacca came to her and nuzzled her hand.
“Mommy,” Joey said, kneeling beside her, “I’m scared. What’d they do to you? What’d they do? Are you going to die? Don’t die, please, don’t die, Mommy, please.”
She put a hand to his face.
He was afraid, trembling. But that was better than an autistic trance.
He slid against her, and after only a moment’s hesitation, she held him with her good arm. Her Joey. Her son. Her child. The feel of him, snuggling against her, was marvelous, indescribably wonderful. The contact was better than any medicine could have been, for it revitalized her, cleared her head, and dissipated the sick images and insane fears that were Grace Spivey’s perverse legacy. Hugging her child, feeling him cling to her in need of love and reassurance, she was cured of Spivey’s mad contagion. This boy was the fruit of her womb, a life she had given to the world, and nothing was more precious to her than he was—and always would be.