Dragon Tears

by Dean R. Koontz

  Of course, though her heart was pounding and her gut was clenched, she would have preferred to go first. Crossing a solid bridge was never as satisfying as walking on a high wire.

  She followed him up the ladder, and he hesitated at the top only briefly before disappearing into the gloom above. No shot rang out, no explosion shook the building, so Connie went into the attic, too.

  Harry had moved out of the gray light that came up through the trap. He crouched a few feet away, beside a naked dead woman.

  On second glance, it proved to be a mannequin with permanently staring, dust-coated eyes and an eerily serene smile. She was bald, and her plaster skull was marred by a water stain.

  The attic was dark but not impenetrable. Pale daylight sifted through a series of screened ventilation cut-outs in the eaves and through larger vane-capped vents in the end walls, revealing cobweb-festooned rafters under a peaked roof. The center offered enough headroom for even a tall man to stand erect, though nearer the wide walls it was necessary to crouch. Shadows loomed everywhere, while piles of storage trunks and crates offered numerous hiding places.

  A congregation seemed to have gathered in that high place to conduct a secret Satanic ceremony. Throughout the long, wide chamber were the partial silhouettes of men and women, sometimes lit from the side, sometimes backlit, more often barely visible, standing or leaning or lying, all silent and motionless.

  They were mannequins similar to the one on the floor beside Harry Nevertheless, Connie felt their stares, and her skin grew pebbly with gooseflesh.

  One of them actually might be able to see her, one who was made not of plaster but of blood, flesh, and bone.

  6

  Time seemed suspended in the high redoubt of the mannequins. The humid air was tainted with dust, the crisp aroma of age-yellowed newspapers, moldering cardboard, and pungent mildew that had sprung up in some dark corner and would perish with the end of the rainy season. The plaster figures watched, breathless.

  Harry tried to remember what businesses shared the building with the restaurant, but he couldn’t recall to whom the mannequins might belong.

  From the east end of the long chamber came a frantic hammering, metal on metal. The perp must be pounding on the larger vent in the end wall, trying to break out, willing to risk a drop to the alley, serviceway, or street below.

  Half a dozen frightened bats erupted from their roosts and swooped back and forth through the long garret, seeking safety but reluctant to trade the gloom for bright daylight. Their small voices were shrill enough to be heard over the rising shriek of the sirens. When they passed close enough, the leathery flap of their wings and an air-cutting whoosh made Harry flinch.

  He wanted to wait for backup.

  The perp hammered harder than before.

  Metal screeched as if giving way.

  They couldn’t wait, didn’t dare.

  Remaining in a crouch, Harry crept between piles of boxes toward the south wall, and Connie slipped away in the opposite direction. They would take the perp in a pincer move. When Harry went as far to the south side of the room as the sloping ceiling allowed, he turned toward the east end, where the heavy hammering originated.

  On all sides, mannequins struck eternal poses. Their smooth, round limbs seemed to absorb and amplify the meager light that passed through the narrow vents in the eaves; where not clothed by shadows, their hard flesh had a supernatural alabaster glow.

  The hammering stopped. No clang or pop or final wrenching noise indicated that the vent had been knocked loose.

  Harry halted, waited. He could hear only the sirens a block away and the squealing of the bats when they swooped near.

  He inched forward. Twenty feet ahead, at the terminus of the musty passageway, dim ash-gray light issued from an unseen source to the left. Probably the big vent on which the perp had been hammering. Which meant it was still firmly in place. If the vent had been knocked out of its frame, daylight would have flooded that end of the attic.

  One by one, the sirens expired down in the street. Six of them.

  As Harry crept forward, he saw a pile of severed limbs in one of the shadowy niches in the eaves between two rafters, spectrally illuminated. He flinched and almost cried out. Arms cut off at the elbows. Hands amputated at the wrists. Fingers spread as if reaching for help, pleading, seeking. Even as he gasped in shock, he realized the macabre collection was only a heap of mannequin parts.

  He proceeded in a duckwalk, less than ten feet from the end of the narrow passageway, acutely aware of the soft but betraying scrape of his shoes on the dusty floorboards. Like the sirens, the agitated bats had fallen silent. A few shouts and the crackling transmissions of police-band radios rose from the street outside, but those sounds were distant and unreal, as if they were the voices in a nightmare from which he was just waking or into which he was slipping. Harry paused every couple of feet, listening for whatever revealing noises the perp might be making, but the guy was ghost-quiet.

  When he reached the end of the aisle, about five feet from the east wall of the attic, he stopped again. The vent on which the perp had been hammering must be just around the last stack of boxes.

  Harry held his breath and listened for the breathing of his prey. Nothing.

  He eased forward, looked around the boxes, past the end of the passageway into the clear area in front of the east wall. The perp was gone.

  He had not left by the yard-square attic vent. It was damaged but still in place, emitting a vague draft and thin, uneven lines of daylight that striped the floor where the perp’s footprints marred the carpet of dust.

  Movement at the north end of the attic caught Harry’s attention, and his trigger finger tensed. Connie peered around the corner of the boxes piled on that side of the garret.

  Across the wide gap, they stared at each other.

  The perp had circled behind them.

  Though Connie was mostly in shadows, Harry knew her well enough to be certain of what she was mouthing silently: shit, shit, shit.

  She came out of the northern eaves and crept across the open space at the east end, moving toward Harry. She peered warily into the mouths of other aisles between rows of boxes and mannequins.

  Harry started toward her, squinting into the gloomy aisles on his side. The garret was so wide, so packed with goods, that it was a maze. And it harbored a monster to rival any in mythology.

  From elsewhere in the high room came the now-familiar voice: “All Shook Up, I Feel So Bad, Steamroller Blues!”

  Harry squeezed his eyes shut. He wanted to be somewhere else. Maybe in the kingdom of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” with its twelve gorgeous young heirs to the throne, subterranean castles of light, trees with leaves of gold, others with leaves of diamonds, enchanted ballrooms filled with beautiful music…. Yeah, that would be all right. It was one of the Grimm Brothers’ gentler tales. Nobody in it got eaten alive or hacked to death by a troll.

  “Surrender!”

  It was Connie’s voice this time.

  Harry opened his eyes and frowned at her. He was afraid she would give away their position. True, he had not been able to pinpoint the perp by listening to him; sounds bounced around the attic in strange ways, which was a protection for them as well as for the madman. Nevertheless, silence was wiser.

  The perp shouted again: “A Mess of Blues, Heartbreak Hotel!”

  “Surrender!” Connie repeated.

  “Go Away Little Girl!”

  Connie grimaced. “That wasn’t Elvis, you peabrain! That was Steve Lawrence. Surrender.”

  “Stay Away.”

  “Surrender.”

  Harry blinked sweat out of his eyes and studied Connie with incomprehension. He had never felt less in control of a situation. Something was going down between her and the lunatic, but Harry didn’t have a clue as to what it was.

  “I Don’t Care If the Sun Don’t Shine.”

  “Surrender.”

  Suddenly Harry remembered that “Surrend
er” was the title of a Presley classic.

  “Stay Away.”

  He thought that might be another Presley song.

  Connie slipped into one of the aisles, out of Harry’s sight, as she called out: “It’s Now or Never.”

  “What’d I Say?”

  Moving away into the maze, Connie answered the perp with two Presley titles: “Surrender. I Beg of You.”

  “I Feel So Bad.”

  After a hesitation, Connie responded: “Tell Me Why.”

  “Don’t Ask Me Why”

  A dialogue had been established. In Presley song titles. Like some bizarre television quiz-show contest with no prizes for correct answers but plenty of peril for wrong ones.

  In a crouch, Harry eased into a different aisle from the one that Connie had taken. A spider’s web wrapped his face. He pulled it off and crept deeper into the mannequin-guarded shadows.

  Connie resorted to a previously used title: “Surrender.”

  “Stay Away.”

  “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”

  After a hesitation, the perp admitted: “Lonely Man.”

  Harry still couldn’t get a fix on the voice. Sweat was really pouring off him now, wispy remnants of the spider web clung to his hair and tickled his brow, his mouth tasted like the bottom of a pestle in Frankenstein’s laboratory, and he felt as if he’d stepped out of reality into some drug addict’s dark hallucinations.

  “Let Yourself Go,” Connie advised.

  “I Feel So Bad,” the perp repeated.

  Harry knew he shouldn’t be so disoriented by the peculiar twists this pursuit kept taking. These were the 1990s, after all, an age of unreason if ever there had been one, when the bizarre was so common as to establish a new definition of normality. Like the holdup men who had recently taken to threatening convenience-store clerks not with guns but with syringes full of AIDS-tainted blood.

  Connie called to the perp, “Let Me Be Your Teddy Bear,” which seemed, to Harry, an odd turn in the song-title conversation.

  But the perp came right back at her in a voice full of yearning and suspicion: “You Don’t Know Me.”

  Connie needed only a few seconds to find the right follow-up: “Doncha Think It’s Time?”

  And talk about bizarre: Richard Ramirez, the serial killer known as the Night Stalker, was visited regularly in prison by a stream of attractive young women who found him appealing, exciting, a romantic figure. Or what about that guy in Wisconsin not long ago, cooking parts of his victims for dinner, keeping rows of severed heads in his refrigerator, and neighbors said, well, yeah, there had been bad smells coming from his apartment for years, and now and then they heard screams and high-powered electric saws, but the screaming never lasted long, and anyway the guy seemed so nice, he seemed to care about people. The 1990s. No decade like it.

  “Too Much,” the perp finally said, evidently disbelieving Connie’s professed romantic interest.

  “Poor Boy,” she said with apparently genuine sympathy.

  “Way Down.” The perp’s voice, now annoyingly whiny, echoed off the cobwebbed rafters as he admitted his lack of self-esteem, a very ‘90s sort of excuse.

  “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck,” Connie said, romancing him as she prowled through the maze, no doubt intending to blow him away the moment she caught sight of him.

  The perp didn’t reply.

  Harry kept on the move, too, diligently searching each shadowy niche and byway, but feeling useless. He had never imagined that in the last decade of this strange century, he might have to be an expert on rock-‘n’-roll trivia to be an effective cop.

  He hated crap like this, but Connie loved it. She embraced the chaos of the times; there was something dark and wild in her.

  Harry reached an aisle that was perpendicular to his. It was deserted — except for a couple of naked mannequins that had toppled over long ago, one atop the other. Hunkered down, shoulders hunched protectively, Harry moved on.

  “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck,” Connie called out again from elsewhere in the maze.

  Maybe the perp was hesitating because he thought it was an offer that a guy should make to a gal, not the other way around. Though definitely a ‘90s man, maybe the bastard still had an old-fashioned sense of gender roles.

  “Treat Me Nice,” Connie said.

  No answer.

  “Love Me Tender,” Connie said.

  The perp still did not respond, and Harry was alarmed that the conversation had become a monologue. The creep might be close to Connie, letting her talk so he could get a better, final fix on her.

  Harry was about to shout a warning when an explosion shook the building. He froze, crossing his arms protectively over his face. But the blast had not occurred in the attic; there had been no flash.

  From the floor below came cries of agony and terror, confused voices, shouts of anger.

  Evidently other cops had entered the lower room where the ladder gave access to the attic, and the perp had heard them. He’d dropped a grenade through the trapdoor.

  The gruesome screams conjured an image in Harry’s mind: some guy trying to keep his intestines from spilling out of his belly.

  He knew that he and Connie were in a rare moment of total agreement, experiencing the same dread and fury. For once he didn’t give a damn about the perp’s legal rights, excessive use of force, or the proper way of doing things. He just wanted the bastard dead.

  Above the screams, Connie tried to re-establish the dialogue: “Love Me Tender.”

  “Tell Me Why” the perp demanded, still doubting her sincerity.

  “My Baby Left Me,” Connie said.

  The screams were subsiding on the floor below. Either the injured man was dying, or others were moving him out of the room where the grenade had detonated.

  “Anyway You Want Me,” Connie said.

  The perp was silent for a moment. Then his voice echoed through the room, infuriatingly directionless, “I Feel So Bad.”

  “I’m Yours,” Connie said.

  Harry couldn’t get over the speed with which she thought of the appropriate titles.

  “Lonely Man.” the perp said, and indeed he sounded miserable.

  “I’ve Got a Thing About You Baby,” Connie said.

  She’s a genius, Harry thought admiringly. And seriously obsessed with Presley.

  Counting on the perp being pretty much distracted by Connie’s weird seduction, Harry risked showing himself. Because he was directly under the peak of the roof, he rose slowly to his full height, and surveyed the garret on all sides.

  Some piles of boxes were shoulder-high, but many others were only a few inches higher than Harry’s waist. A lot of human forms stared back from the shadows, tucked in among the boxes and even sitting on them. But all of them must have been mannequins because none moved or shot at him.

  “Lonely Man. All Shook Up,” the perp said despairingly.

  “There’s Always Me.”

  “Please Don’t Stop Loving Me.”

  “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” Connie said.

  Standing, Harry had a slightly better sense of the direction from which the voices arose. Both Connie and the perp were ahead of him, but at first he couldn’t discern if they were close to each other. He could not see over the boxes into any of the other avenues of the maze.

  “Don’t Be Cruel,” the perp pleaded.

  “Love Me,” Connie urged.

  “I Need Your Love Tonight.”

  They were at the west end of the attic, the south side, and they were close to each other.

  “Stuck on You,” Connie insisted.

  “Don’t Be Cruel.”

  Harry sensed an escalation in the intensity of the dialogue, subtly conveyed in the gunman’s tone, in the speed of responses, and in his repetition of the same title.

  “I Need Your Love Tonight.”

  “Don’t Be Cruel.”

  Harry stopped putting caution first. He hurried toward the voices, into an area more den
sely populated by mannequins, groups clustered in niches between boxes. Pale shoulders, graceful arms, hands pointing or raised as if in greeting. Painted eyes sightless in the gloom, painted lips eternally parted in half-formed smiles, in greetings never vocalized, in passionless erotic sighs.

  More spiders lived there, too, evidenced by webs that tangled in his hair and stuck to his clothes. As he moved, he wiped the gossamer off his face. Wispy rags of it dissolved on his tongue and lips, and his mouth flooded with saliva as nausea gripped him. He choked down his gorge and expelled a wad of spittle and spider stuff.

  “It’s Now or Never,” Connie promised from somewhere nearby.

  The familiar answering three words had become less of a plea than a warning: “Don’t Be Cruel.”

  Harry had the feeling the guy wasn’t being lulled at all but was ticking toward a new explosion.

  He proceeded another few feet and stopped, turning his head from side to side, listening intently, afraid he would miss something because the booming of his own heart was so loud in his ears.

  “I’m Yours, Puppet on a String, Let Yourself Go,” Connie urged, voice falling to a stage whisper to foster a false sense of intimacy with her prey.

  Although Harry respected Connie’s skills and instincts, he was afraid that her eagerness to sucker the perp was distracting her from the realization that the perp might not be responding out of his confusion and longing but out of a similar desire to sucker her.

  “Playing for Keeps, One Broken Heart for Sale,” Connie said.

  She sounded as if she was right on top of Harry, in the next aisle, surely no farther than two aisles away, and parallel with him.

  “Ain’t That Loving You Baby, Crying in the Chapel.” Connie’s whisper had grown more fierce than seductive, as if she was also aware that something had gone wrong with the dialogue.

  Harry tensed, waiting for the perp’s response, squinting into the gloom ahead, then turning to look back the way he had come when he imagined the smiling, moon-faced killer stealing up behind him.