Ashley Bell. Dean Koontz
Debris-strewn stairs led to the flat roof. The four-foot-high parapet was as described. In the liquid dark of the arid night, they dared to stand, surveying the ghost town to the south and east, looking for the smallest of lights, whether mundane or supernatural, finding neither.
Having arrived safely, they slept two at a time, the other two always alert and listening, watching. Every sound would travel far into the hush of the dead town, and therefore they said nothing to one another. They had been through so much together that none of them needed conversation to know what the others must be thinking.
They remained on the roof after sunrise, when the chill of night only half relented, though they stayed below the parapet. They would not execute a search on foot until they had given their quarry and his men twenty-four hours to inadvertently reveal their location. They had their periscopic cameras, their ears, and patience.
Nothing had happened by 4:00 P.M., when Pax raided his MREs for beef jerky, chicken-noodle slop, and a PowerBar. He ate sitting on the roof, his back against the parapet wall. He wore body armor, but his MOLLE-style web system with all the gear attached was a separate rig that could be taken off and set aside. His pistol lay on the roof a mere foot from him: a Sig Sauer P220 chambered for .45 caliber.
Abruptly Bibi came into his mind with such force that, startled, he almost bit his lip along with the half-eaten PowerBar. He thought of his singular girl often every day, but this unbidden image of her lovely face bloomed vividly in his mind’s eye, as no memory had ever pressed itself upon him before. He recognized the moment: he and Bibi stand-up paddleboarding side by side in Newport Harbor on a sunny summer day. She’d said something funny, and his comeback had cracked her up so much that she had almost fallen off her board.
The vision of her face, prettily contorted in laughter, so lifted his spirits that he tried to hold on to it, to freeze-frame the recollection in all its astonishingly sharp and poignant detail. But memory wanes even as it waxes; she faded and could be summoned back only in a less intense manifestation.
Paxton glanced at his G-Shock watch. 4:14 P.M. local time. That would be 4:14 A.M. where Bibi lived half a world away. She should be home in bed, sound asleep. Worry wound its way through him, not just the usual worries he sometimes had when he thought about Bibi, but a deep disquiet unique to this moment. He wondered if he had gone on a blackout operation at the worst possible time.
THIS TIME, STILTING IN SILENCE, THE ROBED AND hooded bearers of the dead convey the corpse along a hospital corridor where the roof and ceiling have been scalped away, allowing moonlight to bathe the scene. They enter Bibi’s room, and the face of one so shocks and horrifies, as always before, that she rebels against consideration of it and sits up in bed, sits up and wakes not from the dream, but from one dream scene to another. Gone are Death’s two henchmen, or whatever they might be. In one of the chairs by the window, in the red radiance of a sunset, sits the corpse cocooned in a white shroud glowing with the reflection of the burning sky. The fabric masking its face stretches, and a shallow concavity appears as its mouth opens. From it comes the voice that she knows well: “The forms … the forms … things unknown.” Frightened of hearing more, she sits up once again, but this time not in another dream scene, this time—
—in the real hospital room.
Morning had come with a difference in it.
The tingling in her left side had completely relented, head to foot. Not one prickle, tickle, shiver, no static in the nerve paths.
Sitting in bed, she flexed her left hand, which had at times seemed to be the instrument of another Bibi than her, some other self who wished to use it to her own—and different—purposes. Now she had full control of it once more. No weakness. She closed it into a fist, and though her fist was small, she liked the look of it.
No headache. No dizziness. No foul taste.
With an exhilarating quickness, she said, “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. She sells seashells by the seashore.” Each word escaped her perfectly formed, without a slur or slip of tongue.
She put down one of the safety railings and sat on the edge of the bed, where for a moment she hesitated, warning herself that the cessation of symptoms didn’t mean that she was somehow cured. If she dared to cry out in wonder and celebration, her voice might trigger an abrupt collapse into her previous condition. But no. That was pure and foolish superstition. There were not three goddesses of destiny as the ancient Greeks had believed, no sisters spinning and measuring out and cutting the thread of each life, who might take offense at her delight in having escaped the fate of cancer. She got out of bed and into her slippers, walked the room, walked it and then did a silly little dance, and in each case her left foot, just like her right, performed as she demanded without a moment of stiffness or a misstep.
Through the doorway came a nurse, Petronella, whose hair was pulled tight and braided at the back. She’d been on duty the previous day and proved to be an efficient and confident woman who had seen everything that anyone in her career could expect to see and who seemed never to have been for a moment unsettled or caught unaware by any of it. Her chocolate-brown face warmed now with surprise and amusement as she stopped just inside the threshold and said, “Girl, what’s gotten into you this morning?”
“I can dance,” Bibi said as she performed a modest soft-shoe number.
“Maybe you can,” the nurse said, “but I’ll wait to see the evidence.”
Bibi laughed and clapped her hands three times quickly. “No funky left foot, no tingling head to toe, no nothing. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers—perfectly pronounced, Petronella. I’m not sick anymore.”
The nurse’s smile first froze and then melted. With pity in her eyes and sympathy in her voice, she said, “Things come and go, then they come again, child. It’s best to stay real with that.”
Bibi shook her head. “It’s true. It’s real. I don’t know what the hell just happened, but something sure did. I can feel it through and through. Clean. Healthy. I need to talk to Dr. Chandra. He needs to see me. We’ve got to take another look at this.”
Twelve Years Earlier
AFTER ANOTHER TWO-WEEK REPRIEVE FROM temptation: the Sunday-morning quiet, the sunless day fogbound and chilly, the key in the lock, the creak of the hinges, the white vase on the table without flowers this time, the open inner door, the living-room threshold, the living room itself, the closed bedroom door. If the blood on the doorknob had been real on her previous visit, someone had wiped the brass clean in the meantime.
Sometimes Bibi did not understand herself. She wasn’t a foolish girl, yet she had returned. She knew that she was no coward, that she didn’t need to test her courage, but here she stood. She remained convinced that the dead didn’t come back, and yet she wondered. Worst of all, she understood that it would not be a good thing if one of them did find a way back into the world of the living; nonetheless, a part of her kind of, sort of, undeniably yearned to have just such an encounter, supposing of course that it turned out to be magical in the best possible way.
She worried that she might have dark impulses. She knew about dark impulses because she’d read about them in novels. She read at a tenth-grade level, five grades above her station, which led her to believe that she must be well informed about compulsions, fixations, obsessions, manias, and morbid drives. Such dark impulses could be of the mind