by Dean Koontz
As I’d told Chief Porter earlier in the day, the cult that had owned the isolated estate in Nevada was serious about its satanism. It had been established in England, in 1580, and among its founding members had been clergymen and nobility. Over the generations, the cultists accumulated enormous wealth, which bought them political influence, but not only wealth. During the centuries, they also acquired genuine supernatural power, not so much that they could stop me from rescuing the kidnapped children and bringing about the destruction of that estate, but power nonetheless. I had spied upon a ceremony for which they conjured demonic entities to witness their human sacrifices. Using animals as their remote eyes and ears might be well within their abilities.
The coyote that had triggered the motion detectors outside the safe house might have been a proxy for the cultists, a proxy through which the property’s perimeter alarm system could be explored and its weak points discovered.
I phoned the number that Mr. Bullock had asked me to memorize. He’d said that he would be available whenever I called, even after midnight. Following four rings, I was sent to voice mail.
Dreading that I had called too late, I left a brief message.
“This is me, this is Odd Thomas. Get out of the house. Get out now!”
Twenty-nine
Driving back to town, I repeatedly checked my rearview mirror. Apparently I had no tail.
I didn’t drive directly to the safe house or cruise past it. I concluded that would be suicide. I wasn’t ready to die, not until I had stopped—or had done my best to stop—whatever catastrophe might be planned for Pico Mundo.
I knew my hometown well, even here in its rural outskirts. In an area of horse farms and ranchettes and undeveloped land, I pulled off the two-lane blacktop and parked among a stand of cottonwoods, far enough from the road that the headlights of passing vehicles wouldn’t reveal the Explorer.
After switching off the engine, I called Deke Bullock again, and as before, he didn’t answer. Which most likely meant he was dead. Maybelle Bullock had probably been killed, too.
Perhaps the safe house had been discovered and invaded, its caretakers murdered, because of the astronaut who had seen something shocking in space and had been running for his life ever since, or because of some other hapless fugitive who had been given shelter there for a while. Maybe. But I was convinced that the responsibility lay with me, that unknowingly I’d led someone to it when I arrived that morning on the Big Dog bike.
Maybelle had made my favorite peach pie. She had hugged me and kissed my cheek before I’d left. She and Deacon had been so sweet together, bantering about whether they’d endured five or, instead, six bad days in twenty-eight years of marriage. My anger might serve me well in the hours ahead, but it came with a gray despair that I had to resist.
If the Bullocks were dead, there could be no good reason for me to return to the house—and no wisdom in doing so. If my only purpose was to confirm their deaths, I would most likely ensure my own.
Supposing they were not dead, however, I had an obligation to assist them. Perhaps they were under siege and needed reinforcements. Or one of them, wounded and left for dead, might still be saved.
Our world was a battleground on which good and evil clashed, and many of the combatants on the dark side were known to everyone. Terrorists, dictators, politicians who were merchants of lies and hate, crooked businessmen in league with them, power-mad bureaucrats, corrupted policemen, embezzlers, street thugs, rapists, and their ilk waged part of the war, and their actions were what made the evening news so colorful and depressing.
But those fighting in that dark army had their secret schemes, too, intentions and desires and goals that would make their public villainy seem almost innocent by comparison. They were assisted by other politicians who concealed their hatred and envy, by judges who secretly had no respect for the law, by clergymen who in private worshipped nothing but money or the tender bodies of children, by celebrities who trumpeted their concern for the common man while in their off-screen lives assiduously hobnobbing with and advancing the interests of the elite of elites.…
The war unseen by most people was one of clandestine militias, unincorporated businesses, unchartered organizations, philosophical movements that could not survive fresh air and sunlight, secretive coalitions of lunatics who didn’t recognize their own lunacy, nature cults and science cults and religious cults. And, as I knew too well, there was supernatural evil participating in this secret war against order, good, and innocence; however, the supernatural was only one regiment of that army and, you might be surprised to hear, numbered far fewer troops than the flesh-and-blood human beings who fought in the countless other battalions.
Until I had met Mrs. Edie Fischer two months earlier, on the Pacific Coast Highway, when she’d come cruising along in a humongous limousine, I hadn’t realized that my side in this secret war had its own clandestine militias and unchartered organizations determined to defeat all the aforementioned malevolent individuals and forces. I now had companions-at-arms, like Mr. and Mrs. Bullock, with resources to match those of the enemy.
On our side of this war, one didn’t leave a friend unsupported. You never, never left a friend to die alone.
I walked out of the grove of cottonwoods and crossed the quiet country lane, marveling at how ordinary the night seemed, as every night and day seemed if you saw only the surface of things. I climbed a split-rail fence into a pasture where, during the day, horses grazed on sweet grass.
Remaining properly oriented in a night so deeply overcast, with nothing to illuminate my way except the glow of downtown Pico Mundo reflected dimly off the low clouds, I would have stumbled or fallen, or stepped in a pile of horse product more than once, if not for my psychic magnetism. Focusing on a mental image of the Victorian house at the end of the driveway that led between colonnades of velvet ashes, I followed the fence to a corner, turned right, and followed it farther before my sixth sense told me to climb it again and to cross a graveled lane into an unfenced field.
I stayed away from stables and outbuildings, and avoided the occasional house with lighted windows. In ten minutes, I came to the ground behind the stable that had been converted into the long garage where my Big Dog Bulldog Bagger awaited deconstruction. I drew the Glock from my shoulder rig and crept along the back wall of the garage to a corner from which I could see the safe house.
Lamplight, none of it very bright, filtered by curtains and draperies, shone at some windows, and others were dark. The back door stood open, which I interpreted as meaning either that Mr. and Mrs. Bullock had fled an assault or that the assassins had done their dirty work and gone away.
I considered both those possibilities, but my usually reliable intuition wouldn’t endorse either of them.
Although I stood listening for a minute or two, I heard nothing that warned me off. The night was so quiet that it almost seemed to be already submerged under fathoms of water.
I left the cover of the garage and crossed the yard. Warily I climbed four brick steps to the back porch.
When we’d sat down for dinner, the kitchen windows had been open to the late-spring light. Now they were covered by blinds.
Surprisingly, the porch floor didn’t creak underfoot. Although it appeared to be painted wood, it felt as solid as concrete.
At the open door, I hesitated, but then went inside quick and low, with the Glock in a two-hand grip.
A light above the sink and another under the cooktop hood kept darkness at bay, but the kitchen was large, and shadows draped a few corners. Rounding the dinette table, I almost stepped into a pool of some liquid that was difficult to see on the dark floor. Judging by the more obvious scarlet spatters on the nearby doors of the glossy-white cabinetry, the pool must be blood.
Thirty
The pantry door stood open on darkness. I assumed that if anyone had been waiting in there, he would already have shot me.
The swinging door between the kitchen and the downstairs h
allway was blocked half open by a large dead man—not Deacon Bullock—lying facedown across the threshold, dressed in black sneakers, black jeans, and a long-sleeved black T-shirt.
Ordinarily I wouldn’t describe what a dead man was wearing any more than I would describe the design on a ten-dollar bill that I used to buy a burger and fries. But in this case, the hombre’s outfit was important because he was clearly dressed like an assassin. And then there were the ski mask and the latex gloves.
Professional killers, sent to clean out one of their enemy’s safe houses, would expect resistance. This guy wouldn’t have come alone to do such dangerous work, and in fact his team probably would have numbered three or four.
Two interior doors led out of the kitchen, and the second opened into the dining room. To avoid the dead man and the soup of bodily fluids in which he sprawled, I preferred to stay out of the bright hallway. I eased open the swinging door to a dining room that was dimly revealed by the crystal chandelier hanging in the center of that space. The fixture had been adjusted to a low setting, and in the faint light, the table appeared to be intended not for serving a meal, but for conducting a séance.
Earlier, during my stay in this house, I hadn’t noticed the uncanny silence with which doors moved on hinges and with which the floors received each footstep. For all the noise I made, I might as well have been a ghost.
A half-open door on the left led to the hallway. Another at the far end connected to the parlor, which I knew because Deacon Bullock had brought me this way from the kitchen when he had first taken me upstairs to see my room.
Another sizable dead man lay across the threshold between the dining room and parlor. He and the first stiff were dressed alike in every detail. He hadn’t purged bowels and bladder in his death throes, as had the other guy, but he still lay in a bit of a mess. His head was turned sideways. Through one of the holes in the ski mask, a fixed eye stared into another world. Just beyond his reaching hand, on the floor of the next room, lay a pistol fitted with a sound suppressor.
I had seen so few of these people’s faces that I was tempted to pull off the dead man’s ski mask. I resisted the urge when I thought, irrationally, What will you do if the face is yours?
I didn’t want to step in blood or on a corpse, but the latter was unavoidable because of the dead man’s size and the limitations of my stride. The heel of my right shoe came down on the fingers of his right hand. Fortunately, the contact produced little sound—the faintest squeak of the latex glove stretching under my shoe—and I didn’t stumble, although I almost revealed my presence by saying, Sorry, sir.
Doorways were the worst. When you’re on the hunt, you must clear them properly, low and fast, weapon in a two-hand grip, tracking the muzzle left to right or right to left, depending on the situation, seeking a target. Even fry cooks know that. The two men who had stopped bullets were dressed and armed like professionals who were trained and experienced in making such transitions, and yet they were dead in doorways.
The parlor was poorly lighted by a single lamp with a pleated blue-silk shade, and crowded with heavy Victorian furniture. A pair of chesterfields, wing-back armchairs: things to crouch behind for concealment. No one popped out of hiding to blast away at me, though the metronomic tock-tock-tock of the pendulum in the grandfather clock seemed to be counting off my last seconds.
As in the dining room, the draperies had been drawn shut at all the windows, perhaps to prevent anyone outside from determining the location of the residents.
A wide archway, instead of a door, connected the parlor to the foyer. I found it refreshing to see that no one lay dead on that threshold.
The foyer. Deserted. To the right, the front door was closed. To the left of the archway lay the brightly lighted hall. Opposite the dining room and parlor were three other rooms that I hadn’t explored.
My sense of things was that the action had moved on from the ground floor after the first two men had been shot. I regarded the stairs, hesitating to climb them and leave unsearched rooms behind me.
Overhead, someone said, “Ahwk,” as though violently clearing his throat, and immediately thereafter something thudded to the floor in an upstairs room.
If, as I had every reason to expect, a third dead man had just given up his ghost, the thud wasn’t as loud as it ought to have been. The floors allowed me to walk as quietly as a cat, and they soaked up most of the sound of dead men falling, which suggested that silence favored the Bullocks and that the place had been constructed as both a safe house and a trap.
Cautioning myself that a trap can sometimes spring unexpectedly and catch not the prey but instead the one who set it, I went to the stairs and climbed warily, silently. I glanced back now and then, prepared to discover that I was looking down the barrel of a gun, but I remained alone.
Thirty-one
At the top of the stairs, I looked along a hallway with large paintings on the walls between doorways, of which there were four on each side. No dead guys were tumbled across any of the thresholds.
The first door on the left stood half open, and a lamp glowed in there, but I couldn’t see the entire space, just the foot of a bed and a dresser and a small armchair in a corner. I cleared the doorway and discovered the room unoccupied.
There were an attached bath and a closet, but I didn’t want to investigate them. A hit team didn’t enter a house to hide in closets and behind bathroom doors. An assault required speed and continuous movement—even if, as seemed to be the case here, it started to go wrong.
In the hall again, on my right, the first door stood open wide. Another bedroom. A third large man, dressed like the two downstairs, lying on his back, leaked enough to require that the carpet be replaced. The uniformity of their dress began to seem like stage clothes, costumes, as though they must be members of a weird punk band, musicians who moonlighted as killers.
I won’t go on about how my heart was pounding and my mouth was dry. Been there, described that.
Because there were no shattered mirrors or bullet holes in the walls, no visible damage from any misspent rounds, it appeared that none of the assassins had gotten off a shot. But such incompetence seemed unlikely. I thought I must be missing something, the kind of missed something that would get me shot in the head.
Nevertheless, I moved silently along the hall, toward the second door on the right. A large painting of mountains towering above a lake and splashed through with spectacular light, maybe a print of something by Albert Bierstadt, abruptly disappeared soundlessly up into the wall as if on pneumatic tracks, leaving only the ornate frame. Where the painting had been was now an opening into the room toward which I had been headed. Standing there, aiming a silencer-equipped pistol at my face, Mr. Bullock managed to check himself before he blew me away. He raised his eyebrows and whispered, “Get in here!”
As the painting slid quietly back into place, I stepped to the door, went into another bedroom, and found that Maybelle Bullock was alive, too. She eased the door almost shut, and her husband put a finger to his lips.
I saw that a different painting, perhaps a print of another Bierstadt, hung here, directly behind the one in the hall, and it evidently retracted simultaneously with the other.
Mrs. Bullock held a device I’d never seen before, about the same width as a cell phone and twice as long. A screen occupied the top half, and two rows of buttons were positioned under it. Nothing on the screen but a field of cool blue. She swung it away from the wall that this room shared with the hallway, toward the wall between this room and the next room, as a fairy godmother might gesture with a magic wand and leave the air sparkling in its wake.
On the blue screen, a red form shaped itself out of pixels. Not anything identifiable. Just a shimmering horizontal mass on a field of blue. It twinkled, constantly adjusting around the edges. My guess: We were watching the heat signature of assassin number four as he moved cautiously through the room adjacent to this one.
As Maybelle moved her hand slowly, from
right to left, keeping the red form in the center of the blue screen, tracking it, Deacon stepped to a large painting hung to the left of the bed. This one looked as if it might be a print of something by John Singer Sargent. Deacon aimed the gun at the painting, as if he were an art critic with violent tendencies. His wife pressed a button on the device she held. The artwork vanished up into the wall, leaving only the frame, in which a fourth assassin stood no more than three feet from the muzzle of Mr. Bullock’s pistol. Mr. Bullock fired twice, point-blank, and the hit man dropped out of sight, as if he had stepped through a trap door.
I started to speak, but Mr. Bullock frowned and put a finger to his lips again. Then he put the same finger to his right ear and pressed on something that resembled a hearing aid. I hadn’t noticed it before. A wire ran behind his ear and down his side to an object about the size of a walkie-talkie that was clipped to his belt. He listened for half a minute, pulled the microphone from his ear, and said, “House says no more damn fools inside or out.”
“Who’s House?” I asked, assuming it was a name.
“This here house, son.”
Mrs. Bullock said, “House computer, Oddie. It’s got itself eyes and ears everywhere.”
“Weight sensors, heat sensors, a whole gaggle of sensors,” her husband added.
“So you knew when I got here?”
“We knew,” Mrs. Bullock said, “but we was too busy stayin’ alive to check video and see who you was.”
“Had to figure you for another of them bastards,” Mr. Bullock said. “Sorry if maybe I just about killed you dead.”
“That’s all right, sir.”
“Call me Deke, why don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
Thirty-two
While we waited for the clean-up crew, Maybelle Bullock insisted that we have coffee spiked with Bailey’s. We took it in mugs, in the dining room rather than the kitchen, because the dead man lying half in the dining room hadn’t soiled himself while dying, as had the dead man lying half in the kitchen. The air smelled nicer in the dining room. The Bullocks sat side by side, frequently exchanging little smiles that I presumed to be expressions of approval about how each had performed in the crisis. I sat across the table from them.