One Door Away From Heaven (21 page)

Chapter 26

AT THE TOP OF THE SLOPE, dog and boy—one panting, one gasping—halt and turn to look back toward the highway, which lies a third of a mile to the south.

If Curtis had just finished a plate of dirt for dinner, his tongue could not have felt grainier than it did now, and the plaque of dust gritting between his teeth could not have been more vile. He is unable to work up enough saliva to spit out a foul alkaline taste. Having been raised for a time on the edge of a desert more forbidding than this one, he knows that sprinting flat-out through such terrain in twenty-percent humidity, even long after sundown, is extremely debilitating. They have hardly begun to run, and already he feels parched.

On the bosom of the dark plain below, a half-mile necklace of stopped traffic, continually growing longer, twinkles diamond-bright and ruby-red. From this elevation, he can see the interdiction point to the southwest. The westbound lanes are blocked by police vehicles that form a gate, and traffic is being funneled down from three lanes to one.

North of the highway, near the roadblock, the large, armored, and perhaps armed helicopter stands in open land. The rotors aren’t turning, but evidently the engines are running, since the interior is softly illuminated. From the open double-bay doors in the chopper’s fuselage, sufficient light escapes to reveal men gathered alongside the craft. At this distance, it’s impossible to discern whether these are additional SWAT-team units or uniformed troops.

With a
Grrrrrrrrr,
spoken and thought, Old Yeller draws Curtis’s attention away from the chopper in the west to action in the east.

Two big SUVs, modified for police use, with racks of rotating red and blue emergency beacons on their roofs, sirens silent, are departing the interstate. They descend the gently sloped embankment and proceed westward across open terrain, paralleling but bypassing the halted traffic on the highway.

Curtis assumes they will continue past him, all the way to the roadblock. Instead, they slow to a stop at a point where a group of people apparently waits for them on the embankment approximately due south of him.

He hadn’t noticed this gathering of tiny figures before: Eight or ten motorists have descended part of the slope from the highway. Three have flashlights, which they’ve used to flag down the SUVs.

Above this group, on the interstate, a larger crowd—forty or fifty strong—has formed along the shoulder, watching the activity below. They have assembled just west of the Windchaser owned by the psychotic teeth collectors.

Alerted by Curtis’s warning as he’d fled the motor home, maybe other motorists investigated the Windchaser. Having found the grisly souvenirs, they have made a citizens’ arrest of the geriatric serial killers and are holding them for justice.

Or maybe not.

From the roadblock, vehicle to vehicle, word might have filtered back to the effect that the authorities are searching for a young boy and a harlequin dog. A motorist—the jolly freckled man with the mop of red hair and one sandal, or perhaps the murderous retirees in the Windchaser—could then have used a cell phone or an in-car computer to report that the fugitive pair had only minutes ago created a scene on the interstate before fleeing north into the wildland.

Below, the three flashlights swivel in unison and point due north. Toward Curtis.

He’s at too great a distance for those beams to expose him. And in the absence of a moon, although he stands on the ridge line, the sky is too dark to reveal him in silhouette.

Nevertheless, instinctively he crouches when the lights point toward him, making himself no taller than one of the scattered clumps of sagebrush that stipple the landscape. He puts one hand on the back of the dog’s neck. Together they wait, alert.

The scale of these events and the rapidity with which they are unfolding allow for no measurable effect of willpower. Yet Curtis wishes with all his might that what appears to be happening between the motorists and the law-enforcement officers in those two SUVs is not happening. He wishes they would just continue westward, along the base of the highway embankment, until they reach the helicopter. He pictures this in his mind, envisions it vividly, and wishes, wishes, wishes.

If wishes were fishes, no hooks would be needed, no line and no rod, no reel and no patience. But wishes are merely wishes, swimming only the waters of the mind, and now one of the SUVs guns its engine, swings north, drives maybe twenty feet deeper into the desert, and brakes to a halt, facing toward Curtis.

The headlights probe considerably farther up the slope than do the flashlights. But they still reach far less than halfway toward Curtis and Old Yeller.

On the roof of the SUV, a searchlight suddenly blazes, so powerful and so tightly focused that it appears to have the substance of a sword. Motorized, the lamp moves, and each time the slicing beam finds sagebrush or a gnarled spray of withered weeds, it cuts loose twisted shadows that leap into the night. Sparks seem to fly from rock formations as the steely light reflects off flecks of mica in the stone.

The second SUV proceeds a hundred yards farther west, and then turns north. A searchlight flares on the roof, stabbing out from the jeweled hilt of red and blue emergency beacons.

Paralleling each other, these two vehicles move north, toward Curtis. They grind along slowly, sweeping the landscape ahead of them with light, hoping to spot an obviously trampled clump of weeds or deep footprints where table stone gives way to a swale of soft sand.

Sooner rather than later, they are likely to find the spoor they seek. Then they will pick up speed.

The officers in the SUVs are operating under the aegis of one legitimate law-enforcement agency or another, and they most likely are who they appear to be. There’s always the chance, however, that they might instead be more of the ferocious killers who struck in Colorado and who have pursued Curtis ever since.

Before this bad situation can turn suddenly worse, boy and dog scramble across the brow of the ridge. Ahead, the land slopes down toward dark and arid realms.

Relinquishing leadership to Old Yeller, he follows her, although not as fast as she would like to lead. He skids and nearly falls on a cascade of loose shale, thrashes through an unseen cluster of knee-high sage, is snared on a low cactus, crying out involuntarily as the sharp spines prickle through the sock on his right foot and tattoo a pattern of pain on his ankle—all because he doesn’t always proceed exactly in the dog’s wake, but at times ranges to the left and right of her.

Trust. They are bonding: He has no doubt that their relationship is growing deeper by the day, better by the hour. Yet they are still becoming what they eventually will be to each other, not yet entirely synchronized spirit to spirit. Curtis is reluctant to commit blindly and headlong to his companion’s lead until they have achieved total synergism.

Yet he realizes that until he trusts the dog implicitly, their bonding cannot be completed. Until then, they will be a boy and his dog, a dog and her boy, which is a grand thing, beautiful and true, but not as fine a relationship as that of the cross-species siblings they could become, brother and sister of the heart.

Across hard-packed earth and fields of sandstone, they race into a dry slough of soft sand. The surefooted dog at once adapts to this abrupt change in the terrain, but because Curtis is not fully attuned to his sister-becoming, he blunders after her into the waterless bog without adjusting his pace or step. He sinks to his ankles, is thrown off-balance, and topples forward, imprinting his face in the sand, fortunately quick-thinking enough to close his eyes and his mouth before making a solid but graceless impact.

Raising his face out of its concave image, snorting sand out of his nostrils, blowing a silicate frosting off his lips, blinking grains from his eyelashes, Curtis pushes up onto his knees. If his mother’s spirit abides with him now, she is laughing, worried, and frustrated all at once.

Old Yeller returns to him. He thinks she’s offering the usual doggy commiseration, maybe laughing at him a little, too, but then he realizes that her attention is elsewhere.

The moonless darkness baffles, but the dog is close enough for Curtis to see that she’s interested in the top of the hill that they recently crossed. Raising her snout, she seeks scents that he can’t apprehend. She clenches her muzzle to stop panting, pricks her ears toward whatever sound engages her.

A flux of light throbs through the air beyond the ridge line: the moving searchlight beams reflecting off the pale stone and soil as the SUVs ascend the slope.

Although Curtis can’t prick his ears—one of the drawbacks of being Curtis Hammond instead of being Old Yeller—he follows the dog’s example and holds his breath, the better to detect whatever noise caught her attention. At first he hears only the grumble of the SUVs…. Then, in the distance, a flutter of sound arises, faint but unmistakable: helicopter rotors beating the thin desert air.

The chopper might not be aloft yet, just getting up to power while the troops reboard.

Whether already airborne or not, it will be coming. Soon. And if the craft itself doesn’t possess the latest electronic search-and-locate gear, the troops will. Darkness won’t thwart them. They have special ways of seeing that make the night as penetrable as daylight.

Trust. Curtis has no choice now but to put his full faith in the dog. If they are to be free, they will be free only together. Whether they live or die, they will live or die as one. His destiny is hers, and her fate is inseparably twined with his. If she leads him out of this danger or if she leads him off the edge of a high cliff, so be it; even in his dying fall, he will love her, his sister-becoming.

A little moonlight nevertheless would be welcome. Rising out of the distant mountains, great wings of black clouds span the western sky, and continue to unfurl in this direction, as though a vault deep in the earth has cracked open to release a terrible presence that is spreading its dominion over all the world. A generous seasoning of stars salts the clear part of the sky, but still the desert steadily darkles, minute by minute, deeper than mere night.

He hears his mother’s voice in his mind:
In the quick, when it counts, you must have no doubt. Spit out all your doubt, breathe it out, pluck it from your heart, tear it loose from your mind, throw it away, be rid of it. We weren’t born into this universe to doubt. We were born to hope, to love, to live, to learn, to know joy, to have faith that our lives have meaning…and to find The Way.

Banishing doubt, seizing hope with a desperation grip, Curtis swallows hard and prepares himself for an exhilarating journey.

Go, pup,
he says or only thinks.

She goes.

With no hesitation, determined to make his mother proud, to be daring and courageous, the boy sprints after the dog. Being Curtis Hammond, he isn’t designed for speed as well as Old Yeller is, but she matches her pace to meet his fastest sprint, leading him north into the barrens.

Through darkness he flees, all but blind, not without fear but purged of doubt, across sandstone but also sand, across loose shale, between masses of sage and weather-sculpted thrusts of rock, zigging and zagging, legs reaching for the land ahead, sneakered feet landing with assurance on terrain that had previously been treacherous, arms pump-pump-pumping like the connecting rods on the driving wheels of a locomotive, the dog often visible in front of him, but sometimes seen less than sensed, sometimes seen not at all, but always reappearing, the two of them bonding more intimately the farther they travel, spirit sewn to spirit with the strong thread of Curtis’s reckless trust.

Running with this strange blind exuberance, he loses all sense of distance and time, so he doesn’t know how far they have gone when the quality of the night abruptly changes, one moment marked by a worrisome air of danger and the next moment
thick
with a terrifying sense of peril. Curtis’s heart, furiously drumming from the physical demands of flight, now booms also with fear. Into the night has entered a threat more ominous than that represented by the officers in the SUVs and the troops in the helicopter. Dog and therefore boy together recognize that they are no longer merely the objects of a feverish search, but again the game in a hunt, the prey of predators, for in the August gloom arise new scents-sounds-pressures-energies that raise the hackles on Old Yeller and pebble-texture the nape of Curtis’s neck. Death is in the desert, striding the sand and sage, stealthy under the stars.

Drawing on reserves that he didn’t know he possessed, the boy runs faster. And the dog. In harmony.

Chapter 27

SNAKE KILLED, mother patched, prayers said, Leilani retired to bed in the blessed dark.

Since the age of three or four, she hadn’t wanted a night-light. As a
little
little girl, she’d thought that a luminous Donald Duck or a radiant plastic Tweetie Bird would ward off hungry demons and spare her from all sorts of supernatural unpleasantness, but she had soon learned that night-lights were more likely to draw the demon than repel it.

Old Sinsemilla sometimes rambled in the most wee of the wee hours, restless because she craved drugs or because she had stuffed herself with too many drugs, or maybe just because she was a haunted woman. Though she had no respect for her children’s need to sleep, she was inexplicably less inclined to wake them when the room was dark than when a plug-in cartoon character watched over them.

Scooby Doo, Buzz Lightyear, the Lion King, Mickey Mouse—they all drew Sinsemilla into their light. She’d often awakened Luki and Leilani from sound sleep to tell them bedtime stories, and she had seemed to deliver these narratives as much to Scooby or to Buzz as to her children, as though these were not molded-plastic lamps made in Taiwan, but graven images of benign gods that listened and that were moved by her tears.

Tears always punctuated the conclusions of her bedtime stories. When she told fairy tales, the classic yarns on which they were based could be recognized, although she fractured the narratives so badly that they made no sense. Snow White was likely to wind up dwarfless in a carriage that turned into a pumpkin pulled by dragons; and poor Cinderella might dance herself to death in a pair of red shoes while baking blackbirds in a pie for Rumpelstiltskin. Loss and calamity were the lessons of her stories. Sinsemilla’s versions of Mother Goose and the Brothers Grimm were deeply disturbing, but sometimes she recounted instead her true-life adventures before Lukipela and Leilani were born, which had more hair-raising effect than any tales ever written about ogres, trolls, and goblins.

So goodbye to Scooby, goodbye to Buzz, to Donald in his sailor suit—and hello, Darkness, my old friend. The only light visible was the ambient suburban glow at the open window, but it didn’t penetrate the bedroom.

No slightest draft sifted through the screen, either, and the hot night was nearly as quiet as it was windless. For a while, no sound disturbed the trailer park except for the steady hum of freeway traffic, but this white noise was so constant and so familiar that you heard it only if you listened for it.

Even by the time the midnight hour had passed, the distant drone of cars and trucks had not lulled Leilani to sleep. Lying with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling, she heard the Dodge Durango pull up in front of the house.

The engine had a distinctive timbre that she would never fail to recognize. In this Durango, Luki had been taken away into the Montana mountains on that slate-gray November afternoon when she’d last seen him.

Dr. Doom didn’t slam the driver’s door, but closed it with such care that Leilani could barely detect the discreet sound even though her bedroom window faced the street. Wherever their travels led them, he treated their neighbors with utmost consideration.

Animals elicited his kindness, as well. Whenever he saw a stray dog, Preston always coaxed it to him, checked for a license, and then tracked down its owner if the address was on the collar, regardless of the time and effort involved. Two weeks ago, on a highway in New Mexico, he’d spotted a car-struck cat lying on the shoulder of the road, both rear legs broken, still alive. He carried a veterinary kit for such emergencies, and he tenderly administered an overdose of tranquilizer to that suffering animal. As he’d knelt on the graveled verge, watching the cat slip into sleep and then into death, he’d wept quietly.

He tipped generously in restaurants, too, and always stopped to assist a stranded motorist, and never raised his voice to anyone. Without fail, he would help an arthritic old lady across a busy street—unless he decided to kill her instead.

Now Leilani rolled onto her right side, putting her back to the door. A single sheet covered her, and she pulled it under her chin.

She had removed her leg brace for comfort, but as usual, she had kept the apparatus in bed with her. She reached out to touch it under the sheet. The metal felt cool beneath her exploring fingers.

A few times over the years, when she’d left the brace on the floor beside her bed, she had awakened to discover that it had been moved during the night. More accurately, hidden.

No game was less amusing than find-the-brace, though Sinsemilla thought it entertaining and also professed to believe that it taught Leilani self-reliance, sharpened her wits, and reminded her that life “throws more stones at you than buttered cornbread,” whatever that might mean.

Leilani never rebuked her mother for this cruelty, or for any other, because Sinsemilla would not tolerate a thankless child. When forced into this hateful game, she proceeded with grim determination and without comment, aware that either a harsh word or refusal to play would bring down upon her the shrillest, most accusative, and most unrelenting of her mother’s upbraidings. And in the end, she would have to find the brace anyway.

Now her open window admitted the sound of Preston at the front door. The jingle of keys. The
clack
as the deadbolt lock disengaged. The quiet scrape of metal weather-stripping against the threshold as he gently closed the door behind him.

Perhaps he would visit the kitchen for a glass of water or a late-night snack.

Drawn by the red light spilling into the hall, perhaps he would go directly to the master bedroom.

What would he make of the dead snake, the discarded closet pole, and Sinsemilla’s bandaged hand?

Most likely he wouldn’t stop in Leilani’s room. He would respect her privacy and her need for rest.

On a daily basis, Preston treated her with the same kindness that always he exhibited toward neighbors and waitresses and animals. On the eve of her tenth birthday, next February, if she had not yet escaped him or devised an effective defense, he would kill her with the selfsame regret and sadness that he had shown when euthanizing the crippled cat. He might even weep for her.

He traveled silently on the matted orange shag, and she didn’t hear him coming through the house until he opened her door. No stop for water or a snack. No curiosity about the red glow in the master bedroom. Directly to Leilani.

Because her back was to him, she hadn’t closed her eyes. A pale rectangle of hall light projected on the wall opposite the entrance, and in that image of the door stood the effigy of Preston Maddoc.

“Leilani?”
he whispered.
“Are you awake?”

She remained dead-cat still and didn’t reply.

As considerate as ever, lest the hallway lamp wake her, Preston entered. He soundlessly closed the door behind him.

In addition to the bed, the room contained little furniture. One nightstand. A dresser. A cane chair.

Leilani knew that Preston had moved the chair close to the bed when she heard him sit on it. The interlaced strips of cane protested when they received his weight.

For a while he was mum. The cane, which would creak and rasp with the slightest shift of his body, produced no faintest noise. He remained perfectly motionless for a minute, two minutes, three.

He must be meditating, for it was too much to hope that he had been turned to stone by one of the gods in whom he didn’t believe.

Although Leilani could see nothing in the darkness and though Preston was behind her, she kept her eyes open.

She hoped he couldn’t hear her thudding heart, which seemed to clump up and down and up the staircase of her ribs.

“We did a fine thing tonight,” he said at last.

Preston Maddoc’s voice, an instrument of smoke and steel, could ring with conviction or express steadfast belief equally well in a murmur. Like the finest actor, he was able to project a whisper to the back wall of a theater. His voice flowed as molten and as rich as hot caramel but not as sweet, and Leilani was reminded of one of those caramel-dipped tart green apples that you could sometimes buy at a carnival. In his university classes, students had surely sat in rapt attention; and if he had ever been inclined to prey upon naive coeds, his soft yet reverberant voice would have been one of his principal tools of seduction.

He spoke now in a hushed tone, although not exactly a whisper: “Her name was Tetsy, an unfortunate variant of Elizabeth. Her parents were well meaning. But I can’t imagine what they were thinking. Not that they seem to think all that much. Both are somewhat dense, if you ask me.
Tetsy
wasn’t a diminutive, but her legal name.
Tetsy
—it sounds more like a little lap dog or a cat. She must have been teased mercilessly. Oh, perhaps the name might have worked if she’d been sprightly, cute, and elfin. But of course, she wasn’t any of that, poor girl.”

In Leilani’s vital coils, a chill arose. She prayed that she wouldn’t shiver and, by shivering, alert Preston to the fact that she was awake.

“Tetsy was twenty-four, and she’d had some good years. The world is full of people who’ve never known a good year.”

Starvation, disease,
Leilani thought grimly.

“Starvation, disease,” Preston said, “desperate poverty—”

War and oppression,
Leilani thought.

“—war, and oppression,” Preston continued. “This world is the only Hell we need, the only Hell there is.”

Leilani much preferred Sinsemilla’s screwed-up fairy tales to Preston’s familiar soft-spoken rant, even if, when Beauty and the Beast came to the rescue of Goldilocks, Beauty was torn to pieces by the bears, and the Beast’s dark side was thrilled by the bears’ savagery, motivating him to slaughter Goldilocks and to eat her kidneys, and even if the bears and the maddened Beast then joined forces with the Big Bad Wolf and launched a brutal attack on the home of three very unfortunate little pigs.

The silken voice of Preston Maddoc slipped through the darkness, as supple as a strangler’s scarf:
“Leilani? Are you awake?”

The chill at the core of her grew colder, spreading loop to loop through her bowels.

She closed her eyes and concentrated on remaining still. She thought that she heard him move on the thatched seat of the chair. Her eyes snapped open.

The cane was quiet.

“Leilani?”

Under the sheets, her good hand still rested on the detached brace. Earlier, the steel had felt cool to the touch. Now it was icy.

“Are you awake?”

She clutched the brace.

Still speaking quietly, he said, “Tetsy had more than her share of good years, so it would have been greedy for the poor girl to want still more.”

As Preston rose from the chair, the stretched cane flexed with considerable noise, as though he had been more difficult to support than would have been any man of equal size.

“Tetsy collected miniatures. Only penguins. Ceramic penguins, glass penguins, carved wood, cast metal, all kinds.”

He eased closer to the bed. Leilani sensed him hulking over her.

“I brought one of her penguins for you.”

If she threw back the sheet, rolled off her side and up, all in one motion, she could swing the brace like a club, toward that darker place in the darkness where she imagined his face to be.

She wouldn’t strike at him unless he touched her.

Looming, Preston said nothing. He must be gazing down at her, though he couldn’t possibly see anything but the vaguest shape in the gloom.

He always avoided touching Leilani, as though her deformities might be contagious. Contact with her at least disturbed him and, she believed, filled him with disgust that he struggled to conceal. When the aliens failed to come, when the time finally arrived for baking a birthday cake and for buying party hats, when he
had
to touch her to kill her, he would surely wear gloves.

“I brought you one little penguin in particular because it reminds me of Luki. It’s very sweet. I’ll put it on your nightstand.”

A faint click. Penguin deposited.

She didn’t want his souvenir, stolen from a dead girl.

As if this house had been built to defeat the laws of gravity, Preston seemed not to be standing by the bed, but to
hang
from the floor like a bat adapted to strange rules, wings furled and silently watchful, a suspensefully suspended presence.

Perhaps he was already wearing gloves.

She tightened her grip on the steel bludgeon.

After what seemed an interminable time, he broke this latest silence in a voice hushed by the importance of the news that he delivered:
“We burst her heart.”

Leilani knew that he was speaking of the stranger named Tetsy, who had loved and been loved, who laughed and cried, who collected miniature animals to brighten her life, and who never expected to die at twenty-four.

“We did it without fanfare, just family. No one will know. We burst her heart, but I’m confident she felt no pain.”

How satisfying it must be to live with unshakable confidence, to know beyond doubt that your intentions are honorable, that your reasoning is always correct, that therefore the consequences of your actions, no matter how extreme, are beyond judgment.

God, take her home,
Leilani thought, referring to the dead woman who had been a stranger moments ago, but to whom she herself was now forever linked through the heartless mercy of Preston Maddoc.
Take her home now where she belongs.

With supreme confidence even in the darkness, he returned the cane chair to the spot from which he’d moved it. Surefooted, he went to the door.

If earlier the snake had spoken to Leilani, while coiled upon her mother’s bed or from its refuge under the chest of drawers, this would have been its voice, not wickedly sibilant but a honeyed croon:
“I would never have caused her pain, Leilani. I’m the enemy of pain. I’ve devoted my life to relieving it.”

When Preston opened the bedroom door, a ghostly portal of light appeared on the wall opposite him, as before, and his phantom form hesitated on that threshold, looking back at her. Then his shadow appeared to cross into another reality, distorting as it went, and a slab of blackness swung shut upon the exit he had taken.