Dean Koontz - City of Night

“I’ve been revisiting that bit of strategy myself.”

“It took two of us to kill that guy in Arnie’s room, and it was a close thing. And then that pair at the house —”

“Fred and Ginger.”

“They did sort of look like dancers, didn’t they? Okay, Fred and Ginger. I’m not sure we could have held them off if Deucalion hadn’t shown up.”

“Everybody on staff at the mansion is going to be as hard to take down as those two.”

After another silence, Michael said, “Maybe we should drive up to Shreveport to visit Aunt Leelee.”

“Deucalion will have some idea when we meet at the Luxe.”

“He hasn’t called back. He doesn’t leave his phone on, and then he forgets to check his voice mail.”

“Cut him some slack on the telecom stuff,” Carson said. “He’s a late-eighteenth-century kind of guy.”

They took the oil lamps down from the tops of the two poles and brought them to the hole in the trash field out of which the mother of all gone-wrongs had risen to snatch the three shrouded cadavers.

The light revealed the mouth of a tunnel, seven or eight feet in diameter, descending at an angle into the depths of the pit. The compacted trash that formed the walls of the passageway seemed to have been plastered over with a clear bonding material, like a glue, that glistened in the lamplight.

“That was something, huh, Nick?” Gunny Alecto asked. “Wasn’t that something?”

“It was something,” Nick Frigg agreed, “but I don’t know what.”

“What a night,” she said excitedly.

“Some night,” he agreed.

“Let’s go after it,” she said.

“Down there after it? I was thinking that myself.”

Life at Crosswoods was pretty good because of the ceremonies with the symbolic killings, more and more of them all the time, but the truth was they didn’t have much novelty in their lives. The sex, all of them at each other every night, and the dances of death, and now and then gone-wrongs always different from the things they’d seen before: But that was about it.

Even Epsilons, simple in their function and dedicated to their work — and especially a Gamma like Nick — could develop a yearning for variety, for something new. Here was something new, all right.

Two of the crew had run back to the supply trailer to get four long-handled flashlights with powerful beams. They returned now, and one of them, Hobb, said, “We going down, Nick?”

Instead of answering at once, Nick took one of the flashlights, switched it on, and knelt at the mouth of the tunnel. He probed with the beam and saw that about a hundred feet from its entrance and at that point maybe ten feet below the surface of the trash field — the passageway took a turn to the left, curving down and out of sight.

He wasn’t afraid of what might be down there. He wouldn’t die easy, and he didn’t mind dying.

When he inhaled, he sure liked the rich smell rising out of the depths of the pit. Complex, familiar yet far more intense than the melange at the surface. Nuanced.

In addition to the thousand odors of garbage, each of which he could identify separately and savor on its own, he detected a scent entirely new to him, a mysterious and alluring fragrance that he believed must be the mark of the colossal agglomeration of gone-wrongs that had too briefly revealed itself.

“We’re gonna go down,” he said. “But not all of us. Just four.”

“Pick me, Nick, pick me,” said Gunny Alecto.

“I already picked you,” he said. “You want to go, Hobb?”

Hobb’s eyes flared with excitement. “Oh, yeah. Count me in, Nick. There’s always screwin’ and eatin’, there’s always that, but there’s never been this .”

Hobb was a guy, so Nick picked a woman for the fourth. Azazel was hot, not as hot as Gunny, but she could take it and dish it out and leave you half broken and needing some time to heal.

Nick figured if they got down into the bottom of the pit and couldn’t find the mother of all gone-wrongs, then they could still go at one another, down there in all that stink, which would be something new, something better than ever.

Gunny, Azazel, and Hobb each took a flashlight.

The incline of the tunnel was steep, but not so steep they couldn’t handle it on foot.

“Let’s go find the rat eater,” Gunny said. “Let’s go see what it does down there.”

Bloodstained but no longer bleeding, hair in disarray, clothes torn, unpresentable in the event of unexpected guests, bruised and sore but healing, Erika located the liquor cabinet. She took out a bottle of Remy Martin.

She almost didn’t bother getting a glass. Then she decided that if Victor saw her drinking from the bottle, there would be trouble.

She went to the billiards room because while she knew now that she couldn’t eat dinner in any room she wished, she did believe that she could drink just about anywhere, as her downloaded etiquette did not say otherwise.

For something to do, she switched on the plasma TV and channel-surfed for a while. Bored, she was just about to click off when she came upon the last half-hour of a show called Desperate Housewives , which she found enthralling.

When the next show didn’t interest her, she killed the TV and went from the billiards room to an adjoining glassed-in porch, where she didn’t turn on any lights, but sat in the dark, gazing out at the expansive grounds, where the trees were dramatically revealed by exquisitely positioned landscape lighting.

As she worked on the cognac, she wished the superb metabolism that her brilliant husband had given her did not process alcohol so efficiently. She doubted that she would ever get the buzz on that she understood alcohol to provide and that she was hoping for. She wanted to… blur things.

Maybe she was more inebriated than she thought, however, because after a while she glimpsed what appeared to be a naked albino dwarf capering across the yard. It fled from the shadows under a magnolia free to the gazebo, into which it disappeared.

By the time that Erika had thoughtfully consumed a few more ounces of cognac in an increasingly contemplative mood, the albino had appeared again, scampering this time from the gazebo to the trumpet vine arbor through which one approached the reflecting pond.

One could not help but think, if one had been programmed with an encyclopedia of literary allusions, that there must be a maiden somewhere nearby spinning straw into gold, for here surely was Rumpelstiltskin come for his compensation.

The Luxe Theater, a Deco palace long gone to seed, had been operating as a revival house, showing old movies on the big screen only three nights a week. As it was now his home and his base of operations, Deucalion had the previous day shut down the business entirely in the interest of saving the world.

They met at midnight in the lobby, where Jelly Biggs had set up a folding table near the concessions stand. In a huge bowl on the table, Jelly piled up Dum-Dums, NECCO wafers, Raisinets, Goobers, M&M’s, Sky Bars, bags of Planters, and other treats from the refreshments counter.

The choice of beverages seemed limited, as compared to the fare in a fully functioning theater. Nevertheless, Carson was able to have a vanilla Coke while Deucalion and Jelly had root beer; and Michael was delighted to be served two bottles of chocolate Yoo-hoo.

“If victory favors the army with the highest blood-sugar count,” Michael said, “we’ve won this war already.”

Before they got down to the discussion of strategy and tactics, Deucalion gave an account of Arnie’s circumstances in Tibet. Carson had many questions, but was considerably relieved.