Dean R. Koontz - Intensity

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INTENSITY
Copyright @ 1995 by Dean R. Koontz.
This book is for Florence Koontz.
MY mother. Long lost. My guardian.
Hope is the destination that we seek.
Love is the road that leads to hope.
Courage is the motor that drives us.
We travel out of darkness into faith.
-THE BOOK OF COUNTED SORROWS
INTENSITY
1
The red sun balances on the highest ramparts of the mountains, and in its waning light, the
foothills appear to be ablaze. A cool breeze blows down out of the sun and fans through the tall
dry grass, which streams like waves of golden fire along the slopes toward the rich and shadowed
valley.
In the knee-high grass, he stands with his hands in the pockets of his denim jacket, studying the
vineyards below. The vines were
pruned during the winter. The new growing season has just begun. The colorful wild mustard that
flourished between the rows during the colder months has been chopped back and the stubble plowed
under. The earth is dark and fertile.
The vineyards encircle a barn, outbuildings, and a bungalow for the caretaker. Except for the
barn, the largest structure is the owners' Victorian house with its gables, dormers, decorative
millwork under the eaves, and carved pediment over the front porch steps.
Paul and Sarah Templeton live in the house year-round, and their daughter, Laura, visits
occasionally from San Francisco, where she at-
tends university. She is supposed to be in residence throughout this weekend.
He dreamily contemplates a mental image of Laura's face, as detailed as a photograph. Curiously,
the girl's perfect features engender thoughts of succulent, sugar-laden bunches of pinot noir and
grenache with translucent purple skin. He can actually taste the phantom grapes as he imagines
them bursting between his teeth.
As it slowly sinks behind the mountains, the sun sprays light so
warmly colored and so mordant that, where touched, the darkening
land appears to be wet with it and dyed forever. The grass grows red as well, no longer like a
fireless burning but, instead, a red tide washing around his knees.
He turns his back on the house and the vineyards. Savoring the steadily intensifying taste of
grapes, he walks westward into the shad-
ows cast by the high forested ridges.
He can smell the small animals of the open meadows cowering in their burrows. He hears the whisper
of feathers carving the wind as a )ld hunting hawk circles hundreds of feet overhead, and he feels
the co
glimmer of stars that are not yet visible.
In the strange sea of shimmering red light, the black shadows of overhanging trees flickered shark-
swift across the windshield.
On the winding two-lane blacktop, Laura Templeton handled the Mustang with an expertise that Chyna
admired, but she drove too fast. "You've got a heavy foot," Chyna said.
Laura grinned. "Better than a big butt." "You'll get us killed."
"Mom has rules about being late for dinner." "Being late is better than being dead for dinner."
"You've never met my mom. She's hell on rules." "So is the highway patrol." Laura laughed.
"Sometimes you sound just like her."
0? @4my MOM." Bracing herself as Laura took a curve too fast, Chyna said, "Well, one of us has to
be a responsible adult." "Sometimes I can't believe you're only three years older than me," Laura
said affectionately. "Twenty-six, huh? You sure you're not a
hundred and twenty-six?" "I'm ancient," Chyna said.
They had left San Francisco under a hard blue sky, taking a four-day break from classes at the
University of California, where, in the spring, they would earn master's degrees in psychology.
Laura hadn't been delayed in her education by the need to earn her tuition and living expenses,
but Chyna had spent the past ten years attending classes part time while working full time as a
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waitress, first in a Denny's, then in a unit of the Olive Garden chain, and most recently in an
upscale restau-
rant with white tablecloths and cloth napkins and fresh flowers on the tables and customers-bless
them-who routinely tipped fifteen or
twenty percent. This visit to the Templetons' house in the Napa Valley would be the closest thing
to a vacation that she'd had in a decade.
From San Francisco, Laura had followed Interstate 8o through Berkeley and across the eastern end
of San Pablo Bay. Blue heron had stalked the shallows and leaped gracefully into flight: enormous,
eerily prehistoric, beautiful against the cloudless heavens.
Now, in the gold-and-crimson sunset, scattered clouds burned in the sky, and the Napa Valley
unrolled like a radiant tapestry. Laura had departed the main road in favor of a scenic route;
however, she drove so fast that Chyna was seldom able to take her eyes off the highway to enjoy
the scenery. "Man, I love speed," Laura said. "I hate it." "I like to move, streak,fly. Hey, maybe
I was a gazelle in a previous life. You think?"
Chyna looked at the speedometer and grimaced. "Yeah, maybe a gazelle-or a madwoman locked away in
Bedlam." "Or a cheetah. Cheetahs are really fast." "Yeah, a cheetah, and one day you were chasing
your prey and ran
straight off the edge of a cliff at full tilt. You were the Wile E. Coyote of cheetahs." "I'm a
good driver, Chyna." "I know.7' "Then relax." "I can't."
Laura sighed with fake exasperation. "Ever?" "When I sleep," Chyna said, and she nearly jammed her
feet through the floorboards as the Mustang took a wide curve at high speed.
Beyond the narrow graveled shoulder of the two-lane, the land sloped down through wild mustard and
looping brambles to a row of tall black alders fringed with early-spring buds. Beyond the alders
lay vineyards drenched with fierce red light, and Chyna was convinced that the car would slide off
the blacktop, roll down the embankment, and crash into the trees, and that her blood would
fertilize the nearest of the vines.
Instead, Laura effortlessly held the Mustang to the pavement. The car swept out of the curve and
up a long incline.
Laura said, "I bet you even worry in your sleep."
"Well, sooner or later, in every dream there's a boogeyman. You've got to be on the lookout for
him." "I have lots of dreams without boogeymen," Laura said. "I have wonderful dreams." "Getting
shot out of a cannon?" "That would be fun. No, but sometimes I dream that I can fly. I'm always
naked and just floating or swooping along fifty feet above the ground, over telephone lines,
across fields of bright flowers, over tree-
tops. So free. People look up and smile and wave. They're so delighted to see that I can fly, so
happy for me. And sometimes I'm with this beautiful guy, lean and muscular, with a mane of golden
hair and lovely green eyes that look all the way tbrougb me to my soul, and we're making love in
midair, drifting up there, and I'm having spectacular orgasms, one after another, floating through
sunshine with flowers below and birds swooping overhead, birds with these gorgeous iridescent-blue
wings and singing the most fantastic birdsongs you ever heard, and I feel as if I'm full of
dazzling light, just a creature of light, and like I'm going to explode, such an energy, explode
and form a whole new universe and be the universe and live forever. You ever have a dream like
that?"
Chyna had finally taken her eyes off the onrushing blacktop. She stared in blank-faced
astonishment at Laura. Finally she said, "No."
Glancing away from the two-lane, Laura said, "Really? You never
had a dream like that?" "Never." "I have lots of dreams like that." "Could you keep your eyes on
the road, kiddo?"
Laura looked at the highway and said, "Don't you ever dream about sex?" "Sometimes." "And?"
"What?" 'And?"
Chyna shrugged. "It's bad." Frowning, Laura said, "You dream about having bad sex? Listen, Chyna,
you don't have to dream about that-there are lots of guys who can provide all the bad sex you
want." "Ho, ho. I mean these are nightmares, very threatening." "Sex is threatening?"
"Because I'm always a little girl in the dreams-six or seven or
eight-and I'm always hiding from this man, not quite sure what he wants, why he's looking for me,
but I know he wants something from me that he shouldn't have, something terrible, and it's going
to be like dying." "Who's the man?" "Different men." "Some of the creeps your mother used to hang
out with?"
Chyna had told Laura a great deal about her mother. She had never told anyone else. "Yeah. Them. I
always got away from them in real life. They never touched me. And they never touch me in the
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dreams. But there's always a threat, always a possibility. . .
6@ So these aren't just dreams. They're memories too." "I wish they were just dreams." "What about
when you're awake?" Laura asked. "What do you mean@" "Do you just turn all warm and fuzzy and let
yourself go when a man makes love to you ... or is the past always there?" "What is this-analysis
at eighty miles an hour?" "Dodging the question?" "You're a snoop." "It's called friendship."
"It's called snoopery." "Dodging the question?"
Chyna sighed. "All right. I like being with a man. I'm not inhibited. I'll admit that I've never
felt as though I'm a creature of light going to explode into a new universe, but I've been fully
satisfied, always had fun." "Fully?" "Fully."
Chyna had never actually been with a man until she was twentyone; and her intimate relationships
now totaled exactly two. Both had been gentle, kind, and decent men, and in each case Cbyna bad
greatly enjoyed the lovemaking. One affair had lasted eleven months, the other thirteen, and
neither lover had left her a single troubling memory. Nevertheless, neither man had helped her
banish the vicious dreams, which continued to plague her periodically, and she'd been unable to
achieve an emotional bond equal to the physical intimacy. To a man whom she loved, Chyna could
give her body, but
even for love, she could not entirely give her mind and heart. She was
afraid to commit herself, to trust without reservation. No one in her life, with the possible
exception of Laura Templeton-stunt driver and dream flier-had ever earned total trust.
Wind shrieked along the sides of the car. In the flickering shadows and fiery light, the long
incline ahead of them seemed to be a ramp, as
if they were going to be launched into space when they reached the top, vaulting across a dozen
burning buses while a stadium full of thrill-seekers cheered. "What if a tire blows?" Chyna asked.
"The tires won't blow," Laura said confidently. "What if one does?"
Wrenching her face into an exaggerated, demonic grin, Laura said, "Then we're just girl jelly in a
can. They won't even be able to separate the remains into two distinct bodies. A total amorphous
mess.
They won't even need coffins for us. They'll just pour our remains in a jug and put us in one
grave, and the headstone will read: Laura Chyna Templeton Shepherd. Only a Cuisinart Would Have
Been More Thorough. "
Chyna had hair so dark that it was virtually black, and Laura was a
blue-eyed blonde, yet they were enough alike to be sisters. Both were five feet four and slender;
they wore the same dress size. Each had high cheekbones and delicate features. Chyna had always
felt that her mouth was too wide, but Laura, whose mouth was as wide as Chyna's, said it wasn't
wide at all but merely "generous" enough to ensure an
especially winning smile.
As Laura's love of speed proved, however, they were in some ways profoundly different people. The
differences, perhaps more than the similarities, were what drew them to each other. "You think
your mom and dad will like me?" Chyna asked. "I thought you were worried about a blown tire." "I'm
a multichannel worrier. Will they like me?" "Of course they'll like you. You know what I worry
about?" Laura asked as they raced toward the top of the incline. "Apparently, not death." "You. I
worry about you," Laura said. She glanced at Chyna, and her expression was uncharacteristically
serious. "I can take care of myself," Chyna assured her. "I don't doubt that. I know you too well
to doubt that. But life isn't just about taking care of yourself, keeping your head down, getting
through."
"Laura Templeton, girl philosopher." "Life is about living." "Deep," Chyna said sarcastically.
"Deeper than you think."
The Mustang crested the long hill, and there were no burning buses or cheering multitudes, but
ahead of them was an older-model Buick, cruising well below the posted limit. Laura cut their
speed by more than half, and they pulled behind the other car. Even in the fading light, Chyna
could see that the round-shouldered driver was a white-haired, elderly man.
They were in a no-passing zone. The road rose and fell, turned left and right, rose again, and
they could not see far ahead.
Laura switched on the Mustang headlights, hoping to encourage the driver of the Buick either to
increase his speed or to ease over where the shoulder widened to let them pass. "Take your own
advice-relax, kiddo," Chyna said. "Hate to be late for dinner." "From everything you've said about
her, I don't think your mom's the type to beat us with wire coat hangers." "Mom's the best." "So
relax," Chyna said. "But she has this disappointed look she gives you that's worse than wire coat
hangers. Most people don't know this, but Mom is the rea-
son the Cold War ended. Several years ago, the Pentagon sent her off to Moscow so she could give
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the whole damn Politburo the Look, and all those Soviet thugs just collapsed with remorse."
Ahead of them, the old man in the Buick checked his rearview
mirror.
The white hair in the headlight beams, the angle of the man's head, and the mere suggestion of his
eyes reflected in the mirror suddenly engendered in Chyna a powerful sense of d6j@ vu. For a
moment, she didn't understand why a chill came over her-but then she was cast back in memory to an
incident that she had long tried unsuccessfully to forget: another twilight, nineteen years ago, a
lonely Florida highway. "Oh, Jesus," she said.
Laura glanced at her. "What's wrong?" Chyna closed her eyes. " Chyna, you're as white as a ghost.
What is it?" "A long time ago ... when I was just a little girl, seven years old ... Maybe we were
in the Everglades, maybe not ... buttheland
was swampy like the 'glades. There weren't many trees, and the few you could see were hung with
Spanish moss. Everything was flat as far as you could see, lots of sky and flatness, the sunlight
red and fading like now, a back road somewhere, far away from anything, very rural, two narrow
lanes, so damn empty and lonely. . . ."
Chyna had been with her mother and Jim Woltz, a Key West drug dealer and gunrunner with whom they
had lived now and then, for a
month or two at a time, during her childhood. They had been on a
business trip and had been returning to the Keys in Woltzs vintage red Cadillac, one of those
models with massive tailfins and with what seemed to be five tons of chrome grillwork. Woltz was
driving fast on
that straight highway, exceeding a hundred miles an hour at times. They hadn't encountered another
car for almost fifteen minutes before they roared up behind the elderly couple in the tan
Mercedes. The woman was driving. Birdlike. Close-cropped silver hair. Seventyfive if she was a
day. She was doing forty miles an hour. Woltz could have pulled around the Mercedes; they were in
a passing zone, and no
traffic was in sight for miles on that dead-flat highway. "But he was high on something," Chyna
told Laura, eyes still closed, watching the memory with growing dread as it played like a
movie on a screen behind her eyes. "He was most of the time high on
something. Maybe it was cocaine that day. I don't know. Don't re-
member. He was drinking too. They were both drinking, him and my mother. They had a cooler full of
ice. Bottles of grapefruit juice and vodka. The old lady in the Mercedes was driving really slow,
and that incensed Woltz. He wasn't rational. What did it matter to him? He could've pulled around
her. But the sight of her driving so slow on the wide-open highway infuriated him. Drugs and
booze, that's all. So irrational. When he was angry ... red-faced, arteries throbbing in his neck,
jaw muscles bulging. No one could get angry quite as totally as
Jim Woltz. His rage excited my mother. Always excited her. So she teased him, encouraged him. I
was in the backseat, hanging on tight, pleading with her to stop, but she kept at him."
For a while, Woltz had hung close behind the other car, blowing his horn at the elderly couple,
trying to force them to go faster. A few times he had nudged the rear bumper of the Mercedes with
the front bumper of the Cadillac, metal kissing metal with a squeal. Eventually the old woman got
rattled and began to swerve erratically, afraid to go faster with Woltz so close behind her but
too frightened of him to pull off the road and let him pass by.
"Of course," Chyna said, "he wouldn't have gone past and left her
alone. By then he was too psychotic. He would have stopped when she stopped. It still would have
ended badly."
Woltz had pulled alongside the Mercedes a few times, driving in the wrong lane, shouting and
shaking his fist at the white-haired couple, who first tried to ignore him and then stared back
wide-eyed and fearfui. Each time, rather than drive by and leave them in his dust, he had dropped
behind again to play tag with their rear bumper. To Woltz, in his drug fever and alcoholic haze,
this harassment was
deadly serious business, with an importance and a meaning that could never be understood by anyone
who was clean and sober. To Chyna's mother, Anne, it was all a game, an adventure, and it was she,
in her ceaseless search for excitement, who said, 91'hy don't we give her a
driving test? Woltz said, Test? I don't need to give the old bitch a test to see
she can't drivefor shit. This time, as Woltz pulled beside the Mercedes, matching speeds with it,
Anne said, I mean, see ifshe can keep it on the road. Make it a challengefor her
To Laura, Chyna recalled, "There was a canal parallel to the road, one of those drainage channels
you see along some Florida highways. Not deep but deep enough. Woltz used the Cadillac to crowd
the Mercedes onto the shoulder of the road. The woman should have crowded him back, forced him the
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other way. She should have tramped the pedal to the floor and pegged the speedometer and gotten
the hell out of there. The Mercedes would've outrun the Cadillac, no problem. But she was old and
scared, and she'd never
encountered anyone like this. I think she was just disbelieving, so un-
able to understand the kind of people she was up against, unable to
grasp how far they'd go even though she and her husband had done nothI.ng to them. Woltz forced
her off the road. The Mercedes rolled into the canal."
Woltz had stopped, shifted the Cadillac into reverse, and backed up to where the Mercedes was
swiftly sinking. He and Anne had gotten out of the car to watch. Chyna's mother had insisted that
she watch too: Come on, you little chicken. You don't want to miss this, baby. This is one to
remember The passenger's side of the Mercedes was flat against the muddy bottom of the canal, and
the driver's side was re-
vealed to them as they stood on the embankment in the humid evening air. They were being bitten by
hordes of mosquitoes but were hardly aware of them, mesmerized by the sight below them, gazing
through the driver-side windows of the submerged vehicle.
"It was twilight," Chyna told Laura, putting into words the images behind her closed eyes, "so the
headlights were on, still on even after the Mercedes sank, and there were lights inside the car.
They had airconditioning, so all the windows were closed, and neither the windshield nor the
driver-side window had shattered when the car rolled. We could see inside, 'cause the windows were
only a few inches under water. There was no sign of the husband. Maybe he was knocked unconscious
when they rolled. But the old woman ... her face was at the window. The car was flooded, but there
was a big bubble of air against the inside of the glass, and she pressed her face into it so she
could breathe. We stood there looking down at her. Woltz could have helped. My mother could have
helped. But they just watched. The old woman couldn't seem to get the window open, and the door
must have been jammed, or maybe she was just too scared and too weak."
Chyna had tried to pull away, but her mother had held her, speaking urgently to her, the whispered
words borne on a tide of breath sour with vodka and grapefruit juice. We're different than other
people, baby. No rules apply to us. You'll never understand what freedom really means ifyou don't
watch this. Chyna had closed her eyes, but she had still been able to hear the old woman screaming
into the big air bubble inside the submerged car. Muffled screaming. "Then gradually the screaming
faded ... finally stopped," Chyna told Laura. "When I opened my eyes, twilight had gone and night
had come. There was still light in the Mercedes, and the woman's face was
still pressed to the glass, but a breeze had risen, rippling the water in the canal, and her
features were a blur. I knew she was dead. She and her husband. I started to cry. Woltz didn't
like that. He threatened to drag me into the canal, open a door on the Mercedes, and shove me
inside with the dead people. My mother made me drink some grapefruit juice with vodka. I was only
seven. The rest of the way back to
Key West, I lay on the backseat, dizzy from the vodka, half drunk and a little sick, still crying
but quietly, so I wouldn't make Woltz angry, crying quietly until I fell asleep."
In Laura's Mustang, the only sounds were the soft rumble of the engine and the singing of the
tires on the blacktop.
Chyna finally opened her eyes and came back from the memory of Florida, from the long-ago humid
twilight to the Napa Valley, where most of the red light had gone out of the sky and darkness
encroached on all sides.
The old man in the Buick was no longer in front of them. They were not driving as fast as before,
and evidently he had gotten far ahead of them.
Laura said softly, "Dear God." Chyna was shaking uncontrollably. She plucked a few Kleeney from
the console box between the seats, blew her nose, and blotted her eyes. Over the past two years,
she had shared part of her childhood with Laura, but every new revelation-and there was much still
to reveal-was as difficult as the one before it. When she spoke of the past, she always burned
with shame, as though she had been as guilty as her mother, as if every criminal act and spell of
madness could be blamed on her, though she had been only a helpless child trapped in the insanity
of others. "Will you ever see her again?" Laura asked.
Recollection had left Chyna half numb with horror. "I don't know." "Would you want to?"
Chyna hesitated. Her hands were curled into fists, the damp Kleenex wadded in the right one.
"Maybe." "For God's sake why?" "To ask her why. To try to understand. To settle some things. But
... maybe not." "Do you even know where she is?" "No. But it wouldn't surprise me if she was in
jail. Or dead. You can't live like that and hope to grow old."
They drove down out of the foothills into the valley. Eventually Chyna said, "I can still see her
standing in the steamy darkness on the banks of that canal, greasy with sweat, her hair hanging
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摘要：

file:///F|/rah/Dean%20R.%20Koontz/Koontz,%20Dean%20-%20Intensity.txtINTENSITYCopyright@1995byDeanR.Koontz.ThisbookisforFlorenceKoontz.MYmother.Longlost.Myguardian.Hopeisthedestinationthatweseek.Loveistheroadthatleadstohope.Courageisthemotorthatdrivesus.Wetraveloutofdarknessintofaith.-THEBOOKOFCOUNTE...

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