The Neighbor (4 page)

I had no recollection of having put aside the scrapbook or of taking a thick diary from another desk drawer. As I paged through this new volume, in an almost dreamlike state, in the grip of cold fear but unable to act upon it, I saw that in handwriting of almost machinelike neatness and consistency, Clockenwall had recorded the events of Melinda Lee Harmony’s captivity, beginning on the day he’d offered her a ride home until—I was compelled to page forward—the day that he killed her, seventeen months later. This was a journal that celebrated depravity, and in the entries that passed before my eyes, he regretted nothing except killing her, lamenting the sudden loss of control during which lust and violence had become for him one and the same thing.

I heard myself say, “Such a waste, such a pity, she was still so useful.”

Again, I had no awareness of putting that volume aside or of retrieving from the desk another scrapbook, this one of more recent vintage. In it were articles clipped from the student newspaper at the middle school that Amalia had attended, the school where Rupert Clockenwall had taught English. They were poems and little stories that she had written for that publication. He had somehow obtained her seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-grade class photos. I noticed the silver cross on a chain around her neck, which she had taken to wearing in those days but no longer wore. There were as well photos taken with a telephoto lens: a younger Amalia sitting on the front porch, standing in the backyard, going to and from the garage that was her safe harbor and mine. Clockenwall seemed to have stopped adding to the scrapbook when my sister was fifteen, and as I came to the blank pages that he had never used, I heard myself say, without intention or control, “A tasty little piece of tail, but too close to home. Too risky. Didn’t dare. Didn’t dare. Wish I had.”

With no recollection of getting up from the desk, leaving the bedroom, and descending the front stairs, I found myself in the kitchen. I was holding a filleting knife.

I tried to throw down the knife, but instead gripped it more tightly than ever. If I was in terror of leaving that house and going home with some unthinkable purpose, I don’t recall. I remained in a dreamlike state as I crossed the kitchen to an inner door, opened it, switched on the cellar lights, and went down the steep stairs to that lower realm.

In that windowless place, entirely below ground, with its block walls and earthen floor, I found a small wooden table and two chairs, as well as a bookcase containing volumes suitable for a girl twelve-going-on-thirteen, stories of horses and romance and adventure. On the floor lay a stained and moldering mattress, and in the concrete-block wall above it was fixed a ringbolt from which trailed a chain and manacle.

In the corner near the furnace, I stood swaying, gazing down at the hard-packed earth, from which had over time fluoresced both bright white and yellowish crystals finer than salt in patterns that were vaguely reminiscent of voodoo veves. Now Clockenwall shared with me his images—memories—of burying the murdered girl in a deep bed of powdered lime to facilitate decomposition and to control the odor. In my mind’s eye, I saw him tamping a layer of soil atop the lime, weeping as he worked, weeping not for the girl but for the loss of his toy. Melinda had been in her grave for so many years that no foul odor lingered.

I looked up from the floor and stared at the knife, wondering for what purpose he had made me take it from a kitchen drawer.

Upstairs, Amalia called my name.

Wide-eyed, wondering, Amalia came down the cellar stairs, her footfalls echoing hollowly off the plank treads. The novel that she had been reading failed to engage her, and she couldn’t be distracted from thinking about the voice that had spoken to her in this house earlier. As twilight approached, she had looked out of her window and had seen the Clockenwall house filled with light once more.

“I went to the garage,” she said, “you weren’t there, but an album was playing, and I just
knew
where I’d find you. It’s my fault you came here. I mean, what’re you going to do when I tell you to stay away from this place, you being twelve and a boy and careening toward puberty? You’re brave—okay?—but we should get out of here.”

She had glanced at the mattress as she came off the stairs, but the horror of it registered with her only on second glance, when she seemed to see the ringbolt, the chain, and the manacle for the first time.

Yet surely she couldn’t fully understand what had happened here. Maybe she’d never heard of Melinda Harmony, who had been kidnapped a year before Amalia was born. Remembering Mr. Clockenwall’s creepy interest in her, however, my very bright sister seemed to deduce that the chain and the manacle were evidence of imprisonment and that the filthy mattress had served not merely as a place of rest. The color drained from her face, although when she turned her attention to me once more, she seemed perplexed but not afraid.

Desperate, suddenly breaking into a sweat, I tried to tell her to run—
run!
—but I was denied my voice.

“Malcolm? What have you found? What’s happened here?”

“Delicious memories,” I said, and though the voice I heard was mine, I was not the one who had spoken.

I had been standing with the knife held down at my side, against my leg. Now she saw it. “Sweetie, what’re you doing with a knife?” She looked toward the furnace, into darker corners of the cellar. “Is someone here, are you in danger?”

Moving toward her, I heard my voice declare, “If I’d seen you first, I never would have
bothered with the other girl.”

Amalia’s eyes widened further, and she backed away from me.

At the head of the stairs, the door slammed shut. I figured that if she could get to the top of the steps ahead of me, the door would prove to be locked.

She was my sister, beloved, who had stayed in my room around the clock when I’d been eight and suffered with a case of the flu that nearly killed me. She was my sister, whose clarinet playing inspired me to find the music in me, to settle on the saxophone, which had fast become the key to my identity. I loved her as I loved no one else, as no others had allowed me to love them, and if I were to kill her under the influence of some malign spirit, I might as well then kill myself.

I was the one who lumbered and stumbled through life, who lacked physical grace, but in this case, Amalia was the one who misstepped, fell backward, and sat hard on the third step as I raised the knife. Her green eyes were as deep as an arctic sea, shining with cold fear, sudden terror.

As the knife reached the apex of its arc, I saw around her neck the silver cross that she had worn in middle school but never since. She must have put it on before leaving our house, as if she’d known that she would not find me in the garage, that once again she would have to enter this hateful place.

As the knife came down, I realized that she had bought the tiny silver cross on the silver chain and had begun wearing it when she’d been thirteen, after the first time she’d caught Rupert Clockenwall staring at her, the day that she’d been in our backyard working on the art project. She must have wanted to ward off his evil, to feel protected in this world where none of us is ever truly safe.

Down came the knife, with less force than Clockenwall wanted, with a different target than he intended. When the blade thrust deep into my thigh, I screamed, and with the scream, I cast him out.

A shriek ricocheted from wall to wall, issuing neither from me nor from Amalia, and in that windowless room, where a mere draft could have had no source, there sprang up not just a draft but a wind, cold on that summer night, churning around the cellar, spinning up dust and the soft white and yellow crystals that marked the grave, a wind that was the embodiment of inhuman rage.

I tore the knife from my thigh, threw it down, dropped to one knee, bleeding but not yet in pain, clamping one hand over the wound.

Amalia came to her feet as the wind seemed to gather itself into a battering ram, whereupon it slammed into her with such velocity, such force, that the rubber band holding her ponytail snapped, and her blond tresses stood on end as if she were a candle and her hair the flame. I thought that she would be lifted off her feet, and the pendant stood straight out from her, to the length of the chain, as though it would be torn from her and blown away. She seized it with one hand and held it to her throat.

Then I heard again the sound that had awakened me and drawn me to my window the previous night, when all this began, a sound like steel stropping steel. As before, it came three times, but now it sounded less like a sword drawn from a scabbard than like some great metal door scraping open across a threshold. The roaring, whistling wind seemed to blow away through that unseen door, and the cellar fell quiet, still, all dust drifting toward the floor.

Because Amalia always was as resilient as she was strong, as strong as she was smart, she knelt beside me, and wasting no time exclaiming about what we had just witnessed, she said, “Your leg, the wound, let me see.”

Blood had streamed between my fingers, darkened the leg of my slacks, spattered the floor, but when I took my hand away from the wound, my trousers were not ripped. In wonder, I raised my hand and saw that the blood dripping from it a moment earlier was nowhere to be seen. The pants were no longer stained, the floor without a single crimson spatter. The blade of the knife gleamed, as clean as if it had just been washed.

I got to my feet, physically as whole as I had been before I entered that house. Amalia rose, too, and met my eyes, and neither of us could speak. She put her arms around me, and I hugged her, and after a while we went up the stairs to the kitchen.

Together, we went through the quiet house, turning out the lights that I had left on. Before we departed, I showed her the scrapbook about Melinda Lee Harmony, the diary, and the scrapbook to the pages of which her own middle-school class photos had been fixed with Scotch tape.

Still, neither of us spoke. We had no need to put our recent experience into words, for we understood the meaning of it in our hearts.

We closed the door, descended the porch steps. Night took the last purple from the sky as we crossed Clockenwall’s backyard.

At the rear gate, Amalia said, “So the Glenn Miller stuff didn’t soothe your nerves.”

I said, “I should have played a Guy Lombardo album.”

We didn’t want to go back into that house ever again. We didn’t want to talk about what had happened there or be questioned about it.

Using a typewriter in a research room at the public library, my sister wrote a letter to the police, reporting in some detail what they would find in the Clockenwall residence. She made sure that she wiped all fingerprints from the paper and envelope before mailing it at a post office twelve blocks from our house.

Maybe they thought the letter was a hoax. But they had to check it out. The story was a sensation for a week, which was a long time in a year when the news was full of big stories about war in Vietnam and race riots in America’s cities.

Having found the scrapbook devoted to Amalia, the police came by to speak to her, and she told them how Mr. Clockenwall had spooked her on those two occasions when she was thirteen. But she said not a word regarding our adventure. Perhaps because she never lied and had about her a palpable air of truthfulness, they never thought to ask if she had recently been inside the house of murder or if she might be the one who had written the letter. I do not believe the cops were careless or incompetent in their investigation; what I think is, because of Amalia’s great good heart and the purity of her gentle soul, some Power that watches over us ensured that she would be spared the ordeal of being the object of a media frenzy.

She and I never again spoke of those events. There was nothing that needed to be said, for we understood and accepted. Occasionally, however, my sister came to me and hugged me tightly for the longest time, and although she seemed to have no reason for doing so, we both knew the reason.

As I said, that was the summer when I met Jonah Kirk, who became my best friend for life, who loved Amalia as if she were his sister, too, and who has written so well of her in his book,
The City
. During the months thereafter, far more happened to us than we, at our most imaginative, could have foreseen, all of it different in character from what I’ve just told you here, with more wonder and delight, with no evil spirits but with worse.

For years, the Clockenwall house remained for sale, but no one would purchase it. When
eventually it sold, the buyer tore it down and, with the city’s permission, converted the property into a pocket park with a fountain where birds bathe and with benches where people sit to watch them and to rest from the stresses of the day. On the granite base of the fountain, a plaque bears only the name
MELINDA LEE HARMONY
, which means to say that she didn’t truly die on that ground but lives there forever.

DEAN KOONTZ, the author of many #1
New York Times
bestsellers, lives in Southern California with his wife, Gerda, their golden retriever, Anna, and the enduring spirit of their golden, Trixie.

www.deankoontz.com

Correspondence for the author should be addressed to:

Dean Koontz

P.O. Box 9529

Newport Beach, California 92658

#1 New York Times bestselling author
Dean Koontz is at the peak of his acclaimed
powers with his major new novel

THE CITY

A rich, multi-layered story that moves back and forth across decades and generations as a gifted musician relates the “terrible and wonderful” events that began in his city in 1967, when he was ten.

Coming Soon from Bantam Books