by Dean Koontz
Willa, more emotionally fragile than her sister, began to cry again.
“Ondine’s right,” Bonnie agreed. “Stinking bastards.”
From the very back of the Microbus, Martin said, “Man, this is wild. Uncle Harris, they’re going after you like you were Michael Jackson or someone.”
“Okay, we’re past them,” Darius said, so Harris could sit up straight again.
Bonnie said, “The police must think we’re home, ’cause of the way the security system handles the lights when no one’s there.”
“It’s programmed with a dozen scenarios,” Darius explained. “It cycles through a different one every night no one’s there, switching off lamps in one room, on in another, switching radios and TVs on and off, imitating realistic patterns of activity. Supposed to convince burglars. Never expected I’d be happy about it convincing cops.”
Bonnie asked, “What now?”
“Let’s just drive for a while.” Harris put his hands in front of the heater vents, in the jets of hot air. He couldn’t get warm. “Just drive while I think about this.”
Already they had spent fifteen minutes cruising through Bel Air while he’d told them about the man who had approached him during his walk, the second stranger in the theater men’s room, and the redhead in the green coat. Even before seeing the TV-news vans, they had all regarded the woman’s warning as seriously as the events of the past few days argued that they should. But it had seemed feasible to drive by the house, quickly leave off Bonnie and Martin, then return ten minutes later and pick them up, along with the clothes that Ondine and Willa had gotten at the mall and with the pathetically few belongings that Jessica and the girls had been able to remove from their own home during the eviction on Saturday. However, their aimless cruising had resulted in an indirect approach to the house, a chance encounter with the TV-news vans, and the realization that the warning had been even more urgent than they had thought.
Darius drove to Wilshire Boulevard and headed west, toward Santa Monica and the sea.
“When I’m charged with the premeditated murder of seven people, including three children,” Harris thought aloud, “the prosecutor is going to go for ‘first-degree murder, special circumstances,’ sure as God made little green apples.”
Darius said, “Bail’s out of the question. Won’t be any. They’ll say you’re a flight risk.”
From her seat at the back, beside Martin, Jessica said, “Even if there was bail, we have no way to raise the money to post it.”
“Court calendars are clogged,” Darius noted. “So many laws these days, seventy thousand pages out of Congress last year. All those defendants, all those appeals. Most cases move like glaciers. Jesus, Harris, you’ll be in jail a year, maybe two, just waiting for a day in court, getting through the trial—”
“That’s time lost forever,” Jessica said angrily, “even if the jury finds him innocent.”
Ondine began to cry again, with Willa.
Harris vividly recalled each of his incapacitating attacks of jailhouse claustrophobia. “I’d never make it six months, not a chance, maybe not even a month.”
Circling through the city, where the millions of bright lights were inadequate to hold back the darkness, they discussed options. In the end, they realized that there were no options. He had no choice but to run. Yet without money or ID, he wouldn’t get far before he was chased down and apprehended. His only hope, therefore, was the mysterious group to which the redhead in the green coat and the other two strangers belonged, although Harris knew too little about them to feel comfortable putting his future in their hands.
Jessica, Ondine, and Willa were adamantly opposed to being separated from him. They feared that any separation was going to be permanent, so they ruled out the option of his going on the run alone. He was sure they were right. Besides, he didn’t want to be apart from them, because he suspected that they would remain targets in his absence.
Looking back through the shadow-filled Microbus, past the dark faces of his children and his sister-in-law, Harris met the eyes of his wife, where she sat next to Martin. “It can’t have come to this.”
“All that matters is that we’re together.”
“Everything we’ve worked so hard for—”
“Gone already.”
“—to start over at forty-four—”
“Better than dying at forty-four,” said Jessica.
“You’re a trooper,” he said lovingly.
Jessica smiled. “Well, it could’ve been an earthquake, the house gone, and all of us besides.”
Harris turned his attention to Ondine and Willa. They were done with tears, shaky but with a new light of defiance in their eyes.
He said, “All the friends you’ve made in school—”
“Oh, they’re just kids.” Ondine strove to be airy about losing all her pals and confidants, which to a teenager would be the hardest thing about such an abrupt change. “Just a bunch of kids, silly kids, that’s all.”
“And,” Willa said, “you’re our dad.”
For the first time since the nightmare had begun, Harris was moved to quiet tears of his own.
“It’s settled then,” Jessica announced. “Darius, start looking for a pay phone.”
They found one at the end of a strip shopping center, in front of a pizza parlor.
Harris had to ask Darius for change. Then he got out of the Microbus and went to the telephone alone.
Through the windows of the pizza parlor, he saw people eating, drinking beer, talking. A group at one large table was having an especially good time; he could hear their laughter above the music from the jukebox. None of them seemed to be aware that the world had recently turned upside down and inside out.
Harris was gripped by an envy so intense that he wanted to smash the windows, burst into the restaurant, overturn the tables, knock the food and the mugs of beer out of those people’s hands, shout at them and shake them until their illusions of safety and normalcy were shattered into as many pieces as his own had been. He was so bitter that he might have done it—would have done it—if he hadn’t had a wife and two daughters to think about, if he had been facing his frightening new life alone. It wasn’t even their happiness that he envied; it was their blessed ignorance that he longed to regain for himself, though he knew that no knowledge could ever be unlearned.
He lifted the handset from the pay phone and deposited coins. For a blood-freezing moment, he listened to the dial tone, unable to remember the number that had been on the paper in the redhead’s hand. Then it came to him, and he punched the buttons on the keypad, his hand shaking so badly that he half expected to discover that he had not entered the number correctly.
On the third ring, a man answered with a simple, “Hello?”
“I need help,” Harris said, and realized that he hadn’t even identified himself. “I’m sorry. I’m…my name is…Descoteaux. Harris Descoteaux. One of your people, whoever you are, she said to call this number, that you could help me, that you were ready to help.”
After a hesitation, the man at the other end of the line said, “If you had this number, and if you got it legitimately, then you must be aware there’s a certain protocol.”
“Protocol?”
There was no response.
For a moment, Harris panicked that the man was going to hang up and walk away from that phone and be forever thereafter unreachable. He couldn’t understand what was expected of him—until he remembered the three passwords that had been printed on the piece of paper below the telephone number. The redhead had told him that he must memorize those too. He said, “Pheasants and dragons.”
At the security keypad, in the short hallway at the back of the barn, Spencer entered the series of numbers that disarmed the alarm. The Dresmunds had been instructed not to alter the codes, in order to make access easy for the owner if he ever returned when they were gone. When Spencer punched in the last digit, the luminous readout changed from ARMED AND SECURE to the l
ess bright READY TO ARM.
He had brought a flashlight from the pickup. He directed the beam along the left-hand wall. “Half bath, just a toilet and sink,” he told Ellie. Beyond the first door, a second: “That’s a small storage room.” At the end of the hall, the light found a third door. “He had a gallery that way, open only to the wealthiest collectors. And from the gallery, there’s a staircase up to what used to be his studio on the second floor.” He swung the beam to the right side of the corridor, where only one door waited. It was ajar. “That used to be the file room.”
He could have switched on the overhead fluorescent panels. Sixteen years ago, however, he had entered in gloom, guided only by the radiance of the green letters on the security-system readout. Intuitively, he knew that his best hope of remembering what he had repressed for so long was to re-create the circumstances of that night insofar as he was able. The barn had been air-conditioned then, and now the heat was turned low, so the February chill in the air was nearly right. The harsh glare of overhead fluorescent bulbs would too drastically alter the mood. If he were striving for a roughly authentic recreation, even a flashlight was too reassuring, but he didn’t have the nerve to proceed in the same depth of darkness into which he had gone when he was fourteen.
Rocky whined and scratched at the back door, which Ellie had closed behind them. He was shivering and miserable.
For the most part and for reasons that Spencer would never be able to determine, Rocky’s argument with darkness was limited to that in the outside world. He usually functioned well enough indoors, in the dark, although sometimes he required a night-light to banish an especially bad case of the willies.
“Poor thing,” Ellie said.
The flashlight was brighter than any night-light. Rocky should have been sufficiently comforted by it. Instead, he quaked so hard that it seemed as if his ribs ought to make xylophone music against one another.
“It’s okay, pal,” Spencer told the dog. “What you sense is something in the past, over and done with a long time ago. Nothing here and now is worth being scared of.”
The dog scratched at the door, unconvinced.
“Should I let him out?” Ellie wondered.
“No. He’ll just realize it’s night outside and start scratching to get back in.”
Again directing the flashlight at the file-room door, Spencer knew that his own inner turmoil must be the source of the dog’s fear. Rocky was always acutely sensitive to his moods. Spencer strove to calm himself. After all, what he had said to the dog was true: The aura of evil that clung to these walls was the residue of a horror from the past, and there was nothing here and now to fear.
On the other hand, what was true for the dog was not as true for Spencer. He still lived partly in the past, held fast by the dark asphalt of memory. In fact, he was gripped even more fiercely by what he could not quite remember than by what he could recall so clearly; his self-denied recollections formed the deepest tar pit of all. The events of sixteen years ago could not harm Rocky, but for Spencer, they had the real potential to snare, engulf, and destroy him.
He began to tell Ellie about the night of the owl, the rainbow, and the knife. The sound of his own voice scared him. Each word seemed like a link in one of those chain drives by which any roller coaster was hauled inexorably up the first hill on its track and by which a gondola with a gargoyle masthead was pulled into the ghost-filled darkness of a fun house. Chain drives worked only in one direction, and once the journey had begun, even if a section of track had collapsed ahead or an all-consuming fire had broken out in the deepest chamber of the fun house, there was no backing up.
“That summer, and for many summers before it, I slept without air-conditioning in my bedroom. The house had a hot-water, radiant-heat system that was quiet in the winter, and that was okay. But I was bothered by the hiss and whistle of cold air being forced through the vanes in the vent grille, the hum of the compressor echoing along the ductwork…. No, ‘bothered’ isn’t the word. It scared me. I was afraid that the noise of the air conditioner would mask some sound in the night…a sound that I’d better be able to hear and respond to…or die.”
“What sound?” Ellie asked.
“I didn’t know. It was just a fear, a childish thing. Or so I thought at the time. I was embarrassed by it. But that’s why my window was open, why I heard the cry. I tried to tell myself it was only an owl or an owl’s prey, far off in the night. But…it was so desperate, so thin and full of fear…so human…”
More swiftly than when he had been confessing to strangers in barrooms and to the dog, he recounted his journey on that July night: out of the silent house, across the summer lawn with its faux frost of moonlight, to the corner of the barn and the visitation of the owl, to the van where the stench of urine rose from the open back door, and into the hall where they now stood together.
“And then I opened the door to the file room,” he said.
He opened it once more and crossed the threshold.
Ellie followed him.
In the dark hallway from which the two of them had come, Rocky still whined and scratched at the back door, trying to get out.
Spencer played the beam of the flashlight around the file room. The long worktable was gone, as were the two chairs. The row of file cabinets had been removed as well.
The knotty-pine cupboards still filled the far end of the room from floor to ceiling and corner to corner. They featured three pairs of tall, narrow doors.
He pointed the beam of light at the center doors and said, “They were standing open, and a strange faint light was coming out of them from inside the cabinet, where there weren’t any lights.” He heard a new note of strain in his voice. “My heart was knocking so hard it shook my arms. I fisted my hands and held them at my sides, struggling to control myself. I wanted to run, just turn and run back to bed and forget it all.”
He was talking about how he had felt then, in the long ago, but he could as easily have been speaking of the present.
He opened the center pair of knotty-pine doors. The unused hinges squeaked. He shone the light into the cabinet and panned it across empty shelves.
“Four latches hold the back wall in place,” he told her.
His father had concealed the latches behind clever strips of flip-up molding. Spencer found all four: one to the left at the back of the bottom shelf, one to the right; one to the left at the back of the second-highest shelf, one to the right.
Behind him, Rocky padded into the file room, claws ticking on the polished-pine floor.
Ellie said, “That’s right, pooch, you stay with us.”
After handing the flashlight to Ellie, Spencer pushed on the shelves. The guts of the cabinet rolled backward into darkness. Small wheels creaked along old metal tracks.
He stepped over the base frame of the unit, into the space that had been vacated by the shelves. Standing inside the cupboard, he pushed the back wall all the way into the hidden vestibule beyond.
His palms were damp. He blotted them on his jeans.
Retrieving the flashlight from Ellie, he went into the six-foot-square room behind the cupboard. A chain dangled from the bare bulb in the ceiling socket. He tugged on it and was rewarded with light as sulfurous as he remembered it from that night.
Concrete floor. Concrete-block walls. As in his dreams.
After Ellie shut the knotty-pine doors, closing herself in the cabinet, she and Rocky followed him into the cramped room beyond.
“That night, I stood out there in the file room, looking in through the back of the cupboard, toward this yellow light, and I wanted to run away so badly. I thought I had started to run…but the next thing I knew, I was in the cupboard. I said to myself, ‘Run, run, get the hell out of here.’ But then I was all the way through the cupboard and in this vestibule, without any awareness of having taken a step. It was like…like I was drawn…in a trance…couldn’t go back no matter how much I wanted to.”
“It’s a yellow bug light
,” she said, “like you use outdoors during the summer.” She seemed to find that curious.
“Sure. To keep mosquitoes away. They never work that well. And I don’t know why he used it here, instead of an ordinary bulb.”
“Well, maybe it was the only one handy at the time.”
“No. Never. Not him. He must have felt there was something more aesthetic about the yellow light, more suited to his purpose. He lived a carefully considered life. Everything he did was done with the aesthetics well worked out in his mind. From the clothes he wore to the way he prepared a sandwich. That’s one thing that makes what he did under this place so horrible…the long and careful consideration.”
He realized that he was tracing his scar with the fingertips of his right hand while holding the flashlight in his left. He lowered his hand to the SIG 9mm pistol that was still jammed under his belt, against his belly, but he didn’t draw it.
“How could your mother not know about this place?” Ellie asked, gazing up and around at the vestibule.
“He owned the ranch before they were married. Remodeled the barn before she saw it. This used to be part of the area that became the file room. He added those pine cabinets out there himself, to close off this space, after the contractors left, so they wouldn’t know he’d concealed the access to the basement. Last of all, he brought in a guy to lay pine floors through the rest of the place.”
The Micro Uzi was equipped with a carrying strap. Ellie slung it over her shoulder, apparently so she could hug herself with both arms. “He was planning what he did planning it before he even married your mother, before you were born?”
Her disgust was as heavy as the chill in the air. Spencer only hoped that she was able to absorb all the revelations that lay ahead without letting her repulsion transfer in any degree from the father to the son. He desperately prayed that he would remain clean in her eyes, untainted.
In his own eyes he regarded himself with disgust every time he saw even an innocent aspect of his father in himself. Sometimes, meeting his reflection in a mirror, Spencer would remember his father’s equally dark eyes, and he would look away, shuddering and sick to his stomach.