by Dean Koontz
He heard also a peculiar grinding noise, soft and rhythmic. This was not an everyday sound, but vaguely familiar and—for reasons he could not define—sinister.
Gradually his eavesdropping began to seem foolish. The only thing sinister in his house was his imagination, which had been dizzied and led into dark byways by the specter of his mortality.
Nevertheless, when he thought to press the swinging door inward and learn the identity of those in the kitchen, fear swelled in him. His heart abruptly clopped as hard as hooves on stone, and so fast that all Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse might have been approaching.
He eased the door shut, backed away from it.
With his right hand over his heart and his left hand against a cabinet to steady himself, he waited for another seizure to sweep his legs out from under him and leave him helpless on the floor.
The butler’s pantry went dark around him.
Ryan might have thought he’d gone blind, except for the lights in the hallway, beyond the open door by which he had entered.
Past the closed swinging door, lights had been extinguished in the kitchen. A wall switch in that room also controlled the pantry.
Now the hallway fell into darkness.
The windowless pantry could not have been blacker if it had been a padded silk-lined clamshell of mortuary bronze.
Able to hear nothing above the noise of his treacherous heart, Ryan became convinced that someone approached, someone whose vision was as keen in this perfect gloom as was the vision of a cat prowling in moonlight. He waited for a hand to be laid on his shoulder, or for a stranger’s cold fingers to be pressed against his lips.
The weight of his heart insisted that he sit on the floor. His knees buckled, and he slid down the face of a cabinet, the drawer pulls gouging his back.
Minutes passed during which the riot in his breast failed to accelerate into full-blown anarchy, and in fact gradually a normal beat was reestablished, a measured rhythm.
His weakness abated, and with the return of his strength, his fear soured into humiliation.
The drawer pulls became handholds by which Ryan drew himself to his feet. He felt his way through the clinging darkness to the swinging door.
There he listened to the kitchen. No murmurs, no whispers, no clink or ping, no soft but ominous grinding noise.
He passed through the door, eased it shut, and stood with his back to it.
To his right, above the primary sinks and the flanking counters, were windows facing west. The glow of the Newport Beach lowlands and the moon above the sea defined the panes.
He dared the light switch and found that he was alone.
In addition to the door to the pantry, the big kitchen had three other exits: the first to a patio, the second to the breakfast room, and the last to the back hall. The breakfast room also offered a door to the patio and another to the hallway.
Surely, the voices had been those of Lee and Kay. They had been engaged on some mundane task, unaware that he was in the butler’s pantry.
But with Ryan supposedly asleep in his bedroom one floor above and at the farther end of the big house, why had the Tings been whispering?
At each end of the kitchen, as at other points throughout the house, Crestron panels were embedded in the wall. He touched one, and the screen brightened. From this, he could control the lighting, the through-house audio, the heating and cooling, and other systems.
He selected the security display and saw that according to established routine, the Tings had engaged the perimeter alarm. No intruders could have entered the house without triggering a siren and a recorded voice identifying the breach point.
Twenty exterior cameras provided views of the grounds. He cycled through them. Although the night-vision technology offered different clarity from camera to camera, depending on ambient light conditions, he saw no prowlers on his property, no motion other than the darting paleness of an occasional moth.
He returned to the master suite, but not to bed. In an alcove, off the sitting room where he had taken dinner, stood an amboina-wood Art Deco desk, circa 1928. He sat there, but not to work.
Lee and Kay Ting had been employed here two years. They were talented, dedicated, and reliable.
Their backgrounds had been thoroughly investigated by Wilson Mott, a former homicide detective, now a security consultant, to whom Ryan turned for all matters that were not directly related to his company, Be2Do.
Yet Forry Stafford had said something that replayed in memory: Scarring of the endocardium, amyloidosis, poisoning…
With every repetition, Forry’s remembered voice seemed to place a more ominous emphasis on the word poisoning, even though he had not considered it a possibility in Ryan’s case.
For a man who had been healthy all his life, not just healthy but vigorous, sudden serious heart disease seemed to require an explanation beyond the genetic disposition or the malfunctioning of his body. A life of struggle and arduous competition had taught him that in this world were people whose motives were suspect and whose methods were unscrupulous.
Poison.
A soft paradiddle drew his attention to the west window. The noise ceased the moment that he turned his head to seek the source.
The steely light of the scimitar moon failed to reveal what had tapped the glass. Most likely the visitor had been only a moth or some other nocturnal insect.
He turned his attention to his hands, which were fisted on the desk. Earlier, during the seizure, his heart had felt as if it were tightly held in a cruel fist.
Again, a noise arose at the window, less a sound of something tapping, more the soft insistent rapping of knuckles sheathed in a lambskin glove.
He was on the third floor. No balcony lay beyond this window, nothing but a sheer fall to the lawn. No one could be at those moonlit panes, seeking his attention.
The condition of his heart had affected his mind, rattling his usual confidence. Even something as harmless as a moth could set a quiet fear fluttering through him.
He refused to look again at the window, for to do so seemed to invite a thousand fears to follow. His resistance was rewarded, and the faint tap turned feeble, faded into a persistent silence.
Poison.
His thoughts turned from imagined threats to real ones, to those people he had known, in business, whose greed and envy and ambition had led them to embrace immoral methods.
Ryan had earned his fortune without sharp practice, honestly. Nevertheless, he had made enemies. Some people did not like to lose, even if they lost by their own faults and miscalculations.
After much thought, he made a list of five names.
Among the phone numbers he had for Wilson Mott was a special cell to which the detective responded personally, regardless of the day or hour. Only two or three of Mott’s wealthiest clients possessed the number. Ryan had never abused it.
He hesitated to place the call. But intuition told him that he was snared in an extraordinary web of deceit, and that he needed more help than physicians could supply. He keyed in the seven digits.
When Mott answered, sounding as crisp and alert as he did at any more reasonable hour of the day, Ryan identified himself but neither mentioned the five names on his list nor suggested further background research on the Tings, as he had intended. Instead, he said something that so surprised him, he rendered himself speechless after the first sentence that he spoke.
“I want you to find a woman named Rebecca Reach.”
EIGHT
Rebecca Reach. Samantha’s mother.
Ryan had learned only the previous evening, at dinner with Sam, that her mother was alive. For a year, she had allowed him to think that Rebecca had died.
No, that was unfair. Samantha had not misled him. He had assumed Rebecca was dead merely from what little Samantha said of her.
Evidently mother and daughter were so estranged that they did not speak and likely never would. She is dead. To me, Samantha had said.
He could un
derstand why, after Rebecca had pulled the plug on disabled Teresa, Samantha had wanted to close a door on the memories of her lost twin sister and on her mother, whom she felt had betrayed them.
“Do you have anything besides the name?” asked Wilson Mott.
“Las Vegas,” Ryan said. “Rebecca Reach apparently lives in an apartment in Las Vegas.”
“Is that R-e-a-c-h?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the context, Mr. Perry?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“What discovery might you be hoping for?”
“I’m hoping for nothing. Just a general background on the woman. And an address. A phone number.”
“I assume you do not want us to speak to her directly.”
“That’s right. Discretion, please.”
“Perhaps by five o’clock tomorrow,” Mott said.
“Five o’clock will be fine. I’m busy in the morning and early afternoon, anyway.”
Ryan hung up, not sure if what he had done was intuitively brilliant or stupid. He did not know what he expected to learn that would have any application to his current crisis.
All he knew was that he had acted now as often he had done in business, trusting in hunches based on reason. His instincts had made him rich.
If Samantha learned of this, she might think he was unacceptably suspicious, even faithless. With luck, she would never have to know what he had done.
Ryan returned to bed. He tuned the TV to a classic film, Roman Holiday, starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck, then switched off the bedside lamp.
Reclining against a pile of feather pillows, he watched the movie without seeing it.
He had never asked Wilson Mott to run a background check on Samantha. Generally, he reserved such investigations for potential employees.
Besides, she had come to him on assignment for a major magazine, a writer of experience and some critical reputation. He had seen no reason to vet her further when her bona fides proved to be in order and when she had been likely to spend no more than a few hours with him.
Over the years, he had dealt with uncountable people in the media. They were mostly harmless, occasionally armed but then with nothing more dangerous than a bias that justified, in their minds, misquoting him.
If something about Rebecca Reach eventually raised suspicions, however, Mott might have to conduct a deep background investigation on Samantha.
Ryan was disappointed—not in Sam, for there was yet no reason to reconsider her, but in himself. He loved being with her. He loved her. He did not want to believe that his judgment in this instance had been poor, that he had failed to see she was someone other than who she appeared to be.
Worse, he was dismayed by how quickly his fear led him to doubt her. Until this day, the only crises with which he had dealt were business problems—capital shortfalls, delayed product roll-outs, hostile-takeover bids. Now he faced an existential threat, and his justifiable fear of incapacitation and death had coiled into a viper-eyed paranoia that looked less to the weakness of his flesh than to the possibility of enemies with agendas.
Disconcerted if not embarrassed to be so enthralled by fear, he considered calling Wilson Mott to cancel the background workup on Rebecca Reach.
But Forry Stafford had raised the possibility of poisoning. If that was a potential cause of Ryan’s condition, prudence required him to consider it.
He did not touch the phone.
After a while, he switched off the TV.
He could not sleep. In a few hours, the cardiologist, Samar Gupta, would pluck three tiny pieces of tissue from Ryan’s heart. His life depended on what those samples revealed. If the diagnosis was not good, he would have plenty of time to sleep; he would have eternity.
Out of the darkness and morbid silence issued a faint tapping at a new window, muffled by draperies; this window or that—he could not tell which.
When he raised his head to listen, the insistent moth or the flying beetle, or the hand in the lambskin glove, ceased to rap.
Each time he returned his head to the pillow, silence ensued but was not sustained. Sooner or later came a bump and a bump and a bump-bump-bump: muffled, toneless, dull, dead, and flat.
He could have gone to the windows, one at a time, and pulled open the draperies to catch the noisemaker in the act. Instead, he told himself that the muted tapping was imagined, and he turned his mind away from it, toward the more intimate and troubling rhythms of his heart.
He recognized a certain cowardice in this denial. He sensed that on some level he knew who tapped for his attention, and knew that to pull back the draperies and confront this visitor would be the end of him.
NINE
The moon was down, the sky still dark that Friday morning when Ryan set out for the hospital. The urban glow obscured many stars, but to the west, the sea and shore were one and black and vast.
In spite of the fact that he might have a seizure while behind the wheel, he risked driving. He preferred that Lee Ting not know he was undergoing a myocardial biopsy.
He told himself that he didn’t want people who worked for him or who were otherwise close to him to worry. But in fact he did not want to give an enemy, if one existed, the satisfaction—and advantage—of knowing that he was weakened and vulnerable.
As he walked alone through the hospital parking garage, where the sorcerous-sour yellow light polished the carapaces of the cars into iridescent beetle shells, he had the eerie feeling that he was home and sleeping, that this place and the test to come were all moments of a dream within a dream.
From the out-patient admitting desk, an orderly showed him the way to the cardiac diagnostics laboratory.
The head cardiology nurse, Kyra Whipset, could not have been more lean if she had eaten nothing whatsoever but celery and had run half a marathon every day. She had so little body fat that even in high-buoyancy saltwater, she would sink like a dropped anchor.
After ascertaining that Ryan had eaten nothing after midnight, Nurse Whipset provided a sedative and water in a small paper cup.
“This won’t put you to sleep,” she said. “It’ll just relax you.”
A second nurse, Ismay Clemm—an older, pleasantly plump black woman—had green eyes in which the striations were like the bevels in a pair of intricately cut emeralds. Those eyes would have been striking in any face; they were especially arresting because of the contrast with her smooth dark skin.
While Nurse Whipset sat at a corner desk to make an entry in Ryan’s file, Ismay watched him take the sedative. “You okay, child?”
“Not really,” he said, crushing the empty paper cup in his fist.
“This is nothin’,” she assured him as he dropped the cup in a waste can. “I’m here. I’m watchin’ over you. You’ll be just fine.”
By contrast with Nurse Whipset’s ascetic tautness, Ismay’s abundance, which included a musical voice that conveyed caring as effortlessly as it would a tune, comforted Ryan.
“Well, you are taking three pieces of my heart,” he said.
“Tiny pieces, honey. I suspect you’ve taken far bigger pieces from the tender hearts of a few sweet girls. And they’re all still livin’, aren’t they?”
In an adjacent prep room, he stripped to his undershorts, stepped into a pair of disposable slippers, and wrapped himself in a thin, pale-green, collarless robe with short sleeves.
Back in the diagnostics laboratory, Dr. Gupta had arrived, as had the radiologist.
The examination table was more comfortable than Ryan expected. Samar Gupta explained that comfort was necessary because during this procedure, a patient must lie on his back, very still, for at least an hour, in some cases perhaps for two hours or more.
Suspended over the table, a fluoroscope would instantly project moving x-ray images on a fluorescent screen.
As the cardiologist, assisted by Nurse Whipset, prepared for the procedure, Ismay Clemm monitored Ryan’s pulse. “You’re doing fine, child.”
&nb
sp; The sedative began to take effect, and he felt calmer, although wide awake.
Kyra Whipset scrubbed Ryan’s neck and painted a portion of it with iodine.
After applying a topical anesthetic to steal the sting from the needle, Dr. Gupta administered a local anesthetic by injection to the same area.
Soon Ryan could feel nothing when the physician tested the nerve response in his neck.
He closed his eyes while something with an astringent smell was swabbed on his numb flesh.
Describing his actions aloud, Dr. Gupta made a small incision in Ryan’s jugular vein and introduced a thin, highly flexible catheter.
Ryan opened his eyes and watched the fluoroscope as it followed the tedious progress of the catheter, which the cardiologist threaded carefully into his heart, guided by the image on the screen.
He wondered what would happen if in the midst of this procedure he suffered a seizure as he had on the surfboard, his heart abruptly hammering two or three hundred beats a minute. He decided not to ask.
“How are you doing?” Dr. Gupta inquired.
“Fine. I don’t feel anything.”
“Just relax. We’re making excellent progress.”
Ryan realized that Ismay Clemm was quietly reporting on his heart rhythm, which evidently had become slightly unstable upon the introduction of the catheter.
Maybe this was normal, maybe not, but the instability passed.
And the beat goes on.
Once the primary catheter was in place, Dr. Gupta inserted into it a second catheter, a bioptome, with tiny jaws at its tip.
Ryan had lost all sense of time. He might have been on the table a few minutes or an hour.
His legs ached. In spite of the sedative, the muscles in his calves were tense. His right hand had tightened into a fist; he opened it, as if hoping to receive another’s hand, a gift.
Long he lay there, wondering, fearing.
The jaws of the bioptome bit.
Inhaling with a hiss through clenched teeth, Ryan didn’t think that he imagined the quick painful pinch, but perhaps he was reacting to the brief frantic stutter of his heart on the fluorescent screen.
Dr. Gupta retrieved the first sample of Ryan’s cardiac muscle.
Nurse Clemm said, “Don’t hold your breath, honey.”
Exhaling, Ryan realized that he expected to die during the procedure.
TEN
In just seventy minutes the biopsy had been completed and the incision repaired with stitches.
The power of the sedative was at its peak, and because Ryan had endured a sleepless night, the drug affected him more strongly than anticipated. Dr. Gupta encouraged Ryan to lie on the narrow bed in the prep room and rest awhile, until he felt fully alert and capable of driving.
The room was windowless. The overhead fluorescent panels were off, and only a fixture in a soffit above the small sink provided light.
The dark ceiling and shadow-hung walls inspired claustrophobia. Thoughts of caskets and the conqueror worm oppressed him, but the phobic moment quickly passed.
Relief that the procedure had gone well and exhaustion were tranquilizing. Ryan did not expect to sleep, but he slept.