by Dean Koontz
They were still more than fifty yards from the highway when the sky exploded with a series of lightning blasts, and thunder shook the night, and the rain came at last, abruptly and in torrents. The hard downpour flattened the meadow grass. The drumming noise was almost deafening. In seconds Patch’s clothes were soaked. With horror he realized that the dry earth would quickly turn to mud and that his dashing costume would become increasingly soiled as the long night wore on.
Patch the cat was not afraid of either known dangers or the unknown. Evil toys, wild dogs, and other villains did not worry him in the least. But to be seen in wet and filthy clothes, with a soggy hat and mud caked on his boots—that was frightening.
7.
VICTOR BODKINS HAD TAKEN a flashlight from the glove compartment of his car and had ventured into the gloomy woods to search for the six stuffed animals that had crossed the road in his headlight beams. Here and there he found signs that might have indicated that the small creatures had passed this way—trampled grass, broken weeds, curious marks in the soft earth—but he could not get a glimpse of the toys themselves.
“You’re dreaming,” he told himself as he poked among the trees. “Pinch yourself and wake up.”
So he pinched himself.
But he did not wake up.
He pinched himself again, harder than before.
“Ouch,” he said.
He still did not wake up.
He pinched himself again: “Ouch!”
And yet again: “Ouch!”
He was a stubborn man.
When rain began to fall, the leafless trees did not provide much of an umbrella, and he was soon soaked.
Shivering, sneezing, feeling foolish, he headed back toward the lane, where the car waited with its engine running and lights blazing. As he stepped onto the dirt roadway, he thought he saw movement out of the corner of his eye, something scurrying into the narrow drainage channel twenty feet away. He rushed to that place, but his light revealed only a trickle of muddy water.
He stepped across the ditch into the weeds along the perimeter of the woods. As he moved, he swept the beam of the flashlight back and forth—and suddenly he saw something even stranger than the six stuffed animals. It was a fourteen-inch-tall toy robot with evil yellow eyes aglow with menace and a nasty mouth cracked open in a wicked, jagged smile. It was standing half-concealed by a clump of dead, dry, drooping milkweed, looking up defiantly at Victor.
He stooped and leaned forward to pick up the robot, but it moved more swiftly than he would have thought possible, dashing under his arm. Beaded with rain, its metal skin glinted in the flashlight beam. The creature went straight to his feet, where it hammered both metal fists on the toe of his left shoe. He never would have imagined that a toy could possess such strength; the blows were hard, painful.
As Victor stumbled backward in surprise, he felt something grab hold of the right leg of his trousers. When he looked down he saw a tuxedoed marionette—with top hat but minus control strings—grinning ferociously at him.
I’ve gone mad, he thought. Stark, raving mad.
The marionette pulled hard on the trousers. Because Victor was already off balance, he almost fell.
Another marionette, a vile looking little woman in a flapper’s costume from the 1920s, seized the other leg of his pants and pulled hard in that direction.
Victor swatted at the male marionette, then at the female, trying to use his flashlight as a club. He missed both of them.
The robot pounded on Victor’s toes again, and a new burst of thunder was timed to the toy’s blows, so it seemed as if the thing’s fists had made that colossal sound.
Victor kicked out, knocking the small, metal man aside.
Suddenly a grotesque, clown-faced jack-in-the-box rolled out of the weeds, propelling himself with gloved hands. He was giggling shrilly, hysterically. “Bring him down!” the jack-in-the-box cried. “Bring him down to our level!”
Streaking out of the rainswept darkness, a toy bee the size of a beer can swooped past Victor’s face, startling him. In the backsplash of his own flashlight, he saw a stinger as big as a switchblade knife. A moment later, when he realized that the bee was dive-bombing him, he threw himself to the ground to avoid being stabbed. He felt the bee bullet by his head, missing his face by only an inch or two. The instant he hit the ground, he began to thrash with both arms and legs to keep the hostile toys away.
He heard one of the impossible little creatures say, “Leave him. Come on! The Oddkins will be heading down to the highway. We’ve got to stop them.”
Victor continued thrashing until he was exhausted. When at last he lay limp on the wet ground, he still half-expected to be attacked. But the robot, the marionettes, the jack-in-the-box, and the bee were gone. He was alone in the stormy night.
Heart hammering, he got to his feet. He was shaky.
He picked up his flashlight, swept the beam around him.
Nothing.
He looked at the woods into which the toys had evidently gone, and he considered pursuing them. Then he turned and ran back to his car, fearing for both his life and his sanity. In the car he locked the doors. He sat there in the middle of the muddy lane, staring through the rain-washed windshield at the portion of the roadway and woods that were revealed in his headlamps. He could not stop shaking.
He pinched himself.
“Ouch!”
Again.
“Ouch!”
He could not make sense of these events. They did not compute. He was a man of reason, a man of logic, a man who worked with numbers and trusted numbers. He loved numbers. There were no surprises in numbers, no magic, no mystery. He preferred life without magic and mystery, and he did not know how he would cope if he discovered that the world was actually more as Isaac had always seen it and less like the ordered and logical place that Victor had believed it to be.
“Ouch!”
One more pinch.
“Ouch!”
Just one more.
“Ouch!”
8.
FOLLOWING AMOS, BURL AND the other Oddkins safely reached a truckstop along the highway. An orange and purple neon sign—HARLEY’S PLACE, GAS AND EATS, TRUCKERS WELCOME—blazed on the roof of the long, single-story building. Those brilliant neon colors were reflected in the wet and puddled pavement; they shimmered and rippled, so it almost seemed as if a fire burned in the blacktop without consuming it.
Harley’s Place was busy out front, where trucks and a few cars were pulled up at the clusters of gasoline pumps. Out there, the big plate-glass windows of the restaurant provided a view of the highway and the rainy night.
But to the side of the building, where forty or fifty enormous trucks were parked in orderly rows, there was little activity. Once in a while a new truck arrived, and the driver dashed from his rig, through the wet night, into Harley’s Place. Less often a driver came out of the restaurant, hurried to his truck, and roared back onto the highway. For the most part, however, the lot was deserted and silent but for the hiss and patter of falling rain.
Burl and the other Oddkins followed Amos around the deepest puddles, through the reflected fire of orange and purple neon, into the purple-black shadows under one of the gigantic vehicles. They huddled out of the wind and rain, thoroughly soaked and miserable.
That is, most of them were miserable, but Burl did not mind the storm at all because somewhere he had gotten the idea that elephants were supposed to enjoy water. In Africa elephants liked to laze in rivers and wallow for hours in cool ponds. Therefore striving to be the perfect little elephant, Burl had sometimes walked with his face turned up to the driving rain, relishing the feel of the thousands of droplets snapping against his velour face. While the others had gone around all the big puddles, Burl had sloshed straight through them, ignoring the peculiar looks from his fellow Oddkins, making quiet snorting sounds of pleasure.
Now, Amos and Butterscotch and Gibbons and Skippy and Patch huddled together beneath the truck, dejected. Forlornly, th
ey looked out at the rain bouncing off the parking lot, where the big puddles grew even bigger.
Burl moved among them, giving them a pep talk. “Not so bad, the rain. We elephants love it. Very good for the skin. Keeps the trunk lubricated and limber.”
“I don’t have a trunk,” Skippy said sourly.
“Well,” Burl said, “I’m sorry about that. Everyone ought to have a trunk.”
“I didn’t say I wanted a trunk.”
“Well, of course, you want a trunk. Who doesn’t? A trunk is a marvelous and beautiful thing. Maybe if you say your prayers every night, without fail, then God might give you a trunk of your own some day.”
Skippy looked at him strangely.
Embarrassed for his trunkless friend, Burl said, “But you have wonderfully big ears, differently shaped than mine but big in their own way … and rain is good for the ears, too.”
“Where do you get all these silly ideas?” Skippy asked.
“They’re not silly, not at all. Rain is good for you.”
“Okay, so what genius told you all this about the healthfulness of rain?”
“No one had to tell me,” Burl said. “I simply know it. You see, we elephants are very in tune with nature. Bears like Amos spend half their lives in hibernation, so they’re not as much aware of nature as we elephants are. Cats like Patch and dogs like Butterscotch are domesticated animals, out of touch with nature. Rabbits live in their warrens underground, which perhaps puts them in tune with the earth but not with the rain. Ah, rain! Wonderful rain! You should all be enjoying it.”
“Look what it’s done to my clothes,” Patch said unhappily. “I’m soaked, rumpled, a thorough mess.”
“Your clothes will dry out,” Burl assured him.
“Look at the mud on my boots!” Patch said, his voice thick with disgust.
“Mud will wash off,” Burl said.
“My hat brim is going to droop,” Patch said.
“It’ll only make you more dashing, more mysterious.”
Patch looked hopeful. “You really think so?”
“Nothing like a down-turned hat brim to lend an air of mystery to a cat such as yourself,” Burl assured him.
Patch sighed. “I never thought adventuring would be so messy.”
“At least your joints aren’t arthritic like mine,” Gibbons said.
Only Amos and Butterscotch did not complain, though they looked as weary and uncomfortable as everyone else.
Burl said, “Well, I’ve a mind to walk out there and roll around in one of those huge puddles, have a really good wallow.”
“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” Amos said, startling Burl. “We already let ourselves be seen by Victor Bodkins. That’s something we should never have done—let an adult get a glimpse of us.”
“It wasn’t our fault,” Butterscotch said. “The noise of the storm prevented us from hearing the car coming.”
“I should have been more careful,” Amos said. “I’m the leader, after all. It’s part of my job to anticipate trouble and avoid it. I’m not doing a very good job of leading, I’m afraid.”
“We’ve gotten this far all right,” Butterscotch said.
“This isn’t even one percent of the way,” Amos said.
“You’ll get us through,” Butterscotch assured him. “Now what do you propose we do next?”
Amos thought for a moment.
Rain drizzled on all sides of the truck. The air stank of grease and oil from the drive shaft and gears and other machinery above the Oddkins’ heads.
Out on the highway an air horn bleated.
Finally, in a brighter tone of voice, Amos said, “I’m reminded of an appropriate bit of verse by Rupert Toon—”
Burl groaned, as did all the other Oddkins, even Butterscotch.
“Not Rupert Toon,” Patch said.
“Tie my ears together and hang me from a hook,” Skippy said, “but please don’t make me listen to Rupert Toon poetry.”
“I’ll have you know,” Amos said, “that Mr. Rupert Toon is a great poet. I’ve read books of poetry in Uncle Isaac’s library, so I know about these things. One day I intend to write poetry of my own, and I only hope I can write half as well as Rupert Toon.”
Burl said, “You give us that same speech every time, but somehow it doesn’t make me appreciate Toon any more.”
“You may be a good elephant, very knowledgeable about the African veldt and the benefits of rainwater,” Amos said, “but you’ve got no appreciation for the finer things in life.”
“Get it over with,” Skippy said. “Recite this bit of Toonian slop and be done with it.”
Another truck pulled into the lot and parked, and they waited for the roar of its engine to cut off.
Then Amos stood very straight, puffed out his chest, and lovingly recited the verse:
When your footsies have been overused,
walked on, run on, and totally abused,
when you’re sore from toesies to heels,
better trade in your shoes for wheels.
“ ‘Footsies’?” Skippy said. “How can Toon be a great poet when he uses words like ‘footsies’?”
“A poet has the freedom to coin his own words when he needs to,” Amos explained.
A fierce gust of wind swept across the parking lot, shrieking like a banshee.
Raising his voice to compete with the storm, Gibbons said, “And you say this Toon has won the Nobel Prize for Literature?”
“Well,” Amos said, “I’m not sure if it was the Nobel—but it was some big prize.”
“Not the Nobel,” Skippy said. “The Dumbbell Prize.”
Patch said, “Toon’s poems sound the way my clothes look. I’m completely a mess. How embarrassing.”
As the wind subsided again, as the shrieking faded into a low moan, Burl said, “All right, all right, so how does this Toon poem apply to our current situation?”
“It’s obvious,” Amos said. “It’s a long way into the city, and already we’re tired—so we need wheels. We’ll hitch a ride in the back of one of these big trucks.”
“But how will we know if the one we choose is headed toward the city or away from it?” Gibbons inquired.
“Uncle Isaac’s in Heaven, watching over us,” Amos said. “He won’t let us choose the wrong truck.”
9.
REX LED HIS GANG of evil toys through a hole in a chain link fence and onto the pavement at the edge of the parking lot.
“They’re here somewhere,” he said, surveying the parked trucks, which looked like rows of prehistoric beasts slumbering in the night.
“Yes,” Lizzie said, “they’re here, all right. You can feel their goodness in the air.”
“Disgusting, isn’t it?” Jack Weasel said.
Gear worked his metal jaws, making grinding noises, and repeatedly flexed his metal hands. Stinger buzzed in circles above their heads.
“Let’s go get them,” Rex said. “Let’s tear them limb from limb and make pillow stuffing out of them.”
10.
HOURS OF WALKING BROUGHT Nick Jagg into a small town more than a hundred miles south of the city. It was an old burg, most of it dating back to the 1700s. All the buildings were brick and stone.
Jagg knew that most people would think the village was unusually pretty, but he hated it. He hated old, historic buildings partly because history bored him but mostly because you were supposed to like these aged structures, and Nick Jagg would never like anything that anyone told him he was supposed to like.
Of course, he hated new buildings, too, which were mostly cold-looking with lots of sharp angles. The prison in which he had spent the last half of his fifteen-year term had been a modern, clean place designed with efficiency in mind, so he hated anyplace that reminded him of that penitentiary.
He was tired and wet to the skin. His cheap shoes, issued by the prison, were soaked and slowly beginning to come apart at the seams. Rain found its way under the collar of his coat, so his suit jacket
and shirt were damp. He felt dirty, clammy, and exhausted. He should have found a room for the night, but something drew him toward the center of the sleepy hamlet.
Four streets met at a town circle that had a small park in the center. Besides an area of brown grass and winter-barren flower beds, the park boasted two towering maple trees and a large, three-bowled marble fountain. The fountain was turned off, but the bowls were overflowing with rainwater.
On the other side of the street, all the way around the circle, were shops: antique stores, an ice-cream parlor, a barbershop and a beauty parlor, a few dress shops, a bookstore. They were all closed and dark except for the lights in their display windows.
There was also a small bus station, and when Jagg saw it he knew that the station was the place that had drawn him to the town circle. Feeling strange,almost as if he were hypnotized, he walked to the front door of the terminal and stepped inside, into the harsh fluorescent glare.
A single clerk was sitting at the far end of the room behind a counter, reading a paperback book. A radio was playing music from the 1940s. It felt good to be in a warm, dry place.
Something on the floor glinted and caught Jagg’s attention. He looked down and saw a brass key on the green tiles. He stooped, plucked it off the tiles, and noticed a number on it.
The station clerk had not looked up from his book. Feeling very strange indeed, still moving as if he were just a marionette being controlled by a puppetmaster, Jagg walked past a group of wooden benches to a row of luggage lockers. He found the locker with the same number as the key and opened it. Inside was a single suitcase. He had never seen this piece of luggage before, but his initials were on it: NJ.
He carried the suitcase into the men’s room and opened it on the counter beside the sink. It was packed full of one-hundred-dollar bills. A few thousand of them.
“What’s this?” Jagg said, finally shocked out of his trance. A soft but deep voice said, “It’s money to buy the toy factory.” Startled, Jagg turned and looked around. He was still alone in the brightly lighted men’s room. No one had entered behind him.