Koontz, Dean - Time Thieves Page 2

  She reached across the table and took his hand. "Don't worry about it, huh? The fact that you recognized him and knew he was from—from that blank period, that's a good sign. Maybe, like Doc said, it'll all come back, slowly."

  They finished the meal without dawdling. At the cash register, Pete had some trouble figuring out how many bills he needed to pay the tab. He kept trying to give the cashier too much, and when she gave him his change, he was certain she had shorted him. Della did not like the looks of him, harried and distraught.

  She tried to make the evening as light as possible. They took Barbara's clothes back to her apartment where they had a drink or two. He had always enjoyed talking and kidding with Barb before, but he was too much of another mind tonight. At home again, Della came close to him in bed, warm and soft. She persuaded him, with little trouble, that they should repeat Billings' first piece of advice. Afterwards, content and sure that he must be too, she fell asleep.

  But he remained awake. He stared at the ceiling a long time, wondering. Two weeks minus two days. . . .

  Where had he slept all that time? Who had given him a bed and food to eat? He had left home with three dollars in his wallet, and that was what he had returned with.

  Credit cards. Of course. He could have slept in motels and eaten in restaurant with his credit cards. The thought was immensly comforting. Next month's bill would tell them where he had been. He sighed and relaxed a bit, leaning back into his pillow.

  Why? That was the major question remaining.

  Why had his mind rejected reality; why had it run loose and blind for twelve days? He loved Della; there was no conflict between them that he might wish to escape. He liked to think they were not just in love with each other, but that they also liked each other, something rare in most marriages. They had seldom argued, even with Della's strong will. The business? He had not been lying to Billings when he said it was fine. What else, then? He was apolitical—or liked to think he was—and could not have been unduly disturbed by the state of the nation. He had long ago decided that politicians would have everyone in their graves ahead of time, either by ignoring pollution or fostering wars. His duty was to live his own life and to hell with having children and planning on a future. Maybe it was not a gallant attitude, but it led to fewer hassles and more chance at happiness in the end.

  Sleep would not come.

  He slid to the edge of the bed and put his slippers on. Perhaps, if he found a book and read for an hour or two, all would be well. He stood and was passing the single window in the room when he saw the man standing under the willow tree on the lawn, watching the house.

  He stepped quickly to the glass only to find the lawn quiet and uninhabited when he got there.

  Della turned, mumbled and settled into sleep again.

  He remembered the nightmare: the face without eyes, the many-fingered hand reaching for him. . . .

  But this watcher had been someone else, for there had been nothing inhuman about him. He was certain it was the same, tall, lean man he had encountered in the restaurant earlier in the evening.

  III

  They drove out of town Tuesday morning, nestled in the airconditioned comfort of the big car, a picnic lunch packed in a cooler on the back seat. The day was bright, with but a few puffy clouds that scudded across the top of the sky under the lash of a high altitude wind which did not make itself felt down here. Pete turned on the radio; the music and the passing landscape combined to settle both of them and to make everything seem fine and good and uncomplicated.

  Except for the stranger who had been standing by the willow tree last night, watching. . . .

  He had not told Della about that. It was not that he feared she wouldn't believe him. They were too close and knew each other to well to mistake sincerity for joviality. And there was nothing, surely, he could gain by lying to her. Neither was he frightened that she might think his mental problems were more severe than mere amnesia. The only reason he kept quiet was that he hated to make her tense and uncertain. She had been through more than he had, for she had been on the edge for twelve days, whereas he had been asleep all that time—or as good as.

  The sunlight dappled the road ahead, making its way through a heavy canopy of elm trees that lined both sides of the road.

  The road began to climb the mountain. The way grew more difficult as they broached the foothills and curved up the slopes of Old Cannon. To either side, the neatly kept ranch homes which had been tucked quietly between the trees began to thin out until, at last, there were no more of them.

  "Anything yet?" Della asked.

  "Nothing. It looks normal. I seem to remember passing it that Thursday morning."

  Abruptly, the even surface of the road gave way to less well-paved patches of cracked macadam as state jurisdiction faded to that of the county.

  A yellow, canvas-roofed dune buggy of Japanese manufacture roared by them on its way down the mountain. Pete recognized the grizzly, white-haired, white-bearded giant behind the wheel as Tom Murdock, who owned a cabin upslope of them. Pete though of stopping him and asking if he had seen Pete that Thursday. He decided against it. Despite the fact that amnesia was nothing to be ashamed of, he would not flaunt his shattered memory until it became absolutely necessary.

  They took Jagger's Curve slowly, the only way it could be taken if one wished to get all the way around it. When the car was on even road again, Pete drove into a small picnic area and stopped the car. He turned in his seat and looked behind them, through the rear window. Jagger's Curve was silhouetted against a blue sky.

  "What's the matter?" Della asked. She followed the direction of his gaze but could not see anything out of the ordinary. "Did you remember something?"

  "I don't know."

  On an almost subliminal level, however, he was certain that he had. But consciously, he had nothing more than a vague fear associated with that wide, acute twist in the roadway.

  "It's silly," he said, "but the minute we entered the curve from the other side, I was uptight. I wanted to jam on the brakes and turn, right there in the middle of the bend. Then we were past it and I felt sure I never went any farther than Jagger's Curve that Thursday morning."

  She waited, then said, "Where else could you have gone?"

  He turned front arid stared through the windshield at the picnic table and the wire trash receptacle. "I don't know. I wouldn't have made a turn in the middle of a curve like that. So I must have come clear around before I changed destinations—though I definitely don't remember making it this far."

  "Your imagination, then," she said.

  "Perhaps."

  But he did not believe it. He felt as if something rested within him, some gloved hand which clutched any surfacing memories from those twelve days and forced them down again. It was as if someone had gone to great lengths to be certain that he didn't remember.

  That was paranoia. He best avoid it, or he would find himself in even more trouble.

  He drove on. The remainder of the ride to the cabin was uneventful, though the certainty persisted that he had not come this far on that Thursday morning.

  The cabin had three rooms: kitchen, living room and bedroom. It was built of logs on a single floor. The rear corner had been expanded with a bath addition which he intended to cover with half-log artificial siding to match the rest of the place. It was set on a slope above the road, and it looked out on the same breathtaking scenery that had accompanied them since Jagger's Curve. They parked by the front door at the top of the tortuously steep driveway and went inside.

  "But you were here!" Della said, delighted at her discovery. "You did some painting!"

  The white plaster had been only half covered with beige paint before. Sometime within the last two weeks, the living room had been finished. It was a good job. He had apparently taken his time with it.

  "I don't remember doing it."

  He tried, to be analytical and speak clamly, but the panic rose in him again. He felt trapped, abruptly
reduced to primitive fears and animal intuitions that threatened to guide his reason. He knew, without any facts, that it was dangerous to be here. He had to fight down the urge to bolt for the car and get off the mountain.

  "You'll remember soon enough," she said. She knew that it was necessary to make him think she believed that, to offer her own certainty as an anchor.

  They prowled the cabin, but they found no other sign of what might have transpired to spark his amnesia. The paintbrushes were washed clean and racked with his typical care. The cans of beige paint were firmly tamped shut to keep the contents from drying out.

  Why couldn't he remember any of it?

  She forced a smile as she saw that his fear was as strong as ever, and she said: "Well, let's do some work! Maybe some exercise will help settle your nerves. I'll lay some tile in the bathroom—and maybe you can clear some of the brush away, downslope, toward the road."

  "I guess we've nothing better to do," He saw the dismay she tried to conceal between flickerings of a tentative, strained smile, and he knew that it wasn't any good, this transmitting his uncertainty to her. He kissed her then and made enthusiastic noises about getting the cabin closer to completion.

  He fetched a sickle from the tool rack and tramped through the ragged clearing he had already cut, to the shaggy perimeter of the lawn. There, he set to work hacking down the shoulder-high brush between the trees.

  The work did have a therapeutic effect He soon removed his shirt and settled to the enjoyment of his muscles working in rhythm. Every time he stopped to survey what he had accomplished, he felt better. It was as if each chopped weed, each torn and dismembered bush, made him less hollow and more sure of himself, made those two lost weeks far less important than they had seemed at first.

  Peter Mullion was a man less bound by tradition and a need for security than most. He had never buckled down to a nine-to-five job in his life, and he never intended to, even if the now prosperous ad agency should suddenly fold. In the early years when the agency wasn't making much money, he had simply adjusted his living standard and didn't worry much. Money had been put away for a nicer house, travel next year, for books, records and art. They had modest investments. But as for a retirement fund—well, he felt that the sooner a man started saving for old age, the sooner his apathy toward the present set in.

  Yet, there were limits to his casualness. Missing two weeks of his life was beyond those limits. If he did not discover what had happened to himself, he would never be at peace.

  Thinking slowly brought the panic back.

  The faster he swung the sickle, the greater the panic became. It was a vicious circle: he could only escape fear through the monotony of manual labor, but manual labor gave him time to think—and thinking brought him directly back to the fear.

  He chopped harder, trying to lose himself in the exertion.

  But the fear swept his mind, the bristles of that dark broom digging deeper every time it arced.

  The sickle, blurred by the furious rate of its arc, struck the trunk of a locust tree. The impact made his arm so numb that his fingers opened and dropped the blade into the high grass where he lost sight of it.

  Pete sat down, exhausted, breathing hard. He felt centuries old. Chin on his chest, he made soft whooping noises as he drew breath and tried to settle himself.

  I am not going mad, he thought. I will not. I cannot! I won't!

  But he was not so sure.

  He had read, somewhere, that the mad never suspect they are mad and that only the rational man wonders about his sanity. Wasn't that evidence of his sanity?

  As he recovered his breath, he began to feel that he was being watched. It was such a strong sensation that it either proved an incurable paranoia or was based on fact. His first reaction was to turn and see if Della had come down from the house in response to his berserker spell, but he saw that she was not there. He looked about the periphery of the clearing, and he moved just swiftly enough to see the mountain laurel rustle to his right, as if someone had parted it slightly in order to look at him and had dropped back out of sight as soon as he had begun to turn his head in that direction.

  Paranoia. He couldn't give in to it. There was nothing there; he had not seen anything at all.

  But before he could convince himself of that, he heard the footsteps of someone moving stealthily away through the weeds farther down the slope. Twigs snapped, and the sound of thorns snagging clothing and ripping free was also clearly audible.

  He stood and tried to see that way. The laurel grew taller there in the flush of a spring that flowed through the culvert beneath the road. He could see nothing but the swaying of brush as someone forced a way through. Abruptly, even that stopped.

  "Hey!" he called.

  There was no answer.

  He pushed into the brush. In moments, he found signs of the watcher's passage: broken grass stems, snapped laurel branches, disturbed earth where the sod had been shredded, as if the watcher had weighed a great deal or had, more likely, been wearing climbing boots with spiked soles.

  He ran faster, his breath still short from his workout with the sickle. He felt as if he were gaining on his quarry, and he was trying to think what to do when he saw the man—when fingers grasped the right hip of his jeans and brought him to a halt.

  He whirled, a hoarse cry caught in the back of his throat.

  What was there? No eyes, split mouth, staring out of darkness at him. . . ?

  He fisted his hands and flailed out as he came around, but he found that there were no fingers, after all. Instead, long thorns snagged his belt and jeans. In a moment, he had freed himself, whimpering uncontrollably, and ran on.

  The signs of the watcher's passage ended in an un-breached wall of vegetation. Pete cautiously examined the land on all sides, but he could find no hiding place. He pushed on toward the highway, scratching himself on the thorns, catching small, brown burrs in his jeans. He found no one when he was in the clear. He crossed the road and looked down the second shelf of the mountain's slope. Nothing. It was as if the watcher had vanished in the middle of the woods.

  He headed back to the cabin. Della came out the front door as he started up the porch steps, almost colliding with him. "There's something here I want you to see," she said. She seemed preoccupied, and she did not notice his condition.

  Inside, she took him to the bathroom door and pointed to the living room wall near the doorway where she had accidentally bumped a carton of floor tiles against the newly painted section. There was a scar on the beige paint which allowed the plaster to show through.

  "Don't worry about it," he said. "I can touch it up when—"

  "It's not that," she interrupted. "Don't you see why it scraped so easily? Touch it, Pete." She was frightened, though he could not see why. Her normally rosy complexion had grown chalky.

  He ran his fingers across the scar and found moisture. There was damp paint on his fingertips. The surface had solidified and seemed dry, but its true nature could be betrayed by a thumbnail. It was not completely set.

  "How long does it take the stuff to dry, Pete?"

  He looked at her, then looked back at the wall. His head felt loose. It would fall off any minute and roll across the floor. He scratched the back of his neck, but that made him shiver, and he stopped.

  "Six hours," he said at last.

  "Which means you might not have been up here at all that Thursday. This had to be painted last night, while you were home sleeping—by someone who wanted us to think that you'd been here that day."

  "Why?" he asked.

  Neither of them had an answer.

  He tried three other places around that half of the room and found the same thing every time.

  His legs felt weak, and his spine seemed to shiver, but at least he was not going mad. If there were other people involved, if there were some point to all this, if it was not just his imagination, perhaps the world was still solidly beneath his feet.

  "Get the picnic cooler,"
he said.

  "What?"

  "I'll start the car; we're getting out of here."

  For the first time, she noticed his scratched and bleeding chest, the red welts along his arms where thorns had done their work. "Good lord! What happned to you?" She touched the blemishes tenderly. Her long, tan fingers were cool.

  "Later," he snapped. He was gruff with her, but he could not help it. He couldn't deny the urgency which had possessed him. "Hurry!"

  Outside, the trees had taken on a sinister, malevolent appearance. The upward regions of the mountain housed demons, the lower regions warlocks, things in the cover of the greenery which amused themselves with tricks played on mere mortals.

  By the time she hurried outside with the hamper, he had already started the car and had come around to open her door. He took the lunch from her and shoved the styrofoam container onto the back seat. He helped her in, closed her door and ran around to the driver's seat.

  "What are you so frightened of?" she asked, not fully comprehending even the little bit she had seen.

  "I was watched while I was in the woods. Maybe the same man who was in the restaurant last night—and who watched our house from the lawn."

  "Watched our house?"

  "In a minute," he said, turning his full attention to the car.

  They left the cabin and Old Cannon more swiftly than was prudent, considering the winding roads and the precipice always at hand on their right. He did not even take time to go back and recover his shirt where he had taken it off and dropped it while cutting brush. He had the feeling that, if he went back there, he might leave Della waiting in the car with the picnic hamper for ever and ever and ever. . . .

  IV

  The following afternoon, Pete got gas and oil in the car and ended up in an argument with the attendant over the change from a twenty dollar bill. He was certain he had been short-changed and was embarrassed and further angered to find that he had not been. Feeling like an ass, he screeched out of the station lot and almost struck a northbound Chevrolet.