The Pray'n Mantis
Author: Marvin Dean Harvey
Date: 2020-10-15 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; General
Description: In the poorest town named Baylon, two young twins are chosen by God to fight in an unknown battle against evil spirits from Hell. Phoenix Toby, being in the spirit, becomes the Pray'n Mantis; the only one whom God will use to fight His final battle against the Serpent Beast. The Serpent Beast is a prisoner released from Hell by Him for a season to roam the world among humans. Joseph Toby, in spirit, is also known as the Black Manicon. It is his job to work side by side with the Pray'n Mantis to prepare Phoenix for prayer to overcome his flesh and fight in spiritual form against evil. With all
Publisher: Yorkshire Publishing

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2019 by The Koontz Living Trust

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle
www.apub.com

Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

eISBN: 9781542016230

Cover design by Phantom City Creative

1

Valjean Jones is only fifty-eight years old, but she looks as if she’s been on Social Security since it was first instituted. Her stringy gray hair might at any moment writhe and braid itself into snakes, revealing her as Medusa. Her facial wrinkles are as deep and numerous as those of a pharaoh’s mistress who’s been mummified for the next world. Gathered in the armchair in the cat-littered living room of her corroded and immobile mobile home, she is wasted into a bony form that suggests some species of spider that, instead of building webs, spins misery that sustains her in place of food.

The room reeks of decades of cigarette addiction underlaid with enough tarry residue from marijuana smoke to pave a mile of highway. Currently she is smoking regular cigarettes, a brand styled as the one for ladies, an alternative to masculine brands like Marlboro. At ten forty on a July morning, she’s sipping whiskey over ice.

“I haven’t seen the bitch in twenty years,” Mrs. Jones reports.

“You mean your daughter, Lucia?”

“Who else we talkin’ about? You don’t seem too damn good at this, Mr.—what’d you say your name was?”

“Shepherd Shaw.” It’s a special name, one she’s heard before, long ago. She should remember it, respond to it, but she doesn’t.

“What insurance company you say you investigate for, Mr. Shaw?”

The man who isn’t Shepherd Shaw, who is nameless, literally Nameless, tells another lie. “Nifelheim Casualty and Life. It’s owned by Lloyds of London.”

“Lloyds I heard of. The ungrateful bitch calls me once a year, see if I’m still alive. Sends me just twenty cartons of cigarettes for Christmas, and her worth a billion. It’s all to mock me.”

“She’s actually worth about a hundred forty million dollars.”

“I guess to earn that much,” says the mother, “she had to keep her legs spread so wide for so long she can’t close them no more.”

“She married well,” he says.

“Three times.” Mrs. Jones blows out a cancerous cloud. “Once was good enough for me.”

“Has she ever spoken to you about any of her husbands?”

“Me and her don’t talk but three minutes each December. What’s she gonna tell me? How well they’re hung? She tells me squat.”

In spite of the air-conditioning, the five cats lying about the room look as limp as though they’re melting like the clocks in the surreal paintings of Salvador Dalí. The only evidence that they’re alive is the occasional twitch of an ear or a thin meow.

“There’s a ten-million-dollar life policy on her most recent spouse,” Nameless lies. Lucia is too smart to risk life insurance on a spouse. She marries them when they’re so rich that life insurance is superfluous. “We would make a generous settlement with anyone who could help us prove foul play.”

“You’re crazy if you pay the greedy, stingy bitch two cents. She killed him sure as she killed the first two.”

Nameless sits forward on the sofa. “How do you know that?”

“It was her heartfelt plan when she left here at sixteen.”

“What plan?”

“To marry herself a rich man, get herself to be the only one in his will, and then kill the shit out of him.”

“She told you this? Will you testify to that in court?”

“Hell, no.” She drinks some whiskey. “What do I care about those rich bastards? And I’m not gonna cross Lucia and maybe get my throat cut. Just yesterday, I saw a butterfly flyin’ after dark.”

“A butterfly . . . ?”

“A butterfly flyin’ after dark is an omen, means your death is maybe comin’ soon. Don’t look at me like that, smart ass. I never stepped on no eggshells.”

Baffled, he says, “Eggshells?”

“A woman steps on eggshells means she’ll soon go mad.”

“I don’t think you’re insane. I just didn’t know about seeing a butterfly at night. Now I do. But we could protect you.”

“You’re a piss-poor interviewer, so I’m supposed to think you’d be a better bodyguard? Lucia’s smarter than you. And meaner.”

“It’s also a moral issue, Mrs. Jones. If your daughter is killing men for money—”

“Money is second,” the mother interrupts. “She kills them first ’cause she hates men the way the pope hates Satan, hates them all.”

“How do you know this?”

“Because I taught her good.”

“You taught Lucia to hate men, all men? Why?”

She glares at him with dark-ringed sour-green eyes that would scare off a rabid wolf. “What’s not to hate?”

Nameless nods as if with gender guilt. He opens his valise and extracts a packet of hundred-dollar bills and puts the money on the coffee table. “Five thousand dollars.”

“You think I’m cheap enough I’d sign some statement and sell out my daughter for that? You’re even dumber than most men.”

“You don’t have to do anything for it except think about how your life would be better if you had a hundred stacks like this.”

“So I can buy me a fancy coffin? No thanks. Anyway, you’ll promise the moon and give me stale cheese, like all men.”

Nameless closes his valise and gets up and moves toward the door, to the indifference of the cats. As he’s about to let himself out of the trailer, he looks back at Valjean. “What happened to your husband, Mrs. Jones?”

Without hesitation, she says, “Killed the sucker. Don’t harm me none to say it. That was thirty-two years ago. All I’m givin’ you is hearsay. Means nothin’ in court. Anyway, I carry a chicory root in one pocket at all times.” His puzzlement seems to exasperate her. “To ensure good luck, of course, and guard against the evil of men.”

“How did you kill him?”

She smiles. “With a hammer.”

“How’d you get away with it?”

“Claimed self-defense ’cause of how he beat me.”

“He beat you?”

Her smoked face twists in scorn. “Hell, no, not that wuss. We lived in a house back then. After I hammered him, I threw myself down the stairs twice, busted myself up pretty damn good. No charges were considered. My main mistake was marryin’ a dumb shit with only forty thousand to his name. Lucia is a stingy bitch, but she won’t never make my main mistake. ’Course, I never did look as hot as her. Stupid men’ll slit their own throats for a girl looks like Lucia.”

One of the cats sighs wearily.

“They’re all white cats,” Nameless notes.

“Am I fool enough to have a black one?”

“I guess not. But they’re so . . . lethargic.”

“White cats are good luck, but I can’t tolerate them quick and restless. Lots of Benadryl keeps them content.”

Nameless carries a pistol in a shoulder holster under his sport coat. He’s tempted to draw it and shoot the woman in the foot to see if the chicory root works.

As he opens the door, she says, “Don’t step on no ants. We’ve had too damn much rain the past week. We don’t need no more.”

Nameless exits the trailer and closes the door.

The darkly overcast day is hot and humid. Fat palmetto beetles drone through the sticky Florida air—hideous flying cockroaches. The decaying trailer park is set on a low rise overlooking the iron-gray Gulf of Mexico. Water views aren’t exclusively for the rich, and certainly not just for the virtuous.

2

The following day, when Valjean answers a knock on her door, a cigarette depending from the right corner of her mouth, she imagines the caller will be a salesman. She looks forward to emasculating him with words.

However, the visitor is a pleasant-faced woman with a padded manila envelope. “Shepherd Shaw wants you to have this.” She hands it to Valjean. “Have a nice day.” She walks away.

The envelope contains another five thousand dollars in cash.

One day later, when a different woman knocks and makes another delivery, Valjean wheezes out a stream of thin blue smoke and says, “You wait one damn minute, chippie.” Standing in the doorway, two steps above the messenger, she opens the envelope and confirms its contents. “Maybe you’re a bought whore, but I’m not for sale.”

The visitor smiles. “No strings attached, Mrs. Jones. We all want you to have it, all of us at Nifelheim Casualty and Life.”

3

Three days and nineteen hundred air miles from Valjean Jones’s trailer park, after a flight in a chartered aircraft arranged by his unknown handlers, Nameless is calling himself Harry Walker. He sits with Eugenia Ann Stossel on the covered patio behind her charming single-story Wrightian home in Scottsdale, Arizona. She is a sweet-faced woman of thirty who, because of a spinal condition, has been in a wheelchair since early childhood.

The housekeeper serves tall glasses of iced tea sweetened with peach nectar. In the shade, the ice cubes glitter like dark jewels, while out in the swimming pool, sun sprites dance on the water.

“I was fifteen when Daddy married her. She was twenty-one. He was thirty-eight. The age difference wasn’t a big deal. He looked younger than he was. She had this refined way about her, when she wanted to, that made her seem older. She was beautiful, stunning, so people talked. But she was sweet to me, like a big sister. Daddy had been a widower nine years, he was lonely, and she made him happy.”

Nameless says, “He died eleven years ago in Jamaica.”

“They were snorkeling with friends they just met there, another couple on vacation. Something happened, nobody knew what, maybe he was caught in an undertow. Suddenly he wasn’t with them. They searched frantically but couldn’t find him.”

“His body washed up on the beach three days later.”

“Yes. The coroner said drowning was the cause of death.”

“His body wasn’t brought back to the States?”

“No. Only his ashes. Lucia had him cremated there. The body was . . . deteriorated after all that time in the warm Caribbean.”

“Were you surprised by the terms of his will?”

“Amazed, astonished. I knew Daddy had money, but never realized how much. After taxes, ten million to me, twenty-five to Lucia.”

“How did you feel about that?”

“Whatever Daddy wanted was okay. Anyway, how many people ever inherit ten million? I’d be a fool not to be grateful. And I knew I could grow it. Which I’ve done.”

Eugenia had lost the use of her legs when she was five, lost her mother to cancer when she was six, and lost her father when she was nineteen. Yet all the losses had not affected her sunny disposition.

“What was Lucia like with you after the will was read?”

“Sweet but different. A little . . . smug. Too happy for a widow. She said what was hers was mine—she’d always be there for me.”

“Since then?”

Eugenia smiles ruefully. “For a year, she was an intense part of my life. Ten years ago, she moved to Seattle, where she met her second husband, and I never heard from her again.”

A hummingbird taps the nectar in one of the red flowers that bedeck the vines that climb the posts that support the patio cover.

“On the phone, when I said I was looking into the death of Lucia’s latest husband, you weren’t surprised I wanted to see you.”

Her remarkable purple-blue eyes meet his stare more directly. “The couple they were snorkeling with . . . Mostly when she talked about them, Lucia called the woman April. But on three occasions, without realizing what she’d done, she referred to her as May. April May’s husband was always Johnny. So I got a feeling maybe there was no couple, just Johnny. And I wondered if the first time my father ever met Johnny was suddenly, underwater.”

“You never spoke of your suspicion to anyone?”

“I couldn’t bring Daddy back. And I had too much to lose.”

“But her twenty-five million should have been yours.”

“I had more than that to lose, Mr. Walker. I was pregnant with Phoebe, soon to marry Kenny. I was afraid of losing them.”

“You think she’s capable of . . .”

“After my daughter was born, Lucia was still here, in Phoenix. She made over the baby like a doting grandmother. Holding Phoebe, she’d stare at me as if . . . I can’t describe it, really. I called it the Rumpelstiltskin look. Once, with Phoebe in her arms, she told me she saw a butterfly flying at night, which she said is an omen of death. I was terrified to breathe a word of my suspicion. Crib death is easy to fake, don’t you think?”

“I assume you would never testify.”

“I’ve no proof. I don’t want to be on Lucia’s radar. But you put her in prison, Mr. Walker, you’ll be a hero to me.”

As Nameless walks through the house to the front door, Eugenia motors along with him. He says, “If Johnny was a hired accomplice, I wonder where he is now.”

“I doubt that’ll be a lead for you, Mr. Walker. I don’t think she leaves loose ends.”

4

Two days and four hundred air miles from Scottsdale, calling himself Nathan Brock, Nameless is driving a black Cadillac Escalade through late-morning Los Angeles traffic, to the offices of Cold Cocked Films in Santa Monica. The SUV was left for him in the parking lot at the private-aircraft terminal in Long Beach Airport, the electronic key secreted in a metal box magnetically attached to the engine block.

He hasn’t been here during the past two years, yet he knows his way around, which means he must be familiar with greater LA from the period of his life lost to amnesia. He suspects this barrier to his memory was engineered—perhaps with his consent.

Not every case requires him to kill, but when he does, he kills known murderers whom the law will not touch or the courts acquit for one reason or another. Even though he is supported by a formidable organization with deep resources, which remains a mystery to him, his fingerprints have been removed to protect him. It’s better to leave no prints behind.

The Cold Cocked offices are on the fourth floor of a four-story building rendered in sleek, dark glass and stainless steel.

The young blond receptionist looks as if she should already be a movie star. So does the mahogany-skinned beauty who leads him to the office suite of Morgan Roskin, owner of the production company.

The huge inner sanctum has a white marble floor softened by a rug of the finest Tibetan wool; three black-granite walls, one bearing an enormous painting by Roy Lichtenstein worth millions; and an immense steel-topped desk with nothing on it. A large L-shaped black sofa and four comfortable padded white chairs by Roche Bobois provide an area for discussing film projects and blue-skying movie plots.

Morgan Roskin—forty-one, with a shaved head and three days of beard stubble, wearing pale-green suede loafers, skinny black jeans, a black pullover, and one earring—drops onto the longer length of the sofa, and Nameless takes the shorter length, and Roskin says, “So you’re a private dick.”

Nameless offers one of four engraved business cards left for him in the Caddy. “I’m not at liberty to say who I’m working for.”

“But you are trying to stick it to that slut, right?”

“Lucia Rickenbah, yes.”

“Rickenbah, huh? How did hubby number three bite the big one?”

“They were on vacation in Paris. There was a terror attack on the restaurant. Four were killed, including Michael Rickenbah.”

“Where was Miss Tits-and-Ass?”

“Went to the ladies room a few minutes before it happened.”

“Convenient. I’d like to burn her face off with a blowtorch.” The intensity of his hatred is unnerving. “They catch these terrorists?”

“No,” Nameless says. “There was just one. He hit fast, split.”

“I wonder when and how she offed this ‘terrorist.’ How much did old Rickenbah leave that blond piece of shit?”

“He had no heirs. She got it all. Over seventy million.”

“Sam, my old man, was a horndog, just about walked around with his fly open to save time. My mother put up with it forever. Then he divorces her to marry Lucia Lecter, Hannibal’s sister.”

“Did he do a prenup?”

“Oh, yeah. But the fool was so hot to get in her pants and stay there that the prenup gave her fifty million. Which she got after just fourteen months of marriage, when he croaked.”

“Your father died of sepsis?”

“Rampant bacterial infection of the blood. Septic shock. It came out of nowhere, no obvious causative wound, though an autopsy showed he had early cirrhosis. Sepsis is ugly and gets worse quickly. By the time he was in ICU, there was major organ damage. We all hated Lucia, but we didn’t think it had anything to do with her. Then the old man was cremated, which he didn’t want, and we wondered if the vicious bitch injected him with a few big damn syringes full of sewage or something, maybe drove it into an arm vein.”

“Why would he let Lucia give him an injection?”

“He was an insomniac, maybe thinking about everyone he screwed over in business. Most nights he took Ambien. It knocked him out. She could’ve pumped an entire septic tank into him, he wouldn’t have woken up. I’d gut her like a fish if I could get away with it.”

Considering that he didn’t seem to much like his father, Morgan Roskin’s rancor was so bitter that Nameless wondered about it. “You and your sister did each inherit three hundred fifty million. Is that right? Lucia got only fifty.”

“All I ever wanted to do was make movies, true immortal art. The old man wouldn’t back me for a ten-minute short. Three hundred fifty million put me on the map. We’ve made nine films, quality shit all the way. One big box office. One medium. Two broke even. Five lost money. If you hit it in this business, you hit it huge. When you flop, you can piss away a fortune in a year. Cold Cocked is doing okay, but I’d rather have that fifty million just the same.”

“Twenty-five,” Nameless said. “Your sister would get half.”

“Screw that crazy witch,” Roskin said. “She doesn’t know art from applesauce. She’s about as creative as a turd.”

The interview went off the rails from that point, but just as Nameless was about to leave, Roskin gave him something of value.

“I hope Lucia’s right about ghosts. That would be karma.”

“What do you mean?”

“The slut is a superstitious idiot. She dropped these scissors one day and insisted my old man had to pick them up. If the person who drops scissors picks them up, he’ll cut his own good luck. My father thought it was cute. She could have crapped on the dining table, and he would have thought it was cute. Stepping on a spider is bad luck. Stepping on ants brings rain. She believed it all.”

“What about ghosts?”

“Oh, she believes in them. She’ll go fifty miles out of her way to avoid driving past a graveyard. I hope my father comes back for her. If that old bastard decides to haunt the shit out of her, a thousand exorcists won’t be able to get rid of him.”

5

As he leaves the building where Cold Cocked Films maintains offices, Nameless receives a text message from Ace of Diamonds. No one else ever texts him. He has never spoken to Ace and doesn’t know if this is a man, woman—or some other entity, such as an artificial intelligence. Ace says: Peninsula hotel, Beverly Hills. Archibald Goodwin.

Minutes later, at the Peninsula hotel, the doorman removes two suitcases from the back of the Escalade. Nameless never packed these bags. They were in the SUV when he found the vehicle where he’d been advised he would, in the airport parking lot in Long Beach.

He tips the doorman forty dollars.

The front desk has a prepaid reservation for Archibald Goodwin. His credit card is on file. No reason for him to present ID. Most of the time, he doesn’t carry ID of any kind. Even a forged driver’s license that’s been inserted in DMV files and passes inspection can later be a place for a police investigation to begin.

His beautifully appointed suite has a large bedroom with bath, a living room, a dining alcove, and a half bath. Fresh flowers. A bowl of apples and pears.

He tips the bellman a hundred dollars.

His mission budget always allows extravagant gratuities. He’s made a habit of them. He doesn’t entirely understand why. He isn’t seeking approval. He takes pleasure in the recipients’ surprise, yes, in their frissons of delight, though there’s some deeper motive that he can sense but not examine in the fluid machinery of his mind.

The first suitcase provides toiletries and clothing to see him through the four days that he’s booked at the Peninsula. The second, smaller bag contains, among other things, a laptop and ten thousand dollars in twenties and hundreds, which he may use for expenses—dining, entertainment—that he may incur outside the hotel.

He plugs in the laptop, removes the flash drive from the recorder he’s carried for days, and sends the interviews to Ace.

After making dinner reservations in a superb restaurant within walking distance of the hotel, he undresses to take a nap. The king-size bed offers extra pillows, and he places his Springfield Armory TRP-Pro .45ACP under the pillow adjacent to the one he will use.

The Peninsula is not in a zone with a high crime rate. However, perhaps the strangest thing about Nameless is neither the shadowy organization behind him nor his amnesia. Stranger still are the clairvoyant visions that occasionally—only occasionally—afflict him, regarding events that have occurred at remote places in the past, as well as events that might occur in the future. Not all the things he foresees come to fruition. The past cannot be altered, but he can take steps to change the future. He isn’t always successful. Horrors he has seen have been averted, while others have come to pass. He keeps the .45 close at hand, because he’s seen a vision of Lucia Jones Stossel Roskin Rickenbah in which she eviscerates him with a knife.

6

On his last morning at the hotel, a padded manila envelope is left for him at the front desk. A bellman brings it to his suite.

At the start of each mission, he receives a recorded statement of the case and the intended course of action. He has been told that he isn’t listening to Ace; but he doesn’t know who makes these recordings. Certain peculiar inflections and hesitations, although few, lead him to suspect the real voice is being processed through an alteration program to prevent it from being identified if the recording should fall into the hands of an authority with voice-recognition capability.

Two things are unique about this case, the first being that Lucia’s most recent husband, the late Michael Rickenbah, who was murdered in a terrorist incident in Paris six months earlier, is said to have been a friend of Ace and of the program. “Of the program,” means he was a contributor to the work that Nameless and the others have undertaken, providing strategy or advice, or money.

This one is personal.

Second, Ace and his team have crafted the most elaborate scheme to date. It is based on Lucia’s known psychology but also very much on questionable extrapolations of it, on well-understood mechanics of superstition but also on iffy assumptions of the likely behavior of a sociopath who is superstitious and under extreme pressure. They want not merely to destroy the woman psychologically and prevent her from murdering again, but also to terrify and torment her so that she feels keenly the sword of justice.

One big problem. They are not, not, not in the business of assuring justice where it has been denied. Justice has been twisted by culture and politics until its meaning is everywhere contested. Each of their missions is instead meant to bring truth and its consequences into the life of someone who has woven a persona of lies, thereby putting an end to his or her crimes.

There’s no doubt that Lucia deserves to be terrified and tormented as reparations for all the evil she has done, but there is peril in this approach. Nameless is on the front line, which means he’ll be the one to deal with the danger of unexpected developments.

Considering his clairvoyant vision—Lucia’s face twisted in a snarl, the steel blade flashing with reflected light as it arcs into his gut—he would prefer to dispatch her with the words This is for Michael Rickenbah, followed at once by a bullet.

However, he is a tool of the program, a status for which he is sure that he volunteered before amnesia was imposed on him. A hammer should not argue with the carpenter who wields it.

Perhaps he once knew Michael Rickenbah. They might even have been dear friends. He has been told this is personal, and he will handle it that way even if it kills him.

At eleven o’clock that morning, he sets out from the Peninsula hotel, driving south about 120 miles to the upscale seaside town of La Jolla, where Lucia Rickenbah owns a house, inherited from her most recent husband, to which she is scheduled to return in seven days.

7

The house is not a McMansion, not one of those wedding-cake constructs of faux French or faux Italian architecture with a massive columned portico and balustraded balconies grossly out of scale with the rest of the structure. It’s merely six or seven thousand square feet of Mediterranean Art Deco with smooth white plaster walls, a slate roof, stainless-steel balusters and railings.

Ace and team have hacked the customer records of Vigilant Eagle Security and have invaded the alarm-system base computer in the Rickenbah residence, from which they teased out the disarming and gate codes. The Art Deco stainless-steel driveway gate rolls aside when Nameless enters five digits into the gatepost keypad.

The palm-tree-shaded ocean-view house sits on a walled acre. It’s hardly visible from the street and not at all from any of the neighboring homes. Michael Rickenbah had owned five expensive but modestly scaled residences in five cities. His mourning widow is currently ensconced in a penthouse apartment in New York, salving her grief with all the pleasures that the Big Apple has to offer.

This is Saturday. No staff is here. Two housekeepers and a gardening service will return Friday morning to prepare the place for Lucia’s arrival the following day, a week from now.

The garage can accommodate eight vehicles, but only four are currently present, including a black Rolls-Royce and a red Ferrari. He parks his Escalade beside the Rolls.

Because this is a retrofitted smart house, of which all the systems are controlled by computer, Ace has remotely unlocked the door between the garage and the house.

Ace has ensured that none of these violations have been reported to Lucia’s smartphone where she grieves in New York City.

Alone, Nameless tours the residence. Antique Deco furniture, sculpture, and art—even including two large paintings by Tamara de Lempicka—allows an exquisite re-creation of an arguably better time, the 1930s, between the wars that changed the world forever.

Nameless wonders if he will die here among all this beauty. There are worse places for it.

8

He searches the most private spaces of the house, opening drawers, looking for nothing specific, but alert for items that might be of use to him. He finds something, a creepy souvenir: the menu from the restaurant in Paris, where her husband was killed.

Later he raids the pantry, freezer, and wine cooler for his dinner, and he sleeps on a sofa in the ground-floor study.

Because he always falls asleep in a minute, he is spared the brooding and the doubt that frays the nerves of insomniacs.

He never dreams.

Or perhaps he dreams but doesn’t remember.

Eleven o’clock Sunday morning, well after he is up and around, the unmarked box truck arrives with a crew of four: two men and two women. He works with them to unload the materials and equipment, as well as the food and drink that will sustain the five of them.

These four know their true names; they reveal only false ones. Unlike him, they lead lives outside the program, but though they are friendly, they share nothing about themselves. They regard him with what might be awe—or only muted amazement seasoned with pity.

He and they have much work to do over the next five days, and they set to it without delay. Nameless will at first be occupied in the attic, where he must prepare a redoubt from which to rule the dark domain into which the unwary Lucia will soon venture.

The attic has hanging lamps and a floor of white melamine that is easy to clean. Aisles of metal shelves stand empty. Lucia has disposed of whatever memories her late husband stored here.

The raftered ceiling is home to spiders that have spun their elaborate versions of dream catchers, their dreams being juicy moths and silverfish. The blond widow for whom Nameless has spun a web is more lethal than the spiders.

The days pass. The four specialists have brought sleeping bags. They use the guest bath. Late on Thursday, they clean up evidence that they were ever here. They leave, taking Nameless’s car, though the one who calls himself Devlin will return on foot on Saturday.

Alone, having set the house alarm in the AWAY mode, Nameless sleeps that night on a bedroll in the attic. He never tosses and turns; he’s as silent as the eight-legged hunters overhead.

Friday, in the realm below, the maids and gardeners fill the day with noise and are gone by five o’clock.

After disengaging the alarm a housekeeper set, he descends to the ground floor and lives there until Saturday afternoon.

Devlin returns at one o’clock. Rarely does Nameless work with a partner after the stage has been set and the action starts. But in this case, he will need assistance at critical moments.

Lucia Rickenbah subscribes to a jet-sharing service. She is scheduled to land in a Gulfstream V, the sole passenger, at two thirty at San Diego International Airport. A waiting limousine should have her home in La Jolla no later than three thirty in the afternoon.

9

The two middle-aged stewards on the ShareJet are both men, and they must at all times be professional, but they want her with the same pathetic intensity with which horny adolescent boys, hormones raging, want the hottest girl in school. Lucia looks the same at thirty-six as she did at twenty-six. Since she was thirteen, if not earlier, she’s always been the hottest girl in—and out of—school.

She enjoys watching the stewards striving not to pant like dogs in the company of a bitch in heat, pretending indifference to her beauty and sensuality, which is as absurd as pretending not to notice an erupting volcano. She teases them by being approachable and warm, as few people are who fly alone in private jets, while also being careful to seem proper, even prim. Consequently, these beguiled men hope that she’s as insatiable as her sensuality might suggest, hope she’s coming on to them, but are afraid to act on their hope. This is low-key psychological torture; it’s not as satisfying as hiring a thug to drown her husband, watching the drowning, making love to the thug later, and then killing him herself. However, it’s amusing, and she has more than five hours, from New York to San Diego, to tie tiny knots in their psyches.

On the ground, after she descends the portable steps from the Gulfstream, she empties the pockets of her Chanel suit, in which she has tucked small wrapped candies and several twenty-dollar bills in order to spill all of it onto the tarmac. When the steward tries to return the money to her, she explains that it is an offering in thanks for a safe flight, ensuring that her luck will continue the next time she travels by air. He smiles, almost laughs. Suppressing his laughter, he solemnly escorts her to the limousine where her luggage is being loaded.

The limo driver, Zachary, is younger and more handsome than the stewards, and the desire with which he regards her is palpable. He has nothing to offer her, of course; therefore, she has no interest in him other than to tease and ultimately humiliate him.

At the house, she chooses not to tell Zachary about the elevator, and he requires three trips to carry her many suitcases upstairs to the master bedroom while she waits in the foyer.

When he returns from the third climb, she has taken off her suit jacket to reveal the thin silk blouse she wears without a bra. The blouse is opened one button short of blatant invitation.

A thin film of perspiration paints a sheen on his brow. A woman less sure of herself than Lucia might think he sweats because of his exertions with the luggage, but she knows he perspires with desire.

As he is transfixed by her cleavage, she takes one of his hands in both of hers to warmly thank him and to pass the tip, which is just five dollars. She has chosen a well-worn, badly soiled bill.

All the way to his next pickup, Zachary will surely seethe at the inadequate gratuity. Perhaps he will understand that the frayed and filthy condition of the five-dollar bill is a symbol of her contempt for him. And if his IQ is above average for his sex, maybe he’ll even realize that he deserves her contempt and worse.

Although it is unlikely that he’ll return, she is hopeful that he might come back after dark and scale the estate wall. He has a rough edge. He might be dangerous. She won’t turn on the alarm for a few nights. Nothing could please her more than if he gave her the opportunity to kill him. Killing husbands—or having them killed by those she later disposes of herself—is profoundly satisfying, but it’s a rare event. Every few years, a man like Zachary, driven by rage or lust, gives her a delightful opportunity.

If the situation ensures that she won’t be caught, she takes advantage of such moments. The men are surprised she’s so prepared and savage. She is clever at disposing of their bodies. She has a gun, but knives are more satisfying. Knives in quick-release mechanical sheaths are fixed under tables and chairs throughout the residence. Ordinarily, no circumstances exist in which she’d wash a dish or mop a floor. But she takes pleasure cleaning up the blood; killing is as close as she ever comes to a mystical experience.

When alone, she extracts a packet of salted crackers from her purse. She strips away the cellophane and puts it on a foyer table. With the three crackers on the palm of her hand, arm extended in offering, she tours every room downstairs and then on the upper floor. Spirits, if any, that have entered the house during her two-week absence will now understand that she means them no harm; they will, in turn, not disturb her.

10

In the eastern portion of the Central Time Zone, less than an hour of light remains. Millions of mosquitoes sheltering in the wetlands begin to shiver in anticipation of the moment, at the setting of the sun, when they will rise in clouds to seek blood.

Carrying a single human passenger, yet another Gulfstream V accelerates along the runway, achieves lift, rises toward the increasingly sullen light, and seems to soar above the setting sun.

Service is provided by two flight attendants who have been carefully selected for this mission according to a list of criteria to which other women in their line of work are not required to conform. The five-hour flight promises to be interesting and perhaps contentious.

11

Leaving the suitcases to the housekeepers, who will return on Monday, Lucia takes a shower with a fragrant coconut-scented soap that produces a thick lather. She loves caressing herself.

In yoga pants and a T-shirt, barefoot, she tours the house once more, this time without salted crackers. She never tires of admiring the Art Deco furniture, the paintings, the sculptures by Chiparus and Manship and Sandoz and Martel. She knows precisely what each of them cost her late husband and the current appraised value.

Michael—Mikey—also left her houses in Santa Fe, Vail, and Palm Beach, plus the twelve-room penthouse apartment in Manhattan. All those residences contain furniture and art worth millions.

Her only regrets about Mikey Rickenbah is that she didn’t get to him when he was younger, couldn’t stop him from giving millions to charity, and didn’t have him killed sooner. She inherited seventy million plus the houses and their contents, but although Mikey was only fifty-four, he had given away over two hundred million by the time she found him.

Each husband has been wealthier than the one before him, but all of them were fools who could have enriched her vastly more if they had not all been infected by the I-want-to-give-back virus.

By six o’clock, still on East Coast time, she is starving. She opens a can of hearts of palm and dresses them with thirty-year-old balsamic vinegar. She plates a can of goose-liver pâté and adds six exquisite little cracked-pepper crispbreads, her favorite cracker.

She opens a chilled bottle of an expensive Chardonnay, of which she will drink at most two glasses before pouring the rest down the sink drain. When it comes to maintaining her spectacular figure, she has discipline that even the Marine Corps can’t teach, not so much because she plans to seduce a fourth husband—she hasn’t made up her mind about that yet—but because she really does enormously enjoy caressing herself.

She takes her dinner at the polished quartzite island in the large kitchen, sitting on a stool, facing the TV that motors out of the ceiling, into viewing range, in response to her remote control. She is pleased to be back in La Jolla, happy to be as wealthy as she is, even though she ought to have more, and delighted that she doesn’t have to share this moment or this house with anyone.

Then she clicks on the television, and her world comes apart.

12

Her husband is on TV. Mikey. Michael. Her dead husband. A close-up of his stupid face. Strange shifting shadows move across him, and a sleet storm of static comes and goes, but it’s no doubt Michael. He’s not only on TV, but he’s also talking to her.

There’s a weird sort of hollowness to his voice, though she recognizes it easily enough, would recognize it even if it weren’t coming from his face there on the TV. “I’ve been waiting for you to come back, Lucia. You went to the ladies’ room, and you didn’t come back for the longest time.”

What shit is this? This can’t be happening. She went through the house with the salted crackers. This isn’t possible.

She is on her feet, having spilled a glass of Chardonnay without realizing it.

Her heart is knocking. She can hear her own heart like a fist on a thick door.

Michael says, “I’ve been trying to find you, but I don’t know where I am. I’m not in Paris anymore, I don’t know where I am, and I don’t know where you are, but I feel you close.”

She picks up the remote and tries to turn off the TV, but it remains on.

“Are you there, Lucia? Do you hear me? Lucia? Lucia?”

Using the down-channel button, she tries to click him off the screen. On her fifth attempt, a sitcom appears.

Another woman might question what has just happened, might even doubt her own senses, would certainly seek alternative explanations to the notion that her former husband has breached the veil between worlds. But Lucia long ago woke to the cold truth that the world is a sinister mystery, that things come and go in the night that no one ever sees, and not just in the night. It’s July, there’s still light beyond the kitchen windows, and she knows what she saw and heard.

The kitchen phone rings. It’s a wall phone. It rings and rings.

Lucia tells herself to get a grip. She’s not some white-bread housewife who spends her days waiting for hubby to come home from the office. She’s bold, smart, ruthless. She shapes her destiny. She has shaped it since high school, when a rich-boy classmate pledged everlasting love and marriage, and got everything he wanted from her, got it over and over, and then made it clear the promise of marriage would never be kept. He was her first. Her first kill. She got away with it. No one suspected. She’s never been afraid of killing, and after that first murder, she’s been afraid of nothing.

The phone is still ringing. It should have gone to voice mail.

The world is dark, yes, and everywhere in it there are things unseen, dimensions and forces and entities. But a dead husband can’t harm her. Mikey was a wimp. Rich and powerful and smart about a lot of things, but a wimp and clueless about her. They all were clueless wimps, chickenshits, starting with the high school boyfriend. None of them could do harm to her in life; and none of them is a threat in death, none of them capable of being a dangerous spirit.

The phone continues to ring.

If Lucia were ever to die, which she doesn’t foresee, she would be the most dangerous ghost the world ever knew, a poltergeist that would tear the shit out of a room, a house, level the place and set it on fire and burn everyone in it to death. Everyone she haunted would be terrified of her; but she is afraid of no one.

As Chardonnay drips off the island to the kitchen floor, she plucks the handset from the wall phone. “Yeah? What do you want?”

Michael says, “Lucia? I know you’re near. I feel your heat. I want your heat. I’m so cold. I want your heat. You hear me? Lucia? I need your heat. I’m so cold. GIVE ME YOUR HEAT, YOU FUCKING BITCH!”

She hangs up. Michael never uses language like that. He never raises his voice to her. He prides himself on being a gentleman. This is a different Michael, maybe ridden by some entity in the dimension that follows death, invaded and ridden and angry.

She needs to change clothes, pack a bag, go to a hotel, and think about this. In movies and real-world accounts, people stay in haunted houses until there is no escaping, which is stupid. Lucia is not stupid. The key is to remain calm and devise a course of action. A plan. She is excellent at making plans and seeing them through.

Upstairs, in the master bedroom, her reflection in the mirror on the back of the walk-in closet door restores her confidence. She is not just beautiful. She is gorgeous, stunning. She looks not one day older than twenty-six. And why? For ten years, she has carried an acorn on her person wherever she goes, which prevents aging. Even the ancient Druids knew the truth of acorns. She isn’t aging; she will never age; she might never die. She has nothing to fear from either the living or the dead.

As she’s folding clothes into an open suitcase on the bed, the lights flicker, pulse, and then go out. The waning daylight pressing in around the closed draperies still leaves her nearly blind.

A hideous voice—as though the speaker’s mouth is soft, his tongue rotting—says, “Baby, give Mikey a kiss where it counts.”

Something cold and sharp touches her back, stings, and at once an inner darkness swells to fill her as she folds down into the lesser darkness of the bedroom.

13

During this pause in the spook show, the lights come on.

Having shot her from a distance of just six feet, Devlin stands over Lucia’s crumpled form. He is dressed all in black, including a hoodie and a black ski mask. If she had turned and seen him before he dropped her with the tranquilizer-dart pistol, he might have seemed to be not just an intruder but almost supernatural.

“Give Mikey a kiss where it counts,” the recording repeats, issuing from the in-ceiling speakers of the through-house music network that, along with the lighting and other systems, Nameless controls from his computer in the attic.

Because Michael Rickenbah spoke at many charity and corporate events, there is ample film and audio of him. Ace and team have played with the video—shading it, adding static, using distorting techniques—to distract Lucia from the realization that Michael’s lip movements do not perfectly match his words. A voice simulation program, Paramimic, allows their ghost to say anything they want.

“Give Mikey a kiss where it counts.”

“She’s down,” Devlin reports, although Nameless can see this through one of the tiny, hidden wireless video cameras they have installed. The woman will be unconscious for about twenty minutes.

Two minutes later, Nameless arrives from the attic.

14

Lucia wakes in waves of increasing awareness, nausea rolling through her. She’s in darkness deep, doesn’t know where she is.

Then she remembers: her bedroom; lights fluttering, going out; the guttural voice—Michael’s?—as if coming from a disintegrating throat and mouth; the cold sharp touch of . . . something.

She doesn’t recall settling on the bed, atop the quilted spread, but that’s where she is.

Lying very still, she listens intently as her mind clears. Although there is no sound, she feels that she is not alone.

Something extraordinary is happening, but Lucia isn’t afraid. She, too, is extraordinary and able to transcend any threat.

If Michael’s spirit has traveled halfway around the world from Paris, to haunt this place, he can’t harm her, not compassionate Mikey who gave away more than half the fortune he earned. Alive, he was a soft-hearted fool who always shyly asked permission to make love to her and seemed grateful when she allowed it. He had no clue whatsoever that her face and body were weapons in her arsenal as surely as were the hit men she hired and the hypodermic syringe that she herself used to inject her second husband, Samuel Roskin, with carefully cultured filth while he was sleeping.

Indeed, if Mikey insists on ghosting around this house, Lucia will torment his spirit until he wishes he could die twice. He’ll learn the depths of her contempt for him, how ugly she thought he was, how his touch disgusted her.

She sits on the edge of the bed and switches on the nightstand lamp, half expecting to see a ghastly semitransparent figure shaped from ectoplasm, but she is alone.

As she stands up, she realizes that the suitcase she’d been packing is still on the bed. No. Leaving the house for a hotel is the wrong move. No mere ghost can expel her from this comfort and luxury that she’s earned by enduring Michael for almost three years.

Her attention is drawn to three strange gray smears on the pale-gold bedspread. Frowning, she strokes a finger through one of them and brings it to her nose and sniffs. She works the stuff between thumb and forefinger and smells it again.

Ashes. So fine they feel slightly greasy.

Elsewhere in the house, in some far room, faint music arises.

“Yesterday” by the Beatles. Michael was a Beatles fan.

If the song is coming from the house music system, and if it’s been conjured by a spirit, why isn’t it playing in this room? The sorrowful melody seems meant to draw her in search of its origin.

Three wickedly sharp knives are concealed in mechanical sheaths under various pieces of bedroom furniture, but she doesn’t bother to retrieve one. A knife will avail her nothing when the intruder is a ghost. Besides, if this is Michael, the sight of her armed will give him the satisfaction of thinking he has frightened her.

On the wall beside the open door to the upstairs hallway is a full handprint in ashes. Something’s odd about it. She looks closely and gradually realizes there are no fingerprints.

She had Michael cremated in Paris. Ashes can’t shape themselves into a revenant, into a weird golem that walks around in human form. A body produces a surprisingly small amount of ash. Anyway, his ashes aren’t here in the house. After bringing his remains from France, she’d thrown the unlabeled funerary urn into a dumpster behind a supermarket.

Yesterday . . .

The faint melancholy music leads her to the ground-floor study, from which it issues. Here, it’s louder. The shelves are still lined with Michael’s favorite books, which she should have thrown away or sold. The boring sonofabitch always had his nose in a book.

“Don’t be a drama queen,” she scolds. “You were bland as milk in life, and you don’t have what it takes to be a kick-ass spirit.”

The volume of the music declines into silence, and then the television swells with light. His stupid face again, filling the screen, seen through a blizzard of static and shifting shadows.

“Murder,” the phantasm says. “Murder, murder, murder.”

“Only what you deserved.”

Those who refuse a spirit can’t be haunted by it. That is a truth well understood by those who know ghosts are real. Consciously or unconsciously—because of guilt, fear, curiosity—you have to invite the spirit’s attention.

She has not invited this and will not countenance it. She turns her back on the TV and leaves the room.

She must show him that he can’t faze her and should fade into the oblivion he deserves. Earlier she plated her dinner but never ate it. She’ll go on with her evening as planned.

The lights grow dim, flicker bright, grow dim again, and as she enters the kitchen, she steps on something that crunches.

Under her bare feet are two shattered hen’s eggs. A third lies unbroken. They weren’t here earlier.

In her mind’s ear, her mother’s voice: If ever a woman steps on eggshells, it means she’ll soon go mad. There is no escape from it.

The shells were whole when she stepped on them, but no contents have burst forth. They are hollow.

If you crack an egg that has no yolk, your death is imminent. These eggs have no yolks or whites.

From the familiar face on the kitchen TV comes the chant, “Murder, murder, murder, murder . . .”

Music issues from the house speakers, another Beatles song, this one with a hard-driving beat, real menace in John Lennon’s voice: “Run for Your Life.”

Something’s wrong with all this. This isn’t how Michael was or how he ever might be. But he’s undeniably here.

Her first plan, to go to a hotel, again appeals to her. As the music grows louder, the threat in it reverberates off every surface.

She turns her back on the kitchen, walks purposefully to the stairs without appearing to be afraid, and ascends to the second floor to change clothes and quickly finish packing her suitcase.

15

In a corner of the attic, at the computer with which he now controls the electronics of this smart house, sits the man who shed his past and knows not if he was once a serpent or something better.

Devlin observes.

Through the array of wireless cameras, they watch this widow-maker widow as she quickly changes from yoga pants into slacks and pulls on a sport coat over her T-shirt and carries clothes from the closet to the suitcase on the bed. Throughout all this, Nameless puts Michael Rickenbah on the bedroom TV—“murder, murder, murder”—and slowly increases the volume of “Run for Your Life” while adjusting for more bass, which makes the song sound increasingly threatening.

Head up, shoulders back, moving purposefully but refusing to hurry, Lucia exits the bedroom and descends the stairs.

In the kitchen, when she tries to open the connecting door to the garage, the deadbolt remains engaged.

It’s electronic, as are all the locks in the residence, part of the smart-house system that Nameless controls.

After struggling with the door to the garage, she goes to the back door that opens onto the porch, but this lock also resists her.

“Run for Your Life” is louder than ever, playing wherever she goes, and under the insistent beat is the Paramimic voice of her dead husband accusing, “Murder, murder, murder . . .”

She steps to a video panel embedded in the wall, intending to employ the Crestron command system to open the door, but the panel doesn’t respond.

She tries to use her iPhone to access the app that allows her to control smart-house functions. Her phone no longer works. Devlin fried the battery while she was sleeping.

Nameless calls up an in-screen display box of the house HVAC system, into which the four-person team that assisted him has integrated a pressurized aerosol tank. That canister contains a scent quite unlike Chanel No. 5, a custom-created stench that combines the smell of something burning and the malodor of rancid flesh. The tank contains enough to saturate the house—though not the attic—with this nauseating vapor for five hours. Nameless triggers it.

This is not how a human body smells during cremation. Lucia might believe it is precisely that, however, because on every TV in the house, the face of her husband speaks to her: “Smell me burning, Lucia. Murder, then fire. Murder and fire. Murder, murder, murder.”

The window locks are part of the smart-house system, and in addition, all exterior doors and window frames are made of bronze. They feature muntins dividing them into multiple panes, muntins that can’t be cut away with less than a blowtorch.

With one exception.

Evidently, the exception occurs to her, because she proceeds along the main hallway, covering her nose and mouth with one hand. In the study, a bronze-and-glass door leads to a small patio. The sidelights flanking the door have no muntins; although each is only eighteen inches wide, Lucia should be able to squeeze through to freedom after she shatters the glass.

Except that the glass won’t shatter. Revolted by the stench, repeatedly gagging, she uses a brass fireplace poker to no effect, swings it a second time with greater energy, and a third. She can’t know that impact-force-distribution film has been applied to these panes, making them shatterproof, although not bulletproof.

If she goes upstairs to get her pistol, she will be unable to find it, as it is now in Nameless’s possession.

Cursing in frustration, she turns to the TV. Her strategy seems to have been to disinvite Michael’s spirit by feigning indifference to it, but abruptly she loses her cool. She attacks the television with the brass poker, bringing darkness to the bright screen.

Nameless increases the volume of the murder accusations that are issuing from other TVs throughout the rest of the house.

He pumps up “Run for Your Life” until the windows are vibrating like drumheads.

The house is so well built and the neighbors are at such a distance, on large lots of their own, that even at greater volume, the music won’t attract a complaint. Devlin and his three associates tested this more than once as they’d prepared for Lucia’s return.

As the thrice-made widow leaves the study in a state of rapidly increasing agitation, Nameless phases out one Beatles song in favor of another. In an escalation of this attempt to disorient, terrify, and break her until she confesses or drowns in the insanity that has long been pooled just beneath the false-calm surface of her decadent and cankered mind, he plays “Helter Skelter,” rocking the house with this ballad of bedlam.

16

High in the night, where stars exist not just above but also to all sides, above the legend of Texas that is not confirmed by the absence of lights below, where Earth seems as if it might be merely an idea rather than a reality, the Gulfstream V is speeding west toward nearby New Mexico, which offers even more lightless terrain. This absence of light is fitting, for the purpose of this flight is to deliver darkness to darkness.

17

The vile stink, the booming music, the incessant accusations by the dead man, the doors that bar themselves, the windows unbreakable have given her a brutal headache, as though the hollows in her skull are the very source of “Helter Skelter,” as though Michael’s voice issues from the deepest tissues of her brain. Covering her ears gives no relief. After leaving the study, she initially ricochets along the hallway, from room to room, seeking surcease, tramping on eggshells already crushed, unable to think because the music is so loud that the paintings vibrate against the walls, and the walls tremble as if the house itself fears the vengeful spirit that has invaded it. The lights pulse in time with the pounding music, each flash driving the stench deeper into her lungs, so that she feels on the verge of synesthesia, when the five senses will become confused, images smelled rather than seen and sounds seen rather than heard.

The air is rapidly growing hotter, as if a fire is seething somewhere close, perhaps within the walls, and this large residence seems to have shrunk into a cocoon. Claustrophobia assaults her. No, it’s not a mere cocoon. A coffin. She is casketed in this house with the revenant of her husband, and the lid is coming down. He wants to suffocate her—air as hot as in an oven!—wants to deafen her and blind her. The headache is cleaving her skull. The heat magnifies the hideous stench. Each spell of gagging leads to a greater nausea, until she leans against a wall and hangs her head and disgorges the half-digested food she ate on the plane.

Regurgitation alarms her, because she knows the lore of ghosts, the netherworld laws that govern these encounters. If in your fear you give an evil spirit your tears—or are so frightened that you pee yourself or throw up—the entity then has license to take another fluid, your precious blood. Having purged herself, she’s in a perilous position and must struggle desperately to think in spite of the hammering music and piercing stink and smothering heat.

In the kitchen, she yanks open a drawer and grabs a fistful of dish towels. The large pantry is one of the few spaces in the house with a door that has no lock. It also has no speaker for the music system. No heating vents. Dish towels in hand, she steps into the pantry, switches on the light, pulls the door shut. “Helter Skelter” still crashes upon her, but less insistently than before. The pantry is warm, but not as warm as elsewhere.

The greatest relief is from the terrible smell, which slithers to her only through an eighth-of-an-inch crack between the door and threshold. On three sides are deep shelves laden with foodstuffs. She opens a bottle of water, saturates a dish towel, and presses the wet cloth along the gap at the bottom of the door. She opens a jar of lemon marmalade and holds it to her nose, trying to sweeten the malodor that has clung to her sinuses, that lingers in her lungs to taint every exhalation.

Over the years, she’s read books that detailed hundreds of hauntings. In only a few did the spirit manifest itself with the intensity of this one. In any case, whether the event involves just ghostly footsteps and shadows without sources or a poltergeist that makes matchsticks out of furniture, the entity exhausts itself in time. She needs only to wait it out, and soon she will be able to leave the house. Just wait it out. All will be well.

18

The psychologists who work with Ace envision four possible reactions that these staged events might elicit from a sociopath as obsessively superstitious as Lucia Rickenbah. One prediction is that she will retreat to a closet or a pantry, just as she has done.

Devlin gets up from his chair. “Back to work.”

“While you’re downstairs, I’ll cut back on the stink,” Nameless says. “But don’t linger. She most likely won’t yank open the pantry door in response to you, but better not to give her a chance.”

19

The walls thrum with “Helter Skelter.” Jars on the pantry shelves clink together every time the drums swell and when either Lennon’s or McCartney’s voice escalates into a scream.

Lucia is sitting on the floor, knees drawn up and arms wrapped around her legs, when the dish towel along the bottom of the door begins to turn a distinctive shade of red. Then something slides under the door, through the quarter-inch crack, slides over the wet cloth, something smeared with dark, slimy blood. It’s the menu from the restaurant in Paris, where Michael was shot to death.

She will not touch it. Not ever. Manifestations of blood are rare during hauntings or séances. Any medium, any experienced ghost hunter, anyone who is woke to the existence of other entities that crawl this haunted world will tell you that blood manifested on such occasions must never be touched, must be allowed to deliquesce, for whoever touches it will surely die before a new day dawns.

More dark blood oozes under the door and seeps past the towel, past the menu. Lucia scoots backward, until she comes up against the shelves. She stares at the blood, but it doesn’t disappear. She stares and stares, and the blood remains.

At first she checks her watch every few minutes, but soon she can’t bear the sight of it. Although time passes, the booming music roars louder, widening the imagined crack in her skull that the headache demarcates. The stench seeps under the door, defeating the marmalade she inhales. From the kitchen, voice raised to compete with “Helter Skelter,” Michael shouts, “Murder, murder, murder!”

The repetition of the word carries her backward through time, backward through the significant moments of a life devoted to hatred and tethered to superstitions that have spared her from knowing any truth. Even in memory, her hatred becomes exquisitely thrilling each time that it’s expressed in murder or in murder done by others at her direction, and she dwells now on each glimmering pool of blood that marks a significant point in her life. Darkness rises around her as she travels backward, and with pleasure she gathers the gathering darkness to her, enrobing herself with the fabric of the void. She relives the killing of the rich boy in high school, he who promised marriage and took his pleasure with her and then revoked his vow. She slides back years and more years, until she is only four, to the night when she saw the hammer crush her father’s skull and crush it again, when, clasped in Valjean’s arms, she had twice tumbled down the stairs from the second floor to the first. She woke days later in the hospital, her bruised mother sitting bedside and murmuring continuously about what the hateful father had done to them, so there could be no confusion.

When Lucia’s fraying mind returns to the house in La Jolla, she finds herself in the pantry and realizes, by the testimony of her wristwatch, that almost five hours have passed. “Helter Skelter” is at last fading to silence. The stench is nearly gone, and the terrible heat is much diminished. The angry chant—“Murder, murder, murder”—continues at a lower volume until she realizes that the only voice she hears is her own, whereupon she falls silent, too.

The blood inside the door has thickened and dried around the edges of the pool, but it has not deliquesced. This confuses her, scares her. The manifested blood remains a barrier to her escape, for she dares not touch it or step in it.

A familiar voice speaks in the kitchen. “Where are you, girl? What damn mess you made of yourself? Vomit in the hall. Spilt wine in the kitchen. Garbage on the floor. You always were a pig.”

The pantry door opens, and here is Valjean Jones, last seen twenty years earlier. The old bitch is in black leggings and a long black blouse, looking like a tarantula that has tucked away six of its limbs and is trying to pass for human.

20

T his is too much. Lucia is exhausted by being under siege by a spirit for more than five hours, and now this . . . this beast.

“Twenty cartons of cigarettes every Christmas,” says Valjean, her sour-green eyes like smoky pools of venom. “Just tobacco, not even Mary Jane, and never one dollar to help your poor old mother.”

With her back pressed to the shelves, Lucia rises slowly to her feet, no less alarmed by this manifestation than by all that has come before it. “What are you doing here?”

“I come to get what’s mine. For twenty years, not one dollar from the flesh of my flesh, but Shepherd Shaw treats me like a queen, brings me here in his private jet.”

“Shepherd Shaw? You pothead old twat, you’ve got weed dementia. Shepherd Shaw is long dead.”

“He’s no deader than me. He says he’ll do right by me, then he does, and he keeps doin’ right like no man ever did. The faithless daughter you’ve been, maybe you’re more male than female, all slut on the outside, all greedy lusting man on the inside. Probably syphilitic. You disgust me.”

Twenty years earlier, Lucia had escaped from this creature’s constant vituperation. She feels more assaulted and oppressed by Valjean than she’d been by “Helter Skelter” and the cremation stench. “Shepherd Shaw? Shepherd Shaw was my stupid jock boyfriend in high school, a lying shit. I killed him on my sixteenth birthday.”

Valjean’s eyes widen, as protuberant as those of a bat. “Was that the name of the boy, you brought parts of him home in a jar?”

“The parts the lying creep most valued,” Lucia confirms. “We buried his package in the backyard.”

Valjean quotes the wisdom of the ages. “No murdered man, if emasculated between the first blow and the lethal blow, can haunt his killer.” Her smoke-cured face produces a demonic smile. “You never did tell me what you done with the rest of him.”

“Shit, you do have dementia. I told you sure enough. I stole a motorboat, took him out on the Gulf, weighed him with chains, rolled him overboard. What’re you doing here? I don’t want you here.”

“I come to get mine.”

“Nothing here is yours, you cancerous old sow. Not a dime.”

“I come to get my share of what you killed them husbands for.”

“You didn’t kill them. What I got is all mine.”

“I’ll tell the cops how you killed them.”

“Look at you, a demented hag. No one is going to believe you.”

Just then the cats arrive. Five plump white cats weave lazily around Valjean’s feet, into the pantry. At once they set to licking the congealed blood.

The sudden appearance of her mother is too much, and this is too much times ten. Other white cats, long before these, were the cause of her night terrors as a child.

“You remember,” Valjean asks, “I put them in your crib and later in your bed, to claw your face and scar you forever if you spoke a word against me in your sleep. To suck the breath of life out of you if they decided you might betray me.”

“There were eight cats then,” Lucia says, shuddering with the memory. “Eight cats in my crib when I was little, in my bed.”

“I’ll bring twenty more to rule this house,” says Valjean, “until you tell me how you killed each husband and who else you killed. Then I’ll own you and get all that’s mine. I’ll own you.”

The cats lick the blood and turn their radiant eyes on Lucia.

She can’t fight off twenty-five cats in the thrall of Valjean. She can’t endure Valjean. “Johnny drowned Felix Stossel, and I cut Johnny. I did Sam Roskin while he slept on Ambien, injected him with filth. A man named Cary shot Michael for me, in Paris, and I slit his throat two days later. I’ll pay you. You hear me, you vicious old bitch? I’ll pay you. But you can’t stay, not with the cats or without them. Even I can’t stay here anymore, there’s no peace here anymore, no peace in any of the houses I got from Michael.”

Valjean puts her left hand to her left ear and seems to speak to someone other than Lucia. “No. Not yet. No, it’s not enough.”

A cold rain of despair washes through Lucia. “I told you I’d pay, damn you. I’ll pay, I’ll pay. But we can’t stay here. It could start up again. Michael could come back.”

“I want her on her knees,” declares Valjean, hand still to her left ear. “I want the greedy pig on her knees, apologizing for crapping on me all these years. Lucia, get on your knees.”

Despair becomes desperation. Lucia is desperate to be out of the pantry, out of the house. The manifested blood that will be the death of her if she touches it, the cats that will suffocate her, the harridan who has been conjured here by some dark power beyond comprehension: It’s too much, too much, intolerable, her heart booming, her breath trapped in her chest.

“You think you’re so beautiful,” Valjean says, “but all I see is a maggot disguised in a human skin. Your father was a maggot, and you’re a maggot, and you’ll get on your knees!”

If she steps in the blood, so be it. If the cats climb her legs in a screeching fury, so be it. Lucia reaches under a pantry shelf, clicks the button on the mechanical sheath, frees the weapon, and plunges forward with the knife held high, to drive it down with all her strength into Valjean’s chest.

The hag has a knife, too, in her bony right hand, and brings it up from her side, where she’s concealed it. Her angle of attack is shorter than her daughter’s, her assault therefore quicker. The blade rips Lucia’s abdomen, opens her with such horrific efficiency that she drops her weapon and falls, dying, at her mother’s feet.

21

Well, that was different. The confrontation between mother and daughter has not ended in any of the ways that Ace and team imagined when they planned this mission.

And Nameless’s moment of clairvoyance, when he had thought he’d foreseen Lucia with a knife, eviscerating him, was in fact Lucia with a knife being eviscerated by Valjean with another knife.

Sans weapon, with the communications device removed from her left ear, Valjean is conducted to the living room by Devlin, where she reposes in a Ruhlmann armchair, in the lightfall from a Tiffany lamp with a red-and-green oriental-poppy shade. Cats lie clustered at her feet.

Nameless sits in a chair facing hers, and Devlin stands by the fireplace. “We had Lucia’s confession on tape,” says Nameless. “Why did you keep pushing her so hard?”

“The greedy pig needed to apologize for treatin’ me like shit all these years. All she needed to do was apologize.”

“But now you’ve killed her,” Devlin says.

“It was self-defense.”

“Where did you get the knife? You didn’t have it on the plane.”

Valjean grins and winks, a most disconcerting expression. “She learned from me how to hide knives under furniture. They’re all over my place—and hers. No lust-crazed man is gonna surprise me. I felt a knife under the foyer table when I come through the front door.”

“That could be seen as proof of homicidal intention.”

“Self-defense,” she insists. “No court will convict me.”

“My friends and I don’t deal with courts.”

“Well, I’ll have to,” Valjean says, “to get my inheritance.”

“Inheritance?”

“What’s hers is now mine.”

“I’d bet my life you’re not mentioned in her will. Besides, we have her confession. She murdered to get her wealth. You’ve no right to it, Mrs. Jones. You can no longer stay here, like we planned, and share your recording with the authorities. We’ll keep the recording and send you back to Florida with the money we promised. You’ll live quietly there with your cats and forget about inheriting a fortune.”

She puffs out her chest and raises her head high and says, “No damn man tells me what to do. You listen to me, Shepherd Shaw, or whoever the hell you are. I want my millions, and I’ll get them.”

Devlin has called the three members of the team that came here with him the previous Sunday. They will arrive in the same truck and strip the house of most of what they installed before housekeepers return on Monday and find Lucia’s corpse in strange circumstances. There is no longer a need for the confession that would have gotten Lucia committed to an institution for the criminally insane.

The only problem now is Valjean.

Nameless loathes having to decide what to do with her. She murdered her husband and made a monster of her daughter. He has executed murderers before, some of them with warmer personalities than Mrs. Jones, but he never takes pleasure in the necessity.

He looks at Devlin. Their eyes lock. But it’s wrong to put this burden on the other man. Devlin isn’t the senior operative here.

As Nameless rises slowly to his feet, a rush of wind somehow gets past the chimney hood and howls down the flue, such a strong gust that it breaches the closed damper and explodes into the firebox. The heavy brass fire screen is blown flat onto the hearth, startling Devlin, who cries out.

Valjean Jones thrusts to her feet as the hollow wail of the wind escalates into a terrifying shriek.

A squall invades the living room, rattles the blinds, blows the paintings askew on the walls. This freakish wind is strong enough to knock over the rack of fire irons, but something more formidable than mere wind picks up those four instruments and whirls them into the air, juggling them.

As the cats scatter to sanctuaries under various items of furniture, Valjean Jones says, “Poltergeist.”

The shriek of the wind morphs into a woman’s shrill scream of rage. Lucia. A fireplace shovel whips across the room and slaps Valjean hard in the face, followed by both log forks, one of which pierces her chest, the other her abdomen. As the old woman staggers toward Nameless, the pointed poker skewers her neck, severing one or both of her carotid arteries. She drops as gracelessly as a toppling scarecrow, her gagging and death throes finished in seconds.

The air is still. The wind’s howl and Lucia’s blood-curdling scream seem to have been imagined.

The two men meet each other’s stare.

After a silence, Devlin says, “You ever . . . ?”

“No. Never.”

“I don’t believe in . . .”

“I don’t either.”

Devlin says, “So I didn’t see that.”

“Neither did I.”

“It won’t be in your report?”

“How could it be when it didn’t happen? The house doesn’t have interior security cameras?”

“Only the Wi-Fi minis we put in for the operation. Those will all be stripped out.”

Nameless nods. “So it’ll look like some psychopath broke in, knifed the daughter, stabbed and beat the mother to death.”

Their hackers would expunge from aviation records the private jet flight that brought Valjean here.

“You count this a win?” Devlin wonders.

“Hell, no. It’s a screwup. Maybe it’s justice they’re both dead. But I’m not about justice. Isn’t all this supposed to be about truth, washing away lies with the truth? But there’s no way to cover our ass and still get out the truth about what the two of them did.”

Devlin says, “What about the cats?”

“They could be nice cats if someone weans them off Benadryl.”

“Ace can find homes for them,” Devlin says. He gets a text message and reads it. “My crew is less than an hour out.”

They look at the dead woman.

They look at the fireplace.

They look at each other.

“Well,” says Nameless, “I better be going.”

His Escalade is waiting in the driveway. After events in the house, the stars in their configuration seem even stranger than usual.

A moment earlier, when he assured Devlin that he, too, did not believe in ghosts, he hadn’t been telling the full truth. The powers conferred on him by some science beyond his comprehension have made him acutely aware that the world he once called ordinary is in fact riddled with mysteries; threads of weirdness are woven through all things, there to be seen though few wish to see them.

Mere days before, in a Sierra Nevada forest, a lovely woman and two children—a girl of about nine, a boy of five—approached him through the trees, not suitably dressed for the place or season, as silent as are those who live no more. The visitation had been brief before they faded. At the time he had thought the encounter was inexplicable—or pretended that he thought so.

Later, he admitted to himself what he has known but avoided considering for a long time: He is a haunted man. Whether those three in the forest were memories called forth from his subconscious or true spirits, the visitation was brief. In either case, he sensed that some guilt of his, cloaked in amnesia, had summoned them either from his previous life or from an otherworldly realm. He would never kill a child—or an innocent, as the woman seemed to be. But you didn’t need to have struck a deathblow against someone to be in part responsible for her ill fate.

Perhaps the work he’s doing now is compensation for failures in his past. In which case, brooding only distracts him from what he is obliged to do, and he is best advised to let the past be past, the better to fulfill his mission. Denial endures because it soothes.

In the Cadillac Escalade, he heads north on Interstate 405. Perhaps he will spend a few days in Newport Beach, waiting to hear what Ace has for him next.

The fat moon is past the apex of its arc, rolling westward like a coin following a groove toward a slot, and when it drops, perhaps the vending machine that is this mysterious world will dispense an item so rich in truth that humanity can begin to be cured by it.

In his mind’s eye, he sees the whirlwind bursting out of the fireplace.

There are more things in heaven and earth . . . than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Sprung out of memory, those words from Hamlet surprise him. He didn’t know that he was, to any extent, a Shakespearean scholar.

Then a realization brings a smile. There are more things in heaven and earth . . . than are dreamt of in your philosophy, and Nameless himself is one of them.

The story continues . . .

Check out the next episode of Dean Koontz’s NAMELESS, Red Rain.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dean Koontz is the author of more than a dozen New York Times number one bestsellers. His books have sold over five hundred million copies worldwide, and his work is published in thirty-eight languages. He was born and raised in Pennsylvania and lives with his wife, Gerda, and their dog, Elsa, in Southern California.

ALSO BY DEAN KOONTZ

Ashley Bell

The City

Innocence

77 Shadow Street

What the Night Knows

Breathless

Relentless

Your Heart Belongs to Me

The Darkest Evening of the Year

The Good Guy

The Husband

Velocity

Life Expectancy

The Taking

The Face

By the Light of the Moon

One Door Away from Heaven

From the Corner of His Eye

False Memory

Seize the Night

Fear Nothing

Mr. Murder

Dragon Tears

Hideaway

Cold Fire

The Bad Place

Midnight

Lightning

Watchers

Strangers

Twilight Eyes

Darkfall

Phantoms

Whispers

The Mask

The Vision

The Face of Fear

Night Chills

Shattered

The Voice of the Night

The Servants of Twilight

The House of Thunder

The Key to Midnight

The Eyes of Darkness

Shadowfires

Winter Moon

The Door to December

Dark Rivers of the Heart

Icebound

Strange Highways

Intensity

Sole Survivor

Ticktock

The Funhouse

Demon Seed

Jane Hawk

The Silent Corner

The Whispering Room

The Crooked Staircase

The Forbidden Door

The Night Window

Odd Thomas

Odd Thomas

Forever Odd

Brother Odd

Odd Hours

Odd Interlude

Odd Apocalypse

Deeply Odd

Saint Odd

Frankenstein

Prodigal Son

City of Night

Dead and Alive

Lost Souls

The Dead Town

Nonfiction

A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog Named Trixie

Table of Contents

- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- The story continues . . .
- About the Author
- Also by Dean Koontz