The Vision (23 page)

The bats stayed with Alan. If anything, their cries grew louder, angrier.

Five steps down he fell, rolled to the next landing, got up, went on, plucked a bat from his nose, tried to shield his eyes with one arm, fell again, couldn’t keep from screaming, had to bite another bat that crawled from his chin into his mouth, had to spit out part of it, gagged, choked, stumbled, leaped from the final flight of stairs into the dark arcade and collapsed.

She walked out of the archway and stood over him.

He was very still.

One by one the bats rose from the body, circled, and flew back up the stairwell to the belfry.

After . . .

At noon the
December sun fell straight down on the cemetery, leaving virtually no shadows on the grass. There was a chill in the air that didn’t come from the sea wind; it radiated from the tombstones and the silent mourners and, most of all, from the plain dark casket suspended above the open grave.

As the winch motor began to purr and the coffin lowered out of sight, Mary turned away. She walked between the small granite and marble monuments toward the open wrought-iron gate, walked by herself, unassisted, alone, because that was what she wanted.

She sat for a while behind the wheel of the Mercedes and stared down the hills to the sea. She was waiting for her hands to stop shaking.

Yesterday, she had buried Alan; and in spite of what he had been and done, she had grieved for him. But this final ceremony was far sadder than yesterday’s. She felt as if a piece of her own flesh had been torn from her.

She needed to cry and wash some of the pain from her system, but she choked the sobs before they could start and squeezed back the tears. She had one more duty to perform before she could allow herself to break down.

She started the Mercedes and drove away from the cemetery.

* * *

Sunlight streamed through
the venetian blinds and banded the private hospital room with shadow and light.

Max was sitting up in bed, one shoulder heavily bandaged, one arm in a sling. He was drawn, sallow, sunken- eyed; but he had a gentle smile for Mary when she came through the door.

She kissed him and sat in the chair beside his bed. They held hands in silence for perhaps a minute; then she began to tell him about Lou’s funeral. When she had nothing more to say, she leaned away from her chair, rested her forehead on the edge of the mattress and finally began to weep. He murmured soothingly, massaged her neck, stroked her hair. She broke down completely. She cried out loud for Lou, but for herself as well; his death left a hole in her life. However, her despair couldn’t last forever; eventually, gradually, her sobbing subsided.

For a while they listened to classical music on the radio, neither of them able to speak.

Later, over dinner in the hospital room, her eyes grew heavy, and she couldn’t stifle her yawns. “Sorry. I didn’t get much sleep.”

“Nightmares?” Max asked, concerned.

“No. In fact, I had lovely dreams—the first pleasant dreams I’ve ever had in my life. I woke up about four- thirty in the morning, exhilarated, full of energy. I even went for a nice long walk.”

“You? A walk? Alone at night?”

She smiled. “I don’t mind being alone as much as I used to,” she said. “And I’m not afraid of the dark anymore.”

NEW AFTERWORD

by

DEAN KOONTZ

I wrote
The Vision
while living in Las Vegas, when I was young and stupid. I am older now, less stupid, and live in California. I do not worry that my deep well of stupidity will ever run dry, although it no longer overflows.

By the time I was twenty-one, the only smart thing that I’d ever done was to persuade Gerda Cerra to marry me. Looking back now, I can’t imagine how I induced her to say yes, especially considering that I never had to resort to a threat of self-immolation if she should turn me down.

When I was twenty-four, Gerda made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I was teaching school, writing fiction evenings and weekends, making some money from my books and short stories but not a steady living. If we could have lived in a tent and grazed in a meadow for our meals, it would have been a living, but I am hopelessly addicted to luxuries like Cheez Doodles. My singular wife offered to support us for five years while I stayed home and wrote. “If you can’t make it in five years,” she said, “you’ll never make it.” I seized upon her generous offer, whereupon many people in our lives let it be known that they considered me a self-deluded fool, a worthless leech who was living off his wife, and a really bad dancer. I had always been a really bad dancer, but no one remarked on my dance-floor ineptitude until I didn’t have a nine-to-five job, whereupon the long knives came out. Some were even scornful about the beard I grew, although when I see photographs from those days, I must admit that I looked as if a mange-afflicted possum had died on my face.

By the time I was thirty, I had been writing full-time for six years, and we had some savings. We could have bought any amount of Cheez Doodles we could consume. Indeed, Gerda had been able to quit her job two years earlier to help me with research and to deal with a growing volume of correspondence from agents and publishers worldwide. That winter in Pennsylvania was extremely cold. When anyone dared me to lick a flagpole, my tongue stuck to it
every time
. In the spring, there were forty days during which we never saw a scrap of blue sky. We were halfway finished building an ark when Gerda said, “Somewhere there’s sunshine, and we’re going to live there.”

That September, to live in the sun—and also because Nevada had no income tax—we moved to Las Vegas, where I discovered in short order that I was not only stupid but naïve. We were not sure that we would like Vegas, even though living there at that time meant we could see Wayne Newton perform six days a week. We decided to rent, and we found a lovely house with a big swimming pool. The owner was a doctor whom I never saw dressed in anything but tennis shoes, khakis, and Hawaiian shirts invariably bearing food stains. Gerda flew back to Pennsylvania to deal with the moving company, and I set about buying a new bed and making sure that the house was sparkling clean when she returned. Once we paid the security deposit and rent, I expected never to see the doctor again, only someone from the property-management company.

I was woefully wrong.

The physician—let’s call him Dr. Hyde—had left behind two desert tortoises, each about eighteen inches in diameter and weighing perhaps twenty pounds each. He said he would have them picked up in a couple of days, as soon as he had arranged a new home for them with a fellow tortoise aficionado. He asked me to keep watch over them so that they wouldn’t fall into the swimming pool and drown. Desert tortoises, he said, could not swim. The house had many large sliding-glass doors opening to the pool, so that I was easily able to check on the tortoises from time to time. I was diligent about looking out for them, largely because I didn’t want to have to give them mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. They were slow—and ambulatory only in daylight. If I saw one creeping close to the pool, I carried it far away from that potential watery grave to a distant corner of the backyard, which seemed to annoy the hell out of both of them.

Desert tortoises are not pretty, but their appearance isn’t their most off-putting quality. When they weren’t eating the food we put out for them, when they weren’t crawling toward the pool in a mean-spirited determination to keep me hopping, they were pooping. You would not think that a twenty-pound tortoise could produce all that much, but by late afternoon, the patio looked as if a horse had been dropping road apples.

During the next week, Dr. Hyde failed to remove the tortoises, but he visited me
every day
for three or four hours at a stretch. Drawing draperies and pretending not to be home didn’t thwart him. The house had a carport, not a garage, and, as long as he saw my car there, he assumed that the only reason I didn’t answer the doorbell was because I happened to be indisposed; therefore, he waited five minutes and rang it again. Once, I kept him waiting for forty minutes, and he rang the bell eight times. When at last I gave up and answered it, he said, “Wow, you must have had a really bad case of constipation.”

Considering that he was the owner of the house and at least a little bit screwy—and perhaps a little bit dangerous—I didn’t want to insult him bluntly. But, in time, it became clear that he
couldn’t
be insulted. To an uncanny degree, Hyde was equally impervious to insult, rudeness, and heartfelt pleas. Every plea and rude request to leave was interpreted by him as highly witty put-down humor. The doctor thought I was hilarious. Nothing I could say could make him even begin to suspect that I wasn’t as fascinated with his company as he was with mine.

He followed me around as I cleaned the house, and he was a nonstop talker. Among other things, I learned that he’d recently gone through a bitter divorce, that he had been banned from practicing medicine in two other states, and that he was currently learning Spanish. If his license got yanked in yet a third state, he figured he’d never get it back in the United States and would have to go to Mexico to practice medicine.

He told me his ex-wife had threatened to kill him and that she was probably serious. He advised me that she thought he was still living in the house and that I shouldn’t answer the door after dark unless I recognized the visitor through the fish-eye security lens. When he saw that I found this alarming, he assured me that I would be safe looking through the fish-eye because he’d had a quarter-inch steel sheet sandwiched inside the door to stop a bullet. This was a door with three inlaid decorative panels down the center, however, and the intense heat of summer in Vegas had caused the panels to shrink, opening narrow cracks along one side of them—cracks through which I could see sunshine unobstructed by steel.

As Dr. Hyde kept me company, he drank sixteen-ounce cans of Coors beer, which he got from an ice-filled cooler in the back of his car. One day, when he’d poured down four of those beers in two hours, he went to his car to get a fifth, and I accompanied him with the hope of nudging him to leave. Taking the beer from the cooler, chancing to see his wristwatch, he exclaimed, “Son of a bitch, I’m going to be late for an appendectomy!” He departed at high speed, peeling rubber in the street.

After Gerda returned, our landlord finally took away the tortoises and stopped coming around quite so frequently, but in the middle of our third week, just after all of our furniture and other belongings were delivered from Pennsylvania, a vile smell began to rise throughout the house. It seemed to be coming from the carpet, but the carpet appeared to be clean. We couldn’t get any satisfaction out of the leasing agent, and Dr. Hyde—alerted by said agent—suddenly was nowhere to be found. From the next-door neighbor, we discovered that the physician and his now ex-wife had kept more than thirty animals in the house, and not just dogs and cats. There were also two monkeys, an iguana, a skunk from which the nasty scent glands had been removed, a pair of tortoises, and God knew what else. According to the neighbor, none of the animals had been housebroken, which didn’t surprise me, considering that the doctor himself seemed hardly housebroken.

When we called in a carpet-cleaning company to tell us what might be done, the representative didn’t have good news. The carpet had been steam cleaned, but that was insufficient. It would have to be taken up and steam cleaned on
both
sides. The carpet padding would have to be thrown away. The concrete-slab floor would have to be lightly sanded, cleaned, and sealed. New padding would have to be put down and the double-cleaned carpet laid once more. “Even then,” he said, “there’s likely to be a kind of, sort of, you know, lingering funny smell.”

As the stench grew stronger by the hour, I was of the opinion that only a tactical nuclear weapon might fully resolve the problem.

After getting an attorney, we were able to break the lease and have our security deposit and last month’s rent refunded. But the Realtor kept the first month’s rent because, after all, we had enjoyed Dr. Hyde’s delightful company and the unforgettable experience of living in the aftermath of a zoo for three weeks.

We went to a different leasing agent, who found us an even more beautiful house on the opposite side of town from our first Las Vegas residence. The place contained just a few pieces of furniture. The owners had moved to Los Angeles, and their son, an attorney, was living there with his nephew to keep the place in good shape until it could be rented. On a Friday, we wrote a check for two months’ rent and a security deposit, and we were told that he would move out over the weekend, taking with him what furniture remained.

On Monday, at nine o’clock as arranged, while Gerda stayed behind at Dr. Hyde’s house to oversee the moving company, I went to meet the owner’s son and his nephew. The doorbell woke them. They were bleary-eyed and surprised to see me. They hadn’t yet taken out the few pieces of furniture, which was dismaying. But they claimed to have emptied the closet of their clothes. They proposed to borrow a friend’s truck, be back in fifteen minutes, and clear out the place just ahead of our moving van. They kindly invited me to relax inside, out of the morning heat.

I didn’t feel right going into the house when some of their belongings were still there. I waited outside. But when they didn’t return in an hour, I became suspicious. I decided to go into the place and ascertain if, in fact, they had emptied the closet. When I tried the front door, I discovered the lock was broken. My suspicion grew because, well, I’m just a misanthrope who doesn’t trust anyone.

When we had toured the house with the Realtor and the owners’ son, he had said the phones were disconnected and that we would have to arrange for service. It seemed an odd thing for him to say at the time, since, of course, a rental house didn’t come with phone service. Now, when I lifted the receiver on the kitchen phone, I got a dial tone. By the time I called the Realtor and got hold of her, I had but one question: “Are you certain that the person from whom you rented this house is in fact authorized to rent it?” She said that of course he was the owners’ son, just as he said. When I asked if she had already presented him with the money we had paid minus her commission, she said that she had done so. I persisted, asking
how
she knew that she was dealing for the true owners, and she got huffy, informing me that I was something like “too paranoid.”

At that moment, someone behind me said, “What are you doing in my house?” I turned to find myself in the company of the true owner and two police officers who had come to evict the man who, through a Realtor, had brazenly rented out a house he didn’t own and from which he had once before been evicted before breaking the lock and returning. The owners had not moved to Los Angeles. The man who conned us was not the owners’ son. He was not an attorney but a sociologist teaching at a major Southern California university. The young man with him wasn’t his nephew but his lover.

The real owner was so bummed out by all this that he didn’t want to rent the house to us or to anyone else ever again, until the end of time. We had to put our furniture in storage until we could find a third house. We lived in a motel for a few days, but eventually found a nice house with a pool. We rented it from its real owner: the comedian, Rip Taylor, who was famous for his huge handlebar mustache, his loony demeanor, and for dumping a shopping bag full of confetti all over the audience as he exited the stage.

Rip turned out to be a great landlord and a good guy. Whether he was as flighty in real life as on the stage, I can’t be sure, although except for the confetti, he certainly seemed to be pretty much the same. On his birthday that year, we were invited to his party, and in his home, on a wall in his study, were photos of Rip with all kinds of celebrities—but also one of him very young and in uniform with some other soldiers. With much of the flamboyant hilarity that he brought to his stage act, he told me that he had been in army intelligence, and when I expressed doubt, he was able to prove it.

During the following eleven—and more settled—months that we lived in Las Vegas, I wrote
The Vision
and
The Face of Fear
. They are simpler books than the kind of thing for which I later became known, small suspense novels with a twist. If I’d continued writing this kind of thing, I would never have made a bestseller list. But writers learn by writing, and I found my way to my real voice, style, and mix of genres by working on books like this for about seven or eight years. I have not put most of my early books back into print and never will, because they were written when I was just
too
stupid. But
The Vision
delivers some chills and thrills and is, I think, a bit of dark fun. As you have by now ascertained, I don’t have much to say about this book, and what I find most interesting about it is the conditions under which it was written: tortoises, mad doctors, and con men.

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