Dean Koontz - Breathless

Moving through their quarters and then sitting at the table as the elderly couple prepared dinner, Tom felt clumsy in build, awkward in motion, gauche, and out of place. He was bewildered to be there, unable to explain to himself why he had not taken up his backpack and fled. Josef and Hannah were together a force of nature, a wind both gentle yet powerful enough to sweep him to the place they wished him to be.

Although he had washed his face and hands in their guest bath, Tom felt grimy compared to their meticulously clean apartment. He had combed his unruly hair as best he could with his fingers, and buttoned the collar of his denim shirt.

Hannah filled bowls with beef noodle soup, and Josef put them on the table. Potatoes, carrots, and lima beans enriched the soup. Tom had eaten nothing as tasty as this in many years.

The second course was a slice of a molded gelatin salad full of finely chopped carrots and celery. Tom expected not to like it, but he did.

Fried fish patties followed, made from flaked halibut, mashed potatoes, eggs, and minced onions. On the side were succotash and sweet-and-sour beets.

Tom Bigger had not eaten home cooking like this in longer than thirty years. Considering that he drank more calories than he ate every day, he was surprised that his shrunken stomach suddenly had the capacity for everything that was put before him.

Josef and Hannah did most of the talking, or so it seemed to Tom, yet more surprising than the capacity of his stomach was the fact that he told them where he was going and what he hoped to do when he got there. He never revealed himself to people-until now.

He didn’t tell them about the incident on the bluff above the sea or about the coyotes. Those things were his to keep until he proved that he could make the journey and complete the task.

Over dessert-lemon-cream pie-Josef offered to drive Tom to his destination after dinner. Tom gratefully declined six different ways. In spite of his failure to accept the favor of a ride, his hosts began to talk about the best route and estimated driving time-two hours-as though Josef and Tom would be leaving shortly.

When Tom expressed concern about Hannah being alone, the couple explained that the evening-shift clerk, Francisco, now manned the front desk downstairs. And in an emergency, Rebecca, their daughter, and her family lived only fifteen minutes away.

Tom found a seventh reason why he must politely decline, and he insisted that their offer was too generous, but at the conclusion of dessert, Hannah encouraged Josef to “say bentshen and hit the road.” Bentshen proved to be a benediction, a grace said following dinner, after which Josef went to the master bathroom to “say hello to Mother Nature,” and Tom used the guest bath. Hannah waited at the apartment door and hugged each of them, and Tom followed Josef down the stairs, through the motel office, outside to a thirty-year-old Mercedes sedan idling in front, where it had been brought by Francisco. The evening clerk also fetched Tom’s backpack from his room, put it in the trunk, provided four bottles of cold water in an insulated carrier in case they got thirsty during the trip, and stood waving at them as they drove out of the motel parking lot and north on the highway.

Tom had long been afraid of crossing the threshold of a new place for the first time, lest he have an encounter with the wrong person, one who profoundly affected him and forced in him a change. In his gray cardigan and bow tie, still wearing slippers because “they’re comfier than shoes to drive, and when you get to be my age, which is a number Methuselah would envy, comfy matters more than style,” Josef Yurashalmi was that wrong person, the embodiment of Tom Bigger’s fear.

Although Tom had long been all but humorless, the realization that the dreaded agent of Apocalypse turned out to be this sweet old man might have inspired a laugh under other circumstances. But he was no longer a ten-day walk from the task that he must perform; only two hours would bring him to it. He lived for decades as a coward, and now with an onerous confrontation rapidly approaching, he had no well of courage to tap.

Sixty-one

In the room, all day the people come and go, excitement high but voices often low.

The light is bright but not as bright as the light of their becoming. Still, the night would be nicer, the big full moon and all the shining stars.

Men and women come and go, and some return, and later yet return again, and always they appear and disappear through the same drapery, which falls shut behind them.

Directly opposite that entrance in the western wall is another entrance in the east. There the drapery is fixed, zippered shut, and no one comes and no one goes by that portal.

Some people stand close and stare, and accept an offered hand, while others sit in chairs to watch, record their notes or take them down by hand.

Sometimes they confer with one another, usually in murmurs and hushed voices. Now and then, they speak louder and with passionate intent, but it is always an angerless argument.

In their cage, Puzzle and Riddle listen with interest to the voices of their visitors, to the music of the voices, to the rhythm of the voices, voices, voices.

They have water, and food is given twice. All is well, and all will be well, as it has been well since their becoming.

This is a time of waiting, and the two wait well, for waiting is only an acceptance of the ways of time. Occasionally slow and on other occasions faster, yet in truth always at the same pace, time flows forward toward one shining moment or another, toward the place where they will fully belong then, as they fully belong in this place now.

In the room, the people come and go, and in time they only go, until dust motes float in the bright light, in the stilled air.

In the night beyond the drapery waits the one who admits all the others. His scent is a scent of weariness, loneliness, and yearning.

Quietly in the quietness, Puzzle works the zipper on the cover of the mattress, and the divider softly clicks as it makes the teeth unclench.

Inside the cover, under the mattress, her probing hand locates what earlier she had hidden. The blade is short, not sharp, rounded without a point.

When she saw it while standing on a chair and searching kitchen drawers for new treasures, her eyes were drawn not to the plain blade but to the pretty handle. It was shiny, full of color, and its contours pleasing.

She plucked it from among other items of interest at the moment that she was lifted from the chair and pressed into the dog crate.

When a thing is provided, the provision is for a reason. This she knows.

After their transferal to the large cage here in the room, as they explore their new quarters, the reason for the thing with the pretty handle becomes clear. The reason is not the handle, but the blade.

The ceiling and the floor of the cage are large pans. The bars of the cage are in framed panels. The panels are bolted to the walls of the floor pan and the ceiling pan. Each panel is held by two bolts at the top, two at the bottom.

Now Puzzle looks at Riddle, and Riddle looks at Puzzle, and by unspoken agreement, they choose a panel and begin.

Holding the tool, she reaches between the bars and bends her wrist severely, inserting the curved head of the blade into the slot in the round head of the bolt.

Between thumb and forefinger, Riddle pinches the square nut in which the bolt is seated, inside the pan of the cage. His small black hands are strong, and strong they need to be as Puzzle begins to turn the bolt.

The revolving bolt, the stable nut, the threads unthreading now and then produce a scraping, a brief squeak, but the soft sounds are only a whisper short of silence, and the man on guard outside will never hear.