Shadowfires

by Dean Koontz

  Shortly after dawn, he came awake with bird-thin cries, full of dread, shuddering, and Rachael was with him. She had moved from the other bed and had drawn him to her, comforting him. Her warm tender touch dispelled the cold and lonely dream. The rhythmic thumping of her heart seemed like the steady throbbing of a bright lighthouse beacon along a fogbound coast, each pulse a reassurance.

  He believed she had intended to offer nothing more than the comfort that a good friend could provide, though perhaps unconsciously she brought the greater gift of love and sought it in return. In the half-awake state following sleep, when his vision seemed filtered by a semitransparent cloth, when an invisible thinness of warm silk seemed to interpose itself between his hands and everything he touched, and while sounds were still dream-muffled, his perceptions were not sharp enough to determine how and when her offered comfort became offered—and accepted—love. He only knew that it happened and that, when he drew her unclothed body to his, he felt a rightness that he had never felt before in his thirty-seven years.

  He was at last within her, and she was filled with him. It was fresh and wondrous, yet they did not have to search for the rhythms and patterns that pleased them, because they knew what was perfect for them as lovers of a decade might know.

  Although the softly rumbling air conditioner kept the room cool, Ben had an almost psychic awareness of desert heat pressing at the windows. The cool chamber was a bubble suspended outside the reality of the harsh land, just as their special moment of tender coupling was a bubble drifting outside the normal flow of seconds and minutes.

  Only one opaque window of frosted glass—high in the kitchenette wall—was not covered with a drape, and upon it the rising sun built a slowly growing fire. Outside, palm fronds, fanning lazily in a breeze, filtered the beams of the sun; feathery tropical shadows and frost-pale light fell on their nude bodies, rippling as they moved.

  Ben saw her face clearly even in that inconstant light. Her eyes were shut, mouth open. She drew deep breaths at first, then breathed more quickly. Every line of her face was exquisitely sensuous—but also infinitely precious. His perception of her preciousness mattered more to him than the shatteringly sensuous vision she presented, for it was an emotional rather than physical response, a result of their months together and of his great affection for her. Because she was so special to him, their coupling was not merely an act of sex but an immeasurably more gratifying act of love.

  Sensing his examination, she opened her eyes and looked into his, and he was electrified by that new degree of contact.

  The palm-patterned morning light grew rapidly brighter, changing hue as well, from frost-pale to lemon-yellow to gold. It imparted those colors to Rachael’s face, slender throat, full breasts. As the richness of the light increased, so did the pace of their lovemaking, till both were gasping, till she cried out and cried out again, at which moment the breeze outside became a sudden energetic wind that whipped the palm fronds, casting abruptly frantic shadows through the milky window, upon the bed. At precisely the moment when the wind-sculpted shadows leaped and shuddered, Ben thrust deep and shuddered too, emptying copious measures of himself into Rachael, and just when the last rush of his seed had streamed from him, the spill of wind was also depleted, flowing away to other corners of the world.

  In time he withdrew from her, and they lay on their sides, facing each other, heads close, their breath mingling. Still, neither spoke nor needed to, and gradually they drifted toward sleep again.

  He had never before felt as fulfilled and contented as this. Even in the good days of his youth, before the Green Hell, before Vietnam, he had never felt half this fine.

  She slept before Ben did, and for a long pleasant moment he watched as a bubble of saliva slowly formed between her parted lips, and popped. His eyes grew heavy, and the last thing he saw before he closed them was the vague—almost invisible—scar along her jawline, where she had been cut when Eric had thrown a glass at her.

  Drifting down into a restful darkness, Ben almost felt sorry for Eric Leben, because the scientist had never realized love was the closest thing to immortality that men would ever know and that the only—and best—answer to death was loving. Loving.

  16

  IN THE ZOMBIE ZONE

  For part of the night he lay fully clothed on the bed in the cabin above Lake Arrowhead, in a condition deeper than sleep, deeper than coma, his body temperature steadily declining, his heart beating only twenty times a minute, blood barely circulating, drawing breath shallowly and only intermittently. Occasionally his respiration and heartbeat stopped entirely for periods as long as ten or fifteen minutes, during which the only life within him was at a cellular level, though even that was not life as much as stasis, a strange twilight existence that no other man on earth had ever known. During those periods of suspended animation, with cells only slowly renewing themselves and performing their functions at a greatly reduced pace, the body was gathering energy for the next period of wakefulness and accelerated healing.

  He was healing, and at an astonishing rate. Hour by hour, almost visibly, his multitude of punctures and lacerations were scabbing over, closing up. Beneath the ugly bluish blackness of the bruises that he had suffered from the brutal impact with the garbage truck, there was already a visible yellow hue arising as the blood from crushed capillaries was leeched from the tissues. When he was awake, he could feel fragments of his broken skull pressing insistently into his brain, even though medical wisdom held that tissue of the brain was without nerve endings and therefore insensate; it was not a pain as much as a pressure, like a Novocaine-numbed tooth registering the grinding bit of a dentist’s drill. And he could sense, without understanding how, that his genetically improved body was methodically dealing with that head injury as surely as it was closing up its other wounds. For a week he would need much rest, but during that time the periods of stasis would grow shorter, less frequent, less frightening. That was what he wanted to believe. In two or three weeks, his physical condition would be no worse than that of a man leaving the hospital after major surgery. In a month he might be fully recovered, although he’d always have a slight—or even pronounced—depression along the right side of his skull.

  But mental recovery was not keeping pace with the rapid physical regeneration of tissues. Even when awake, heartbeat and respiration close to normal, he was seldom fully alert. And during those brief periods when he possessed approximately the same intellectual capacity he had known before his death, he was acutely and dismally aware that for the most part he was functioning in a robotic state, with frequent lapses into a confused and, at times, virtually animalistic condition.

  He had strange thoughts.

  Sometimes he believed himself to be a young man again, recently graduated from college, but sometimes he recognized that he was actually past forty. Sometimes he did not know exactly where he was, especially when he was out on the road, driving, with no familiar reference points to his own past life; overcome by confusion, feeling lost and sensing that he would forever be lost, he had to pull over to the edge of the highway until the panic passed. He knew that he had a great goal, an important mission, though he was never quite able to define his purpose or destination. Sometimes he thought he was dead and making his way through the levels of hell on a Dantean journey. Sometimes he thought he had killed people, although he could not remember who, and then he did briefly remember and shrank from the memory, not only shrank from it but convinced himself that it was not a memory at all but a fantasy, for of course he was incapable of cold-blooded murder. Of course. Yet at other times he thought about how exciting and satisfying it would be to kill someone, anyone, everyone, because in his heart he knew they were after him, all of them, out to get him, the rotten bastards, as they had always been out to get him, though they were even more determined now than ever. Sometimes he thought urgently, Remember the mice, the mice, the deranged mice bashing themselves to pieces against the walls of their cages, and more than once
he even said it aloud, “Remember the mice, the mice,” but he had no idea what those words meant: what mice, where, when?

  He saw strange things, too.

  Sometimes he saw people who could not possibly be there: his long-dead mother, a hated uncle who had abused him when he had been a little boy, a neighborhood bully who had terrorized him in grade school. Now and then, as if suffering from the delirium tremens of a chronic alcoholic, he saw things crawling out of the walls, bugs and snakes and more frightening creatures that defied definition.

  Several times, he was certain that he saw a path of perfectly black flagstones leading down into a terrible darkness in the earth. Always compelled to follow those stones, he repeatedly discovered the path was illusory, a figment of his morbid and fevered imagination.

  Of all the apparitions and illusions that flickered past his eyes and through his damaged mind, the most unusual and the most disturbing were the shadowfires. They leaped up unexpectedly and made a crackling sound that he not only heard but felt in his bones. He would be moving right along, walking with reasonable sure-footedness, passing among the living with some conviction, functioning better than he dared believe he could—when suddenly a fire would spring up in the shadowed corners of a room or in the shadows clustered beneath a tree, in any deep pocket of gloom, flames the shade of wet blood with hot silvery edges, startling him. And when he looked close, he could see that nothing was burning, that the flames had erupted out of thin air and were fed by nothing whatsoever, as if the shadows themselves were burning and made excellent fuel in spite of their lack of substance. When the fires faded and were extinguished, no signs of them remained—no ashes, charred fragments, or smoke stains.

  Though he had never been afraid of fire before he died, had never entertained the pyrophobic idea that he was destined to die in flames, he was thoroughly terrified of these hungry phantom fires. When he peered into the flickering brightness, he felt that just beyond lay a mystery he must solve, though the solution would bring him unimaginable anguish.

  In his few moments of relative lucidity, when his intellectual capacity was nearly what it once had been, he told himself that the illusions of flames merely resulted from misfiring synapses in his injured brain, electrical pulses shorting through the damaged tissues. And he told himself that the illusions frightened him because, above all else, he was an intellectual, a man whose life had been a life of the mind, so he had every right to be frightened by signs of brain deterioration. The tissues would heal, the shadowfires fade forever, and he would be all right. That was also what he told himself. But in his less lucid moments, when the world turned tenebrous and eerie, when he was gripped by confusion and animal fear, he looked upon the shadowfires with unalloyed horror and was sometimes reduced to paralysis by something he thought he glimpsed within—or beyond—the dancing flames.

  Now, as dawn insistently pressed upon the resistant darkness of the mountains, Eric Leben ascended from stasis, groaned softly for a while, then louder, and finally woke. He sat up on the edge of the bed. His mouth was stale; he tasted ashes. His head was filled with pain. He touched his broken pate. It was no worse; his skull was not coming apart.

  The meager glow of morning entered by two windows, and a small lamp was on—not sufficient illumination to dispel all the shadows in the bedroom, but enough to hurt his extremely sensitive eyes. Watery and hot, his eyes had been less able to adapt to brightness since he had risen from the cold steel gurney in the morgue, as if darkness were his natural habitat now, as if he did not belong in a world subject either to sun or to man-made light.

  For a couple of minutes he concentrated on his breathing, for his rate of respiration was irregular, now too slow and deep, now too fast and shallow. Taking a stethoscope from the nightstand, he listened to his heart as well. It was beating fast enough to assure that he would not soon slip back into a state of suspended animation, though it was unsettlingly arrhythmic.

  In addition to the stethoscope, he had brought other instruments with which to monitor his progress. A sphygmomanometer for measuring his blood pressure. An ophthalmoscope which, in conjunction with a mirror, he could use to study the condition of his retinas and the pupil response. He had a notebook, too, in which he had intended to record his observations of himself, for he was aware—sometimes only dimly aware but always aware—that he was the first man to die and come back from beyond, that he was making history, and that such a journal would be invaluable once he had fully recovered.

  Remember the mice, the mice …

  He shook his head irritably, as if that sudden baffling thought were a bothersome gnat buzzing around his face. Remember the mice, the mice: He had not the slightest idea what it meant, yet it was an annoyingly repetitive and peculiarly urgent thought that had assailed him frequently last night. He vaguely suspected that he did, in fact, know the meaning of the mice and that he was suppressing the knowledge because it frightened him. However, when he tried to focus on the subject and force an understanding, he had no success but became increasingly frustrated, agitated, and confused.

  Returning the stethoscope to the nightstand, he did not pick up the sphygmomanometer because he did not have the patience or the dexterity required to roll up his shirt sleeve, bind the pressure cuff around his arm, operate the bulb-type pump, and simultaneously hold the gauge so he could read it. He had tried last night, and his clumsiness had finally driven him into a rage. He did not pick up the ophthalmoscope, either, for to examine his own eyes he would have to go into the bathroom and use the mirror. He could not bear to see himself as he now appeared: gray-faced, muddy-eyed, with a slackness in his facial muscles that made him look … half dead.

  The pages of his small notebook were mostly blank, and now he did not attempt to add further observations to his recovery journal. For one thing, he had found that he was not capable of the intense and prolonged concentration required to write either intelligibly or legibly. Besides, the sight of his sloppily scrawled handwriting, which previously had been precise and neat, was yet another thing that had the power to excite a vicious rage in him.

  Remember the mice, the mice bashing themselves against the walls of their cages, chasing their tails, the mice, the mice …

  Putting both hands to his head as if to physically suppress that unwanted and mysterious thought, Eric Leben lurched out of bed, onto his feet. He needed to piss, and he was hungry. Those were two good signs, two indications that he was alive, at least more alive than dead, and he took heart from those simple biological needs.

  He started toward the bathroom but stopped suddenly when fire leaped up in a corner of the room. Not real flames but shadowfire. Blood-red tongues with silver edges. Crackling hungrily, consuming the shadows from which they erupted yet in no way reducing that darkness. Squinting his light-stung eyes, Eric found that, as before, he was compelled to peer into the flames, and within them he thought he saw strange forms writhing and … and beckoning to him …

  Though he was unaccountably terrified of these shadowfires, a part of him, perverse beyond his understanding, longed to go within the flames, pass through them as one might pass through a door, and learn what lay beyond.

  No!

  As he felt that longing grow into an acute need, he desperately turned away from the fire and stood swaying in fear and bewilderment, two feelings that, in his current fragile state, quickly metamorphosed into anger, the anger into rage. Everything seemed to lead to rage, as if it were the ultimate and inevitable distillate of all other emotions.

  A brass-and-pewter floor lamp with a frosted crystal shade stood beside an easy chair, within his reach. He seized it with both hands, lifted it high above his head, and threw it across the room. The shade shattered against the wall, and gleaming shards of frosted crystal fell like cracking ice. The metal base and pole hit the edge of the white-lacquered dresser and rebounded with a clang, clattered to the floor.

  The thrill of destruction that shivered through him was of a dark intensity akin to a
sadistic sexual urge, and its power was nearly as great as orgasm. Before his death, he had been an obsessive achiever, a builder of empires, a compulsive acquirer of wealth, but following his death he had become an engine of destruction, as fully compelled to smash property as he had once been compelled to acquire it.

  The cabin was decorated in ultramodern with accents of art deco—like the ruined floor lamp—not a style particularly well suited to a five-room mountain cabin but one which satisfied Eric’s need for a sense of newness and modernity in all things. In a frenzy, he began to reduce the trendy decor to piles of bright rubble. He picked up the armchair as if it weighed only a pound or two and heaved it at the three-panel mirror on the wall behind the bed. The tripartite mirror exploded, and the armchair fell onto the bed in a rain of silvered glass. Breathing hard, Eric seized the damaged floor lamp, held it by the pole, swung it at a piece of bronze sculpture that stood on the dresser, using the heavy base of the lamp as a huge hammer—bang!—knocking the sculpture to the floor, swung the lamp-hammer twice at the dresser mirror—bang, bang!—smashing, smashing, swung it at a painting hanging on the wall near the door to the bathroom, brought the picture down, hammered the artwork where it lay on the floor. He felt good, so good, never better, alive. As he gave himself entirely and joyfully to his berserker rage, he snarled with animal ferocity or shrieked wordlessly, though he was able to form one special word with unmistakable clarity, “Rachael,” spoke it with unadulterated hatred, spittle spraying, “Rachael, Rachael.” He pounded the makeshift hammer into a white-lacquered occasional table that had stood beside the armchair, pounded and pounded until the table was reduced to splinters—“Rachael, Rachael”—struck the smaller lamp on the nightstand and knocked it to the floor. Bang! Arteries pounding furiously in his neck and temples, blood singing in his ears, he hammered the nightstand itself until he had broken the handles off the drawers, hammered the wall, “Rachael,” hammered until the pole lamp was too bent to be of any further use, angrily tossed it aside, grabbed the drapes and ripped them from their rods, tore another painting from the wall and put his foot through the canvas, “Rachael, Rachael, Rachael.” He staggered wildly now and flailed at the air with his big arms and turned in circles, a crazed bull, and he abruptly found it hard to breathe, felt the insane strength drain out of him, felt the mad destructive urge flowing away, away, and he dropped to the floor, onto his knees, stretched flat out on his chest, head turned to one side, face in the deep-pile carpet, gasping. His confused thoughts were even muddier than the strange and clouded eyes that he could not bear to look at in a mirror, but though he no longer possessed demonic energy, he had the strength to mutter that special name again and again while he lay on the floor: “Rachael … Rachael … Rachael …”