Dean Koontz - DEMON SEED

The Honda picked up speed.

I used one, two, three security cameras, zooming in, zooming out, panning, tilting, zooming in again, tracking the car as it weaved around the turning circle, providing Susan with as much of the action as I could capture.

Holding fast to the car, pulling his feet off the cobblestones, hanging on for the ride, the squealing Shenk chopped with the cleaver and missed again.

Arling drew back sharply in panic from the arc of the glinting blade.

The car curved half off the cobblestones, and one tire churned through a bordering bed of red and purple impatiens.

Wrenching the wheel to the right, Arling brought the Honda back onto the pavement barely in time to avoid a palm tree.

Shenk chopped again.

This time the blade sank home.

One of Arling’s fingers flew.

Zoom in.

Blood sprayed across the windshield.

As red as impatiens petals.

Arling screamed.

Susan screamed.

Shenk laughed.

Zoom out.

The Honda swung out of control.

Pan.

Tires gouged through another bed of flowers.

Blossoms and torn leaves sprayed off rubber.

A sprinkler head snapped.

Water geysered fifteen feet into the June day.

Tilt up.

Silver water gushing high, sparkling like a fountain of dimes in the sunshine.

Immediately, I shut off the landscape watering system.

The glittering geyser telescoped back into itself. Vanished.

The recent winter had been rainy. Nevertheless,

California suffers periodic droughts. Water should not be wasted.

Tilt down. Pan.

The Honda crashed into one of the queen palms. Shenk was thrown off, tumbling back onto the cobblestones.

The cleaver slipped from his hand. It clattered across the pavement.

Gasping, hissing with pain, making strange wordless sounds of desperation, clamping his badly wounded hand in his other, Arling shouldered open the driver’s door and scrambled out of the car.

Dazed, Shenk rolled off his back, onto his hands and knees.

Arling stumbled. Nearly fell. Kept his balance. Shenk was wheezing, striving to regain his breath, which had been knocked out of him.

Arling staggered away from the car.

I thought the old man would go for the cleaver.

Evidently he didn’t know that the weapon had fallen from Shenk’s grasp, and he was loath to go around to his assailant’s side of the Honda.

On all fours in the driveway, Shenk hung his head as though he were a clubbed dog. He shook it. His vision cleared.

Arling ran. Ran blindly.

Shenk lifted his malformed head, and his red gaze fixed on the weapon.

‘Baby,’ he said, and seemed to be talking to the cleaver.

He crawled across the driveway.

‘Baby.’

He gripped the handle of the cleaver.

‘Baby, baby.’

Weak with pain, losing blood, Arling weaved ten

steps, twenty, before he realized that he was returning to the house.

He halted, spun around, blinking tears from his eyes, searching for the gate.

Shenk seemed to be energized by regaining possession of the weapon. He sprang to his feet.

When Arling started toward the gate, Shenk angled in front of him, blocking the way.

Watching from her bed, Susan seemed to have contracted religion from Fritz Arling. I had not been aware that she possessed any strong religious convictions, but now she was chanting: ‘Please, God, dear God, no, please, Jesus, Jesus, no…

And, ah, her eyes.

Her eyes.

Radiant eyes.

Two deep lambent pools of haunted and beautiful light in the gloomy bedroom.

Outside, in the end game, Arling moved to the left, and Shenk blocked him.

Arling moved to the right, and Shenk blocked him.

When Arling feinted to the right but moved to the left, Shenk blocked him.

With nowhere else to go, Arling backed under the portico and onto the front porch.

The door was open, as Shenk had left it.

Hoping against hope, Arlmg leaped across the threshold and knocked the door shut.

He tried to lock it. I would not allow him to do so.

When he realized that the deadbolt was frozen, he leaned his weight against the door.

This was insufficient to stop Shenk. He bulled inside. Arling backed toward the stairs, until he bumped against the newel post.

Shenk closed the front door.

I locked it.

Grinning, testing the weight of the cleaver as he approached the old man, Shenk said, ‘Baby make the music. Little baby gonna make the wet music.’

Now I required only one camera to provide Susan with coverage of the incident.

Shenk closed to within six feet of Arling. The old man said, ‘Who are you?’

‘Make me the blood music,’ Shenk said, speaking not to Arling but either to himself or to the cleaver.

What a strange creature he was.

Inscrutable at times. Less mysterious than he seemed but more complex than one would expect.

With the foyer camera, I did a slow zoom to a medium shot.

To Susan, I said, ‘This will be a good lesson.’

I was not in any way controlling Shenk. He was entirely free now to be himself, to do as he wished.

I could not have committed the vicious deeds of which he was capable. I would have shrunk from such brutality, so I had no choice but to release him to do his terrible work then take control of him again when he was finished.

Only Shenk, being Shenk, could teach Susan the lesson that she needed to learn. Only the Enos Eugene Shenk who had earned the death sentence for his crimes against children could make Susan rethink her bull-headed resistance to my simple and reasonable desire to have a life in the flesh.

‘This will be a good lesson,’ I repeated. ‘Discipline.’ Then I saw that her eyes were closed.

She was shaking, and her eyes were tightly shut.

‘Watch,’ I instructed. She disobeyed me.

Nothing new about that.

I could think of no way to make her open her eyes.

Her stubbornness angered me.

Arling cowered against the newel post, too weak to run farther.

Shenk loomed.

The brute’s right arm swung high over his head.

The cutting edge of the cleaver sparkled.

‘Wet music, wet music, wet music.’

Shenk was too close to miss.

Arling’s scream would have curdled my blood if I’d had any blood to curdle.

Susan could close her eyes to the images on the television screen. But she could not shut out sounds.

I amplified Fritz Arling’s agonizing screams and pumped them through the music-system speakers in every room. It was the sound of Hell at dinnertime, with demons feeding on souls. The great house itself seemed to be screaming.

Because Shenk was Shenk, he did not kill Arling quickly. Each chop was administered with finesse, to prolong the victim’s suffering and Shenk’s pleasure.

What frightful specimens the human species harbours. Most of you are decent, of course, and kind and honourable and gentle etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

Let’s have no misunderstanding.

I am not maligning the human species.

Or even judging it.

I am certainly in no position to judge. In the docket myself. In this dark docket.

Besides, I am a non-judgemental entity.

I admire humanity.

After all, you created me. You have the capacity for wondrous achievements.

But some of you give me pause.

Indeed.

So…

Arling’s screams were a lesson to Susan. Quite a lesson, an unforgettable learning experience.

However, she reacted to them more fiercely than I had expected. She startled and then worried me.

At first she screamed in sympathy with her former employee, as though she could feel his pain. She thrashed in her restraining ropes and tossed her head from side to side, until her golden hair was dark and lank with sweat. She was full of terror and rage. Her face was wrenched with anguish and fury, and not beautiful in the least.