Dean Koontz - Life Expectancy

“Whose valuables?”

“The hotel’s valuables.”

Although Dad never triumphs in exchanges of this nature, he always remains hopeful that if only he persists, reason will prevail.

“Why,” he asked, “wouldn’t they put a big heavy safe on the ground floor? Why go to all the trouble of craning it to the roof?”

My mother said, “Because no doubt their valuables were on the top floor.”

In moments like these, I have never been quite sure if Mom shares more than a little of Weena’s cockeyed perspective on the world or if she’s playing with my father.

Her face is guileless. Her eyes are never evasive, and always limpid. She is by nature a straightforward woman. Her emotions are too clear for misinterpretation, and her intentions are never ambiguous.

Yet as Dad says, for a person so admirably open and direct by nature, she can turn inscrutable when it tickles her to, just as easily as throwing a light switch.

That’s one of the things he loves about her.

Our conversation continued through an endive salad with pears, walnuts, and crumbled blue cheese, followed by filet mignon on a bed of potato-and-onion pancakes, with asparagus on the side.

Before Dad got up to roll the dessert cart in from the kitchen, we had agreed that, for the momentous day ahead, I should keep to my usual vacation routine. With caution. But not too much caution.

Midnight arrived.

September 15 began.

Nothing happened right away.

“Maybe nothing will,” Mom said.

“Something will,” Grandma disagreed, and smacked her lips. “Something will.”

If I had not been obliterated or even badly crushed by nine o’clock the next evening, we would meet here for dinner again. Together, we would break bread while remaining alert for the whiff of natural gas and the drone of a descending airliner.

Now, after demidessert, followed by a full dessert, followed by petits fours, all accompanied by oceans of coffee, Dad went off to work, and I helped with the kitchen cleanup.

Then at one-thirty in the morning, I retired to the living room to read a new book for which I had high expectations. I have a great fondness for murder mysteries.

On the first page, a victim was found chopped up and packed in a trunk. His name was Jim.

I put that book aside, selected another from the stack on the coffee table, and returned to my armchair.

A beautiful dead blonde stared from the book jacket, strangled with an antique Japanese obi knotted colorfully around her throat.

The first victim was named Delores. With a sigh of contentment, I settled down in my chair.

Grandma sat on the sofa, busy with a needlepoint pillow. She had been a master of decorative stitching since her teenage years.

Since she had moved in with Mom and Dad almost two decades ago, she had kept baker’s hours, sewing elaborate patterns through the night. My mother and I kept that schedule, too. Mom had home-schooled me because our family lived by night.

Recently, Grandma’s preferred embroidery motifs were insects. Her butterfly wall hanging and even her ladybug chair cushions were charming, but I did not care for the spider-festooned antimacassars on my armchair or for the cockroach pillow.

In an adjacent alcove, which Mom had outfitted as her studio, she worked happily on a pet portrait. The subject was a glittery-eyed Gila monster named Killer.

Because Killer was hostile toward strangers and not housebroken, the proud owners had provided a series of photos from which Mom could work. A hissing, biting, pooping Gila monster can really spoil an otherwise pleasant evening.

The living room is small and the shallow art alcove is separated from it only by silk curtains in a wide archway. The curtains were open, so Mom could keep an eye on me and could be ready to move fast in case she recognized, say, signs of impending spontaneous human combustion.

For perhaps an hour, we were silent, immersed in our various pursuits, and then Mom said, “Sometimes I worry that we’re becoming the Addams family.”

The initial eight hours of my first terrible day passed without a disturbing incident.

At 8:15, his eyebrows white with flour, Dad came home from work. “I couldn’t make a good crème plombières to save my ass. I’ll be glad when we’ve got through this day and I can focus again.”

We had breakfast together at the kitchen table. By 9:00 A.M., after more than the usual day’s-end hugs, we went to our bedrooms and hid beneath the sheets.

Perhaps the rest of my family wasn’t hiding, but I pretty much was. I believed in my grandfather’s predictions more than I cared to admit to the rest of them, and my nerves tightened with every tick of the clock.

Going to bed at an hour when most people are beginning their workday, I required blackout blinds overlaid by heavy drapes that absorbed both light and sound. My room was quiet and dead black.

After a few minutes, I urgently needed to turn on a bedside lamp. Not since early childhood had I been this disturbed by the dark.

From my nightstand drawer I withdrew a plastic sleeve in which was preserved the free pass to the circus that Officer Huey Foster had given to my father more than twenty years ago. The three-by-five card appeared newly printed, marred only by the crease through the middle, where Dad had folded it to fit in his wallet.

On the blank reverse, Dad had taken dictation from Josef on his deathbed. The five dates.

The front of the pass featured lions and elephants. ADMIT TWO it directed in black letters, and in red blazed the promise FREE.

Toward the bottom were four words I had read uncounted times over the years: PREPARE TO BE ENCHANTED.

Depending on my mood, sometimes that sentence seemed to betoken forthcoming adventure and wonder. At other times, I drew from it a more threatening interpretation: PREPARE TO BE SCARED SHITLESS.

After returning the pass to the drawer, I lay awake for a while. I didn’t think I would sleep. Then I slept.

Three hours later, I sat up in bed, instantly awake and alert. Trembling with fear.

To the best of my knowledge, I hadn’t been awakened by a bad dream. No nightmare images lingered in memory.

Nevertheless, I woke with a completely formed and terrifying thought so oppressive that my heart felt as if it were being squeezed in a vise, and I could draw only quick shallow breaths.

If there were to be five terrible days in my life, I would not die on this one. In her inimitable way, however, Weena had pointed out that an exemption from death this September did not rule out severed limbs, mutilation, paralysis, and brain damage.

Neither could I rule out the death of someone else. Someone dear to me. My father, my mother, my grandmother …

If this were to be a terrible day because one of them would suffer a painful and violent death that would haunt me for the rest of my life, then I might wish that I had been the one to die.

I sat on the edge of the bed, glad that I had gone to sleep with the nightstand lamp aglow. My hands were slick with sweat and shaking so badly that I might not have been able either to find the switch or to turn it.

A close and loving family is a blessing. But the more people we love and the more deeply we love them, the more vulnerable we are to loss and grief and loneliness.

I was finished with sleep.

The bedside clock reported 1:30 P.M.

Less than half the day remained, only ten and a half hours until midnight.

In that time, however, a life could be taken, a world could end—and hope.

6

Millions of years before the Travel Channel existed to report the change, storms inside the earth had raised the land into serried waves, like a monsoon seascape, so any voyager in this territory is nearly always moving up or down, seldom on the horizontal.