Dean Koontz - One Door Away From Heaven

Two more hula girls danced on the small table between the two armchairs in the lounge, another three on the table beside the sofa-bed that faced the chairs. Counter space in the kitchen was at a premium, but ten additional figurines danced there, as well. Still others were performing in the bathroom and bedroom.

Although simple counterweight systems kept many of the dancers moving, others operated on batteries to ensure that when the motor home stopped to refuel or when it dropped anchor for the night, the hula-hula celebration would continue unabated. Sinsemilla believed that these ever-swiveling dolls generated beneficial electromagnetic waves, and that these waves protected their vehicle from collisions, breakdowns, hijackings, and from being sucked into another dimension in an open-highway version of the Bermuda Triangle. She insisted that never fewer than two dancers be in motion in every room at all times.

On the sofabed in the lounge at night, Leilani was occasionally lulled to sleep by the faint rhythmic whisper of hula hips and tiny swirling skirts. But as often as not, she clamped a pillow around her ears to block out the sound and to resist the urge to jam the little dancers into a pot, put the pot on the cooktop, and smelt them down in a dramatic production that she'd already written in her head and had tided Dangerous Young Mutant Hawaiian Volcano Goddess.

On those not infrequent occasions when the incessant sound of hula dolls in the night irritated Leilani, the seven-foot-diameter face painted on the ceiling of the lounge, over her fold-out bed, sometimes soothed her to sleep. This kindly countenance of the Hawaiian sun god, faintly phosphorescent in the dark, gazed down with a sleepy-eyed, stone-temple smile.

Their motor home, which featured other Hawaiian motifs in its interior design, was a high-end luxury custom coach converted from a Prevost bus. Old Sinsemilla christened it Makani 'olu'olu — Hawaiian for "fair wind" — which seemed no more appropriate for a vehicle with a gross weight of over fifty-two thousand pounds than would have been the right name for an elephant. With slide-out bedroom and galley-lounge extensions, it reliably proved to be the biggest vehicle in any campground, so large that children gaped in awe. Retiree vagabonds of a certain age, already worried about turning radiuses and tricky angles of approach to their campsite hookups, turned as pale as Milk of Magnesia if they were unfortunate enough to be required to slot-park their humbler Winnebagos and Air-streams in this beast's shadow, and most regarded the leviathan with resentment or paranoid terror.

It sure rode well, however, as stable and solid as a bank vault on wheels. The motion-triggered hula dolls danced steadily, but in pleasantly lazy swivels, never with spasmodic abandon. And while in transit, Leilani could read her novel about evil pigmen from another dimension with no risk of motion sickness.

She was so accustomed to the dolls that they didn't distract her from her book, and the same could be said of the colorful Hawaiian-shirt fabrics in which the dinette chairs were upholstered. Plenty of distraction was continually provided, however, by old Sinsemilla and Dr. Doom, who occupied the pilot's and co-pilot's chairs.

They were up to something. Of course, being up to something was the natural condition of these two, as sure as bees were born to make honey and beavers to build dams.

Conspiratorial, they kept their voices low. Since Leilani was the only other person aboard Fair Wind, she was inclined to suspect that they were conspiring against her.

They wouldn't be scheming up a simple game of find-the-brace or its equivalent. Such mean fun was impromptu by nature, dependent on opportunity and on what chemicals dear Mater had recently ingested. Besides, petty cruelties had no appeal for Dr. Doom, whose interest was excited only by cruelty on an operatic scale.

From time to time, Sinsemilla looked sneakily over her shoulder at Leilani or peeked around the wing of the co-pilot's chair. Leilani pretended to be unaware of this surreptitious monitoring. Her mother might interpret even fleeting eye contact as an invitation to wreak a little torment.

More than anything else, the giggling unnerved her. Sinsemilla was a frequent giggler, and perhaps seventy or eighty percent of the time, this indicated that she was in an effervescent girls-just-want-to-have-fun frame of mind, but sometimes it served the same purpose as a rattlesnake's rattle, warning of a strike. Worse, more than once during this long conversation, between whispers and murmurs, Dr. Doom giggled, as well, which was a first; his giggle had the artery-icing effect of Charles Manson merry-eyed and tittering with delight.

They were eastbound on Interstate 15, nearing the Nevada border, deep in the blazing Mojave Desert, when Sinsemilla left the cockpit and joined Leilani at the dinette table.

"What're you reading, baby?"

"A fantasy thing," she replied without looking up from the page.

"What's it about?"

"Evil pigmen."

"Piggies aren't evil," Sinsemilla corrected. "Piggies are sweet, gentle creatures."

"Well, these aren't pigs as we know them. These are from another dimension."

"People are evil, not piggies."

"Not all people are evil," Leilani countered in defense of her species, finally looking up from the book. "Mother Teresa wasn't evil."

"Evil," Sinsemilla insisted.

"Haley Joel Osment isn't evil. He's cute."

"The actor kid? Evil. All of us are evil, baby. We're a cancer on the planet," Sinsemilla said with a smile that was probably like the one that she had worn when the doctors shot enough megawatts of electricity through her brain to fry bacon on her forehead.

"Anyway, these are pigmen. Not just pigs."

"Baby, Lani, trust me. If you combined a piggy and a man, the natural goodness of the piggy would overcome the evil of the man. Pigmen would never be evil. They'd be good."

"Well, these pigmen are total bastards," Leilani said, wondering if anyone, anywhere, in the history of the world, had ever engaged in philosophical discussions like those that her mother inspired. As far as she was aware, Plato and Socrates hadn't conducted a dialogue on the morality and the motives of pigmen from other dimensions. "These particular pigmen," she said, tapping the book, "would gut you with their tusks as soon as look at you."

"Tusks? They sound more like boars than piggies."

"They're pigs," Leilani assured her. "Pigmen. Evil, nasty, rude, obnoxious, filthy pigmen."

"Boarmen," Sinsemilla said with a serious expression that most people reserved for news of untimely deaths, "would never be evil, either. Piggymen and boarmen would both be good. So would monkeymen, chickenmen, dogmen, or any type of animal-man crossbreed."

Leilani wished that she could fetch her journal and record this conversation in her invented form of shorthand without making her mother suspicious as to the true nature of the diary. "There aren't any chickenmen in this story, Mother. This is literature."

"Smart as you are, you should be reading something enlightening, not piggymen books. Maybe you're old enough to read Brautigan."

"I've already read him."

Sinsemilla looked surprised. "You have? When?"

"Before birth. You were reading him even back then, over and over again, and I just absorbed it all through the placenta."

Sinsemilla took this declaration seriously and was delighted. Her expression brightened. "Cool. That's so cool." Then a sly look found fox features in her face and brought them to the fore as if she were undergoing a moon-driven transformation. She leaned across the table and whispered, "You want to know a secret?"

This question alarmed Leilani. The impending revelation surely involved whatever the mother and the pseudofather had been murmuring and whispering about all the way from Santa Ana to San Bernardino, to sun-baked Barstow, to Baker and beyond. Anything that tickled them could not be good news for Leilani.