by Dean Koontz
I don’t know how I could turn away the bereft, the hopeful. In the event that I learned to do so, I’m not sure I’d like the person I would have become.
Yet if I could turn no one away, they would wear me down with their love and their hate. They would grind me on their wheels of need until I had been reduced to dust.
Now, afraid of being found in Dr. Jessup’s house, I flopped, twitched, and scrabbled across the floor. No longer in severe pain, I was not yet fully in control of myself, either.
As if I were Jack in the giant’s kitchen, the knob on the pantry door appeared to be twenty feet above me. With rubbery legs and arms still spastic, I don’t know how I reached it, but I did.
I’ve a long list of things I don’t know how I’ve done, but I’ve done them. In the end, it’s always about perseverance.
Once in the pantry, I pulled the door shut behind me. This close dark space reeked of pungent chemical scents the likes of which I had never before smelled.
The taste of scorched aluminum made me half nauseous. I’d never previously tasted scorched aluminum; so I don’t know how I recognized it, but I felt sure that’s what it was.
Inside my skull, a Frankenstein laboratory of arcing electrical currents snapped and sizzled. Overloaded resistors hummed.
Most likely my senses of smell and taste weren’t reliable. The Taser had temporarily scrambled them.
Detecting a wetness on my chin, I assumed blood. After further consideration, I realized I was drooling.
During a thorough search of the house, the pantry would not be overlooked. I’d only gained a minute or two in which to warn Chief Porter.
Never before had the function of a simple pants pocket proved too complicated for me to understand. You put things in, you take things out.
Now for the longest time, I couldn’t get my hand into my jeans pocket; someone seemed to have sewn it shut. Once I finally got my hand in, I couldn’t get it back out. At last I extracted my hand from the clutching pocket, but discovered that I’d failed to bring my cell phone with it.
Just when the bizarre chemical odors began to resolve into the familiar scents of potatoes and onions, I regained possession of the phone and flipped it open. Still drooling but with pride, I pressed and held 3, speed-dialing the chief’s mobile number.
If he was personally engaged in the search of the house, he most likely wouldn’t stop to answer his cell phone.
“I assume that’s you,” Wyatt Porter said.
“Sir, yes, right here.”
“You sound funny.”
“Don’t feel funny. Feel Tasered.”
“Say what?”
“Say Tasered. Bad guy buzzed me.”
“Where are you?”
“Hiding in the pantry.”
“Not good.”
“It’s better than explaining myself.”
The chief is protective of me. He’s as concerned as I am that I avoid the misery of public exposure.
“This is a terrible scene here,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Terrible. Dr. Jessup was a good man. You just wait there.”
“Sir, Simon might be moving Danny out of town right now.”
“I’ve got both highways blocked.”
There were only two ways out of Pico Mundo—three, if you counted death.
“Sir, what if someone opens the pantry door?”
“Try to look like canned goods.”
He hung up, and I switched off my phone.
I sat there in the dark awhile, trying not to think, but that never works. Danny came into my mind. He might not be dead yet, but wherever he was, he was not anywhere good.
As had been true of his mother, he lived with an affliction that gravely endangered him. Danny had brittle bones; his mother had been pretty.
Simon Makepeace most likely wouldn’t have been obsessed with Carol if she had been ugly or even plain. He wouldn’t have killed a man over her, for sure. Counting Dr. Jessup, two men.
I had been alone in the pantry up to this point. Although the door didn’t open, I suddenly had company.
A hand clasped my shoulder, but that didn’t startle me. I knew my visitor had to be Dr. Jessup, dead and restless.
FIVE
DR. JESSUP HAD BEEN NO DANGER TO ME when he was alive, nor was he a threat now.
Occasionally, a poltergeist—which is a ghost who can energize his anger—is able to do damage, but they’re usually just frustrated, not genuinely malicious. They feel they have unfinished business in this world, and they are people for whom death has not diminished the stubbornness that characterized them in life.
The spirits of thoroughly evil people do not hang around for extended periods of time, wreaking havoc and murdering the living. That’s pure Hollywood.
The spirits of evil people usually leave quickly, as though they have an appointment, upon death, with someone whom they dare not keep waiting.
Dr. Jessup had probably passed through the pantry door as easily as rain through smoke. Even walls were no barrier to him anymore.
When he took his hand off my shoulder, I assumed that he would settle on the floor, cross-legged Indian style, as I was sitting, and evidently he did. He faced me in the dark, which I knew when he reached out and gripped my hands.
If he couldn’t have his life back, he wanted reassurance. He did not have to speak to convey to me what he needed.
“I’ll do my best for Danny,” I said too softly to be heard beyond the pantry.
I did not intend my words to be taken as a guarantee. I haven’t earned that level of confidence from anyone.
“The hard truth is,” I continued, “my best might not be good enough. It hasn’t always been enough before.”
His grip on my hands tightened.
My regard for him was such that I wanted to encourage him to let go of this world and accept the grace that death offered him.
“Sir, everyone knows you were a good husband to Carol. But they might not realize just how very good a father you were to Danny.”
The longer a liberated spirit lingers, the more likely he will get stuck here.
“You were so kind to take on a seven-year-old with such medical problems. And you always made him feel that you were proud of him, proud of how he suffered without complaint, his courage.”
By virtue of the way that he had lived, Dr. Jessup had no reason to fear moving on. Remaining here, on the other hand—a mute observer incapable of affecting events—guaranteed his misery.
“He loves you, Dr. Jessup. He thinks of you as his real father, his only father.”
I was thankful for the absolute darkness and for his ghostly silence. By now I should be somewhat armored against the grief of others and against the piercing regret of those who meet untimely deaths and must leave without good-byes, yet year by year I become more vulnerable to both.
“You know how Danny is,” I continued. “A tough little customer. Always the wisecrack. But I know what he really feels. And surely you know what you meant to Carol. She seemed to shine with love for you.”
For a while I matched his silence. If you push them too hard, they clutch up, even panic.
In that condition, they can no longer see the way from here to there, the bridge, the door, whatever it is.
I gave him time to absorb what I’d said. Then: “You’ve done so much of what you were put here to do, and you did it well, you got it right. That’s all we can expect—the chance to get it right.”
After another mutual silence, he let go of my hands.
Just as I lost touch with Dr. Jessup, the pantry door opened. Kitchen light dissolved the darkness, and Chief Wyatt Porter loomed over me.
He is big, round-shouldered, with a long face. People who can’t read the chief’s true nature in his eyes might think he’s steeped in sadness.
As I got to my feet, I realized that the residual effects of the Taser had not entirely worn off. Phantom electrical sounds sizzled inside my head agai
n.
Dr. Jessup had departed. Maybe he had gone on to the next world. Maybe he had returned to haunting the front yard.
“How do you feel?” the chief asked, stepping back from the pantry.
“Fried.”
“Tasers don’t do real harm.”
“You smell burnt hair?”
“No. Was it Makepeace?”
“Not him,” I said, moving into the kitchen. “Some snaky guy. You find Danny?”
“He’s not here.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“The way’s clear. Go to the alley.”
“I’ll go to the alley,” I said.
“Wait at the tree of death.”
“I’ll wait at the tree of death.”
“Son, are you all right?”
“My tongue itches.”
“You can scratch it while you wait for me.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Odd?”
“Sir?”
“Go.”
SIX
THE TREE OF DEATH STANDS ACROSS THE alley and down the block from the Jessup place, in the backyard of the Ying residence.
In the summer and autumn, the thirty-five-foot brugmansia is festooned with pendant yellow trumpet flowers. At times, more than a hundred blooms, perhaps two hundred, each ten to twelve inches long, depend from its branches.
Mr. Ying enjoys lecturing on the deadly nature of the lovely brugmansia. Every part of the tree—roots, wood, bark, leaves, calyxes, flowers—is toxic.
One shred of its foliage will induce bleeding from the nose, bleeding from the ears, bleeding from the eyes, and explosive terminal diarrhea. Within a minute, your teeth will fall out, your tongue will turn black, and your brain will begin to liquefy.
Perhaps that is an exaggeration. When Mr. Ying first told me about the tree, I was a boy of eight, and that is the impression I got from his disquisition on brugmansia poisoning.
Why Mr. Ying—and his wife as well—should take such pride in having planted and grown the tree of death, I do not know.
Ernie and Pooka Ying are Asian Americans, but there’s nothing in the least Fu Manchu about them. They’re too amiable to devote any time whatsoever to evil scientific experiments in a vast secret laboratory carved out of the bedrock deep beneath their house.
Even if they have developed the capability to destroy the world, I for one cannot picture anyone named Pooka pulling the GO lever on a doomsday machine.
The Yings attend Mass at St. Bartholomew’s. He’s a member of the Knights of Columbus. She donates ten hours each week to the church thrift shop.
The Yings go to the movies a lot, and Ernie is notoriously sentimental, weeping during the death scenes, the love scenes, the patriotic scenes. He once even wept when Bruce Willis was unexpectedly shot in the arm.
Yet year after year, through three decades of marriage, while they adopted and raised two orphans, they diligently fertilized the tree of death, watered it, pruned it, sprayed it to ward off spider mite and whitefly. They replaced their back porch with a much larger redwood deck, which they furnished to provide numerous viewpoints where they can sit together at breakfast or during a warm desert evening, admiring this magnificent lethal work of nature.
Wishing to avoid being seen by the authorities who would be going to and coming from the Jessup house during the remaining hours of the night, I stepped through the gate in the picket fence at the back of the Ying property. Because taking a seat on the deck without invitation seemed to be ill-mannered, I sat in the yard, under the brugmansia.
The eight-year-old in me wondered if the grass could have absorbed poison from the tree. If sufficiently potent, the toxin might pass through the seat of my jeans.
My cell phone rang.
“Hello?”
A woman said, “Hi.”
“Who’s this?”
“Me.”
“I think you have the wrong number.”
“You do?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“I’m disappointed,” she said.
“It happens.”
“You know the first rule?”
“Like I said—”
“You come alone,” she interjected.
“—you’ve got a wrong number.”
“I’m so disappointed in you.”
“In me?” I asked.
“Very much so.”
“For being a wrong number?”
“This is pathetic,” she said, and terminated the call.
The woman’s caller ID was blocked. No number had appeared on my screen.
The telecom revolution does not always facilitate communication.
I stared at the phone, waiting for her to misdial again, but it didn’t ring. I flipped it shut.
The wind seemed to have swirled down a drain in the floor of the desert.
Beyond the motionless limbs of the brugmansia, which were leafy but flowerless until late spring, in the high vault of the night, the stars were sterling-bright, the moon a tarnished silver.
When I checked my wristwatch, I was surprised to see 3:17 A.M. Only thirty-six minutes had passed since I had awakened to find Dr. Jessup in my bedroom.
I had lost all awareness of the hour and had assumed that dawn must be drawing near. Fifty thousand volts might have messed with my watch, but it had messed more effectively with my sense of time.
If the tree branches had not embraced so much of the sky, I would have tried to find Cassiopeia, a constellation with special meaning for me. In classic mythology, Cassiopeia was the mother of Andromeda.
Another Cassiopeia, this one no myth, was the mother of a daughter whom she named Bronwen. And Bronwen is the finest person I have ever known, or ever will.
When the constellation of Cassiopeia is in this hemisphere and I am able to identify it, I feel less alone.
This isn’t a reasoned response to a configuration of stars, but the heart cannot flourish on logic alone. Unreason is an essential medicine as long as you do not overdose.
In the alley, a police car pulled up at the gate. The headlights were doused.
I rose from the yard under the tree of death, and if my buttocks had been poisoned, at least they hadn’t yet fallen off.
When I got into the front passenger’s seat and pulled the door shut, Chief Porter said, “How’s your tongue?”
“Sir?”
“Still itch?”
“Oh. No. It stopped. I hadn’t noticed.”
“This would work better if you took the wheel, wouldn’t it?”
“Yeah. But that would be hard to explain, this being a police car and me being just a fry cook.”
As we drifted along the alleyway, the chief switched on the headlights and said, “What if I cruise where I want, and when you feel I should turn left or right, you tell me.”
“Let’s try it.” Because he had switched off the police radio, I said, “Won’t they be wanting to reach you?”
“Back there at the Jessup house? That’s all aftermath. The science boys are better at that than I am. Tell me about the guy with the Taser.”
“Mean green eyes. Lean and quick. Snaky.”
“Are you focusing on him now?”
“No. I only got a glimpse of him before he zapped me. For this to work, I’ve got to have a better mental picture—or a name.”
“Simon?”
“We don’t know for certain that Simon’s involved.”
“I’d bet my eyes against a dollar that he is,” Chief Porter said. “The killer beat on Wilbur Jessup long after he was dead. This was a passionate homicide. But he didn’t come alone. He’s got a kill buddy, maybe someone he met in prison.”
“Just the same, I’ll try for Danny.”
We drove a couple of blocks in silence.
The windows were down. The air looked clear yet carried the silica scent of the Mojave vastness by which our town is embraced. Scatterings of crisp leaves, shed by Indian laurels, crunched under the tires.
Pico Mundo appeared to have been evacuated.
The chief glanced sideways at me a couple times, then said, “You ever going back to work at the Grille?”
“Yes, sir. Sooner or later.”
“Sooner would be better. Folks miss your home fries.”
“Poke makes good ones,” I said, referring to Poke Barnett, the other short-order cook at the Pico Mundo Grille.
“They’re not so bad you have to choke them down,” he admitted, “but they’re not in the same league with yours. Or his pancakes.”
“Nobody can match the fluff factor in my pancakes,” I agreed.
“Is it some culinary secret?”
“No, sir. It’s a born instinct.”
“A gift for pancakes.”
“Yes, sir, it seems to be.”
“You feel magnetized yet or whatever it is you feel?”
“No, not yet. And it would be better if we don’t talk about it, just let it happen.”
Chief Porter sighed. “I don’t know when I’m ever going to get used to this psychic stuff.”
“I never have,” I said. “Don’t expect I ever will.”
Strung between the boles of two palm trees in front of the Pico Mundo High School, a large banner declared GO, MONSTERS!
When I attended PMHS, the sports teams were called the Braves. Each cheerleader wore a headband with a feather. Subsequently, this was deemed an insult to local Indian tribes, though none of the Indians ever complained.
School administrators engineered the replacement of Braves with Gila Monsters. The reptile was said to be an ideal choice because it symbolized the endangered environment of the Mojave.
In football, basketball, baseball, track, and swimming, the Monsters haven’t equaled the winning record of the Braves. Most people blame it on the coaches.
I used to believe that all educated people knew an asteroid might one day strike the earth, destroying human civilization. But perhaps a lot of them haven’t heard about it yet.
As though reading my mind, Chief Porter said, “Could’ve been worse. The Mojave yellow-banded stink bug is an endangered species. They could’ve called the team Stink Bugs.”
“Left,” I suggested, and he turned at the next intersection.