by Dean Koontz
Even if the government had established a secret police force, however, why was it so anxious to cover up the true facts of Danny’s death? What were they trying to hide about the Sierra tragedy? What really had happened up in those mountains?
Tina.
Suddenly he realized she was in as much danger as he was. If these people were determined to kill him just to stop the exhumation, they would have to kill Tina. In fact, she must be their primary target.
He ran to the kitchen phone, snatched up the handset, and realized that he didn’t know her number. He quickly leafed through the telephone directory. But there was no listing for Christina Evans.
He would never be able to con an unlisted number out of the directory-assistance operator. By the time he called the police and managed to explain the situation, they might be too late to help Tina.
Briefly he stood in terrible indecision, incapacitated by the prospect of losing Tina. He thought of her slightly crooked smile, her eyes as quick and deep and cool and blue as a pure mountain stream. The pressure in his chest grew so great that he couldn’t get his breath.
Then he remembered her address. She had given it to him two nights ago, at the party after the premiere of Magyck! She didn’t live far from him. He could be at her place in five minutes.
He still had the silencer-equipped pistol in his hand, and he decided to keep it.
He ran to the car in the driveway.
18
TINA LEFT THE REPAIRMAN FROM THE GAS COMPANY in the garage and returned to Danny’s room. She took the graphic novel out of the carton and sat on the edge of the bed in the tarnished-copper sunlight that fell like a shower of pennies through the window.
The magazine contained half a dozen illustrated horror stories. The one from which the cover painting had been drawn was sixteen pages long. In letters that were supposed to look as if they had been formed from rotting shroud cloth, the artist had emblazoned the title across the top of the first page, above a somber, well-detailed scene of a rain-swept graveyard. Tina stared at those words in shocked disbelief.
THE BOY WHO WAS NOT DEAD
She thought of the words on the chalkboard and on the computer printout: Not dead, not dead, not dead. . . .
Her hands shook. She had trouble holding the magazine steady enough to read.
The story was set in the mid-nineteenth century, when a physician’s perception of the thin line between life and death was often cloudy. It was the tale of a boy, Kevin, who fell off a roof and took a bad knock on the head, thereafter slipping into a deep coma. The boy’s vital signs were undetectable to the medical technology of that era. The doctor pronounced him dead, and his grieving parents committed Kevin to the grave. In those days the corpse was not embalmed; therefore, the boy was buried while still alive. Kevin’s parents went away from the city immediately after the funeral, intending to spend a month at their summer house in the country, where they could be free from the press of business and social duties, the better to mourn their lost child. But the first night in the country, the mother received a vision in which Kevin was buried alive and calling for her. The vision was so vivid, so disturbing, that she and her husband raced back to the city that very night to have the grave reopened at dawn. But Death decided that Kevin belonged to him, because the funeral had been held already and because the grave had been closed. Death was determined that the parents would not reach the cemetery in time to save their son. Most of the story dealt with Death’s attempts to stop the mother and father on their desperate night journey; they were assaulted by every form of the walking dead, every manner of living corpse and vampire and ghoul and zombie and ghost, but they triumphed. They arrived at the grave by dawn, had it opened, and found their son alive, released from his coma. The last panel of the illustrated story showed the parents and the boy walking out of the graveyard while Death watched them leave. Death was saying, “Only a temporary victory. You’ll all be mine sooner or later. You’ll be back some day. I’ll be waiting for you.”
Tina was dry-mouthed, weak.
She didn’t know what to make of the damned thing.
This was just a silly comic book, an absurd horror story. Yet . . . strange parallels existed between this gruesome tale and the recent ugliness in her own life.
She put the magazine aside, cover-down, so she wouldn’t have to meet Death’s wormy, red-eyed gaze.
The Boy Who Was Not Dead.
It was weird.
She had dreamed that Danny was buried alive. Into her dream she incorporated a grisly character from an old issue of a horror-comics magazine that was in Danny’s collection. The lead story in this issue was about a boy, approximately Danny’s age, mistakenly pronounced dead, then buried alive, and then exhumed.
Coincidence?
Yeah, sure, just about as coincidental as sunrise following sunset.
Crazily, Tina felt as if her nightmare had not come from within her, but from without, as if some person or force had projected the dream into her mind in an effort to —
To what?
To tell her that Danny had been buried alive?
Impossible. He could not have been buried alive. The boy had been battered, burned, frozen, horribly mutilated in the crash, dead beyond any shadow of a doubt. That’s what both the authorities and the mortician had told her. Furthermore, this was not the mid-nineteenth century; these days, doctors could detect even the vaguest heartbeat, the shallowest respiration, the dimmest traces of brain-wave activity.
Danny certainly had been dead when they had buried him.
And if, by some million-to-one chance, the boy had been alive when he’d been buried, why would it take an entire year for her to receive a vision from the spirit world?
This last thought profoundly shocked her. The spirit world? Visions? Clairvoyant experiences? She didn’t believe in any of that psychic, supernatural stuff. At least she’d always thought she didn’t believe in it. Yet now she was seriously considering the possibility that her dreams had some otherworldly significance. This was sheer claptrap. Utter nonsense. The roots of all dreams were to be found in the store of experiences in the psyche; dreams were not sent like ethereal telegrams from spirits or gods or demons. Her sudden gullibility dismayed and alarmed her, because it indicated that the decision to have Danny’s body exhumed was not having the stabilizing effect on her emotions that she had hoped it would.
Tina got up from the bed, went to the window, and gazed at the quiet street, the palms, the olive trees.
She had to concentrate on the indisputable facts. Rule out all of this nonsense about the dream having been sent by some outside force. It was her dream, entirely of her making.
But what about the horror comic?
As far as she could see, only one rational explanation presented itself. She must have glimpsed the grotesque figure of Death on the cover of the magazine when Danny first brought the issue home from the newsstand.
Except that she knew she hadn’t.
And even if she had seen the color illustration before, she knew damned well that she hadn’t read the story—The Boy Who Was Not Dead. She had paged through only two of the magazines Danny had bought, the first two, when she had been trying to make up her mind whether such unusual reading material could have any harmful effects on him. From the date on its cover, she knew that the issue containing The Boy Who Was Not Dead couldn’t be one of the first pieces in Danny’s collection. It had been published only two years ago, long after she had decided that horror comics were harmless.
She was back where she’d started.
Her dream had been patterned after the images in the illustrated horror story. That seemed indisputable.
But she hadn’t read the story until a few minutes ago. That was a fact as well.
Frustrated and angry at herself for her inability to solve the puzzle, she turned from the window. She went back to the bed to have another look at the magazine, which she’d left there.
The gas company workman calle
d from the front of the house, startling Tina.
She found him waiting by the front door.
“I’m finished,” he said. “I just wanted to let you know I was going, so you could lock the door behind me.”
“Everything all right?”
“Oh, yeah. Sure. Everything here is in great shape. If there’s a gas leak in this neighborhood, it’s not anywhere on your property.”
She thanked him, and he said he was only doing his job. They both said “Have a nice day,” and she locked the door after he left.
She returned to Danny’s room and picked up the lurid magazine. Death glared hungrily at her from the cover.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, she read the story again, hoping to see something important in it that she had overlooked in the first reading.
Three or four minutes later the doorbell rang — one, two, three, four times, insistently.
Carrying the magazine, she went to answer the bell. It rang three more times during the ten seconds that she took to reach the front door.
“Don’t be so damn impatient,” she muttered.
To her surprise, through the fish-eye lens, she saw Elliot on the stoop.
When she opened the door, he came in fast, almost in a crouch, glancing past her, left and right, toward the living room, then toward the dining area, speaking rapidly, urgently. “Are you okay? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. What’s wrong with you?”
“Are you alone?”
“Not now that you’re here.”
He closed the door, locked it. “Pack a suitcase.”
“What?”
“I don’t think it’s safe for you to stay here.”
“Elliot, is that a gun?”
“Yeah. I was — ”
“A real gun?”
“Yeah. I took it off the guy who tried to kill me.”
She was more able to believe that he was joking than that he had really been in danger. “What man? When?”
“A few minutes ago. At my place.”
“But — ”
“Listen, Tina, they wanted to kill me just because I was going to help you get Danny’s body exhumed.”
She gaped at him. “What are you talking about?”
“Murder. Conspiracy. Something damn strange. They probably intend to kill you too.”
“But that’s — ”
“Crazy,” he said. “I know. But it’s true.”
“Elliot — ”
“Can you pack a suitcase fast?”
At first she half believed that he was trying to be funny, playing a game to amuse her, and she was going to tell him that none of this struck her as funny. But she stared into his dark, expressive eyes, and she knew that he’d meant every word he said.
“My God, Elliot, did someone really try to kill you?”
“I’ll tell you about it later.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No, no. But we ought to lie low until we can figure this out.”
“Did you call the police?”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“Maybe they’re part of it somehow.”
“Part of it? The cops?”
“Where do you keep your suitcases?”
She felt dizzy. “Where are we going?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“But — ”
“Come on. Hurry. Let’s get you packed and the hell out of here before any more of these guys show up.”
“I have suitcases in my bedroom closet.”
He put a hand against her back, gently but firmly urging her out of the foyer.
She headed for the master bedroom, confused and beginning to be frightened.
He followed close behind her. “Has anyone been around here this afternoon?”
“Just me.”
“I mean, anyone snooping around? Anyone at the door?”
“No.”
“I can’t figure why they’d come for me first.”
“Well, there was the gas man,” Tina said as she hurried down the short hall toward the master bedroom.
“The what?”
“The repairman from the gas company.”
Elliot put a hand on her shoulder, stopped her, and turned her around just as they entered the bedroom. “A gas company workman?”
“Yes. Don’t worry. I asked to see his credentials.”
Elliot frowned. “But it’s a holiday.”
“He was an emergency crewman.”
“What emergency?”
“They’ve lost some pressure in the gas lines. They think there might be a leak in this neighborhood.”
The furrows in Elliot’s brow grew deeper. “What did this workman need to see you for?”
“He wanted to check my furnace, make sure there wasn’t any gas escaping.”
“You didn’t let him in?”
“Sure. He had a photo ID card from the gas company. He checked the furnace, and it was okay.”
“When was this?”
“He left just a couple minutes before you came in.”
“How long was he here?”
“Fifteen, twenty minutes.”
“It took him that long to check out the furnace?”
“He wanted to be thorough. He said—”
“Were you with him the whole time?”
“No. I was cleaning out Danny’s room.”
“Where’s your furnace?”
“In the garage.”
“Show me.”
“What about the suitcases?”
“There may not be time,” he said.
He was pale. Fine beads of sweat had popped out along his hairline.
She felt the blood drain from her face.
She said, “My God, you don’t think — ”
“The furnace!”
“This way.”
Still carrying the magazine, she rushed through the house, past the kitchen, into the laundry room. A door stood at the far end of this narrow, rectangular work area. As she reached for the knob, she smelled the gas in the garage.
“Don’t open that door!” Elliot warned.
She snatched her hand off the knob as if she had almost picked up a tarantula.
“The latch might cause a spark,” Elliot said. “Let’s get the hell out. The front door. Come on. Fast!”
They hurried back the way they had come.
Tina passed a leafy green plant, a four-foot-high schefflera that she had owned since it was only one-fourth as tall as it was now, and she had the insane urge to stop and risk getting caught in the coming explosion just long enough to pick up the plant and take it with her. But an image of crimson eyes, yellow skin— the leering face of death— flashed through her mind, and she kept moving.
She tightened her grip on the horror-comics magazine in her left hand. It was important that she not lose it.
In the foyer, Elliot jerked open the front door, pushed her through ahead of him, and they both plunged into the golden late-afternoon sunshine.
“Into the street!” Elliot urged.
A blood-freezing image rose at the back of her mind: the house torn apart by a colossal blast, shrapnel of wood and glass and metal whistling toward her, hundreds of sharp fragments piercing her from head to foot.
The flagstone walk that led across her front lawn seemed to be one of those treadmill pathways in a dream, stretching out farther in front of her the harder that she ran, but at last she reached the end of it and dashed into the street. Elliot’s Mercedes was parked at the far curb, and she was six or eight feet from the car when the sudden outward-sweeping shock of the explosion shoved her forward. She stumbled and fell into the side of the sports car, banging her knee painfully.
Twisting around in terror, she called Elliot’s name. He was safe, close behind her, knocked off balance by the force of the shock wave, staggering forward, but unhurt.
The garage had gone up first, the big door ripping from its hinges an
d splintering into the driveway, the roof dissolving in a confetti-shower of shake shingles and flaming debris. But even as Tina looked from Elliot to the fire, before all of the shingles had fallen back to earth, a second explosion slammed through the house, and a billowing cloud of flame roared from one end of the structure to the other, bursting those few windows that had miraculously survived the first blast.
Tina watched, stunned, as flames leaped from a window of the house and ignited dry palm fronds on a nearby tree.
Elliot pushed her away from the Mercedes so he could open the door on the passenger side. “Get in. Quick!”
“But my house is on fire!”
“You can’t save it now.”
“We have to wait for the fire company.”
“The longer we stand here, the better targets we make.”
He grabbed her arm, swung her away from the burning house, the sight of which affected her as much as if it had been a hypnotist’s slowly swinging pocket watch.
“For God’s sake, Tina, get in the car, and let’s go before the shooting starts.”
Frightened, dazed by the incredible speed at which her world had begun to disintegrate, she did as he said.
When she was in the car, he shut her door, ran to the driver’s side, and climbed in behind the steering wheel.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She nodded dumbly.
“At least we’re still alive,” he said.
He put the pistol on his lap, the muzzle facing toward his door, away from Tina. The keys were in the ignition. He started the car. His hands were shaking.
Tina looked out the side window, watching in disbelief as the flames spread from the shattered garage roof to the main roof of the house, long tongues of lambent fire, licking, licking, hungry, bloodred in the last orange light of the afternoon.
19
As ELLIOT DROVE AWAY FROM THE BURNING house, his instinctual sense of danger was as sensitive as it had been in his military days. He was on the thin line that separated animal alertness from nervous frenzy.
He glanced at the rearview mirror and saw a black van pull away from the curb, half a block behind them.
“We’re being followed,” he said.