The Moonlit Mind (Novella): A Tale of Suspense Page 11

  As ominous rumbling rises far below, Crispin takes a can of lighter fluid from his backpack and a butane match from a pocket of his jeans. He squirts the fluid into the ground-floor drawing room from which the cat escaped and lights the dribbled trail with the match. Flames roar at once through the miniature room and into the ground-floor hallway.

  He hammers out a couple of windows on the second floor, floods two more rooms with lighter fluid, and sets them afire.

  Intuition tells him that he has no more time, that he shouldn’t even hesitate to retrieve his backpack. He has left his deck of cards and all his money with Amity. He doesn’t need to take from Theron Hall anything he brought to it, except the dog.

  He holds fast to the hammer, however, in case he needs a weapon, and Harley precedes him from the room into the third-floor hallway.

  Smoke. The burning rooms are on the second and ground floors, but smoke has already found its way to the third, thin gray tendrils weaving through the air like malevolent spirits.

  Boy and dog run for the south stairs.

  They are three-quarters of the way along the corridor when Mr. Mordred explodes from an open doorway with all the suddenness of a joke snake springing from a can. He tears the hammer out of Crispin’s grasp, throws him against a wall, and swings the weapon he has just confiscated. As Crispin ducks, the struck wall booms above his head.

  Nothing about the tutor is amusing now. His face is contorted in hatred, his eyes bloodshot. From him issues a continuous stream of curses and a spray of spittle as he the turns the hammer in his hand and swings with the claw end as the weapon. The smooth back curve of the wicked instrument grazes Crispin’s face. No damage. He dodges and twists, but the next assault is a closer thing, the claw snags his jacket, and the denim rips.

  As the house fire alarm starts to shriek, the dog leaps onto Mordred’s back, knocking the hulking man off balance, driving him face-first into the floor.

  Crispin snatches up the dropped hammer, the dog does a 180-degree spin on Mordred’s back, and they are off for the south stairs once more.

  There’s not the pale fire of the moon at the bottom of the stairwell this time, but real fire, bright as the sun, and smoke churning upward. They can’t go all the way down, only as far as the second floor.

  Harley leads along this new corridor, where the fire is toward the farther end. They race down one of the curving front staircases to the foyer, though this route is forbidden to children and staff, not to mention dogs.

  As he comes off the bottom step, Crispin hears the shot and in the same instant the bullet ringing off the head of the hammer, which falls from his hand.

  In the foyer, wearing a black knit suit and red scarf, Nanny Sayo advances with a pistol in both hands. “Piglet,” she says. “You wouldn’t leave without a kiss for Nanny, would you?”

  For the first time ever, the dog growls.

  “There’s nothing special about you, piglet. Now you’ll be food for worms, just like your sister and brother.”

  “You’ve lost,” he says.

  She smiles and moves toward him. “You little fool. I’ve bent a hundred like you and broken a hundred more. I look young, but I am older than Jardena.”

  Less than an arm’s length away, she halts.

  The fire alarm continues to shrill, and smoke begins to slither down the dual staircases.

  Crispin stares into the muzzle of the pistol, but then he meets her eyes, which are as beautiful and as magnetic as ever.

  “Food for worms … or not. Your choice. But Nanny has so much to teach you, pretty piglet, and you’ll love learning all of it. You’ll find my lessons quite delicious.”

  Although thirteen, the boy feels nine again, and in her thrall. He remembers her warm hand on his bare chest as if the touch occurred only minutes earlier.

  “What you saw Nanny doing in front of the altar that night … Oh, my pretty piglet, Nanny would love to do the same to you.”

  Her eyes are bottomless wells into which a boy might fall.

  He knows he should say something, counter her words, but he remains mute. And trembles.

  “But before Nanny can be for you what you need her to be, she has to know she can trust you. Come here, sweetie. Prove to Nanny that you love her. Come here and put your mouth around the barrel of the gun.”

  Before he can take a step toward her, if indeed he will, the fire-sprinkler system goes off, and a hard rain falls into the foyer as elsewhere in the house.

  Startled, Nanny Sayo takes a step backward, swings the pistol to the left, and then to the right.

  Swift-moving water. The cascades in the park behind which he has sometimes taken shelter. A rushing stream. Now this indoor rain. This is a dispensation that Nature in its mercy bestows on him and the dog, invisibility to this woman and all her kind.

  He and the dog go to the front door, which he opens.

  Moving warily, seeking him in the wrong part of the foyer, a sodden Nanny Sayo fires a round, trusting to luck, and then squeezes off one more that comes nowhere near him.

  He says, “Mirabell and Harley live,” and she swivels, shooting out one of the sidelights flanking the door.

  Another portion of the underpinnings of the house collapses with a boom. The walls shudder and the chandelier sways.

  Nanny Sayo totters as the foyer shifts under her.

  When Crispin steps outside with Harley, into what will soon be a blizzard if a wind rises, he closes the door, turns away, and hears what might be the foyer floor collapsing into the basement.

  Strangely—or perhaps not so strangely—he and the dog are dry, untouched by the sprinkler-system rain.

  Across the street, through the heavy snow, the Pendleton at the moment looks less like a great mansion than like a work of primitive architecture such as Stonehenge but much larger, or like a place the Aztecs might have built in which to offer up the freshly taken hearts of virgins. In fact, although the city below is so modern, a home for many high-tech companies, Crispin can almost see another city through the veil of glamour, a huddled place that is ancient and dangerous and full of stone idols to gods with inhuman faces.

  He is grateful for the masking snow.

  He and Harley follow Shadow Street down Shadow Hill, staying on the sidewalk. Fire trucks will soon roar up the eastbound lanes.

  The snowflakes are smaller than the silver-dollar variety with which the storm began, but still large, lacy dime-size hieroglyphics full of meaning but whirling past too fast to read.

  A faint meow reminds Crispin, and he looks down to see the tiny cat, his avatar, the claws of its forepaws hooked over the edge of his jacket pocket, its small head poked out. The cat regards the snow with what seems to be wonder.

  Briefly the descending flakes appear to stutter, as if they are a special effect produced by a machine that has lost its current for a second, but then they continue falling as smoothly and gracefully as ever. Crispin suspects that at the instant of the stutter, someone in Broderick’s turned on the artificial snow that will spiral down all day on the model of the store that stands at the center of the toy department. From time to time, things in this world fall out of harmony, and there is a need to synchronize.

  19

  They buy a used car with cash. He is too young to drive, but at sixteen—looking eighteen—she is just old enough. Her driver’s license is a forgery, but she’s pretty good behind a wheel, anyway.

  No longer alone, she gives up the security of Broderick’s for the wonderful uncertainty of the world beyond. Neither of them has any reason to stay in this city, where their families were taken from them.

  They don’t know where they’re going, but they both know without doubt that there is somewhere they need to be.

  With their dog and cat, they leave on Christmas morning, which seems an ideal time to start the world anew.

  By virtue of her great suffering, she is his sister, and by virtue of his great suffering, he is her brother. They are not yet adults, but neither
are they children anymore. A hard-won wisdom has settled upon them and with it that quality with which true wisdom is always twined—humility.

  Later, in open land, with evergreen forests rising up slopes to the north of the highway and descending to pristine lowlands in the south, he puts into words for her the most important thing that they have learned or perhaps ever will.

  The true nature of the world is veiled, and if you shine a bright light on it, you can’t expose that truth; it melts away with the shadows in which it was cloaked. The truth is too awesome for us to stare directly at it, and we are meant to glimpse it only at the periphery of our vision. If the landscape of your mind is too dark with fear or doubt or anger, you are blind to all truth. But if your mental landscape is too bright with certitude and arrogance, you are snow-blind and likewise unable to see what lies before you. Only the moonlit mind allows wonder, and it is in the thrall of wonder that you can see the intricate weave of the world of which you are but one thread, one fantastic and essential thread.

  Terror lives on Shadow Street.

  Discover the evil that lies behind the doors of the Pendleton, in Dean Koontz’s forthcoming novel, 77 Shadow Street.

  Keep reading for an excerpt.

  The North Elevator

  BITTER AND DRUNK, EARL BLANDON, A FORMER United States Senator, got home at 2:15 A.M. that Thursday with a new tattoo: a two-word obscenity in blue block letters between the knuckles of the middle finger of his right hand. Earlier in the night, at a cocktail lounge, he thrust that stiff digit at another customer who didn’t speak English and who was visiting from some third-world backwater where the meaning of the offending gesture evidently wasn’t known in spite of countless Hollywood films in which numerous cinema idols had flashed it. In fact, the ignorant foreigner seemed to mistake the raised finger for some kind of friendly hello and reacted by nodding repeatedly and smiling. Earl was frustrated directly out of the cocktail lounge and into a nearby tattoo parlor, where he resisted the advice of the needle artist and, at the age of fifty-eight, acquired his first body decoration.

  When Earl strode through the front entrance of the exclusive Pendleton into the lobby, the night concierge, Norman Fixxer, greeted him by name. Norman sat on a stool behind the reception counter to the left, a book open in front of him, looking like a ventriloquist’s dummy: eyes wide and blue and glassy, pronounced marionette lines like scars in his face, head cocked at an odd angle. In a tailored black suit and a crisp white shirt and a black bow tie, with a fussily arranged white pocket handkerchief blossoming from the breast pocket of his coat, Norman was overdressed by the standards of the two other concierges who worked the earlier shifts.

  Earl Blandon didn’t like Norman. He didn’t trust him. The concierge tried too hard. He was excessively polite. Earl didn’t trust polite people who tried too hard. They always proved to be hiding something. Sometimes they hid the fact that they were FBI agents, pretending instead to be lobbyists with a suitcase full of cash and a deep respect for the power of a senator. Earl didn’t suspect that Norman Fixxer was an FBI agent in disguise, but the concierge was for damn sure something more than what he pretended to be.

  Earl acknowledged Norman’s greeting with only a scowl. He wanted to raise his newly lettered middle finger, but he restrained himself. Offending a concierge was a bad idea. Your mail might go missing. The suit you expected back from the dry cleaner by Wednesday evening might be delivered to your apartment a week later. With food stains. Although flashing the finger at Norman would be satisfying, a full apology would require doubling the usual Christmas gratuity.

  Consequently, Earl scowled across the marble-floored lobby, his embellished finger curled tightly into his fist. He went through the inner door that Norman buzzed open for him and into the communal hallway, where he turned left and, licking his lips at the prospect of a nightcap, proceeded to the north elevator.

  His third-floor apartment was at the top of the building. He did not have a city view, only windows on the courtyard, and eight other apartments shared that level, but his unit was sufficiently well-positioned to justify calling it his penthouse, especially because it was in the prestigious Pendleton. Earl once owned a five-acre estate with a seventeen-room manor house. He liquidated it and other assets to pay the ruinous fees of the blood-sucking, snake-hearted, lying-bastard, may-they-all-rot-in-hell defense attorneys.

  As the elevator doors slid shut and the car began to rise, Earl surveyed the hand-painted mural that covered the walls above the white wainscoting and extended across the ceiling: bluebirds soaring joyously through a sky in which the clouds were golden with sunlight. Sometimes, like now, the beauty of the scene and the joy of the birds seemed forced, aggravatingly insistent, so that Earl wanted to get a can of spray paint and obliterate the entire panorama.

  He might have vandalized it if there hadn’t been security cameras in the hallways and in the elevator. But the homeowners’ association would only restore it and make him pay for the work. Large sums of money no longer came to him in suitcases, in valises, in fat manila envelopes, in grocery bags, in doughnut-shop boxes, or taped to the bodies of high-priced call girls who arrived naked under leather trench coats. These days, this former senator so frequently felt the urge to deface so many things that he needed to strive mightily to control himself lest he vandalize his way into the poorhouse.

  He closed his eyes to shut out the schmaltzy scene of sun-washed bluebirds. When the air temperature abruptly dropped perhaps twenty degrees in an instant, as the car passed the second floor, Earl’s eyes startled open, and he turned in bewilderment when he saw that the mural no longer surrounded him. The security camera was missing. The white wainscoting had vanished, too. No inlaid marble underfoot. In the stainless-steel ceiling, circles of opaque material shed blue light. The walls, doors, and floor were all brushed stainless steel.

  Before Earl Blandon’s martini-marinated brain could fully absorb and accept the elevator’s transformation, the car stopped ascending—and plummeted. His stomach seemed to rise, then to sink. He stumbled sideways, clutched the handrail, and managed to remain on his feet.

  The car didn’t shudder or sway. No thrumming of hoist cables. No clatter of counterweights. No friction hum of rollers whisking along greased guide rails. With express-elevator speed, the steel box raced smoothly, quietly down.

  Previously, the car-station panel—B, 1, 2, 3—had been part of the controls to the right of the doors. It still was there, but now the numbers began at 3, descended to 2 and 1 and B, followed by a new 1 through 30. He would have been confused even if he’d been sober. As the indicator light climbed—7, 8, 9—the car dropped. He couldn’t be mistaking upward momentum for descent. The floor seemed to be falling out from under him. Besides, the Pendleton had just four levels, only three above ground. The floors represented on this panel must be subterranean, all below the basement.

  But that made no sense. The Pendleton had one basement, a single underground level, not thirty or thirty-one.

  So this could not be the Pendleton anymore. Which made even less sense. No sense at all.

  Maybe he had passed out. A vodka nightmare.

  No dream could be this vivid, this intensely physical. His heart thundered. His pulse throbbed in his temples. Acid reflux burned his throat, and when he swallowed hard to force down the bitter flood, the effort brought tears that blurred his vision.

  He blotted the tears with a suit-coat sleeve. He blinked at the indicator board: 13, 14, 15.…

  Panicked by a sudden intuitive conviction that he was being conveyed to a place as terrifying as it was mysterious, Earl let go of the handrail. He crossed the car and scanned the backlit control board for an EMERGENCY STOP button.

  None existed.

  As the car passed 23, Earl jammed a thumb hard against the button for 26, but the elevator didn’t stop, didn’t even slow until it passed 29. Then, rapidly yet smoothly, momentum fell. With a faint liquid hiss like hydraulic fluid being compressed in a cylinder,
the car came to a full stop, apparently thirty floors under the city.

  Sobered by a supernatural fear—fear of what, he could not say—Earl Blandon shrank away from the doors. With a thud, he backed into the rear wall of the car.

  In his storied past, as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he had once been to a meeting in the bunker far beneath the White House, where the president might one day try to ride out a nuclear holocaust. That deep redoubt was bright and clean, yet it impressed him as more ominous than any graveyard at night. He had some experience of cemeteries from his earliest days as a state lawmaker, when he had thought that in such lonely places, from earth and graves and dust, no one could be raised up to witness the paying of a bribe. This quiet elevator felt far more ominous than even the presidential bunker.

  He waited for the doors to open. And waited.

  Throughout his life, he’d never been a fearful man. Instead, he inspired fear in others. He was surprised that he could be so suddenly and completely terrorized. But he understood what reduced him to this pathetic condition: evidence of something otherworldly.

  A strict materialist, Earl believed only in what he could see, touch, taste, smell, and hear. He trusted nothing but himself, and he needed no one. He believed in the power of his mind, in his singular cunning, to bend any situation to his benefit.

  In the presence of the uncanny, he was without defense.

  Shudders passed through him with such violence that it seemed he should hear his bones knocking together. He tried to make fists, but proved to be so weak with dread that he could not clench his hands. He raised them from his sides, looked at them, willing them to close into tight knuckled weapons.

  He was sober enough now to realize that the two words tattooed on the middle finger of his right hand could have made his insult no clearer to the clueless third-world patron in the cocktail lounge. The guy probably couldn’t read English any more than he could speak it.