My name is Eduardo Fernandez, and I have witnessed a series of strange and unsettling events. I am not much of a diarist. Often, I’ve resolved to start a diary with the new year, but I have always lost interest before the end of January. However, I am sufficiently worried to put down here everything that I’ve seen and may yet see in the days to come, so there will be a record in the event that something happens to me.
He strove to recount his peculiar story in simple terms, with a minimum of adjectives and no sensationalism. He even avoided speculating about the nature of the phenomenon or the power behind the creation of the doorway. In fact, he hesitated to call it a doorway, but he finally used that term because he knew, on a deep level beyond language and logic, that a doorway was precisely what it had been. If he died—face it, if he was killed—before he could obtain proof of these bizarre goings-on, he hoped that whoever read his account would be impressed by its cool, calm style and would not disregard it as the ravings of a demented old man.
He became so involved in his writing that he worked through the lunch hour and well into the afternoon before pausing to prepare a bite to eat. Because he’d skipped breakfast too, he had quite an appetite. He sliced a cold chicken breast left over from dinner the previous night, and he built a couple of tall sandwiches with cheese, tomato, lettuce, and mustard. Sandwiches and beer were the perfect meal because that was something he could eat while still composing in the yellow legal tablet.
By twilight, he had brought the story up to date. He finished with: I don’t expect to see the doorway again because I suspect it has already served its purpose. Something has come through it. I wish I knew what that something was. Or perhaps I don’t.
CHAPTER NINE
A sound woke Heather. A soft thunk, then a brief scraping, the source unidentifiable. She sat straight up in bed, instantly alert.
The night was silent again.
She looked at the clock. Ten minutes past two in the morning.
A few months ago, she would have attributed her apprehension to some fright in an unremembered dream, and she would have rolled over and gone back to sleep. Not any more.
She had fallen asleep atop the covers. Now she didn’t have to disentangle herself from the blankets before getting out of bed.
For weeks, she had been sleeping in sweatsuits instead of her usual T-shirt and panties. Even in pajamas, she would have felt too vulnerable. Sweats were comfortable enough in bed, and she was dressed for trouble if something happened in the middle of the night.
Like now.
In spite of the continued silence, she picked up the gun from the nightstand. It was a Korth .38 revolver, made in Germany by Waffenfabrik Korth and perhaps the finest handgun in the world, with tolerances unmatched by any other maker.
The revolver was one of the weapons she had purchased since the day Jack had been shot, with the consultation of Alma Bryson. She’d spent hours with it on the police firing range. When she picked it up, it felt like a natural extension of her hand.
The size of her arsenal now exceeded Alma’s, which sometimes amazed her. More amazing still: she worried that she was not well enough armed for every eventuality.
New laws were soon going into effect, making it more difficult to purchase firearms. She was going to have to weigh the wisdom of spending more of their limited income on defenses they might never need against the possibility that even her worst-case scenarios would prove to be too optimistic.
Once, she would have regarded her current state of mind as a clear-cut case of paranoia. Times had changed. What once had been paranoia was now sober realism.
She didn’t like to think about that. It depressed her.
When the night remained suspiciously quiet, she crossed the bedroom to the hall door. She didn’t need to turn on any lights. During the past few months, she had spent so many nights restlessly walking through the house that she could now move from room to room in the darkness as swiftly and silently as a cat.
On the wall just inside the bedroom, there was a panel for the alarm system she’d had installed a week after the events at Arkadian’s service station. In luminous green letters, the lighted digital monitor strip informed her that all was SECURE.
It was a perimeter alarm, involving magnetic contacts at every exterior door and window, so she could be confident the noise that awakened her hadn’t been made by an intruder already in the premises. Otherwise, a siren would have sounded and a microchip recording of an authoritarian male voice would have announced: You have violated a protected dwelling. Police have been called. Leave at once.
Barefoot, she stepped into the dark second-floor hallway and moved along to Toby’s room. Every evening she made sure both his and her doors were open, so she would hear him if he called to her.
For a few seconds she stood by her son’s bed, listening to his soft snoring. The boy shape beneath the covers was barely visible in the weak ambient light that passed from the city night through the narrow slats of the Levolor blinds. He was dead to the world and couldn’t have been the source of the sound that had interrupted her dreams.
Heather returned to the hall. She crept to the stairs and went down to the first floor.
In the cramped den and then in the living room, she eased from window to window, checking outside for anything suspicious. The quiet street looked so peaceful that it might have been located in a small Midwestern town instead of Los Angeles. No one was up to foul play on the front lawn. No one skulking along the north side of the house, either.
Heather began to think the suspicious sound had been part of a nightmare, after all.
She seldom slept well any more, but usually she remembered her dreams. They were more often than not about Arkadian’s service station, though she’d driven by the place only once, on the day after the shootout. The dreams were operatic spectacles of bullets and blood and fire, in which Jack was sometimes burned alive, in which she and Toby were often present during the gunplay, one or both of them shot down with Jack, one or both of them afire, and sometimes the well-groomed blond man in the Armani suit knelt beside her where she lay riddled with bullets, put his mouth to her wounds, and drank her blood. The killer was frequently blind, with hollow eye sockets full of roiling flames. His smile revealed teeth as sharp as the fangs of a viper, and once he said to her, I’m taking Toby down to hell with me—put the little bastard on a leash and use him as a guide dog.
Considering that her remembered nightmares were so bad, how gruesome must be the ones she blocked from memory?
By the time she had circled the living room, returned to the archway, and crossed the hall to the dining room, she decided that her imagination had gotten the better of her. There was no immediate danger. She no longer held the Korth in front of her but held it at her side, with the muzzle aimed at the floor and her finger on the trigger guard rather than on the trigger itself.
The sight of someone outside, moving past a dining-room window, brought her to full alert again. The drapes were open, but the sheers under them were drawn all the way shut. Backlit by a streetlamp, the prowler cast a shadow that pierced the glass and rippled across the soft folds of the translucent chiffon. It passed quickly, like the shadow of a night bird, but she suffered no doubt that it had been made by a man.
She hurried into the kitchen. The tile floor was cold under her bare feet.
Another alarm-system control panel was on the wall beside the connecting door to the garage. She punched in the deactivating code.
With Jack in the hospital for an unthinkably long convalescence, herself out of work, and their financial future uncertain, Heather had been hesitant to spend precious savings on a burglar alarm. She had always assumed security systems were for mansions in Bel Air and Beverly Hills, not for middle-class families like theirs. Then she’d learned that six homes out of the sixteen on their block already relied on high-tech protection.
Now the glowing green letters on the readout strip changed from SECURE to the less comforting REA
DY TO ARM.
She could have set off the alarm, summoning the police. But if she did that, the creeps outside would run. By the time a patrol car arrived, there would be no one to arrest. She was pretty sure she knew what they were—though not who—and what mischief they were up to. She wanted to surprise them and hold them at gunpoint until help arrived.
As she quietly disengaged the dead-bolt lock, opened the door—NOT READY TO ARM, the system warned—and stepped into the garage, she knew she was out of control. Fear should have had her in its thrall. She was afraid, yes, but fear was not what made her heart beat hard and fast. Anger was the engine that drove her. She was infuriated by repeated victimization and determined to make her tormentors pay regardless of the risks.
The concrete floor of the garage was even colder than the kitchen tiles.
She rounded the back end of the nearer car. Stopping between the fenders of the two vehicles, she waited, listened.
The only light came through a series of six-inch-square windows high in the double-wide garage doors: the sickly yellow glow of the streetlamps. The deep shadows seemed contemptuous of it, refusing to withdraw.
There. Whispering outside. Soft footfalls on the service walkway along the south side of the house. Then the telltale hiss for which she’d been waiting.
Bastards.
Heather walked quickly between the cars to the man-size door in the back wall of the garage. The lock had a thumb-turn on the inside. She twisted it slowly, easing the dead bolt out of the striker plate without the clack that it made if opened unthinkingly. She turned the knob, carefully pulled the door inward, and stepped onto the sidewalk behind the house.
The May night was mild. The full moon, well on its westward course, was mostly hidden by an overcast.
She was being irresponsible. She wasn’t protecting Toby. If anything, she was putting him in greater jeopardy. Over the top. Out of control. She knew it. Couldn’t help it. She’d had enough. Couldn’t take any more. Couldn’t stop.
To her right lay the covered rear porch, the patio in front of it. The backyard was lit only patchily by what moonlight penetrated the ragged veil of clouds. Tall eucalyptuses, smaller benjaminas, and low shrubs were dappled with lunar silver.
She was on the west side of the house. She moved to her left along the walkway, toward the south.
At the corner she halted, listening. Because there was no wind, she could clearly hear the vicious hissing, a sound that only stoked her anger.
Murmurs of conversation. Couldn’t catch the words.
Stealthy footsteps hurrying toward the back of the house. A low, suppressed laugh, almost a giggle. Having such a good time at their game.
Judging the moment of his appearance by the sound of his swiftly approaching footsteps, intending to scare the living hell out of him, Heather moved forward. With perfect timing, she met him at the turn in the sidewalk.
She was surprised to see he was taller than she was. She had expected them to be ten years old, eleven, twelve at the oldest.
The prowler let out a faint “Ah!” of alarm.
Putting the fear of God into them was going to be a harder proposition than if they’d been younger. And no retreating now. They’d drag her down. And then…
She kept moving, collided with him, rammed him backward across the eight-foot-wide setback and into the ivy-covered concrete-block wall that marked the southern property line. The can of spray paint flew out of his hand, clattered against the sidewalk.
The impact knocked the wind out of him. His mouth sagged open, and he gasped for breath.
Footsteps. The second one. Running toward her.
Pressed against the first boy, face-to-face, even in the darkness, she saw that he was sixteen or seventeen, maybe older. Plenty old enough to know better.
She rammed her right knee up between his spread legs and turned away from him as he fell, wheezing and retching, into the flower bed along the wall.
The second boy was coming at her fast. He didn’t see the gun, and she didn’t have time to stop him with a threat.
She stepped toward him instead of away, spun on her left foot, and kicked him in the crotch with her right. Because she’d moved into him, it was a deep kick; she caught him with her ankle and the upper part of the bridge of her foot instead of with her toes.
He crashed past her, slammed into the sidewalk, and rolled against the first boy, afflicted by an identical fit of retching.
A third one was coming at her along the sidewalk from the front of the house, but he skidded to a halt fifteen feet away and started to back up.
“Stop right there,” she said. “I’ve got a gun.” Though she raised the Korth, holding it in a two-hand grip, she did not raise her voice, and her calm control made the order more menacing than if she had shouted it in anger.
He stopped, but maybe he couldn’t see the revolver in the dark. His body language said he was still contemplating making a break for it.
“So help me God,” she said, still at a conversational level, “I’ll blow your brains out.” She was surprised by the cold hatred in her voice. She wouldn’t really have shot him. She was sure of that. Yet the sound of her own voice frightened her…and made her wonder.
His shoulders sagged. His entire posture changed. He believed her threat.
A dark exhilaration filled her. Nearly three months of intense tae kwon do and women’s defense classes, provided free to members of police families three times a week at the division gym, had paid off. Her right foot hurt like blazes, probably almost as badly as the second boy’s crotch hurt him. She might have broken a bone in it, would certainly be hobbling around for a week even if there wasn’t a fracture, but she felt so good about nailing the three vandals that she was happy to suffer for her triumph.
“Come here,” she said. “Now, come on, come on.”
The third kid raised his hands over his head. He was holding a spray can in each of them.
“Get down on the ground with your buddies,” she demanded, and he did as he was told.
The moon sailed out from behind the clouds, which was like slowly bringing up the stage lights to quarter power on a darkened set. She could see well enough to be sure that they were all older teenagers, sixteen to eighteen.
She could also see that they didn’t fit any popular stereotypes of taggers. They weren’t black or Hispanic. They were white boys. And they didn’t look poor, either. One of them wore a well-cut leather jacket, and another wore a cable-knit cotton sweater with what appeared to be a complicated and beautifully knitted pattern.
The night quiet was broken only by the miserable gagging and groaning of the two she’d disabled. The confrontation had unfolded so swiftly in the eight-foot-wide space between the house and the property wall, and in such relative silence, that they hadn’t even awakened any neighbors.
Keeping the gun on them, Heather said, “You been here before?”
Two of them couldn’t yet have answered her if they’d wanted to, but the third was also unresponsive.
“I asked if you’d been here before,” she said sharply, “done this kind of crap here before.”
“Bitch,” the third kid said.
She realized it was possible to lose control of the situation even when she was the only one with a gun, especially if the crotch-bashed pair recovered more easily than she expected. She resorted to a lie that might convince them she was more than just a cop’s wife with a few smart moves: “Listen, you little snots—I can kill all of you, go in the house and get a couple of knives, plant them in your hands before the first black-and-white gets here. Maybe they’ll drag me into court and maybe they won’t. But what jury’s going to put the wife of a hero cop and the mother of a little eight-year-old boy in prison?”
“You wouldn’t do that,” the third kid said, although he spoke only after a hesitation. A thread of uncertainty fluttered in his voice.
She continued to surprise herself by speaking with an intensity and bitterness she didn’t
have to fake. “Wouldn’t I, huh? Wouldn’t I? My Jack, two partners shot down beside him in one year, and him lying in the hospital since the first of March, going to be in there weeks yet, months yet, God knows what pain he might have the rest of his life, whether he’ll ever walk entirely right, and here I am out of work since October, savings almost gone, can’t sleep for worrying, being harassed by crud like you. You think I wouldn’t like to see somebody else hurting for a change, think I wouldn’t actually get a kick out of hurting you, hurting you real bad? Wouldn’t I? Huh? Huh? Wouldn’t I, you little snot?”
Jesus. She was shaking. She hadn’t been aware that anything this dark was in her. She felt her gorge rising in the back of her throat and had to fight hard to keep it down.
From all appearances, she had scared the three taggers even more than she had scared herself. Their eyes were wide with fright in the moonlight.
“We…been here…before,” gasped the kid whom she’d kicked.
“How often?”
“T-twice.”
The house had been hit twice before, once in late March, once in the middle of April.
Glowering down at them, she said, “Where you from?”
“Here,” said the kid she hadn’t hurt.
“Not from this neighborhood, you aren’t.”
“L.A.,” he said.
“It’s a big city,” she pressed.
“The Hills.”
“Beverly Hills?”
“Yeah.”
“All three of you?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t screw around with me.”
“It’s true, that’s where we’re from—why wouldn’t it be true?”
The unhurt boy put his hands to his temples as if he’d just been overcome with remorse, though it was far more likely to be a sudden headache. Moonlight glinted off his wristwatch and the beveled edges of the shiny metal band.
“What’s that watch?” she demanded.
“Huh?”
“What make is it?”
“Rolex,” he said.
That was what she’d thought it was, although she couldn’t help but express astonishment: “Rolex?”