by Dean Koontz
7
ON AN AUTUMN EVENING, WHEN HOWIE WAS thirty-two and the father of three beautiful children, as he sat in his favorite armchair, reading a novel, he felt a sudden relief, as if a burden had been lifted from him that he hadn’t known he was carrying. The curious sensation, not related to any apparent cause, was so extraordinary that he had to put his book aside and get at once to his feet. For a moment, because his life had been going so well for so long and because he knew how abruptly good fortune could pivot to bad, he imagined that this new buoyancy of spirit was instead light-headedness, the first—and only benign—symptom in a series that would grow rapidly worse until something catastrophic, like a stroke or a heart attack, felled him. But he was not pessimistic by nature, and as the sense of relief persisted, he went looking for Felicity. He found her in the kitchen, and he kissed her more than once. He discovered the kids—Mia, Leo, and Josh—watching TV instead of doing their homework, but he did not scold them.
In his study, he sat at his desk, staring at the phone, certain there was someone with whom he must speak, though he could not think who that might be. One of the desk drawers contained hanging files that held copies of various insurance policies, among other things. Howie didn’t at first realize why he opened the drawer—and then he knew. The final file contained a sealed envelope. He slit it open and removed a five-dollar bill and a pair of ones, the seven bucks that he had kept from Blackwood’s thirty, for the sandwiches. All these years, he had felt that this money could buy him only bad luck, and he had even been reluctant to give it away for fear that it came with a curse that he would be passing to someone else. He didn’t know why the money should suddenly be clean, but he felt that it was, and he decided to drop it in the poor box at church.
The following day, one of the lead stories on the television news concerned several bizarre murders in a distant city, culminating in an attack on the home of a homicide detective named John Calvino, the same person who, twenty years earlier, at the age of fourteen, killed Alton Turner Blackwood. These new murders were of families and seemed eerily reminiscent of Blackwood’s killing spree two decades earlier. Howie realized that the inexplicable feeling of relief that overcame him while he was reading in the armchair had occurred at the very hour that Calvino’s wife and children were targeted in their own home. He followed the story for a couple of days, both on TV and in the papers, with a growing conviction that the most important aspect of the case was not being reported, perhaps because no reporter was aware of the full truth.
Six days later, Howie placed a call to the homicide division of the police department in which Calvino worked, and in a few hours the detective returned his call. Assuming Calvino must have read the journal of Alton Turner Blackwood that was available on the Internet, Howie said, “I am the boy who made good sandwiches for him. Because there’s no photo of Blackwood, you’ll know it’s true if I describe him.”
After listening to the description, John Calvino said, “All he says in his journal is that yours was the first family he intended to kill, but you saved them.”
“It’s more accurate to say they almost died because of me.”
“My family did die because of me, Mr. Dugley. Thank God you were spared that.”
“Thank you. I’m sorry for your losses. All your losses. But … may I ask, Detective Calvino, if in any way, any way whatsoever, the case just in the news—all those deaths—is it related to Blackwood?”
John Calvino’s silence was long enough to mean yes, but when at last he spoke, he said only, “I killed Alton Turner Blackwood more than twenty years ago.”
“Yes. I know. I heard about it at the time. Yet … all these years, I’ve been waiting for … something.” Howie realized he had put his hand protectively on his throat, and he thought of Bleeker pinned to the wall. “Even though I knew Blackwood was dead, if ever someone could come back … I think it would be him. I guess that sounds irrational at best.”
After another silence, Calvino said, “All I’ll tell you is that for twenty years, I’ve been waiting for something, too.”
A phantom finger, spatulate and cold, traced a line down the back of Howell Dugley’s neck.
After a silence of his own, he said, “Is it over at last?”
“In my work, Mr. Dugley, I’ve seen that good usually triumphs. But I’ve also seen that evil never dies. It’s always wise to remain vigilant.”
Later that afternoon, Howie decided against dropping the seven dollars in the poor box at his church. He took the three bills into the backyard and put a match to them.
By the following June, the pall of Blackwood had so lifted from Howie’s life that, at play in the park with his kids, he did not even realize this day marked the twenty-second anniversary of his rooftop lunch with the murderer. They were playing Frisbee with Barney, their dog, who jumped and caught the disc again and again with exuberance. The sky was cloudless, the velvet-green park dappled with the cool shadows of the trees. In the pleasure of the moment, Howie had almost forgotten that life had ever wounded him, and if someone had held up a mirror to him, he might have been surprised, just for a moment, that he was scarred.
Mia took a break from the game, but Howie and the boys were indefatigable. Minutes passed before he glanced at his daughter—and froze. Seven years old, petite and as pretty as her mother, Mia perched on the edge of a wooden bench, unaware that behind her and to her left, a raven sat on the head-rail of the bench back. Its inky eyes were as hard as buckshot and seemed to draw a bead on Howie. As if in response to his attention and apprehension, the bird spread its wings, craned its head forward, cracked its beak, but made no sound, as silent as Death himself is silent when he glides in for the kill.
Howie was holding the Frisbee, and he flung it with a snap of the wrist. The disc whizzed past Mia, grazed the bird, and sent it squawking into frightened flight, to the surprise of the girl and to the delight of her brothers. Barney barked, and Howie took a bow.
When they returned to play, he didn’t once search the sky for that bird or any other. Howell Dugley, survivor, hero to some and butt-ugly freak to others, did not fear either the darkness of the night or the darkness under the sun that can sometimes crowd in upon us when we least expect it.
He knew the bird circled above. Twice it came so low that he saw its shadow swoop across the grass. He never looked up.
That night he woke and lay listening to the distinctive calls of a raven: the hollow brronk, the deep resonant prruck, interspersed with bell-clear notes. Judging by the proximity and the direction of the voice, the bird must have been perched on a telephone wire in the nearby street. Howie did not get out of bed to look.
The next morning, he was the first downstairs to make coffee and to let the dog out to toilet. On the breakfast table in the kitchen lay a single black feather. He buried it at the bottom of the trash can and mentioned it to no one.
When the coffee was brewing, he stepped outside to get the newspaper from the front lawn. Something swooped low overhead, not so low that its talons stroked his scalp, but low enough that he felt the wind of its passage, and it entered the beech tree, causing the leaves to stir noisily.
On the way back into the house, Howie never raised his eyes from the weather report in the paper. Clear and sunny.
In this world of ours, there is always a chance that a day of fire will come, but there is nothing to be gained by extending an invitation to the arsonist, no matter how persistently he hints that he would like to have one.
Read on for a special advance preview of
WHAT THE NIGHT KNOWS
by Dean Koontz
A ghost story unlike any you’ve read before…
Available December 28, 2010
1
WHAT YEAR THESE EVENTS TRANSPIRED IS OF NO CONSEQUENCE. Where they occurred is not important. The time is always, and the place is everywhere.
Suddenly at noon, six days after the murders, birds flew to trees and sheltered roosts. As if their wings had
lanced the sky, the rain fell close behind their flight. The long afternoon was as dim and drowned as twilight in Atlantis.
The state hospital stood on a hill, silhouetted against a gray and sodden sky. The September light appeared to strop a razor’s edge along each skein of rain.
A procession of eighty-foot purple beeches separated the inbound and the outbound lanes of the approach road. Their limbs overhung the car and collected the rain to redistribute it in thick drizzles that rapped against the windshield.
The thump of the wipers matched the slow, heavy rhythm of John Calvino’s heart. He did not play the radio. The only sounds were the engine, the windshield wipers, the rain, the swish of tires turning on wet pavement, and a memory of the screams of dying women.
Near the main entrance, he parked illegally under the portico. He propped the POLICE placard on the dashboard.
John was a homicide detective, but this car belonged to him, not to the department. The use of the placard while off duty might be a minor violation of the rules. But his conscience was encrusted with worse transgressions than the abuse of police prerogatives.
At the reception desk in the lobby sat a lean woman with close-cropped black hair. She smelled of the lunchtime cigarettes that had curbed her appetite. Her mouth was as severe as that of an iguana.
After glancing at John’s police ID and listening to his request, she used the intercom to call an escort for him. Pen pinched in her thin fingers, white knuckles as sharp as chiseled marble, she printed his name and badge number in the visitors’ register.
Hoping for gossip, she wanted to talk about Billy Lucas.
Instead, John went to the nearest window. He stared at the rain without seeing it.
A few minutes later, a massive orderly named Coleman Hanes escorted him to the third—top—floor. Hanes so filled the elevator that he seemed like a bull in a narrow stall, waiting for the door to the rodeo ring to be opened. His mahogany skin had a faint sheen, and by contrast his white uniform was radiant.
They talked about the unseasonable weather: the rain, the almost wintry cold two weeks before summer officially ended. They discussed neither murder nor insanity.
John did most of the talking. The orderly was self-possessed to the point of being phlegmatic.
The elevator opened to a vestibule. A pink-faced guard sat at a desk, reading a magazine.
“Are you armed?” he asked.
“My service pistol.”
“You’ll have to give it to me.”
John removed the weapon from his shoulder rig, surrendered it.
On the desk stood a Crestron touch-screen panel. When the guard pressed an icon, the electronic lock released the door to his left.
Coleman Hanes led the way into what appeared to be an ordinary hospital corridor: gray-vinyl tile underfoot, pale-blue walls, white ceiling with fluorescent panels.
“Will he eventually be moved to an open floor or will he be kept under this security permanently?” John asked.
“I’d keep him here forever. But it’s up to the doctors.”
Hanes wore a utility belt in the pouches of which were a small can of Mace, a Taser, plastic-strap handcuffs, and a walkie-talkie.
All the doors were closed. Each featured a lock-release keypad and a porthole.
Seeing John’s interest, Hanes said, “Double-paned. The inner pane is shatterproof. The outer is a two-way mirror. But you’ll be seeing Billy in the consultation room.”
This proved to be a twenty-foot-square chamber divided by a two-foot-high partition. From the top of this low wall to the ceiling were panels of thick armored glass in steel frames.
In each panel, near the sill and just above head height, two rectangular steel grilles allowed sound to pass clearly from one side of the glass to the other.
The nearer portion of the room was the smaller: twenty feet long, perhaps eight feet wide. Two armchairs were angled toward the glass, a small table between them.
The farther portion of the room contained one armchair and a long couch, allowing the patient either to sit or to lie down.
On this side of the glass, the chairs had wooden legs. The back and seat cushions were button-tufted.
Beyond the glass, the furniture featured padded, upholstered legs. The cushions were smooth-sewn, without buttons or upholstery tacks.
Ceiling-mounted cameras on the visitor’s side covered the entire room. From the guard’s station, Coleman Hanes could watch but not listen.
Before leaving, the orderly indicated an intercom panel in the wall beside the door. “Call me when you’re finished.”
Alone, John stood beside an armchair, waiting.
The glass must have had a nonreflective coating. He could see only the faintest ghost of himself haunting that polished surface.
In the far wall, on the patient’s side of the room, two barred windows provided a view of slashing rain and dark clouds curdled like malignant flesh.
On the left, a door opened, and Billy Lucas entered the patient’s side of the room. He wore slippers, gray cotton pants with an elastic waistband, and a long-sleeved gray T-shirt.
His face, as smooth as cream in a saucer, seemed to be as open and guileless as it was handsome. With pale skin and thick black hair, dressed all in gray, he resembled an Edward Steichen glamour portrait from the 1920s or ’30s.
The only color he offered, the only color on his side of the glass, was the brilliant, limpid, burning blue of his eyes.
Neither agitated nor lethargic from drugs, Billy crossed the room unhurriedly, with straight-shouldered confidence and an almost eerie grace. He looked at John, only at John, from the moment he entered the room until he stood before him, on the farther side of the glass partition.
“You’re not a psychiatrist,” Billy said. His voice was clear, measured, and mellifluous. He had sung in his church choir. “You’re a detective, aren’t you?”
“Calvino. Homicide.”
“I confessed days ago.”
“Yes, I know.”
“The evidence proves I did it.”
“Yes, it does.”
“Then what do you want?”
“To understand.”
Less than a full smile, a suggestion of amusement shaped the boy’s expression. He was fourteen, the unrepentant murderer of his family, capable of unspeakable cruelty, yet the half-smile made him look neither smug nor evil, but instead wistful and appealing, as though he were recalling a trip to an amusement park or a fine day at the shore.
“Understand?” Billy said. “You mean—what was my motive?”
“You haven’t said why.”
“The why is easy.”
“Then why?”
The boy said, “Ruin.”
2
THE WINDLESS DAY ABRUPTLY BECAME TURBULENT AND RATTLED raindrops like volleys of buckshot against the armored glass of the barred windows.
That cold sound seemed to warm the boy’s blue gaze, and his eyes shone now as bright as pilot lights.
“ ‘Ruin,’ ” John said. “What does that mean?”
For a moment, Billy Lucas seemed to want to explain, but then he merely shrugged.
“Will you talk to me?” John asked.
“Did you bring me something?”
“You mean a gift? No. Nothing.”
“Next time, bring me something.”
“What would you like?”
“They won’t let me have anything sharp or anything hard and heavy. Paperback books would be okay.”
The boy had been an honor student, in his junior year of high school, having skipped two grades.
“What kind of books?” John asked.
“Whatever. I read everything and rewrite it in my mind to make it what I want. In my version, every book ends with everyone dead.”
Previously silent, the storm sky found its voice. Billy looked at the ceiling and smiled, as if the thunder spoke specifically to him. Head tilted back, he closed his eyes and stood that way even after the rumble
faded.
“Did you plan the murders or was it on impulse?”
Rolling his head from side to side as though he were a blind musician enraptured by music, the boy said, “Oh, Johnny, I planned to kill them long, long ago.”
“How long ago?”
“Longer than you would believe, Johnny. Long, long ago.”
“Which of them did you kill first?”
“What does it matter if they’re all dead?”
“It matters to me,” John Calvino said.
Pulses of lightning brightened the windows, and fat beads of rain quivered down the panes, leaving a tracery of arteries that throbbed on the glass with each bright palpitation.
“I killed my mother first, in her wheelchair in the kitchen. She was getting a carton of milk from the refrigerator. She dropped it when the knife went in.”
Billy stopped rolling his head, but he continued to face the ceiling, eyes still closed. His mouth hung open. He raised his hands to his chest and slid them slowly down his torso.
He appeared to be in the grip of a quiet ecstasy.
When his hands reached his loins, they lingered, and then slid upward, drawing the T-shirt with them.
“Dad was in the study, at his desk. I clubbed him from behind, twice on the head, then used the claw end of the hammer. It went through his skull and hooked so deep I couldn’t pull it loose.”
Now Billy slipped the T-shirt over his head and down his arms, and he dropped it on the floor.
His eyes remained closed, head tipped back. His hands languidly explored his bare abdomen, chest, shoulders, and arms. He seemed enravished by the texture of his skin, by the contours of his body.
“Grandma was upstairs in her room, watching TV. Her dentures flew out when I punched her in the face. That made me laugh. I waited till she regained consciousness before I strangled her with a scarf.”