Читать книгу Relentless - Dean Koontz, Dean Koontz - Страница 15

After walking the house to lock every window and door, after setting the security alarm, I felt safe enough to leave Milo in his room with Lassie, while Penny and I huddled at the kitchen table, at the center of which stood the damaged photo in the silver frame.

“So you knew Waxx would be there for lunch,” she said. “But you didn’t tell me. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I wondered about that at the time.”

“Are you still wondering about it?”

“No, I’ve figured it out.”

“Share with me.”

“I didn’t want you to talk me out of going.”

“You knew better than to confront him.”

She wasn’t angry, just disappointed in me.

I wished that she would get angry instead.

“I didn’t confront him,” I assured her.

“Seems like something must have happened.”

“I just wanted to get a look at him. He’s so reclusive.”

Her blue gaze is as direct as the aim of an experienced bird hunter in his blind, her double-barreled eyes tracking the truth. My determination always to meet her extraordinary gaze has made a better man of me over the years.

“So what does he look like?” she asked.

“Like a walking slab of concrete with white hair and a bow tie.”

“What did you say to him?”

“I didn’t approach him. I watched him from a distance. But then at the end of lunch, after I paid the check, Milo needed to pee.”

“Is the pee germane to the story, or are you vamping to delay telling me about the confrontation with Waxx?”

“It’s germane.” I told her the rest of the tale.

Frowning, she said, “And Milo didn’t sprinkle him?”

“No. Not even a drop.”

“Waxx said ‘Doom’? What do you think he meant by it?”

“At first I thought he meant he’ll rip my next book even worse.”

Indicating the framed photo that I had rescued from the oven, she said, “Now what do you think?”

“I don’t know. This is crazy.”

For a moment we sat in silence.

Night had fallen. Evidently, Penny distrusted the darkness at the windows as much as I did. She got up to shut the pleated shades.

I almost told her that she should stand to the side of the window when she pulled the cord. Backlit, she made an easy target.

Instead, I got up and dropped two of the shades.

She said, “I need a cookie.”

“Before dinner? What if Milo sees you?”

“He already knows I’m a hypocrite when it comes to the cookie rules. He loves me anyway. You want one?”

“All right. I’ll pour the milk.”

In times of trouble, in times of stress, in times of doubt, in times when even a vague sense of misgiving overcomes her, Penny turns to the same mood elevator: cookies. I don’t know why she doesn’t weigh five hundred pounds.

She once said just being married to me burns up seven thousand calories a day. I pretended to believe she meant I was a total stud. I love to make her laugh.

At the table once more, with glasses of cold milk and chocolate-chip-pecan cookies as big as saucers, we restored our confidence.

“Most critics are principled,” she said. “They love books. They have standards. They tend to be gentle people.”

“This guy isn’t one of them.”

“Even the biased and mean ones—they don’t generally wind up in prison for violent crimes. Words are their only weapons.”

I said, “Remember Josh McGintry and the magazine?”

Josh is a friend and writer. His Catholicism is an implicit part of his novels.

Over the course of a year, he received a venomous hate letter once a week from an anti-Catholic bigot. He never responded to them.

When his new novel came out, the same hater reviewed it in a national weekly magazine for which he was a staff writer. The guy did not reveal his prejudice, but he mocked the book and Josh’s entire career in an outrageously dishonest fashion.

Josh is married to Mary, and Mary said, “Let it go.”

Women have been saying “Let it go” since human beings lived in caves; and men responded then pretty much as they respond today.

Instead of letting it go, Josh wrote the editor in chief of the magazine, copying him on the hate letters. The editor defended his staff writer and suggested Josh could have forged the correspondence.

Emboldened, the bigot wrote to Josh on magazine stationery. The envelopes were stamped with one of the magazine’s postage meters.

When Josh copied the editor on this new evidence, he received no reply. But a year later, when his subsequent book was published, the review in the magazine was not written by the same man.

This vicious review was written by a different bigot, a friend of the first one, who began also to send hate letters to Josh.

Again, Mary told him to let it go. Josh listened to her this time, though ever since he’d been grinding his teeth in his sleep so assiduously that he needed to wear a soft-acrylic bite guard.

“Neither of those guys showed up at Josh’s house,” Penny said. “They prove my contention—their only weapons were words.”

“So you don’t think Waxx will come back?”

“If he were a true nut, wouldn’t he have already shot you?”

“It would be nice to think so.”

“Anyway, you can’t report him to the cops. I didn’t see him. Only you saw him. He’ll deny having been here.”

“It’s just—the whole thing was so freaky.”

“Clearly, he’s arrogant and eccentric,” she said. “Some little thing you said set him off.”

“All I did was apologize for Milo nearly peeing on him.”

“He misinterpreted something. So he’s had his payback. Probably the worst he’ll do now is trash every book you ever write.”

“Swell.” I locked eyes with her. “You really think it’s over?”

She hesitated but then said, “Yes.”

As a truth detector, her double-barreled gaze works both ways. When she did not blink, I knew she was being a straight shooter.

“Cubby, he thinks you were spying on him, you violated his personal space. So he violated yours. Now, sweetie, let it go.”

I sighed. “I will. I’ll let it go.”

Penny’s smile could power a small city.

Together, we prepared salads, ravioli, and meatballs. Milo never knew that we had indulged in cookies and milk before dinner. But I’m pretty sure Lassie, with her exceptional sense of smell, detected the truth on our breath, because her mismatched eyes said guilty.

Later that night, I had difficulty falling asleep. When at last I slept, I found myself in another lost-and-alone dream: the infinite library with the winding aisles.

I had been prowling those byways for a while, in anticipation of a momentous discovery, when a serpentine turn in the stacks brought me to a place where the shelves held no books. Displayed instead, in big jars sealed with corks and wax, was a collection of severed heads in preservative fluid.

From floor to ceiling, onward past another turn and another, men and women peered out of their glass ossuaries, eyes wide but fixed. None wore an expression of agony or horror. Instead, they appeared to be either astonished or contemplative.

These bodiless multitudes, breathless in formaldehyde, disturbed me for obvious reasons but also for a reason I could not identify. As I began to realize that I knew them—or at least some of them—my heart raced in rebellion against the pending revelation.

Suspecting that the way ahead would never bring me again to any books, but only to additional heads in jars, I turned back toward the true library out of which I had wandered. Although I hurried farther than I had come, I found only heads behind me.

I first recognized Charles Dickens, bearded behind a curve of glass, and then Truman Capote. Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Heinlein, Zane Grey, Raymond Chandler. The creator of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs. Virginia Woolf. Somerset Maugham. Mickey Spillane.

A premonition chilled mere anxiety into a colder fear: I knew that I would recognize my face in a jar. And when I met my dead eyes, I would cease to exist in either the dream or the waking world, but would forevermore be only a severed head drowned in formaldehyde.

As I tried to run out of the dream, I strove not to look at the jars, but my eyes were repeatedly drawn to them. When the lights went off, the darkness was a blessing until, as I blindly progressed, I heard Shearman Waxx speak nearby: “Doom.”

With my breath caught in my throat, I sat up in bed, in a room as dark as the lightless maze of the nightmare library. For a moment, I half believed that Waxx had spoken not in the dream but here in the waking world.

I exhaled, inhaled, and oriented myself by the feel of the entangling sheets, by the residual smell of fabric softener, by the familiar faint whistle of forced air coming through the heating vent, by the palest blush of moonlight at the edges of the heavy draperies.

The room was blacker than it should have been. The green numbers on my digital clock were not lit. The clock on Penny’s nightstand had been extinguished, as well.

The luminescent numerals of the alarm-system keypad should have been visible on the wall, only a few steps from my side of the bed. They were not glowing.

Furthermore, a tiny green indicator lamp should have confirmed that the system was powered. And a red indicator of the same size should have noted that the alarm was set on HOME mode, which meant that the motion detectors were not engaged but that all of the window and door circuits were activated to warn of any attempted intrusion. Neither the green nor the red was lit.

The power-company service had failed. Perhaps a drunk driver had sheared off a utility pole. A transformer might have blown up. Such interruptions were rare and usually short-lived, nothing to worry about.

As the last clouds of sleep lifted from my mind, I remembered that the security system included a backup battery that should keep it operative for three hours. And when the main power supply was cut off, as the system switched to battery, a recorded voice should announce “power failure” throughout the house.

Apparently, the battery had gone dead. The recorded voice had never spoken.

I cautioned myself not to leap to conclusions. Coincidence is seldom credible in a work of fiction, but it is a primary thread in the tapestry of real life. An accident at a power station was a more likely explanation than was the return of the bow-tied critic.

From somewhere in the pitch-black bedroom, Shearman Waxx said again, “Doom.”