Dean Koontz - Intensity

For a moment she became confused, thinking that she was back in the Templeton house in the Napa Valley, hiding under the bed in the guest room. But there hadn’t been flatware scattered across that bedroom floor, and when she focused on the stainless-steel utensils again, her thoughts cleared.

“Now I’m going to have to wash all these,” the killer said, “before I put them away.”

He was circling through the kitchen, picking up the flatware and being methodical about it, keeping spoons with spoons, knives with knives.

Chyna was surprised that she could move her arm, which was as heavy as a great tree limb, a petrified tree once wood but now stone. Nevertheless, she managed to point at the killer and even curl her throbbing trigger finger, swallowing her pain and the bitter taste that came with it.

The gun didn’t fire.

She squeezed the trigger again, and still there was no boom, and then she realized that her hand was empty. She wasn’t holding the pistol.

Strange.

One of the knives was near her hand. It was a table knife with a finely serrated edge, suitable for spreading butter or for slicing well-cooked chicken or for cutting green beans into bite-size pieces, but not ideal for stabbing someone to death. A knife was a knife, however, better than no weapon at all, and she quietly closed her hand around it.

Now all she had to do was find the strength to get off the floor. Curiously, she couldn’t even lift her head. She had never before felt so tired .

She had been hit hard on the back of the neck. She wondered about spinal injury.

She refused to weep. She had the knife.

The killer came to her, stooped, and extracted the knife from her hand. She was amazed at how easily it slipped from her fingers, even though she clutched it ferociously, as if it hadn’t been a knife at all but a sliver of melting ice.

“Bad girl,” he said, and rapped the flat of the blade against the top of her skull.

He continued with the cleanup.

While trying not to think about spinal injuries, Chyna managed to get her hand around a fork.

He returned and took that away from her too. “No,” he said, as though he were training a recalcitrant puppy. “No.”

“Bastard,” she said, dismayed to hear a slur in her voice.

“Sticks and stones.”

“Fucking bastard.”

“Oh, very pretty,” he said scornfully.

“Shithead.”

“I should wash your mouth out with soap.”

“Asshole.”

“Your mother never taught you words like that.”

“You don’t know my mother,” she said thickly.

He hit her again, a hard chop to the side of the neck this time.

Then Chyna lay in darkness, listening worriedly to her mother’s distant gay laughter and strange men’s voices. Shattering glass. Cursing. Thunder and wind. Palm trees thrashing in the night over Key West. The quality of the laughter changed. Mocking now. Crashes that weren’t thunder. And the skittery palmetto beetle over her bare legs and across her back. Other times. Other places. In the vapory realm of dreams, the iron fist of memory.

Shortly after nine o’clock in the morning, after dealing with the woman and washing the flatware, Mr. Vess sets loose the dogs.

At the back door, at the front door, and in his bedroom, there are call buttons that, when pushed, sound a soft buzzer in the kennel behind the barn. When the Dobermans have been sent there with the word crib , as they were sent earlier, the buzzer is a command that at once returns them to active patrol.

He uses the call button by the kitchen door and then steps to the large window by the dinette to watch the backyard.

The sky is low and gray, still shrouding the Siskiyou Mountains, but rain is no longer falling. The drooping boughs of the evergreens drip steadily. The bark on the deciduous trees is a sodden black; their limbs — some with the first fragile green buds of spring, others still barren — are so coaly that they appear to have been stripped by fire.

Some people might think that the scene is passive now, with the thunder spent and the lightning extinguished, but Mr. Vess knows that a storm is as powerful in its aftermath as in its raging. He is in harmony with this new kind of power, the quiescent power of growth that water bestows on the land.

From the back of the barn come the Dobermans. They pad side by side for a distance, but then split up and proceed each in his own direction.

They are not on attack status at this time. They will chase down and detain any intruder, but they will not kill him. To prime them for blood, Mr. Vess must speak the name Nietzsche .

One of the dogs — Liederkranz — comes onto the back porch, where he stares at the window, adoring his master. His tail wags once, and then once again, but he is on duty, and this brief and measured display of affection is all that he will allow himself.

Liederkranz returns to the backyard. He stands tall, vigilant. He gazes first to the south, then west, and then east. He lowers his head, smells the wet grass, and at last he moves off across the lawn, sniffing industriously. His ears flatten against his skull as he concentrates on a scent, tracking something that he imagines might be a threat to his master.

On a few occasions, as a reward to the Dobermans and to keep them sharp, Mr. Vess has turned loose a captive and has allowed the dogs to stalk her, forgoing the pleasure of the kill himself. It is an entertaining spectacle.

Secure behind the screen of his four-legged Praetorian Guard, Mr. Vess goes upstairs to the bathroom and adjusts the water in the shower until it is luxuriously hot. He lowers the volume of the radio but leaves it tuned to the swing-music program.

As he strips off his soiled clothing, clouds of steam pour over the top of the shower curtain. This humidity enhances the fragrance of the dark stains in his garments. Naked, he stands for a couple of minutes with his face buried in the blue jeans, the T-shirt, the denim jacket, breathing deeply at first but then delicately sniffing one exquisite nuance of odor after another, wishing that his sense of smell were twenty thousand times more intense than it is, like that of a Doberman.

Nevertheless, these aromas transport him into the night just past. He hears once more the soft popping of the sound suppressor on the pistol, the muffled cries of terror and the thin pleas for mercy in the night calm of the Templeton house. He smells Mrs. Templeton’s lilac-scented body lotion, which she’d applied to her skin before retiring, the fragrance of the sachet in the daughter’s underwear drawer. He tastes, in memory, the spider.

Regretfully, he puts the clothes aside for laundering, because by this evening he must pass for the ordinary man that he is not, and this reverse lycanthropy requires time if the transformation is to be convincing.

Therefore, as Benny Goodman plays “One O’clock Jump,” Mr. Vess plunges into the stinging-hot water, being especially vigorous with the washcloth and lavish with a bar of Irish Spring, scrubbing away the too pungent scents of sex and death, which might alarm the sheep. They must never suspect the shepherd of having a snaggle-toothed snout and a bushy tail inside his herdsman’s disguise. Taking his time, bopping to song after song, he shampoos his thick hair twice and then treats it with a penetrating conditioner. He uses a small brush to scrub under his fingernails. He is a perfectly proportioned man, lean but muscular. As always, he takes great pleasure in soaping himself, enjoying the sculpted contours of his body under his slippery hands; he feels like the music sounds, like the soap smells, like the taste of sweetened whipping cream.

Life is. Vess lives.