by Dean Koontz
He had it pretty good, really. The cheap wine kept him warm, temporarily purged him of self-hatred and remorse, and put him in touch with certain innocent feelings and naive expectations of childhood. Two fat blueberry-scented candles, salvaged from someone else’s garbage and anchored now in a pie pan, filled his sanctuary with a pleasant fragrance and a soft light as cozy as that from an antique Tiffany lamp. The close walls of the packing crate were comforting rather than claustrophobic. The ceaseless chorus of the rain was lulling. But for the candles, perhaps it had been something like this in the sac of fetal membranes: snugly housed, suspended weightless in amniotic fluid, surrounded by the soft liquid roar of Mother’s blood rushing through her veins and arteries, not merely unconcerned about the future but unaware of it.
Even when the ratman pulled aside the hanging rug that served as a door over the only opening in the crate, Sammy was not delivered from his imitation prenatal bliss. Deep down, he knew that he was in trouble, but he was too whacked to be afraid.
The crate was eight feet by six, as large as many walk-in closets. Bearish as he was, the ratman still could have squeezed in across from Sammy without knocking over the candles, but he remained crouched in the doorway, holding back the rug with one arm.
His eyes were different from what they had always been before. Shiny black. Without any whites at all. Pinpoint yellow pupils in the center, glowing. Like distant headlights on the night highway to Hell.
“How’re you doing, Sammy?” the ratman asked in a tone of voice that was uncharacteristically solicitous. “You getting along okay, hmmmmm?”
Though a surfeit of wine had so numbed Sammy Shamroe’s survival instinct that he couldn’t get back in touch with his fear, he knew that he should be afraid. Therefore he remained motionless and watchful, as he might have done if a rattlesnake had slithered into his crate and blocked the only way out.
The ratman said, “Just wanted you to know, I won’t be stopping around for a while. Got new business. Overworked. Got to deal with more urgent matters first. When it’s over, I’ll be exhausted, sleep for a whole day, around the clock.”
Being temporarily fearless did not mean that Sammy had become courageous. He dared not speak.
“Did you know how much this exhausts me, Sammy? No? Thinning out the herd, disposing of the lame and the diseased—it’s no piece of cake, let me tell you.”
When the ratman smiled and shook his head, shining beads of rainwater were flung off his beard. They spattered Sammy.
Even in the comforting womb of his wine haze, Sammy retained enough awareness to be amazed by the ratman’s sudden garrulousness. Yet, as amazing as it was, the huge man’s monologue was curiously reminiscent of something he had heard before, a long time ago in another place, though he could not recall where or when or from whom. It wasn’t the gravelly voice or the words themselves that brought Sammy to the edge of déjà vu, but the tonal quality of the ratman’s revelations, the eerie earnestness, the cadences of his speech.
“Dealing with vermin like you,” the ratman said, “is draining. Believe me. Draining. It’d be so much easier if I could waste each of you the first time we meet, make you spontaneously combust or make your head explode. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
No. Colorful, exciting, interesting for sure, but not nice, Sammy thought, although his fear remained in abeyance.
“But to fulfill my destiny,” the ratman said, “to become what I am required to become, I have to show you my wrath, make you quiver and be humbled before me, make you understand the meaning of your damnation.”
Sammy remembered where he had heard this sort of thing before. Another street person. Maybe eighteen months ago, two years ago, up in Los Angeles. A guy named Mike, had a messiah complex, thought he was chosen by God to make the world pay for its sins, finally went over the top with the concept, knifed three or four people who were lined up outside an art-house theater that was showing a re-released director’s cut of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure with twenty minutes of material never seen in the original version.
“Do you know what I am becoming, Sammy?”
Sammy just clutched his remaining two-liter jug.
“I am becoming the new god,” said the ratman. “A new god is needed. I have been chosen. The old god was too merciful. Things have gotten out of hand. It’s my duty to Become, and having Become, to rule more sternly.”
In the candlelight, the raindrops remaining in the ratman’s hair and eyebrows and beard glimmered as if a woefully misguided artisan had decorated him with jewels in the manner of a Fabergé egg.
“When I deal out these more urgent judgments, and when I’ve had a chance to rest, I’ll be back to see you,” the ratman promised. “I just didn’t want you to think you’d been forgotten. Wouldn’t want you to feel neglected, unappreciated. Poor, poor Sammy. I won’t forget you. That’s not just a promise—it’s the sacred word of the new god.”
Then the ratman worked a malevolent miracle to insure that he was not forgotten even in the thousand-fathom oblivion of a deep wine sea. He blinked, and when his lids popped up again, his eyes were no longer ebony and yellow, were not eyes at all any longer, but were balls of greasy white worms writhing in his sockets. When he opened his mouth, his teeth had become razor-sharp fangs. Venom dripped, a glossy black tongue fluttered like that of a questing serpent, and a violent exhalation erupted from him, reeking of putrefied flesh. His head and body swelled, burst, but didn’t deconstruct into a horde of rats this time. Instead, ratman and clothes were transformed into tens of thousands of black flies that swarmed through the packing crate, buzzing fiercely, batting against Sammy’s face. The thrumming of their wings was so loud that it drowned out even the drone of the pouring rain, and then—
They were gone.
Vanished.
The rug hung heavy and wet over the open section of the crate.
Candleglow flickered and pulsed across the wooden walls.
The air smelled of blueberry-scented wax.
Sammy chugged a couple of long swallows of wine directly from the mouth of the jug, instead of pouring it first into the dirty jelly jar that he had been using. A little of it spilled over his whisker-stubbled chin, but he didn’t care.
He was eager to remain numb, detached. If he had been in touch with his fear during the past few minutes, he would no doubt have peed his pants.
He felt it was also important to remain detached in order to think less emotionally about what the ratman had said. Previously, the creature had spoken little and had never revealed anything of its own motivations or intentions. Now it was spouting all this babble about thinning the herd, judgment, godhood.
It was valuable to know the ratman’s mind was filled with the same crazy stuff that had cluttered up the head of old Mike, stabber of moviegoers. Regardless of his ability to appear out of nowhere and disappear into thin air, in spite of his inhuman eyes and ability to change shapes, all of that god blather made him seem hardly more special than any of the countless heirs of Charles Manson and Richard Ramirez who roamed the world, heeding inner voices, killing for pleasure, and keeping refrigerators filled with the severed heads of their victims. If in some fundamental way he was like the other psychos out there, then even with his special talents he was as vulnerable as they were.
Though functioning in a wine fog, Sammy could see that this new insight might be a useful survival tool. The problem was, he had never been good at survival.
Thinking about the ratman made his head hurt. Hell, the mere prospect of surviving gave him a migraine. Who wanted to survive? And why? Death would only come later if not sooner. Each survival was merely a short-term triumph. In the end, oblivion for everyone. And in the meantime, nothing but pain. To Sammy, it seemed that the only terrible thing about the ratman was not that he killed people but that he apparently liked to make them suffer first, cranked up the terror, poured on the pain, did not remove his victims from this world with kindly despatch.
Sammy tipp
ed the jug and poured wine into the jelly jar that was on the floor, braced between his splayed legs. He raised the glass to his lips. In the glimmering ruby liquid, he sought a glimmerless, peaceful, perfect darkness.
9
Mickey Chan was sitting alone in a back booth, concentrating on his soup.
Connie saw him as soon as she pushed through the front door of the small Chinese restaurant in Newport Beach, and she made her way toward him between black-lacquered chairs and tables with silver-gray tablecloths. A red and gold painted dragon coiled across the ceiling, serpentined around the light fixtures.
If Mickey saw her coming, he pretended to be unaware. He sucked soup from the spoon, then spooned up more, never taking his gaze off the contents of his bowl.
He was small but sinewy, in his late forties, and wore his hair closely cropped. His skin was the shade of antique parchment.
Although he allowed his Caucasian clients to think that he was Chinese, he was actually a Vietnamese refugee who had fled to the States after the fall of Saigon. Rumor had it, he’d been a Saigon homicide detective or an officer in the South Vietnamese Internal Security Agency, which was probably true.
Some said that he’d had a reputation as a real terror in the interrogation room, a man who would resort to any tool or technique to break the will of a suspected criminal or Communist, but Connie doubted those stories. She liked Mickey. He was tough, but he had about him the air of a man who had known great loss and was capable of profound compassion.
As she reached his table, he spoke to her without shifting his attention from the soup: “Good evening, Connie.”
She slid into the other side of the booth. “You’re fixated on that bowl as if the meaning of life is in it.”
“It is,” he said, still spooning.
“It is? Looks like soup to me.”
“The meaning of life can be found in a bowl of soup. Soup always begins with a broth of some kind, which is like the liquid flow of days that makes up our lives.”
“Broth?”
“Sometimes in the broth are noodles, sometimes vegetables, bits of egg white, slivers of chicken or shrimp, mushrooms, perhaps rice.”
Because Mickey would not look at her, Connie found herself staring across the table at his soup almost as intensely as he was.
He said, “Sometimes it is hot, sometimes cool. Sometimes it is meant to be cool, and then it is good even if there’s no slightest warmth in it. But if it’s not meant to be cool, then it will taste bitter, or curdle in the stomach, or both.”
His strong but gentle voice had a hypnotic effect. Enthralled, Connie stared at the placid surface of the soup, oblivious now to everyone else in the restaurant.
“Consider. Before the soup is eaten,” Mickey said, “it has value and purpose. After it is eaten, it is valueless to everyone except to whoever has consumed it. And in fulfilling its purpose, it ceases to exist. Left behind will be only the empty bowl. Which can symbolize either want and need—or the pleasant expectation of other soups to come.”
She waited for him to continue, and only shifted her gaze from his soup when she realized that he was now staring at her. She met his eyes and said, “That’s it?”
“Yes.”
“The meaning of life?”
“All of it.”
She frowned. “I don’t get it.”
He shrugged. “Me neither. I make up this crap as I go along.”
She blinked at him. “You what?”
Grinning, Mickey said, “Well, it’s sort of expected of a Chinese private detective, you see. Pithy sayings, impenetrable philosophical observations, inscrutable proverbs.”
He was not Chinese, nor was his real name Mickey Chan. When he arrived in the US and decided to put his police background to use by becoming a private detective, he had felt that Vietnamese names were too exotic to inspire confidence and too difficult for Westerners to pronounce. And he’d known he couldn’t make a good living solely from clients of Vietnamese heritage. Two of his favorite American things were Mickey Mouse cartoons and Charlie Chan movies, and it made sense to him to have his name legally changed. Because of Disney and Rooney and Mantle and Spillane, Americans liked people named Mickey; and thanks to a lot of old movies, the name Chan was subconsciously associated with investigative genius. Evidently, Mickey had known what he was doing, because he had built a thriving business with a sterling reputation, and now had ten employees.
“You suckered me,” she said, indicating the soup.
“You’re not the first.”
Amused, she said, “If I could pull the right strings, I’d have the courts change your name to Charlie Mouse. See how that works.”
“I’m glad you can still smile,” Mickey said.
A beautiful young waitress with jet-black hair and almond eyes appeared at the table and asked if Connie would like to order dinner.
“Just a bottle of Tsingtao, please,” Connie said. And to Mickey: “I don’t feel much like smiling, if you want to know the truth. You sure as hell ruined my day with that call this morning.”
“Ruined your day? Me?”
“Who else?”
“Maybe a certain gentleman with a Browning and a few grenades?”
“So you heard about that.”
“Who hasn’t? Even in southern California it’s the kind of story that gets on the news ahead of the sports report.”
“On a slow day maybe.”
He finished his soup.
The waitress returned with the beer.
Connie poured the Tsingtao down the side of the chilled pilsner glass to minimize the head, took a sip, and sighed.
“I’m sorry,” Mickey said sincerely “I know how much you wanted to believe you had a family.”
“I did have a family,” she said. “They’re just all gone.”
Between the ages of three and eighteen, Connie had been raised in a series of state institutions and temporary foster homes, each more abysmal than the one before it, requiring her to be tough and to fight back. Because of her personality, she had not appealed to adoptive parents and could not escape by that route. Certain of her character traits, which she saw as strengths, were considered attitude problems by other people. From the youngest age, she had been independent-minded, solemn beyond her years, virtually unable to be a child. To act her age, she literally would have had to act, for she had been an adult in a child’s body.
Until seven months ago, she had not given much thought to the identity of her parents. There seemed to be no percentage in caring. For whatever reason, they had abandoned her as a child, and she had no memory whatsoever of them.
Then one sunny Sunday afternoon, when she went skydiving out of the airfield at Perris, her ripcord jammed. She fell four thousand feet toward brown desert scrub as arid as Hell, with the conviction that she was dead except for the actual dying. Her chute deployed at the last possible moment to allow survival. Although her landing was rough, she was lucky; it resulted in only a sprained ankle, abraded left hand, bruises—and a sudden need to know where she’d come from.
Everyone had to exit this life without a clue as to where they were going, so it seemed essential to know at least something about the entrance.
During off-duty hours, she could have used official channels, contacts, and computers to investigate her past, but she preferred Mickey Chan. She didn’t want her colleagues getting involved with her search, pulling for her and curious—in case she found something she didn’t want to share with them.
As it turned out, what Mickey had learned after six months of prying into official files was not pretty.
When he handed her the report in his stylish Fashion Island office with its 19th-century French art and Biedermeier furniture, he said, “I’ll be in the next room, dictating some letters. Let me know when you’re finished.”
His Asian reticence, the implication that she might need to be alone, alerted her to just how bad the truth was.
According to Mickey’s report, a c
ourt had removed her from the care of her parents because she had suffered repeated severe physical abuse. As punishment for unknown transgressions—perhaps merely for being alive—they beat her, shaved off all of her hair, blindfolded her and tied her and left her in a closet for eighteen hours at a stretch, and broke three of her fingers.
When remanded to the care of the court, she had not yet learned to speak, for her parents had never taught or permitted her to talk.
But speech had come quickly to her, as if she relished the rebellion that the mere act of speaking represented.
However, she never had the opportunity to accuse her mother and father. While fleeing the state to avoid prosecution, they had died in a fiery head-on collision near the California-Arizona border.
Connie read Mickey’s first report with grim fascination, less shaken by its contents than most people would have been because she had been a cop long enough to have seen the likes of it many times—and worse. She did not feel that the hatred directed against her had been earned by her shortcomings or because she had been less lovable than other kids. It was just how the world worked sometimes. Too often. At least she finally understood why, even at the tender age of three, she had been too solemn, too wise beyond her years, too independent-minded, just too damned tough to be the cute and cuddly girl that adoptive parents were seeking.
The abuse must have been worse than the dry language of the report made it sound. For one thing, courts usually tolerated a lot of parental brutality before taking such drastic action. For another— she had blocked all memories of it and of her sister, which was an act of some desperation.
Most children who survived such experiences grew up deeply troubled by their repressed memories and feelings of worthlessness—or even utterly dysfunctional. She was fortunate to be one of the strong ones. She had no doubts about her value as a human being or her specialness as an individual. Though she might have enjoyed being a gentler person, more relaxed, less cynical, quicker to laugh, she nevertheless liked herself and was content in her own way.
Mickey’s report hadn’t contained entirely bad news. Connie learned that she had a sister of whom she’d been unaware. Colleen. Constance Mary and Colleen Marie Gulliver, the former born three minutes before the latter. Identical twins. Both abused, both permanently removed from parental care, eventually sent to different institutions, they had gone on to lead separate lives.
As she sat in the client chair that day a month ago, in front of Mickey’s desk, a shiver of delight had swept along Connie’s spine at the realization that someone existed with whom she shared such a singularly intimate bond. Identical twins. She abruptly understood why she sometimes dreamed of being two people at once and appeared in duplicate in those sleeping fantasies. Though Mickey was still seeking leads on Colleen, Connie dared to hope she was not alone.
But now, a few weeks later, Colleen’s fate was known. She had been adopted, raised in Santa Barbara—and died five years ago at the age of twenty-eight.
That morning, when Connie learned she had lost her sister again, and forever this time, she had known a more intense grief than at any time in her life.
She had not wept.
She seldom did.
Instead, she had dealt with that grief as she dealt with all disappointments, setbacks, and losses: she kept busy, obsessively busy— and she got angry. Poor Harry. He had taken the brunt of her anger all morning without having a clue as to the cause of it. Polite, reasonable, peace-loving, long-suffering Harry. He would never know just how perversely grateful she had been for the chance to chase down the moon-faced perp, James Ordegard. She had been able to direct her rage at someone more deserving of it, and work off the pent-up energy of the grief that she could not release through tears.
Now she drank Tsingtao and said, “This morning, you mentioned photographs.”
The busboy removed the empty soup bowl.
Mickey put a manila envelope on the table. “Are you sure you want to look at them?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“You can never know her. The pictures might bring that home.”
“I’ve already accepted it.”
She opened the envelope. Eight or ten snapshots slid out.
The photos showed Colleen as young as five or six, as old as her mid-twenties, which was nearly as old as she had ever gotten. She wore different clothes from those that Connie had ever worn, styled her hair differently, and was photographed in living rooms and kitchens, on lawns and beaches, that Connie had never seen. But in every fundamental way—height, weight, coloration, facial features, even expressions and unconscious body attitudes—she was Connie’s perfect double.
Connie had the uncanny feeling that she was seeing photos of herself in a life that she could not remember having lived.
“Where did you get these?” she asked Mickey Chan.
“From the Ladbrooks. Dennis and Lorraine Ladbrook, the couple that adopted Colleen.”
Examining the photographs again, Connie was struck by the fact that Colleen was smiling or laughing in every one of them. The few pictures that had ever been taken of Connie as a child were usually institutional group shots with a crowd of other kids. She didn’t have a single photograph of herself in which she was smiling.
“What are the Ladbrooks like?” she asked.
“They’re in business. They work together, own an office-supply store in Santa Barbara. Nice people, I think, quiet and unassuming. They weren’t able to have any children of their own, and they adored Colleen.”