Dean Koontz - The Mask

Startled, she looked up and saw a thin, jaundice-skinned man in a rumpled blue suit that hadn’t been in fashion for many years. His shirt and tie were hopelessly out of style, too. He looked as if he had stepped out of a photograph taken in the 1940s. He had thinning hair the color of summer dust, and his eyes were an unusual shade of soft brown, almost beige. His face was composed entirely of narrow features and sharp angles that gave him a look halfway between that of a hawk and that of a parsimonious moneylender in a Charles Dickens novel. He appeared to be in his early or middle fifties.

Grace glanced at the gate in the white board fence that separated her property from the street. The gate was standing wide open. Evidently, the man had been strolling by, had seen the roses through a gap in the poplar-tree hedge that stood on the outside of the fence, and had decided to come in and have a closer look.

His smile was warm, and there was kindness in his eyes, and he seemed not to be intruding, even though he was. “You must have two dozen varieties of roses here.”

“Three dozen,” she said.

“Truly magnificent,” he said, nodding approval.

His voice wasn’t thin and sharp like the rest of him. It was deep, mellow, friendly, and would have seemed more fitting if it had issued from a brawny, hearty fellow half again this man’s size. “You take care of the entire garden yourself?”

Grace sat back on her heels, still holding the trowel in one gloved hand. “Sure. I enjoy it. And somehow. it just wouldn’t be my garden if I hired someone to help me with it.”

“Exactly!” the stranger said. “Yes, I can understand how you feel.”

“Are you new in the neighborhood?” Grace asked.

“No, no. Used to live just a block from here, but that was a long, long time ago.” He took a deep breath and smiled again. “Ah, the wonderful aroma of roses!

Nothing else smells half so pretty. Yes, you’ve got

a superb garden. Really superb.”

“Thank you.”

He snapped his fingers as a thought occurred to him. “I ought to write something about this. It might make a first-rate human-interest piece. This fantasy-land tucked away in an ordinary backyard. Yes, I’m sure it would be just the thing. A nice change of pace for me.”

“Are you a writer?”

“Reporter,” he said, still taking deep breaths and savoring the aroma of the blooms.

“Are you with a local paper?”

“The Morning News. Name’s Palmer Wainwright”

“Grace Mitowski.”

“I hoped you might recognize my byline,” Wainwright said, grinning.

“Sorry. I don’t read the Morning News. I take the

Patriot-News from the delivery boy every morning.” “Ah, well,” he said, shrugging, “that’s a good paper, too. But of course, if you don’t read the Morning News, you never saw my story about the Bektermann case.”

As Grace realized that Wainwright intended to hang around awhile, she got off her haunches, stood up, and flexed her rapidly stiffening legs. “The Bektermann case? That sounds familiar.”

“All the papers reported it, of course. But I did a five-part series. Good stuff, even if I do say so myself. I got a Pulitzer nomination for it. Did you know that? An honest-to-God Pulitzer nomination.”

“Really? Why, that’s something,” Grace said, not sure if she should take him seriously but not wanting to offend him. “That is really something. Imagine. A Pulitzer nomination.”

It seemed to her that the conversation had suddenly taken an odd turn. It wasn’t casual any longer. She sensed that Wainwright had come into the yard not to admire her roses and not to have a friendly chat, but to tell her, a complete stranger, about his Pulitzer nomination.

“Didn’t win,” Wainwright said. “But the way I look at it, a nomination is almost as good as the prize itself. I mean, out of the tens of thousands of newspaper articles that’re published in a year, only a handful are up for the prize.”

“Refresh my memory, if you will,” Grace said.

“What was the Bektermann case about?”

He laughed good-naturedly and shook his head. “Wasn’t about what I thought it was about. That’s for damned sure. I wrote it up as a tangled, Freudian

puzzle. You know — the iron-willed father, with perhaps an unnatural attraction for his own daughter, the mother with a drinking problem, the poor girl caught in the middle. The victimized young girl subjected to hideous psychological pressures beyond her understanding, beyond her tolerance, until at last she simply —snapped. That’s how I saw it. That’s how I wrote it up. I thought I was a brilliant detective, digging to the deepest roots of the Bektermann tragedy.

But all I ever saw was the window-dressing. The real story was far stranger than anything I ever imagined. Hell, it was too strange for any serious reporter to risk handling it. No reputable paper would have printed it as news. If had known the truth, and if! had somehow gotten it published, I’d have destroyed my career.”

What the devil’s going on? Grace wondered. He seems obsessed with telling me about this in detail, compelled to tell me, even though he’s never even seen me before. Is this life imitating art — Coleridge’s poem reset in a rose garden? Am I the partygoer and Wainwright the Ancient Mariner?

As she looked into Wainwright’s beige eyes, she suddenly realized how alone she was, even here in the yard. Her property was ringed by trees, sheltered, private.

“Was it a murder case?” she asked.

“Was and is,” Wainwright said. “It didn’t end with the Bektermanns. It’s still going on. This damned, endless pursuit. It’s still going on, and it’s got to be stopped this time around. That’s why I’m here. I’ve come to tell you that your Carol is in the middle of it. Caught in the middle. You’ve got to help her. Get her out of the girl’s way.”

Grace gaped at him, reluctant to believe that she

had heard what she knew she had heard.

“There are certain forces, dark and powerful forces,” Wainwright said calmly, “that want to see— Shrieking angrily, Aristophanes sprang at Wainwright with berserk passion. He landed on the man’s chest and scrambled onto his face.

Grace screamed and jumped back in fright.

Wainwright staggered to one side, grabbed the cat with both hands, and tried unsuccessfully to wrench it off his face.

“Ari!” Grace cried. “Stop it!”

Aristophanes had his claws in the man’s neck and was biting his cheek.

Wainwright wasn’t screaming as he ought to have been. He was eerily silent as he wrestled with the cat, even though the creature seemed determined to tear off his face.

Grace moved toward Wainwright, wanting to help, not knowing what to do.

The cat was squealing. It bit off a gobbet of flesh from Wainwright’s cheek.

Oh Jesus, no!

Grace moved in quickly, raising the trowel, but hesitated. She was afraid of hitting the man instead of the cat.

Wainwright suddenly turned away from her and stumbled through the rose bushes, past white and yellow blooms, the cat still clinging to him. He walked into a waist-high hedge, fell through it, onto the lawn On the other side, out of sight.

Grace hurried to the end of the hedgerow, stepped around it, heart hammering, and discovered that

Wainwright had vanished. Only the cat was there, and it bolted past her, sprinted across the garden, up the back porch steps, and into the house through the half-open rear door.

Where was Wainwright? Had he crawled away, dazed, wounded? Had he passed out in some sheltered corner of the garden, bleeding to death?

The yard contained half a dozen shrubs large and dense enough to conceal the body of a man Wainwright’s size. She looked around all of them, but she could find no trace of the reporter.