Dean Koontz - Intensity

Chyna came out of Key West darkness and tropical thunder into a fluorescent glare that stung her bleary eyes. At first she mistook the fear that drove her pounding heart for the fear of Jim Woltz, her mother’s friend; she thought that her face was pressed to the floor under the bed in his seaside cottage. But then she remembered the killer and the captive girl.

She was sitting forward in a chair, slumped over the round table in the dining area off the knotty-pine kitchen. Her head was turned to her right, and she was looking through a window at the back porch, the backyard.

The killer had removed a seat cushion from one of the other chairs and had placed it under her head, so her face wouldn’t press uncomfortably against the wood. She shuddered at his thoughtfulness.

As she tried to lift her head, pain shot up the back of her neck and throbbed in the right side of her face. She almost blacked out, and decided not to be in a rush about getting up.

When she shifted in the chair, the clink of chains indicated that getting up might not be a choice either now or later. Her hands were in her lap, and when she tried to lift one, she lifted both, for her wrists were cuffed.

She tried to pull her feet apart — and discovered that her ankles were shackled. Judging by the noisy rattling and clinking that her small movements generated, there were other encumbrances as well.

Outside, something as black as soot bounded across the green lawn, scampered up the steps, and crossed the porch. It came to the window, jumped up, put its paws on the window stool, and peered in at her. A Doberman pinscher.

Against her breasts, Ariel holds an open book as if it is a shield, hands splayed across the binding. She is in the enormous armchair, legs drawn up beneath her, the only perfect doll of all those in the room.

Mr. Vess sits on a footstool before her.

He cleans up well. Showered, shampooed, shaved, and combed, he is presentable in any company, and any mother, seeing him on the arm of her daughter, would think that he was a prize. He is wearing loafers without socks, beige cotton Dockers, a braided leather belt, and a pale-green chambray shirt.

In her schoolgirl uniform, Ariel looks good too. Vess is pleased to see that she has regularly groomed herself in his absence, as she was instructed. It is not easy for her, taking only sponge baths and shampooing her glorious hair in the sink.

He constructed this room for others, who came before her, none of whom was in residence longer than two months. Until he’d met his Ariel, and learned what an engagingly independent spirit she was, he’d never imagined that he would insist on anyone staying this long. Consequently, a shower had seemed unnecessary.

He had first seen the girl in a newspaper photograph. Though only a tenth-grader, she had been something of a prodigy and had led her Sacramento high school team to victory in a statewide California academic decathlon. She had looked so tender. The newspaper had trembled in his hands when he had seen her, and he had known at once that he must drive to Sacramento and meet her. He’d shot the father. The mother had owned an enormous collection of dolls and had made dolls of her own as a hobby. Vess had beaten her to death with a ventriloquist dummy that had a large, carved-maple head as effective as a baseball bat.

“You’re more beautiful than ever,” he tells Ariel, and his voice is muffled by the soundproofing, as if he were speaking from inside a coffin, buried alive.

She does not reply or even acknowledge his presence. She is in her silent mode, as she has been without interruption for more than six months.

“I missed you.”

These days, she never looks at him but stares at a point above his head and off to one side. If he were to stand up from the footstool and move into her line of sight, she would still be looking over his head and to one side, though he would never quite be able to see her eyes shift in avoidance.

“I brought a few things to show you.”

From a shoe box on the floor beside the footstool, he extracts two Polaroid photographs. She will not accept them or turn her eyes to them, but Vess knows that she will examine these mementos after he leaves.

She is not as lost to this world as she pretends to be. They are engaged in a complicated game with high stakes, and she is a good player.

“This first is a picture of a lady named Sarah Templeton, the way she looked before I had her. She was in her forties but very attractive. A lovely woman.”

The armchair is so deep that the seat cushion provides a ledge in front of Ariel on which Vess can place the photograph.

“Lovely,” he repeats.

Ariel doesn’t blink. She is capable of staring fixedly without blinking for surprisingly long periods. Now and then Mr. Vess worries that she will damage her striking blue eyes; corneas require frequent lubrication. Of course, if she goes too long without blinking and her eyes become dangerously dry, the irritation will cause tears to spring up involuntarily.

“This is a second photograph of Sarah, after I was finished with her,” Mr. Vess says, and he also places this picture on the chair. “As you can see if you choose to look, the word lovely doesn’t apply any more. Beauty never lasts. Things change.”

From the shoe box he takes two more photographs.

“This is Sarah’s daughter, Laura. Before. And after. You can see she was beautiful. Like a butterfly. But there’s a worm in every butterfly, you know.”

He places these snapshots on the chair and reaches into the box again.

“This was Laura’s father. Oh, and here’s her brother…and the brother’s wife. They were incidental.”

Finally he brings out the three Polaroids of the young Asian gentleman and the Slim Jim with the bite missing.

“His name is Fuji. Like the mountain in Japan.”

Vess puts two of the three photos on the chair.

“I’ll keep one for myself. To eat. And then I’ll be Fuji, with the power of the East and the power of the mountain, and when the time comes for me to do you, you’ll feel both the boy and the mountain in me, and so many other people, all their power. It’ll be very exciting for you, Ariel, so exciting that when it’s over, you won’t even care that you’re dead.”

This is a long speech for Mr. Vess. He is for the most part not a garrulous man. The girl’s beauty, however, moves him now and then to speeches.

He holds up the Slim Jim.

“The missing bite was taken by Fuji just before I killed him. His saliva will have dried on the meat. You can taste a little of his quiet power, his inscrutable nature.”

He puts the wrapped sausage on the chair.

“I’ll be back after midnight,” Mr. Vess promises. “We’ll go out to the motor home, so you can see Laura, the real Laura, not just the picture of her. I brought her back so you could see what becomes of all pretty things. And there’s a young man too, a hitchhiker that I picked up along the way. I showed him a photograph of you, and I just didn’t like the way he looked at it. He wasn’t respectful. He leered. I didn’t like something he said about you, so I sewed his mouth shut, and I sewed his eyes shut because of the way he looked at your picture. You’ll be excited to see what I did to him. You can touch him…and Laura.”

Vess watches her closely for any tic, shudder, flinch, or subtle change in the eyes that will indicate that she hears him. He knows that she hears, but she is clever at maintaining a solemn face and a pretense of catatonic detachment.

If he can force one faint flinch from her, one tic, then he will soon shatter her completely and have her howling like a goggle-eyed patient in the deepest wards of Bedlam. That collapse into ranting insanity is always fascinating to watch.