Dean Koontz - 77 Shadow Street

Mickey also had never before popped a relative. Jerry was his brother. Maybe it should have felt different, but it didn’t. The only difference was not receiving a fat envelope full of cash for the job.

Not once in years of dreaming about murder had Mickey imagined offing someone in this apartment. So inconvenient.

Jerry Dime had forced the moment. He had come here to kill Mickey. But he was an amateur. He telegraphed his intentions.

Come to think of it, Mickey would eventually get a payday for this bit of work. No need now to share their mother’s estate.

From the bedroom closet, he got a spare blanket. It was made of some microfiber, as soft as fur but strong. He rubbed it against his face. It smelled like a camel-hair sport coat, which was one of Mickey’s favorite smells.

Jerry’s wide-open eyes seemed bluer in death than in life. Mickey had russet eyes. Their mother’s eyes had been green. Mickey didn’t know about their fathers’ eyes. Their fathers had been anonymous sperm donors.

After pulling the corpse out of the armchair and onto the blanket, Mickey went through his brother’s pockets. He took Jerry’s wallet, phone, coins. The coins were warm with Jerry’s body heat.

Mickey rolled the dead man in the blanket. He cinched the ends tight with a couple of his neckties.

Stepping out of the study, he pulled the door shut behind him. As he glanced at his watch, the doorbell rang.

His twice-a-month manicurist, Ludmila, had arrived. She was a Russian immigrant, in her mid-fifties, dark-haired and intense.

She spoke English well. But they were agreed that she would not speak except to thank him for payment. Any conversation would detract from the pleasure of the manicure and pedicure.

After his mother’s death, Mickey had expanded the master bath into the guest bedroom. He never had overnight guests.

The huge bathroom had white-marble walls and ceiling, blackgranite countertops, and a checkerboard marble-and-granite floor. It featured a spa chair with water supply, a custom massage table, and a corner sauna lined with cedar.

Mickey reclined in the spa chair. He soaked his bare feet in warm water. The footbath was scented with fragrant salts.

As Ludmila worked on his hands, Mickey closed his eyes. Slowly he ceased to be a man and became only ten fingertips. The whisper of the emery board was a symphony. The fragrance of the clear nail polish intoxicated him. The simplest pleasure could be rapturous if you gave yourself entirely to it.

Sensation was everything. It was the only thing.

One

I am not what you of great faith imagined, but I am what you sought. I am the past undone in its entirety .

I celebrate death. Death makes room for new life. I die every day and rise again. Those weaker creatures who die and do not rise have done a service to the world, because a world of weaklings is a world with no future .

Ironically, my tremendous strength and immortality have their origin in a fault: a fault in the structure of space-time that lies in the heart of Shadow Hill. Periodically, when conditions are right, past and present and future exist here simultaneously, just as they exist in me. Those who live at the pivot point, where past and future meet, sometimes glimpse what once was and what will come to be. By the Native Americans who first lived here and by everyone who followed them, those presences out of time are thought to be ghosts or hallucinations or visions .

Every thirty-eight years comes an event of greater power than mere apparitions. Involuntary pilgrims journey to my kingdom and discover their fate, which is the fate of the entire world .

Arriving from 1935, the wealthy Ostock family learned to be more submissive to the One than their servants were to them . Humanity believes it is exceptional, but it is to the world as fleas to a dog, as lice to a chimpanzee. An infestation. A plague. The Ostocks and all human beings are rats on the road out of Hamelin, enchanted by a tune that leads them to drown in me .

Soon the songwriter will stand before me, and I will feed upon her heart, which she imagines is the source of emotion in her songs. The elderly attorney, who believes in the law, will learn there is no law but mine. The retired detective who believes in justice will get the justice he deserves. I will enter the boy, control his body, but allow him to be aware for a while, allow him to witness the slow corruption of his body and his innocence. Vermin born of vermin, they are the infestation for which I am the purifying fire .

12

Apartment 3-A

Smoke in an armchair and Ashes on a footstool watched Martha Cupp as she moved impatiently from window to window in the living room, their orange eyes as bright as lanterns.

Except for the betrayals of her body, from minor annoyances like gray hair to the greater treachery of arthritis in her hands, Martha felt twenty years old. She was as quick of mind as she had been six decades earlier, sharpened by the wisdom that came from a life rich in experiences.

At eighty, as at twenty, she had no patience for nonsense. To her dismay, the world was more than ever a temple of absurdity. So many people had stopped believing in any truth that offered hope, uncritically embracing instead a belief in the animated inanimate that was computer “intelligence,” in the gleaming but hollow utopia of the Internet and all things digital, in the preposterous economic theories of envious sociopaths, in the absolute moral and legal equality of men and ants and apes and asparagus. In particular, Martha disliked the numerous denominations of End Timers who, like the odious Mr. Udell in 3-H, believed passionately in one existential threat or another, from a looming ice age to an imminent planetary meltdown, to the Rapture followed by Satanic rule and Armageddon. Nonsense.

A few days earlier, their cook and housekeeper, Sally Hollander, had been among the sane. Then suddenly she began talking about vivid and disturbing dreams. She became so distressed by the third round of nightmares that she believed they must be prophetic glimpses of a rapidly approaching doomsday. And now she claimed to have seen the devil in the butler’s pantry.

The city was real, the storm was real, and the window before Martha was real, but the devil in the pantry was rubbish and humbug. Either Sally, previously so dependable and sound of mind, was having a midlife crisis and developing a personality disorder, or the poor woman suffered from some physical malady with symptoms that included hallucinations and delusions. Because Sally was like a beloved niece, Martha didn’t want to consider the second possibility, which might indicate a brain tumor or other dire condition.

A blazing axe of lightning chopped the sky and thunder crashed like a thousand trees felled and falling as one. For a moment the entire city seemed to go dark. But that must have been just a brief blinding effect of the brilliant thunderbolt, because when she blinked twice, the city was out there again, its twinkling buildings and lamplit avenues receding in the murk.

Earlier, Smoke and Ashes, a pair of British blue shorthairs, had remained cat-calm through Sally’s outburst, languid and self-absorbed. Their ears had pricked slightly at the first scream, and their heads had turned toward the source of the sound. But their muscles had not tensed nor had their dense and ultra-plush blue-gray fur bristled in the least. As the housekeeper’s cries of terror softened into sobs, Smoke and Ashes had lost interest and had focused once more on their grooming. The behavior of the cats was for Martha proof enough that nothing demonic had paid a visit.