Dean Koontz - Night Chills

Half an hour later, when Ogden finished, Dawson — who had never before been humble anywhere but in church — said, “Dear God.” He stared at Salsbury as a devout Catholic might have gazed upon the vision at Fatima. “Ogden, the two of us are going to — inherit the earth?” His face was suddenly split by an utterly humorless smile.

Saturday, August 13, 1977

IN ONE OF THE THIRD-FLOOR GUEST BEDROOMS of the Edison house, Paul Annendale arranged his shaving gear on top of the dresser. From left to right: a can of foam, a mug containing a lather brush, a straight razor in a plastic safety case, a dispenser full of razor blades, a styptic pencil, a bottle of skin conditioner, and a bottle of after-shave lotion. Those seven items had been arranged in such an orderly fashion that they looked as if they belonged in one of those animated cartoons in which everyday items come to life and march around like soldiers.

He turned from the dresser and went to one of the two large windows. In the distance the mountains rose above the valley walls, majestic and green, mottled by purple shadows from a few passing clouds. The nearer ridges — decorated with stands of pines, scattered elms, and meadows — sloped gently toward the town. On the far side of Main Street, birch trees rustled in the breeze. Men in short-sleeved shirts and women in crisp summer dresses strolled along the sidewalk. The veranda roof and the sign for Edison’s store were directly below the window.

As his gaze moved back and back from the distant mountains, Paul became aware of his own reflection in the window glass. At five ten and one hundred fifty pounds, he was neither tall nor short, heavy nor thin. In some ways he looked older than thirty-eight, and in other ways he looked younger. His Crinkly, almost frizzy light brown hair was worn full on the

sides but not long. It was a hair style more suited to a younger man, but it looked good on him. His eyes were so blue that they might have been chips of mirrors reflecting the sky above. The expression of pain and loss lying beneath the surface brightness of those eyes belonged to a much older man. His features were narrow, somewhat aristocratic; but a deep tan softened the sharp angles of his face and saved him from a haughty look. He appeared to be a man who would feel at ease both in an elegant drawing room and in a waterfront bar.

He was wearing a blue workshirt, blue jeans, and black square-toed boots; however, he did not seem to be casually dressed. Indeed, in spite of the jeans, there was an air of formality about his outfit. He wore those clothes better than most men wore tuxedos. The sleeves of his shirt had been carefully pressed and creased. His opened collar stood up straight and stiff, as if it had been starched. The silvery buckle on his belt had been carefully polished. Like his shirt, his jeans seemed to have been tailored. His low-heeled boots shone almost like patent leather.

He had always been compulsively neat. He couldn’t remember a time when his friends hadn’t kidded him about it. As a child he had kept his toy box in better order than his mother had kept the china closet.

Three and a half years ago, after Annie died and left him with the children, his need for order and neatness had become almost neurotic. On a Wednesday afternoon, ten months after the funeral, when he caught himself rearranging the contents of a cabinet in his veterinary clinic for the seventh time in two hours, he realized that his compulsion for neatness could become a refuge from life and especially from grief. Alone in the clinic, standing before an array of instruments — forceps, syringes, scalpels — he cried for the first time since he learned Annie was dead. Under the misguided belief that he had to hide his grief from the children in order to provide them with an example of strength, he had never given vent to the powerful emotions that the loss of his wife had engendered. Now he cried, shook, and raged at the cruelty of it. He rarely used foul language, but now he strung together all the vile words and phrases

that he knew, cursing God and the universe and life — and himself. After that, his compulsive neatness ceased to be a neurosis and became, again, just another facet of his character, which frustrated some people and charmed others.

Someone knocked on the bedroom door.

He turned away from the window. “Come in.”

Rya opened the door. “It’s seven o’clock, Daddy. Suppertime.”

In faded red jeans and a short-sleeved white sweater, with her dark hair falling past her shoulders, she looked startlingly like her mother. She tilted her head to one side, just as Annie use to do, as if trying to guess what he was thinking.

“Is Mark ready?”

“Oh,” she said, “he was ready an hour ago. He’s in the kitchen, getting in Sam’s way.”

“Then we’d better get down there. Knowing Mark’s appetite, I’d say he has half the food eaten already.”

As he came toward her, she stepped back a pace. “You look absolutely marvelous, Daddy.”

He smiled at her and lightly pinched her cheek. If she had been complimenting Mark, she would have said that he looked “super,” but she wanted him to know that she was judging him by grown-up standards, and she had used grown-up language.

“You really think so?” he asked.

“Jenny won’t be able to resist you,” she said.

He made a face at her.

“It’s true,” Rya said.

“What makes you think I care whether or not Jenny can resist me?”

Her expression said he should stop treating her as a child. “When Jenny came down to Boston in March, you were altogether different.”

“Different from what?”

“Different from the way you usually are. For two whole weeks,” she said, “when you came home from the clinic, you didn’t once grump about sick poodles and Siamese cats.”

“Well, that’s because the only patients I had for those two weeks were elephants and giraffes.”

“Oh, daddy.”

“And a pregnant kangaroo.”

Rya sat on the bed. “Are you going to ask her to marry you?”

“The kangaroo?”

She grinned, partly at the joke and partly at the way he was trying to evade the question. “I’m not sure I’d like a kangaroo for a mother,” she said. “But if the baby is yours, you’re going to have to marry her if you want to do the right thing.”

“I swear it’s not mine,” he said. “I’m not romantically inclined toward kangaroos.”

“Toward Jenny?” she asked.

“Whether or nor I’m attracted to her, the important question is whether Jenny likes me.”

“You don’t know?” Rya asked. “Well. I’ll find out for you.”

Teasing her, he said, “How will you do that?”

“Ask her.”

“And make me look like Miles Standish?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I’ll be subtle about it.” She got up from the bed and went to the door. “Mark must have eaten three-fourths of the food by now.”

“Rya?”

She looked back at him.

“Do you like Jenny?”

She grinned. “Oh, very much.”

For seven years, since Mark was two and Rya four, the Annendales had been taking their summer vacation in the mountains above Black River. Paul wanted to communicate to his children his own love of wild places and wild things. During these four- and six-week vacations, he educated them in the ways of nature so that they might know the satisfaction of being in harmony with it. This was a joyous education, and they looked forward to each outing.

The year that Annie died, he almost canceled the trip. At

first it had seemed to him that going without her would only make their loss more evident. Rya had convinced him otherwise. “It’s like Mommy is still in this house,” Rya had said. “When I go from one room to another, I expect to find her there, all pale and drawn like she was near the end. If we go camping up beyond Black River, I guess maybe I’ll expect to see her in the woods too, but at least I won’t expect to see her pale and drawn. When we went to Black River, she was so pretty and healthy. And she was always so happy when we were out in the forest.” Because of Rya, they took their vacation as usual that year, and it proved to be the best thing they could have done.