by Dean Koontz
Kyle Barlowe had slid down to the floor, his back against the wall, and had buried his face in his hands to avoid staring at Mother Grace’s hideous remains. But the dog came to Kyle, nuzzled him, and Kyle looked up. The mutt licked his face; its tongue was warm, its nose cold, like the tongue and nose of any dog. It had a clownish face. How could he ever have imagined that such a dog was a hound from Hell?
“I loved her like a mother, and she changed my life, so I stayed with her even when she went wrong, went bad, even when she started . . . to do really crazy things,” Kyle said, startled by the sound of his own voice, surprised to hear himself explaining his actions to Christine Scavello and Charlie Harrison. “She had . . . this power. No denying that. She was . . . like in the movies . . . clairvoyant. You know? Psychic. That’s how she could follow you and the boy . . . not because God was guiding her . . . and not because the boy was the son of Satan . . . but because she was just . . . clairvoyant.” This was not something he had known until he heard himself speaking it. In fact, even now, he did not seem to know what he was going to say until the words came from him. “She had visions. I guess they weren’t religious like I thought. Not from God. Not really. Maybe she knew that all along. Or maybe she misunderstood. Maybe she actually believed she was talking with God. I don’t think she meant to do bad, you know. She could’ve misinterpreted her visions, couldn’t she? But there’s a big difference between being psychic and being Joan of Arc, huh? A big difference.”
Charlie listened to Kyle Barlowe wrestle with his conscience, and he was curiously soothed by the ugly giant’s deep, remorseful voice. The soothing effect was partly due to the fact that Barlowe was helping them understand these recent events in a light less fantastic than that shed by Armageddon; he was showing them how it might be paranormal without being supernatural or cataclysmic. But Charlie was also affected and relaxed by the odd, soft, rumbling tones and cadences of the big man’s voice, by a slight smokiness in the air, and by some indefinable quality of light or heat that made him receptive to this message, as a hypnotist’s subject is receptive to suggestions of all kinds.
Kyle said, “Mother Grace meant well. She just got confused there toward the end. Confused. And, God help me, I went along with her even though I had my doubts. Almost went too far. Almost . . . God help me . . . almost used the knife on that little boy. See, what it is . . . I think maybe your Joey . . . maybe he has a little psychic ability of his own. You know? Have you ever noticed it? Any indications? I think he must be a little like Mother Grace herself, a little bit clairvoyant or something, even if he doesn’t know it, even if the power hasn’t become obvious yet . . . and that was what she sensed in him . . . but she misunderstood it. That must be it. That must explain it. Poor Grace. Poor, sweet Grace. She meant well. Can you believe that? She meant well, and so did I, and so did everyone in the church. She meant well.”
Chewbacca left Kyle and came to Charlie, and he let the dog nuzzle him affectionately. He noticed blood in its ears, and blood matting the fur on its ears, which meant Barlowe had hit it very hard with the butt of the rifle, terribly hard indeed, and yet it seemed completely recovered. Surely it had suffered a severe concussion. Yet it was not dizzy or disoriented.
The dog looked into his eyes.
Charlie frowned.
“She meant well. She meant well,” Kyle said, and he put his face in his hands and began to cry.
Cuddling with his mother, Joey said, “Mommy, he scares me. What’s he talkin’ about? He scares me.”
“It’s all right,” Christine said.
“He scares me.”
“It’s okay, Skipper.”
To Charlie’s surprise, Christine found the strength to sit up and hitch backward a couple of feet, until she was leaning against the wall. She had seemed too exhausted to move, even to speak. Her face looked better, too, not quite so pale.
Still sniffling, wiping at his nose with his sleeve, wiping his eyes with one small fist, Joey said, “Charlie? You okay?”
Although Spivey and her people no longer posed any threat, Charlie was still quite certain that he would die in this cave. He was in bad shape, and it would be hours yet before help could be summoned and could reach them. He would not last that long. Yet he tried to smile at Joey, and in a voice so weak it frightened him, he said, “I’m okay.”
The boy left his mother and came to Charlie. He said, “Magnum couldn’t’ve done better than you did.”
Joey sat down beside Charlie and put a hand on him. Charlie flinched, but it was all right, perfectly all right, and then for a couple of minutes he lost consciousness, or perhaps he merely dropped off to sleep. When Charlie came to, Joey was with his mother again, and Kyle Barlowe seemed to be getting ready to leave. “What’s wrong?” Charlie asked. “What’s happening now?”
Christine was obviously relieved to see him conscious once more. She said, “There’s no way you and I can make it out of here on our feet. We’ll have to be carried in litters. Mr. Barlowe is going for help.”
Barlowe smiled reassuringly. It was a ghastly expression on his cruelly formed face. “The snow’s stopped falling, and there’s no wind. If I stay to the forest trails, I should be able to make it down to civilization in a few hours. Maybe I can get a mountain rescue team back here before nightfall. I’m sure I can.”
“Are you taking Joey with you?” Charlie asked. He noticed that his voice was stronger than before; speaking did not require as much effort as it had done a few minutes ago. “Are you getting him out?”
“No,” Christine said. “Joey’s staying with us.”
“I’ll move faster without him,” Barlowe said. “Besides, the two of you need him to put wood on the fire every now and then.”
Joey said, “I’ll take care of them, Mr. Barlowe. You can count on me. Chewbacca and me.”
The dog barked softly, once, as if in affirmation of the boy’s pledge.
Barlowe favored the boy with another malformed smile, and Joey grinned at him in return. Joey had accepted the giant’s conversion with considerably greater alacrity than Charlie had, and his trust seemed to be reciprocated and well placed.
Barlowe left them.
They sat in silence for a moment.
They did not even glance at Grace Spivey’s corpse, as if it were only another formation of stone.
Clenching his teeth, preparing for an agonizing and most likely fruitless ordeal, Charlie tried pulling himself up into a sitting position. Although he had possessed insufficient strength to do it before, he now found the task remarkably easy. The pain from the bullet wound in his shoulder had dramatically subsided, much to his surprise, and was now only a dull ache which he could endure with little trouble. His other injuries provided a measure of discomfort, but they were not as bothersome or as sapping of his energy as they had been. He felt somewhat . . . revitalized . . . and he knew that he would be able to hold onto life until the rescue team had arrived and had gotten them off the mountain, to a hospital.
He wondered if he felt better because of Joey. The boy had come to him, had laid a hand on him, and he had slept for a couple of minutes, and when he had regained consciousness he was . . . partially healed. Was that one of the child’s powers? If so, it was an imperfect power, for Charlie had not been entirely or even mostly healed; the bullet wound had not knitted up; his bruises and lacerations had not faded; he felt only a little bit better. The very imperfection of the healing power—if it existed at all—seemed to argue for the psychic explanation that Barlowe had offered them. The inadequacy of it indicated that it was a power of which Joey was unaware, a paranormal ability expressed in an entirely unconscious manner. Which meant he was just a little boy with a special gift. Because if he was the Antichrist, he would possess unlimited and miraculous power, and he would quickly and entirely heal both his mother and Charlie. Wouldn’t he? Sure. Sure he would.
Chewbacca returned to Charlie.
There was still blood crusted in the dog’s ears.
> Charlie stared into its eyes.
He petted it.
The bullet wound in Christine’s leg had stopped bleeding, and the pain had drained out of it. She felt clearheaded. With each passing minute she developed a greater appreciation of their survival, which was (she now saw) a tribute—not to the intervention of supernatural forces, but—to their incredible determination and endurance. Confidence returned to her, and she began to believe, once more, in the future.
For a few minutes, when she had been bleeding and helpless, when Spivey had been looming over Joey, Christine had surrendered to an uncharacteristic despair. She had been in such a bleak mood that, when the angry bats had responded to the gunfire and had attacked Spivey, Christine had even briefly wondered if Joey was, after all, what Spivey had accused him of being. Good heavens! Now, with Barlowe on his way for help, with the worst of her pain gone, with a growing belief in the likelihood of her and Charlie’s survival, watching Joey as he fumblingly added a few branches to the fire, she could not imagine how such dark and foolish fears could have seized her. She had been so exhausted and so weak and so despondent that she had been susceptible to Spivey’s insane message. Though that moment of hysteria was past and equilibrium restored, she was chilled by the realization that even she had been, however briefly, fertile ground for Spivey’s lunacy.
How easily it could happen: one lunatic spreads her delusions to the gullible, and soon there is a hysterical mob, or in this case a cult, believing itself to be driven by the best intentions and, therefore, armored against doubt by steely self-righteousness. There was evil, she realized: not in her little boy but in mankind’s fatal attraction to easy, even if irrational, answers.
From across the room, Charlie said, “You trust Barlowe?”
“I think so,” Christine said.
“He could have another change of heart on the way down.”
“I think he’ll send help,” she said.
“If he changes his mind about Joey, he wouldn’t even have to come back. He could just leave us here, let cold and hunger do the job for him.”
“He’ll come back, I bet,” Joey said, dusting his small hands together after adding the branches to the fire. “I think he’s one of the good guys, after all. Don’t you, Mom? Don’t you think he’s one of the good guys?”
“Yeah,” Christine said. She smiled. “He’s one of the good guys, honey.”
“Like us,” Joey said.
“Like us,” she said.
Hours later, but well before nightfall, they heard the helicopter.
“The chopper will have skis on it,” Charlie said. “They’ll land in the meadow, and the rescue team will walk in from there.”
“We’re going home?” Joey asked.
Christine was crying with relief and happiness. “We’re going home, honey. You better get your jacket and gloves, start getting dressed.”
The boy ran to the pile of insulated sportswear in the corner.
To Charlie, Christine said, “Thank you.”
“I failed you,” he said.
“No. We had a bit of luck there at the end . . . Barlowe’s indecision, and then the bats. But we wouldn’t have gotten that far if it hadn’t been for you. You were great. I love you, Charlie.”
He hesitated to reply in kind, for any embrace of her was also an embrace of the boy; there was no escaping that. And he was not entirely comfortable with the boy, even though he was trying hard to believe that Barlowe’s explanation was the right one.
Joey went to Christine, frowning. The drawstring on his hood was too loose, and he could not undo the clumsy knot he had put it in. “Mommy, why’d they have to put a shoelace under my chin like this?”
Smiling, Christine helped him. “I thought you were getting really good at tying shoelaces.”
“I am,” the boy said proudly. “But they gotta be on my feet.”
“Well, I’m afraid we can’t think of you as a big boy until you’re able to tie a shoelace no matter where they put it.”
“Jeez. Then I guess I’ll never be a big boy.” Christine finished retying the hood string. “Oh, you’ll get there one day, honey.”
Charlie watched as she hugged her son. He sighed. He shook his head. He cleared his throat. He said, “I love you, too, Christine. I really do.”
Two days later, in the hospital in Reno, after enduring the attention of uncountable doctors and nurses, after several interviews with the police and one with a representative of the press, after long phone conversations with Henry Rankin, after two nights of much-needed drug-induced sleep, Charlie was left to find unassisted rest on the third night. He had no difficulty getting to sleep, but he dreamed.
He dreamed of making love to Christine, and it was not a fantasy of sex but more a memory of their lovemaking at the cabin. He had never given himself so completely as he had to her that night, and the next day she had gone out of her way to tell him that she had done things with him that she had never contemplated doing with another man. Now, in the dream, they coupled with that same startling fervor and energy, casting aside all inhibitions. But in the dream, as it had been in reality, there was also something . . . savage about it, something fierce and animalistic, as if the sex they shared were more than an expression of love or lust, as if it were a . . . ceremony, a bonding, which was somehow committing him totally to Christine and, therefore, to Joey as well. As Christine straddled him, as he thrust like a bull deep within her, the floor under them began to split open—and here the dream departed from reality—and the couch began to slip into a widening aperture, and although both he and Christine recognized the danger, they could not do anything about it, could not cease their rutting even to save themselves, but continued to press flesh to flesh as the crack in the floor grew ever wider, as they became aware of something in the darkness below, something that was hungry for them, and Charlie wanted to pull away from her, flee, wanted to scream, but could not, could only cling to her and thrust within her, as the couch collapsed through the yawning hole, the cabin floor vanishing above them. And they fell away into—
He sat up in the hospital bed, gasping.
The patient in the other bed grunted softly but did not rouse from his deep sleep.
The room was dark except for a small light at the foot of each bed and vague moonglow at the window.
Charlie leaned back against the headboard.
Gradually, his rapid heartbeat and frantic breathing subsided.
He was damp with sweat.
The dream had brought back all his doubts about Joey. Val Gardner had flown up from Orange County and had taken Joey home with her this afternoon, and Charlie had been genuinely sorry to see the kid go. The boy had been so cute, so full of good humor and unconsciously amusing banter, that the hospital staff had taken him to their hearts, and his frequent visits had made the time pass more quickly and agreeably for Charlie. But now, courtesy of his nightmare, which was courtesy of his subconscious, he was in an emotional turmoil again.
Charlie had always thought of himself as a good man, a man who always did the right thing, who tried to help the innocent and punish the guilty. That was why he had wanted to spend his life playing Mr. Private Investigator. Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Lew Archer, Charlie Harrison: moral men, admirable men, maybe even heroes. So. So what if? What if Joey had called forth those bats? What if Chewbacca was Brandy, dead twice and resurrected by his master both times? What if Joey was less the unaware psychic that Barlowe believed and more the . . . more the demon that Spivey claimed? Crazy. But what if? What was a good man supposed to do in such a case? What was the right course of action?
Weeks later, on a Sunday evening in April, Charlie went to the pet cemetery where Brandy had been buried. He arrived after closing time, well after dark, and he took a pick and shovel with him.
The small grave with its little marker was right at the top of a knoll, where Christine had said it was, between two Indian laurels, where the grass looked silver in the light of a three-quart
er moon.
BRANDY
BELOVED DOG
PET AND FRIEND
Charlie stood beside the plot, staring down at it, not really wanting to proceed, but aware that he had no choice. He would not be at peace until he knew the truth.
The night-mantled graveyard full of eternally slumbering cats, dogs, hamsters, parrots, rabbits, and guinea pigs was preternaturally silent. The mild breeze was cool. The branches of the trees stirred slightly, but with only an infrequent rustle.
Reluctantly, he stripped off his lightweight jacket, put his flashlight aside, and set to work. The bullet wound in his shoulder had healed well, more quickly than the doctors had expected, but he was not yet back in shape, and his muscles began to ache from his labors. Suddenly his spade produced a hollow thunk-clonk when it struck the lid of a solidly made though unfinished and unadorned pine box, a little more than two feet below ground. A few minutes later he had bared the entire coffin; in the moonlight it was visible as a pale, undetailed rectangle surrounded by black earth.
Charlie knew that the cemetery offered two basic methods of burial: with or without coffin. In either case, the animal was wrapped in cloth and tucked into a zippered canvas bag. Evidently, Christine and Joey had opted for the full treatment, and one of those zippered bags now lay within this box.
But did the bag contain Brandy’s remains—or was it empty?
He perceived no stench of decomposition, but that was to be expected if the canvas sack was moisture-proof and tightly sealed.
He sat at the edge of the grave for a moment, pretending that he needed to catch his breath. Actually, he was just delaying. He dreaded opening the dog’s casket, not because he was sickened by the thought of uncovering a maggotriddled golden retriever but because he was sickened by the thought of not uncovering one.
Maybe he should stop right now, refill the grave, and go away. Maybe it did not matter what Joey Scavello was.