by Dean Koontz
Snakes thin as whips, snakes thick and muscular, black snakes and green, yellow and brown, plain and patterned, red-eyed, yellow-eyed, some hooded like cobras, watchful and grinning, supple tongues fluttering, hissing, hissing. Had to be dreaming. Hallucinating. A big blacksnake, at least four feet long, bit him, oh Jesus, struck at the back of his left hand, sinking its fangs deep, blood brimming, and still it might have been a dream, nightmare, except for the pain.
He had never felt pain in a dream, and certainly not like this. A sharp stinging filled his left hand, and then a sharper stabbing agony shot like an electrical charge through his wrist and all the way along his forearm to his elbow.
Not a dream. This was happening. Somehow. But where had they come from? Where?
They were all over him, sixty or eighty of them, slithering. Another one struck at him, sank fangs through his shirt sleeve and pierced his left forearm, tripling the pain in it. Another bit through his sock, raked teeth down his ankle.
He scrambled to his feet, and the snake that had bitten his arm fell away, as did the one at his ankle, but the one with its fangs through his left hand hung fast, as if it had stapled itself to him. He grabbed it, tried to jerk it loose. The flash of pain was so intense, white-hot, that he almost passed out, and still the snake was clamped tight to his bleeding hand.
A turmoil of snakes hissed and coiled around him. He didn’t see any rattlers at a glance, or hear them. He had too little knowledge to identify the other species, wasn’t sure which were poisonous, or even if any of them were, including the ones that had already bitten him. Poisonous or not, more of them were going to bite if he didn’t move fast.
He snatched a meat cleaver from a wall rack of knives. When he slammed his left arm down on the nearest counter, the relentless blacksnake flopped full-length across the tile counter top. Ricky swung the cleaver high, brought it down, chopped through the snake, and the steel blade rang off the ceramic surface underneath.
The hateful-looking head still held fast to his hand, trailing only a few inches of the black body, and the glittering eyes seemed td be watching him, alive. Ricky dropped the cleaver and attempted to pry open the serpent’s mouth, spring its long curved teeth out of his flesh. He shouted and cursed, furious with pain, kept prying, but it was no use.
The snakes on the floor were agitated by his shouting.
He plunged toward the archway between the kitchen and the hall, kicking snakes out of his way before they could coil and spring at him. Some were already coiled, and they struck, but his heavy, loose-fitting khaki pants foiled them.
He was afraid they would slither over his shoes, under a pants cuff, up and under one of the legs of his khakis. But he reached the hall safely.
The snakes were behind him and not pursuing. Two tarantulas had fallen out of the snack cabinet into the herpetological nightmare on the floor, and the snakes were fighting over them. Frantically kicking arachnid legs vanished under rippling scales.
Thump!
Ricky jumped in surprise.
Thump!
Until now he hadn’t associated the strange noise, which had plagued him earlier in the evening, with the spiders and snakes.
Thump!
Thump!
Someone had been playing games with him then, but this was not a game any more. This was deadly serious. Impossible, as fantastic as anything in a dream, but serious.
Thump!
Ricky couldn’t pinpoint the source of the pounding or even tell for sure if it came from above or below him. Windows reverberated, and echoes of each blow vibrated hollowly in the walls. He sensed that something was coming, worse than spiders or snakes, something he did not want to encounter.
Gasping, with the head of the blacksnake still dangling from his left hand, Ricky turned away from the kitchen toward the front door at the end of the hall.
His twice-bitten arm throbbed horribly with each beat of his trip-hammering heart. No good, dear Jesus, a racing heart spread the poison faster, if there was any poison. What he had to do was calm down, take deep slow breaths, walk instead of run, go to a neighbor’s house, call 911, and get emergency medical attention. THUMP!
He could have used the telephone in his bedroom, but he didn’t want to go in there. He didn’t trust his own house any more, which was nuts, yes, crazy, but he felt the place had come alive and turned against him. THUMP, THUMP, THUMP!
The house shook as if riding the back of a bucking earthquake, almost knocking him down. He staggered sideways, bounced against the wall.
The ceramic statue of the Holy Virgin toppled off the hall table that he had set up as a shrine like all of the shrines his mother had kept in her home. Since being gutshot, he had been reduced by fear to his mother’s choice of armor against the cruelties of the world. The statue crashed to the floor, shattered at his feet.
The heavy red-glass container with the votive candle bounced on the table, causing goblin shadows to dance across the wall and ceiling.
THUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMP!
Ricky was two steps from the front door when the oak flooring creaked ominously, pushed upward, and cracked almost as loudly as a thunderclap. He stumbled backward.
Something smashed out of the crawlspace under the bungalow, shattering the floor as if it were an eggshell. For a moment the blizzard of dust and splinters and jagged boards made it impossible to glimpse what had been born into the hallway.
Then Ricky saw a man in the hole, feet planted in the earth about eighteen inches under the floor of the house. In spite of standing below Ricky, the guy loomed, immense and threatening. His untamed hair and beard were tangled and dirty, and the visible portions of his face were grossly scarred. His black raincoat billowed like a cape around him as a draft whistled out of the crawlspace and up through the broken boards.
Ricky knew he was looking at the vagrant who had appeared to Harry out of a whirlwind. Everything about him fit the description—except his eyes.
When he glimpsed those grotesque eyes, Ricky froze midst the fragments of the Holy Virgin, paralyzed by fear and by the certainty that he had gone mad. Even if he had kept backing away or had turned and tried to run for the rear door, he would not have escaped, for the vagrant clambered out of the hole and into the hall as lightning-quick as any striking serpent. He seized Ricky, swept him off the floor with such unhuman power that any resistance was pointless, and slammed him against the wall hard enough to crack the plaster and his spine.
Face to face, washed by the vagrant’s foul breath, Ricky gazed into those eyes and was too terrified to scream. They were not the pools of blood that Harry had described. They were not really eyes at all. Nestled in the deep sockets were two snake heads, two small yellow eyes in each, forked tongues fluttering.
Why me? Ricky wondered.
As if they were a pair of jack-in-the-box fright figures, the snakes sprang from the vagrant’s sockets and bit Ricky’s face.
7
Between Laguna Beach and Dana Point, Harry drove so fast that even Connie, lover of speed and risk-taking, braced herself and made wordless noises of dismay when he took some of the turns too sharply. They were in his own car, not a department sedan, so he didn’t have a detachable emergency beacon to stick on the roof. He didn’t have a siren either; however, the coast highway was not heavily used at ten-thirty on a Tuesday night, and by pounding the horn and flashing the headlights, he was able to clear a way through what little obstructive traffic he encountered.
“Maybe we should call Ricky, warn him,” she said, when they were still in south Laguna.
“Don’t have a car phone.”
“Stop at a service station, convenience store, somewhere.”
“Can’t waste the time. I figure his phone won’t work anyway.”
“Why won’t it?”
“Not unless Ticktock wants it to work.”
They shot up a hill, rounded a curve too fast. The rear tires dug up gravel from the shoulder of the highway, sprayed it against the undercarriag
e and fuel tank. The right rear bumper kissed a metal guardrail, and then they were back on the pavement, rocketing onward without having braked.
“So let’s call Dana Point Police,” she said.
“The way we’re moving, if we don’t stop to call, we’ll be there before they could make it.”
“We might be able to use the backup.”
“Won’t need backup if we’re too damned late and Ricky’s dead when we get there.”
Harry was sick with apprehension and furious with himself. He had endangered Ricky by going to him earlier in the day. He couldn’t have known the heap of trouble he was bringing down on his old friend at the time, but later he should have realized Ricky was a target when Ticktock had promised first everything and everyone you love.
Sometimes it was hard for a man to admit he loved another man, even in a brotherly way. He and Ricky Estefan had been partners, through some tight scrapes together. They were still friends, and Harry loved him. It was that simple. But the American tradition of macho self-reliance mitigated against admitting as much.
Bullshit, Harry thought angrily.
The truth was, he found it difficult to admit he loved anyone, male or female, even his parents, because love was so damned messy. It entailed obligations, commitments, entanglements, the sharing of emotions. When you admitted to loving people, you had to let them into your life in a more major way, and they brought with them all of their untidy habits, indiscriminate tastes, muddled opinions, and disorganized attitudes.
As they roared across the Dana Point city line, the muffler clanging against a bump in the road, Harry said, “Jesus, sometimes I’m an idiot.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Connie said.
“A really screwed-up specimen.”
“We’re still in familiar territory.”
He had only one excuse for not realizing that Ricky would become a target: since the fire at his condo less than three hours ago, he had been reacting instead of acting. He’d had no other option. Events had moved so fast, and were so weird, one piece of strangeness piled atop another, that he hadn’t time to think. A poor excuse, but he clung to it.
He didn’t even know how to think about bizarre crap like this. Deductive reasoning, every detective’s most useful tool, was not adequate to deal with the supernatural. He’d been trying inductive reasoning, which was how he’d come up with the theory of a sociopath with paranormal powers. But he wasn’t good at it because inductive reasoning seemed, to him, the next thing to intuition, and intuition was so illogical. He liked hard evidence, sound premises, logical deductions, and neat conclusions tied up in ribbons and bows.
As they turned the corner into Ricky’s street, Connie said, “What the hell?”
Harry glanced at her.
She was staring into her cupped hand.
“What?” he asked.
Something was cradled in her palm. Voice quavering, she said, “I didn’t have this a second ago, where the hell did it come from?”
“What is it?”
She held it up for him to see as he pulled under the streetlamp in front of Ricky’s house. The head of a ceramic figurine. Broken off at the neck.
Scraping the tires against the curb, he braked to a hard stop, and his safety harness jerked tight across his chest.
She said, “It was like my hand snapped shut, spasmed shut, and this was in it, out of nowhere, for God’s sake.”
Harry recognized it. The head of the Virgin Mary that had been at the center of the shrine on Ricky Estefan’s hall table.
Overcome by dark expectations, Harry threw open the door and got out of the car. He pulled his gun.
The street was peaceful. Lights glowed warmly in most of the houses, including Ricky’s. Music from a neighbor’s stereo drifted on the cool air, so faint he could not quite identify the tune. The breeze whispered and softly clattered in the fronds of the big date palms in Ricky’s front yard.
Nothing to worry about, the breeze seemed to say, all is calm here, all is right with this place.
Nevertheless, he kept his revolver in hand.
He hurried up the front walk, through the night shadows of the palm trees, onto the bougainvillaea-draped porch. He was aware that Connie was right behind him and that she also had drawn her weapon.
Let Ricky be alive, he thought fervently, please let him be alive.
That was as close to prayer as he had gotten in many years.
Behind the screen door, the front door was ajar. A narrow wedge of light projected the pattern of the screen onto the porch floor.
Although he thought no one noticed and would have been mortified to know that his fear was obvious, Ricky had been obsessive about security ever since he’d been shot. He kept everything locked tight. A door standing open even an inch or two was a bad sign.
Harry tried to survey the foyer through the gap between the door and the jamb. With the screen door in the way, he couldn’t get close enough to the crack to see anything.
Drapes blocked the windows flanking the door. They were tightly drawn, overlapping at the center.
Harry glanced at Connie.
With her revolver she indicated the front entrance.
Ordinarily they might have split up, Connie going around to cover the back while Harry took the front. But they weren’t trying to keep the perp from getting away, because this was one bastard who couldn’t be cornered, subdued, and cuffed. They were just trying to stay alive, and to keep Ricky alive if it was not already too late for him.
Harry nodded and cautiously eased open the screen door. Hinges squeaked. The closure spring sang a long, low swamp-insect note.
He hoped to be silent, but when the outer door defeated him, he put one hand on the inner door and pushed it, intending to go in low and fast. It swung to the right, and he shouldered through the widening gap. The door bumped against something and stopped before there was enough of an opening. He shoved it. Cracking. Scraping. A hard clatter. The door swung all the way open, pushing debris of some nature out of the way, and Harry burst inside so aggressively that he almost plunged through the hole in the hallway floor.
He was reminded of the shattered corridor in the building in Laguna, above the restaurant. If a grenade had done this damage, however, it had exploded in the crawlspace under the bungalow. The blast had driven joists, insulation, and floorboards upward into the hallway. But he could detect none of the charred, chemical odor of a bomb.
The overhead foyer light shone down onto the bare earth below the smashed oak flooring and sub-flooring. Standing perilously near the edge of the shrine table, the votive candle in the squat red glass threw off fluttering pennants of light and shadow.
Halfway back the hall, the left-hand wall was spattered with blood, not buckets of it but enough to signify mortal combat. On the floor under the bloodstains, close against the wall, lay the body of a man, twisted into such an unnatural posture that the fact of death was grimly obvious at a glance.
Harry could see just enough of the corpse to know beyond a doubt that it was Ricky. Never had he felt so sick at heart. A coldness rose in the pit of his stomach, and his legs grew weak.
As Harry moved around the hole in the floor, Connie entered the house after him. She saw the body, said nothing, but gestured toward the living-room arch.
Habitual police procedure had tremendous appeal for Harry at the moment, even if it was pointless to search for the killer in this instance. Ticktock, whatever manner of creature he was, would not be cowering in a corner or clambering out a back window, not when he could vanish in a whirlwind or a pillar of fire. And what good were guns against him, even if he could be found? Nonetheless, it was calming to proceed as if they were the first to arrive at an ordinary crime scene; order was imposed on chaos through policy, method, custom, and ritual.
Just inside the living-room archway and to the left lay a pile of dark mud, an eighth of a ton if there was an ounce. He would have thought that it had come from under the house,
geysering up with the explosion, except that no mud was splattered in the foyer or hallway. It was as if someone had carefully carried the mud into the house in buckets and heaped it on the living-room carpet.
Curious as it was, Harry gave the mud only a cursory glance before continuing across the living room. Later there would be time to ponder it at length.
They searched the two baths and bedrooms, but found only a fat tarantula. Harry was so startled by the spider, he almost squeezed off a shot. If it had run toward him instead of out of sight under a dresser, he might have blown it to bits before realizing what it was.
Southern California, a desert before man had brought in water and made larger areas of it habitable, was a perfect breeding ground for tarantulas, but they kept to undeveloped canyons and scrublands. Though fearsome in appearance, they were shy creatures, living most of their lives underground, rarely surfacing outside of the mating season. Dana Point, or this part of it at least, was too civilized to be of interest to tarantulas, and Harry wondered how one had found its way into the heart of the town, where it was as out of place as a tiger would have been.
Silently they retraced their route through the house, into the foyer, the hall, then moved past the body. A quick glance confirmed that Ricky was far beyond help. Fragments of the ceramic religious statue clinked underfoot.
The kitchen was full of snakes.
“Oh shit,” Connie said.
One snake was just inside the archway. Two more were questing among the chair and table legs. Most were at the far side of the room, a tangled mass of squirming, serpentine coils, no fewer than thirty or forty, perhaps half again as many. Several seemed to be feeding on something.
Two more tarantulas were scuttling along a white tile counter, near the edge, keeping a watch on the teeming serpents below.
“What the hell happened here?” Harry wondered, and was not surprised to hear a tremor in his voice.
The snakes began to notice Harry and Connie. Most of them were disinterested, but a few slithered forth from the churning mass to investigate.
A pocket door separated the kitchen from the hall. Harry quickly slid it shut.
They checked the garage. Ricky’s car. A damp spot on the concrete where the roof had leaked earlier in the day, and a puddle that had not entirely evaporated. Nothing else.
Back in the hallway, Harry finally knelt beside the body of his friend. He had delayed the dreaded examination as long as possible.
Connie said, “I’ll see if there’s a bedroom phone.”
Alarmed, he looked up at her. “Phone? No, for God’s sake, don’t even think about it.”
“We’ve gotta put in a homicide call.”
“Listen,” he said, checking his wristwatch, “it’s going on eleven o’clock already. If we report this, we’re going to be tied up here for hours.”
“But—”
“We don’t have the time to waste. I don’t see how we’re ever going to find this Ticktock before sunrise. We don’t seem to have a chance in hell. Even if we find him, I don’t know how we could deal with him. But we’d be foolish not to try, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, you’re right. I don’t just want to sit around waiting to be whacked.”
“Okay then,” he said. “Forget the phone.”
“I’ll just… I’ll wait for you.”
“Watch out for snakes,” he said as she moved up the hall.
He turned his attention to Ricky.
The condition of the corpse was even worse than he anticipated. He saw the snake head fixed by deep-sunk fangs to Ricky’s left hand, and he shivered. Pairs of small holes on the face might have been bite marks. Both arms were bent backward at the elbows; the bones were not just broken but pulverized. Ricky Estefan was so battered that it was difficult to specify one injury as the cause of death; however, if he had not been dead when his head had been wrenched a hundred and eighty degrees around on his shoulders, he had surely died in that savage moment. His neck was torn and bruised, his head lolled loosely, and his chin rested between his shoulder blades.
His eyes were gone.
“Harry?” Connie called.
Staring into the dead man’s empty eye sockets, Harry was unable to answer her. His mouth was dry, and his voice caught like a burr in his throat.
“Harry, you better look at this.”
He had seen enough of what had been done to Ricky, too much. His anger at Ticktock was exceeded only by his fury with himself.
He rose from the body, turned, and caught sight of himself in the silver-leafed mirror above the shrine table. He was ashen. He looked as dead as the man on the floor. A part of him had died when he’d seen the body; he felt diminished.
When he met his own eyes, he had to look away from the terror, confusion, and primitive rage that he saw in them. The man in the mirror was not the Harry Lyon he knew—or wanted to be.