Dark Rivers of the Heart

by Dean Koontz

  Sadly, most people were too timid to seize the day and discover what such transcendence felt like. Timidity, however, had never been one of Roy’s shortcomings.

  Revelation of his compassionate crusade had earned Roy all the glories of Eve’s bedroom, and he had decided that revelation was called for again. Journeying across the mountains, he had realized that Steven was perfect in some way few people ever were—although the nature of his perfection was more subtle than Eve’s devastating beauty, more sensed than seen, intriguing, mysterious. Instinctively Roy knew that Steven and he were simpatico to an even greater extent than were he and Eve. True friendship might be forged between them if he revealed himself to the artist as forthrightly as he’d revealed himself to the dear heart in Las Vegas.

  Standing by the moonlit window, in the dark and empty gallery, Roy Miro began to explain, with tasteful humility, how he had put his ideals into practice in ways that even the agency, for all its willingness to be bold, would have been too timid to endorse. As the artist listened, Roy almost hoped that the fugitives would not come that night or the next, not until he and Steven were granted sufficient time together to build a foundation for the friendship that surely was destined to enrich their lives.

  Outside Hamlet Gardens in Westwood, the uniformed valet brought Darius’s VW Microbus from the narrow lot beside the building, drove it into the street, and swung it to the curb at the front entrance, where the two Descoteaux families waited, fresh from dinner.

  Harris was at the rear of their group, and as he was about to step into the Microbus, a woman touched his shoulder. “Sir, may I give you something to think about?”

  He wasn’t surprised. He didn’t back off, as he had done in the men’s room at the theater. Turning, he saw an attractive redhead in high heels, an ankle-length coat in a shade of green complementary to her complexion, and a stylishly wide-brimmed hat worn at a rakish angle. She appeared to be on her way to a party or a nightclub.

  “If the new world order turns out to be peace, prosperity, and democracy, how wonderful for us all,” she said. “But perhaps it will be less appealing, more like the Dark Ages if the Dark Ages had had all these wonderful new forms of high-tech entertainment to make them tolerable. But I think you’d agree…being able to get the latest movies on video doesn’t fully compensate for enslavement.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “To help you,” she said. “But you have to want the help, have to know you need it, and have to be ready to do what needs done.”

  From inside the Microbus, his family was staring at him with curiosity and concern.

  “I’m no bomb-throwing revolutionary,” he told the woman in the green coat.

  “Nor are we,” she said. “Bombs and guns are the instruments of last resort. Knowledge should be the first and foremost weapon in any resistance.”

  “What knowledge do I have that you could want?”

  “To begin with,” she said, “the knowledge of how fragile your freedom is in the current scheme of things. That gives you a degree of commitment that we value.”

  The valet, though standing just out of earshot, was staring at them oddly.

  From a coat pocket, the woman extracted a piece of paper and showed it to Harris. He saw a telephone number and three words.

  When he tried to take the paper from her, she held it tightly. “No, Mr. Descoteaux. I would prefer that you memorize it.”

  The number was designed to be memorable, and the three words gave him no difficulty, either.

  As Harris stared at the paper, the woman said, “The man who has done this to you is named Roy Miro.”

  He remembered the name but not where he had heard it before.

  “He came to you pretending to be an FBI agent,” she said.

  “The guy asking about Spence!” he said, looking up from the paper. He was suddenly furious, now that he had a face to put on the enemy who had thus far been faceless. “But what in the hell did I do to him? We had the mildest disagreement over an officer who once served under me. That’s all!” Then he heard the other part of what she had said, and he frowned. “Pretended to be with the FBI? But he was. I checked him out between the time he made the appointment and when he came to the office.”

  “They are seldom what they seem to be,” the redhead said.

  “They? Who are they?”

  “Who they have always been, through the ages,” she said, and smiled. “Sorry. No time to be other than inscrutable.”

  “I’m going to get my house back,” he said adamantly, although he did not feel as confident as he sounded.

  “But you won’t. And even if the public outcry was loud enough to have these laws rescinded, they’d just pass new laws giving them other ways to ruin people they want to ruin. The problem’s not one law. These are power fanatics who want to tell everyone how they should live, what they should think, read, say, feel.”

  “How do I get at Miro?”

  “You can’t. He’s too deep-cover to be easily exposed.”

  “But—”

  “I’m not here to tell you how to get Roy Miro. I’m here to warn you that you must not go back to your brother’s tonight.”

  A chill shimmered through the chambers of fluid in his spine, working up his back to the base of his neck with a queer, methodical progression like no chill he had ever felt before.

  He said, “What’s going to happen now?”

  “Your ordeal isn’t over. It isn’t ever going to be over if you let them have their way. You’ll be arrested for the murder of two drug dealers, the wife of one, the girlfriend of the other, and three young children. Your fingerprints have been found on objects in the house where they were shot to death.”

  “I never killed anyone!”

  The valet heard enough of that exclamation to scowl.

  Darius was getting out of the Microbus to see what was wrong.

  “The objects with your prints on them were taken from your home and planted at the scene of the murders. The story will probably be that you disposed of two competitors who tried to muscle in on your territory, and you wiped out the wife, girlfriend, and kids just to teach other dealers a hard lesson.”

  Harris’s heart was pounding so fiercely that he would not have been surprised to see his breast shuddering visibly with each hard beat. Instead of pumping warm blood, it seemed to be circulating liquid Freon through his body. He was colder than a dead man.

  Fear regressed him to the vulnerability and helplessness of childhood. He heard himself seeking solace in the faith of his beloved, gospel-singing mother, a faith from which he had slipped away through the years but to which he now suddenly reached out with a sincerity that surprised him: “Jesus, dear sweet Jesus, help me.”

  “Perhaps He will,” the woman said as Darius approached them. “But in the meantime, we’re ready to help as well. If you’re smart, you’ll call that number, use those passwords, and get on with your life—instead of getting on with your death.”

  As Darius joined them, he said, “What’s up, Harris?”

  The redhead returned the slip of paper to her coat pocket.

  Harris said, “But that’s just it. How can I ever get on with my life after what’s happened to me?”

  “You can,” she said, “though you won’t be Harris Descoteaux anymore.”

  She smiled and nodded at Darius, and she walked away.

  Harris watched her go, overcome by that here-we-are-in-the-magic-kingdom-of-Oz feeling again.

  Long ago those acres had been beautiful. As a boy with another name, Spencer had been especially fond of the ranch in wintertime, swaddled in white. By day, it was a bright empire of snow forts, tunnels, and sled runs that had been tamped down with great care and patience. On clear nights, the Rocky Mountain sky was deeper than eternity, deeper even than the mind could imagine, and starlight sparkled in the icicles.

  Returning after his own eternity in exile, he found nothing that was pleasing to the eye. Each slope and cur
ve of land, each building, each tree was the same as it had been in that distant age, but for the fact that the pines and maples and birches were taller than before. Changeless though it might be, the ranch now impressed him as the ugliest place that he had ever seen, even when flattered by its winter dress. They were harsh acres, and the stark geometry of those fields and hills was designed, at every turn, to offend the eye, like the architecture of Hell. The trees were only ordinary specimens, but they looked to him as though they were malformed and gnarled by disease, nurtured on horrors that had leached into the soil and into their roots from the nearby catacombs. The buildings—stables, house, barn—were all graceless hulks, looming and haunted, the windows as black and menacing as open graves.

  Spencer parked at the house. His heart was pounding. His mouth was so dry and his throat was so tight that he could hardly swallow. The door of the pickup opened with the resistance of a massive portal on a bank vault.

  Ellie remained in the truck, with the computer on her lap. If trouble came, she was on-line and ready for whatever strange purpose she had prepared. Through the microwave transceiver, she had linked to a satellite and from there into a computer system that she hadn’t identified to Spencer and that could be anywhere on the surface of the earth. Information might be power, as she had said, but Spencer couldn’t imagine how information would shield them from bullets, if the agency was nearby and lying in wait for them.

  As though he were a deep-sea diver, encased in a cumbersome pressure suit and steel helmet, burdened by an incalculable tonnage of water, he walked to the front steps, crossed the porch, and stood at the door. He rang the bell.

  He heard the chimes inside, the same five notes that had marked a visitor’s arrival when he’d lived there as a boy, and even as they rang out, he had to struggle against an urge to turn and run. He was a grown man, and the hobgoblins that terrorized children should have had no power over him. Irrationally, however, he was afraid that the chimes would be answered by his mother, dead but walking, as naked as she’d been found in that ditch, all her wounds revealed.

  He found the willpower to censor the mental image of the corpse. He rang the bell again.

  The night was so hushed that he felt as though he would be able to hear the earthworms deep in the ground, below the frost line, if only he could clear his mind and listen for their telltale writhing.

  When no one responded to the bell the second time, Spencer retrieved the spare key from the hiding place atop the door head. The Dresmunds had been instructed to leave it there, in the event that it was ever needed by the owner. The deadbolt locks of the house and barn were keyed the same. With that freezing bit of brass half sticking to his fingers, he hurried back to the black pickup.

  The driveway forked. One lane led past the front of the barn and the other behind it. He took the second route.

  “I should go inside the same way I went that night,” he told Ellie. “By the back door. Re-create the moment.”

  They parked where the van with the rainbow mural had stood in a long-ago darkness. That vehicle had been his father’s. He’d seen it for the first time that night because it had always been garaged off the property and registered under a false name. It was the hunting wagon in which Steven Ackblom had traveled to various distant places to stalk and capture the women and the girls who were destined to become permanent residents of his catacombs. For the most part, he’d driven it onto the property only when his wife and son had been away, visiting her parents or at horse shows—though also on rare occasions when his darker desires became stronger than his caution.

  Ellie wanted to stay in the pickup truck, leave the engine running, and keep the computer on her lap, with her fingers poised over the keys, ready to respond to any provocation.

  Spencer couldn’t imagine anything that she could possibly do, while actually under attack, to force a call-back of the agency thugs. But she was dead serious, and he knew her well enough to trust that her plan, however peculiar, was not frivolous.

  “They’re not here,” he told her. “No one’s waiting for us. If they were here, they’d have been all over us by now.”

  “I don’t know….”

  “To remember what happened in those missing minutes, I’m going to have to go down…into that place. Rocky isn’t company enough. I don’t have the courage to go alone, and I’m not ashamed to say so.”

  Ellie nodded. “You shouldn’t be. If I were you, I’d never have been able to come this far. I’d have driven by, never looked back.” She surveyed the moon-dappled fields and hills behind the barn.

  “No one,” he said.

  “All right.” Her fingers tapped across the laptop keyboard, and she pulled back from whatever computer she had invaded. The display screen went dark. “Let’s go.”

  Spencer doused the headlights. He switched off the engine.

  He took the pistol. Ellie had the Micro Uzi.

  When they got out of the truck, Rocky insisted on scrambling out with them. He was shaking, saturated by his master’s mood, afraid to go with them but equally afraid to stay behind.

  Shivering more violently than the dog. Spencer peered into the sky. It was as clear and star-spattered as it had been on that July night. This time, however, the cataracts of moonlight revealed neither an owl nor an angel.

  In the dark gallery, where Roy had spoken of many things and the artist had listened with increasing interest and gratifying respect, the grumble of the approaching truck brought a temporary halt to the sharing of intimacies.

  To avoid the risk of being seen, they took one step back from the window. They still had a view of the driveway.

  Instead of stopping in front of the barn, the pickup continued around to the back of the building.

  “I brought you here,” Roy said, “because I have to know how your son’s involved with this woman. He’s a wild card. We can’t figure him. There’s a feeling of organization about his involvement. That disturbs us. For some time, we’ve suspected there may be a loosely woven organization out to undo our work or, failing that, cause us as many headaches as it can. He might be involved with such a group. If it exists. Maybe they’re assisting the woman. Anyway, considering Spencer’s…I’m sorry. Considering Michael’s military training and his obvious Spartan mind-set, I don’t think he’ll crack under the usual methods of interrogation, no matter how much pain is involved.”

  “He’s a strong-willed boy,” Steven acknowledged.

  “But if you interrogate him, he’ll break wide open.”

  “You might be right,” Steven said. “Quite perceptive.”

  “And this also gives me a chance to help right a wrong.”

  “What wrong would that be?”

  “Well, of course, it’s wrong for a son to betray his father.”

  “Ah. And in addition to being able to avenge that betrayal, may I have the woman?” Steven asked.

  Roy thought of those lovely eyes, so direct and challenging. He had coveted them for fourteen months. He would be willing to relinquish his claim, however, in return for the opportunity to witness what a creative genius of Steven Ackblom’s stature could achieve when permitted to work in the medium of living flesh.

  In anticipation of visitors, they now spoke in whispers:

  “Yes, that seems only fair,” Roy said. “But I want to watch.”

  “You understand that what I’ll do to her will be…extreme.”

  “The timid never know transcendence.”

  “That’s very true,” Steven agreed.

  “‘They were all so beautiful in their pain, and all like angels when they died,’” Roy quoted.

  “And you want to see that brief, perfect beauty,” Ackblom said.

  “Yes.”

  From the far end of the building came the scrape and clack of a lock bolt. A hesitation. Then the faint creak of door hinges.

  Darius braked at the stop sign. He was traveling east, and he lived two and a half blocks north of where he had stopped, but he didn
’t put on the turn signal.

  Facing the Microbus from across the intersection were four television-news vans with elaborate microwave dishes on the roofs. Two were parked to the left, two to the right, bathed in the sodium-yellow light-fall from the streetlamps. One was from KNBC, the local affiliate of the national network, and another was marked KTLA, which was Channel 5, the independent station with the highest news ratings in the Los Angeles market. Harris couldn’t make out the call letters on the other vans, but he figured they would be from the ABC and CBS affiliate stations in Los Angeles. Behind them were a few cars, and in addition to the people in all those vehicles, half a dozen others were milling around, talking.

  Darius’s voice was colored by both heavy sarcasm and anger: “Must be a breaking story.”

  “Not quite yet,” Harris said grimly. “Best to drive straight through, right by them, and not so fast that they pay any attention to us.”

  Instead of turning left, toward home, Darius did as his brother asked.

  Passing the media, Harris leaned forward, as if fiddling with the radio, averting his face from the windows. “They’ve been tipped off, asked to stay a few blocks away until it goes down. Somebody wants to ensure there’ll be plenty of film of me being taken out of the house in handcuffs. If they go as far as using a SWAT team, then just before the bastards break down the door, these TV vans will get the word to come on up.”

  Behind Harris, from the middle of three rows of seats, Ondine leaned forward. “Daddy, you mean they’re all here to film you?”

  “I’d bet on it, honey.”

  “The bastards,” she fumed.

  “Just newsmen doing their job.”