Read Koontz, Dean R. - Mr. Murder Page 15


  sooner or later he'd be back, just as weird and crazy but even angrier,

  better prepared. Marty had to finish what he started before his double

  had a chance to do the same.

  He glanced at the phone. Dial 911. Get the police, then go after the

  wounded man.

  But the desk clock was beside the phone, and he saw the time-4,26.

  Paige and the girls. On their way home from school, later than usual,

  delayed by piano lessons. Oh, my God. If they came into the house and

  saw the other Marty, or found him in the garage, they'd think he was

  their Marty, and they'd run to him, frightened by his wounds, wanting to

  help, and maybe he would still be strong enough to harm them. Was the

  pistol that he dropped his only weapon? Can't make that assumption.

  Besides, the son of a bitch could get a knife out of the rack in the

  kitchen, the butcher's knife, hide it against his side, behind his back,

  let Emily get close, then jam it through her throat, or deep into

  Charlotte's belly.

  Every second counted. Forget 911. Waste of time. The cops wouldn't

  get there before Paige.

  As Marty rounded the desk, his legs were wobbly, but less so as he

  crossed the room toward the hallway. He saw blood splattered on the

  wall, oozing down the spines of his own books, staining his name. A

  creeping tide of darkness lapped at the edges of his vision again. He

  clenched his teeth and kept going.

  When he reached the double's pistol, he kicked it deeper into the room,

  farther from the doorway. That simple act gave him a surge of

  confidence because it seemed like something a cop would have the

  presence of mind to do--make it harder for the perp to regain his

  weapon.

  Maybe he could handle this, get through it, as strange and scary as it

  was, the blood and all. Maybe he would be okay.

  So nail the guy. Make sure he's down, all the way down and all the way

  out.

  To write his mystery novels, he'd done a lot of research into police

  procedures, not merely studying police-academy textbooks and training

  films but riding with uniformed cops on night patrols and hanging out

  with plainclothes detectives on and off the job. He knew perfectly well

  how best to go through a doorway under these circumstances.

  Don't be too confident. Figure the creep has another weapon besides the

  one he dropped, gun or knife. Stay low, clear that doorway fast.

  Easier to die in a doorway than anywhere else because every door opens

  on the unknown. Keep your gun in both hands as you move, arms in front

  of you, straight and locked, sweep left and right as you cross the

  threshold, swinging the gun to cover both flanks Then slip to one side

  or the othe rand keep your back against the wall as you move, so you

  always know your back is safe, only three sides to worry about.

  All of that wisdom flashed through his mind, as it might have passed

  through the mind of one of his hard-nosed police characters--yet he

  behaved like any panicked civilian, stumbling heedlessly into the

  upstairs hall, holding the pistol in only his right hand, arms loose,

  breathing explosively, making more of a target than a threat of himself,

  because when you came right down to it, he wasn't a cop, only an asshole

  who sometimes wrote about them. No matter how long you indulged the

  fantasy, you couldn't live the fantasy, you couldn't act like a cop in a

  pressurized situation unless you had trained like a cop. He had been as

  guilty as anyone of confusing reality and fiction, thinking he was as

  invincible as the hero on a printed page, and he'd been damned lucky the

  other Marty hadn't been waiting for him. The upstairs hall was

  deserted.

  He looked exactly like me.

  Couldn't think about that now, no time for it yet. Concentrate on

  staying alive, wasting the bastard before he hurt Paige or the girls.

  If you survive, there'll be time to seek an explanation for that

  astonishing resemblance, solve the mystery, but not now.

  Listen. Movement?

  Maybe.

  No. Nothing.

  Keep the gun up, muzzle aimed ahead.

  Just outside the office doorway, a smeary handprint in wet blood marred

  the wall. A horrid amount of blood was puddled on the light-beige

  carpet there. At least part of the time when Marty had stood behind his

  desk, stunned and temporarily immobilized by the violence, the wounded

  man had leaned against this hallway wall, perhaps trying unsuccessfully

  to staunch his bleeding wounds.

  Marty was sweating, nauseated and afraid. Perspiration trickled into

  the corner of his left eye, stinging, blurring his vision. He blotted

  his slick forehead with his shirt sleeve, blinked furiously to wash the

  salt out of his eye.

  When the intruder had shoved away from the wall and started

  moving--perhaps while Marty was still frozen behind his desk--he had

  walked through his own pooled blood. His route was marked by

  fragmentary red imprints of the ridged patterns on athletic-shoe soles

  as well as by a continuous scarlet drizzle.

  Silence in the house. With a little luck, maybe it was the silence of

  the dead.

  Shivering, Marty cautiously followed the repulsive trail past the hall

  bath, around the corner, past the double-door entrance to the dark

  master bedroom, past the head of the stairs. He stopped at that point

  where the second-floor hall became a gallery overlooking the living

  room.

  On his right was a bleached oak railing, beyond which hung the brass

  chandelier that he'd switched on when he'd passed through the foyer

  earlier. Below the chandelier were the descending stairs and the

  two-story, tile-floored entrance foyer that flowed directly into the

  two-story living room.

  To his left and a few feet farther along the gallery was the room Paige

  used as a home office. One day it would become another bedroom for

  Charlotte or Emily when they decided they were ready to sleep

  separately. The door stood half open. Bat-black shadows swarmed

  beyond, relieved only by the gray storm light of the waning day, which

  hardly penetrated the windows.

  The blood trail led past that office to the end of the gallery, directly

  to the door of the girls' bedroom, which was closed. The intruder was

  in there, and it was infuriating to think of him among the girls'

  belongings, touching things, tainting their room with his blood and

  madness.

  He recalled the angry voice, touched with lunacy yet so like his own

  voice, My Paige, she's mine, my Charlotte, my Emily . . .

  "Like hell, they're yours," Marty said, keeping the Smith & Wesson aimed

  squarely at the closed door.

  He glanced at his wristwatch.

  4,28.

  Now what?

  He could stay there in the hallway, ready to blow the bastard to Hell if

  the door opened. Wait for Paige and the kids, shout to them when they

  came in, tell Paige to call 911. Then she could hustle the kids across

  the street to Vic and Kathy Delorio's house, where they'd be safe, while

  he covered the door until the police arrived.
/>
  That plan sounded good, responsible, cool and calm. Briefly, the

  knocking of his heart against his ribs became less insistent, less

  punishing.

  Then the curse of a writer's imagination hit him hard, a black whirlpool

  sucking him down into dark possibilities, the curse of what if, what if,

  what if. What if the other Marty was still strong enough to push open

  the window in the girls' room, climb out onto the patio cover at the

  back of the house, and jump down to the lawn from there?

  What if he fled along the side of the house and out to the street just

  as Paige was pulling into the driveway with the girls?

  It might happen. Could happen. Would happen. Or something else just

  as bad would happen, worse. The whirlpool of reality spun out more

  terrible possibilities than the darkest thoughts of any writer's mind.

  In this age of social dissolution, even on the most peaceful streets in

  the quietest neighborhoods, unexpected acts of grotesque savagery could

  occur, whereupon people were shocked and horrified but not surprised.

  He might be guarding the door to a deserted room.

  4,29.

  Paige might be turning the corner two blocks away, entering their

  street.

  Maybe the neighbors had heard the gunshots and had already called the

  police. Please, God, let that be the case.

  He had no conscionable choice but to throw open the door to the girls'

  room, go in, and confirm whether The Other was there or not.

  The Other. In his office, when the confrontation had begun, he'd

  quickly dismissed his initial thought that he was dealing with something

  supernatural. A spirit could not be as solid and three-dimensional as

  side of the line between life and death would not be vulnerable to

  bullets. Yet a feeling of the uncanny persisted, weighed heavier on him

  moment by moment. Although he suspected that the nature of this

  adversary was far stranger than ghosts or shape-changing demons, that it

  was simultaneously more terrifying and more mundane, that it was born of

  this world and no other, he nevertheless could not help but think of it

  in terms usually reserved for stories of haunting spirits, Ghost,

  Phantom, Revenant, Apparition, Specter, The Uninvited, The Undying, The

  Entity.

  The Other.

  The door waited.

  The silence of the house was deeper than death.

  Already focused narrowly on the pursuit of The Other, Marty's attention

  constricted further, until he was oblivious of his own heartbeat, blind

  to everything but the door, deaf to all sounds except those that might

  come from the girls' room, conscious of no sensation except the pressure

  of his finger on the trigger of the pistol.

  The blood trail.

  Red fragments of shoeprints.

  The door.

  Waiting.

  He was rooted in indecision.

  The door.

  Something suddenly clattered above him. He snapped his head back and

  looked at the ceiling. He was directly under the three-footsquare,

  seven-foot-deep shaft that soared up to a dome-shaped Plexiglas sky

  clatter of rain.

  As if the strain of indecision had snapped him back to the full spectrum

  of reality, he was abruptly deluged by all the voices of the storm, of

  which he'd been utterly unaware while tracking The Other.

  He'd been intently listening through the background racket for the

  stealthier sounds of his quarry. Now the wind's gibbering-hooting

  moaning, the rataplan of rain, fulminant thunder, the bony scraping of a

  tree limb against one side of the house, the tinny rattle of a loose

  section of rain gutter, and less identifiable noises flooded over him.

  The neighbors couldn't have heard gunshots above the raging storm. So

  much for that hope.

  Marty seemed to be swept forward by the tumult, along the blood trail,

  one hesitant step, then another, inexorably toward the waiting door.

  The storm ushered in an early twilight, bleak and protracted, and Paige

  had the headlights on all the way home from the girls' school.

  Though turned to the highest speed, the windshield wipers could barely

  cope with the cataracts that poured out of the draining sky.

  Either the latest drought would be broken this rainy season or nature

  was playing a cruel trick by raising expectations she would not fulfill.

  Intersections were flooded. Gutters overflowed. The BMW spread great

  white wings of water as it passed through one deep puddle after another.

  And out of the misty murk, the headlights of oncoming cars swam at them

  like the searching lamps of bathyscaphes probing deep ocean trenches.

  "We're a submarine," Charlotte said excitedly from the passenger seat

  beside Paige, looking out of the side window through plumes of tire

  spray, "swimming with the whales, Captain Nemo and the autihis twenty

  thousand leagues beneath the sea, giant squids stalking us.

  Remember the giant squid, Mom, from the movie?"

  "I remember," Paige said without taking her eyes from the road.

  "Up periscope," Charlotte said, gripping the handles of that imaginary

  instrument, squinting through the eyepiece. "Raiding the sea lanes,

  ramming ships with our super-strong steel bow--boom!-and the crazy

  captain playing his huge pipe organ! You remember the pipe organ, Mom?"

  "I remember."

  "Diving deeper, deeper, the pressure hull starting to crack, but the

  crazy Captain Nemo says deeper, playing his pipe organ and saying

  deeper, and all the time here comes the squid." She broke into the

  shark's theme from the movie Jaws, "Dum-dum, dum-dum, dumdum, dum-dum,

  da-da-dum!"

  "That's silly," Emily said from the rear seat.

  Charlotte turned in her shoulder harness to look back between the front

  seats. "What's silly?"

  "Giant squid."

  "Oh, is that so? Maybe you wouldn't think they were so silly ùf you

  were swimming and one of them came up under you and bit you in half, ate

  you in two bites, then spit out your bones like grape

  "Squid don't eat

  people," Emily said.

  "Of course they do."

  "Other way around."

  "Huh?"

  "People eat squid," Emily said.

  "No way."

  "Way."

  "Where'd you get a dumb idea like that?"

  "Saw it on a menu at a restaurant."

  "What restaurant?" Charlotte asked.

  "Couple different restaurants. You were there. Isn't it true,

  Mom--don't people eat squid?"

  "Yes, they do," Paige agreed.

  "You're just agreeing with her so she won't look like a dumb

  seven-year-old," Charlotte said skeptically.

  "No, it's true," Paige assured her. "People eat squid."

  "How?" Charlotte asked, as if the very thought beggared her

  imagination.

  "Well," Paige said, braking for a red traffic light, "not all in one

  piece, you know."

  "I guess not!" Charlotte said. "Not a giant squid, anyway."

  "You can slice the tentacles and saute them in garlic butter for one

  thing," Paige said, and looked at her daughter to see what impact that

  bit of culinary news would have.

  Charlot
te grimaced and faced forward again. "You're trying to gross me

  out."

  "Tastes good," Paige insisted.

  "I'd rather eat dirt."

  "Tastes better than dirt, I assure you."

  Emily piped up from the back seat again, "You can also slice their

  tentacles and french-fry 'em."

  "That's right," Paige said.

  Charlotte's judgment was simple and direct, "Yuck."

  "They're like little onion rings, only squid," Emily said.

  "This is sick."

  "Little gummy french-fried squid rings dripping gooey squid ink," Emily

  said, and giggled.

  Turning in her seat again to look at her sister, Charlotte said, "You're

  a disgusting troll."

  "Anyway," Emily said, "we're not in a submarine."

  "Of course we're not," Charlotte said. "We're in a car."

  "No, we're in a hypofoil."

  "A what?"

  Emily said, "Like we saw on TV that time, the boat that goes between

  England and somewhere, and it rides on top of the water, really

  zoooooming along."