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by
Dean Koontz
Read between
September 21 - September 30, 2021
Text copyright © 2019 by The Koontz Living Trust All rights reserved.
eISBN: 9781542016261
1
On waking, he knew that his destiny was henceforth to be a defender of the innocent who are ill served—or not served at all—by the current justice system, especially when their tormentors are among the empowered. His task is to visit appropriate consequences upon murderers, and bring truth into the lives of those who thrive on lies and deceit.
This morning, after he showers, he opens a locked suitcase that was in the motel room closet when he arrived the previous evening. It contains a Kimber Pro Carry 9 mm with two eight-round magazines, a Galco shoulder rig for the gun, a combat knife in a leather sheath, the latest generation night-vision goggles, the clothes he’ll need today and tomorrow, an electronic key to a Lincoln SUV, thirty thousand dollars in cash, his favorite make of electric razor, a toothbrush, toiletries, and a driver’s license in the name of Alan Grofield.
This assignment is different from most. For some reason he can’t entirely explain, he finds it profoundly disturbing.
Before the morning is done, he’ll be going underground, perhaps to a significant depth, where there is no light but what he brings with him, in search of a man who has no mercy, and a boy who might have lost all hope.
2
The quarry whom Nameless seeks is Chilton Cutter, a weekend spelunker with a passion for caves. He was an engineer before he became a murderer and kidnapper.
When he was thirty-six, Cutter married a widow, Amy Forester, who had a three-year-old son, Jamie. Over the ensuing few years, the engineer underwent a serious personality change, perhaps because a prescription for opioids led him to other drugs, a pharmaceutical cocktail, that swept him along a path of paranoia. Certain that his wife and her parents were scheming to commit him to an institution, determined to have custody of Jamie even though the child wasn’t of his blood, Chilton Cutter shotgunned Amy and her parents and went on the run with the six-year-old boy.
Thanks to Ace’s crew, Nameless knows what the police do not: approximately where to find Chilton Cutter and his stepson Jamie.
Using satellite video, Ace’s team located the farm owned by Amy’s parents, whom she and Jamie were visiting on the fateful night. They zeroed in on the signature of a vehicle that arrived shortly before the time of the murders and that departed at high speed minutes later. They tracked it west on State Road 62, all the way past the town of Leavenworth, before it switched to an unpaved forest-service road. A few miles later, it went off-road, whereupon its heat signature was effectively masked by the canopy of trees.
He retrieves the combat knife from the console box, plucks the night-vision goggles from the passenger seat, and gets out of the SUV. He strips off his sport coat and tosses it through the open door, no longer needing it to conceal the shoulder rig, pistol, and spare magazine case. He clips the knife sheath to his belt, so that the weapon depends from his right hip.
He puts on the cumbersome goggles but flips the lenses up to his forehead. He won’t need them until he ventures into a cave. Even then, they might not provide the clarity of vision that he requires.
He’s almost to the bottom when the vision slams him.
A dimpled little girl with a ponytail, holding a floppy-eared plush-toy rabbit (the scent of peppermint); pale early light, a great blue heron, four feet tall, foraging in shallow water, long neck craning up from a search for a fingerling or a frog, one yellow eye with large black pupil regarding him with foreboding (from it, a rapid, throaty kok-kok-kok); a young blond waitress in a white uniform with blue trim, smiling as she places a menu on the table before him (the aroma of coffee); a sullen-looking bearded man, glancing at him, his stare poisonous, green eyes like distilled venom; some
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As when he experienced this vision twice before, he’s oppressed by a sense of responsibility coupled with feelings of inadequacy. If the event he’s seen is one that occurred long ago, perhaps he is somehow to blame for it. If this is a horror yet to come, maybe he will be given a chance to prevent it, though it seems too great a calamity for one man to avert, even a man with his gifts.
A demon named Cutter waits in a dark and barren hell, holding with him a young and innocent soul to whom hell has no lawful claim.
3
Jamie is not afraid of shadows. He’s not afraid of pretend snakes. He is afraid of his stepfather. Jamie is six, not yet halfway to seven, but he isn’t a baby anymore. He is done with crying. No more tears.
He wants to escape, but that seems impossible. They have gone through many rooms and passageways from the first cave they entered. Jamie doesn’t know the way out.
Sometimes Jamie can hear Chilton snoring in the distance. But the snoring echoes in weird ways, and you can go crazy trying to locate the man. Jamie wants to locate him while he’s sleeping and steal the lantern and the fuel and the matches. He has watched Chilton light it on camping trips in the past. He knows how to do that.
But Chilton also has a flashlight. He doesn’t need to take time to strike a match and fire up the Coleman. If he hears Jamie trying to find him, he can switch on the flashlight in a second. Chilton also has two guns. A shotgun and a pistol. And he has a humongous knife. He has a name for it. The knife is called Old Bloody Mac.
In the hissing lantern light, listening to his book, Chilton sways and mutters, “Shake them, break them, grind the bastards to dust.”
4
The tire prints are the giveaway. Although a storm is pending now, no rain has fallen since Cutter passed this way. In his wake, he left a two-yard-long set of tread patterns in what must have been a patch of mud on that night of shotgun murder, and the dry weather has preserved this spoor. The tire tracks lead toward the Halliana.
At this point, Nameless could report his finding to the local authorities. However, he agrees with Ace that, for two reasons, this is not an option.
Ace’s team, Nameless, and whatever organization supports their missions are all working outside the law. Their purpose is moral, their actions justified. However, if they are discovered, they are not going to be treated like high-tech knights-errant engaged in acts of chivalry, but instead like common criminals.
He alone must find the boy and bring him out alive.
Nameless wades through the tall grass and parts the cascades of flowering Halliana and steps into the first cave.
Without armor, without Excalibur, but with magical goggles that would dazzle even Merlin, pistol in hand, Nameless proceeds into the world below southern Indiana.
He finds two. The first is a cramped passage through which a grown man must sidle. The second is more generous and therefore more promising.
5
When he’s really furious, Chilton presses Old Bloody Mac to Jamie’s throat and says one quick slice is all it’ll take. Or he puts the point of the blade in one of Jamie’s nostrils. Or touches it to a lower eyelid and says, You piss me off, kid, and I’ll pop out both your peepers, play marbles with them.
Whatever he’s listening to, it’s making him angrier.
6
When he leaps across the stream, he finds evidence that man and boy must bathe here from time to time. Beside the pool are sponges and a bottle of liquid soap.
Nameless moves with greater caution into a narrow downsloping corridor of smooth flowstone. He is acutely aware that a man using a shotgun, stationed at the far end, could hold off a battalion.
7
“You need a bath,” Chilton repeats, clambering to his feet. “We’ll climb to the pool. Get up, boy.”
Jamie always bathes first. After he dries off and dresses, Chilton will use zip ties to bind his hands together and then his ankles, so he can’t run for it when the man takes his own bath.
It’s like there’s something filthy on him that only he can see. Something as hard to wash off as paint.
8
Abruptly, the crevasse seems to widen drastically before him, as if the earth is splitting under some new stress, and a fragment of the repeating vision slams him harder than before: a swarm of vehicles, trucks and cars, sliding-colliding on rain-slick blacktop, sliding-colliding-tumbling. But this time a continuation of the montage reveals something new: The highway is a bridge, which has broken open, a great slab of pavement canting down, a ramp to ruin, off which the tumbling vehicles fall away into a gorge.
There is a boy in peril. He must not fail the boy. Must not fail a child. Not in this new life, as perhaps he failed one in his forgotten past.
By the time the words become clearer, the tone of the speaker is hectoring, and there can be no doubt that the object of his meanness is the missing boy.
In a different, parallel alley of the stone forest through which Nameless is moving, Chilton Cutter is talking about a bath, bullying the boy, harassing him to get to his feet, then to move along.
The boy looks past his kidnapper and sees Nameless between the columns of stone, more than thirty feet away.
9
But it’s okay. It’ll be okay. Help is here. Nothing bad can happen now.
