Dean Koontz: Breathless

Then again, Henry knew nothing about farming. These knives might be standard stock at any farm-supply store.

Outside, the afternoon air remained mild. From the split cords of pine came the scent of raw wood.

Overhead, two magnificent birds with four-foot wingspans glided in intersecting gyres. The ventral feathers of the first were white with black wing tips. The second was boldly barred in white and brown.

“Northern harriers,” Jim said. “The white one with the black tips is the male. Harriers are raptors. When they’re hunting, they fly low over the fields and kill with a sudden pounce.”

He worked the axe loose from the tree-stump chopping block.

“Better put this away in the barn,” he said, “before I forget and leave it overnight.”

“Harriers,” Henry said. “They’re so beautiful, you don’t think of them as killing anything.”

“They eat mostly mice,” Jim said. “But also smaller birds.”

Henry grimaced. “Cannibalism?”

“They don’t eat other harriers. Their feeding on smaller birds is no more cannibalism than us feeding on other mammals-pigs, cows.”

“Living in the city, I guess we idealize nature,” Henry said.

“Well, when you accept the way of things, there’s a stark kind of beauty in the dance of predators and prey.”

Heading to the barn, Jim carried the axe in both hands, as if to raise and swing it should he see something that needed to be chopped.

The harriers had fled the sky.

When Henry glanced back toward the house, he saw Nora watching them from a window. With her pale hair and white blouse, she looked like a ghost behind the glass. She turned away.

“Life and death,” Jim said as they drew near the barn.

“Excuse me?”

“Predators and prey. The necessity of death, if life is to have meaning and proportion. Death as a part of life. I’m working on a series of poems with those themes.”

Jim opened the man-size entrance beside the pair of larger barn doors. Henry followed his brother into the wedge of sunshine that the door admitted to this windowless and otherwise dark space.

Inside, in the instant before the lights came on, Henry was gripped by the expectation that before him would be some sight for which Jim’s poem had not prepared him, that the poem was a lie, that the truck farming and the quilting and the simple-folks image were all lies, that the reality of this place and these people was more terrible than anything he could imagine.

When Jim threw a switch, a string of bare light bulbs brightened the length of that cavernous space, revealing the barn to be nothing more than a barn. A tractor and a backhoe were garaged on the left. Two horses occupied stalls on the right. The air was fragrant with the scents of hay and feed grain.

Although Henry’s alarming premonition had proved false, and although he knew that fearing his brother was as absurd as fearing the tractor or the horses, or the smell of hay, his sense of a nameless impending horror did not abate.

Behind him, the barn door swung shut of its own weight.

Jim turned to him with the axe, and Henry shrank back, and Jim stepped past him to hang the axe on a rack of tools.

Heart racing, breath suddenly ragged, Henry drew the SIG P245 from the snugly fit shoulder rig under his jacket and shot his twin point-blank, twice in the chest and once in the face.

Henry had come here with the hope that his relationship with his brother would change, and his hope had been fulfilled. Claude Henry Rouvroy was in the process of becoming James Carlyle.

The pistol was fitted with a sound suppressor, and the shots were no louder than a horse cutting wind. Indeed, neither of the horses had been spooked by the gunfire.

Standing over the corpse, Henry strove to quiet his breathing. His tremors forced him to holster the pistol to avoid accidentally squeezing off another round.

He had worried that his brother would grow suspicious of him, and he had feared that he would not be able to pull the trigger when the time came. In the process of assiduously repressing those fears so that he could carry out his plan, he projected his motivations onto Jim, imagining a conspiracy between him and Nora, finding in everyday objects-the knives, the axe-proof of sinister intentions. He had misread menace in innocent actions: Nora watching them from the window, Jim talking about the harriers, about predators and prey.

After a couple of minutes, when his breathing returned to normal and the tremors abated, Henry was able to laugh at himself. Although his laughter was soft, something about it disturbed the horses. They whinnied nervously and pawed the stall floors with their hooves.

Grady Adams lived in a two-story house with silvered cedar siding and a black slate roof, the last of ten residences on a county road. The two-lane blacktop had no official name, only a number, but locals called it Cracker’s Drive, after Cracker Conley, who built-and for forty years occupied-the house in which Grady now lived.

No one remembered what Cracker’s first name had been or why he was called Cracker. Evidently he was an eccentric and certainly a recluse, because to the locals, Cracker was more of a legend than he was a real neighbor with whom they had interacted.

In their minds, Conley’s addiction to solitude forever affected the character of the house itself. They rarely called it the Conley place or Cracker’s place, never the Adams house or even the house at the end of the lane. It was known as the hermit’s house, and in respect of the name, they tended to keep their distance.

Most of the time, their reticence suited Grady just fine. He was not a misanthrope. But in recent years, he had enough experience-too much-of people, which was why he returned to these sparsely populated mountains. For at least a while, perhaps a long while, he preferred the solitude that Cracker Conley apparently had cherished.

In the kitchen, after returning from the hike on which the intriguing animals had been encountered, Grady prepared Merlin’s four o’clock meal. Preparation took longer than consumption.

“You were well named, the way you make food vanish.”

The dog licked his chops and ambled to the door to be let out.

Half of the three-acre property lay behind the house. After his dinner, the wolfhound liked to prowl the grounds, sniffing the grass to learn what creatures of field and forest had recently visited. The yard was Merlin’s newspaper.

On the back porch, with an icy bottle of beer, Grady sat in one of two teak rockers with wine-red cushions.

A low table with a black-marble top stood beside the chair. Stacked on the table were three reference books from his library.

As intent as a detective at a crime scene, nose to the grass, Merlin vacuumed every clue to the identities of all trespassers.

A large paper birch overhung the north side of the house, and three others graced the yard, their white bark tinted gold in places by the late-afternoon sun. At times, Merlin seemed to be following the intricate patterns the trees cast upon the lawn, as if their shadows were cryptography that he intended to read and decode.

No fence was needed to contain him. He never rebelled against the rule to stay within his master’s sight.

Grady’s property ended where mown lawn gave way to tall grass. The forest loomed, the land rose under the forest, the foothills broke in green waves against the mountains, and the mountains soared.

From time to time, Merlin marked his territory. For the more substantive half of his toilet, he waded into the tall grass, where there would be no need to pick up after him. Even then he remained within sight, for the grass didn’t rise above his brisket.

When he returned to the yard, he raced in great circles and figure eights, chasing nothing, running for the delight of running. His long legs were made for galloping, his heart for joy.