Breathless. Dean Koontz
these walls. Room by room, lock the windows and doors. Pull shut the drapes, lower the pleated shades.
His tremors had diminished but had not subsided altogether. Dry mouth. Moist palms. Eyes hot and grainy.
Although he had practiced with the shotgun both on shooting ranges and in lonely landscapes on the long drive west, he had no experience sweeping a house to find an intruder. Fortunately, the place was small and was arranged in such a fashion that his quarry could not circle quietly behind him as he searched.
The living room harbored no one. Neither did the kitchen nor the dining area.
The door to the cellar, which earlier he had closed, stood open. Wooden stairs with rubber treads led down into darkness.
Beside the door, the wall was marred by a bloody handprint, as if a wounded man had leaned here for a moment before descending into the dark. The blood glistened, wet.
Holding the shotgun with one hand, Henry pressed the back of his left hand against the wall, next to the print. The length of his pale fingers and the size of his palm seemed to match the hand of whoever had ventured into the cellar.
Another blackjack table. Another casino. This time, Dr. Lamar Woolsey was calling himself Mitch Feigenbaum.
This seemed to be an unlikely name for a sixty-year-old African-American. But his resemblance to the beloved star of a long-ago TV sitcom gave him such instant credibility that no one ever seemed to suspect he was someone other than whom he pretended to be.
He was winning bigger than previously, because he enjoyed the double advantage of being a card counter and a man with an intuitive ability to recognize patterns in apparently chaotic systems.
His intuition had been refined and enhanced by a life’s work in physics and mathematics, in each of which he held a doctorate. His specialty was chaos theory.
For most of its history, science had been reductionist, seeking to learn how things worked by analyzing their constituent parts. But as successful as the sciences had been, discoveries in the last half of the twentieth century revealed that the sum of human knowledge amounted to a few grains of sand, while what waited to be discovered was an infinite – and very strange – beach.
In every complex system – from solar-system dynamics to Earth’s climate, to crystal formation, to cardiological processes – just under the facade of order, which science had discovered and long thought it fully understood, lurked an eerie and disturbing chaos. But also, deep inside every chaos, an eerier kind of hidden order waited to be found.
Even a simple system, like a card game dealt from a six-deck blackjack shoe, was fundamentally chaotic, likely to produce complex and unpredictable results. As a card counter, Lamar Woolsey hoped to impose a profitable order on the random flow of cards.
After thirty minutes of play, the composition of the six-deck shoe tipped slightly in Lamar’s favor: somewhat rich in aces and face cards, a bit low on fives and sixes, but still ruled by randomness. He couldn’t yet justify aggressive betting.
Then something strange happened. A series of Hail Mary draws gave Lamar a glimpse of the eerie nature of reality, of hidden and mysterious order.
The dealer showed a queen above his hole card. Lamar had a ten and a six, to which he drew a five, beating the dealer by a point.
In the next hand, he drew a three and a seven while the dealer showed a six. He doubled down, but drew only a deuce. The dealer revealed a sixteen count – and drew a six, busting.
Now the dealer had an ace up, and Lamar had a four and a three. He drew another four. Then a deuce. Another deuce. Then a six. His final twenty-one beat the dealer, who had a nine under his ace.
None of those three wins involved card counting, and even the most paranoid pit boss would see them as nothing but luck.
Not a believer in luck, Lamar read them instead as one of those curious patterns that expressed a hidden order under the randomness – under the chaos – of any game of chance. This phase of the pattern, which benefited him, was a wave that offered effortless surfing. Until it lost its benign character, he ought to ride it.
He won nine more hands in a row, lost two, then won another eight with such unlikely combinations of cards that counting tens and aces could have had no effect on his fortunes.
Sometimes the power of hidden order can have, with its patterns, such an obvious presence in a system that its precise mechanisms seem within the theorist’s grasp – until chaos reappears. Even when Lamar played irrationally, splitting a pair of fours when the dealer showed a face card, he won. When the dealer showed an ace, Lamar doubled down on eight – and won.
After losing three hands in a row, he suspected that the patterns under the apparent chaos of the cards no longer favored him, and he asked to have his winnings converted into high-value chips to make them easier to carry. His thousand-dollar buy-in had grown to nineteen thousand.
At the cashier’s window, he converted two chips into folding money. After the two casinos, this left him ahead four hundred for the night. He intended to give away the other seventeen thousand in chips before leaving the building.
Exploring the house bottom to top with Grady, Merlin was as stealthy as an excited pony. They found no intruder.
Whatever had finished Grady’s dinner for him, whatever had taken the three baked chicken breasts and the pan on the stove, left no sign that it had ventured farther than the kitchen.
Before returning to the ground floor, Grady turned off the lights room by room. In the darkness, he drew aside any draperies that were closed, raised any shades that were lowered.
On the ground floor again, he made sure that the views from all the windows were likewise unobstructed.
In the kitchen, he washed his dinner dishes. He brewed a pot of coffee, poured it into a thermos bottle, and stood the thermos on the dinette table. He set a mug on the table, too.
Merlin watched as if witnessing a ritual with solemn meaning.
Only two chairs served the table. They were at opposite ends of the window that looked out onto the back porch.
Grady moved one of the chairs to face the window from across the table. He switched off the lights and sat in the chair, in the dark, in the lingering aroma of strong coffee, his mug empty.
Merlin stood very still, as if pondering the situation. He was a contemplative dog, always ruminating on some aspect of his world.
Out of sight above the house, the mirror moon reflected the sun of a day not yet dawned, shining the pale light of tomorrow on the yard and on the paper birches.
The porch lay in shadow.
Merlin padded to the kitchen door, a French door with panes all the way to the bottom, installed specifically to allow the wolfhound to see outside. Alert, he stood there, barely visible in the gloom.
Grady’s window had three rows of panes, three panes per row. In another house, miles from here, this was the identical configuration of the window through which Grady’s mother had foreseen her future.
A year before Grady was born, his father gave his mother a puppy – half German shepherd, half everything else. She named him Sneakers because he had a dark coat and paws as white as tennis shoes.
Growing up with Sneakers was a fine adventure, although the dog reserved the greater part of his devotion for Grady’s mother. He loved his human brother, but he adored Ellen Adams.
Grady’s dad, Paul, worked at the lumber mill. A few weeks before