by Dean Koontz
harder. But the smells keep coming. He can’t not smell them.
The ratman is real. He’s real.
At last the fat man returns with the strange bottle and a bag for the stinky man—and with a plate heaped with scraps.
Wagging his tail, shivering, he thinks the scraps are for him, but he doesn’t want to be too bold, doesn’t want to go for the scraps and then they aren’t for him and then the fat man takes a kick at him or something. He waits. He whines so the fat man won’t forget about him. Then the fat man puts the plate down, which means the scraps are for him, and this is good, this is very good, oh, this is the best.
He slinks up to the plate, snatches at the food. Ham. Beef. Chunks of bread soaked in gravy. Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.
The fat man squats down, wants to pet him, scratch behind his ears, so he lets that happen though he’s a little spooked. Some people, they tease you with food, hold it out to you, give it to you, make like they want to pet you, then they swat you on the nose or kick you or worse.
Once he remembers some boys who had food for him, laughing boys, happy boys. Pieces of meat. Hand-feeding him. Nice boys. All of them petting him, scratching behind his ears. He sniffed them, smelled nothing wrong. Licked their hands. Happy boys, smelling like summer sun, sand, sea salt. He stood on his hind legs, and he chased his tail, and he fell over his own feet—all to make them laugh, please them. And they did laugh. They wrestled with him. He even rolled on his back. Exposed his belly. Let them rub his belly. Nice boys. Maybe one of them would take him home, feed him every day. Then they grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, and one of them had fire on a little stick, and they were trying to light his fur. He squirmed, squealed, whined, tried to get free. The fire stick went out. They lit another one. He could have bit at them. But that would have been bad. He was a good dog. Good. He smelled burnt fur but didn’t quite catch fire, so they had to light another fire stick, and then he got away. He ran out of their reach. Looked back at them. Laughing boys. Smelling of sun, sand, and sea salt. Happy boys. Pointing at him and laughing.
Most people are nice but others are not nice. Sometimes he can smell the not-nice ones right away. They smell… like cold things… like ice… like winter metal… like the sea when it’s gray and no sun and people all gone from the beach. But other times, the not-nice people smell just like the nice ones. People are the most interesting things in the world. They are also the scariest.
The fat man behind the food place is a nice one. No hitting on the nose. No kicking. No fire. Just good food, yes yes yes yes, and a nice laugh when you lick his hands.
Finally the fat man makes it clear that there is no more food right now. You stand on your hind feet, you whine, whimper, roll over and expose your belly, sit up and beg, do your little dance in a circle, tilt your head, wag wag wag wag your tail, shake your head and flap your ears, do all your little food-getting tricks, but you can’t get anything more out of him. He goes inside, closes the door.
Well, you are full. Don’t need more food.
Doesn’t mean you can’t want more.
So wait anyway. At the door.
He’s a nice man. He’ll come back. How can he forget you, your little dance and wagging tail and begging whine?
Wait.
Wait.
Wait. Wait.
Gradually he remembers that he was doing something interesting when he came upon the fat man with the food. But what?
Interesting…
Then he remembers: the stinky man.
The strange stinky man is at the far end of the alley, at the corner, sitting on the ground between two shrubs, his back against the wall of the food place. He is eating out of a bag, drinking out of a big bottle. Coffee smell. Food.
Food.
He trots toward the stinky man because maybe he can get some more to eat, but then he stops because he suddenly smells the bad thing. On the stinky man. But on the night air, too. Very strong again, that scent, cold and terrible, carried on the breeze.
The thing-that-will-kill-you is outside again.
No longer wagging his tail, he turns away from the stinky man and hurries through the night streets, following that one scent among thousands of others, moving toward where the land disappears, where there is only sand and then water, toward the rumbling, cold, dark, dark sea.
3
James Ordegard’s neighbors, like those of Ricky Estefan, did not acknowledge the commotion next door. The gunfire and shattering glass elicited no response. When Harry opened the front door and looked up and down the street, the night remained calm, and no sirens rose in the distance.
It seemed as if the confrontation with Ticktock had taken place in a dream to which only Harry and Connie were privy. However, they had plenty of proof that the encounter had been real: expended shell casings in their revolvers; broken glass all over the master-bedroom balcony; cuts, scrapes, and various tender spots that would later become bruises.
Harry’s first urge—and Connie’s too—was to get the hell out of there before the vagrant returned. But they both knew that Ticktock could find them as easily elsewhere, and they needed to learn what they could from the aftermath of their confrontation with him.
In James Ordegard’s bedroom again, under the malevolent stare of the ghoul in the Goya painting, Harry looked for one more proof. Blood.
Connie had shot Ticktock at least three times, maybe four, at close range. A portion of his face had been blown away, and there had been a substantial wound in his throat. After the vagrant had thrown Connie through the sliding glass door, Harry had pumped two rounds into his back.
Blood should have been splattered as liberally as beer at a frat-house party. Not one drop of it was visible on the walls or carpet.
“Well?” Connie asked from the doorway, holding a glass of water. The Anacins had stuck in her throat. She was still trying to wash them all the way down. Or maybe she had gotten the pills down easily enough, and something else had stuck in her throat—like fear, which she usually had no trouble swallowing. “Did you find anything?”
“No blood. Just this… dirt, I guess it is.”
The stuff certainly felt like moist earth when he crumbled it between his fingertips, smelled like it, too. Clots and sprinkles were scattered across the carpet and the bedspread.
Harry moved around the room in a crouch, pausing at the larger clumps of dirt to poke at them with one finger.
“This night’s going too fast,” Connie said.
“Don’t tell me the time,” he said without looking up.
She told him anyway. “Few minutes past midnight. Witching hour.”
“For sure.”
He kept moving, and in one small mound of dirt, he found an earthworm. It was still moist, glistening, but dead.
He uncovered a wad of decaying vegetable matter, which seemed to be ficus leaves. They peeled apart like layers of filio dough in a Mideastern pastry. A small black beetle with stiff legs and jewel-green eyes was entombed in the center of them.
Near one of the nightstands, Harry found a slightly misshapen lead slug, one of the rounds that Connie had pumped into Ticktock. Damp earth clung to it. He picked it up and rolled it between his thumb and forefinger, staring at it thoughtfully.
Connie came farther into the room to see what he had discovered. “What do you make of it?”
“I don’t know exactly… though maybe…”
“What?”
He hesitated, looking around at the soil on the carpet and the bedspread.
He was recalling certain folk legends, fairy tales of a fashion, although with even a stronger religious overtone than those of Hans Christian Andersen. Judaic in origin, if he wasn’t mistaken. Tales of cabalistic magic.
He said, “If you gathered up all this dirt and debris, if you packed it together real tight… do you think it would be just exactly the right amount of material to fill in the wound in his throat and the hole in the side of his face?”
Frowning,
Connie said, “Maybe. So… what’re you saying?”
He stood and pocketed the slug. He knew that he didn’t have to remind her about the inexplicable pile of dirt in Ricky Estefan’s living room—or about the exquisitely sculpted hand and coat sleeve sprouting from it.
“I’m not sure what I’m saying just yet,” Harry told her. “I need to think about it a little more.”
As they passed through Ordegard’s house, they turned off the lights. The darkness they left behind seemed alive.
Outside in the post-midnight world, ocean air washed the land without cleansing it. Wind off the Pacific had always felt crisp and clean to Harry, but no longer. He had lost his faith that the chaos of life was continuously swept into order by the forces of nature. Tonight the cool breeze made him think of unclean things: graveyard granite, fleshless bones in the eternal embrace of gelid earth, the shiny carapaces of beetles that fed on dead flesh.
He was battered and tired; perhaps exhaustion accounted for this new somber and portentous turn of mind. Whatever the cause, he was drifting toward Connie’s view that chaos, not order, was the natural state of things and that it could not be resisted, only ridden in the manner that a surfer rides a towering and potentially deadly wave.
On the lawn, between the front door and the driveway where he had parked the Honda, they almost walked into a large mound of raw earth. It had not been there when they had first gone inside.
Connie got a flashlight from the glove compartment of the Honda, returned, and directed the beam on the mound, so Harry could examine it more closely. First he carefully circled the pile, studying it closely, but he could find no hand or other human feature molded from it. Deconstruction had been complete this time.
Scraping at the dirt with his hands, however, he uncovered clusters of dead and rotting leaves like the wad he had discovered in Ordegard’s bedroom. Grass, stones, dead earthworms. Soggy pieces of a moldering cigar box. Pieces of roots and twigs. Thin parakeet bones, including the fragile calcium lace of one folded wing. Harry wasn’t sure what he expected to find: maybe a heart sculpted from mud with all the detail of the hand they had seen in Ricky’s living room, and still beating with strange malignant life.
In the car, after he started the engine, he switched on the heater. A deep chill had settled in him.
Waiting to get warm, staring at the black mound of earth on the dark lawn, Harry told Connie about that vengeful monster of legend and folklore—the golem. She listened without comment, even less skeptical about this astonishing possibility than she had been at her apartment, earlier in the night, when he had raved on about a sociopath with psychic abilities and the demonic power to possess other people.
When he finished, she said, “So he makes a golem and uses it to kill, while he stays safe somewhere.”
“Maybe.”
“Makes a golem out of dirt.”
“Or sand or old brush or maybe just about anything.”
“Makes it with the power of his mind.”
Harry didn’t respond.
She said, “With the power of his mind or with magic like in the folktales?”
“Jesus, I don’t know. It’s all so crazy.”
“And you still think he can also possess people, use them like puppets?”
“Probably not. No proof of it so far.”
“What about Ordegard?”
“I don’t think there’s any connection between Ordegard and this Ticktock.”
“Oh? But you wanted to go to the morgue because you thought—”
“I did, but I don’t now. Ordegard was just an ordinary, garden-variety, pre-millennium nutcase. When I blew him away in the attic yesterday afternoon, that was the end of it.”
“But Ticktock showed up here at Ordegard’s—”
“Because we were here. He knows how to find us somehow. He came here because we were here, not because he has anything to do with James Ordegard.”
A forced stream of hot air poured out of the dashboard vents. It washed over him without melting the ice he imagined he could feel in the pit of his stomach.
“We just ran into two psychos within a couple of hours of each other,” Harry said. “First Ordegard, then this guy. It’s been a bad day for the home team, that’s all.”
“One for the record books,” Connie agreed. “But if Ticktock isn’t Ordegard, if he wasn’t angry with you for shooting Ordegard, why’d he fixate on you? Why’s he want you dead?”
“I don’t know.”
“Back at your place, before he burned it down, didn’t he say you couldn’t shoot him and think that was the end of it?”
“Yeah, that’s part of what he said.” Harry tried to recall the rest of what the vagrant-golem had thundered at him, but the memory was elusive. “Now that I think of it, he never mentioned Ordegard’s name. I just assumed…. No. Ordegard’s been a false trail.”
He was afraid she was going to ask how they could pick up the real trail, the right one, that would lead them to Ticktock. But she must have realized that he was completely at a loss, because she didn’t put him on the spot.
“It’s getting too hot in here,” she said.
He lowered the temperature control on the heater.
At the bone, he was still chilled.
In the light from the instrument panel, he noticed his hands. They were coated with grime, like the hands of a man who, buried prematurely, had desperately clawed his way out of a fresh grave.
Harry backed the Honda out of the driveway and drove slowly down through the steep hills of Laguna. The streets in those residential neighborhoods were virtually deserted at that late hour. Most of the houses were dark. For all they knew, they might have been descending through a modern ghost town, where all of the residents had vanished like the crew of the old sailing ship Mary Celeste, beds empty in the darkened houses, televisions aglow in deserted family rooms, midnight snacks laid out on plates in silent kitchens where no one remained to eat.
He glanced at the dashboard clock. 12:18.
Little more than six hours until dawn.
“I’m so tired I can’t think straight,” Harry said. “And, damn it, I’ve got to think.”
“Let’s find some coffee, something to eat. Get our energy back.”
“Yeah, all right. Where?”
“The Green House. Pacific Coast Highway. It’s one of the few places open this late.”
“Green House. Yeah, I know it.”
After a silence during which they descended another hill, Connie said, “You know what I found weirdest about Ordegard’s house?”
“What?”
“It reminded me of my apartment.”
“Really? How?”
“Don’t shine me on, Harry. You saw both places tonight.”
Harry had noticed a certain similarity, but he hadn’t wanted to think about it. “He has more furniture than you do.”
“Not a whole damn lot more. No knickknacks, none of what they call decorative pieces, no family photos. One piece of art hanging in his place, one in mine.”
“But there’s a big difference, a huge difference—you’ve got that sky-diver’s eye-view poster, bright, exhilarating, gives you a sense of freedom just to look at it, nothing like that ghoul chewing on human body parts.”
“I’m not so sure. The painting in his bedroom’s about death, human fate. Maybe my poster isn’t so exhilarating, really. Maybe what it’s really about is death, too, about falling and falling and never opening the chute.”
Harry glanced away from the street. Connie wasn’t looking at him. Her head was tilted back, eyes closed.
“You’re not any more suicidal than I am,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
“The hell you do.”
He stopped at a red traffic light at Pacific Coast Highway, and looked at her again. She still hadn’t opened her eyes. “Connie—”
“I’ve always been chasing freedom. And what is the ultimate freedom?�
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“Tell me.”
“The ultimate freedom is death.”
“Don’t get Freudian on me, Gulliver. One thing I’ve always liked about you is, you don’t try to psychoanalyze everyone.”
To her credit, she smiled, evidently remembering that she had used those words on him in the burger restaurant after the shooting of Ordegard, when he had wondered if she was as hard inside as she pretended to be.
She opened her eyes, checked the traffic light. “Green.”
“I’m not ready to go.”
She looked at him.
He said, “First I want to know if you’re just jiving or if you really think you’ve got something in common with a fruitcake like Ordegard.”
“All this shit I go on about, how you have to love chaos, have to embrace it? Well, maybe you do, if you want to survive in this screwed-up world. But tonight I’ve been thinking maybe I used to like surfing on it because, secretly, I hoped it would wipe me out one day.”
“Used to?”
“I don’t seem to have the same taste for chaos that I once did.”
“Ticktock give you your fill of it?”
“Not him. It’s just… earlier, right after work, before your condo was burned down and everything went to hell, I discovered I’ve got a reason to live that I never knew about.”
The light had turned red again. A couple of cars whooshed past on the coast highway, and she watched them go.
Harry said nothing because he was afraid that any interruption would discourage her from finishing what she had begun to tell him. In six months, her arctic reserve had never thawed until, for the briefest moment in her apartment, she had seemed about to disclose something both private and profound. She had quickly frozen again; but now the face of the glacier was cracking. His desire to be let into her world was so intense that it revealed as much about his own need for connections as it did about the extent to which she had heretofore guarded her privacy; he was prepared to expend all of his last six hours of life at that traffic light, if necessary, waiting for her to provide him with a better understanding of the special woman that he believed existed under the hard veneer of the streetwise cop.
“I had a sister,” she said. “Never knew about her until recently. She’s dead. Been dead five years. But she had a child. A daughter. Eleanor. Ellie. Now I don’t want to be wiped out, don’t want to surf on the chaos any more. I just want to have a chance to meet Ellie, get to know her, see if I can love her, which I think maybe I can. Maybe what happened to me when I was a kid didn’t burn love out of me forever. Maybe I can do more than hate. I’ve got to find out. I can’t wait to find out.”
He was dismayed. If he understood her correctly, she had not yet felt for him anything like the love he had begun to feel for her. But that was all right. Regardless of her doubts, he knew that she had the ability to love and that she would find a place in her heart for her niece. And if for the girl, why not for him as well?
She met his eyes and smiled. “Good God, just listen to me, I sound like one of those confessional neurotics spilling their guts on an afternoon TV talkshow.”
“Not at all. I… I want to hear it.”
“Next thing you know, I’ll be telling you how I like to have sex with men who dress like their mothers.”
“Do you?”
She laughed. “Who doesn’t?”
He wanted to know what she meant when she said what happened to me when I was a kid, but he dared not ask. That experience, if not the core of her, was at least what she believed the core to be, and she would be able to reveal it only at her own pace. Besides, there were a thousand other questions he wanted to ask her, ten thousand, and if he started, they really would sit at that intersection until dawn, Ticktock, and death.
The traffic light was in their favor again. He entered the intersection and turned right. Two blocks farther north he parked in front of The Green House.