Dean R. Koontz - Forever Odd

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FOREVER ODD
ALSO BY DEAN KOONTZ
Velocity • Life Expectancy • The Taking • Odd Thomas •
The Face • By the Light of the Moon • One Door Away From Heaven
• From the Corner of His Eye • False Memory • Seize the Night •
Fear Nothing • Mr. Murder • Dragon Tears • Hideaway
• Cold Fire • The Bad Place - Midnight • Lightning •
Watchers • Strangers • Twilight Eyes • Darkfall • Phantoms
• Whispers • The Mfl5fe • The Vision • The Face of Fear •
Night Chills - Shattered • The Voice of the Night• The Servants of Twilight • The House of Thunder •
The Key to Midnight • The Eyes of Darkness
• Shadowfires • Winter Moon • The Door to December •
Dark Rivers of the Heart • Icebound • Strange Highways
• Intensity • Sole Survivor • Ticktock •
The Funhouse • Demon Seed
DEAN KOONTZ'S FRANKENSTEIN
Book One: Prodigal Son • with Kevin]. Anderson
Book Two: City of Night • with Ed Gorman
DEAN KOONTZ
Bantam Books
FOREVER ODD A Bantam Book / December 2005
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either
are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or
locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2005 by Dean Koontz
Title page photograph by Andrew Simpson
Drawing on page 335 © 2003 by Phil Parks
Book design by Virginia Norey
A signed, limited edition has been privately published by Charnel House. Charnelhouse.com
Bantam Books is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the publisher.
ISBN-10: 0-553-80416-2 ISBN-13: 978-0-553-80416-4
Printed in the United States of America Published simultaneously in Canada
www.bantamdell.com
BVG 10 987654321
This book is for Trixie, though she will never read it. On the most difficult days at the keyboard, when I
despaired, she could always make me laugh. The words good dog are inadequate in her case. She is a
good heart and a kind soul, and an angel on four feet.
Unearned suffering is redemptive.
—Martin Luther King Jr.
Look at those hands, Oh God, those hands toiled to raise me.
—Elvis Presley at his mother's casket
FOREVER ODD
ONE
WAKING, I HEARD A WARM WIND STRUMMING THE LOOSE screen at the open window, and I
thought Stormy, but it was not.
The desert air smelled faintly of roses, which were not in bloom, and of dust, which in the Mojave
nourishes twelve months of the year.
Precipitation falls on the town of Pico Mundo only during our brief winter. This mild February night was
not, however, sweetened by the scent of rain.
I hoped to hear the fading rumble of thunder. If a peal had awakened me, it must have been thunder in a
dream.
Holding my breath, I lay listening to the silence, and felt the silence listening to me.
The nightstand clock painted glowing numbers on the gloom— 2:41 a.m.
For a moment I considered remaining in bed. But these days I do not sleep as well as I did when I was
young. I am twenty-one and much older than when I was twenty.
Certain that I had company, expecting to find two Elvises watching over me, one with a cocky smile and
one with sad concern, I sat up and switched on the lamp.
A single Elvis stood in a corner: a life-size cardboard figure that had been part of a theater-lobby display
for Blue Hawaii. In a Hawaiian shirt and a lei, he looked self-confident and happy.
Back in 1961, he'd had much to be happy about. Blue Hawaii was a hit film, and the album went to
number one. He had six gold records that year, including "Can't Help Falling in Love," and he was falling in
love with Priscilla Beaulieu.
Less happily, at the insistence of his manager, Tom Parker, he had turned down the lead in West Side
Story in favor of mediocre movie fare like Follow That Dream. Gladys Presley, his beloved mother, had
been dead three years, and still he felt the loss of her, acutely. Only twenty-six, he'd begun to have weight
problems.
Cardboard Elvis smiles eternally, forever young, incapable of error or regret, untouched by grief, a
stranger to despair.
I envy him. There is no cardboard replica of me as I once was and as I can never be again.
The lamplight revealed another presence, as patient as he was desperate. Evidently he had been
watching me sleep, waiting for me to wake.
I said, "Hello, Dr. Jessup."
Dr. Wilbur Jessup was incapable of a response. Anguish flooded his face. His eyes were desolate
pools; all hope had drowned in those lonely depths.
"I'm sorry to see you here," I said.
He made fists of his hands, not with the intention of striking anything, but as an expression of frustration.
He pressed his fists to his chest.
Dr. Jessup had never previously visited my apartment; and I knew in my heart that he no longer
belonged in Pico Mundo. But I clung to denial, and I spoke to him again as I got out of bed.
"Did I leave the door unlocked?"
He shook his head. Tears blurred his eyes, but he did not wail or even whimper.
Fetching a pair of jeans from the closet, slipping into them, I said, "I've been forgetful lately."
He opened his fists and stared at his palms. His hands trembled. He buried his face in them.
"There's so much I'd like to forget," I continued as I pulled on socks and shoes, "but only the small stuff
slips my mind—like where I left the keys, whether I locked the door, that I'm out of milk. . . ."
Dr. Jessup, a radiologist at County General Hospital, was a gentle man, and quiet, although he had never
before been this quiet.
Because I had not worn a T-shirt to bed, I plucked a white one from a drawer.
I have a few black T-shirts, but mostly white. In addition to a selection of blue jeans, I have two pair of
white chinos.
This apartment provides only a small closet. Half of it is empty. So are the bottom drawers of my
dresser.
I do not own a suit. Or a tie. Or shoes that need to be shined.
For cool weather, I own two crew-neck sweaters.
Once I bought a sweater vest. Temporary insanity. Realizing that I had introduced an unthinkable level
of complexity to my wardrobe, I returned it to the store the next day.
My four-hundred-pound friend and mentor, P. Oswald Boone, has warned me that my sartorial style
represents a serious threat to the apparel industry.
I've noted more than once that the articles in Ozzie's wardrobe are of such enormous dimensions that he
keeps in business those fabric mills I might otherwise put in jeopardy.
Barefoot, Dr. Jessup wore cotton pajamas. They were wrinkled from the rigors of restless sleep.
"Sir, I wish you'd say something," I told him. "I really wish you would."
Instead of obliging me, the radiologist lowered his hands from his face, turned, and walked out of the
bedroom.
I glanced at the wall above the bed. Framed behind glass is a card from a carnival fortune-telling
machine. It promises YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER.
Each morning, I begin my day by reading those seven words. Each night, I read them again, sometimes
more than once, before sleep, if sleep will come to me.
I am sustained by the certainty that life has meaning. As does death.
From a nightstand, I retrieved my cell phone. The first number on speed dial is the office of Wyatt
Porter, chief of the Pico Mundo Police Department. The second is his home number. The third is his cell
phone.
More likely than not, I would be calling Chief Porter, one place or another, before dawn.
In the living room, I turned on a light and discovered that Dr. Jessup had been standing in the dark,
among the thrift-shop treasures with which the place is furnished.
When I went to the front door and opened it, he did not follow.
Although he had sought my assistance, he couldn't find the courage for what lay ahead.
In the rubescent light from an old bronze lamp with a beaded shade, the eclectic decor—Stickley-style
armchairs, plump Victorian footstools, Maxfield Parrish prints, carnival-glass vases—evidently appealed to
him.
"No offense," I said, "but you don't belong here, sir."
Dr. Jessup silently regarded me with what might have been supplication.
"This place is filled to the brim with the past. There's room for Elvis and me, and memories, but not for
anyone new."
I stepped into the public hall and pulled the door shut.
My apartment is one of two on the first floor of a converted Victorian house. Once a rambling
single-family home, the place still offers considerable charm.
For years I lived in one rented room above a garage. My bed had been just a few steps from my
refrigerator. Life was simpler then, and the future clear.
I traded that place for this not because I needed more space, but because my heart is here now, and
forever.
The front door of the house featured an oval of leaded glass. The night beyond looked sharply beveled
and organized into a pattern that anyone could understand.
When I stepped onto the porch, this night proved to be like all others: deep, mysterious, trembling with
the potential for chaos.
From porch steps to flagstone path, to public sidewalk, I looked around for Dr. Jessup but didn't see him.
In the high desert, which rises far east beyond Pico Mundo, winter can be chilly, while our low-desert
nights remain mild even in February. The curbside Indian laurels sighed and whispered in the balmy wind,
and moths soared to street lamps.
The surrounding houses were as quiet as their windows were dark. No dogs barked. No owls hooted.
No pedestrians were out, no traffic on the streets. The town looked as if the Rapture had occurred, as if
only I had been left behind to endure the reign of Hell on Earth.
By the time I reached the corner, Dr. Jessup rejoined me. His pajamas and the lateness of the hour
suggested that he had come to my apartment from his home on Jacaranda Way, five blocks north in a
better neighborhood than mine. Now he led me in that direction.
He could fly, but he plodded. I ran, drawing ahead of him.
Although I dreaded what I would find no less than he might have dreaded revealing it to me, I wanted to
get to it quickly. As far as I knew, a life might still be in jeopardy.
Halfway there, I realized that I could have taken the Chevy. For most of my driving life, having no car
of my own, I borrowed from friends as needed. The previous autumn, I had inherited a 1980 Chevrolet
Camaro Berlinetta Coupe.
Often I still act as though I have no wheels. Owning a few thousand pounds of vehicle oppresses me
when I think about it too much. Because I try not to think about it, I sometimes forget I have it.
Under the cratered face of the blind moon, I ran.
On Jacaranda Way, the Jessup residence is a white-brick Georgian with elegant ornamentation. It is
flanked by a delightful American Victorian with so many decorative moldings that it resembles a wedding
cake, and by a house that is baroque in all the wrong ways.
None of these architectural styles seems right for the desert, shaded by palm trees, brightened by
climbing bougainvillea. Our town was founded in 1900 by newcomers from the East Coast, who fled the
harsh winters but brought with them cold-climate architecture and attitude.
Terri Stambaugh, my friend and employer, owner of the Pico Mundo Grille, tells me that this displaced
architecture is better than the dreary acres of stucco and graveled roofs in many California desert towns.
I assume that she is right. I have seldom crossed the city line of Pico Mundo and have never been
beyond the boundaries of Maravilla County.
My life is too full to allow either a jaunt or a journey. I don't even watch the Travel Channel.
The joys of life can be found anywhere. Far places only offer exotic ways to suffer.
Besides, the world beyond Pico Mundo is haunted by strangers, and I find it difficult enough to cope
with the dead who, in life, were known to me.
Upstairs and down, soft lamplight shone at some windows of the Jessup residence. Most panes were
dark.
By the time I reached the foot of the front-porch steps, Dr. Wilbur Jessup waited there.
The wind stirred his hair and ruffled his pajamas, although why he should be subject to the wind, I do not
know. The moonlight found him, too, and shadow.
The grieving radiologist needed comforting before he could summon sufficient strength to lead me into
his house, where he himself no doubt lay dead, and perhaps another.
I embraced him. Only a spirit, he was invisible to everyone but me, yet he felt warm and solid.
Perhaps I see the dead affected by the weather of this world, and see them touched by light and
shadow, and find them as warm as the living, not because this is the way they are but because this is the
way I want them to be. Perhaps by this device, I mean to deny the power of death.
My supernatural gift might reside not in my mind but instead in my heart. The heart is an artist that
paints over what profoundly disturbs it, leaving on the canvas a less dark, less sharp version of the truth.
Dr. Jessup had no substance, but he leaned heavily upon me, a weight. He shook with the sobs that he
could not voice.
The dead don't talk. Perhaps they know things about death that the living are not permitted to learn from
them.
In this moment, my ability to speak gave me no advantage. Words would not soothe him.
Nothing but justice could relieve his anguish. Perhaps not even justice.
When he'd been alive, he had known me as Odd Thomas, a local character. I am regarded by some
people—wrongly—as a hero, as an eccentric by nearly everyone.
Odd is not a nickname; it's my legal handle.
The story of my name is interesting, I suppose, but I've told it before. What it boils down to is that my
parents are dysfunctional. Big-time.
I believe that in life Dr. Jessup had found me intriguing, amusing, puzzling. I think he had liked me.
Only in death did he know me for what I am: a companion to the lingering dead.
I see them and wish I did not. I cherish life too much to turn the dead away, however, for they deserve
my compassion by virtue of having suffered this world.
When Dr. Jessup stepped back from me, he had changed. His wounds were now manifest.
He had been hit in the face with a blunt object, maybe a length of pipe or a hammer. Repeatedly. His
skull was broken, his features distorted.
Torn, cracked, splintered, his hands suggested that he had desperately tried to defend himself—or that
he had come to the aid of someone. The only person living with him was his son, Danny.
My pity was quickly exceeded by a kind of righteous rage, which is a dangerous emotion, clouding
judgment, precluding caution.
In this condition, which I do not seek, which frightens me, which comes over me as though I have been
possessed, I can't turn away from what must be done. I plunge.
My friends, those few who know my secrets, think my compulsion has a divine inspiration. Maybe it's
just temporary insanity.
Step to step, ascending, then crossing the porch, I considered phoning Chief Wyatt Porter. I worried,
however, that Danny might perish while I placed the call and waited for the authorities. The front door
stood ajar.
I glanced back and saw that Dr. Jessup preferred to haunt the yard instead of the house. He lingered in
the grass.
His wounds had vanished. He appeared as he had appeared before Death had found him—and he
looked scared.
Until they move on from this world, even the dead can know fear. You would think they have nothing to
lose, but sometimes they are wretched with anxiety, not about what might lie Beyond, but about those
whom they have left behind.
I pushed the door inward. It moved as smoothly, as silently as the mechanism of a well-crafted,
spring-loaded trap.
TWO
FROSTED FLAME-SHAPED BULBS IN SILVER-PLATED sconces revealed white paneled doors, all
closed, along a hallway, and stairs rising into darkness.
Honed instead of polished, the marble floor of the foyer was cloud-white, looked cloud-soft. The ruby,
teal, and sapphire Persian rug seemed to float like a magic taxi waiting for a passenger with a taste for
adventure.
I crossed the threshold, and the cloud floor supported me. The rug idled underfoot.
In such a situation, closed doors usually draw me. Over the years, I have a few times endured a dream
in which, during a search, I open a white paneled door and am skewered through the throat by something
sharp, cold, and as thick as an iron fence stave.
Always, I wake before I die, gagging as if still impaled. After that, I am usually up for the day, no matter
how early the hour.
My dreams aren't reliably prophetic. I have never, for instance, ridden bareback on an elephant, naked,
while having sexual relations with Jennifer Aniston.
Seven years have passed since I had that memorable night fantasy as a boy of fourteen. After so much
time, I no longer have any expectation that the Aniston dream will prove predictive.
I'm pretty sure the scenario with the white paneled door will come to pass. I can't say whether I will be
merely wounded, disabled for life, or killed.
You might think that when presented with white paneled doors, I would avoid them. And so I would. . .
if I had not learned that fate cannot be sidestepped or outrun. The price I paid for that lesson has left my
heart an almost empty purse, with just two coins or three clinking at the bottom.
I prefer to kick open each door and confront what waits rather than to turn away—and thereafter be
required to remain alert, at all times, for the creak of the turning knob, for the quiet rasp of hinges behind
my back.
On this occasion, the doors did not attract me. Intuition led me to the stairs, and swiftly up.
The dark second-floor hallway was brightened only by the pale outfall of light from two rooms.
I've had no dreams about open doors. I went to the first of these two without hesitation, and stepped into
a bedroom.
The blood of violence daunts even those with much experience of it. The splash, the spray, the drip and
drizzle create infinite Rorschach patterns in every one of which the observer reads the same meaning: the
fragility of his existence, the truth of his mortality.
A desperation of crimson hand prints on a wall were the victim's sign language: Spare me, help me,
remember me, avenge me.
On the floor, near the foot of the bed, lay the body of Dr. Wilbur Jessup, savagely battered.
Even for one who knows that the body is but the vessel and that the spirit is the essence, a brutalized
cadaver depresses, offends.
This world, which has the potential to be Eden, is instead the hell before Hell. In our arrogance, we have
made it so.
The door to the adjacent bathroom stood half open. I nudged it with one foot.
Although blood-dimmed by a drenched shade, the bedroom lamplight reached into the bathroom to
reveal no surprises.
Aware that this was a crime scene, I touched nothing. I stepped cautiously, with respect for evidence.
Some wish to believe that greed is the root of murder, but greed seldom motivates a killer. Most
homicide has the same dreary cause: The bloody-minded murder those whom they envy, and for what they
covet.
That is not merely a central tragedy of human existence: It is also the political history of the world.
Common sense, not psychic power, told me that in this case, the killer coveted the happy marriage that,
until recently, Dr. Jessup had enjoyed. Fourteen years previously, the radiologist had wed Carol
Makepeace. They had been perfect for each other.
Carol came into their marriage with a seven-year-old son, Danny. Dr. Jessup adopted him.
Danny had been a friend of mine since we were six, when we had discovered a mutual interest in
Monster Gum trading cards. I traded him a Martian brain-eating centipede for a Venusian methane slime
beast, which bonded us on first encounter and ensured a lifelong brotherly affection.
We've also been drawn close by the fact that we are different, each in his way, from other people. I see
the lingering dead, and Danny has osteogenesis imperfecta, also called brittle bones.
Our lives have been defined—and deformed—by our afflictions. My deformations are primarily social;
his are largely physical.
A year ago, Carol had died of cancer. Now Dr. Jessup was gone, too, and Danny was alone.
I left the master bedroom and hurried quietly along the hallway toward the back of the house. Passing
two closed rooms, heading toward the open door that was the second source of light, I worried about
leaving unsearched spaces behind me.
After once having made the mistake of watching television news, I had worried for a while about an
asteroid hitting the earth and wiping out human civilization. The anchorwoman had said it was not merely
possible but probable. At the end of the report, she smiled.
I worried about that asteroid until I realized I couldn't do anything to stop it. I am not Superman. I am a
short-order cook on a leave of absence from his grill and griddle.
For a longer while, I worried about the TV news lady. What kind of person can deliver such terrifying
news—and then smile?
If I ever did open a white paneled door and get skewered through the throat, the iron pike—or
whatever—would probably be wielded by that anchorwoman.
I reached the next open door, stepped into the light, crossed the threshold. No victim, no killer.
The things we worry about the most are never the things that bite us. The sharpest teeth always take
their nip of us when we are looking the other way.
Unquestionably, this was Danny's room. On the wall behind the disheveled bed hung a poster of John
Merrick, the real-life Elephant Man.
Danny had a sense of humor about the deformities—mostly of the limbs—with which his condition had
left him. He looked nothing like Merrick, but the Elephant Man was his hero.
They exhibited him as a freak, Danny once explained. Women fainted at the sight of him, children
wept, tough men flinched. He was loathed and reviled. Yet a century later a movie was based on his
life, and we know his name. Who knows the name of the bastard who owned him and put him on
exhibit, or the names of those who fainted or wept, or flinched? They're dust, and he's immortal.
Besides, when he went out in public, that hooded cloak he wore was way cool.
On other walls were four posters of ageless sex goddess Demi Moore, who was currently more
ravishing than ever in a series of Versace ads.
Twenty-one years old, two inches short of the five feet that he claimed, twisted by the abnormal bone
growth that sometimes had occurred during the healing of his frequent fractures, Danny lived small but
dreamed big.
No one stabbed me when I stepped into the hall once more. I wasn't expecting anyone to stab me, but
that's when it's likely to happen.
If Mojave wind still whipped the night, I couldn't hear it inside this thick-walled Georgian structure,
which seemed tomblike in its stillness, in its conditioned chill, with a faint scent of blood on the cool air.
I dared not any longer delay calling Chief Porter. Standing in the upstairs hall, I pressed 2 on my
cell-phone keypad and speed-dialed his home.
When he answered on the second ring, he sounded awake.
Alert for the approach of a mad anchorwoman or worse, I spoke softly: "Sir, I'm sorry if I woke you."
"Wasn't asleep. I've been sitting here with Louis L’Amour."
"The writer? I thought he was dead, sir."
“About as dead as Dickens. Tell me you're just lonesome, son, and not in trouble again."
"I didn't ask for trouble, sir. But you better come to Dr. Jessup's house."
"I'm hoping it's a simple burglary."
"Murder," I said. "Wilbur Jessup on the floor of his bedroom. It's a bad one."
"Where's Danny?"
"I'm thinking kidnapped."
"Simon," he said.
Simon Makepeace—Carol's first husband, Danny's father—had been released from prison four months
ago, after serving sixteen years for manslaughter.
"Better come with some force," I said. “And quiet."
"Someone still there?"
"I get the feeling."
"You hold back, Odd."
"You know I can't."
"I don't understand your compulsion."
"Neither do I, sir."
I pressed END and pocketed the cell phone.
THREE
ASSUMING THAT DANNY MUST BE STILL NEARBY AND under duress, and that he was most
likely on the ground floor, I headed toward the front stairs. Before I began to descend, I found myself
turning and retracing the route that I'd just followed.
I expected that I would return to the two closed doors on the right side of the hall, between the master
bedroom and Danny's room, and that I would discover what lay behind them. As before, however, I wasn't
drawn to them.
On the left side were three other closed doors. None of those had an attraction for me, either.
In addition to the ability to see ghosts, a gift I'd happily trade for piano artistry or a talent for flower
arranging, I've been given what I call psychic magnetism.
When someone isn't where I expect to find him, I can go for a walk or ride my bicycle, or cruise in a
car, keeping his name or face in my mind, turning randomly from one street to another; and sometimes in
minutes, sometimes in an hour, I encounter the one I'm seeking. It's like setting a pair of those Scottie-dog
magnets on a table and watching them slide inexorably toward each other.
The key word is sometimes.
On occasion, my psychic magnetism functions like the finest Carrier watch. At other times, it's like an
egg timer bought at a cheap discount store's going-out-of-business sale; you set it for poached, and it gives
you hard-boiled.
The unreliability of this gift is not proof that God is either cruel or indifferent, though it might be one
proof among many that He has a sense of humor.
The fault lies with me. I can't stay sufficiently relaxed to let the gift work. I get distracted: in this case,
by the possibility that Simon Makepeace, in willful disregard of his surname, would throw open a door, leap
into the hallway, and bludgeon me to death.
I continued through the lamplight that spilled from Danny's room, where Demi Moore still looked
luminous and the Elephant Man still looked pachydermous. I paused in the gloom at an intersection with a
second, shorter hallway.
This was a big house. It had been built in 1910 by an immigrant from Philadelphia, who had made a
fortune in either cream cheese or gelignite. I can never remember which.
Gelignite is a high explosive consisting of a gelatinized mass of nitroglycerin with cellulose nitrate added.
In the first decade of the previous century, they called it gelatin dynamite, and it was quite the rage in those
circles where they took a special interest in blowing up things.
Cream cheese is cream cheese. It's delicious in a wide variety of dishes, but it rarely explodes.
I would like to have a firmer grasp of local history, but I've never been able to devote as much time to
the study of it as I have wished. Dead people keep distracting me.
Now I turned left into the secondary hallway, which was black but not pitch. At the end, pale radiance
revealed the open door at the head of the back stairs.
The stairwell light itself wasn't on. The glow rose from below.
In addition to rooms and closets on both sides, which I had no impulse to search, I passed an elevator.
This hydraulic-ram lift had been installed prior to Wilbur and Carol's wedding, before Danny— then a child
of seven—had moved into the house.
If you are afflicted with osteogenesis imperfecta, you can occasionally break a bone with remarkably
little effort. When six, Danny had fractured his right wrist while snap-dealing a game of Old Maid.
Stairs, therefore, pose an especially grave risk. As a child, at least, if he had fallen down a flight of
stairs, he would most likely have died from severe skull fractures.
Although I had no fear of falling, the back stairs spooked me. They were spiral and enclosed, so it
wasn't possible to see more than a few steps ahead.
Intuition told me someone waited down there.
As an alternative to the stairs, the elevator would be too noisy. Alerted, Simon Makepeace would be
waiting when I arrived below.
I could not retreat. I was compelled to go down—and quickly— into the back rooms of the lower floor.
Before I quite realized what I was doing, I pushed the elevator-call button. I snatched my finger back as
though I'd pricked it on a needle.
The doors did not at once slide open. The elevator was on the lower floor.
As the motor hummed to life, as the hydraulic mechanism sighed, as the cab rose through the shaft with
a faint swish, I realized that I had a plan. Good for me.
In truth, the word plan was too grandiose. What I had was more of a trick, a diversion.
The elevator arrived with a bink so loud in the silent house that I twitched, though I had expected that
sound. When the doors slid open, I tensed, but no one lunged out at me.
I leaned into the cab and pushed the button to send it back to the ground floor.
Even as the doors rolled shut, I hurried to the staircase and rushed blindly down. The value of the
diversion would diminish to zero when the cab arrived below, for then Simon would discover that I wasn't,
after all, on board.
The claustrophobia-inducing stairs led into a mud room off the kitchen. Although a stone-floored mud
room might have been essential in Philadelphia, with that city's dependably rainy springs and its snowy
winters, a residence in the sun-seared Mojave needed it no more than it needed a snowshoe rack.
At least it wasn't a storeroom full of gelignite.
From the mud room, one door led to the garage, another to the backyard. A third served the kitchen.
The house had not originally been designed to have an elevator. The remodel contractor had been
forced to situate it, not ideally, in a corner of the large kitchen.
No sooner had I arrived in the mud room, dizzy from negotiating the tight curve of the spiral staircase,
than a bink announced the arrival of the cab on the ground floor.
I snatched up a broom, as though I might be able to sweep a murderous psychopath off his feet. At best,
surprising him by jamming the bristles into his face might damage his eyes and startle him off balance.
The broom wasn't as comforting as a flamethrower would have been, but it was better than a mop and
certainly more threatening than a feather duster.
Positioning myself by the door to the kitchen, I prepared to take Simon off his feet when he burst into
the mud room in search of me. He didn't burst.
After what seemed to be enough time to paint the gray walls a more cheerful color, but what was in
reality maybe fifteen seconds, I glanced at the door to the garage. Then at the door to the backyard. I
wondered if Simon Makepeace had already forced Danny out of the house. They might be in the garage,
Simon behind the wheel of Dr. Jessup's car, Danny bound and helpless in the backseat.
Or maybe they were headed across the yard, toward the gate in the fence. Simon might have a vehicle
of his own in the alleyway behind the property.
I felt inclined, instead, to push through the swinging door and step into the kitchen.
Only the under-the-cabinet lights were on, illuminating the countertops around the perimeter of the room.
Nevertheless, I could see that I was alone.
Regardless of what I could see, I sensed a presence. Someone could have been crouched, hiding on the
farther side of the large center work island.
Fierce with broom, gripping it like a cudgel, I cautiously circled the room. The gleaming mahogany floor
pealed soft squeaks off my rubber-soled shoes.
When I had rounded three-quarters of the island, I heard the elevator doors roll open behind me.
I spun around to discover not Simon, but a stranger. He'd been waiting for the elevator, and when I
hadn't been in it, as he had expected, he'd realized that it was a ruse. He'd been quick-witted, hiding in the
cab immediately before I entered from the mud room.
He was sinuous and full of coiled power. His green gaze shone bright with terrible knowledge; these
were the eyes of one who knew the many ways out of the Garden. His scaly lips formed the curve of a
perfect lie: a smile in which malice tried to pass as friendly intent, in which amusement was in fact dripping
venom.
Before I could think of a serpent metaphor to describe his nose, the snaky bastard struck. He squeezed
the trigger of a Taser, firing two darts that, trailing thin wires, pierced my T-shirt and delivered a disabling
shock.
I fell like a high-flying witch suddenly deprived of her magic: hard, and with a useless broom.
FOUR
WHEN YOU TAKE MAYBE FIFTY THOUSAND VOLTS FROM a Taser, some time has to pass
before you feel like dancing.
On the floor, doing a broken-cockroach imitation, twitching violently, robbed of basic motor control, I
tried to scream but wheezed instead.
A flash of pain and then a persistent hot pulse traced every nerve pathway in my body with such
authority that I could see them in my mind's eye as clearly as highways on a road map.
I cursed my attacker, but the invective issued as a whimper. I sounded like an anxious gerbil.
He loomed over me, and I expected to be stomped. He was a guy who would enjoy stomping. If he
wasn't wearing hobnail boots, that was only because they were at the cobbler's shop for the addition of toe
spikes.
My arms flopped, my hands spasmed. I couldn't cover my face.
He spoke, but his words meant nothing, sounded like the sputter and crackle of short-circuiting wires.
When he picked up the broom, I knew from the way he held it that he intended to drive the blunt metal
handle into my face repeatedly, until the Elephant Man, compared to me, would look like a GQ model.
He raised that witchy weapon high. Before he slammed it into my face, however, he turned abruptly
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