Dean Koontz - Breathless

“Allison Givens. We called her Ally.”

“Is she in veterinary practice in Michigan?”

“I assume so. I don’t know. I didn’t stay in touch with her.”

“Have you stayed in touch with anyone from vet school?”

“Yes. A few.”

“Have any of them stayed in touch with Ally Givens?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. They’ve never said anything. What’s all this about Michigan?”

“Please remember, as we discussed, I ask the questions, you answer them, not the other way around.”

Either he had come to the end of that subject or he did not want to pursue it with her curiosity raised. He moved on to her experiences with Puzzle and Riddle.

Almost an hour later, as the session was drawing to a close, he asked a question that was a verbal punch.

“Dr. Rivers, have you ever killed anyone?”

Stunned, she met his eyes through the glass.

He repeated the question. “Cammy, have you ever killed anyone?”

“Yes.”

“Who did you kill?”

“My mother’s boyfriend.”

“What was his name?”

“Jake Horner. Jacob Horner.”

Jardine didn’t bother consulting the graphics on his laptop screen. He knew that she was telling the truth.

“That was on your fifteenth birthday, wasn’t it?”

“Those police records, the court hearing-that’s all sealed.”

“That was on your fifteenth birthday, wasn’t it?”

“Sealed. It’s all sealed. I was a juvenile. Nobody has the right to know about that.”

Jardine’s eyes gave out no light in the gloom, but in the glow of the computer screen, Cammy could see them well enough to recognize his contempt.

He said, “Was it ten years aboard Therapy? Ten years? Was it ten years, Cammy?”

In addition to his contempt, she saw his rich satisfaction in her reaction, her distress.

He had the power to reveal her ten-year ordeal and thereby to ensure that, ever after, when people looked at her, they would see her past in her present and would disdain her or, worse, pity her.

This was his way of guaranteeing her perpetual silence about Puzzle and Riddle, and her meek cooperation.

She stripped off the glove woven full of electronic sensors and threw it on the table.

“That’s it,” she said. “I’m finished.”

“Yes,” Jardine said. “I believe you are completely finished.”

The noise in the attic came and went, came and went. Sometimes it was a crawling sound, like someone shuffling from eave to eave on hands and knees. At other times, someone softly rapped out rhythms on a ceiling beam.

Henry walked through the house, back and forth, gazing at the ceiling, tracking the sounds. Wondering.

Standing in the bedroom closet, staring at the attic trapdoor, listening to the rapping, rapping, rapping on the back of that panel, which was bolted from below, he began to think of the sound as being more precise than mere rhythm. This was measured rhythm divided into stanzas. This was meter, as if some poet living in the garret above was composing new lines and rapping out the meter as he wrote.

When this thought fully flowered in his mind, Henry decided not to listen to the rapping anymore. He returned to the kitchen to continue preparing his lunch.

Later, as he ate, he wondered what the secret retreats were like where the senator and the other power elites would hide out when the social order had been purposefully pushed into collapse. He supposed they would be far more comfortable and better-provisioned quarters than any Henry could arrange for himself.

Of the many hundreds of billions of dollars that had gone out the treasury door, not all had been wastefully spent. Fully a third of it had been cleverly and secretly transferred into the accounts of those who had devised this strategy for the remaking of the world, which included numerous politicians but also many private-sector entrepreneurs.

The senator and those with whom he ran had panicked just once, when an investigative journalist with the Post reported that seventy billion of funds were gone and unaccounted for from just one package of the economic stimulus. But the public seemed indifferent. And considering that the Post’s number was woefully short of the true figure, the reporter’s sources could not be inside the circle of the conspiracy.

It was during that crisis-that-never-was that Henry decided not to throw in with the senator but to make his own preparations. Now, as he listened to the rapping in the attic, to the rapping that he was not listening to, he wondered if he had made a serious mistake when he had come west to become his brother.

For the first time in memory, Tom Bigger slept deeply and peacefully. The trouble began when he woke.

Usually, dreams poured from a reservoir of venom and flooded sleep. In the murk of sunken cities and drowned countryside, he moved ceaselessly, going nowhere and seeking nothing, but going and seeking with quiet desperation nonetheless. Out of submerged streets, down from fathomless hills, along lonely airless roads came half-seen figures to menace him. In perpetual flight, he breathed water with increasing panic, until he woke and breathed air. Awake and sometimes while asleep, he suspected that every one of those who menaced him was only a shrouded aspect of himself.

At 4:15 Monday afternoon, after a uniquely dreamless sleep, Tom woke, and the real world felt as airless as his usual dreams. A suffocating need oppressed him. In this condition, he found relief only and always in one thing: spirits of the bottled kind.

Having been unable to still his restless mind, which had circled incessantly around the memory of the incident on the bluff above the sea, Tom had stretched out on the bed with no expectation of sleep, still wearing his clothes. Now he sat up, stood, moved toward the motel-room door, hoping that fresh air might relieve his sense of suffocation.

One step short of the door, he turned from it and went to his backpack. The previous night, from a bridge, he threw an unsampled pint of tequila into a dry creek. Five pints remained in his supply.

He extracted a stuffsack from the backpack, a bottle from the sack. The glass was smooth in his rough hands, smooth and cool.

The journey ahead and the task at its end required commitment, focus, sobriety. He had spent his life fleeing from all three.

Smooth and cool.

Considering that he was forty-eight, still alive, and not in jail, an argument might be mounted that he had fared better than some who made more responsible decisions than he did. Fundamental change at his age might bring the opposite of what he desired; he might be trading failure and sorrow not for hope and peace, but for worse misery and despair.

One incident, one moment of recognition in decades of barren existence, did not justify a revolution of the mind and heart. At the time, his head and stomach turning in spirals of vertigo, he had been vomiting into a barrel, not a situation in which his perceptions or his judgment were necessarily reliable.

The pint bottle of tequila felt smooth, cool, full of power, full of promise, the power of forgetfulness, the promise of death by incremental self-destruction. The power of the tequila passed through the glass container and into his clutching fingers, causing his hand to shake, then his arm, then his entire body. The tremors shivered cold sweat from his palms, and he gripped the suddenly slippery bottle with both hands.

Although he needed a drink, a long one, he intended instead to empty the bottle into the bathroom sink.

He stood no more than six steps from the bathroom door. The sink lay one or two steps beyond that threshold. Eight steps. During the previous night, he walked mile after mile. Now eight steps seemed to be a greater distance than he traveled from his cave to this room.