by Dean Koontz
“God, I hope not.”
“I think it is.”
She smiled. “I suspect that already happened weeks or months ago, but we’re just getting around to admitting it.”
They stood in companionable silence for a while.
He wondered how much time had passed since they’d fled from the counting golem on Pacific Coast Highway. He felt as if he had surely been on the run for an hour, but it was difficult to tell real time when you were not living in it.
The longer they were stuck in the Pause, the more inclined Harry was to believe their enemy’s promise that the ordeal would only last one hour. He had a feeling, perhaps at least partly cop instinct rather than entirely wishful thinking, that Ticktock was not as all-powerful as he seemed, that there were limits to even his phenomenal abilities, and that engineering the Pause was so draining, he could not long sustain it.
The growing inner cold that troubled both him and Connie might be a sign that Ticktock was finding it increasingly difficult to exempt them from the enchantment that had stilled the rest of the world. In spite of their tormentor’s attempt to control the altered reality that he had created, perhaps Harry and Connie were gradually being transformed from movable game pieces to permanent fixtures on the game board itself.
He remembered the shock of hearing the gravelly voice speak to him out of his car radio last evening, when he had been speeding between his burning condo in Irvine and Connie’s apartment in Costa Mesa. But until now he had not realized the importance of the words the golem-vagrant had spoken: Gotta rest now, hero… gotta rest… tired… a little nap…. More had been said, mostly threats, the raspy voice gradually fading into static, silence. However, Harry suddenly understood that the most important thing about the incident was not the fact that Ticktock could somehow control the ether and speak to him out of a radio, but the revelation that even this being of godlike abilities had limits and needed periodic rest like any ordinary mortal.
When Harry thought about it, he realized that each of Ticktock’s more flamboyant manifestations was always followed by a period of an hour or longer when he didn’t come around to continue his torments.
Gotta rest, hero… tired… a little nap….
He remembered telling Connie, earlier at her apartment, that even a sociopath with enormous paranormal powers was certain to have weaknesses, points of vulnerability. During the intervening hours, as he had seen Ticktock perform a series of tricks each of which was more amazing than the one before it, he had grown more pessimistic about their chances. Now optimism blossomed again.
Gotta rest, hero… tired… a little nap….
He was about to share these hopeful thoughts with Connie when she suddenly stiffened. His arm was still around her waist, so he also felt her shivering abruptly stop. For an instant he was afraid that she had been too deeply chilled, surrendered to entropy, and become part of the Pause.
Then he saw that she had tilted her head in response to some faint sound that he, in his woolgathering, had not heard.
It came again. A click.
Then a low scrape.
A much louder clatter.
The sounds were all flat, truncated, like those they themselves had made during their long run from the coast highway.
Alarmed, Connie slipped her arm from around Harry’s waist, and he let go of her as well.
Down on the main floor of the warehouse, the golem-vagrant moved through iron shadows and revealing shafts of frozen light, between the zombie spectators and among the petrified dancers. Ticktock had entered through the same door they had used, following their trail.
4
Connie’s instinct was to step back from the loft railing, so the golem would not look up and see her, but she overcame that reflexive urge and remained motionless. In the fathomless stillness of the Pause, even the whispery friction of shoe sole against floor, or the softest creak of a board, would instantly draw the creature’s unwanted attention.
Harry was also quick enough to slam a lock on his instinctual reaction, remaining almost as still as any of the ravers caught in the Pause. Thank God.
If the thing looked up, it probably would not see them. Most of the light was below, and the loft hung in shadows.
She realized she was clinging to the stupid hope that Ticktock really was trailing them only with ordinary senses, keeping his promise. As if any sociopathic serial killer, paranormally empowered or not, could be trusted to keep a promise. Stupid, not worthy of her, but she clung to the possibility anyway. If the world could fall under an enchantment as profound as any in a fairy tale, who was to say that her own hopes and wishes did not also have at least some power?
And wasn’t that an odd idea coming from her of all people, who had given up hope as a child, who had never in memory wished for any gift or blessing or surcease?
Everyone can change, they said. She had never believed it. For most of her life, she had been unchanging, expecting nothing from the world that she did not earn twice over, taking perverse solace from the fact that her expectations were never exceeded.
Life can be as bitter as dragon tears. But whether dragon tears are bitter or sweet depends entirely on how each man perceives the taste.
Or woman.
Now she felt a stirring within, an important change, and she wanted to live to see how it played out.
But below prowled the golem-vagrant, hunting.
Connie breathed through her open mouth, slowly and quietly.
Moving among the fossilized dancers, the massive creature turned its burly head left and then right, methodically scanning the crowd. It changed color as it passed through frozen lasers and spotlights, red to green, green to yellow, yellow to red to white to green, gray and black when it moved between shafts of light. But always its eyes were blue, radiant and strange.
When the space between dancers narrowed, the golem shoved aside a young man in jeans and a blue corduroy jacket. The dancer toppled backward, but the resistance of all Paused things prevented him from completing the fall. He stopped at a forty-five-degree angle to the floor and hung there precariously, still poised mid-dance, with the same celebratory expression on his face, ready to complete the fall in the first fraction of a second after time started up again, if it ever did.
Moving from front to back of the cavernous room, the hulking golem shoved other dancers aside, into falls and spins and stumbles and head-butting collisions that would not be completed until the Pause ended. Getting out of the building safely when real time kicked in again would be a challenge, because the startled ravers, never having seen the beast pass among them while they were Paused, would blame those around them for being knocked down and shoved. A dozen fights would erupt in the first half-minute, Pandemonium would break out, and confusion would inevitably give way to panic. With lasers and spotlights sweeping the crowd, the throbbing bass of the techno music shaking the walls, and violence inexplicably erupting at every turn, the rush to get out would pile people up at the doors, and it would be a miracle if a number of them were not trampled to death in the melee.
Connie had no special sympathy for the mob on the dance floor, since defiance of the law and policemen was one of the motivations that brought them to a rave in the first place. But as rebellious and destructive and socially confused as they might be, they were nonetheless human beings, and she was outraged at the callousness with which Ticktock was bulling through them, without a thought for what would happen to them when the world suddenly shifted into gear again.
She glanced at Harry beside her and saw a matching anger in his face and eyes. His teeth were clenched so tight that his jaw muscles bulged.
But there was nothing they could do to stop what was happening below. Bullets had no effect, and Ticktock was not likely to respond to a heartfelt request.
Besides, by speaking out, they would only be revealing their presence. The golem-vagrant had not once glanced toward the loft, and as yet there was no reason to think either that Ticktock was u
sing more than ordinary senses to search for them or that he knew they were in the warehouse.
Then Ticktock perpetrated an outrage that made it clear he fully intended to cause Bedlam and leave bloody tumult in his wake. He stopped in front of a raven-haired girl of twenty, whose slender arms were raised above her head in one of those rapturous expressions of the joy that rhythmic movement and primitive driving music could sometimes bring to a dancer even without the assistance of drugs. He loomed over her for a moment, studying her, as if taken with her beauty. Then he grabbed one of her arms in both his monstrous hands, wrenched with shocking violence, and tore it out of her shoulder socket. A low, wet laugh escaped him as he threw the arm behind him, where it hung in the air between two other dancers.
The mutilation was as bloodless as if he had merely disconnected the arm of a mannequin, but of course blood would not begin to flow until time itself flowed again. Then the madness of the act and its consequences would be all too apparent.
Connie squeezed her eyes shut, unable to watch what he might do next. As a homicide cop, she had seen countless acts of mindless barbarity—or the consequences of them—and she had collected stacks of newspaper stories about crimes of positively fiendish brutality, and she had seen the damage this particular psychotic bastard had done to poor Ricky Estefan, but the fierce savagery of the act he committed on the dance floor rocked her as nothing had before.
The utter helplessness of this young victim might have been the difference that knocked the wind out of Connie and left her shaking not from any inner or outer chill but with icy horror. All victims were helpless to one degree or another; that was why they became targets for the savages among them. But this pretty young woman’s helplessness was of an infinitely more terrible nature, for she had never seen her assailant coming, would never see him go or know his identity, would be stricken as suddenly as any innocent field mouse pierced by the razor claws of a swooping hawk which it had never seen diving from on high. Even after she had been maimed, she remained unaware of the attack, frozen in the last moment of pure happiness and worry-free existence that she might ever know, a laugh still painted on her face though she had been forever crippled and perhaps condemned to death, not even permitted to know her loss or to feel the pain or to scream until her attacker had returned to her the ability to feel and react.
Connie knew that, to this monstrous enemy, she was as shockingly vulnerable as the young dancer below. Helpless. No matter how fast she could run, regardless of the cleverness of her strategies, no defense would be adequate and no hiding place secure.
Although she had never been particularly religious, she suddenly understood how a devout fundamentalist Christian might tremble at the thought that Satan could be loosed from Hell to stalk the world and wreak Armageddon. His awesome power. His relentless-ness. His hard, gleeful, merciless brutality.
Greasy nausea slithered in her guts, and she was afraid she might throw up.
Beside her, the softest hiss of apprehension escaped Harry, and Connie opened her eyes. She was determined to meet her death face to face with all the resistance she could muster, useless as resistance might be.
On the floor of the warehouse below, the golem-vagrant reached the foot of the same set of stairs up which she and Harry had climbed to the loft. He hesitated there, as if considering whether to turn and walk away, search elsewhere.
Connie dared to hope that their continued silence, in spite of every provocation to cry out, had encouraged Ticktock to believe that they could not possibly be hiding anywhere in the rave.
Then he spoke in that rough demonic voice. “Fee, fie, fo, fum,” he said, starting up the stairs, “I smell the blood of hero cops.”
His laugh was as cold and inhuman as any sound that might issue from a crocodile—yet contained an eerily recognizable quality of childlike delight.
Arrested development.
A psychotic child.
She remembered Harry telling her that the burning vagrant, in the process of destroying the condominium, had said, You people are so much fun to play with. This was his private game, played by his rules, or without rules at all if he wished, and she and Harry were nothing but his toys. She had been foolish to hope that he would keep his promise.
The crash of each of his heavy footsteps reverberated across the wood treads and up through the entire structure. The floor of the loft shook from his ascent. He was climbing fast: BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM!
Harry grabbed her by the arm. “Quick, the other stairs!”
They turned away from the railing and toward the opposite end of the loft from where the golem was ascending.
At the head of the second set of stairs stood a second golem identical to the first. Huge. Mane of tangled hair. Wild beard. Raincoat like a black cape. He was grinning broadly. Blue flames flickering brightly in deep sockets.
Now they knew one more thing about the extent of Ticktock’s power. He could create and control at least two artificial bodies at the same time.
The first golem reached the top of the stairs to their right. He started toward them, ruthlessly kicking a path through the tangled lovers on the floor.
To their left, the second golem approached with no greater respect for the Paused people in his way When the world started up again, cries of injury and outrage would arise from end to end of the wide loft.
Still gripping Connie’s arm, pulling her back against the railing, Harry whispered, “Jump!”
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM, the thud of the twin golems’ footsteps shook the loft, and BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM, the pounding of her heart shook Connie, and the two sounds became indistinguishable from one another.
Following Harry’s example, she put her hands behind her on the railing, pushed up to sit on the handrail.
The golems kicked more viciously at the human obstacles between them and their prey, closing in faster from both sides.
She lifted her legs and swung around to face the warehouse. At least a twenty-foot drop to the floor. Far enough to break a leg, crack open her skull? Probably.
Each of the golems was less than twenty feet away, coming toward her with all the irresistible force of freight trains, gas-flame eyes burning as hot as any fires in Hell, reaching for her with massive hands.
Harry jumped.
With a cry of resignation, Connie pushed with her feet against the balusters and her hands against the handrail, launching herself into the void—
—and fell only six or seven feet before coasting to a full stop in midair, beside Harry. She was facing straight down, legs and arms spread in an unconscious imitation of the classic skydiving position, and below her were the frozen dancers, all of them as oblivious of her as they were of everything else beyond the instant when they had been spellbound.
The deepening chill in her bones and the rapid depletion of her energy as they fled through Laguna Beach had indicated that she was not making her way through the Paused world as easily as it seemed, certainly not as easily as she moved through the normal world. The fact that they did not create their own wind when they ran, which Harry also noticed, seemed to support the idea that resistance to their motion was present even if they were not conscious of it, and now the arrested fall proved it. As long as they exerted themselves, they could keep moving, but they could not rely on momentum or even the pull of gravity to carry them far when exertion ceased.
Looking over her shoulder, Connie saw that she had managed to launch herself outward only five feet from the loft railing, though she had shoved away from it with all her might. However, combined with a five- or six-foot vertical drop, she had gone far enough to be beyond the reach of the golems.
They stood at the loft railing, leaning out, reaching down, grasping for her but coming up only with handsful of empty air.
Harry shouted at her: “You can move if you try!”
She saw that he was using his arms and legs somewhat in the manner of a swimmer doing a breaststroke, angled toward the floor, pulling himself downwa
rd by agonizing inches, as if the air wasn’t air at all but some curious form of extremely dense water.
She quickly realized she was unfortunately not weightless like an astronaut in orbit aboard the space shuttle, and enjoyed none of the motive advantages of a gravity-free environment. A brief experiment proved she couldn’t propel herself with an astronaut’s ease or change direction on a whim.
When she imitated Harry, however, Connie found that she could pull herself down through the gluey air if she was methodical and determined. For a moment it seemed even better than skydiving because the period of the dive when you had the illusion of flying like a bird was at comparatively high altitudes; and with features on the ground rapidly enlarging, the illusion was never fully convincing. Here, on the other hand, she was right over the heads of other people and airborne within a building, which even under the circumstances gave her an exhilarating sense of power and buoyancy, rather like one of those blissful dreams of flying that too seldom informed her sleep.
Connie actually might have enjoyed the bizarre experience if Ticktock had not been present in the form of the two golems and if she had not been fleeing for her life. She heard the BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM of their heavy hurried footsteps on the wooden loft, and when she looked back over her shoulder and up, she saw they were headed for opposite sets of stairs.
She was still ten or eleven feet from the warehouse floor and “swimming” downward at an infuriatingly slow speed, inch by grinding inch through the colorful fixed beams of the spotlights and party lasers. Gasping for breath from the exertion. Getting rapidly colder now, colder.
If there had been something solid for her to push against, such as a nearby wall or roof-supporting column, she’d have been able to achieve greater propulsion. But there was nothing besides the air itself off which to launch—almost like trying to lift herself entirely by her own bootstraps.
To her left, Harry was about a foot ahead of her but making no better time than she was. He was farther along only because he had started sooner.
Kick. Pull the arms. Struggle.
Her sense of freedom and buoyancy swiftly gave way to a feeling of being trapped.
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM, the footfalls of their pursuers echoed flatly through the huge chamber.
She was perhaps nine feet off the floor, moving toward a clear space among the dancers. Kick. Pull. Kick and pull. Keep moving, moving. So cold.
She glanced over her shoulder again, even though she was afraid that the act of doing so would slow her down.
At least one of the golems had reached the head of one set of stairs. He descended the steps two at a time. In his cloaklike raincoat, shoulders hunched, burly head lowered, leaping down in the rollicking manner of an ape, he reminded her of an illustration in a long-forgotten storybook, a picture of an evil troll from some medieval legend.
Struggling so fiercely that her heart felt as if it might explode, she drew herself within eight feet of the floor. But she was angled headfirst; she would have to pull herself laboriously all the way to the concrete, which would provide the first solid surface against which she could regain her equilibrium and scramble to her feet. BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM.
The golem reached the bottom of the stairs.
Connie was exhausted. Freezing.
She heard Harry cursing the cold and the resisting air.
The pleasant dream of flying had become the most classic of all nightmares, in which the dreamer could flee only in slow motion, while the monster pursued with terrifying speed and agility.
Concentrating on the floor below, seven feet from it now, Connie nevertheless saw movement from the corner of her left eye and heard Harry cry out. A golem had reached him.
A darker shadow fell across the shadow-layered floor directly below her. Reluctantly, she turned her head to the right.
Suspended in midair, with her feet above and behind her, like an angel swooping down to do battle with a demon, she found herself face to face with the other golem. Regrettably, unlike an angel, she was not armed with a fiery sword, a bolt of lightning, or an amulet blessed by God and capable of knocking demons back into the fires and boiling tar of the Pit.
Grinning, Ticktock gripped her throat. The golem’s hand was so enormous that the thick fingers overlapped the fat thumb where they met at the back of her head, completely encircling her neck, though it did not immediately crush her windpipe and cut off her breath.
She remembered how Ricky Estefan’s head had been turned backward on his shoulders, and how the raven-haired dancer’s slender arm had been ripped so effortlessly from her body.
A flash of rage burned away her terror, and she spat in the huge and terrible face. “Let go of me, shithead.”
A foul exhalation washed over her, making her grimace, and the scar-faced golem-vagrant said, “Congratulations, bitch. Time’s up.”
The blue-flame eyes burned brighter for an instant, then winked out, leaving deep black sockets beyond which it seemed that Connie could see to the end of eternity. The vagrant’s hideous face, writ large on this oversize golem, was abruptly transformed from flesh and hair into a highly detailed monochromatic brown countenance that appeared to have been sculpted from clay or mud. An elaborate web of hairline cracks formed from the bridge of his nose, swiftly spinning in a spiral pattern across his face, and in a wink his features crumbled.
The giant vagrant’s entire body dissolved, and with a shattering detonation of techno music that resumed full-blast in mid-note, the world started up again. No longer suspended in the air, Connie fell the last seven feet to the warehouse floor, face-first into the moist mound of dirt and sand and grass and rotting leaves and bugs that had been the golem’s body, cushioned from injury by the now-lifeless mass but gagging and spitting in disgust.
Around her, even above the pounding music, she heard screams of shock, terror, and pain.
5
“Game’s over—for now,” the golem-vagrant said, then obligingly dissolved. Harry dropped out of the air. He sprawled on his stomach in the remains, which smelled strongly of nothing more than rich damp earth.
In front of his face was a hand formed entirely of dirt, similar to— but larger than—the one they had seen in Ricky’s bungalow. Two fingers twitched with a residue of supernatural energy and seemed to reach toward his nose. He slammed one fist into that disembodied monstrosity, pulverizing it.