by Dean Koontz
Almost reverently, he pulls back the chenille bedspread. The blanket. The top sheet. He stares at the bottom sheet on which she slept last night, and the pillows on which her delicate head rested.
His heart swells with affection, tenderness.
He puts one hand against the sheet, slides it back and forth, back and forth, feeling the fabric on which her young body has so recently lain.
Every night he will tuck her into bed. She will press her small mouth to his cheek, such warm little kisses, and her breath will have the sweet peppermint aroma of toothpaste.
He bends down to smell the sheets.
“Emily,” he says softly.
Oh, how he longs to be her father and to look into those dark yet limpid eyes, those huge and adoring eyes.
With a sigh, he returns to Charlotte’s side of the room. He drops the silver-framed photograph of his family on her bed, and he studies the kept creatures housed on the bookless bookshelves.
Some of the wild things watch him.
He begins with the gerbil. When he unlatches the door and reaches into its cage, the timid creature cowers in a far corner, paralyzed with fear, sensing his intent. He seizes it, withdraws it from the cage. Although it tries to squirm free, he grips its body firmly in his right hand, its head in his left, and wrenches sharply, snapping its neck. A brittle, dry sound. Its cry is shrill but brief.
He throws the dead gerbil on the brightly colored bedspread.
This will be the beginning of Charlotte’s discipline.
She will hate him for it. But only for a while.
Eventually she will realize that these are unsuitable pets for a little girl. Symbols of evil. Reptiles, rodents, beetles. The sort of creatures witches use as their familiars, to communicate between them and Satan.
He has learned all about witches’ familiars from horror movies. If there was a cat in the house he would kill it as well, without hesitation, because sometimes they are cute and innocent, just cats and nothing more, but sometimes they are the very spawn of Hell. By inviting such creatures into your home, you risk inviting the devil himself.
One day Charlotte will understand. And be grateful.
Eventually she will love him.
They will all love him.
He will be a good husband and father.
Much smaller than the gerbil, the frightened mouse quivers in his fist, its tail hanging below his clenched fingers, only its head protruding above. It empties its bladder. He grimaces at the warm dampness and, in disgust, squeezes with all his strength, crushing the life out of the filthy little beast.
He tosses it onto the bed beside the dead gerbil.
The harmless garden snake in the glass terrarium makes no effort to slither away from him. He holds it by the tail and snaps it as if it is a whip, snaps it again, then lashes it hard against the wall, again, and a third time. When he dangles it before his face, it is entirely limp, and he sees that its skull is crushed.
He coils it next to the gerbil and the mouse.
The beetle and the turtle make satisfying crunching sounds when he stomps them under the heel of his shoe. He arranges their oozing remains on the bedspread.
Only the lizard escapes him. When he slides the lid partway off its terrarium and reaches in for it, the chameleon scampers up his arm, quicker than the eye, and leaps off his shoulder. He spins around, searching for it, and sees it on the nearby vanity, where it skitters between a hairbrush and a comb, onto a jewelry box. There it freezes and begins to change color to match its background, but when he tries to snatch it up, it darts away, off the dresser, onto the floor, across the room, under Emily’s bed, out of sight.
He decides to let it go.
This might be for the best. When Paige and the girls get home, the four of them will search for it together. When they find it, he will kill it in front of Charlotte or perhaps require her to kill it herself. That will be a good lesson. Thereafter, she will bring no more inappropriate pets into the Stillwater house.
3
In the parking lot outside of the three-story, Spanish-style business complex where Dr. Guthridge had his offices, while a gusty wind harried dead leaves across the pavement, Marty sat in his car and read the article about himself in People. Two photographs and a page’s worth of prose were spread over three pages of the magazine. At least for the few minutes he took to read the piece, all of his other worries were forgotten.
The black headline made him flinch even though he knew what it would be—MR. MURDER—but he was equally embarrassed by the subhead in smaller letters: IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, MYSTERY NOVELIST MARTIN STILLWATER SEES DARKNESS AND EVIL WHERE OTHERS SEE ONLY SUNSHINE.
He felt it portrayed him as a brooding pessimist who dressed entirely in black and lurked on beaches and among the palm trees, glowering at anyone who dared to have fun, tediously expounding on the inherent vileness of the human species. At best it implied he was a theatrical phony costuming himself in what he thought was the most commercial image for a mystery novelist.
Possibly he was over-reacting. Paige would tell him that he was too sensitive about these things. That was what she always said, and she usually made him feel better, whether he could bring himself to believe her or not.
He examined the photographs before reading the piece.
In the first and largest picture, he was standing in the yard behind the house, against a backdrop of trees and twilight sky. He looked demented.
The photographer, Ben Walenko, had been given instructions to induce Marty into a pose deemed fitting for a mystery novelist, so he had come with props he assumed Marty would brandish with suitable expressions of malevolent intent: an axe, an enormous knife, an ice pick, and a gun. When Marty politely declined to use the props and also refused to wear a trenchcoat with the collar turned up and a fedora pulled low on his forehead, the photographer agreed it was ludicrous for an adult to play dress-up, and suggested they avoid the usual clichés in favor of shots portraying him simply as a writer and an ordinary human being.
Now it was obvious that Walenko had been clever enough to get what he wanted without props, after lulling his subject into a false sense of security. The backyard had seemed an innocuous setting. However, through a combination of the deep shadows of dusk, looming trees, ominous clouds backlit by the final somber light of day, the strategic placement of studio lights, and an extreme camera angle, the photographer succeeded in making Marty appear weird. Furthermore, of the twenty exposures taken in the backyard, the editors had chosen the worst: Marty was squinting; his features were distorted; the photographer’s lights were reflected in his slitted eyes, which seemed to be glowing like the eyes of a zombie.
The second photograph was taken in his study. He was sitting at his desk, facing the camera. He was recognizably himself in this one, though by now he preferred not to be recognizable, for it seemed that the only way he could maintain a shred of dignity was to have his true appearance remain a mystery; a combination of shadows and the peculiar light of the stained-glass lamp, even in a black-and-white shot, made him resemble a Gypsy fortuneteller who had glimpsed a portent of disaster in his crystal ball.
He was convinced that a lot of the modern world’s problems could be attributed to the popular media’s saturation of society and its tendency not merely to simplify all issues to the point of absurdity but to confuse fiction and reality. Television news emphasized dramatic footage over facts, sensationalism over substance, seeking ratings with the same tools employed by the producers of prime-time cop and courtroom dramas. Documentaries about real historical figures had become “docudramas” in which accurate details of famous lives and events were relentlessly subordinated to entertainment values or even to the personal fantasies of the show’s creators, grossly distorting the past. Patent medicines were sold in TV commercials by performers who also played doctors in highly rated programs, as if they had in fact graduated from Harvard Medical School instead of merely having attended an acting class or two. Politicians made cameo appearan
ces on episodes of situation comedies. Actors in those comedies appeared at political rallies. Not long ago the Vice-President of the United States engaged in a protracted argument with a fictional television reporter from a sitcom. The public confused actors and politicians with the roles they played. A mystery writer was supposed to be not merely like a character in one of his books but like the cartoonish archetype of the most common character in the entire genre. And year by troubled year, fewer people were able to think clearly about important issues or separate fantasy from reality.
Marty had been determined not to contribute to that sickness, but he had been suckered. Now he was fixed in the public mind as Martin Stillwater, creepy and mysterious author of creepy murder mysteries, preoccupied with the dark side of life, as brooding and strange as any of the characters about whom he wrote.
Sooner or later a disturbed citizen, having confused Marty’s manipulation of fictional people in novels for the manipulation of actual people in real life, would arrive at his house in an old van decorated with signs accusing him of having killed John Lennon, John Kennedy, Rick Nelson, and God-alone-knew-who-else, even though he was an infant when Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger on Kennedy (or when seventeen thousand and thirty-seven homosexual conspirators pulled the trigger, if you believed Oliver Stone’s movie). Something similar had happened to Stephen King, hadn’t it? And Salman Rushdie had sure experienced a few years as suspenseful as any endured by a character in a Robert Ludlum extravaganza.
Chagrined by the bizarre image the magazine had given him, flushed with embarrassment, Marty surveyed the parking lot to be sure no one was watching him as he read about himself. A couple of people were going to and from their cars, but they were paying no attention to him.
Clouds had crept into the previously sunny day. The wind spun dead leaves into a miniature tornado that danced across an empty expanse of blacktop.
He read the article, punctuating it with sighs and mutters. Although it contained a few minor errors, the text was generally factual. But the spin on it matched the photographs. Spooky old Marty Stillwater. What a dour and gloomy guy. Sees a criminal’s wicked grin behind every smile. Works in a dimly lighted office, almost dark, and says he’s just trying to reduce the glare on the computer screen (wink, wink).
His refusal to allow Charlotte and Emily to be photographed, based upon a desire to protect their privacy and to guard against their being teased by schoolmates, was interpreted as a fear of kidnappers lurking under every bush. After all, he had written a novel about a kidnapping a few years ago.
Paige, “as pretty and cerebral as a Martin Stillwater heroine, ” was said to be a “psychologist whose own job requires her to probe into the darkest secrets of her patients,” as if she was engaged not in the counseling of children troubled by their parents’ divorces or the death of a loved one but in the deep analysis of the era’s most savage serial killers.
“Spooky old Paige Stillwater,” he said aloud. “Well, why else would she have married me if she wasn’t already a little weird?”
He told himself he was over-reacting.
Closing the magazine, he said, “Thank God I didn’t let the girls participate. They’d have come out of it looking like the children in ‘The Addams Family.’ ”
Again he told himself that he was over-reacting, but his mood didn’t improve. He felt violated, trivialized; and the fact that he was talking aloud to himself seemed, annoyingly, to validate his new national reputation as an amusing eccentric.
He twisted the key in the ignition, started the engine.
As he drove across the parking lot toward the busy street, Marty was troubled by the feeling that his life had taken more than merely a temporary turn for the worse with the fugue on Saturday, that the magazine article was yet another signpost on this new dark route, and that he would travel a long distance on rough pavement before rediscovering the smooth highway that he had lost.
A whirlwind of leaves burst over the car, startling him. The dry foliage rasped across the hood and roof, like the claws of a beast determined to get inside.
4
Hunger overcomes him. He has not slept since Friday night, has driven across half the country at high speed, in bad weather more than not, and has experienced an exciting and emotional hour and a half in the Stillwater house, confronting his destiny. His stores of energy are depleted. He is shaky and weak-kneed.
In the kitchen he raids the refrigerator, piling food on the oak breakfast table. He consumes several slices of Swiss cheese, half a loaf of bread, a few pickles, the better part of a pound of bacon, mixing it all together without actually bothering to make sandwiches, a bite of this and a bite of that, chewing the bacon raw because he doesn’t want to waste time cooking it, eating fast and with single-minded fixation on the feast, ravenous, oblivious of manners, urgently washing down everything with big swallows of cold beer that foams over his chin. There is so much he wants to do before his wife and kids return home, and he doesn’t know quite when to expect them. The fatty meat is cloying, so periodically he dips into a wide-mouth jar of mayonnaise and scoops out thick wads of the stuff, sucking it off his fingers to lubricate a mouthful of food that he finds hard to swallow even with the aid of another bottle of Corona. He concludes his meal with two thick slices of chocolate cake, washing those down with beer as well, whereafter he hastily cleans up the mess with paper towels and washes his hands at the sink.
He is revitalized.
With the silver-framed photograph in hand, he returns to the second floor, taking the stairs two at a time. He proceeds to the master bedroom, where he clicks on both nightstand lamps.
For a while he stares at the king-size bed, excited by the prospect of having sex with Paige. Making love. When it is done with someone for whom you truly care, it is called “making love.”
He truly cares for her.
He must care.
After all, she is his wife.
He knows that her face is good, excellent, with a full mouth and fine bone structure and laughing eyes, but he can’t tell much about her body from the photograph. He imagines that her breasts are full, belly flat, legs long and shapely, and he is eager to lie with her, deep inside of her.
At the dresser, he opens drawers until he finds her lingerie. He caresses a half-slip, the smooth cups of a brassiere, a lace-trimmed camisole. He removes a pair of silky panties from the drawer and rubs his face with them, breathing deeply while repeatedly whispering her name.
Making love will be unimaginably different from the sweaty sex he has known with sluts picked up in bars, because those experiences have always left him feeling empty, alienated, frustrated that his desperate need for true intimacy is unfulfilled. Frustration fosters anger; anger leads to hatred; hatred generates violence—and violence sometimes soothes. But that pattern will not apply when he makes love to Paige, for he belongs in her arms as he has belonged in no others. With her, his need will be satisfied every bit as much as will his desire. Together, they will achieve a union beyond anything he can imagine, perfect oneness, bliss, spiritual as well as physical consummation, all of which he has seen in countless movies, bodies bathed in golden light, ecstasy, a fierce intensity of pleasure possible only in the presence of love. Afterward, he will not have to kill her because then they will be as one, two hearts beating in harmony, no reason for killing anyone, transcendent, all needs gloriously satisfied.
The prospect of romance leaves him almost breathless.
“I will make you so happy, Paige,” he promises her picture.
Realizing he hasn’t bathed since Saturday, wanting to be clean for her, he returns her silken panties to the stack from which he had plucked them, closes the dresser drawer, and goes into his bathroom to shower.
He strips out of the clothes he took from the motorhome closet of the white-haired retiree, Jack, in Oklahoma on Sunday, hardly twenty-four hours ago. After wadding each garment into a tight ball, he stuffs it into a brass wastebasket.
The shower stall is spacious, and the water is wonderfully hot. He works up a heavy lather with the bar of soap, and soon the clouds of steam are laden with an almost intoxicating floral aroma.
After drying off on a yellow towel, he searches bathroom drawers until he finds his toiletries. He uses a roll-on deodorant and then combs his wet hair straight back from his forehead to let it dry naturally. He shaves with an electric razor, splashes on some lime-scented cologne, and brushes his teeth.
He feels like a new man.
In his half of the large walk-in closet, he selects a pair of cotton briefs, blue jeans, a blue-and-black-checkered flannel shirt, athletic socks, and a pair of Nikes. Everything fits perfectly.
It feels so good to be home.
5
Paige stood at one of the windows and watched the gray clouds roll in from the west, driven by a Pacific wind. As they came, the earth below them darkened, and sunmantled buildings put on cloaks of shadows.
The inner sanctum of her three-room, sixth-floor office suite had two large panes of glass that provided an uninspiring view of a freeway, a shopping center, and the jammed-together roofs of housing tracts that receded across Orange County apparently to infinity. She would have enjoyed a panoramic ocean vista or a window on a lushly planted courtyard, but that would have meant higher rent, which had been out of the question during the early years of Marty’s writing career when she’d been their primary breadwinner.
Now, in spite of his growing success and impressive income, obligating herself to a pricier lease at a new location was still imprudent. Even a prospering literary career was an uncertain living. The owner of a fresh-produce store, when ill, had employees who would continue to sell oranges and apples in his absence, but if Marty became ill, the entire enterprise screeched to a halt.
And Marty was ill. Perhaps seriously.
No, she wouldn’t think about that. They knew nothing for sure. It was more like the old Paige, the pre-Marty Paige, to worry about mere possibilities instead of about only what was already fact.