by Dean Koontz
Most criminal types like Jagg would have been thinking about all that lovely money in the suitcase. They would have been scheming to keep it even though it was the Devil’s own money and would not be easily stolen. There was enough cash to allow him to live in luxury for a long time. But Jagg had no such thoughts. He did not care about the money. He dreamed only about making toys that would harm little children, toys that would bring misery into countless lives. Those mean-spirited thoughts excited him.
To the red-eyed face in the bus window, Nick Jagg said, “Thank you for giving me this wonderful opportunity.” The face smiled back at him.
Although it was only a reflection in the glass, he smelled its terrible, sulfurous breath.
Then it disappeared, and his own dim reflection replaced that of his demonic patron.
3.
REX LED LIZZIE, GEAR, AND Jack Weasel along a twisty walkway in the park, under the wind-rattled branches of barren trees.
“They’re here,” Rex said. “Somewhere in the park. Not far away now. We’ll get them this time.”
“Break them,” Gear said.
“Burn them,” Lizzie said.
“Chew them up with my sharp wooden teeth,” Jack said.
Suddenly Stinger swooped out of the sleet-slashed night and hovered in front of them. He had recovered from his collision with the bookshop sign, though both of his antennae were somewhat bent. “Thissss way,” the bee said excitedly. “I’ve sssseen them. Thissss way to the Oddkinsssss.”
4.
VICTOR BODKINS FINALLY TOOK shelter from the storm in an all-night coffeeshop.
The restaurant was warm and cozy. The air smelled of coffee, frying eggs, and bacon. The counter, stools, tables, and blue vinyl booths were clean, and everything gleamed.
When Victor first walked in, the two waitresses stared at him, as if debating whether to tell him that they did not serve bums like him. But then he took off his filthy, torn raincoat. His other clothes—except for his shoes and trousers—were still reasonably presentable, so the waitresses did not ask him to leave.
The place was not busy tonight. Other than Victor, the only customers were uniformed police officers who came and went in pairs.
He sat alone in a booth by the front windows, which were mostly steamed over. Like a witch’s hooked fingernails, sleet ticked against the glass.
Victor ordered a piece of apple pie and coffee.
Using a paper napkin, he wiped a patch of condensation from the window and stared out at the wet and gloomy street, trying to make sense of what had happened to him this night.
He ate only two bites of the pie. It stuck in his throat and was hard to swallow. But the coffee went down easily.
He was nearly finished with his second cup of coffee when he saw the black bus pull up at the curb on the far side of the avenue. He had never seen a totally black bus before. For a moment he thought his eyes were deceiving him. He used another napkin to wipe at the steamed window again, clearing a larger portion of the glass.
No, it was definitely a black bus.
Completely, utterly black.
A very strange bus.
5.
AMOS AND THE OTHER Oddkins had reluctantly left the elephant at the zoo and had made their way along a series of paths in search of an exit from the park. In a shallow glen, as they passed beneath the drooping boughs of ice-crusted evergreens, they heard Jack Weasel’s thin, mad giggle. The jack-in-the-box’s laughter had not come from close at hand; it echoed from farther back along the walkway or perhaps from another walkway altogether, an eerie sound that seemed to slither low across the cold ground just like the wispy tendrils of fog that curled and eddied on all sides.
“They’ve found us,” Skippy said, skidding to a halt.
“No,” Amos said, grabbing the rabbit’s arm and pulling him along. “They’re nearby, but they haven’t found us yet. However, they will find us if we don’t hurry. We’ll have to run as fast as we can … though I don’t think we can outrun Jack Weasel.”
“Think positive,” Butterscotch said, trotting at Amos’s side. “Maybe Weasel will have a flat tire.”
“Not with his steel wheels,” Amos said.
“Maybe he’ll run head-on into a lamppost and knock himself senseless,” Patch said.
“Maybe he’ll take a shortcut through the elephant pen and get squished,” Burl said.
“Maybe aliens will land in a flying saucer and kidnap him,” said Skippy.
“We can’t expect to be saved by an accident or by aliens,” Amos said. “The only way we’ll be saved is if we save ourselves. Good people can’t triumph over bad people just by being good; they have to act.”
“He’s right,” Gibbons said, caning himself along as fast as he could. “History proves what Amos just said.”
“Run fast,” Amos repeated. “And stay under the trees or scurry along beneath the shrubbery as much as possible because the bee might be looking for us. It might be flying overhead, scanning the ground, so we’ve not only got to move fast but stay out of sight as well.”
“The bee must’ve bashed itself to pieces when it hit the sign,” Patch said.
“We don’t know for sure,” Amos said. “We’ve got to figure that the bee is still around.”
“Well, you’re sure a cheerful sort,” Skippy said sourly.
“You can’t expect Amos always to be in a sunny mood at this time of the year,” Burl said. “He’s meant to be hibernating now, after all. He should be snoozing in a cave, dreaming of honey and wild berries. So of course he’s cranky.”
“I’m not cranky,” Amos said as he hurried them along the evergreen-shrouded walkway. “Just worried and careful.”
“Cranky,” Burl insisted.
“Am not.”
“Cranky,” Patch agreed.
“Am not.”
“Does Rupert Toon have anything to say about crankiness?” Skippy asked scornfully.
“No!” the other four Oddkins chorused as one.
“No time for Rupert Toon,” Amos said as they reached the place where the sheltering pines stopped.
The walkway led across an open field where the bee, if cruising above, would spot them right away. Fortunately, a wide row of evergreen shrubs flanked one side of the walk, and they were able to continue in the shelter of those plants.
They had to crawl a lot because the shrubs grew low to the ground, providing little room to get under the branches. In some places they had to wriggle along on their bellies, and a couple of times Amos heard Patch moaning about the further deterioration in his appearance.
As they made their way to the edge of the park, they heard the distant giggle of Jack Weasel. Sometimes the jack-in-the-box sounded closer than at other times, as if he repeatedly passed nearby without sensing them. That was probably just a trick of the chilly, sleet-filled night air.
They heard a droning noise, too, which might have been a big plane passing over the city, high above the storm. Or it might have been a certain toy bee swooping low over the park.
“What Uncle Isaac should have done,” Skippy whispered, “was make us twenty feet tall. We could have walked to Mrs. Shannon’s place real fast, and no bad toys would have tried to stop us.”
“It would be a little hard to keep people from seeing us if we were twenty feet tall, don’t you think?” Amos whispered.
They crawled for a while as Skippy thought about that. At last he said, “Well, we could have tied long strings to ourselves and then, each time we ran into people, we could pretend to be giant animal balloons in some sort of parade.”
At last they came to the end of the long row of bristly shrubbery and stepped onto a sidewalk flanked by tall stone pillars. Beyond the pillars were a street, buildings, the city. They had reached the end of the park.
“Which way now?” Gibbons asked Amos.
Frowning, Amos looked left, right, and straight ahead.
The sleet began to cover them with ice again.
Along
the avenue, traffic lights turned from red to green, though there was no traffic.
“Maybe it’d be better if a horse was leading us,” Burl said. “No offense meant, Amos, but they say horses have a good sense of direction.”
“A homing pigeon would be even better,” Patch said. “Homing pigeons have a terrific sense of direction.”
“Of course, if Amos was a homing pigeon,” Skippy said, “he’d have to have another name. Amos is a silly name for a pigeon.”
“We could call him … Tweetie,” Burl said.
“Or maybe Beaky,” Skippy said.
Patch said, “Or Featherface.”
“Or Wingo.”
“Or Birdie.”
“Or Peter,” Burl said.
Skippy and Patch said, “Peter?”
“Peter Pigeon,” Burl said. “Yeah, I like the sound of that. Let’s call him Peter Pigeon.”
“He’s still a bear,” Gibbons reminded them.
“Oh, yeah,” Burl said.
“Too bad,” Skippy said. “I don’t think bears have any sense of direction at all.”
“Give Amos a chance,” Butterscotch said.
“That way,” Amos said, pointing straight across the street. “That’s the way to Mrs. Shannon’s toy shop.” He led them across the sidewalk, through six-inch-deep icy slop in the gutter, and out onto the deserted avenue. They were halfway to the other side of the broad street when they heard a cry behind them. Turning, they saw Rex and the other bad toys coming out of the park.
6.
A MAN GOT OFF the black bus and came straight to the coffeeshop. He put his suitcase on the floor at the counter, sat on a stool, and ordered coffee. When Victor Bodkins looked back at the street, the black bus was gone. He had never heard its engine start up. It seemed to have drifted away on the storm wind.
To Victor, the stranger looked like a hard, perhaps dangerous man. He thought he might be overreacting. But when he looked at the two policemen in the coffeeshop, he saw they were studying the new arrival with interest and suspicion.
Several times, the stranger glanced at Victor, and Victor always quickly looked down at his unfinished pie or out at the night.
Eventually the policemen left.
Only Victor, the stranger, the two waitresses, and the short-order cook remained. After a moment the hard-looking man put money on the counter to pay for his coffee, got off his stool, and picked up his suitcase. Surprisingly, the guy came straight to Victor and sat across the table from him.
“I believe you have a toy factory for sale?” the man said.
Victor was startled.
“Am I right? A toy factory?”
“Why … yes … but who are you?” Victor asked.
“I want to buy your factory.”
Victor was confused. “Where did you come from? How do you know who I am?”
“My name’s Nick Jagg.”
The stranger lifted his suitcase onto the table, then quickly looked around the restaurant to be sure they weren’t being watched. They were still the only two customers. The waitresses and the short-order cook were gathered at the counter, at the far end of the restaurant, involved in their own conversation.
Opening the suitcase, Jagg said, “I’ll pay cash for the factory if you’ll sell it now. Right now.”
Victor stared in shock and disbelief at the tightly banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills that filled the suitcase. “But … th-th-there must be a m-m-million dollars in there.”
“More than two million.”
Victor’s head was filled with fevered thoughts of the investments that the money could buy. He began to calculate interest rates, stock and bond prices, and his mind overflowed with torrents of numbers. He began to breathe heavily and to shake with excitement. Making money, using that money to make more money, reinvesting the profits from the profits to make more profits—those were things that Victor Bodkins understood. He was not at ease with the idea that there could be such things as magic toys, but he was perfectly comfortable with money.
As he stared into the suitcase, he began to feel that the weird events of the earlier part of the night were all part of a spell of temporary insanity. He had gone a little crazy, but now he was all right again. There were no such things as living toys, no such thing as real magic at work in the world. But money was real, and he knew what to do with more than two million dollars.
“Will you sell me the factory?” Nick Jagg asked.
“It’s a most generous offer,” Victor said, finally looking up from the stacks of hundred-dollar bills and meeting Jagg’s eyes.
Those eyes jolted and frightened him. They were so hard, so cold. Mean.
Staring into Jagg’s disturbing eyes, Victor recalled the strange black bus. His mind turned from thoughts of money, and he realized again how odd it was that Jagg should know there was a toy factory for sale, even though Victor had not yet advertised or announced his desire to sell. It was odder still that Jagg should know precisely where to find Victor on this night of all nights.
“How did you find me?” Victor asked.
“I have my ways,” Jagg said.
“And what are those ways?”
“A friend told me where to find you.”
“What friend?” Victor demanded. “A friend of mine? But no one knew where I was tonight. Not even I knew where I was going until I got here. Besides … I’m not pleased to admit this … but I don’t actually have any friends. Never had time to make any. Always too busy with my investments. Now who are you and how did you find me?”
Scowling, Jagg said, “Look at the cash, Victor. Money is your friend. Your best and truest friend. You don’t need any other friend but money. Look at the cash and think about what you can do with it, and you won’t be worried any more about who I am or how I found you.”
There was something hypnotic in Jagg’s voice, and Victor was unable to keep his gaze from lowering to the cash-filled suitcase. The sight of all that money made him breathless, and his thoughts became muddled.
“Be sensible, Victor. Sell the factory to me now.”
The factory was a curse. Look what the place had done to Isaac: it had kept him a child all his life, an irresponsible child. And having inherited the place only this morning, Victor had been cursed by it, too: running like a madman through city streets in a sleet storm, searching for imaginary magical toys.
“Sell, Victor. Sell. Sell to me and take your money and live happily ever after.”
“Well …”
“Sell, sell to me, sell the place and live happily ever after.”
Torn between wanting the money and wanting to believe that Isaac had, somehow, created magical toys, Victor was in emotional turmoil. He was frightened of his inability to resist the money, but he was also afraid to look up into Jagg’s hate-filled eyes, so he turned his deeply troubled gaze to the night. That was when he heard the small, barely audible voice just beyond the window:
“Booga-booga-booga!”
Puzzled, leaning closer to the window, he saw the stuffed toys on the sidewalk, hurrying past the coffeeshop. The rabbit was running backward, shouting at something that was following him and his stuffed-toy friends.
“Booga-booga-booga!”
The rabbit, the elephant, the cavalier cat, and the other Oddkins vanished to the right.
Astonished, Victor pressed his face to the glass, flattening his nose almost painfully against the cold pane, trying to see more.
“Over two million dollars, Victor,” said Nick Jagg with new urgency.
The Oddkins had gone. Victor could not get another glimpse of them, but suddenly he saw the marionettes and the robot and the jack-in-the-box to his left. They rushed past the front of the coffeeshop in pursuit of the Oddkins.
In his haste to get out of the booth, Victor bumped the suitcase, which fell to the floor, scattering packets of hundred-dollar bills.
The waitresses and the short-order cook looked up in surprise, and their eyes widened at the sight
of the money.
“Wait!” Jagg said.
But Victor ran, not even bothering to put on his raincoat. He threw open the door of the coffeeshop and dashed into the wind and sleet.
The nasty toys that had attacked him in the woods were just turning the corner at the end of the block.
Victor sprinted after them, slipped, fell, got up, slipped again, but kept going.
7.
AMOS KNEW THEY HAD to get off the streets. For one thing, they could not outrun their enemies forever; they had to hide and hope to throw the bad toys off their trail. For another thing, the longer they stayed on the streets, even in the lonely hours of the night and in the middle of this terrible ice storm, the more likely they were to reveal themselves accidentally to people who were never meant to see them.
In a dimly lighted alleyway between two tall buildings, Amos found a small window that opened into the basement of one of the immense structures. It was much too narrow to admit a man and only just large enough to admit an Oddkin. It was unlocked, and Amos directed his friends through it, into the dark room beyond.
Gibbons, Patch, Butterscotch, and Burl slipped inside.
But Skippy hesitated and said, “Let me wait for those nasties and give them one more booga.”
“No.”
“I’m sure they didn’t hear me before. When they hear me giving them a booga, they’ll be so scared they’ll run away like those alley cats.”
“These creatures aren’t as easily scared as alley cats.”
Before Skippy could protest, Amos grabbed the rabbit by the tail and the nape of the neck and threw him through the open window, into the cellar.