After death, p.31
After Death, page 31
Royce isn’t interested in either science fiction or science. He’s not interested in much of anything other than his girlfriends and housekeeping; he doesn’t care what’s cool in movies or music or art or fashion, and he has no politics. People say there will be robots everywhere one day, but he’s sure that is at least a decade from now. So, aliens. A lot of people seem to be fascinated with UFOs, but Royce isn’t. He couldn’t care less about aliens. Whatever extraterrestrial females are like, they won’t be hot in any way that’s likely to get his sap rising. Earth girls are enough for him.
He wishes the robots hadn’t so unnerved him. He can’t go back and fill the grave now. That’s like asking to be caught.
Although he panicked and although Lenore will now be found sooner than later, he is confident that no one can connect her to him. One of the benefits of his style of romance is that no one ever sees him in public with any of his ladies. He abandoned the shovel and pick, but he bought them for cash at a yard sale years earlier. The tools can’t be traced to him, and he always wears gloves when handling them. As for Lenore, subsequent to breaking up with her, he submerged her lovely body in a special chemical bath and took other steps to ensure that no trace of his DNA can be found on or in her. Proper handling of an ex-girlfriend is a housekeeping chore more crucial than any other. After fleeing the robots—how crazy that sounds!—he drove several miles to another lonely place, where he used a powerful handheld vacuum to go over the interior of his Lexus SUV. He purchased the vehicle months after he’d abducted Lenore, and she’d been in it only once, after her body was sealed in plastic sheeting; however, just in case one hair of hers somehow found its way into the vehicle, an hour of vacuuming was the right thing to do. He stopped at a public park to throw the hand vac in a trash can. He drove the SUV through an automatic car wash that was open around the clock—and then drove it through again.
The Prozac, the tea, the cookies, and his singular housekeeping habits give him confidence that all will be well. After a few days of rest, he will start scouting for his next girlfriend. He needs between two and four months, on average, to find a new companion, research her routines, plan the acquisition of her, bring her home unseen, and teach her how to be happy and fulfilled by making him happy. It is an arduous process—but fun!—and rewarding when she’s at last in place and trained.
Dawn paints reefs of gold and coral pink across the sky as Royce finishes washing and drying the teapot. No longer shaken by the surreal events of the night, pleased to be moving into a new phase of his life, with the robots merely a curiosity to be wondered about in years to come, he makes his way along the downstairs hall to the foyer, exhausted and ready to go upstairs to bed, when the chimes announce a visitor.
At one of the sidelights flanking the front door, a man in a uniform peers into the foyer. A policeman. For a moment, Royce can’t draw a breath. The policeman smiles and nods and raises one hand as if to say, Hi, there. Because it is impossible that a link exists between Royce and Lenore in the open grave, the policeman’s warm smile is surely genuine, his purpose benign. Royce opens the door.
Two officers, not just one, step inside, and the second isn’t smiling. He says, “Royce Kinnel?” Royce moves to quell any suspicion they have by being respectful, polite, relaxed, and puzzled rather than either fearful or angry. Nevertheless, the smiling policeman presents him with a search warrant, announces that they will be impounding the Lexus, and informs Royce that he is under arrest.
Royce cheated his way through private schools and college, and not one teacher ever tumbled to his scams and plagiarisms because he manipulated them into seeing him as an earnest and dedicated—though not exceptional—student. In much the same way, he has manipulated his girls to believe that he is a deeply troubled but not violent man who will eventually free them if they do all that he desires, even if some of it is disgusting or even painful. He is tall and handsome, has a firm handshake and always makes eye contact and has white teeth and is well-mannered, and he comes from a family of some prominence. That is all he has needed to skate in the past, and he believes it is all he needs now, if he just remains calm.
The unsmiling officer produces an unusual eight-by-ten photo. Everything captured by the camera is in eerie shades of green and gradations of black. The perspective is from a low angle. A spade stands with its point buried in the earth. A man looms. Cradled in his arms is a woman. The night was too dark for anyone to have seen his face. But in this green version of events, Royce Kinnel has no difficulty recognizing himself.
As the smiling officer says something about an attorney and a right to remain silent, Royce hears footsteps behind him and turns to see that two more policemen have entered the hallway from the back of the house.
The insistently glum officer returns the photograph to a manila envelope and refers to an anonymous informant in the company that provides navigation service to the Lexus. Royce has long enjoyed the convenience of GPS navigation, but he hasn’t realized that a record exists of everywhere he has gone. He’s not into all this tech stuff. It’s boring. He doesn’t have time for it, what with his domestic chores and his uniquely vigorous love life. Even if he’d known about such a record, he’d have done nothing different. He’s been careful, so very careful, to make sure no one ever sees him with one of his girlfriends, because if no one sees them with him, it doesn’t matter where he goes in his vehicle; there’s nothing to connect him to the poor dears. Until the alien robots. And how surreal is that? Now Officer Always Scowling informs him that GPS records of his previous vehicles are archived and will be subpoenaed.
They seem to expect Royce to confess, but of course he has no such intention. He is still tall and handsome, has a firm handshake and always makes eye contact and has white teeth and is still well-mannered, and his family is as prominent as ever. In addition, there is the Constitution of the United States and the rights guaranteed in it. Royce has no interest in history and knows not much more about the Constitution than that it exists, but he’s pretty damn sure no court will allow them to introduce photographic evidence provided by invading space aliens whose advanced technology allows them to fake the image beyond anyone’s ability to detect the fakery, just as they can hack and fiddle with archived navigation-system records. He will surely skate.
OF WHAT IS PAST, OR PASSING, OR TO COME
In the Caribbean Sea, the jewel-tone waters are warm and clear. Of the many islands, the Caymans are among the smallest.
On Grand Cayman is a bank. In the bank is an account held in the name of Only Truth, Inc.
In Idaho lies a hundred-acre ranch of grassy fields and forests that is owned by Only Truth, Inc. It isn’t a working ranch, at least not in the traditional sense.
On the ranch is a modest but beautifully finished house in the Craftsman style.
Residing in the house are Peter and Susan Pevensie, husband and wife, who are financially independent and who say they retired early to write novels. Their only child, Edward, is homeschooled, and they have a dog named Lucy. More than two years have passed since any of them has mistakenly spoken the names Michael or Nina or John even in the privacy of their home.
Also on the property is a stable for eight horses, though only three are currently in residence: Bree, Hwin, and Puzzle—one mare and two stallions.
The family rides together, canoes together, skis together, attends church together, and participates in the life of the small town of Baskin Springs to such an extent that none of the locals ever thinks of them as in any way mysterious.
As peaceful and idyllic as life can be in rural Idaho, this is the worst of times and the best of times in the wider world, an age of great turmoil, though the changes underway are mostly nonviolent. Someone whom the media calls “Superhacker” controls the internet and maintains access to all data in every computer, cell phone, device, and system that’s internet dependent. Telecom, banking, and social media entities; the power grid; private enterprises; all government bureaus and agencies: He enjoys unrestricted access to pretty much everything. Worldwide. Superhacker isn’t really anything as ordinary as a hacker, but something stranger and more powerful for which no one has yet come up with a better name. Many billions of dollars and countless man-hours have been spent trying to locate Superhacker or wrest control from him or her, all to no avail. In some ineffable way, this villain has reconfigured the internet so that those who thrive on anonymity and illegal enterprise can opt out only at the unbearable cost of collapsing their company or agency and being denied all forms of electronic communication ever after.
Much has been said and written about the totalitarian threat posed by Superhacker, but it has not materialized. The first change imposed by this individual was to make it impossible to be anonymous in social media or elsewhere. In one day, every concocted handle was translated into the user’s real name; now every attempt to go online incognito fails. The abrupt collapse of the ability to deceive and harass by such means has been a societal shockwave. But fascism grows in the dark, not in the light, and so it doesn’t grow.
Just a week later, everyone with an email account—everyone—received in his or her mailbox reams of incontrovertible evidence of the massive corruption of fifteen members of Congress, paired with the emails and recorded phone conversations of justice department officials and law-enforcement personnel and media figures who had secretly conspired with those politicians to assist them in escaping prosecution and preserving their power, their reputations. That was only the first fifteen.
During the past three years, politicians at federal, state, and local levels, as well as bureaucrats, journalists, media executives, businesspeople, judges, clergy, teachers, university presidents, and citizens in all walks of life have been outed for testifying falsely before a grand jury, for lining their pockets with millions in graft and bribery and embezzled funds, for bold tax evasion, for selling national defense secrets to the government of China, for rape or murder or, in two cases, treason. Indicted by their own emails and recorded phone calls and bank records, they face such mountains of evidence that only a few escape prison; none has held on to his or her previous office or position.
These developments have resulted in much outrage and threats and limited violence. The most egregious criminals are those who issue the loudest, most bitterly insistent denials of their guilt. Because the wicked often have a charisma that the naive view as godliness, rather than demonic suasion, some miscreants for a time raise mass movements in their defense. In those cases, Superhacker exposes them again—and as before—with their own voices and with video of them engaged in conspiracies to deceive. Of the naive who join those crusades, most fall away when they see they have been duped, and only the most self-blinded cling to their faith in their faithless manipulators.
If, for a while, the social cohesion of the nation seemed sure to break from the strain of these changes, a new and better order asserted itself sooner than Superhacker hoped. Once depressed or cynical judges of an honest bent were heartened by the impeachment and conviction of their colleagues whom they knew to be corrupted by money or ideological passion. They found the courage to take over their state bar associations, state attorneys general offices, and even the justice department of the United States to strive for a fairer system swept clean of spoils and wild unreason. Institution after institution is evolving, not always with enthusiasm, because it has lost the power to define truth. The power of the state to rule by fear and moral exhortation based on lies is fading in a society where raw truth is available for everyone to see and where lies are quickly revealed by the liars’ own indiscretions and a narcissistic certainty of their cleverness.
Superhacker is expanding operations to other nations, where changes have already been occurring in dreaded anticipation of his or her intention to broaden the mission. What will be will be, but what was before had become intolerable.
There are those who say that the human heart is deceitful above all things (which is true) and that lying is essential to grease the often grinding wheels of human relationships (which might be true as concerns relatively harmless falsehoods like insincere compliments, even flattery). But when Superhacker began to press the case that truth and the derivative of truth called “common sense” were in such short supply as to threaten the world, civilization had been fast sliding toward an abyss from which there might have been no return, a future of lawlessness, ginned-up hatred, irrational ideologies, and war. Perhaps this experiment in veracity will ultimately fail, but all polls show that a large majority of the populace finds that life is better these days, and polls can’t be fudged in this new world.
Winter has arrived in Idaho. Yesterday, the sky was clear, and birds glided across like figure skaters on wind-polished ice. This morning, the clouds are thick and gray and lowering with a warning that autumn will soon seem to have been a dream. The big thermometer fastened to the wall of the back porch indicates the temperature is thirty-eight degrees and falling.
After a breakfast of bacon, eggs, fried potatoes, thick cuts of toasted and lavishly buttered raisin bread, washed down with orange juice or coffee, Peter and Susan and Edward mount their horses. They ride the meadows high and higher, their breath smoking from them in lesser plumes than it smokes from Bree and Hwin and Puzzle.
They rarely speak, for the evergreen forests and the golden meadows and the great mountains rising to bare-rock summits are nature’s version of a cathedral. No matter how familiar the scene, their hearts are taken by awe. The vistas are supremely grand, so that the world seems newly created, full of promise and free from iniquity across its hemispheres, which is but a lovely illusion. Peter knows that the Earth will never be as innocent as it appears here and now. A reckoning can’t be avoided, only delayed—but it has always been thus.
Lucy, a golden retriever, accompanies them, often straying toward one scent or another that intrigues her, never venturing too far. She races ahead to roll and wriggle in the grass. Come spring, such frolicking will bejewel her coat with the bright petals of torn wildflowers, and soon there will be snow to drape her in ermine.
A rifle is sleeved on Peter’s saddle. After a long absence, gray wolves make their home in this territory once more, but he’s watching primarily for a mountain lion, which is the greater threat to Lucy. He hasn’t used the rifle for any purpose other than to fire a shot that scares a predator away. He hopes to get through life without killing another human being, and he prefers to pass his remaining years without killing any creature at all.
The vision of an eventual Singularity, a decades-long dream of transcendence, that is in fact a yearning for absolute power, has come to pass in him. And here is the irony always present in human affairs: He wants no power over others. He is trying to use his gift to thwart those who want control over their fellow men and women, to use truth to disperse power more widely than it’s ever been before, so each person is free from the lies that have previously trammeled them. Succeed or fail, it will be a fine adventure.
Toward the end of the second hour of their ride, as they are heading home, the first snow falls. With no wind to hurry them, the huge flakes wheel down in graceful spirals. Lucy halts, looks up in wonderment, and then gambols across the meadow, leaping to bite the flakes from the air as if they must be manna.
Words come to Peter from a poem by William Butler Yeats that Shelby Shrewsberry loved: We must laugh and we must sing / We are blest by everything / Everything we look upon is blest.
NOTE
Some of the chapter titles in this novel are taken from poetry that I admire. A list is provided here for the curious reader.
A Bridge over Troubled Water. “Bridge over Troubled Water” by Paul Simon.
Leaning Together, Headpieces Filled with Straw. “The Hollow Men” by T. S. Eliot.
Voices as Meaningless as Wind in Dry Grass. “The Hollow Men” by T. S. Eliot.
In the Twilight Kingdom. “The Hollow Men” by T. S. Eliot.
The Pain of Living and the Drug of Dreams. “Animula” by T. S. Eliot.
The Red-Eyed Scavengers Are Creeping. “A Cooking Egg” by T. S. Eliot.
We Are Encompassed with Snakes. “Choruses from ‘The Rock.’” by T. S. Eliot.
What Life Have You If You Have Not Life Together? “Choruses from ‘The Rock’” by T. S. Eliot.
The Only Wisdom We Can Hope to Acquire. “East Coker” by T. S. Eliot.
Here in Death’s Dream Kingdom. “Eyes That I Last Saw in Tears” by T. S. Eliot.
Life You May Evade, but Death You Shall Not. “Choruses from ‘The Rock’” by T. S. Eliot.
A Troubled Guest on the Dark Earth. “The Holy Longing” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
There Comes a Moment When Everything Is Still and Ripens. “Grappa in September” by Cesare Pavese.
With Spiders I Had Friendship Made. “The Prisoner of Chillon” by Lord Byron.
Who Rides at Night, Who Rides So Late? “The Invisible King” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
The Night Isn’t Dark; the World Is Dark. “Departure” by Louise Glück.
Deep into the Darkness Peering. “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe.
Nothing at All around Me but the Beast. “The Inferno” by Dante Alighieri.
Everything That Rises Must Converge. The title of a short story by Flannery O’Connor.
Of What Is Past, or Passing, or to Come. “Sailing to Byzantium” by William Butler Yeats.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
International bestselling author Dean Koontz was only a senior in college when he won an Atlantic Monthly fiction competition. He has never stopped writing since. Koontz is the author of The House at the End of the World, The Big Dark Sky, Quicksilver, The Other Emily, Elsewhere, Devoted, and seventy-nine New York Times bestsellers, fourteen of which were #1, including One Door Away from Heaven, From the Corner of His Eye, Midnight, Cold Fire, The Bad Place, Hideaway, Dragon Tears, Intensity, Sole Survivor, The Husband, Odd Hours, Relentless, What the Night Knows, and 77 Shadow Street. He’s been hailed by Rolling Stone as “America’s most popular suspense novelist,” and his books have been published in thirty-eight languages and have sold over five hundred million copies worldwide. Born and raised in Pennsylvania, he now lives in Southern California with his wife, Gerda, their golden retriever, Elsa, and the enduring spirits of their goldens Trixie and Anna. For more information, visit his website at www.deankoontz.com.
