Dean Koontz - City of Night

“He must sweat like a pig in that suit.”

“You couldn’t pay me enough to be Barney,” he said.

“I used to hate Big Bird when I was a kid.”

“Why?”

She said, “He was such a self-righteous bore.”

“You know who used to scare me when I was a little kid? Snuggle the Bear.”

“Do I know Snuggle?”

“In those TV ads for that fabric softener. Somebody would say how soft their robe was or their towels, and Snuggle the teddy bear would be hiding behind a pillow or creeping around under a chair, giggling.”

“He was just happy that people were pleased.”

“No, it was a maniacal little giggle. And his eyes were glazed. And how did he get in all those houses to hide and giggle?”

“You’re saying Snuggle should’ve been charged with B and E?”

“Absolutely. Most of the time when he giggled, he covered his mouth with one paw. I always thought he didn’t want you to see his teeth.”

“Snuggle had bad teeth?” she asked.

“I figured they were rows of tiny vicious fangs he was hiding. When I was maybe four or five, I used to have nightmares where I’d be in bed with a teddy bear, and it was Snuggle, and he was trying to chew open my jugular and suck the lifeblood out of me.”

She said, “So much about you suddenly makes more sense than it ever did before.”

“Maybe if we aren’t cops someday, we can open a toy shop.”

“Can we run a toy shop and have guns?”

“I don’t see why not,” he said.

Sitting at the kitchen table in Michael Maddison’s apartment, Cindi Lovewell used a pair of tweezers to pluck the last of the wood splinters out of Benny’s left eye.

He said, “How’s it look?”

“Icky. But it’ll heal. Can you see?”

“Everything blurry in that eye. But I can see well with the right. We don’t look so cute anymore.”

“We will again. You want something to drink?”

“What’s he got?”

She went to the refrigerator, checked. “Like nine kinds of soft drinks and beer.”

“How much beer?”

“Two six-packs.”

“I’ll take one of them,” Benny said.

She brought both six-packs to the table. They twisted the caps off two bottles and chugged Corona.

Her wrist had already pretty much healed, though some weakness remained in it.

Maddison’s place was hardly bigger than a studio apartment. The kitchen was open to the eating area and the living room.

They could see the front door. They would hear the key in the lock.

Maddison would be dead two steps across the threshold. Maybe the bitch would be with him, and then the job would be done.

O’Connor being barren, Cindi felt sorry for her, but she still wanted her dead in the worst way.

Opening a second bottle of beer, Benny said, “So who was that tattooed guy?”

“I’ve been thinking.”

“He wasn’t Old Race. He has to be one of us.”

“He was stronger than us,” she reminded Benny. “Much stronger. He kicked our ass.”

“A new model.”

“He sure didn’t look like a new model,” she said. “What I’m thinking is voodoo.”

Benny groaned. “ Don’t think voodoo.”

Sometimes Benny didn’t seem imaginative enough for a Gamma. She said, “The tattoo on his face was sort of like a veve .”

“None of this makes sense.”

“A veve is a design that represents the figure and power of an astral force.”

“You’re getting so weird on me again.”

“Somebody put some super-bad mojo on us and conjured up a god of Congo or Petro, and sent it after us.”

“Congo is in Africa.”

“Voodoo has three rites or divisions,” Cindi said patiently. “Rada calls upon the powers of the benevolent gods.”

“Listen to yourself.”

“Congo and Petro appeal to the powers of two different groups of evil gods.”

“You called voodoo science. Gods aren’t science.”

“They are if they work according to laws as reliable as those of physics,” she insisted. “Somebody conjured up a Congo or a Petro and sent it after us, and you saw what happened.”

Erika Helios had finished her dinner and had been for some time drinking cognac in the formal living room, enjoying the ambience and trying not to think about the thing in the glass case, when Victor arrived home from the Hands of Mercy, evidently having decided not to work through the night, after all.

When he found her in the living room, she said, “Good evening, dear. What a lovely surprise, when I thought I wouldn’t see you until tomorrow.”

Surveying the dirty dishes, he said, “You’re having dinner in the living room?”

“I wanted to have dinner somewhere that I could have cognac, and Christine said I could have cognac anywhere I pleased, and so here I am. It was very nice. We should invite guests and have a dinner party in the living room some night soon.”

“No one eats dinner in a formal living room,” he said sharply.

Erika could see now that he was in a mood, but part of the function of a good wife was to elevate her husband’s mood, so she pointed to a nearby chair and said cheerily, “Why don’t you pull that up and sit with me and have some cognac. You’ll see it’s really a charming place for dinner.”

Looming, glowering, he said, “You’re having dinner in a formal living room at a three-hundred-thousand-dollar, eighteenth-century French escritoire! ” The bad mood abruptly had become something worse.

Frightened and confused but hopeful of explaining herself in a way that might yet win his heart, she said, “Oh, I know the history of the piece, dear. I’m quite well-programmed on antiques. If we —”

He seized her by her hair, jerked her to her feet, and slapped her across the face once, twice, three times, very hard.

“As stupid and useless as the other four,” he declared, speaking with such force that he sprayed spittle in her face.

When he threw her aside, Erika staggered against a small table and knocked over a chinoiserie vase, which fell on the Persian carpet, yet shattered.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t understand about not eating in the living room. I see now it was foolish of me. I’ll think more seriously about etiquette before I —”

The ferocity with which he came at her was much greater than anything he had exhibited before, than anything she had imagined she might have to endure.

He backhanded her, chopped at her with the edges of his hands, hammered her with his fists, even bit her, and of course she could not defend herself, and of course he forbade her to switch off the pain. And the pain was great.

He was fierce and cruel. She knew he would not be cruel to her unless she deserved it. Almost worse than the pain was the shame of having failed him.

When at last he left her on the floor and walked out of the room, she lay there for a long time, breathing shallowly, cautiously, because it hurt so much to breathe deeply.

Eventually, she got up far enough to sit on the floor with her back against the sofa. From this perspective she noted with shock how many fine and expensive things were spotted with her blood.

Erika realized that her brilliant husband had invented the miraculous spot remover not solely for those rare occasions when a butler chewed off his fingers.

If she were to be the final Erika, she would need to learn from this experience. She must meditate on all that he had said and on the precise nature of the punishment he had administered. If she applied herself to a thoughtful analysis of the incident, she would surely be a better wife.