Relentless

by Koontz, Dean

  “What were you doing with the laptop?”

  “I was online, seeing what other painters Russell Bertrand might have savaged.”

  “This place is wired for Internet access?”

  “Yeah. There’s a little card about it on the desk. Government program to bring Internet access to cheap motels for the benefit of the traveling poor. This place isn’t all that cheap.”

  “When Milo’s head of the FBI, he can look into it.”

  “That’s another thing,” Penny said. “Milo has been freaking me out a little. He’s being kind of … quirky.”

  “Not Milo.”

  The boy sat on the floor, his paraphernalia spread across half the cottage living room. A small strange tool, the purpose of which I could not guess, nestled like a pencil behind his right ear. Over his left ear hung several loops of ultrafine wire, apparently not because he was wiring himself into a version of Iron Man’s superhero suit but because he wanted to keep the wire where he could find it when he needed it.

  As he worked on a series of small objects that resembled crystal salt-and-pepper shakers, he kept up what sounded like a conversation with someone: “Yeah … I guess so…. Well, that requires a capacitor….

  Oh, I see…. I wonder what megahertz…. Hey, thanks…. This is cool….”

  I might have thought he was talking to his canine companion, but the dog was not at his side. When I checked the bedroom, she wasn’t there, either.

  Returning to the living room, I said, “Milo, where’s Lassie?”

  “Probably in a drawer.”

  “You put her in a drawer?”

  “No. I’m just guessing.”

  “What drawer, where?”

  He pointed to a knotty-pine chest. The lower two drawers were deep, the top three more shallow.

  When I opened the bottom drawer, I found Lassie lying on her back, her hind legs spread wide, her forepaws tucked against her chest. She grinned, tongue lolling, and her tail swished around the interior of the drawer.

  “How did this happen?” I asked Penny.

  “I have no idea.”

  “You didn’t put her in here?”

  “Why would I put a dog in a drawer?”

  “Well, she seems to like it.”

  “How on earth would I know she’d like it?”

  “Relax. You didn’t put her in here. I believe you.”

  I tried to coax Lassie out of the drawer, but she remained comfortably ensconced.

  “There’s something wrong with this dog,” Penny decided.

  “She’s just a little eccentric.”

  “Maybe I can lure her out with those bacon biscuits she likes.”

  “Good idea.”

  Leaving the dog in the open drawer, I knelt on the floor beside Milo.

  Evidently his mom had encouraged him to shower. He wore fresh clothes. Bold red letters on his white T-shirt spelled PERSIST.

  His collection of custom T-shirts came from an ordinary mall shop. Periodically, he gave his mother a series of new words that he wanted to wear.

  No, I can’t explain it to you. Milo can’t explain it to us, either. Our conversations about it have all been like this:

  “Why do you have to wear words, Milo?”

  “Names are important.”

  “These aren’t names.”

  “Every word is a name.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Every word names an object, an action, a quality, a quantity, a condition….”

  “So why are names important?”

  “Nothing could be more important.”

  “But why?”

  “Because nothing is if it isn’t named.”

  Kneeling at his side in the cottage living room, I said, “I’m going to get take-out. What would you like?”

  Fixated on his work, Milo said, “I’m not hungry.”

  When we stopped for lunch at a McDonald’s in Eureka, he had been so absorbed by the strange displays on his Game Boy that he ate only half his cheeseburger and none of his fries.

  “You’ve got to eat, Milo. I’m not going to let you sit here doing … whatever it is you’re doing … if you don’t eat.”

  “Pizza,” he said. “Vegetarian with black olives.”

  “All right.” I patted his shoulder. “And I promise never to tell your grandmother you ate vegetarian.”

  Grimacing, he said, “No. Grandma Clotilda—she’ll read about it in her coffee grounds or something. Better add pepperoni.”

  On my walk to and from the Casas house, I had seen a pizza shop a block from the motor court. I called and placed an order.

  Later, as I was about to leave, Milo said, “Dad, be really, really careful. Keep your eyes open. We’re running out of time.”

  That declaration alarmed Penny. “What do you mean? Keep his eyes open for what?”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

  “You better be,” Penny said. “Hear me clear, Cubby, you damn well better be.”

  I hugged her. “I love you, too.”

  At Smokeville Pizzeria, no one tried to kill me.

  Walking back to the cottage in the twilight, I learned why the town was named Smokeville. At certain conditions of temperature and humidity imbalance between the ocean and the shore, the sea gave up some of its substance, and the thirsty land drew the mist eastward so aggressively that it looked less like fog than like smoke harried by the heat of a fire behind it. Faux smoke seethed through the trees, the houses smoldered, and twilight dimmed behind the racing fumes.

  Milo ate well, but not at the dinette table with us. He remained on the floor, engaged in his mysterious project. Lassie watched him from atop the television cabinet.

  I told Penny about Henry Casas, his mother, Arabella, and the painfully tedious method by which he now painted.

  She was as astonished as I had been that the impressionistic portrait of one of his tormentors should at once be recognizable as the deformed man in the Maserati. Most disturbing, however, was Henry’s contention that he had been imprisoned and mutilated not by a lone psychopath or even two, but by an organization of many.

  His hands and tongue were removed with clinical precision, under anesthesia, and he received competent postoperative care while being held against his will. Consequently, the organization, whatever its nature, included at least one good surgeon and others with medical knowledge.

  I could not believe that a large group, including highly skilled health-care professionals, could come together to assist one another in their secret lives as serial killers. This was something else—and worse—than we had thought.

  The more that we learned, the more the odds of our survival seemed poor.

  Researching the artists whom Waxx had savaged under his pen name, Russell Bertrand, Penny had found another who seemed to have been a victim of more than the critic’s words.

  “Cleveland Pryor, a painter. He was found dead in a Dumpster in Chicago, where he lived.”

  His body was so tightly wound in so much barbed wire that he appeared almost mummified. According to the coroner’s report, the wire had been cinched to Pryor while he had been alive.

  “Cleveland never knew his father,” Penny said. “His mother died when he was nineteen. Never married, no children, so at least he didn’t have to see everyone he loved destroyed before Waxx murdered him.”

  In her research, she also discovered that some writers and artists of a new philosophical movement were relocating to Smokeville or were considering doing so. They hoped to establish a creative community.

  Like Henry Casas and Tom Landulf, these people rejected both the nihilism and utopianism of our time and of the previous 150 years. They sought a future based not on the theories of one man or on one narrow ideology, but on the centuries of tradition and wisdom from which their civilization had grown.

  “Which explains,” I said, “why Waxx might have had two targets in the same small town.”

  “He prob
ably has more,” Penny said. “And … here we are.”

  Having gone to bed at nine o’clock, exhausted, I woke at 11:10 P.M. Before retiring, we switched off only one of the two nightstand lamps. Penny remained asleep beside me.

  The cottage bedroom offered two double beds with mattresses that were no doubt provided free by a chiropractor in need of business. The second bed was empty.

  Remembering John Clitherow’s vanished daughters, I hurried out to the living room. Milo remained at work on the floor. He sat at the center of what seemed to be a much larger array of gadgets, gizmos, thingamajigs, and thingamadoodles than had been there previously.

  My laptop rested on a footstool, and Milo gazed at the screen, on which streamed a mystifying video of complex but unidentifiable constructs.

  “When are you coming to bed, kiddo?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You need your sleep.”

  “Not really.”

  Lassie sat under a straightback chair. The legs and stretcher bars formed a cage around her. She barely fit in the cramped space, but she was grinning, her tail wagging.

  As surely as Costello knew what Abbott would reply when asked “Who’s on first?” I knew the answer when I asked, “Did you put the dog under the chair?”

  “No,” Milo said. “She did it to herself.”

  “That can’t be comfortable.”

  I lifted the chair straight up, off the dog, and set it aside.

  Lassie stood, shook herself, and cocked her head at me as if to say that I remained, in her view, by far the most curious part of this family.

  Looking at the video on the laptop, I said, “What is that?”

  “Structure,” Milo said.

  “Is there any point in my asking what structure?”

  “No.”

  The image enlarged as the camera appeared to descend into it, much like a microscope probing a tissue sample at an ever-increasing power of magnification—and then a new pattern arose where the previous one had been.

  “What’s that?”

  “Deeper structure.”

  “That’s what I thought. Come to bed soon.”

  “Okay.”

  “Is that a sincere okay?”

  “Okay.”

  At the doorway between the living room and bedroom, I glanced back. Milo raised one hand to the computer screen, as if he wanted to reach into the image of the deeper structure and feel it. The dog was caged under the chair again, and grinning.

  When I woke at 1:22, Penny was asleep beside me, and Milo’s bed remained empty.

  I was at once aware of the whorls and pulses and radiating fingers of blue and red light that shimmered beyond the open door, as if someone had parked a police cruiser in the cottage.

  When I entered the front room, I found that the entire ceiling had become a projection screen on which were displayed patterns more complex and dimensional than those that had been on the computer during my previous visit.

  Two-dimensional versions of the images appeared as streaming video on the laptop screen. A cord led from the computer to a jerry-built device that projected them in 3-D onto the ceiling.

  Milo lay on the floor, in a debris field of high-tech thingums and doohickeys and flumadiddles, staring at the spectacle overhead.

  Movement drew my attention to the sofa. Lassie was lying there, on her back, also staring at the ceiling, all four legs kicking as if she were running through a meadow. She did not appear to be in distress, but perhaps in a state of rapture.

  I sat on the floor beside Milo and said, “Structure?”

  “Yeah. Even deeper than before.”

  “Structure of what?”

  “Everything.”

  “Do you understand what you’re looking at?”

  “Yes.”

  I tried another tack: “Where is this coming from, Spooky?”

  “Somewhere.”

  “From some Internet site?”

  “No.”

  “From some government computer you hacked into?”

  “No.”

  I pushed aside a few dofunnys and half a dozen something-or-others, and stretched out on my back beside my son. The visuals on the ceiling were awesome from this perspective.

  “Did this turn out to be an interstellar communications device, after all?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Come on, is this stuff from an alien world?”

  “No.”

  “Is it from the far future, a time transmission or something?”

  “No.”

  “Can you say anything besides no?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m just doing what your T-shirt says. It says persist.”

  “You should go to bed, Dad. This is gonna be too much for you.”

  “Are you kidding? I do this stuff all the time. So now … what is this stuff we’re doing?”

  “I’m learning,” Milo said.

  “Am I learning, too?”

  “I don’t think so. You really should go to bed, Dad. If you keep watching this, it’s going to get too scary for you.”

  “Oh, no. I’m enjoying it. Are you enjoying it, Milo?”

  “It’s amazing.”

  “It’s like fireworks,” I said, “without the risk of burning off your eyebrows.”

  On the sofa, the upside-down running dog issued what sounded like a whimper of delight.

  “This is beautiful,” I said. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  “It’s elegant,” Milo said, “in seventy-seven ways.”

  “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Isn’t it the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen, Milo?”

  “It’s very beautiful, Dad.”

  “Isn’t it? Isn’t it beautiful, Milo?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s so beautiful that it’s getting a little ominous.”

  “Close your eyes, Dad. It’s a good ominous, but you’re not ready for it.”

  “Just a little ominous, Milo. And now … more than a little.”

  “I warned you it might get too scary for you.”

  “I don’t scare easily, son. I was once trapped in an elevator for three hours with Hud Jacklight.”

  “Scary.”

  “I was so afraid your mother would rip his throat out. I didn’t want your mother to end up in prison. I love your mother, Milo.”

  “I know, Dad.”

  “It’s more beautiful by the second, but it’s also more ominous. I feel like … when I’m looking into this, whatever it is, at the same time it’s looking into me.”

  “Close your eyes, Dad, or you’ll get very dizzy.”

  “Oh, no, I’m not dizzy at all. It’s so strange and complex and ominously beautiful. Milo, do you feel like your skull is going to collapse?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “I feel all this pressure, like the hull of a submarine at forty thousand feet, as if my skull might collapse like a popped balloon and squirt my brain out my ears.”

  Milo didn’t say anything. On the sofa the dog whimpered with pleasure again, and farted.

  I said, “This thing on the ceiling … it’s getting alarmingly, dreadfully beautiful, Milo. Horribly, terrifyingly beautiful, and the whole room is spinning.”

  “I warned you about dizziness, Dad. If you don’t close your eyes, nausea is next.”

  “Oh, no, I don’t feel the least bit ill. Just anxious, you know, and alarmed, maybe even aghast. And humbled. This is very humbling, Milo. This is too beautiful for me.”

  “Close your eyes, Dad.”

  “This structure, whatever it is, it’s too deep for me, Milo. It’s like a thousand times too deep for me. Here comes the nausea.”

  I passed out before I could throw up.

  Compared to me, Mozart’s father had it so easy.

  I woke on the living-room floor shortly after four o’clock in the morning, and my skull had not collapsed. Almost as good: I felt fresh and buoyant, with a sense of having experienced something tra
nscendent, though I could not put into words what it had been.

  In the light of a single lamp, the ceiling was blank, mere plaster and paint.

  When I sat up, I discovered that Milo had packed away all his gear. Not a single item littered the cottage floor.

  In the bedroom, Penny lay sleeping in one bed, Milo and Lassie in the other.

  I stood watching them sleep.

  In spite of where we were, how we had gotten here, and why we had come, I felt that at this moment of our lives, this place was exactly where we belonged. We were not drifting but rising, rising toward something right and of significance.

  Everything that rises must converge. The ultimate convergence of man and maker requires the navigation of that final passage, death. At that moment, however, watching my family sleep, I was in the thrall of a quiet elation and was not thinking of death, though as it turned out, Death was thinking of me.

  In the morning light and stillness, the fog no longer mimicked smoke. Damp and chill, it barely eddied, stirring significantly only in the wake of the Mercury Mountaineer.

  The vehicle was fully loaded. Although we paid for two nights at the motor court, we left nothing behind at the cottage. I wanted to be able to flee Smokeville and its environs, and make for the open highway without delay, if suddenly flight seemed essential.

  Tom Landulf, whose first book had been published only fourteen months previously and who had died three months thereafter, had lived outside of Smokeville, along a winding state route, where houses were few, the sea beyond view, and the forest everywhere encroaching.

  On the Internet, Penny found a recent magazine story about the case and its aftermath, in which a Realtor suggested the property might not sell for years. Potential buyers were reluctant to live in a place where extremely violent murders had occurred.

  The house stood back from the road, cloaked in fog. We almost missed it. The Realtor’s sign near the mailbox caught our attention.

  I didn’t want to park in the driveway. If a car pulled behind us, we might be boxed in even though we had four-wheel drive.

  In front of the property, neither shoulder of the two-lane blacktop was wide enough to allow me to park off the pavement.

  After continuing north on a gradual downslope for about three hundred yards, past a meadow only glimpsed between white curtains of mist, then past a length of bearded forest, I came to a wide lay-by on the right. I was able to get forty feet off the pavement, where the fog would shroud the vehicle from what little traffic might pass.