by Dean Koontz
“You think you can read minds or something?”
“Didn’t you tell me that your old lady always spent more time with her girlfriends than she did with you? Was she ever around when you needed her?”
“Everyone has friends,” Colin said weakly.
“Did you have friends before you met me?”
Colin shrugged. “I’ve always had my hobbies.”
“And didn’t you tell me that when she was married to your old man, she left him once a month—”
“Not that often.”
“—just walked out for a few days at a time, even for a week or more?”
“That was because he beat her,” Colin said.
“Did she take you with her when she left?”
Colin finished his grape soda.
“Did she take you with her?” Roy asked again.
“Not usually.”
“She left you there with him.”
“He’s my father, after all.”
“He sounds dangerous to me,” Roy said.
“He never touched me. Just her.”
“But he might have hurt you.”
“But he didn’t.”
“She couldn’t know for sure what he’d do when she left you with him.”
“It worked out okay. That’s all that matters.”
“And now all her time’s taken up with this art gallery,” Roy said. “She works every day and most evenings.”
“She’s building a future for herself and for me.”
Roy made a sour face. “Is that her excuse? Is that what she tells you?”
“It’s true, I guess.”
“How touching. Building a future. Poor, hard-working Weezy Jacobs. It breaks my heart, Colin. It really does. Shit. More nights than not, she’s out with someone like Thomberg—”
“That’s business.”
“—and she still doesn’t have time for you.”
“So what?”
“So you should stop worrying about getting home,” Roy said. “Nobody gives a damn if you’re home or not. Nobody cares. So let’s have some fun.”
Colin put his empty bottle in the rack. “What’ll we do?”
“Let’s see ... I know. The Kingman place. You’ll like the Kingman place. You been there yet?”
“What’s the Kingman place?” Colin asked.
“It’s one of the oldest houses in town.”
“I’m not much interested in landmarks.”
“It’s that big house at the end of Hawk Drive.”
“The spooky old place on top of the hill?”
“Yeah. Nobody’s lived there for twenty years.”
“What’s so interesting about an abandoned house?”
Roy leaned close and cackled like a fiend, twisted his face grotesquely, rolled his eyes, and whispered dramatically: “It’s haunted!”
“What’s the joke?”
“No joke. They say it’s haunted.”
“Who says?”
“Everyone.” Roy rolled his eyes again and tried to imitate Boris Karloff. “People have seen exceedingly strange things at the Kingman place.”
“Such as?”
“Not now,” Roy said, dropping the Karloff voice. “I’ll tell you all about it when we get there.”
As Roy lifted his bicycle away from the wall, Colin said, “Wait a minute. I think you’re serious. You mean this house is really haunted?”
“I guess it depends on whether or not you believe in that sort of thing.”
“People have seen ghosts there?”
“People say they’ve seen and heard all kinds of crazy things at that house ever since the Kingman family died up there.”
“Died?”
“They were killed.”
“The whole family?”
“All seven of them.”
“When was this?”
“Twenty years ago.”
“Who did it?”
“The father.”
“Mr. Kingman?”
“He went crazy one night and chopped up everyone while they were sleeping.”
Colin swallowed hard. “Chopped them up?”
“With an ax.”
Axes again! Colin thought.
For a moment his stomach seemed to be not a part of him but a separate entity alive within him, for it slipped and slid and twisted wetly back and forth, as if trying to crawl out of him.
“I’ll tell you all about it when we get there,” Roy said. “Come on.”
“Wait a minute,” Colin said nervously, stalling for time. “My glasses are dirty.”
He took off his glasses, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, and carefully polished the thick lenses. He could still see Roy fairly well, but everything farther than five feet was blurry.
“Hurry up, Colin.”
“Maybe we should wait for tomorrow.”
“Is it going to take you that long to clean your goddamned glasses?”
“I mean, in daylight we’ll be able to see more of the Kingman place.”
“Seems to me it’s more fun to look at a haunted house at night.”
“But you can’t see much at night.”
Roy regarded him silently for a few seconds. Then: “Are you scared?”
“Of what?”
“Ghosts.”
“Of course not.”
“Sounds like it.”
“Well ... it does seem kind of foolish to go poking around a place like that in the dark, in the dead of night, you know.”
“No. I don’t know.”
“I’m not talking about ghosts. I mean, one of us is bound to get hurt if we mess around in an old broken-down house in the middle of the night.”
“You are scared.”
“Like hell.”
“Prove you’re not.”
“Why should I prove anything?”
“Want your blood brother to think you’re a coward ?”
Colin was silent. He fidgeted.
“Come on!” Roy said.
Roy mounted his bike and pedaled out of the deserted service station, heading north on Broadway. He did not glance back.
Colin stood at the soda machine. Alone. He didn’t like being alone. Especially at night.
Roy was a block away and still moving.
“Damn!” Colin said. He shouted, “Wait for me,” and clambered onto his bicycle.
10
They walked the bikes up the last steep block toward the dilapidated house that crouched above them. With each step, Colin’s trepidation grew.
It sure looks haunted, he thought.
The Kingman place was well within the Santa Leona city limits, yet it was separated from the rest of the town, as if everyone were afraid to build nearby. It stood on top of a hill and held dominion over five or six acres. At least half of that land had once been well-tended, formal gardens, but long ago it had gone badly to seed. The north leg of Hawk Drive dead-ended in a wide turnaround in front of the Kingman property; and the lampposts did not go all the way to the end of the street, so that the old mansion and its weed-choked grounds were shrouded in blackest shadows, highlighted only by the moon. On the lower two thirds of the hill, on both sides of the road, modem California-style ranch houses clung precariously to the slopes, waiting with amazing patience for a mudslide or the next shock wave from the San Andreas Fault. Only the Kingman place occupied the upper third of the hill, and it appeared to be waiting for something far more terrifying, something a great deal more malevolent than an earthquake.
The house faced the center of town, which lay below it, and the sea, which was not visible at night, except in the negative as a vast expanse of lightlessness. The house was a huge, rambling wreck, ersatz Victorian, with too many fancy chimneys and too many gables, and with twice as much ginger-bread around the eaves and windows and railing as true Victorian demanded. Storms had ripped shingles from the roof. Some of the ornate trim was broken, and in a few spots it had fallen down altogether. Where shutters still survived, t
hey often hung at a slant, by a single mounting. The white paint had been weathered away. The boards were silver-gray, bleached by the sun and the constant sea wind, waterstained. The front-porch steps sagged, and there were gaps in the railing. Half of the windows were haphazardly boarded shut, but the others were without protection, thus shattered; moonlight revealed jagged shards of glass like transparent teeth biting at the empty blackness where stones had been pitched through. In spite of its shabby condition, however, the Kingman place did not have the air of a ruin; it did not give rise to sadness in the hearts of those who looked upon it, as did many once-noble but now decrepit buildings; somehow it seemed vital, alive... even frighteningly alive. If a house could be said to have a human attitude, an emotional aspect, then this house was angry, very angry. Furious.
They parked their bicycles by the front gate. It was a big rusted iron grill with a sunburst design in the center.
“Some place, huh?” Roy said.
“Yeah.”
“Let’s go.”
“Inside?”
“Sure.”
“We don’t have a flashlight.”
“Well, at least let’s go up on the porch.”
“Why?” Colin asked shakily. ,
“We can look in the windows.”
Roy walked through the open gate and started up the broken flagstone walk, through the tangled weeds, toward the house.
Colin followed him for a few steps, then stopped and said, “Wait. Roy, wait a sec.”
Roy turned back. “What is it?”
“You been here before?”
“Of course.”
“You been inside?”
“Once.”
“Did you see any ghosts?”
“Nah. I don’t believe in ‘em.”
“But you said people see things here.”
“Other people. Not me.”
“You said it was haunted.”
“I told you other people said it was haunted. I think they’re full of shit. But I knew you’d enjoy the place, what with you being such a big horror-movie fan and everything.”
Roy began to walk along the path again.
After several more steps, Colin said, “Wait.”
Roy looked back and grinned. “Scared?”
“No.”
“Ha!”
“I just have some questions.”
“So hurry up and ask them.”
“You said a lot of people were killed here.”
“Seven,” Roy said. “Six murders, one suicide.”
“Tell me about it.”
During the past twenty years, the very real tragedy of the Kingman murders had evolved into a highly embellished tale, a grisly Santa Leona legend, recalled most often at Halloween, composed of myth and truth, perhaps more of the former than the latter, depending on who was telling it. But the basic facts of the case were simple, and Roy stuck close to them when he told the story.
The Kingmans had been wealthy. Robert Kingman was the only child of Judith and Big Jim Kingman; but Robert’s mother died of massive hemorrhaging while delivering him. Big Jim was even then a rich man, and he grew continually richer over the years. He made millions from California real estate, farming, oil, and water rights. He was a tall, barrel-chested man, as was his son, and Big Jim liked to boast that there was no one west of the Mississippi who could eat more steak, drink more whiskey, or make more money than he could. Shortly before Robert’s twenty-second birthday, he inherited the entire estate when Big Jim, having drunk too much whiskey, choked to death on a large, inadequately chewed chunk of filet mignon. He lost that eating contest to a man who had yet to make a million dollars in plumbing supplies, but who could at least boast of having lived through the feast. Robert had not developed his father’s competitive attitude toward food and beverage, but he had acquired the old man’s business sense, and although he was quite young, he made even more money with the funds that had been left to him.
When he was twenty-five, Robert married a woman named Alana Lee, built the Victorian house on Hawk Hill, just for her, and began fathering a new generation of Kingmans. Alana was not from a wealthy family, but she was said to be the most beautiful girl in the county, with the sweetest temper in the state. The children came fast, five of them in eight years—three boys and two girls. Theirs was the most respected family in town, envied, but also liked and admired. The Kingmans were churchgoers, friendly, graced with the common touch in spite of their high station, charitable, involved in their community. Robert obviously loved Alana, and everyone could see that she adored him; and the children returned the affection their parents lavished upon them.
On a night in August, a few days before the Kingmans’ twelfth wedding anniversary, Robert secretly ground up two dozen sleeping tablets that a physician had prescribed for Alana’s periodic insomnia, and sprinkled the powder in drink and food that his family shared for a bedtime snack, as well as in various items consumed by the live-in maid, cook, and butler. He neither ate nor drank anything he had contaminated. When his wife, children, and servants were soundly asleep, he went out to the garage and fetched an ax that was used to chop wood for the mansion’s nine fireplaces. He spared the maid, cook, and butler, but no one else. He killed Alana first, then his two young daughters, then his three sons. Every member of the family was dispatched in the same hideously brutal, gory fashion: with two sharp and powerful blows of the ax blade, one vertical and one horizontal, in the form of a cross, either on the back or on the chest, depending on the position in which each was sleeping when attacked. That done, Robert visited his victims a second time and crudely decapitated all of them. He carried their dripping heads downstairs and lined them up on the long mantel above the fireplace in the drawing room. It was a shockingly gruesome tableau: six lifeless, blood-splashed faces observing him as if they were a jury or judges in the court of Hell. With his beloved dead watching him, Robert Kingman wrote a brief note to those who would find him and his maniacal handiwork the following morning: “My father always said that I entered the world in a river of blood, my dying mother’s blood. And now I will shortly leave on another such river.” When he had written that curious good-bye, he loaded a .38-caliber Colt revolver, put the barrel in his mouth, turned toward the death-shocked faces of his family, and blew his brains out.
As Roy finished the story, Colin grew cold all the way through to his bones. He hugged himself and shivered violently.
“The cook was the first to wake up,” Roy said. “She found blood all over the hallway and stairs, followed the trail to the drawing room, and saw the heads on the mantel. She ran out of the house, down the hill, screaming at the top of her lungs. Went almost a mile before anyone stopped her. They say she nearly lost her mind over it.”
The night seemed darker than it had been when Roy had begun the story. The moon appeared to be smaller, farther away than it had been earlier.
On a distant highway a big truck shifted gears and accelerated. It sounded like the cry of a prehistoric animal.
Colin’s mouth was as dry as ashes. He worked up enough saliva to speak, but his voice was thin. “For God’s sake, why? Why did he kill them?”
Roy shrugged. “No reason.”
“There had to be a reason.”
“If there was, nobody ever figured it out.”
“Maybe he made some bad investments and lost all of his money.”
“Nah. He left a fortune.”
“Maybe his wife was going to leave him.”
“All of her friends said she was, very happy with her marriage.”
A dog barking.
A train whistling.
Wind whispering in the trees.
The stealthy movement of unseen things.
The night was speaking all around him.
“A brain tumor,” Colin said.
“A lot of people thought the same thing.”
“I’ll bet that’s it. I’ll bet Kingman had a brain tumor, something like that, something that made hi
m act crazy.”
“At the time it was the most popular theory. But the autopsy didn’t turn up any signs of a brain disease.”
Colin frowned. “You seem to have filed away every single fact about the case.”
“I know it almost as well as if it had happened to me.”
“But how do you know what the autopsy uncovered?”
“I read about it.”
“Where?”
“The library has all the back issues of the Santa Leona News Register on microfilm,” Roy said.
“You researched the case?”
“Yeah. It’s exactly the kind of thing that interests me. Remember? Death. I’m fascinated by death. As soon as I heard the Kingman story, I wanted to know more. A whole lot more. I wanted to know every last bit and piece of it. You understand? I mean, wouldn’t it have been terrific to be in that house on that night, the night it happened, just sort of observing, just hiding in a comer, on that night, hiding and watching him do it, watching him do it to all of them and then to himself? Think of it! Blood everywhere. You’ve never seen so much goddamned blood in your life! Blood on the walls, soaked and clotted in the bedclothes, slick puddles of blood on the floor, blood on the stairs, and blood splashed over the furniture.... And those six heads on the mantel! Jesus, what a popper! What a terrific popper!”
“You’re being weird again,” Colin said.
“Would you like to have been there?”
“No thanks. And neither would you.”
“I sure as hell would!”
“If you saw all that blood, you’d puke.”
“Not me.”
“You’re just trying to gross me out.”
“Wrong again.”
Roy started toward the house.
“Wait a minute,” Colin said.
Roy didn’t turn back this time. He climbed the sagging steps and walked onto the porch.
Rather than stand alone, Colin joined him. “Tell me about the ghosts.”
“Some nights there are strange lights in the house. And people who live farther down the hill say that sometimes they hear the Kingman children screaming in terror and crying for help.”
“They hear the dead kids?”
“Moaning and carrying on something fierce.”
Colin suddenly realized he had his back to one of the broken first-floor windows. He shifted away from it.