Dean Koontz - Dragonfly

“Yes, sir.”

Finally, he took off his scarf and hat, stood up and wrestled loose of his coat. He didn't bother to hang up anything; he tossed the garments onto the nearest easy chair.

Now what?

He answered himself: Just wait. Just relax.

The pessimistic half of his mind told him: Impossible. It isn't just the Dragonfly project that's at stake. If this bastard McAlister breaks us on this one, he's going to destroy us altogether.

The optimistic Rice told the pessimistic Rice: He won't touch you. He can't touch you. You have all the advantages.

But I can lose everything I've built these last seventeen years…

Don't be a fool. You'll lose nothing. If he gets too close to you — or if anyone else gets too close to you— you can have him killed. You're more ruthless than any of them. That counts for something.

This brief, internal pep talk didn't help Rice at all. He still felt a deep pressure in his chest. He was still tense.

He sat down at his desk again, reached into the open drawer, picked up a second cookie and ate it in one bite. A few crumbs fell onto the front of his shirt. Before he had fully swallowed the second cookie, he popped a third one into his mouth. Then a fourth. A fifth and sixth… The very process of masticating, salivating, and swallowing affected him as a tranquilizer might have done. The combination of chocolate and marshmallow seemed to act like an emetic on the time stream of his mind, causing him to flush out the present and the future until only the past remained to tantalize him…

Perhaps the single most important hour of Rice's existence came at eleven o'clock at night, two days before Christmas, in the middle of his twenty-fourth year — although he was not at that time aware of the irresistible forces of change that were already working relentlessly within and upon his life.

At that time he was living in Boston, doing graduate work at Harvard, studying economics and political systems during the day and writing feverishly about politics and social theory at night. Once a month he took the train down to New York City, where he met J. Prescott Hennings, the young editor and publisher of two periodicals that were devoted to the dissemination of every facet of ultra-conservative American thought. Scott Hennings, at least in Rice's opinion, was proof that the American Dream could still come true. Hennings had inherited a twenty-million-dollar real estate fortune which he had built into a fifty-million-dollar empire by his thirtieth birthday. Now he let his businesses run themselves while he dedicated himself to the preservation of the capitalistic system in a world where Communists squirmed on all sides like worms in the walls of an old mansion. Each of his magazines had a circulation of just twenty thousand and a combined readership of a hundred thousand, and every issue lost money. Hennings hardly cared, for he could lose money every day for the remainder of his life, even if he died an octogenarian, and nonetheless leave a fortune behind him. Once a month Rice personally submitted an article to Hennings, with whom he had become close friends. Routinely, Hennings read it the same day, paid two or three hundred dollars for it, and published it forthwith.

None of Rice's Harvard acquaintances had ever read one of these articles or seen a copy of Hennings' magazines. That was of little consequence to Rice. He made rent money writing them — and he was reaching thousands of readers who were already enough in agreement with him to give his theories the careful consideration he could not have received in liberal circles. Indeed, at Harvard he was not well known. He merely used the university's library and other educational facilities much as a man might use a whore — or a whore use a man; he ignored the propaganda and took only the knowledge, and he tried not to be tainted by the extreme left-wing attitudes which lay, in his opinion, like an oppressive blanket of smog over the entire campus. Twice a year he was invited to a party at Hennings' penthouse apartment on Park Avenue, where he could socialize without having to mute or conceal his political views. At these affairs, which he treasured more than he did the money Hennings paid him, he met conservative congressmen, millionaire businessmen, generals and admirals, a few movie stars — and once even George Lincoln Rockwell, head of the National Socialist Party in the United States, had been there in a swastika-emblazoned uniform which, to Rice, was not at all anachronistic here in the 1960s. This was rare air for Rice. This was Mount Olympus, and he had somehow been allowed to mingle with the gods. Rice did not care, therefore, that the Harvard elite had never read or even heard of his monthly essays.

At eleven o'clock at night, two days before Christmas, in his twenty-fourth year, Rice completed a book-length manuscript, an inspired — if unbalanced and unfair — attack on Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. Exhausted but unable to sleep, he stayed up all night rereading, correcting words and phrases, agonizing over sentence structure for more dark hours than he'd ever spent agonizing over the condition of his immortal soul.

The next morning he slept on the tram to New York. He delivered the script to Hennings, hoping it could be serialized in one of his magazines and that Hennings could place it with a publisher who specialized in conservative political theory. Although he hadn't known Rice was writing a book, Hennings promised to read it in a few days.

On Christmas Eve, 1964, Rice was alone in New York. He spent the evening in his hotel room, eating candy bars and pretending to watch television and trying not to think of his book. He had a nightmare in which Hennings rejected the book, called it a piece of unpublishable trash, and tried — with the help of four men in storm troopers' uniforms — to use the three hundred typewritten pages as a suppository which, though applied to Rice's anal canal, would cure him of his mental hemorrhoids. He woke up with loose bowels and ran for the bathroom.

Hennings didn't call Christmas Day, and Rice told himself this was to be expected. Scott had two children. He wouldn't give up his holiday to read the script. Yet Rice cursed him and ate more candy.

That evening the pressure became unbearable. He went walking in Tunes Square, where happy crowds lined up at theaters and street-corner Santas endured the final hours of their reincarnations. Oblivious of the cold wind and snow flurries, he kept his mind on that commodity which he had left his room to find: a professional piece of ass.

He found one: a pretty young brunette on Forty-second Street. He weighed only two-thirty in those days, and she wasn't much put off by him as some prostitutes eventually came to be. They set a price. He said he had no hotel room, but she knew a place where a key cost six dollars and there was no register to sign.

In the room he sat and watched her undress. She stripped without ceremony or style. Her breasts were large, belly flat, legs long and lovely. She was firm, unmarked. She seemed sweet and wholesome except for the plastic sheen of her eyes and the hard twist of her mouth.

When he began to take off his clothes, she stretched out on her back in the center of the bed, closed her eyes. Nude, he got onto the bed and straddled her chest as if he wanted her to use her mouth on him. She opened her eyes in time to see that he was about to strike her. She screamed — just as his fist chopped her chin, split her lip, broke a couple of her teeth, and knocked her unconscious. Breathing heavily, muttering, giggling, he pummeled her face, breasts, and stomach. He used his fists and open hands and finger-nails. His climax was spontaneous and intense. Then, whimpering, he washed the blood off his hands and chest. He dressed and left the room and walked out of the hotel into the wind and snow.