Read Online 77 Shadow Street by Dean Koontz - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Dean Koontz
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control and certain to make mistakes, leave clues of other kinds. So even though it had been the best night of his life to that point, he decided never again to kill as an amateur. He was proud of his subsequent self-control.
Mickey also had never before popped a relative. Jerry was his brother. Maybe it should have felt different, but it didn’t. The only difference was not receiving a fat envelope full of cash for the job.
Not once in years of dreaming about murder had Mickey imagined offing someone in this apartment. So inconvenient.
Jerry Dime had forced the moment. He had come here to kill Mickey. But he was an amateur. He telegraphed his intentions.
Come to think of it, Mickey would eventually get a payday for this bit of work. No need now to share their mother’s estate.
From the bedroom closet, he got a spare blanket. It was made of some microfiber, as soft as fur but strong. He rubbed it against his face. It smelled like a camel-hair sport coat, which was one of Mickey’s favorite smells.
Jerry’s wide-open eyes seemed bluer in death than in life. Mickey had russet eyes. Their mother’s eyes had been green. Mickey didn’t know about their fathers’ eyes. Their fathers had been anonymous sperm donors.
After pulling the corpse out of the armchair and onto the blanket, Mickey went through his brother’s pockets. He took Jerry’s wallet, phone, coins. The coins were warm with Jerry’s body heat.
Mickey rolled the dead man in the blanket. He cinched the ends tight with a couple of his neckties.
Stepping out of the study, he pulled the door shut behind him. As he glanced at his watch, the doorbell rang.
His twice-a-month manicurist, Ludmila, had arrived. She was a Russian immigrant, in her mid-fifties, dark-haired and intense.
She spoke English well. But they were agreed that she would not speak except to thank him for payment. Any conversation would detract from the pleasure of the manicure and pedicure.
After his mother’s death, Mickey had expanded the master bath into the guest bedroom. He never had overnight guests.
The huge bathroom had white-marble walls and ceiling, blackgranite countertops, and a checkerboard marble-and-granite floor. It featured a spa chair with water supply, a custom massage table, and a corner sauna lined with cedar.
Mickey reclined in the spa chair. He soaked his bare feet in warm water. The footbath was scented with fragrant salts.
As Ludmila worked on his hands, Mickey closed his eyes. Slowly he ceased to be a man and became only ten fingertips. The whisper of the emery board was a symphony. The fragrance of the clear nail polish intoxicated him. The simplest pleasure could be rapturous if you gave yourself entirely to it.
Sensation was everything. It was the only thing.
One
I am not what you of great faith imagined, but I am what you sought. I am the past undone in its entirety .
I celebrate death. Death makes room for new life. I die every day and rise again. Those weaker creatures who die and do not rise have done a service to the world, because a world of weaklings is a world with no future .
Ironically, my tremendous strength and immortality have their origin in a fault: a fault in the structure of space-time that lies in the heart of Shadow Hill. Periodically, when conditions are right, past and present and future exist here simultaneously, just as they exist in me. Those who live at the pivot point, where past and future meet, sometimes glimpse what once was and what will come to be. By the Native Americans who first lived here and by everyone who followed them, those presences out of time are thought to be ghosts or hallucinations or visions .
Every thirty-eight years comes an event of greater power than mere apparitions. Involuntary pilgrims journey to my kingdom and discover their fate, which is the fate of the entire world .
Arriving from 1935, the wealthy Ostock family learned to be more submissive to the One than their servants were to them .
Mickey also had never before popped a relative. Jerry was his brother. Maybe it should have felt different, but it didn’t. The only difference was not receiving a fat envelope full of cash for the job.
Not once in years of dreaming about murder had Mickey imagined offing someone in this apartment. So inconvenient.
Jerry Dime had forced the moment. He had come here to kill Mickey. But he was an amateur. He telegraphed his intentions.
Come to think of it, Mickey would eventually get a payday for this bit of work. No need now to share their mother’s estate.
From the bedroom closet, he got a spare blanket. It was made of some microfiber, as soft as fur but strong. He rubbed it against his face. It smelled like a camel-hair sport coat, which was one of Mickey’s favorite smells.
Jerry’s wide-open eyes seemed bluer in death than in life. Mickey had russet eyes. Their mother’s eyes had been green. Mickey didn’t know about their fathers’ eyes. Their fathers had been anonymous sperm donors.
After pulling the corpse out of the armchair and onto the blanket, Mickey went through his brother’s pockets. He took Jerry’s wallet, phone, coins. The coins were warm with Jerry’s body heat.
Mickey rolled the dead man in the blanket. He cinched the ends tight with a couple of his neckties.
Stepping out of the study, he pulled the door shut behind him. As he glanced at his watch, the doorbell rang.
His twice-a-month manicurist, Ludmila, had arrived. She was a Russian immigrant, in her mid-fifties, dark-haired and intense.
She spoke English well. But they were agreed that she would not speak except to thank him for payment. Any conversation would detract from the pleasure of the manicure and pedicure.
After his mother’s death, Mickey had expanded the master bath into the guest bedroom. He never had overnight guests.
The huge bathroom had white-marble walls and ceiling, blackgranite countertops, and a checkerboard marble-and-granite floor. It featured a spa chair with water supply, a custom massage table, and a corner sauna lined with cedar.
Mickey reclined in the spa chair. He soaked his bare feet in warm water. The footbath was scented with fragrant salts.
As Ludmila worked on his hands, Mickey closed his eyes. Slowly he ceased to be a man and became only ten fingertips. The whisper of the emery board was a symphony. The fragrance of the clear nail polish intoxicated him. The simplest pleasure could be rapturous if you gave yourself entirely to it.
Sensation was everything. It was the only thing.
One
I am not what you of great faith imagined, but I am what you sought. I am the past undone in its entirety .
I celebrate death. Death makes room for new life. I die every day and rise again. Those weaker creatures who die and do not rise have done a service to the world, because a world of weaklings is a world with no future .
Ironically, my tremendous strength and immortality have their origin in a fault: a fault in the structure of space-time that lies in the heart of Shadow Hill. Periodically, when conditions are right, past and present and future exist here simultaneously, just as they exist in me. Those who live at the pivot point, where past and future meet, sometimes glimpse what once was and what will come to be. By the Native Americans who first lived here and by everyone who followed them, those presences out of time are thought to be ghosts or hallucinations or visions .
Every thirty-eight years comes an event of greater power than mere apparitions. Involuntary pilgrims journey to my kingdom and discover their fate, which is the fate of the entire world .
Arriving from 1935, the wealthy Ostock family learned to be more submissive to the One than their servants were to them .
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