Dean Koontz - Night Chills

No cats.

No men in scuba suits.

Although he knew that he had been dreaming, although he’d had this same dream on each of the last three days, Buddy got out of bed, stepped into a pair of slippers that were as large as most men’s boots, and lumbered into the kitchen to check the water faucets. There were no cats streaming out of them, and that was a good thing to know.

However, he was badly shaken. He was no less affected by the dream for having endured it on two other occasions. All week his sleep had been disturbed by dreams of one sort or another; and he never was able to fall back to sleep once brought awake by a vivid nightmare.

The wall clock showed 12:13. He came home from the mill at half past eight and went to bed at half past nine, five days a week, as if he were a clockwork mechanism. Which meant that he had gotten barely three hours of sleep.

He went to the kitchen table, sat down, and opened the travel magazine that he had bought at the general store last Monday. He studied the photographs of divers in scuba suits.

why? he thought. Divers. Seamen. Guns. At the reservoir. Why? So late. Late at night. Dark. Divers. ‘Why? Figure it. Come on. Figure it. Can’t. Can. Can’t. Can. Can’t. Divers. In woods. Night. So crazy. Can’t figure it.

He decided to shower, get dressed, and walk across the street to Edison’s General Store. It was time he asked Sam to figure it for him.

At 12:05 Rya watched a man in thick glasses, gray trousers, and a dark blue shirt enter Pauline Vicker’s rooming house. He was the man who had ordered Bob Thorp to kill Mark.

At 12:10 she went to St. Margaret Mary’s and hid in one of the confessionals at the right rear corner of the nave. Last week she had heard Emma mention the Friday lunch and card club that met all afternoon in the church basement. Through a chink in the crimson velveteen confessional curtains, she could look across the back of the nave to the steps that]ed down to the recreation room. Women in bright summer dresses and pant-Suits, many of them carrying umbrellas, arrived singly and in pairs for the next fifteen minutes — and Emma Thorp came through the foyer arch promptly at twelve thirty. Rya recognized her even in the dim light. As soon as Emma disappeared down the stairs, Rya left the confessional.

For a moment she was transfixed by the sight of the crucifix at the far end of the chamber. The wooden Christ seemed to be staring over all the pews, directly at her.

You could have saved my mother, she thought. You could have saved Mark. Why did you put killers on earth?

Of course the crucifix had no answer.

God helps those who help themselves, she thought. Okay. I’m going to help myself. I’m going to make them pay for what they did to Mark. I’m going to get proof of it. You wait and see if I don’t. You wait and see.

She was beginning to tremble again, and she felt tears at the Corners of her eyes. She took a minute to calm herself, then Walked out of the nave.

In the foyer she discovered that one of the main doors was

open, and that the lowest of its four hinges had been removed. A toolbox stood on the foyer floor, and a variety of tools were spread out around it. The workman apparently had gone to get some piece of material that he had forgotten on his first trip.

She turned and looked through the archway at the twelve-foot-high crucifix.

The wooden eyes still seemed to be staring at her, a terribly sad expression in them.

Quickly, worried that the workman might return at any moment, she bent down, peered into the toolbox, and plucked a heavy wrench from it. She slipped the wrench into a pocket of her windbreaker and left the church.

At 12:35 she strolled past the municipal building which was at the northeast corner of the square. The police chief’s office was toward the rear of the first floor, and it had two large windows. The venetian blinds were raised. As she passed she saw Bob Thorp sitting at his desk, facing the windows; he was eating a sandwich and reading a magazine.

At 12:40 she stood in front of Ultman’s Cafe and watched as a dozen kids cycled north on Union Road toward the macadamed alley where some of the Friday races were held. Jeremy Thorp was one of the cyclists.

At 12:45, at the southern end of Union Road, Rya crossed the street, walked under the grapevine arbor, and went around to the back of the Thorp place. The lawn ended in brush and trees, no parallel streets and no buildings in that direction. There was no house to her left — just the lawn and the garage and the river. To her right the nearest dwelling was set closer to Union Road than was the Thorp house; therefore, she was not in anyone’s line of sight.

A polished copper knocker gleamed in the center of the door. To one side of that, near the knob, were three decorative windows, each six inches wide and nine inches long.

She knocked loudly.

No one answered.

When she tried the door she found that it was locked. She had expected as much.

She took the stolen wrench from her windbreaker, gripped it tightly in one hand, and used it to smash the middle pane in the verticle row of three. The blow made considerably more noise than she had anticipated — although not sufficient noise to discourage her. When she had broken every shard of glass out of the frame, she pocketed the wrench, reached through the window, and felt for the latch. She began to despair of ever locating the mechanism — and then her fingers touched cool metal. She fumbled with the lock for almost a minute, finally released it, withdrew her arm from the window, and shoved open the door.

Standing on the stoop, staring warily into the shadow-hung kitchen, she thought: ‘What if one of them comes back home and finds me in there?

Go ahead, she urged herself. You better go inside before you lose your courage.

I’m scared. They killed Mark.

You ran away this morning. Are you going to run away again? Are you going to run away from everything that scares you, from now until the day you die?

She walked into the kitchen.

Glass crunched underfoot.

When she reached the electric range where the murder had taken place, she stood quite still, poised to flee, and listened closely for movement. The refrigerator and the upright freezer rumbled softly, steadily. The clock-radio hummed. A loose window rattled as a gust of wind rushed along the side of the house. In the living room a grandfather clock, running a few minutes late, solemnly chimed the third quarter of the hour; the note reverberated long after the pipe had been struck. The house was filled with noises; but none of them had a human source; she was alone.

Having broken the law, having violated the sanctity of another person’s home, with the first and most dangerous step already taken, she couldn’t decide what to do next. Well. Search the house. Of course. Search it from top to bottom. Look for the body. But where to begin?

At last, when she realized that her indecision was an outgrowth of the fear which she was determined to overcome, when she realized that she was desperately afraid of finding Mark’s corpse even though she had come here to do precisely that, she began the search in the kitchen. There were only a few places in that room where the body of a nine-year-old boy might possibly be concealed. She looked in the pantry, in the refrigerator, and then in the freezer, but she uncovered nothing out of the ordinary.

When she opened the cabinet beneath the sink, however, she saw a bucket full of bloody rags. Not rags, really. Dish towels. They had used the towels to clean up, had thrown them in the bucket — and then apparently had forgotten to destroy the evidence. She picked up one of the cloths. It was wet, cold, and heavy with blood. She dropped it and gazed at her stained hand.