Dean R Koontz Read online

  Although the prospect of violence might be romantic, the reality was blood, bone, decomposition, dust. The reality was Laura on the bed and the unknown young man sewn into silence behind the pleated vinyl door.

  Chyna sat with her cold hands covering her colder face, aware that she would never be as strangely beautiful as her mother.

  Eventually she regained control of her breathing.

  The motor home rolled on, and she was reminded of nights when, as a child, she had dozed on trains, on buses, in the backseats of cars, lulled by the motion and the hum of wheels, unsure where her mother was taking her, dreaming of being part of a family like one of those on television—with befuddled but loving parents, an amusing next-door neighbor who might be frustrating but never malicious, and a dog that knew a few tricks. But good dreams never lasted, and she woke repeatedly from nightmares, gazing out windows at strange landscapes, wishing that she could travel forever without stopping. The road was a promise of peace, but destinations were always hell.

  This time would be no different from all those others. Wherever they were bound, Chyna didn’t want to go there. She intended to get off between destinations and hoped to find her way back to the better life that she had struggled so hard to build these past ten years.

  She left the corner of the bedroom to retrieve the butcher knife, which she had dropped when she’d been rocked backward by the sight of the dead man in the closet. Then she went around the bed to the nightstand and switched off the pharmacy lamp.

  Being in the dark with dead people didn’t frighten her. Only the living were a danger.

  The motor home slowed again and then turned left. Chyna leaned against the tilt of the vehicle to keep her balance.

  They must be on State Highway 29. A right turn would have taken them down the Napa Valley, south into the town of Napa. She wasn’t sure what communities lay to the north, other than St. Helena and Calistoga.

  Even between the towns, however, there would be vineyards, farms, houses, and rural businesses. Wherever she got out of the motor home, she should be able to find help within a reasonable distance.

  She sidled blindly to the door and stood with one hand on the knob, waiting for instinct to guide her once more. Much of her life had been lived like a balancing act on a spearpoint fence, and on a particularly difficult night when she was twelve, she had decided that instinct was, in fact, the quiet voice of God. Prayers did receive replies, but you had to listen closely and believe in the answer. At twelve, she wrote in her diary: “God doesn’t shout; He whispers, and in the whisper is the way.”

  Waiting for the whisper, she thought about the battered body in the closet, which appeared to have been dead for less than a day, and about Laura, still warm on the sagging bed. Sarah, Paul, Laura’s brother Jack, Jack’s wife, Nina: six people murdered in twenty-four hours. The eater of spiders was not an ordinary homicidal sociopath. In the language of the cops and the criminologists who specialized in searching for and stopping men like this, he was hot, going through a hot phase, burning up with desire, need. But Chyna, who intended to follow her master’s in psychology with a doctorate in criminology, even if she had to work six years waiting tables to get there, sensed that this guy was not just hot. He was a singularity, conforming only in part to standard profiles in aberrant psychology, as purely alien as something from the stars, a runaway killing machine, merciless and irresistible. She had no hope of eluding him if she didn’t wait for the murmuring voice of instinct.

  She remembered seeing a large rearview mirror when she’d briefly occupied the driver’s seat earlier. The vehicle had no rear window, so the mirror was there to provide the driver with a view of the lounge and the dining area behind him. He would be able to see all the way into the end hall that served the bath and bedroom, and if the devil’s luck was with him, he would glance up just when Chyna opened the door, stepped out, and was exposed.

  When the moment felt right, Chyna opened the door.

  A small blessing, a good omen: The ceiling light in the hall was out.

  Standing in gloom, she quietly pulled shut the bedroom door.

  The lamp above the dining table was on as before. At the front of the vehicle was the green glow of the instrument panel—and beyond the windshield, the headlights were silver swords.

  After moving forward past the bathroom and out of the welcome shadows, she crouched behind the paneled side of the dining nook. She peered across the crescent booth to the back of the driver’s head, about twenty feet away.

  He seemed so close—and, for the first time, vulnerable.

  Nevertheless, Chyna wasn’t foolish enough to creep forward and attack him while he was driving. If he heard her coming or glanced at the rearview mirror and spotted her, he could wrench the steering wheel or slam on the brakes, sending her sprawling. Then he might be able to stop the vehicle and get to her before she could reach the rear door—or he might swivel in his chair and shoot her down.

  The entrance through which he had carried Laura was immediately to Chyna’s left. She sat on the floor with her feet in the step well, facing this door, concealed from the driver by the dining nook.

  She put the butcher knife aside. When she leaped out, she would probably fall and roll—and she might easily stab herself with the knife if she tried to take it with her.

  She didn’t intend to jump until the driver either stopped at an intersection or entered a turn sharp enough to require him to cut his speed dramatically. She couldn’t risk breaking a leg or being knocked unconscious in a fall, because then she wouldn’t be able to get away from the road and safely into hiding.

  She didn’t doubt that he would be aware of her escape even as it began. He would hear the door open or the wind whistling at it, and he would see her either in his rearview or in his side-mounted mirror as she made her break for freedom. Even in the unlikely event that she was not seen, the wind would slam the door hard behind her the instant she was gone; the killer would suspect that he hadn’t been alone with his collection of corpses, and he’d pull off the highway and come back along the pavement, panicky, to have a look.

  Or perhaps not panicky. Not panicky at all. More likely, he would search with grim, methodical, machine efficiency. This guy was all about control and power, and Chyna found it difficult to imagine him ever succumbing to panic.

  The motor home slowed, and Chyna’s heart quickened. As the driver reduced speed further, Chyna rose into a crouch in the step well and put a hand on the lever-action door handle.

  They came to a full stop, and she pressed down on the handle, but the door was locked. Quietly but insistently she pressed up, down, up—to no avail.

  She couldn’t find any latch button. Just a keyhole.

  She remembered the rattling that she’d heard when she’d been in the bedroom and the spider eater had come back inside and closed this door. Rattle, rattle. The rattle of a key, perhaps.

  Maybe this was a safety feature to prevent kids from tumbling out into traffic. Or maybe the crazy bastard had modified the door lock to enhance security, to make it more difficult for a burglar or casual intruder to stumble upon any lip-sewn or shackled cadavers that might just happen to be aboard. Can’t be too careful when you have dead bodies stacked in the bedroom. Prudence requires certain security measures.

  The motor home pulled forward through the intersection and began to pick up speed again.

  She should have known that escape wouldn’t be easy. Nothing was easy. Ever.

  She sat down, leaning against the breakfast-nook paneling, still facing the door, thinking furiously.

  Earlier, on her way back through the vehicle from the driver’s seat, she’d seen a door on the other side, toward the front, behind the copilot’s chair. Most motor homes had two doors, but this was a rare older model with three. She was reluctant to go forward to escape, however, and for the same reason that she didn’t want to attack him: He might see her coming, rock her off her feet, and shoot her before she could get up.
/>
  All right, she had one advantage. He didn’t know that she was aboard.

  If she couldn’t just open a door and jump out, if she was going to have to kill him, she could lie in wait here past the dining nook, surprise the bastard, gut him, step over him, and leave by the front. Just minutes ago she had been ready to kill him, and she could make herself be ready again.

  The engine vibrations rose through the floor, half numbing her butt. Total numbing would have been welcome; the carpet soon proved to be inadequate padding, and her tailbone began to ache. She shifted her weight from cheek to cheek, leaned forward and then leaned back; nothing provided more than a few seconds of relief. The ache spread to the small of her back, and mild discomfort escalated into serious pain.

  Twenty minutes, half an hour, forty minutes, an hour, longer, she endured the agony by striving to imagine all the ways that her escape might unfold once the motor home stopped and the killer got out from behind the wheel. Concentrating. Thinking it through. Planning for myriad eventualities. Finally, however, she couldn’t think about anything but the pain.

  The motor home was cool, and down in the step well, there was no heat at all. The engine and road vibrations penetrated her shoes, beating relentlessly on her heels and soles. She flexed her toes, afraid that her cold, achy feet and stiffening calf muscles would develop cramps and hobble her when the time came for action.

  With a strange hilarity unnervingly close to despair, she thought, Forget about grief. Forget about justice. Right now just give me a comfortable chair to pamper my ass, just let me sit for a while until my feet are warm again, and later you can have my life if you want it.

  The prolonged inactivity not only took a physical toll but soon began to depress her. Back at the house when she’d first heard the intruder, before he had even come to the guest room, Chyna had known that safety lay in movement. Now emotional safety lay in movement, distraction. But circumstances required her to be still and wait. She had too much time to think—and too many disturbing thoughts on which to dwell.

  She worked herself into such a state of distress that tears welled—which was when she realized that she was not suffering unduly from butt ache or back pain or the cold throbbing in her feet. The real pain was in her heart, the anguish that she had been forced to repress since she’d found Paul and Sarah, since she’d detected the vague ammoniacal scent of semen in Laura’s bedroom and had seen the dimly gleaming links of the shackling chain. Her physical pain was only a lame excuse for tears.

  If she dared weep in self-pity, however, then a flood would come for Paul, for Sarah, for Laura, for the whole sorry damn screwed-up human race, and in useless resentment at the fact that hard-won hope so often spiraled into nightmare. She would bury her face in her hands, uselessly wailing the question that had been asked of God more often than any other: Why, why, why, why, why?

  Surrendering to tears would be so easy, satisfying. These were selfish tears of defeat; they would not only purge the heart of grief but also wash out the need to care about anyone, anything. Blessed relief could be hers if she simply admitted that the long struggle to understand wasn’t worth the pain of experience. Her sobbing would bring the motor home to a sudden halt, and the driver would come back to find her huddled at the step well. He would club her, drag her into the bedroom, rape her beside the body of her friend; there would be terror beyond anything that she had ever known before, but it would be brief. And this time it would be final. He would free her forever from the need to ask why, from the torment of repeatedly falling through the fragile floor of hope into this too familiar desolation.

  For a long time, maybe even since the stormy night of her eighth birthday and the frenzied palmetto beetle, she’d known that being a victim was often a choice people made. As a child, she hadn’t been able to put this insight into words, and she hadn’t known why so many people chose suffering; when older, she had recognized their self-hatred, masochism, weakness.

  Not all or even most suffering is at the hands of fate; it befalls us at our invitation.

  She’d always chosen not to be victimized, to resist and fight back, to hold on to hope and dignity and faith in the future. But victimhood was seductive, a release from responsibility and caring: Fear would be transmuted into weary resignation; failure would no longer generate guilt but, instead, would spawn a comforting self-pity.

  Now she trembled on an emotional high wire, not sure whether she would be able to keep her balance or would allow herself to fail and fall.

  The motor home slowed again. They were angling to the right. Slowing. Maybe pulling off the highway and stopping.

  She tried the door. She knew that it was locked, but she quietly worked the lever-action handle anyway, because she wasn’t capable, after all, of simply giving up.

  As they climbed a slight incline, their speed continued to drop.

  Wincing at the pain in her calves and thighs as she moved, yet relieved to be off her butt, she rose just far enough to look across the dining nook.

  The back of the killer’s head was the most hateful thing that Chyna had ever seen, and it aroused fresh anger in her. The brain beneath that curve of bone hummed with vicious fantasies. It was infuriating that he should be alive and Laura dead. That he should be sitting here so smug, so content with all his memories of blood, recalling the pleas for mercy that must be like music to him. That he should ever see a sunset again and take pleasure from it, or taste a peach, or smell a flower. To Chyna, the back of this man’s skull seemed like the smooth chitinous helmet of an insect, and she believed that if she ever touched him, he would be as cold as a squirming beetle under her hand.

  Beyond the driver, beyond the windshield, at the top of the low rise toward which they were headed, a structure appeared, indistinct and unidentifiable. A few tall sodium-vapor arc lamps cast a sour, sulfurous light.

  She squatted below the back of the dining nook again.

  She picked up the knife.

  They had reached the top of the rise. They were on level ground once more. Steadily slowing.

  Turning around, facing away from the exit, she eased into the step well. Left foot on the lower step, right foot on the higher. Back pressed to the locked door, crouching in shadows beyond the reach of the nook lamp, she was ready to launch herself up and at him if he came back through the motor home and gave her a chance.

  With a final sigh of air brakes, the vehicle stopped.

  Wherever they were, people might be nearby. People who could help her.

  But if she screamed, would those outside be near enough to hear?

  Even if they heard, they would never reach her in time. The killer would get to her first, gun in hand.

  Besides, maybe this was a roadside rest area: nothing more than a parking lot, some picnic tables, a poster warning about the dangers of campfires, and rest rooms. He might have taken a break to use the public facilities or the john in the trailer. At this dead hour, after three o’clock in the morning, they were likely to be the only vehicle on site, in which case she could scream until she was hoarse, and no one would come to her assistance.

  The engine cut off.

  Quiet. No vibrations in the floor.

  Now that the motor home was still, Chyna was shaking. No longer depressed. Stomach muscles fluttering. Scared again. Because she wanted to live.

  She would have preferred that he go outside and give her a chance to escape, but she expected him to use the trailer facilities instead of the public rest room. He would come right past her. If she couldn’t escape, then she was hot to finish this.

  Crazily, she wondered if what came out of him when he was cut would be blood—or the stuff that oozed from a fat beetle when it was crushed.

  She expected to hear the bastard moving, heavy footfalls and the hollow spong when he stepped on a weak seam in the floor, but there was silence. Maybe he was taking a moment to stretch his arms, roll his achy shoulders, massage the back of his bull neck, and shrug off the weariness of travel
.

  Or perhaps he had glimpsed her in the rearview mirror, her face moon-bright in the light from the dining-table lamp. He could ease out of his seat and creep toward her, avoiding all the creaks in the floor because he knew where they were. Slide into the dining nook. Lean over the back of the booth. Shoot her point-blank where she crouched in the step well. Shoot her in the face.