Dean Koontz - One Door Away From Heaven

The sisters pop open bottles of Tsing tao beer for themselves and a bottle of nonalcoholic beer for Curtis, so that he might have some appreciation for the exquisite combination of good Chinese food and cold beer. Plates are piled high, and the sisters prove to have appetites more prodigious than Curtis's, even though the boy must eat not only to sustain himself but also to produce the additional energy that is necessary to control his biological structure and continue being Curtis Hammond, an identity that isn't yet natural to him.

Old Yeller is served strips of beef and chicken on a plate, as though she is like any other guest. Curtis is able to use the boy-dog bond to ensure she refrains from wolfing down the food, as programmed in her canine nature, and to ensure she eats the meat one piece at a time, savoring each morsel. She finds this dining pace to be odd at first, but soon she recognizes the greater pleasure to be had from a meal when it isn't consumed in forty-six seconds flat. Even if she had been able to use silverware, hold a porcelain teacup in one paw with her dew claw raised like a pinkie, and converse in the flawless English of an heiress who had attended a first-rate finishing school, Old Yeller could not have conducted herself more like a lady than she did at this Chinese feast.

Throughout dinner, the sisters prove to be vastly entertaining, recounting adventures they have had while skydiving, bronco-busting, hunting sharks with spear guns, skiing down the faces of seventy-degree cliffs, parachuting off high-rise buildings in several major cities, and defending their honor at chichi Hollywood parties attended by, in Polly's words, "rodent hordes of grasping, horny, drug-crazed, dimwitted, sleazebag movie stars and famous directors."

"Some of them were nice," Cass says.

Polly demurs: "With all respect and affection, Cassie, you would find someone to like even at a convention of cannibal Nazi kitten killers."

To Curtis, Cass says, "After we left Hollywood, I performed an exhaustive analysis of our experiences and determined that six and one-half percent of people in the film business are both sane and good. I will admit that the rest of them are evil, even if another four and one half percent are sane. But it's not fair to condemn the entire community, even if the vast majority of them are mad swine."

When they have all eaten to excess and then have eaten just a little more, the table is cleared, two fresh bottles of Tsingtao and one of nonalcoholic beer are opened, a dish of water is provided for Old Yeller, candles are lit, the electric lights are turned off, and after Cass has determined that the ambience is "deliciously spooky," the twins return to the dining nook, clasp their hands around their bottles of Tsingtao, lean over the table, and focus intently on their guests, both boy and dog. Cass says, "You're an alien, aren't you, Curtis?" Polly says, "You're an alien, too, aren't you, Old Yeller?" And they both say, "Dish us the dirt, ET."

WAITING FOR DR. DOOM to return with dinner, trying not to listen to her mother's headcase monologue in the lounge, Leilani sat in the co-pilot's seat, at the panoramic windshield, watching the sunset. Hawthorne was a true desert town established on a broad plain, rimmed by rugged mountains. The sun, as orange as a dragon's egg, cracked on the western peaks and spilled a crimson yolk. Against this fiery backlight, the mountains wore king's gold for a while, then gradually took off their shining crowns and drew royal-blue nightclothes up their slopes.

Preston now knew that Leilani believed he'd murdered Lukipela. If he hadn't previously been planning to rid himself of her in Idaho or during a subsequent side trip to Montana, he had begun making such plans since lunch.

The scarlet twilight drained into the west, washed away by the incoming tides of east-born darkness. Curtains of stored heat rose from the desert plain, causing the purple mountains to shimmer as might a landscape in one of dear Mater's hallucinatory fantasies.

As dusk faded at the windows and the motor home fell into gloom relieved only by the glow of one lamp in the lounge, old Sinsemilla ceased muttering, stopped giggling, and began to whisper to the sun god or to other spirits not represented on the ceiling.

The idea of bio-etching her daughter's hand had been planted in the fertile swamp of her mind. That seed would sprout, and the sprout would grow.

Leilani worried that her mother, in possession of an extensive pharmacopoeia, would drug her milk or orange juice, slip her a Mickey Finn, a blackjack in a glass. She could imagine waking, groggy and disoriented, to discover that Sinsemilla had been busily carving.

She shuddered as the last light died in the west. Although the desert night was warm, chill chased chill up and down the ladder of her spine.

If the motherthing was in a sour mood, perhaps inspired by a bad mushroom or by an ill-conceived mix of chemicals, she might decide that prettifying Leilani's hand would fail to bring balance to her appearance, that it would be easier and more interesting and more creative to carve the normal parts of her to match the deformed hand, the twisted leg. Then Leilani might awake in agony, with obscenities cut into her face.

This was why she made a joke of everything, why wisecracks and prayers were equally important to her. If she couldn't find a silver laugh, bright and sparkling, then she would find a dark one, cold but comforting, because if ever she failed to find a laugh of any kind, then she would be crushed by dread, by hopelessness, and it wouldn't matter if she was technically still alive, for she'd be dead in her heart.

Laughs of any variety were getting harder to find.

As the dream-racked hive queen whispered, whispered, no longer lying on her back, no longer face-to-face with the smiling sun god, but curled in the fetal position on the lounge floor, she seemed to be speaking in two distinct voices, though both were as hushed as lovers sharing intimacies. One whisper remained recognizably her own, but the other sounded deeper, rougher, strange, as though she were conversing with a demon that possessed her and spoke through her.

Sitting in the co-pilot's chair with her back to the lounge, Leilani couldn't quite hear what old Sinsemilla said either in her whisper or in that of her alter ego. Only two words, repeated from time to time, rose out of the susurrant flow of dialogue and became distinguishable, although in truth Leilani was probably imagining them, translating meaningless babble to feed her growing paranoia. The girl, Sinsemilla seemed to whisper, and later the demon said it, too, with a hungry guttural longing, the girl.

These words were surely just fumes of fantasy, for when Leilani listened, head cocked either left or right, or when she turned in the swiveling chair to face her mother's jackknifed form, she heard only meaningless murmurs, as though the hive queen had reverted to insect speech or, under the influence of the mushroom god, talked only in tongues impossible to interpret. Yet when she faced front again, when her thoughts sped forward to Idaho and to means of self-defense, when she didn't actively listen to old Sinsemilla, she either imagined or heard again what she dreaded hearing: the girl. the girl.

She needed her knife.

Lukipela had gone with Preston Maddoc into a Montana twilight, never to return, and in the first night that followed her brother's disappearance, Leilani had crept into the kitchen of the motor home to steal a paring knife from the cutlery drawer. Sharp and pointed, the blade measured three and a half inches from the haft to the tip. As a weapon, it rated less desirable than either a.38 revolver or a flamethrower, but unlike those more formidable armaments, it was available and easy to conceal.