Dean Koontz - One Door Away From Heaven

She detested the weakness in herself revealed by a tremor in her voice: "Why? Why babies, why babies at all? Just because he wants them?"

Her mother looked up from the book, slid it across the table to Leilani, and repeated the interminable mantra that she had composed to express her satisfaction with herself when she was in a good mood: "I am a sly cat, I am a summer wind, I am birds in flight, I am the sun, I am the sea, I am me!"

"What does that even mean?" Leilani asked.

"It means — who else but your own mama is cool enough to bring a new human race into the world, a psychic humanity bonded to Gaea? I'll be the mother of the future, Lani, the new Eve."

Sinsemilla believed his nonsense. Her belief imbued her face with a beatific radiance and brought a sparkle of wonder to her eyes.

Maddoc surely wouldn't put any credence in this garbage, however, because the doom doctor wasn't moronic. Evil, yes, he had earned the right to have his towels monogrammed with that word, and he loved himself no less than Sinsemilla loved herself. But he wasn't stupid. He didn't believe that fetuses carried to term in a bath of hallucinogens were likely to be the superhuman forerunners of a new humanity. He wanted babies for his own reasons, for some enigmatic purpose that had nothing to do with being the new Adam or with a yearning for fatherhood.

"Wizard babies by late April, early May," said Sinsemilla. "I've been knocked up close a month. I'm already a brood bitch, filled up with wizard babies that'll change the world. Their time's coming, but first you."

"Me what?"

"Healed, you ninny," said Sinsemilla, getting to her feet. "Made good, made right, made pretty. The only reason we've been haulin' ass from Texas to Maine to shitcan towns in Arkansas all these past four years."

"Yeah, healed, just like Luki."

Sinsemilla didn't hear the sarcasm. She smiled and nodded, as though she expected Luki, fully remade, to be beamed back to them at their next rest stop. "Your daddy says it'll happen soon, baby. He's got a feeling maybe in Idaho we'll meet some ETs ready for a laying-on of hands. North of a hunch, he says, and south of a vision, a real strong feeling that you'll get your healing soon."

The brood bitch went to the refrigerator and got a beer to wash down whatever baby-shaping cactus or mushroom snacks were medically appropriate for midmorning.

On her way back to the co-pilot's chair, she ruffled Leilani's hair. "Soon, baby, you'll go from pumpkin to princess."

As usual, Sinsemilla got her fairy tales screwed up. The pumpkin had been transformed into Cinderella's coach. Mater was remembering the story of the frog that became a prince, not a princess.

Hula-hula, grass skirts swishing.

Sun god on the ceiling.

Sinsemilla giggling in the co-pilot's chair.

The mirror. Preston's twitchy eyes.

Beyond the panoramic windshield, the vast Mojave blazed, and sunshine seemed to gather in molten pools upon the desert plains.

In Nun's Lake, Idaho, a man claimed to have had contact with extraterrestrial physicians.

In the Montana woods, Lukipela waited for his sister at the bottom of a hole. He was no longer her precious brother, but just a worm farm, gone not to the stars but gone forever.

When she and Preston were alone in a deepness of forest, as he and Luki had been alone, when they were beyond observation, beyond the reach of justice, would he kill her with compassion? Would he press a chloroform-soaked rag against her face to anesthetize her quickly and then finish the job with a lethal injection while she slept, sparing her as much terror as possible? Or in the lonely cloisters of ancient evergreens, where civilizing sunlight barely reached, would Preston be a different man than the one he played in public, perhaps less man than beast, free to admit that he took pleasure not from the administration of mercy, as he called it, but from the killing itself?

Leilani read the answer in the predator's eyes, as he kept a watch on her by angled mirror. The quiet deaths that were arranged with genteel rituals as complex as tea ceremonies — like that of penguin-collecting Tetsy — didn't fully slake Preston's thirst for violence, but in the solitudinous woods, he could drink his fill. Leilani knew that if ever she were alone with the pseudofather in any remote place, her death, like Lukipela's, would be hard, brutal, and prolonged.

He married Sinsemilla in part because in her deepest drug stupors, she seemed dead, and death stirred Preston as beauty stirred other men. Furthermore, she'd come with two children who, by his philosophy, needed to die, and he had been attracted to her because he possessed the desire to fulfill her children's need. So was his purpose in breeding new babies really so enigmatic? Preston was fond of saying that death was never truly a tragedy but always a natural event, because we are all born to die, sooner or later. From his perspective, could any significant difference exist between children being born to die, as are we all, and children bred to die?

ELSEWHERE, the California dream might still have a glowing tan; but here it had blistered, peeled, and faded. Once a good residential street, the neighborhood had been rezoned for mixed use. Depression-era bungalows and two-story Spanish houses — never grand, but at one time graceful and well maintained — now wanted paint, stucco patches, and repairs to crumbling porch steps. Some sagging residences had been torn down decades ago, replaced by fast-food outlets and corner minimalls. These commercial properties, too, were beyond their best days: bottom-feeding burger franchises you'd never see advertised on television; shabby beauty salons, themselves in need of makeovers; a thrift shop selling all things used. Micky parked at the curb and locked her car. Ordinarily, she wouldn't have worried that her aging Camaro might be boosted, but the low quality of the other iron on the block suggested that her tired wheels might present a temptation.

In the windows that flanked the front door of the narrow house, a blue neon sign in the left pane announced PALM READER, and in the right glowed an orange neon outline of a hand, bright even on a sunny morning. The cracked and hoved walkway led to a blue door featuring a painting of a mystic eye, but it also branched toward a flight of exterior stairs, most likely not originally part of the house, at the south side of the structure, where a discreet sign indicated that the detective's offices were on the second floor.

The house stood among enormous phoenix palms, one of which shaded the stairs with its great green crown. The tree hadn't been trimmed in years; a densely layered, twenty-foot-long collar of dead fronds drooped over one another and encircled the bole, creating a fire danger and an ideal home for tree rats.

Ascending toward the covered landing, Micky heard the rustle of busy rodents scurrying along vertical tunnels in the thatchwork of dry brown fronds, as though they were pacing her, keeping her under observation.

When no one responded to the doorbell, she knocked. When the knock was ignored, she leaned on the bell again.

The man who finally responded to her insistent summons was big, good-looking in a rough sort of way, with melancholy eyes. He wore tattered sneakers, chinos, and a Hawaiian shirt. He had skipped his morning shave.

"You," he said, without preamble, "are a woman in some kind of trouble, but I'm not in that line of work anymore."

"Maybe I'm just from County Vector Control, want to talk to you about the rat farm in this tree right here."

"That would sure be a waste of talent."

Expecting a nasty crack in the tradition of F. Bronson, Micky bristled. "Yeah? What's that supposed to mean?"

"It wasn't an insult, if that's how you took it."