Dean Koontz - Tick Tock

‘What’s that mean?’

‘Whatever you expect is what will be, so simply change your expectations.’

‘I don’t know what that means, either.’

‘It means what it means,’ she said, enigmatic once more.

In the living room, he said, ‘Damn it, wait a minute!’

Del turned to look at him.

The dog turned to look at him.

Tommy sighed, gave up. ‘Okay, change your clothes. But hurry.’

To the dog, Del said, ‘You stay here and get acquainted with Tuong Tommy.’ Then she went into the foyer and up the stairs.

Scootie cocked his head, studying Tommy as if he were a strange and amusing form of life never seen before.

‘Your mouth is not cleaner than mine,’ Tommy said.

Scootie pricked one ear.

‘You heard me,’ Tommy said.

He crossed the living room to the large glass sliding doors and gazed out toward the harbour. Most of the houses on the far shore were dark. Where dock and landscape lamps glowed, attenuated reflections of gold and red and silver light glimmered hundreds of feet across the black water.

After a few seconds, Tommy became aware of being watched - not by someone outside, but by someone inside. He turned and saw the dog hiding behind the sofa, only its head revealed, observing him.

‘I see you,’ Tommy said.

Scootie pulled his head back, out of sight.

Along one wall was a handsome entertainment centre and library unit made from a wood with which Tommy was unfamiliar. He went to have a closer look, and he discovered that the beautiful grain was like rippled ribbons that appeared to undulate as he shifted his head from one side to the other.

He heard noises behind him and knew that Scootie was on the move, but he refused to be distracted from his examination of the entertainment centre. The depth of the glossy lacquer finish was remarkable.

From elsewhere in the room came the sound of a fart.

‘Bad dog,’ he said.

The sound repeated.

Finally Tommy turned.

Scootie was sitting on his hindquarters in one of the armchairs, staring at Tommy, both ears pricked, holding a large rubber hotdog in his mouth. When he bit down on the toy, it made that sound again. Perhaps the rubber hotdog had once produced a squeak or a whistle, but now only a repulsive flatulence issued from it.

Checking his watch, Tommy said, ‘Come on, Del.’

Then he went to an armchair that directly faced that in which the dog sat, with only the coffee table between them. The chair was upholstered in leather, in a sea skin shade, so he didn’t think his damp jeans would harm it.

He and Scootie stared at each other. The Labrador’s eyes were dark and soulful.

‘You’re a strange dog,’ Tommy said.

Scootie bit the hotdog again, producing the blatty noise.

‘That’s annoying.’

Scootie chomped on the toy.

‘Don’t.’

Another faux fart.

‘I’m warning you.’

Again the dog bit the toy, again, and a third time.

‘Don’t make me take it away from you,’ Tommy said. Scootie dropped the hotdog on the floor and barked twice.

The room was plunged into darkness, and Tommy was startled out of his chair before he remembered that two closely spaced barks was the signal that told the computer to switch off the lights.

Even as Tommy was bolting to his feet, Scootie was coming across the coffee table in the dark. The dog leaped, and Tommy was carried backward into the leather armchair.

The dog was all over him, chuffing in a friendly way, licking his face affectionately, licking his hands when he raised them to cover his face.

‘Stop, damn it, stop, get off me.’

Scootie scrambled off Tommy’s lap, onto the floor -but seized the heel of his right shoe and began to worry at it, trying to gain possession of it.

Not wanting to kick at the mutt, afraid of hurting it, Tommy reached down, trying to get hold of its burly head.

The Rockport suddenly slipped off his foot.

‘Ah, shit.’

He heard Scootie hustling away through the darkness with the shoe.

Getting to his feet, Tommy said, ‘Lights!’ The room remained dark, and then he remembered the complete command. ‘Lights on!’

Scootie was gone.

From the study, adjacent the living room, came a single bark, and light appeared beyond the open door.

‘They’re both crazy,’ Tommy muttered as he went around the coffee table and picked up the rubber bone from beside the second armchair.

Scootie appeared in the study doorway, without the shoe. When he saw that he’d been seen, he retreated.

Limping across the living room to the study, Tommy said, ‘Maybe the dog wasn’t always crazy. Maybe she made it crazy, the same way she’ll make me crazy sooner or later.’

When he entered the study, he found the dog standing on the bleached-cherry desk. The mutt looked like an absurdly oversized decorative accessory.

‘Where’s my shoe?’

Scootie cocked his head as if to say, What shoe? Holding up the toy hotdog, Tommy said, ‘I’ll take this outside and throw it in the harbour.’

With his soulful eyes focused intently on the toy, Scootie whined.

‘It’s late, I’m tired, my Corvette blew up, some damn thing is after me, so I’m in no mood for games.’

Scootie merely whined again.

Tommy circled the desk, searching for his shoe.

Atop the desk, Scootie turned, following him with interest.

‘If I find it without your help,’ Tommy warned, ‘then I won’t give the hotdog back.’

‘Find what?’ Del asked from the doorway.

She had changed into blue jeans and a cranberry-red turtle-neck sweater, and she was holding two big guns.

‘What the hell are those?’ Tommy asked.

Hefting the weapon in her right hand, she said, ‘This is a short-barreled, pump-action, pistol-grip, 12-gauge Mossberg shotgun. Excellent home-defence weapon.’ She raised the gun in her left hand. ‘This beauty is a Desert Eagle.44 Magnum pistol, Israeli-made. It’s a real door-buster. A couple of rounds from this baby will stop a charging bull.’

‘You run into a lot of charging bulls?’

‘Or the equivalent.’

‘No, seriously, why do you keep heavy artillery like that?’

‘I told you before - I lead an eventful life.’

He remembered how easily she had dismissed the damage to her van earlier in the evening: It comes with the territory.

And when he had worried about the rain ruining the upholstery, she had shrugged and said, There’s frequently damage… I’ve learned to roll with it.

Tommy sensed a satori, a sudden profound insight, looming like a tidal wave, and he waited breathlessly for it to wash over him. This woman was not what she appeared to be. He had thought of her as a waitress, but had discovered she was an artist. Then he had thought of her as a struggling artist who worked as a waitress to pay the rent, but she lived in a multimillion-dollar house. Her eccentricities and her habit of peppering her conversation with cryptic babble and non sequiturs had convinced him that she had a few screws loose in the cranium, but now he suspected that the worst mistake he could make with her would be to write her off as a flake. There were depths to her that he was only beginning to perceive -and swimming in those depths were some strange fish that would surprise him more than anything that he had seen to date.

He recalled another fragment of their conversation, and it seemed to have new import: Reality is perception. Perceptions change. Reality is fluid. So if by ‘reality’ you mean reliably tangible objects and immutable events, then there’s no such thing. I’ll explain someday when we have more time.

He sensed that every screwball statement she made was not, in fact, half as screwball as it seemed. Even in her most air headed statements, an elusive truth was lurking. If he could just step back from her, put aside the conception of her that he had already formed, he would see her entirely differently from the way that he saw her now. He thought of those drawings by M. C. Escher, which played with perspective and with the viewer’s expectations, so a scene might appear to be only a drift of lazily falling leaves until, suddenly, one saw it anew as a school of fast-swimming fish. Within the first picture was hidden another. Within Del Payne was hidden a different person - someone with a secret - who was cloaked by the ditsy image that she projected.