Dean Koontz - One Door Away From Heaven

Preston couldn't understand what was so impressive about the code having resisted analysis for just an additional eleven minutes. He withheld the Hand's name and made no mention of her relationship to him. He professed to have found the journal on a park bench and to have developed a keen curiosity about it because of its mysterious-looking contents.

Trevor also said that the text on the sample page was "amusing, acerbic but full of gentle humor." Preston had read it several times, and although he was relieved to discover that nothing in it required him to paste patches on his original park-bench story, he hadn't been able to find anything to smile about. In fact, using the translation bible that Trevor provided, Preston secretly studied the entire journal — a few pages every morning when Leilani showered, odd bits and pieces as other opportunities arose — and found not one amusing line, cover to cover. In the year since, continuing to sneak peeks at the girl's self-important scribblings, he'd not been charmed into even a faint smile by any of her observations in subsequent entries. In fact, she'd revealed herself to be a disrespectful, mean-spirited, ignorant little smartass who was as ugly inside as out. Evidently, Trevor Kingsley had a degenerate sense of humor.

These past few days, as the journal entries revealed that the Hand was scheming to save herself, Preston made careful preparations to overcome her resistance with ease when he was ready to take her to a suitably secluded killing ground. He didn't know when and in what circumstances he might need to overpower her, and while he hadn't any concern that she could effectively resist him, lie didn't want to give her a chance to scream and perhaps draw the attention of someone who would intervene on her behalf.

Since Friday, when they had driven east from California, he'd been carrying a folded, one-quart Hefty OneZip plastic bag in the left back pocket of his pants. The bag could be closed airtight by means of a small plastic slide-seal device built into it. Inside the OneZip was a washcloth saturated in a homemade anesthetic that he had produced by combining carefully measured quantities of ammonia and three other household chemicals. In his life's work, he had used this concoction to assist in a few suicides. When inhaled, it caused instantaneous collapse into unconsciousness; sustained application resulted in respiratory failure and in the rapid destruction of the liver. He intended to use this anesthetic only to ensure against resistance and induce unconsciousness, because as a killing weapon, it was too merciful to excite him.

Nun's Lake lay one mile ahead.

OLD SINSEMILLA, wearing a sarong in a bright Hawaiian pattern, sat among the disheveled bedclothes, leaning back against mounds of pillows. She'd torn the pages out of her worn copy of In Watermelon Sugar and scattered this enlightening confetti across the bed and floor.

She wept but with fury, red-faced and tear-streaked and shaking. "Somebody, some bastard, some sick freak screwed around with my book, screwed it all up, and it's not right, it's not fair."

Leilani cautiously approached the bed, looking for pet-shop boxes and the equivalent. "Mother, what's wrong?"

With a snarled curse that tied her face in red knots of anger, Sinsemilla snatched handfuls of torn pages off the rumpled sheets and threw them in the air. "They didn't print it right, they got it all wrong, all backwards, they did it just to mess with me. This page where that page should be, paragraphs switched around and sentences backwards. They took a beautiful thing, and they turned it into just a bunch of shit, because they didn't want me to understand, they didn't want me to get the message." Mere tears gave way to wretched sobs and with her fists she pounded her thighs, struck herself again and again, hard enough to bruise. And maybe she hit herself because on some level she understood that the problem wasn't the book, that the problem was her stubborn insistence to find the meaning of life in this one slim volume, to demand that broth be stew, to acquire enlightenment as easily as she daily attained escape through pills, powders, and injections.

In ordinary times — or as ordinary as any time could be aboard the Fair Wind — Leilani would have been patient with her mother, would have assumed the bitter role always expected of her in these dramas, providing sympathy and reassurance and attentive concern, drawing out the woman's anguish as a poultice draws upon a wound. But this moment was extraordinary, for lost hope had been restored by means fantastic and perhaps even mystical; therefore, she dared not squander this chance by being once more entangled either by her mother's emotional demands or by her own yearning for a mother-daughter reconciliation that could never happen.

Leilani didn't sit on the bed, but remained standing, didn't offer commiseration, but said, "What do you want? What do you need? What can I get for you?" She kept repeating these simple questions as Sinsemilla wallowed in self-pity and in perceived victimization. "What do you need? What can I get for you?" She kept her tone of voice cool, and she persisted, because she knew that in the end no amount of sympathy or attentive concern would in fact bring peace to her mother and that Sinsemilla would, as always, finally turn for solace to her drugs. "What do you need? What can I get for you?"

Persistence paid off when Sinsemilla — still crying, but trading anger for a good pout — slumped back against the pillows, head hung, and said, "My numbies. Need my numbies. Took some stuff already, but wasn't numbies. Weirded me. Must've been bad shit. Supposed to take me after Alice down the rabbit hole, but it weirded me into some snake hole instead."

"What numbies do you want? Where are they?"

Her mother pointed toward the built-in dresser. "Bottom drawer. Blue bottle. Numbies to chase the head snakes out."

Leilani found the pills. "How many do you want? One? Two? Ten?"

"One numbie now. One for later. Later's gonna come. Mommy's got a bad day goin', Lani. Snaky day goin' here. You don't know trouble till you've been your mommy."

A bottle of vanilla-flavored soy milk stood on the nightstand.

Sinsemilla sat up and used the milk to chase the first pill. She put the second on the nightstand with the bottle.

"Do you want anything else?" Leilani asked.

"A new book."

"He'll buy you one."

"Not that damn book."

"No. Something else."

"Some book makes sense."

"Ail right."

"Not one of your stupid pigmen books."

"No. Not one of them."

"You'll get stupid reading those stupid books."

"I won't read them anymore."

"You can't afford to be ugly and stupid."

"No. No, I can't."

"You've got to face up to bein' screwed up."

"I will. I'll face up to it."

"Ah, shit, leave me alone. Go read your stupid book. What does it matter? Nothing matters anyway." Sinsemilla rolled onto her side and drew her knees up in the fetal position.

Leilani hesitated, wondering if this might be the last time that she saw her mother. After what she had endured, after growing all these grim years in the harsh desert of Sinsemilla, she should have felt nothing less than relief, if not joy. But it wasn't easy to cut yourself loose of what few roots still held you down, even if they were rotten. The prospect of freedom thrilled her, but life as a tumbleweed, blown here and there and to oblivion by the capricious winds of fate, wasn't a much better future than this.

Leilani murmured too softly for her mother to hear, "Who will take care of you?"

She had never imagined that such a concern would cross her mind when the longed-for chance to escape at last arrived. How peculiar that so many years of cruelty had not hardened Leilani's heart, as she had so long believed to be the case, but proved now to have made it tender, leaving her capable of compassion even for this pitiable beast. Her throat thickened with something not quite grief, and her chest tightened in a Gordian knot of pain the causes of which were so complex that she would need a long, long time to untie it.