Dean Koontz - Strange Highways

"We're getting closer," Bruno informed me as we continued down the stairs, "but Stone isn't here."

The wafer still was not a bright crimson.

"This way," I said as we reached the bottom of the stairs and arrived at the damp, fetid, trash-heaped basement of the abandoned warehouse. The place smelled of urine and dead meat, and it was most likely the breeding ground of the virus that will eventually wipe out humanity.

I followed the siren strains of the head-banger music from one cold stone room to another, scaring rats and spiders and God knows what else. Even Jimmy Hoffa might have been down there. Or Elvis — but a strange, walking-dead Elvis with lots of sharp teeth, red eyes, and an uncharacteristically bad attitude.

In the dankest, most stench-filled room of all, I came to an old timbered door with iron hinges. It was locked.

"Stand back," I said.

"What're you doing?"

"Renovation," I said, and blew the lock out of the door.

When that hellacious roar finished bouncing around the cellar, Bruno said, "I have subtler devices that accomplish the same thing."

"To hell with them," I said.

I opened the door — only to discover another door behind it. Steel. Relatively new. There was no handle or lock on our side. The double-door arrangement was meant to seal off this building from the next, so it was impossible to get from one to the other without people acting in concert on both sides.

Stepping forward into the beam of my flashlight, Bruno said, "Allow me."

From a pocket of his voluminous coat, he produced a four-inch-long rod of green crystal and shook it as if it were a thermometer.

I could hear the instrument begin to ring, way up on the scale where it would soon become inaudible to human beings but bother the hell out of dogs. Weirdly, I could feel the vibrations of the damn thing in my tongue.

"My tongue's vibrating," I said.

"Of course."

He touched the crystal rod to the steel door, and the locks — more than one — popped open with a hard clack-clack-clack.

My tongue stopped vibrating, Bruno returned the crystal rod to his pocket, and I pushed open the steel door.

We were in a washroom, alone. Two stalls with the doors half open, two urinals that some of the stoned customers evidently found too stationary to hit with any regularity, a sink so filthy that it looked as if Bobo the Dog Boy regularly took baths in it, and a stained mirror that showed us grimacing like a pair of old maids in a bordello.

"What's that music?" Bruno shouted. It was necessary to shout, because the heavy-metal band was nearby now.

"Metallica!"

"Not very danceable," he complained.

"Depends on how old you are."

"I'm not that old."

"Yeah, but you're a bear."

I sort of like heavy metal. It clears out my sinuses and makes me feel immortal. If I listened to too much of it, I'd start eating live cats and shooting people whose names annoyed me. I needed my jazz and blues. But a little was always good, and the band at this club wasn't half bad.

"Now what?" Bruno shouted.

"Sounds like a bar or club or something," I said. "We'll go out and look for him."

"Not me. I mean, it's okay to be out on the streets, especially at night, at a distance from people where they can't quite get a look at me unless I let them, but this would be close quarters. Stone shouldn't be mingling either. He looks human mostly — but someone might get suspicious. He should never have tried jaunting into an unexplored time line in the first place. It was desperation when he knew I almost had him."

"What then?" I asked.

"I'll stay here, in one of the stalls. You check the place out. If he isn't there, we'll go back into the warehouse and up into the street where we can pick up the trail."

"Earning my money, eh?" I asked.

While I adjusted my tie in the mirror, Bruno went into a toilet stall and closed the door.

From in there, he said, "Lord Almighty."

"What's wrong."

"Do people on this world have any respect for cleanliness?"

"Some of us have standards."

"This is disgusting."

"Try the other stall," I advised.

"What might be in there?" he grumbled.

"I won't be long," I promised, and I left the reeking washroom in search of Graham Stone.

I HAD TO BULL MY WAY OUT OF THE WASHROOM, BECAUSE THERE WERE so many people in the place that they were stacked like cordwood on end, wall to wall. I had seen Graham Stone's picture on that changing badge of Bruno's, and I knew what to look for: six feet tall, pale face, jet-black hair, eyes that were crystal blue and looked as empty as a tax collector's heart, thin lips — an image of cruelty. I checked out those around me, rejected them, and worked my way deeper into the mob of head-bangers who were swilling beer, smoking medicinal herbs, feeling up their girls, feeling up their guys, jumping to the music, and looking me over as if I might hand them copies of Watchtower magazine and try to convince them that Jesus was their savior.

It wasn't easy finding one face out of that crowd. Things kept distracting me. There were strobe lights winking every few minutes, and when they were on, I had to stop and wait before moving on again. When the strobes were off, there were shimmering film clips from horror movies projected on the walls and ceiling, and on the patrons as well. About ten minutes after I had started across the floor, through the scattered dancers, past the bar and bandstand, I spotted Graham Stone working his way to the lighted doorway in the far right corner.

A sign above the door claimed OFFICE, and another on the door itself insisted EMPLOYEES ONLY. It was half open, and I walked through as though I belonged there, keeping a hand in my jacket pocket where I had the pistol.

There were several rooms back here, all leading off a short hall, all the doors closed. I rapped on the first one, and when a woman said, "Yes?" I opened it and checked out the room.

She was a stacked redhead in a leotard, doing ballet steps in front of a mirror to the sounds — now — of Megadeth. Ten chairs were lined up against the walls around the room, and in each chair sat a different ventriloquist dummy. Some held bananas in their wooden hands.

I didn't want to know any more about it.

"Sorry," I said. "Wrong room."

I closed the door and went to the one across the hall.

Graham Stone was there. He stood by the desk, watching me with those cold eyes. I stepped inside, closed the door, and took the Smith & Wesson out of my pocket to be certain that he understood the situation. "Stand real still," I said.

He didn't move, and he didn't answer me. When I started toward him, however, he sidestepped. I cocked the.38, but it didn't grab his attention like it should have. He watched disinterestedly.

I walked forward again, and he moved again. I'd had the word from Bruno that a bring-him-back-alive clause was not a condition of my employment contract. In fact, the bear had implied that any display of mercy on my part would be met with all the savagery of a Hare Krishna panhandler on a megadose of PCP. Well, he hadn't put it quite that way, but I got the message. So I shot Graham Stone in the chest, pointblank, because I had no way of knowing what he might be able to do to me.

The bullet ripped through him, and he sagged, folded onto the desk, fell to the floor, and deflated. Inside of six seconds, he was nothing more than a pile of tissue paper painted to look like a man. A three-dimensional snakeskin that, shed, was still convincingly real. I examined the remains. No blood. No bones. Just ashes.

I looked at the Smith & Wesson. It was my familiar gun. Not a Disney.780 Death Hose. Which meant that this hadn't been the real Graham Stone but — something else, an amazing construct of some kind that was every bit as convincing as it was flimsy. Before I had too much time to think about that, I beat it back into the corridor. No one had heard the shot. The thrashmasters on the bandstand were doing a fair imitation of Megadeth — a bitchin' number from Youthanasia —and providing perfect cover.