Watchers (52 page)
Travis flicked the wall switch. A corner lamp came on. It did not shed much light, just enough to reveal more details of the rubble.
Looks like somebody went through here with a chainsaw and then a power mower, he thought.
The house remained silent.
Leaving the door open behind him, he took a couple of steps into the room, and the crumpled pages of the ruined books crunched crisply underfoot. He noticed dark, rusty stains on some of the paper and on the bone-white foam padding, and suddenly he stopped, realizing the stains were blood.
A moment later, he spotted the corpse. It was that of a big man, lying on his side on the floor near the sofa, half-covered by gore-smeared book pages, book boards, and dust jackets.
Einstein’s growling grew louder, meaner.
Moving closer to the body, which was just a few feet from the dining-room archway, Travis saw that it was his landlord, Ted Hockney. Beside him was his Craftsman toolbox. Ted had a key to the house and Travis had no objections to his entering at any time to make repairs. Lately there had been a number of repairs required, including a leaky faucet and broken dishwasher. Evidently, Ted had walked down the block from his own house and entered with the intention of fixing something. Now Ted was broken, too, and beyond repair.
Because of the ripe stink, Travis first thought the man must have been killed at least a week ago. But on closer inspection, the corpse proved to be neither bloated with the gas of decomposition nor marked by any signs of decay, so it could not have been there for very long. Perhaps only a day, perhaps less. The hideous stench had two other sources: for one thing, the landlord had been disemboweled; furthermore, his killer had apparently defecated and urinated on and around the body.
Ted Hockney’s eyes were gone.
Travis felt sick, and not only because he had liked Ted. He would have been sickened by such insane violence regardless of who the dead man had been. A death like this left the victim no dignity whatsoever and somehow diminished the entire human race.
Einstein’s low growling gave way to ugly snarling punctuated with hard, sharp barks.
With a nervous twitch and a sudden hammering of his heart, Travis turned from the corpse and saw that the retriever was facing into the nearby dining room. The shadows were deep in there because the drapes were drawn shut over both windows, and only a thin gray light passed through from the kitchen beyond.
Go, get out, leave! an inner voice told him.
But he did not turn and run because he had never run away from anything in his life. Well, all right, that was not quite true: he had virtually run away from life itself these past few years when he had let despair get the best of him. His descent into isolation had been the ultimate cowardice. However, that was behind him; he was a new man, transformed by Einstein and Nora, and he was not going to run again, damned if he was.
Einstein went rigid. He arched his back, thrust his head down and forward, and barked so furiously that saliva flew from his mouth.
Travis took a step toward the dining-room arch.
The retriever stayed at Travis’s side, barking more viciously.
Holding the revolver in front of him, trying to take confidence from the powerful weapon, Travis eased forward another step, treading cautiously in the treacherous rubble. He was only two or three steps from the archway. He squinted into the gloomy dining room.
Einstein’s barking resounded through the house until it seemed as if a whole pack of dogs must be loose in the place.
Travis took one more step, then saw something move in the shadowy dining room.
He froze.
Nothing. Nothing moved. Had it been a phantom of the mind?
Beyond the arch, layered shadows hung like gray and black crepe.
He wasn’t sure if he had seen movement or merely imagined it.
Back off, get out, now! the inner voice said.
In defiance of it, Travis raised one foot, intending to step into the archway.
The thing in the dining room moved again. This time there was no doubt of its presence, because it rushed out of the deepest darkness at the far side of that chamber, vaulted onto the dining-room table, and came straight at Travis, emitting a blood-freezing shriek. He saw lantern eyes in the gloom, and a nearly man-size figure that—in spite of the poor light— gave an impression of deformity. Then the thing was coming off the table, straight at him.
Einstein charged forward to engage it, but Travis tried to step back and gain an extra second in which to squeeze off a shot. As he pulled the trigger, he slipped on the ruined books that littered the floor, and fell backward. The revolver roared, but Travis knew he had missed, had fired into the ceiling. For an instant, as Einstein scrambled toward the adversary, Travis saw the lantern-eyed thing more clearly, saw it work alligator jaws and crack open an impossibly wide mouth in a lumpish face, revealing wickedly hooked teeth.
“Einstein, no!” he shouted, for he knew the dog would be torn to pieces in any confrontation with this hellish creature, and he fired again, twice, wildly, from his position on the floor.
His cry and the shots not only brought Einstein to a halt but gave the enemy second thoughts about going up against an armed man. The thing turned—it was quick, far quicker than a cat—and crossed the unlighted dining room to the kitchen doorway. For a moment, he saw it silhouetted in the murky light from the kitchen, and he had the impression of something that had never been meant to stand erect but was standing erect anyway, something with a misshapen head twice as large as it ought to have been, a hunched back, arms too long and terminating in claws like the tines of a garden rake.
He fired again and came closer to the mark. The bullet tore out a chunk of the door frame.
With a shriek, the beast disappeared into the kitchen.
What in the name of God was it? Where had it come from? Had it really escaped from the same lab that had produced Einstein? But how had they made this monstrosity? And why?
Why?
Why?
He was a well-read man: in fact, for the last few years, most of his time was devoted to books, so possibilities began to occur to him. Recombinant-DNA research was foremost among them.
Einstein stood in the middle of the dining room, barking, facing the doorway where the thing had vanished.
Lurching to his feet in the living room, Travis called the dog back to his side, and Einstein returned quickly, eagerly.
He shushed the dog, listened intently. He heard Nora frantically calling his name from the yard out front, but he heard nothing in the kitchen.
For Nora’s benefit, he shouted, “I’m okay! I’m all right! Stay out there!”
Einstein was shivering.
Travis could hear the loud two-part thudding of his own heart, and he could
almost
hear the sweat trickling down his face and down the small of his back, but he could hear nothing whatsoever to pinpoint that escapee from a nightmare. He did not think it had gone out the back door into the rear yard. For one thing, he figured the creature did not want to be seen by a lot of people and, therefore, only went outside at night, traveled exclusively in the dark, when it could slip even into a fair-sized town like Santa Barbara without being spotted. The day was still light enough to make the thing leery of the outdoors. Furthermore, Travis could sense its presence nearby, the way he might sense that someone was staring at him behind his back, the way he might sense an oncoming thunderstorm on a humid day with a lowering sky. It was out there, all right, waiting in the kitchen, ready and waiting.
almost
hear the sweat trickling down his face and down the small of his back, but he could hear nothing whatsoever to pinpoint that escapee from a nightmare. He did not think it had gone out the back door into the rear yard. For one thing, he figured the creature did not want to be seen by a lot of people and, therefore, only went outside at night, traveled exclusively in the dark, when it could slip even into a fair-sized town like Santa Barbara without being spotted. The day was still light enough to make the thing leery of the outdoors. Furthermore, Travis could sense its presence nearby, the way he might sense that someone was staring at him behind his back, the way he might sense an oncoming thunderstorm on a humid day with a lowering sky. It was out there, all right, waiting in the kitchen, ready and waiting.
Cautiously, Travis returned to the archway and stepped into the half-dark dining room.
Einstein stayed close at his side, neither whining nor growling nor barking. The dog seemed to realize that Travis needed complete silence in order to hear any sound the beast might make.
Travis took two more steps.
Ahead, through the kitchen door, he could see a corner of the table, the sink, part of a counter, half of the dishwasher. The setting sun was at the other end of the house, and the light in the kitchen was dim, gray, so their adversary would not cast a revealing shadow. It might be waiting on either side of the door, or it might have climbed onto the counters from which it could launch itself down at him when he entered the room.
Trying to trick the creature, hoping that it would react without hesitation to the first sign of movement in the doorway, Travis tucked the revolver under his belt, quietly picked up one of the dining-room chairs, eased to within six feet of the kitchen, and pitched the chair through the open door. He snatched the revolver out of his waistband and, as the chair sailed into the kitchen, assumed a shooter’s stance. The chair crashed into the Formica-topped table, clattered to the floor, and banged against the dishwasher.
The lantern-eyed enemy did not go for it. Nothing moved. When the chair finished tumbling, the kitchen was again marked by a hushed expectancy.
Einstein was making a curious sound, a quiet shuddery huffing, and after a moment Travis realized the noise was a result of the dog’s uncontrollable shivering.
No question about it: the intruder in the kitchen was the very thing that had pursued them through the woods more than three months ago. During the intervening weeks, it had made its way north, probably traveling mostly in the wildlands to the east of the developed part of the state, relentlessly tracking the dog by some means that Travis could not understand and for reasons he could not even guess.
In response to the chair he had thrown, a large white-enameled canister crashed to the floor just beyond the kitchen doorway, and Travis jumped back in surprise, squeezing off a wild shot before he realized he was only being taunted. The lid flew off the container when it hit the floor, and flour spilled across the tile.
Silence again.
By responding to Travis’s taunt with one of its own, the intruder had displayed unnerving intelligence. Abruptly Travis realized that, coming from the same research lab as Einstein and being a product of related experiments, the creature might be as smart as the retriever. Which would explain Einstein’s fear of it. If Travis had not already accommodated himself to the idea of a dog with humanlike intelligence, he might have been unable to credit this beast with more than mere animal cleverness; however, events of the past few months had primed him to accept—and quickly adapt to— almost anything.
Silence.
Only one round left in the gun.
Deep silence.
He had been so startled by the flour canister that he had not noticed from which side of the doorway it had been flung, and it had fallen in such a fashion that he could not deduce the position of the creature that had hurled it. He still did not know if the intruder was to the left or right of the doorway.
He was not sure he any longer cared where it was. Even with the .357 in hand, he did not think he would be wise to enter the kitchen. Not if the damn thing was as smart as a man. It would be like doing battle with an intelligent buzzsaw, for Christ’s sake.
The light in the east-facing kitchen was dwindling, almost gone. In the dining room, where Travis and Einstein stood, the darkness was deepening. Even behind them, in spite of the open front door and window and the corner lamp, the living room was filling with shadows.
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