Dean Koontz - One Door Away From Heaven

"What they want your mother for? Was it… a land thing?"

Curtis has no idea what the caretaker means by land thing, but the opportunity exists to make an ally of this man. So he takes a chance and replies, "Yes, sir, it was a land thing."

Spluttering with anger, Gabby says, "Call me a hog an' butcher me for bacon, but don't you ever tell me the gov'ment ain't a land-crazy, dirt-grabbin' tyrant!"

The very thought of butchering anyone repulses Curtis; in fact, the suggestion entirely bewilders him. And he's too polite to call the caretaker a hog, even if the peculiar request was as sincere as it sounded.

Fortunately, Curtis isn't required to formulate an inoffensive response, because at once the fuming caretaker inhales a great chest-expanding breath and blows out a storm of words: "Me and the missus, we bought us this sweet piece of land, not a nicer plot of dirt up in Paradise itself, got its own water source, got this grove of big old cottonwoods been there so long they probably has dinosaur bones a-tangled in the roots, got some good pasture with it, taken us the better part of fifteen years to pay off the blood-suckin' bank, then more years savin' to carpenter-up a little place, an' when we finally gets ready to dig us a foundation, the gov'ment says we can't. The gov'ment says this here butt-ugly, bandy-shanked stink bug what lives on the property might be disturbed by us movin' in, which would be what the gov'ment calls an ecological tragedy, because this sticky-footed, no-necked, crap-eatin' stink bug maybe exists on only a hundred twenty-two tracts of land in five Western states. So me and the missus have ourselves this sweet property we can't build on, an' no jackass ever born ain't crazy enough to buy it from us if they can't never build it, neither. But, oh, it sure do give me a special fine fuzzy-good feelin' in my heart to know the dung-eatin', flame-fartin' stink bug is all snug and cozy and AIN'T NEVER COIN' TO BE DISTURBED!"

By now Old Yeller is hiding behind Curtis.

In the east, the chop-chop-chop of the helicopter grows louder, and this ceaseless cutting sound echoes off the hard land, back into the wounded air. Steadily, rapidly closer.

"Iffen they catch you, what they plannin' to do, boy?"

"The worse ones," says Curtis, "will kill me. But the government. most likely they'll first try to hide me someplace they think is safe, where they can interrogate me. And if the worse scalawags don't find me where the FBI's hidden me. well, then sooner or later the government will probably do experiments on me."

Although his claim sounds outrageous, Curtis is describing what he genuinely believes will happen to him.

Either the caretaker hears truth resonating in the boy's voice or he is prepared to believe any horror story about a government that values him less than it does a stink bug. "Experiment! On a child!"

"Yes, sir."

Gabby doesn't need to know what type of experiments Curtis would be subjected to or what purpose they would serve. Evidently he's able to stir up endless hideous possibilities in the pot of paranoia that is ever boiling on his mental stove. "Sure, why the blazes not, what better them dirty bastards got to do with my taxes but go torture a child? Hell's bells, them is the type what would hack you up, cook you in some rice, serve you with salsa to the damn stink bugs if they thought that might make the damn stink bugs happy."

Beyond the eastern crest of the valley, a pale radiance blooms in the night: the reflected beams of headlamps or searchlights from the two SUVs and the helicopter. Flowering brighter by the second.

"Better move," Curtis says, more to himself and to the dog than to the caretaker.

Gabby glares at the rising light in the east, the frizzles of his beard seeming to bristle as if enlivened by an electric current. Then he squints so intently at Curtis that his sun-toughened face crinkles and twills and crimps and puckers like the features of an Egyptian mummy engaged in a long but losing battle with eternity. "You ain't been shovelin' horseshit, have you, boy?"

"No, sir, and my ears aren't full of it, either."

"Then, by all that's holy and some that's not, we're gonna feed these skunks our dust. Now you stay on me like grease on Spam, you understand?"

"No, sir, I don't," Curtis admits.

"Like green on grass, boy, like wet on water," the caretaker explains impatiently. "Come on!" In that quick but hitching gait familiar from his grandfather's many movies, Gabby runs past the front of Smithy's Livery toward the hotel next door.

Curtis hesitates, puzzling over how to be grease, green, and wet.

He's still a little damp from playing at the pump, though the desert air has already more than half dried him out.

In spite of her previous reservations about the caretaker, Old Yeller trots after him. Apparently instinct tells her that her faith is well placed.

Trusting his sister-becoming and therefore Gabby, Curtis lights out after them, past the livery and onto the boardwalk in front of Bettleby's Grand Hotel. Bettleby's is a forty-foot-wide, three-story, shabby clapboard building that could no more satisfy a taste for grandness than a cow pie could satisfy when you wanted a slice of grandma's deep-dish apple.

Suddenly the chop of the helicopter rotors explodes into a boom-boom-boom, no longer muffled by the valley wall.

Curtis senses that if he looks to his right, across the street and over the roofs of buildings on the other side of town, he will see the aircraft hovering at the crest of the valley, an ominous black mass defined only by its small red and white running lights. Instead, he keeps his mind on Old Yeller, keeps his eyes fixed on Gabby and on the hobbling beam of the flashlight.

Past the hotel, tightly adjoining it, stands Jensen's Readymade, ALL-DONE OUTFITS FOR LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. A hand-lettered sign in the window announces that fashions "currently to be seen everywhere in San Francisco" are now for sale here, which makes San Francisco seem as far away as Paris.

Past Jensen's Readymade and before reaching the post office, Gabby turns left, off the boardwalk and into a narrow walkway between buildings. This passage is similar to the one by which Curtis and Old Yeller earlier entered town from the other side of the street.

The chopper approaches: an avalanche of hard rhythmic sound sliding down the valley wall.

Something else is coming, too. Something marked by a hum that Curtis feels in his teeth, that resonates in his sinuses, and by a rapidly swelling but also quickly subsiding tingle in the Haversian canals of his bones.

To counter a rising tide of fear, he reminds himself that the way to avoid panicking in a flood is to concentrate on swimming.

The wood-frame structures, crowding them on both sides, glow golden as the flashlight passes. Shadows ebb up the plunk walls in advance of Gabby, flow down again in his wake, and spill across Curtis as he wades after the caretaker and the dog.

Overall the faint fumes of recently applied paint, with an underlying spice of turpentine. A whiff of dry rabbit pellets. So peculiar that a rabbit would venture in here where it might easily be trapped by predators. Tan fragrance of a discarded apple core, fresh this very day, still a human scent clinging to it. Coyote urine, aggressively bitter.

Reaching the end of the passageway, the caretaker switches off the flashlight, and the moonless dark closes over them as if they have descended into a storm cellar and pulled the door shut at their backs. Gabby halts only a step or two into the open dirt yard beyond the west side of town.

If not for the dog's guidance, Curtis would collide with the old man. Instead, he steps around him.

Gabby grabs Curtis, pulls him close, and raises his voice above the thunder of the incoming chopper. "We goin' spang north to the barn what ain't a barn!"