Dean Koontz: Your Heart Belongs To Me

“But it wouldn’t be only a visitor, would it?” Ismena asked. “Not in one of Mr. Poe’s creations.”

The rapping.

Ismay had known about the rapping.

After the biopsy, as he dozed in the prep room, she had said to Ryan, You hear him, don’t you, child? Yes, you hear him.

He didn’t understand how she could have known about the rapping, but of course that was not as much of a stumper as how she could have been there almost two years after dying.

You must not listen, child.

Now he opened the volume of verse to a random page-and saw a poem titled “The City in the Sea.”

“Ismay knew all of Mr. Poe’s verses by heart-except for ‘Al Aaraaf.’ She just couldn’t make herself like that one.”

Ryan scanned the early lines of “The City in the Sea,” and found something that he felt compelled to read aloud: “‘But light from out the lurid sea / Streams up the turrets silently / Gleams up the pinnacles far and free / Up domes, up spires, up kingly halls / Up fanes, up Babylon-like walls…’”

His voice must have trembled or otherwise betrayed his fear, for Ismena Moon said, “Are you all right, Mr. Perry?”

“I had a dream like this,” he said. “More than once.”

After scanning more lines, he looked up, realizing that the two women were waiting for him to explain himself.

Rather than elucidate, he said, “Ms. Moon, I see that you have half a dozen copies of Poe’s collected poetry.”

“Ismay bought it over and over again every time she found a new edition with different illustrations.”

“May I pay you for one of them? I’d like it as a…as a memento of Ismay.”

“I wouldn’t think of accepting a dime,” she said. “You take whichever one you like. But you still haven’t told me what kindness she did for you that impressed you so much.”

Carrying the book, he returned to the Chesterfield on which Cathy sat, and settled there to spin a story peppered with a little of the truth. He set the date of this tale before Ismay’s death, did not mention a heart transplant, but instead gave himself a multiple bypass. He told of how afraid he’d been that he was going to die, of how Ismay counseled him so wisely for an hour in the hospital one night, two hours the next night, and how she stayed in touch with him after his release, keeping his spirits up at a time when he would otherwise have fallen into depression.

He must have told the story well, because Ismena was moved to tears. “That’s her, all right, that’s how Ismay was, always giving.”

Cathy Sienna watched him dry-eyed.

Ismena pulled on calf-high boots and a coat, and walked with Ryan and Cathy across the street to the cemetery. She led them to Ismay’s grave and focused her flashlight on the headstone.

Ryan thought about how things would have been different from the way they were now if he had found this cemetery and this grave on his previous visit to Denver, before his transplant.

In the Escalade, Ryan was neither in a mood to talk nor capable of thinking of anything to say. Cathy remained professional and uninquisitive.

Painted with reflected city light, mottled black and chrome-yellow, the low sky seemed to be smouldering. Like drifting ashes, snow flurries fluttered across the windshield.

At the hotel, her room was four floors below his. Getting off the elevator, she said, “Dream well,” as the doors slid shut between them.

Because he had only an overnight bag, Ryan had not wanted the assistance of a bellman. When Cathy left him alone in the elevator, his stomach turned over, and he felt as if the cab would plunge to the bottom of the shaft.

Instead, it took him to his floor, and he found his suite.

Beyond the windows, Denver rose in a lurid light, as if Ryan had brought the city in the sea with him out of a dream.

Sitting at a desk, he took his medications with a bottle of beer from the honor bar.

When he swallowed the last of two tablets and five capsules, he opened the book of poetry and paged through it from the beginning.

He found a poem titled “The Lake,” and it was the wild lake of his dream, lovely in its loneliness, bound all around with black rocks and tall pines.

When he came again upon “The City in the Sea,” he read it silently twice, and the final four lines a third time, aloud: “‘And when, amid no earthly moans, / Down, down that town shall settle hence, / Hell, rising from a thousand thrones, / Shall do it reverence.’”

Farther into the volume, he found his third dream in a poem titled “The Haunted Palace.”

He could think of no chain of sound reasoning that would explain Ismay Clemm or those dreams that had been inspired by the work of her favorite writer.

As for diving into unreason and conjuring some supernatural explanation, Ryan had no practice swimming in seas of superstition. This seemed to be a dangerous time to take the plunge.

He did not believe in ghosts, but if Ismay had been a ghost with a message to impart, he could not puzzle out her meaning.

He almost put the book down without paging to the end, but he remembered how he had put aside the ring binder in Barghest’s study after finding Teresa’s photo-delaying for sixteen months the discovery of Ismay Clemm’s photo, twelve sleeves later.

The next-to-last poem in the book, titled “The Bells,” called to mind something else Ismay had said to him. He heard her admonition now almost as clearly as if she had been here in the hotel room with him.

If you hear the iron bells, you come to me.

Poe’s “The Bells” had four sections, and Ryan read them with growing disquiet. The first celebrated the merry bells on Christmas sleighs. The second dealt with the harmony of wedding bells. The third part took a dark turn, describing fire-alarm bells and the human tragedy they could foretell.

The fourth part spoke of iron bells rung by ghouls high in a church, the melancholy menace of their tone.

“‘For every sound that floats,’” he read aloud, “‘From the rust within their throats / Is a groan.’”

Hearing the words spoken disturbed him more than reading them from the page, and he fell silent.

The extraordinary rhythms, rhymes, and repetitions of the rest of the poem brought back to him the cacophony and the chaos of the ringing bells that had awakened him in the hospital bed on the night before his transplant.

He could see, he could smell, he could hear the room again, Wally at the window, looking down, down, down, into waves of rising sound, a gloss on every surface, even shadows with a shine, and the shiver of the bells in his bones, in his blood, ringing thickly in his blood, and the smell of rust, a red and bitter dust, washing wave after wave, after heavy warning wave.

Finally he put the book aside.

He did not know what to make of any of this. He did not want to know what to make of it.

He knew that he would not sleep. Not in his current condition.

But he was desperate for sleep, for dreamless sleep. He could not tolerate being awake.

He did something then of which Dr. Hobb would not have approved, not for him or for any heart-transplant recipient. He raided the honor bar and hammered himself into sleep with a series of gin-and-tonics.

In the Learjet, Ryan at first sat apart from Cathy Sienna. Because he had awakened with a hangover and had needed time to chase off his headache, to settle his stomach with bland food, and to pull himself together, they were late leaving Denver. The runway rush, the lift-off, and the big banking turn across the Rockies had the potential to bring up his breakfast, and he preferred to ride out the start of the trip by himself.