Dean Koontz - One Door Away From Heaven

MIDNIGHT IN SACRAMENTO: Those three words would never be the title of a romance novel or a major Broadway musical.

Like every place, this city had its special beauty and its share of charm. But to a worried and weary traveler, arriving at a dismal hour, seeking only cheap lodgings, the state capital appeared to huddle miserably under a mantle of gloom.

A freeway ramp deposited Micky in an eerily deserted commercial zone: no one in sight, her Camaro the only car on the street. Acres of concrete, poured horizontal and vertical, oppressed her in spite of a brightness of garish electric signs. The hard lights honed sharp shadows, and the atmosphere was so oddly medieval that she mistook a cluster of brown leaves in a gutter for a pile of dead rats. She half expected to find that everyone here lay dead or dying of the plague.

In spite of the lonely streets, her uneasiness had no external cause, but only an inner source. During the long drive north, she'd had too much time to think about all the ways she might fail Leilani.

She located a motel within her budget, and the desk clerk was both alive and of this century. His T-shirt insisted LOVE is THE ANSWER! A small green heart formed the dot in the exclamation point.

She carried her suitcase and the picnic cooler to her ground-floor unit. She'd eaten an apple while driving, but nothing more.

The motel room was a flung palette of colors, a fashion seminar on the disorienting effects of clashing patterns, bleak in spite of its aggressive cheeriness. The place wasn't entirely filthy: maybe just clean enough to ensure that the cockroaches would be polite.

She sat in bed with the cooler. The ice cubes in the Ziploc bags hadn't half melted. The cans of Coke were still cold.

While she ate a chicken sandwich and a cookie, she watched TV, switching from one late-night talk show to another. The hosts were funny, but the cynicism that informed every joke soon depressed her, and under all the yuks, she perceived an unacknowledged despair.

Increasingly since the 1960s, being hip in America had meant being nihilistic. How strange this would seem to the jazz musicians of the 1920s and '30s, who invented hip. Back then hipness had been a celebration of individual freedom; now it required surrendering to groupthink, and a belief in the meaninglessness of human life.

Between the freeway and the motel, Micky had passed a packaged-liquor store. Closing her eyes, she could see in memory the ranks of gleaming bottles on the shelves glimpsed through the windows.

She searched the cooler for the special treat that Geneva had mentioned. The one-pint Mason jar, with a green cast to the glass, was sealed airtight by a clamp and a rubber gasket.

The treat was a roll of ten- and twenty-dollar bills wrapped with a rubber band. Aunt Gen had hidden the money at the bottom of the cooler and had mentioned the jar at the last minute, calculating that Micky wouldn't have accepted it if it had been offered directly.

Four hundred thirty bucks. This was more than Gen could afford to contribute to the cause.

After counting the cash, Micky rolled it tightly and sealed it in the Mason jar once more. She put the cooler on the dresser.

This gift came as no surprise. Aunt Gen gave as reliably as she breathed.

In the bathroom, washing her face, Micky thought of another gift that had come in the form of a riddle, when she'd been six: What will you find behind the door that is one door away from Heaven?

The door to Hell, Micky had replied, but Aunt Gen had said that her response was incorrect. Although the answer seemed logical and right to young Micky, this was, after all, Gen's riddle.

Death, that long-ago Micky had said. Death is behind the door because you have to die before you can to go heaven. Dead people… they're all cold and smell funny, so I leaven must be gross.

Bodies don't go to Heaven, Geneva explained. Only souls go, and souls don't rot.

After a few more wrong answers, a day or two later, Micky had said, What Yd find behind the door is someone waiting to stop me from getting to the next door, someone to keep me out of Heaven.

What a peculiar thing to say, little mouse. Who would want to keep an angel like you out of Heaven?

Lots of people.

Like who?

They keep you out by making you do bad things.

Well, they'd fail. Because you couldn't be bad if you tried.

I can be bad, Micky had assured her, / can be real bad.

This claim had struck Aunt Gen as adorable, the tough posing of a pure-hearted innocent. Well, dear, I'll admit I haven't checked the FBI's most-wanted list recently, but I suspect you're not on it. Tell me one thing you've done that would keep you out of Heaven.

This request had at once reduced Micky to tears. If I tell, then you won't like me anymore.

Little mouse, hush now, hush, come here, give Aunt Gen a hug. Easy now, little mouse, I'm always going to love you, always, always.

Tears had led to cuddling, cuddling had led to baking, and by the time the cookies were ready, that potentially revealing train of conversation had been derailed and had remained derailed for twenty-two years, until two nights ago, when Micky had finally spoken of her mother's romantic preference for bad boys.

What will you find behind the door that is one door away from Heaven?

Aunt Gen's revelation of the correct answer made the question less of a riddle than it was the prelude to a statement of faith.

Here, now, as she finished brushing her teeth and studied her face in the bathroom mirror, Micky recalled the correct answer — and wondered if she could ever believe it as her aunt seemed genuinely to believe it.

She returned to bed. Switched off the lamp. Seattle tomorrow. Nun's Lake on Sunday.

And if Preston Maddoc never showed up?

She was so exhausted that even with all her worries, she slept— and dreamed. Of prison bars. Of mournfully whistling trains in the night. A deserted station, strangely lighted. Maddoc waiting with a wheelchair. Quadriplegic, helpless, she watched him take custody of her, unable to resist. We'll harvest most of your organs to give to more-deserving people, he said, but one thing is mine. I'll open your chest and eat your heart while you 're still alive.

UPON FINDING THE PENGUIN in place of the paring knife, Leilani shot to her feet faster than her cumbersome leg brace had previously allowed. Suddenly, Preston seemed to be all-seeing, all-knowing. She looked toward the galley, half expecting to discover him there, to see him smiling as if to say boo.

The TV-sitcom characters became instant mimes, and no less funny, when Leilani pressed the MUTE button on the remote control.

A suspicious silence welled from the bedroom, as though Preston might be biding his time, trying to judge the moment when he would be most likely to catch her in the discovery of the penguin— not with a confrontation in mind, but strictly for the amusement value.

Leilani moved to the transition point between the lounge and the galley. She peered warily toward the back of the motor home.

The door to the bathroom-laundry stood open. Beyond that shadowy space was the bedroom door: closed.

A thin warm luminous amber line defined the narrow gap between the door and the threshold. And that was wrong. The amorous side of Preston Maddoc took no inspiration from the romantic glow of a silk-shaded lamp or from the sinuous throb of candle flames. Sometimes he wanted darkness for the deed, perhaps the better to imagine that the bedroom was a mortuary, the bed a casket. At other times—

The amber light winked out. Darkness married door to threshold. Then in that gap, Leilani detected the faint yet telltale flicker of a television: the pulse of phantoms moving through dreamscapes on the screen, casting- their ghost light on the walls of the bedroom.