Dean Koontz - Life Expectancy

Sometimes the story was about a Snow White whose seven dwarf friends suffered fatal accidents and diseases until it was Snow alone against the evil queen. Come to think of it, a two-ton safe fell on Happy once. That was a lot cleaner than what happened to poor Sneezy. Or maybe Weena would read the one about Cinderella—the dangerous glass slippers splintering painfully around Cindy’s feet, the pumpkin coach plunging off the road into the ravine.

I was a grown man before I discovered that in Arnold Lobel’s charming Frog and Toad books, there was not always a scene in which one or the other of the title characters had a foot gnawed off by another meadowland creature.

“I didn’t have a caring mother,” the maniac said, a disturbing note of whiny distress entering his voice. “My childhood was hard, cold, and loveless.”

Now occurred an unexpected turn of events: My fear of being shot to death took second place to the dread that this guy would harangue us with a droning account of his victimization. Beaten with wire coathangers. Forced to wear girly clothes until he was six. Sent to bed without his porridge.

I didn’t need to get kidnapped, cuffed, and held at gunpoint to be subjected to a pityfest. I could have stayed home and watched daytime-TV talk shows.

Fortunately, he bit his lip, stiffened his spine, and said, “It’s a waste of time to dwell on the past. What’s done is done.”

Un fortunately, the glimmer of teary self-pity in his eyes was not replaced by that charming twinkle, but instead by a fanatical gleam.

The spider had not continued its descent. It hung in front of our faces, perhaps freaked out by the sight of us and frozen in fear.

As though he were a vintner plucking a grape from a vine, the maniac pinched the fat spider between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, crushed it, and brought the mangled remains to his nose to savor the scent.

I hoped he wouldn’t offer me a sniff. I have a highly refined sense of smell, which is one reason that I’m a natural-born baker.

Fortunately, he had no intention of sharing the heady fragrance.

Un fortunately, he brought the morsel to his mouth and delicately licked the arachnid paste. He savored this strange fruit, decided it was not sufficiently ripe, and wiped his fingers on the sleeve of his jacket.

Here was a graduate of Hannibal Lecter University, ready for a career in hospitality services as the new manager of the Bates Motel.

This spider-sampling had not been a performance for our benefit. The entire incident had been as unconscious as shooing away a fly, except the opposite.

Now, quite unaware of the effect his culinary curiosity had on us, he said, “Anyway, the time for talking is long past. It’s time for action now, for justice.”

“And how will that justice be achieved?” Lorrie wondered. For the moment, anyway, she was no longer able to maintain a sprightly, let alone flippant, let alone devil-may-care tone of voice.

In spite of his adult baritone, he sounded uncannily like an angry little boy: “I’m going to blow up a lot of stuff and kill a bunch of people and make this town sorry.”

“Sounds pretty ambitious,” she said.

“I’ve been planning this all my life.”

Having changed my mind, I said, “Actually, I’d really like to hear about the coathangers.”

“What coathangers?” he asked.

Before I could talk my way into a bullet between the eyes, Lorrie said, “Do you think I could have my purse?”

He frowned. “Why?”

“It’s a female emergency.”

I couldn’t believe she was going to do this. I knew I hadn’t won the argument, but I assumed that I’d put enough doubt in her mind to give her second thoughts.

“Female emergency?” the maniac asked. “What’s that mean?”

“You know,” she said coyly.

For a guy who looked like a babe magnet able to draw swooning women like iron filings from a hundred-mile radius, he proved surprisingly obtuse in this matter. “How would I know?”

“It’s that time of month,” she said.

He claimed bafflement. “The middle?”

As if it were infectious, Lorrie caught his bewilderment: “The middle?”

“It’s the middle of the month,” he reminded her. “The fifteenth of September. So what?”

“It’s my time of month,” she elucidated.

He just stared at her, befuddled.

“ I’m having my period ,” she declared impatiently.

The furrows in his brow were smoothed away by understanding. “Ah. A female emergency.”

“Yes. That’s right. Hallelujah. Now may I have my purse?”

“Why?”

If she ever got her hands on that nail file, she would plunge it into him with enthusiasm.

“I need a tampon,” she said.

“You’re saying there’s a tampon in your purse?”

“Yes.”

“And you need it now, you can’t wait?”

“No, I absolutely can’t wait,” she confirmed. Then she played to his compassionate side, which he hadn’t shown to the head-shot librarian, but which she seemed to think must be there, considering that he had not been actually rude: “I’m sorry, gee, this is so embarrassing.”

Regarding matters female, he might be a bit thick, but regarding Machiavellian schemes, he smelled a rat instantly: “What’s really in your purse—a gun?”

Admitting that she had been caught out, Lorrie shrugged. “No gun. Just a pointy metal nail file.”

“You were going to—what?—stab me in the carotid artery?”

“Only if I couldn’t get one of your eyes,” she said.

He raised his pistol, and though he pointed it at her, I figured that once he started blasting away, he’d drill me, too. I’d seen what he’d done to the newspaper.

“I should kill you dead right here,” he said, although without any animosity in his voice.

“You should,” she agreed. “I would if I were you.”

He grinned and shook his head. “What a piece of work.”

“Right back at ya,” she said, and matched his grin.

My teeth were revealed molar to molar, as well, though my grin was so tight with anxiety that it hurt my face.

“All these years, planning for this day,” the maniac said, “I expected it to be gratifying in a savage sort of way, even thrilling, but I never thought it would be as much fun as this.”

Lorrie said, “A party can never be better than the guests you invite.”

The lunatic killer considered this as if Lorrie had quoted one of the most complex philosophical propositions of Schopenhauer. He nodded solemnly, rolled his tongue over his teeth, uppers and lowers, as though he could taste the brilliance of those words, and finally he said, “How true. How very true.”

I realized that I wasn’t holding up my end of the conversation. I didn’t want him to get the idea that a party of two might be more fun than three.

When I opened my mouth—no doubt to say something even more inappropriate than my stupid coathangers line, something that would bring me closer to a bullet in the groin—a great hollow peal tolled through the vaulted subcellar. King Kong pounded his mighty fists one, two, three times against the giant door in the massive wall that separated his half of the island from the half where the nervous natives lived.

The maniac brightened at the sound. “That’ll be Honker and Crinkles. You’ll like them. They have the explosives.”

11

As it turned out, Cornelius Randolph Snow not only had a keen appreciation for fine Victorian architecture but also for Victorian hugger-mugger of the kind that flourished in melodramas of the period and that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had used with singular effect in his immortal Sherlock Holmes yarns: concealed doors, hidden rooms, blind staircases, secret passageways.