by Dean Koontz
She had an almost psychic sense that the perpetrator of this viciousness was in the building now, perhaps on the third floor with her. She imagined herself leaving her office, walking down the long hallway, opening doors, peering into silent, deserted offices, until at last she found a man sitting at another terminal. He would turn toward her, surprised, and she would finally know who he was.
And then what?
Would he harm her? Kill her?
This was a new thought: the possibility that his ultimate goal was to do something worse than torment and scare her.
She hesitated, fingers on the keyboard, not certain if she should proceed. She probably wouldn’t get the answers she needed, and she would only be acknowledging her presence to whomever might be out there at another workstation. Then she realized that, if he really was nearby, he already knew she was in her office, alone. She had nothing to lose by trying to follow the data chain. But when she attempted to type in her instruction, the keyboard was locked; the keys wouldn’t depress.
The printer hummed.
The room was positively arctic.
On the screen, scrolling up:
I’M COLD AND I HURT
MOM? CAN YOU HEAR?
I’M SO COLD
I HURT BAD
GET ME OUT OF HERE
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE
NOT DEAD NOT DEAD
The screen glowed with those words — then went blank.
Again, she tried to feed in her questions. But the keyboard remained frozen.
She was still aware of another presence in the room. Indeed the feeling of invisible and dangerous companionship was growing stronger as the room grew colder.
How could he make the room colder without using the air conditioner? Whoever he was, he could override her computer from another terminal in the building; she could accept that. But how could he possibly make the air grow so cold so fast?
Suddenly, as the screen began to fill with the same seven-line message that had just been wiped from it, Tina had enough. She switched the machine off, and the blue glow faded from the screen.
As she was getting up from the low chair, the terminal switched itself on.
I’M COLD AND I HURT
GET ME OUT OF HERE
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE
“Get you out of where?” she demanded. “The grave?”
GET ME OUT OUT OUT
She had to get a grip on herself. She had just spoken to the computer as if she actually thought she was talking to Danny. It wasn’t Danny tapping out those words. Goddamn it, Danny was dead!
She snapped the computer off.
It turned itself on.
A hot welling of tears blurred her vision, and she struggled to repress them. She had to be losing her mind. The damned thing couldn’t be switching itself on.
She hurried around the desk, banging her hip against one corner, heading for the wall socket as the printer hummed with the production of more hateful words.
GET ME OUT OF HERE
GET ME OUT OUT
OUT
OUT
Tina stooped beside the wall outlet from which the computer received its electrical power and its data feed. She took hold of the two lines — one heavy cable and one ordinary insulated wire — and they seemed to come alive in her hands, like a pair of snakes, resisting her. She jerked on them and pulled both plugs.
The monitor went dark.
It remained dark.
Immediately, rapidly, the room began to grow warmer.
“Thank God,” she said shakily.
She started around Angela’s desk, wanting nothing more at the moment than to get off her rubbery legs and onto a chair — and suddenly the door to the hall opened, and she cried out in alarm.
The man in black?
Elliot Stryker halted on the threshold, surprised by her scream, and for an instant she was relieved to see him.
“Tina? What’s wrong? Are you all right?”
She took a step toward him, but then she realized that he might have come here straight from a computer in one of the other third-floor offices. Could he be the man who’d been harassing her?
“Tina? My God, you’re white as a ghost!”
He moved toward her.
She said, “Stop! Wait!”
He halted, perplexed.
Voice quavery, she said, “What are you doing here?”
He blinked. “I was in the hotel on business. I wondered if you might still be at your desk. I stopped in to see. I just wanted to say hello.”
“Were you playing around with one of the other computers?”
“What?” he asked, obviously baffled by her question.
“What were you doing on the third floor?” she demanded. “Who could you possibly have been seeing? They’ve all gone home. I’m the only one here.”
Still puzzled but beginning to get impatient with her, Elliot said, “My business wasn’t on the third floor. I had a meeting with Charlie Mainway over coffee, downstairs in the restaurant. When we finished our work a couple minutes ago, I came up to see if you were here. What’s wrong with you?”
She stared at him intently.
“Tina? What’s happened?”
She searched his face for any sign that he was lying, but his bewilderment seemed genuine. And if he were lying, he wouldn’t have told her the story about Charlie and coffee, for that could be substantiated or disproved with only a minimum of effort; he would have come up with a better alibi if he really needed one. He was telling the truth.
She said, “I’m sorry. I just . . . I had . . . an . . . an experience here . . . a weird . . .”
He went to her. “What was it?”
As he drew near, he opened his arms, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for him to hold and comfort her, as if he had held her many times before, and she leaned against him in the same spirit of familiarity. She was no longer alone.
13
TINA KEPT A WELL-STOCKED BAR IN ONE CORNER OF her office for those infrequent occasions when a business associate needed a drink after a long work session. This was the first time she’d ever had the need to tap those stores for herself.
At her request, Elliot poured Rémy Martin into two snifters and gave one glass to her. She couldn’t pour for them because her hands were shaking too badly.
They sat on the beige sofa, more in the shadows than in the glow from the lamps. She was forced to hold her brandy snifter in both hands to keep it steady.
“I don’t know where to begin. I guess I ought to start with Danny. Do you know about Danny?”
“Your son?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Helen Mainway told me he died a little over a year ago.”
“Did she tell you how it happened?”
“He was one of the Jaborski group. Front page of the papers.”
Bill Jaborski had been a wilderness expert and a scoutmaster.Every winter for sixteen years, he had taken a group of scouts to northern Nevada, beyond Reno, into the High Sierras, on a seven-day wilderness survival excursion.
“It was supposed to build character,” Tina said. “And the boys competed hard all year for the chance to be one of those selected to go on the trip. It was supposed to be perfectly safe. Bill Jaborski was supposed to be one of the ten top winter-survival experts in the country. That’s what everyone said. And the other adult who went along, Tom Lincoln — he was supposed to be almost as good as Bill. Supposed to be.” Her voice had grown thin and bitter. “I believed them, thought it was safe.”
“You can’t blame yourself for that. All those years they’d taken kids into the mountains, nobody was even scratched.”
Tina swallowed some cognac. It was hot in her throat, but it didn’t burn away the chill at the center of her.
A year ago Jaborski’s excursion had included fourteen boys between the ages of twelve and eighteen. All of them were top-notch scouts — and all of them died along with Jaborski and Tom Lincoln.
“Have the authorities ever figured out exactly why it happened?” Elliot asked.
“Not why. They never will. All they know is how. The group went into the mountains in a four-wheel-drive minibus built for use on back roads in the winter. Huge tires. Chains. Even a snowplow on the front. They weren’t supposed to go into the true heart of the wilderness. Just into the fringes. No one in his right mind would take boys as young as twelve into the deepest parts of the Sierras, no matter how well prepared, supplied, and trained they were, no matter how strong, no matter how many big brothers were there to look out for them.”
Jaborski had intended to drive the minibus off the main highway, onto an old logging trail, if conditions permitted. From there they were going to hike for three days with snowshoes and backpacks, making a wide circle around the bus, coming back to it at the end of the week.
“They had the best wilderness clothing and the best down-lined sleeping bags, the best winter tents, plenty of charcoal and other heat sources, plenty of food, and two wilderness experts to guide them. Perfectly safe, everyone said. Absolutely, perfectly safe. So what the fuck went wrong?”
Tina could no longer sit still. She got up and began to pace, taking another swallow of cognac.
Elliot said nothing. He seemed to know that she had to go through the whole story to get it off her mind.
“Something sure as hell went wrong,” she said. “Somehow, for some reason, they drove the bus more than four miles off the main highway, four miles off and a hell of a long way up, right up to the damn clouds. They drove up a steep, abandoned logging trail, a deteriorated dirt road so treacherous, so choked with snow, so icy that only a fool would have attempted to negotiate it any way but on foot.”
The bus had run off the road. There were no guardrails in the wilderness, no wide shoulders at the roadside with gentle slopes beyond. The vehicle skidded, then dropped a hundred feet straight onto rocks. The fuel tank exploded. The bus opened like a tin can and rolled another hundred feet into the trees.
“The kids . . . everyone . . . killed.” The bitterness in her voice dismayed her because it revealed how little she had healed. “Why? Why did a man like Bill Jaborski do something so stupid as that?”
Still sitting on the couch, Elliot shook his head and stared down at his cognac.
She didn’t expect him to answer. She wasn’t actually asking the question of him; if she was asking anyone, she was asking God.
“Why? Jaborski was the best. The very best. He was so good that he could safely take young boys into the Sierras for sixteen years, a challenge a lot of other winter survival experts wouldn’t touch. Bill Jaborski was smart, tough, clever, and filled with respect for the danger in what he did. He wasn’t foolhardy. Why would he do something so dumb, so reckless, as to drive that far along that road in those conditions?”
Elliot looked up at her. Kindness marked his eyes, a deep sympathy. “You’ll probably never learn the answer. I understand how hard it must be never to know why.”
“Hard,” she said. “Very hard.”
She returned to the couch.
He took her glass out of her hand. It was empty. She didn’t remember finishing her cognac. He went to the bar.
“No more for me,” she said. “I don’t want to get drunk.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “In your condition, throwing off all that nervous energy the way you are, two small brandies won’t affect you in the slightest.”
He returned from the bar with more Rémy Martin. This time she was able to hold the glass in one hand.
“Thank you, Elliot.”
“Just don’t ask for a mixed drink,” he said. “I’m the world’s worst bartender. I can pour anything straight or over ice, but I can’t even mix vodka and orange juice properly.”
“I wasn’t thanking you for the drink. I was thanking you for . . . being a good listener.”
“Most attorneys talk too much.”
For a moment they sat in silence, sipping cognac.
Tina was still tense, but she no longer felt cold inside.
Elliot said, “Losing a child like that . . . devastating. But it wasn’t any recollection of your son that had you so upset when I walked in a little while ago.”
“In a way it was.”
“But something more.”
She told him about the bizarre things that had been happening to her lately: the messages on Danny’s chalkboard; the wreckage she’d found in the boy’s room; the hateful, taunting words that appeared in the computer lists and on the monitor.
Elliot studied the printouts, and together they examined the computer in Angela’s office. They plugged it in and tried to get it to repeat what it had done earlier, but they had no luck; the machine behaved exactly as it was meant to behave.
“Someone could have programmed it to spew out this stuff about Danny,” Elliot said. “But I don’t see how he could make the terminal switch itself on.”
“It happened,” she said.
“I don’t doubt you. I just don’t understand.”
“And the air . . . so cold . . .”
“Could the temperature change have been subjective?”
Tina frowned. “Are you asking me if I imagined it?”
“You were frightened — ”
“But I’m sure I didn’t imagine it. Angela felt the chill first, when she got the initial printout with those lines about Danny. It isn’t likely Angela and I both just imagined it.”
“True.” He stared thoughtfully at the computer. “Come on.”
“Where?”
“Back in your office. I left my drink there. Need to lubricate my thoughts.”
She followed him into the wood-paneled inner sanctum.
He picked up his brandy snifter from the low table in front of the sofa, and he sat on the edge of her desk. “Who? Who could be doing it to you?”
“I haven’t a clue.”
“You must have somebody in mind.”
“I wish I did.”
“Obviously, it’s somebody who at the very least dislikes you, if he doesn’t actually hate you. Someone who wants you to suffer. He blames you for Danny’s death . . . and it’s apparently a personal loss to him, so it can hardly be a stranger.”
Tina was disturbed by his analysis because it matched her own, and it led her into the same blind alley that she’d traveled before. She paced between the desk and the drapery-covered windows. “This afternoon I decided it has to be a stranger. I can’t think of anyone I know who’d be capable of this sort of thing even if they did hate me enough to contemplate it. And I don’t know of anyone but Michael who places any of the blame for Danny’s death on me.”
Elliot raised his eyebrows. “Michael’s your ex-husband?”
“Yes.”
“And he blames you for Danny’s death?”
“He says I never should have let him go with Jaborski. But this isn’t Michael’s dirty work.”
“He sounds like an excellent candidate to me.”
“No.”
“Are you certain?”
“Absolutely. It’s someone else.”
Elliot tasted his cognac. “You’ll probably need professional help to catch him in one of his tricks.”
“You mean the police?”
“I don’t think the police would be much help. They probably won’t think it’s serious enough to waste their time. After all, you haven’t been threatened.”
“There’s an implicit threat in all of this.”
“Oh, yeah, I agree. It’s scary. But the cops are a literal bunch, not much impressed by implied threats. Besides, to properly watch your house . . . that alone will require a lot more manpower than the police can spare for anything except a murder case, a hot kidnapping, or maybe a narcotics investigation.”
She stopped pacing. “Then what did you mean when you said I’d probably need professional help to catch this creep?”
“Private detectives.”
“Isn’t that melodramatic?”
>
He smiled sourly. “Well, the person who’s harassing you has a melodramatic streak a mile wide.”
She sighed and sipped some cognac and sat on the edge of the couch. “I don’t know . . . Maybe I’d hire private detectives, and they wouldn’t catch anyone but me.”
“Send that one by me again.”
She had to take another small sip of cognac before she was able to say what was on her mind, and she realized that he had been right about the liquor having little effect on her. She felt more relaxed than she’d been ten minutes ago, but she wasn’t even slightly tipsy. “It’s occurred to me . . . maybe I wrote those words on the chalkboard. Maybe I wrecked Danny’s room.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Could have done it in my sleep.”
“That’s ridiculous, Tina.”
“Is it? I thought I’d begun to get over Danny’s death back in September. I started sleeping well then. I didn’t dwell on it when I was alone, like I’d done for so long. I thought I’d put the worst pain behind me. But a month ago I started dreaming about Danny again. The first week, it happened twice. The second week, four nights. And the past two weeks, I’ve dreamed about him every night without fail. The dreams get worse all the time. They’re full-fledged nightmares now.”
Elliot returned to the couch and sat beside her. “What are they like?”
“I dream he’s alive, trapped somewhere, usually in a deep pit or a gorge or a well, someplace underground. He’s calling to me, begging me to save him. But I can’t. I’m never able to reach him. Then the earth starts closing in around him, and I wake up screaming, soaked with sweat. And I . . . I always have this powerful feeling that Danny isn’t really dead. It never lasts for long, but when I first wake up, I’m sure he’s alive somewhere. You see, I’ve convinced my conscious mind that my boy is dead, but when I’m asleep it’s my subconscious mind that’s in charge; and my subconscious just isn’t convinced that Danny’s gone.”
“So you think you’re — what, sleepwalking? In your sleep, you’re writing a rejection of Danny’s death on his chalkboard?”
“Don’t you believe that’s possible?”
“No. Well . . . maybe. I guess it is,” Elliot said. “I’m no psychologist. But I don’t buy it. I’ll admit I don’t know you all that well yet, but I think I know you well enough to say you wouldn’t react that way. You’re a person who meets problems head-on. If your inability to accept Danny’s death was a serious problem, you wouldn’t push it down into your subconscious. You’d learn to deal with it.”