by Dean Koontz
Homeless winos and crackheads lived in some of the lusher stands of shrubbery, in concealed cardboard boxes insulated with newspapers and old blankets. In the sunlight, the beach crowd moved in and the day was filled with well-tanned skaters and surfers and seekers of false dreams. Then the true residents wandered to the streets to make the rounds of trash bins, to panhandle, and to shamble on quests that only they could understand. But at night, the park belonged to them again, and the green lawns and the benches and the handball courts were as dangerous as any places on earth. In darkness, the deranged souls then ventured forth from the undergrowth to prey on one another. They were likely to prey, as well, on unwary visitors who incorrectly assumed that a park was public domain at any hour of the day.
It was no place for women and girls—unsafe for armed men, in fact—but it was the only quick route to the sand and to the foot of the old pier. At the pier stairs, they were to be met by someone who would take them on from there to the new life that they were so blindly embracing.
They had expected to wait. But even as they approached the dark structure, a man walked out of the shadows between those pilings that were still above the tide line. He joined them at the foot of the stairs.
Even with no lamppost nearby, with only the ambient light of the great city that hugged the shoreline, Harris recognized the man who had come for them. It was the Asian in the reindeer sweater, whom he had first encountered in the theater men’s room in Westwood earlier in the evening.
“Pheasants and dragons,” the man said, as though he was not sure that Harris could tell one Asian from another.
“Yes, I know you,” Harris said.
“You were told to come alone,” the contact admonished, but not angrily.
“We wanted to say good-bye,” Darius told him. “And we didn’t know…We wanted to know—how will we contact them where they’re going?”
“You won’t,” said the man in the reindeer sweater. “Hard as it may be, you’ve got to accept that you will probably never see them again.”
In the Microbus, both before Harris had made the phone call from the pizza parlor and after, as they had found their way to the park, they had discussed the likelihood of a permanent separation. For a moment, no one could speak. They stared at one another, in a state of denial that approached paralysis.
The man in the reindeer sweater backed off a few yards to give them privacy, but he said, “We have little time.”
Although Harris had lost his house, his bank accounts, his job, and everything but the clothes on his back, those losses now seemed inconsequential. Property rights, he had learned from bitter experience, were the essence of all civil rights, but the theft of every dime of his property did not have one tenth—not one hundredth—the impact of losing these beloved people. The theft of their home and savings was a blow, but this loss was an inner wound, as if a piece of his heart had been cut out. The pain was of an immeasurably greater magnitude and of a quality inexpressible.
They said good-bye with fewer words than Harris would ever have imagined possible—because no words were adequate. They hugged one another fiercely, acknowledging that they were most likely parting until they met again on whatever shore lay beyond the grave. Their mother had believed in that far and better shore. Since childhood they had drifted away from the belief that she had instilled in them, but they were for this terrible moment, in this place, fully in the faith again. Harris held Bonnie tightly, then Martin, and came at last to his brother, who was separating tearfully from Jessica. He hugged Darius and kissed his cheek. He had not kissed his brother for more years than he could recall, because for so long they had both been too adult for that. Now he wondered at the silly rules that had constituted his sense of mature behavior, for in a single kiss, all was said that needed to be said.
The incoming waves crashed through the pier pilings behind them with a roar hardly louder than the pounding of Harris’s own heart, as at last he stepped back from Darius. Wishing there were more light in the gloom, he studied his brother’s face for the last time in this life, desperate to freeze it in memory, for he was leaving without even a photograph.
“Must go,” said the man in the reindeer sweater.
“Maybe everything won’t fall over the brink,” Darius said.
“We can hope.”
“Maybe the world will come to its senses.”
“You be careful going back through that park,” Harris said.
“We’re safe,” Darius said. “Nobody back there’s more dangerous than me. I’m an attorney, remember?”
Harris’s laugh was perilously close to a sob.
Instead of good-bye, he simply said, “Little brother.”
Darius nodded. For a moment it seemed that he wouldn’t be able to say anything more. But then: “Big brother.”
Jessica and Bonnie turned away from each other, both of them with Kleenex pressed to their eyes.
The girls and Martin parted.
The man in the reindeer sweater led one Descoteaux family south along the beach while the other Descoteaux family stood by the foot of the pier, watching. The sward was as pale as a path in a dream. The phosphorescent foam from the breakers dissolved on the sand with a whispery sizzle like urgent voices delivering incomprehensible warnings from out of the shadows in a nightmare.
Three times, Harris glanced at the other Descoteaux family over his shoulder, but then he could not bear to look back again.
They continued south on the beach, even after they reached the end of the park. They passed a few restaurants, all closed on that Monday night, then a hotel, a few condominiums, and warmly lighted beachfront houses in which lives were still lived without awareness of the hovering darkness.
After a mile and a half, perhaps even two miles, they came to another restaurant. Lights were on in that establishment, but the big windows were too high above the beach for Harris to see any diners at the view tables. The man in the reindeer sweater led them off the sward, alongside the restaurant, into the parking lot in front of the place. They went to a green-and-white motor home that dwarfed the cars around it.
“Why couldn’t my brother have brought us directly here?” Harris asked.
Their escort said, “It wouldn’t be a good idea for him to know this vehicle or its license number. For his own sake.”
They followed the stranger into the motor home through a side door, just aft of the open cockpit, and into the kitchen. He stepped aside and directed them farther back into the vehicle.
An Asian woman in her early or middle fifties, in a black pants suit and a Chinese-red blouse, was standing at the dining table, beyond the kitchen, waiting for them. Her face was uncommonly gentle, and her smile was warm.
“So pleased that you could come,” she said, as if they were paying her a social visit. “The dining nook seats seven altogether, plenty of room for the five of us. We’ll be able to talk on the way, and we’ve so much to discuss.”
They slid around the horseshoe-shaped booth, until the five of them encircled the table.
The man in the reindeer sweater had gotten behind the steering wheel. He started the engine.
“You may call me Mary,” said the Asian woman, “because it’s best that you don’t know my name.”
Harris considered keeping his silence, but he had no talent for deception. “I’m afraid that I recognize you, and I’m sure that my wife does as well.”
“Yes,” Jessica confirmed.
“We’ve eaten in your restaurant several times,” Harris said, “up in West Hollywood. On most of those occasions, either you or your husband was greeting guests at the front door.”
She nodded and smiled. “I’m flattered that you would recognize me out of…shall we say, out of context.”
“You and your husband are so charming,” Jessica said. “Not easy to forget.”
“How was dinner when you had it with us?”
“Always wonderful.”
“Thank you. So kind of you to say
so. We do try. But now I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting your lovely daughters,” said the restaurateur, “although I know their names.” She reached across the table to take each girl’s hand. “Ondine, Willa, my name is Mae Lee. It’s a pleasure to meet you both, and I want you to be unafraid. You are in good hands now.”
The motor home pulled out of the restaurant parking lot, into the street, and away.
“Where are we going?” Willa asked.
“First, out of California,” said Mae Lee. “To Las Vegas. Many motor homes crowd the highway between here and Vegas. We’re just one more. At that point, I leave you, and you go on with someone else. Your father’s picture will be all over the news for a time, and while they’re telling their lies about him, you will all be in a safe and quiet place. You will change your looks as much as possible and learn what you will be able to do to help others like yourselves. You will have new names, first and middle and last. New hairstyles. Mr. Descoteaux, you might grow a beard, and you will certainly work with a good voice coach to lose your Caribbean accent, pleasant as it is to the ear. Oh, there will be many changes, and more fun than you imagine there could be now. And meaningful work. The world has not ended, Ondine. It has not ended, Willa. It’s only passing through one edge of a dark cloud. There are things to be done to be sure that the cloud does not swallow us entirely. Which, I promise you, it will not. Now, before we begin, may I serve anyone tea, coffee, wine, beer, or a soft drink perhaps?”
…bare-chested and barefoot, colder even than I was in the hot July night, I stand in the room of blue light, past the green chair and purple table, before the open door, determined to abandon this strange quest and race back up into the summer night, where a boy might become a boy again, where the truth which I don’t know that I know can remain unknown forever.
Between one blink and another, however, as though transported by the power of a magical incantation, I’ve left the blue room and have arrived in what must be the basement of an earlier barn that stood on a site adjacent to that which the current barn occupies. While the old barn above ground was torn down and the land was smoothed over and planted with grass, the cellars were left intact and were connected to the deepest chamber of the new barn.
I’m again being drawn forward against my will. Or think that I am. But although I shudder in fear of some dark force that draws me, it’s my own deeper need to know, my true will, that draws me. I’ve repressed it since the night my mother died.
I’m in a curving corridor, six feet wide. A looping electrical cord runs along the center of the rounded ceiling. Low-wattage bulbs, like those on a Christmas tree, are spaced a foot apart. The walls are rough red-black brick, sloppily mortared. The bricks are overlaid in places with patches and veins of stained white plaster as smooth and greasy as the marbling fat in a slab of meat.
I pause in the curved passage, listening to my rampaging heart, listening to the unseen rooms ahead for a clue as to what might lie in wait for me, listening to the rooms behind for a voice to call me back to the safe world above. But there’s no sound ahead or behind, only my heart, and even though I don’t want to listen to the things it tells me, I sense that my heart has all the answers. In my heart I know that the truth about my precious mother lies ahead and that what lies behind is a world which will never be the same for me again, a world which changed forever and for the worse when I walked out of it.
The floor is stone. It might as well be ice beneath my feet. It slopes steeply but in a wide loop that would make it possible to push a wheelbarrow up without becoming exhausted or roll one down without losing control of it.
Across that icy stone, I walk barefoot and afraid, around the curve and into a room that’s thirty feet long and twelve wide. The floor is flat here, the descent complete. A low, flat ceiling. The frosted-white, low-wattage Christmas bulbs on the looping cord continue to provide the only light. This might have been a fruit cellar in the days before electrical service was brought to the ranch, stacked full of August potatoes and September apples, deep enough to be cool in summer and above freezing in winter. There might have been shelves of home-canned fruits and vegetables stored here as well, enough to last three seasons, although the shelves are long gone.
Whatever the room might once have been, it is something very different now, and I am suddenly frozen to the floor, unable to move. One entire long wall and half the other are occupied by tableaux of life-size human figures carved in white plaster and surrounded by plaster, forming out of a plaster background, as if trying to force their way out of the wall. Grown women but also girls as young as ten or twelve. Twenty, thirty, maybe even forty of them. All naked. Some in their own niches, others in groups of two and three, face beside face, here and there with arms overlapping. He has mockingly arranged a few so they are holding hands for comfort in their terror. Their expressions are unbearable to look upon. Screaming, pleading, agonized, wrenched and suffering, warped by fear beyond measure and by unimaginable pain. Without exception, their bodies are humbled. Often their hands are raised defensively or extended beseechingly or crossed over breasts, over genitals. Here a woman peers between the spread fingers of hands that she’s clasped defensively across her face. Imploring, praying, they would be a horror unendurable if they were only what they seem to be at first glance, only sculpture, only the twisted expression of a deranged mind. But they’re worse, and even in the cloistering shadows, their blank white stares transfix me, freeze me to the stone floor. The face of the Medusa was so hideous it transformed those who saw it to stone, but these faces aren’t like that. These are petrifying because they are all women who might have been mothers like my mother, young girls who might have been my sisters if I’d been fortunate enough to have sisters, all people who were loved by someone and who loved, who had felt the sun on their faces and the coolness of rain, who’d laughed and dreamed of the future and worried and hoped. They turn me to stone because of the common humanity that I share with them, because I can feel their terror and be moved by it. Their tortured expressions are so poignant that their pain is my pain, their deaths my death. And their sense of being abandoned and fearfully alone in their final hours is the abandonment and isolation that I feel now.
The sight of them is unendurable. Yet I’m compelled to look, because even though I am only fourteen, only fourteen, I know that what they’ve suffered demands witnessing and pity and anger, these mothers who might have been mine, these sisters who might have been my sisters, these victims like me.
The medium appears to be molded, sculpted plaster. But the plaster is only the preserving material that records their tormented expressions and beseeching postures—which aren’t their true postures and expressions at death but cruel arrangements he made after. Even in the merciful shadows and cold arcs of frosty light, I see places where the plaster has been discolored by unthinkable substances seeping from within: gray and rust and yellowish green, a biological patina by which it’s possible to date the figures in the tableaux.
The smell is indescribable, less because of its vileness than because of its complexity, though it is repulsive enough to make me ill. Later, it became known that he had used a sorcerer’s brew of chemicals in an attempt to preserve the bodies within the plaster sarcophaguses. To a considerable extent he had been successful, though some decomposition occurred. The underlying stink is that of the world below cemetery lawns. The ghastliness of caskets long after living people have looked into them and closed the lids. But it is masked by scents as pungent as that of ammonia and as fresh as that of lemons. It is bitter and sour and sweet—and so strange that the cloying stench alone, without the ghostly figures, could make my heart pound and my blood run as icy as January rivers.
In the unfinished wall, there’s a niche already prepared for a new body. He has chiseled out the bricks and stacked them to one side of the hole. He has scooped out a cavity in the earth beyond the wall and has carried that soil away. Lined up near the cavity are fifty-pound bags of dry plaster mix, a lon
g wooden mixing trough lined with steel, two cans of tar-based sealant, both the tools of a mason and those of a sculptor, a stack of wooden pegs, coils of wire, and other items that I can’t quite see.
He is ready. He needs only the woman who will become the next figure in the tableau. But he has her too, of course, for it is she who lost control of her bladder in the back of the rainbow van. Her hands have made the flock of bloody birds across the vestibule door.
Something moves, quick and furtive, out of the new hole in the wall, among the tools and supplies, through shadows and patches of light as pale as snow. It freezes at the sight of me as I have frozen before the martyred women in the walls. It’s a rat, but no rat like any other. Its skull is deformed, one eye lower than the other, mouth twisted in a permanent lopsided grin. Another scurries after the first and also goes rigid when it sees me, though not before it rises on hind feet. It too is a creature like no other, encumbered by strange excrescences of bone or cartilage different from anything the first rat exhibits, and with a nose that spreads too wide across its narrow face. These are members of the small family of vermin that survives within the catacombs, tunneling behind the tableaux, nourished in part on that which has been saturated with toxic chemical preservatives. Each year a new generation of their kind produces more mutant forms than was produced the year before. Now they break their paralysis, as I can’t yet break mine, and they scurry back into the hole from which they came.