by Dean Koontz
In the eerily quiet night, behind the barn, I creep cautiously toward the Chevy van, which I’ve never seen before. No one is behind the wheel or in the other front seat. When I place my hand on the hood, it’s warm with engine heat. The metal is still cooling with faint ticks and pings. I slip past the rainbow mural on the side of the van to the open rear door.
Although the interior of the cargo section is dark, enough pale moonlight filters back from the windshield to reveal that no one is in there, either. I’m also able to see this is only a two-seater, with no apparent amenities, though the customized exterior led me to expect a plush recreational vehicle.
I still sense there’s something ominous about the van—other than the simple fact that it doesn’t belong here. Seeking a reason for that ominousness, leaning through the open door, squinting, wishing I’d brought a flashlight, I’m hit by the stink of urine. Someone has pissed in the back of the van. Weird. Jesus. Of course, maybe it’s only a dog that made the mess, which isn’t so weird after all, but it’s still disgusting.
Holding my breath, wrinkling my nose, I step back from the door and hunker down to get a closer look at the license plate. It’s from Colorado, not out of state.
I stand.
I listen. Silence.
The barn waits.
Like many barns built in snow country, it had been essentially windowless when constructed. Even after the radical conversion of the interior, the only windows are two on the first floor, the south side, and four second-floor panes in this face. Those four above me are tall and wide to capture the north light from dawn to dusk.
The windows are dark. The barn is silent.
The north wall features a single entrance. One man-size door.
After moving around to the far side of the van, finding no one there, either, I’m indecisive for precious seconds.
From a distance of twenty feet, under a moon that seems to conceal as much with its shadows as it reveals with its milky light, I nevertheless can see that the north door is ajar.
On some deep level, perhaps I know what I should do, what I must do. But the part of me that keeps secrets so well is insistent that I return to my bed, forget the cry that woke me from a dream of my mother, and sleep the last of the night away. In the morning, of course, I’ll have to continue living in the dream that I’ve made for myself a prisoner of this life of self-deception, with truth and reality tucked into a forgotten pocket at the back of my mind. Maybe the burden of that pocket has become too heavy for the fabric to contain it, and maybe the threads of the seams have begun to break. On some deep level, maybe I have decided to end my waking dream.
Or maybe the choice I make is preordained, having less to do with either my subconscious agonies or my conscience than with the track of destiny on which I’ve traveled since the day I was born. Maybe choice is an illusion, and maybe the only routes we can take in life are those marked on a map at the moment of our conception. I pray to God that destiny isn’t a thing of iron, that it can be flexed and reshaped, that it bends to the power of mercy, honesty, kindness, and virtue—because otherwise, I can’t tolerate the person I will become, the things I will do, or the end that will be mine.
That hot July night, beaded with sweat but chilled, fourteen in moonlight, I am thinking about none of that: no brooding about hidden secrets or destiny. That night, I’m driven by emotion rather than intellect, by sheer intuition rather than reason, by need rather than curiosity. I’m only fourteen years old, after all. Only fourteen.
The barn waits.
I go to the door, which is ajar.
I listen at the gap between the door and the jamb.
Silence within.
I push the door inward. The hinges are well oiled, my feet are bare, and I enter with a silence as perfect as that of the darkness that welcomes me….
Spencer opened his eyes from the dark interior of the barn in the dream to the dark interior of the rock-pinned Explorer, and he realized that night had come to the desert. He had been unconscious for at least five or six hours.
His head was tipped forward, his chin on his chest. He gazed down into his own upturned palms, chalk white and supplicant.
The rat was on the floor. Couldn’t see it. But it was there. In the darkness. Floating.
Don’t think about that.
The rain had stopped. No drumming on the roof.
He was thirsty. Parched. Raspy tongue. Chapped lips.
The truck rocked slightly. The river was trying to push it over the cliff. The tireless damned river.
No. That couldn’t be the explanation. The roar of the waterfall was gone. The night was silent. No thunder. No lightning. No water sounds out there anymore.
He ached all over. His head and neck were the worst.
He could barely find the strength to look up from his hands.
Rocky was gone.
The passenger door hung open.
The truck rocked again. Rattled and creaked.
The woman appeared at the bottom of the open door. First her head, then her shoulders, as if she were levitating up out of the flood. Except, judging by the comparative quiet, the flood was gone.
Because his eyes were adapted to darkness and cool moonlight shone between ragged clouds, Spencer was able to recognize her.
In a voice as dry as cinders, but without a slur, he said, “Hi.”
“Hi, yourself,” she said.
“Come in.”
“Thank you, I think I will.”
“This is nice,” he said.
“You like it here?”
“Better than the other dream.”
She levered herself into the truck, and it wobbled more than before, grinding against rock at both ends.
The motion disturbed him—not because he was concerned that the truck would shift and break loose and fall, but because it stirred up his vertigo again. He was afraid of spiraling out of this dream, back into the nightmare of July and Colorado.
Sitting where Rocky had once sat, she remained still for a moment, waiting for the truck to stop moving. “This is one tricky damned situation you’ve gotten into.”
“Ball lightning,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“Ball lightning.”
“Of course.”
“Knocked the truck into the arroyo.”
“Why not,” she said.
It was so hard to think, to express himself clearly. Thinking hurt. Thinking made him dizzy.
“Thought it was aliens,” he explained.
“Aliens?”
“Little guys. Big eyes. Spielberg.”
“Why would you think it was aliens?”
“Because you’re wonderful,” he said, though the words didn’t convey what he meant. In spite of the poor light, he could see that the look she gave him was peculiar. Straining to find better words, made dizzier by the effort, he said, “Wonderful things must happen around you…happen around you all the time.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m the center of a regular festival.”
“You must know some wonderful thing. That’s why they’re after you. Because you know some wonderful thing.”
“You been taking drugs?”
“I could use a couple aspirin. Anyway…they’re not after you because you’re a bad person.”
“Aren’t they?”
“No. Because you’re not. A bad person, I mean.”
She leaned toward him and put a hand against his forehead. Even her light touch made him wince with pain.
“How do you know I’m not a bad person?” she asked.
“You were nice to me.”
“Maybe it was an act.”
She produced a penlight from her jacket, peeled back his left eyelid, directed the beam at his eye. The light hurt. Everything hurt. The cool air hurt his face. Pain accelerated his vertigo.
“You were nice to Theda.”
“Maybe that was an act too,” she said, now examining his right eye with the penlight.
; “Can’t fool Theda.”
“Why not?”
“She’s wise.”
“Well, that’s true.”
“And she makes huge cookies.”
Finished examining his eyes, she tipped his head forward to have a look at the gash in the top of his skull. “Nasty. Coagulated now, but it needs cleaned and stitched.”
“Ouch!”
“How long were you bleeding?”
“Dreams don’t hurt.”
“Do you think you lost a lot of blood?”
“This hurts.”
“’Cause you’re not dreaming.”
He licked his chapped lips. His tongue was dry. “Thirsty.”
“I’ll get you a drink in just a minute,” she said, putting two fingers under his chin and tipping his head up again.
All this head tipping was making him dangerously dizzy, but he managed to say, “Not dreaming? You’re sure?”
“Positive.” She touched his upturned right palm. “Can you squeeze my hand?”
“Yes.”
“Go ahead.”
“All right.”
“I mean now.”
“Oh.” He closed his hand around hers.
“That’s not bad,” she said.
“It’s nice.”
“A good grip. Probably no spinal damage. I expected the worst.”
She had a warm, strong hand. He said, “Nice.”
He closed his eyes. An inner darkness leaped at him. He opened his eyes at once, before he could fall back into the dream.
“You can let go of my hand now,” she said.
“Not a dream, huh?”
“No dream.”
She clicked on the penlight again and directed it down between his seat and the center console.
“This is really strange,” he said.
She was peering along the narrow shaft of light.
“Not dreaming,” he said, “must be hallucinating.”
She popped the release button that disengaged the buckle on his safety harness from the latch between his seat and the console.
“It’s okay,” he said.
“What’s okay?” she asked, switching off the light and returning it to her jacket pocket.
“That you peed on the seat.”
She laughed.
“I like to hear you laugh.”
She was still laughing as she carefully extricated him from the harness.
“You’ve never laughed before,” he said.
“Well,” she said, “not much recently.”
“Not ever before. You’ve never barked either.”
She laughed again.
“I’m going to get you a new rawhide bone.”
“You’re very kind.”
He said, “This is damned interesting.”
“That’s for sure.”
“It’s so real.”
“Seems unreal to me.”
Even though Spencer remained mostly passive through the process, getting out of the harness left him so dizzy that he saw three of the woman and three of every shadow in the car, like superimposed images on a photograph.
Afraid that he would pass out before he had a chance to express himself, he spoke in a raspy rush of words: “You’re a real friend, pal, you really are, you’re a perfect friend.”
“We’ll see if that’s how it turns out.”
“You’re the only friend I have.”
“Okay, my friend, now we’ve come to the hard part. How the hell am I going to get you out of this junker when you can’t help yourself at all?”
“I can help myself.”
“You think you can?”
“I was an Army Ranger once. And a cop.”
“Yes, I know.”
“I’ve been trained in tae kwon do.”
“That would really be handy if we were under assault by a bunch of ninja assassins. But can you help me get you out of here?”
“A little.”
“I guess we’ve got to give it a try.”
“Okay.”
“Can you lift your legs out of there, swing them to me?”
“Don’t want to disturb the rat.”
“There’s a rat?”
“He’s dead already but…you know.”
“Of course.”
“I’m very dizzy.”
“Then let’s wait a minute, rest a minute.”
“Very, very dizzy.”
“Just take it easy.”
“Goodbye,” he said, and surrendered to a black vortex that spun him around and away. For some reason, as he went, he thought of Dorothy and Toto and Oz.
The back door of the barn opens into a short hallway. I step inside. No lights. No windows. The green glow from the security-system readout—NOT READY TO ARM—in the right-hand wall provides just enough light for me to see that I am alone in the corridor. I don’t ease the door all the way shut behind me but leave it ajar, as I found it.
The floor appears to be black beneath me, but I’m on polished pine. To the left are a bathroom and a room where art supplies are stored. Those doorways are barely discernible in the faint green wash, which is like the unearthly illumination in a dream, less like real light than like a lingering memory of neon. To the right is a file room. Ahead, at the end of the hallway, is the door to the large first-floor gallery, where a switchback staircase leads to my father’s studio. That upper chamber occupies the entire second floor and features the big north-facing windows under which the van is parked outside.
I listen to the hallway darkness.
It doesn’t speak or breathe.
The light switch is to the right, but I leave it untouched.
In the green-black gloom, I ease the bathroom door all the way open. Step inside. Wait for a sound, a sense of movement, a blow. Nothing.
The supply room is also deserted.
I move to the right side of the hall and quietly open the door to the file room. I step across the threshold.
The overhead fluorescent tubes are dark, but there is other light where no light should be. Yellow and sour. Dim and strange. From a mysterious source at the far end of the room.
A long worktable occupies the center of that rectangular space. Two chairs. File cabinets stand against one of the long walls.
My heart is knocking so hard it shakes my arms. I make fists of my hands and hold them at my sides, struggling to control myself.
I decide to return to the house, to bed, to sleep.
Then I’m at the far end of the file room, though I don’t recall having taken a single step in that direction. I seem to have walked those twenty feet in a sudden spell of sleep. Called forward by something, someone. As if responding to a powerful hypnotic command. To a wordless, silent summons.
I am standing in front of a knotty-pine cabinet that extends from floor to ceiling and from corner to corner of the thirteen-foot-wide room. The cabinet features three pairs of tall, narrow doors.
The center pair stand open.
Behind those doors, there should be nothing but shelves. On the shelves should be boxes of old tax records, correspondence, and dead files no longer kept in the metal cabinets along the other wall.
This night, the shelves and their contents, along with the back wall of the pine cabinet, have been pushed backward four or five feet into a secret space behind the file room, into a hidden chamber I’ve never seen before. The sour yellow light comes from a place beyond the closet.
Before me is the essence of all boyish fantasies: the secret passage to a world of danger and adventure, to far stars, to stars farther still, to the very center of the earth, to lands of trolls or pirates or intelligent apes or robots, to the distant future or to the age of dinosaurs. Here is a stairway to mystery, a tunnel through which I might set out upon heroic quests, or a way station on a strange highway to dimensions unknown.
Briefly, I thrill to the thought of what exotic travels and magical discoveries might lay ahead. But instinct quickly tells me that on the far side of t
his secret passage, there is something stranger and deadlier than an alien world or a Morlock dungeon. I want to return to the house, to my bedroom, to the protection of my sheets, immediately, as fast as I can run. The perverse allure of terror and the unknown deserts me, and I’m suddenly eager to leave this waking dream for the less threatening lands to be found on the dark side of sleep.
Although I can’t recall crossing the threshold, I find myself inside the tall cabinet instead of hurrying to the house, through the night, the moonlight, and the owl shadows. I blink, and then I find that I’ve gone farther still, not back one step but forward into the secret space beyond.
It’s a vestibule of sorts, six feet by six feet. Concrete floor. Concrete-block walls. Bare yellow bulb in a ceiling socket.
A cursory investigation reveals that the back wall of the pine cabinet, complete with the attached and laden shelves, is fitted with small concealed wheels. It’s been shoved inward on a pair of sliding-door tracks.
To the right is a door out of the vestibule. An ordinary door in many ways. Heavy, judging by the look of it. Solid wood. Brass hardware. It’s painted white, and in places the paint is yellowed with age. However, though it’s more white and grimy yellow than it is anything else, tonight this is neither a white nor a yellow door. A series of bloody handprints arcs from the area around the brass knob across the upper portion of the door, and their bright patterns render the color of the background unimportant. Eight, ten, twelve, or more impressions of a woman’s hands. Palms and spread fingers. Each hand partially overlapping the one before it. Some smeared, some as clear as police-file prints. All glistening, wet. All fresh. Those scarlet images bring to mind the spread wings of a bird leaping into flight, fleeing to the sky, in a flutter of fear. Staring at them, I am mesmerized, unable to get my breath, my heart storming, because the handprints convey an unbearable sense of the woman’s terror, desperation, and frantic resistance to the prospect of being forced beyond the gray concrete vestibule of this secret world.