The Key to Midnight by Dean Koontz
“Do you want to take chances with Joanna’s life?”
“No. But ...
“Trust me.”
She hesitated. “All right.”
Alex got to his feet. “I’ve arranged a private room for Wayne. You’d better go up there now. They’ll be transferring him from the recovery room in a few minutes.”
“Is it safe for you to leave here alone?” Mariko asked.
He picked up the suitcase that contained the Chelgrin file, having left the other bag in Wayne’s room. “They think they’ve scared me off. For a while they’ll be lying low, just watching.”
Outside the hospital, the night was cold, but the snow flurries had long ago stopped. Backlighted by the moon, fast-moving trains of clouds tracked west to east.
Alex took a taxicab to the hotel, packed his bags, and checked out of his suite. From the hospital to the hotel, then from the hotel to the Moonglow Lounge, he was followed by two men in a white Honda.
By seven-thirty at Joanna’s place, he had unpacked. The spare bedroom was cozy, with a low, slanted ceiling and a pair of dormer windows.
Shortly before Dr. Mifuni left, Joanna went into the kitchen to check on dinner, and the physician took advantage of her absence to draw Alex aside and speak with him. “Once or twice a night, you should look in on her to be certain she’s only sleeping.”
“You don’t think she’d try it again?”
“No, no,” Mifuni said. “There’s virtually no chance. What she did last night was strictly impulsive, and she’s not really impulsive by nature. Nevertheless ...”
“I’ll watch over her,” Alex said softly.
“Good,” Mifuni said. “I’ve known her since she came to Kyoto. A singer who performs more evenings than not is bound to have throat problems once in a while. But she’s more than a patient. She’s a friend too.”
“Right now she needs all the friends she can get.”
“But she’s an amazingly resilient woman. She’s got that going for her. Last night’s experience appears to have left only minor psychological scars. And physically, she doesn’t seem marked at all. Untouched. It almost seems a month has passed, not just one day.”
Joanna returned from the kitchen to say good-bye to the doctor, and indeed she did look splendid. Even in faded jeans and a midnight-blue sweater worn to a smooth shine at the elbows and frayed at the cuffs, she was a vision, the golden girl once more.
“Arigato, Isha-san. ”
“Do itashimashita. ”
“Konbanwa.”
“Konbanwa.”
Suddenly, as Alex watched Joanna and Mifuni bowing to each other at the apartment door, he was caught in a powerful wave of desire that swept him into a strange state of mind. He seemed to be looking back and down at himself, somewhere between a condition of heightened consciousness and an out-of-body experience. He saw the familiar Alex Hunter, the carefully crafted persona that he put on view to the world—the quiet, self-assured, self-contained, determined, no-nonsense businessman-but he was also aware of an aspect of himself that had never before been visible to him. Within the cool and analytical detective was an insecure, lonely, desperately seeking, hungry creature driven by emotional need. Regarding this heretofore hidden aspect of himself, he understood that the power to see deeper into himself came from his desire for Joanna, from his need to share a life with her.
For the first time in his experience, Alex was overwhelmed by a desire that couldn’t be satisfied solely through hard work and the application of his intellect. He was filled with a longing for something more abstract and spiritual than the drive for success, money, and status that had always motivated him. Joanna. He wanted Joanna. He wanted to touch her. He wanted to hold her, make love to her, be as close to her as one human being could ever get to another. But he required far more than mere physical intimacy. He sought from her a number of things that he couldn’t entirely understand: a kind of peace that he could not describe; satisfactions he had never known; feelings for which he had no words. After a lifetime shaped by his unwavering denial of love’s existence, he wanted love from Joanna Rand.
Old convictions and reliable psychic crutches were not easily cast aside. He couldn’t yet accept the reality of love, but a part of him desperately wanted to believe.
The prospect of belief, however, scared the hell out of him.
26
Joanna wanted the dinner to be perfect. She needed to prove to herself, as much as to Alex, that she was coping again, that life was going on, that the event of the past night was an aberration.
She served at the low table in her Japanese-style dining room, using royal-blue placemats, several shades of gray dinnerware, and dark red napkins. Six fresh white carnations were spread in a fan on one end of the table.
The food was hearty but not heavy. Igaguri: thorny shrimp balls filled with sweet chestnuts. Sumashi wan: clear soup with soybean curd and shrimp. Tatsuta age: sliced beef garnished with red peppers and radish. Yuan zuke: grilled fish in a soy-and-sake marinade. Umani: chicken and vegetables simmered in a richly seasoned broth. And of course they also had steamed rice—a staple of the Japanese menu—and they accompanied everything with cups of hot tea.
The dinner was a success, and Joanna felt better than she had in months. In a curious way, the suicide attempt was beneficial. Having sunk to the depths of ultimate despair, having reached even a brief moment during which she’d had no reason to go on living, she could now face anything that might come. Even by acting halfheartedly on her death wish, she seemed to have been purged of it.
For the first time, she felt that she would be able to overcome the periodic paranoia and the strange claustrophobia that had destroyed so many opportunities for happiness in the past.
Immediately after they had eaten, Joanna had a chance to test her newfound strength. She and Alex moved into the living room, sat together on the sofa, and began to look through the Chelgrin file, which filled the large suitcase—and which, according to Alex, held the true story of the first two decades of her life. There were thick stacks of field investigators’ reports in the gray-and-green folders of the Bonner-Hunter Security Corporation, Alex’s company, scores of transcriptions of interviews with potential witnesses as well as with friends and relatives of Lisa Chelgrin, plus copies of the Jamaican police records and other official documents. The sight of all that evidence had a negative effect on Joanna, and for the first time all day, she felt threatened. The familiar strains of paranoia were a distant, ominous music in her mind-but growing louder.
More than anything else in the suitcase, the photographs disturbed her. Here was Lisa Chelgrin in blue jeans and a T-shirt, standing in front of a Cadillac convertible, smiling and waving at the camera. Here was Lisa Chelgrin in a bikini, posed at the foot of an enormous palm tree. Several close-ups, in all of which she was smiling. A dozen photos in all. All were snapshots except for the professional portrait taken for the high-school yearbook when she had been a senior. The settings in which Lisa posed and the people with whom she was photographed meant nothing whatsoever to Joanna. Nevertheless, the young girl herself—blond, with a full but lithe hgure—was as familiar as the image in any mirror. As Joanna stared in disbelief at the face of the missing woman, a chill crept along her spine.
Finally she got up and retrieved half a dozen photographs of her own from a box in the bedroom closet. These shots had been taken the first year she’d lived in Japan, when she’d been working in Yokohama. She spread them on the coffee table, next to the old photos from the Chelgrin file. As she studied the resemblance between Lisa’s face and her own as she had looked more than a decade ago, a dynamic but formless fear stirred in her.
“It’s a remarkable likeness, isn’t it?” Alex asked.
“Identical,” she said weakly.
“You can see why I was convinced almost from the moment I saw you in the Moonglow.”
Suddenly the air seemed too thick to breathe comfortably. The room was warm. Hot. She stood,
“Joanna?”
She closed her eyes.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
She was overcome by an irrational urge to tell him to pack up his pictures and his reports, and get out. His presence now seemed to be a terrible intrusion into her life, an unconscionable intimacy, and a flutter of nausea went through her at the thought that he might touch her. He’s dangerous, she thought.
“Joanna?”
Restraining herself from lashing out at him, she said in a whisper: “The walls are closing in again.”
“Walls?” Alex looked around, perplexed.
To her, the room appeared to be only a third of its former size.
The air was so hot and dry that it scorched her lungs, parched her lips.
“And the ceiling,” she said. “Coming lower.”
She broke into a sweat. Dissolving in the heat. Melting. As if made of wax. Unable to breathe. The heat was going to kill her.
“Is that really what you see?” he asked. “Walls closing in?”
“Y-yes.”
She stared at the walls, trying to make them roll back, willing the room to return to its former proportions. She was determined not to let fear get the better of her this time.
“You’re hallucinating,” Alex said.
“I know. Because of you. Because of feeling... too close to you. This is always what happens. I’ve never told anyone... not even Mariko. I’ve never told anyone about the spells of paranoia either. Sometimes I think the whole world’s against me, out to get me. Seems like nothing’s real, all just a clever stage setting. When I start thinking like that, I want to run off and hide where no one can find me, hurt me.” She was speaking rapidly, in part because she was afraid that she would lose the courage she needed to reveal these things, and in part because she hoped that talking would distract her from the advancing walls and the steadily lowering ceiling. “I’ve never told anyone about it because I’ve been afraid people will think I’m crazy. But I’m not nuts. If I were crazy, I’d accept paranoia as a perfectly normal state of mind. I wouldn’t even realize I was having spells of paranoia.”
The hallucinations grew worse. Although she was sitting, the ceiling appeared to be no more than ten or twelve inches above her head. The walls were only a few feet away on every side, rolling closer on well-oiled tracks. The atmosphere was being compressed within this space, molecules jamming against molecules, until the air ceased to be a gas and became a liquid, first as dense as water, then syrup. When she breathed, she was convinced against all reason that her throat and lungs were filling with fluid. She heard herself whimpering, and she despised her weakness, but she couldn’t silence herself.
Alex took her hand. “None of it’s real. You can turn it off if you try.”
The air became so thick that she choked on it. She bent forward, coughed, gagged.
Alex tried to guide her through the seizure. “You’ve been brainwashed, Joanna. That’s got to be it. The answer. Somehow. All the memories of your true past have been eradicated, replaced with totally false recollections.”
She understood, but that understanding didn’t stop the ceiling from descending farther.
“After they did that to you,” Alex said, holding fast to her hand as she tried to pull away from him, “they must have implanted a couple of posthypnotic suggestions that have twisted your life ever since. One of those suggestions is affecting you right this minute. Every time you meet someone who’s interested in your past, anyone who might uncover the deception, then you suffer attacks of paranoia and claustrophobia because the people who brainwashed you told you this would happen.”
To Joanna’s ear, at least, his voice boomed and echoed within the shrinking room. He was loud, demanding, as fearsome as the relentless advance of the viselike walls.
“And each time you reject the person with whom you’ve become close,” he continued, “the claustrophobia goes away, the paranoid fear declines—because they told you it would. That’s a damn effective method for keeping inquisitive people out of your life. You’re programmed to be a loner, Joanna. Programmed.”
He was so plausible, so earnest—but he was not a friend. He was one of Them. He was one of the people who had been trying to kill her, part of the conspiracy. He couldn’t be trusted. He was the worst of them all, a conniving and despicable—
As if reading her mind, he said, “No, Joanna. I’m with you. I’m here for you. I’m the best friend and the best hope you have.”
She jerked reflexively as the ceiling shuddered and dropped closer to her, and she wrenched her hand out of his. She slid down on the couch.
The air had been compressed to such a degree that she could feel it against her skin. Insistent. Heavy. Metallic. All around her. Like a suit of armor. A suit of armor that was constantly growing tighter, smaller, more confining. Inside that defensive garment, she was drenched with perspiration. Her flesh was bruised by the steel embrace of her armor, and the bones ached in every torturously compressed joint.
“Fight it,” Alex said.
“The walls, the walls,” she keened, because the room began to close around her more quickly. No previous attack of claustrophobia had been as fierce as this one. She gasped. Her lungs were clogged. She tasted blood and realized that she had bitten her tongue. The room was rapidly shrinking to the size of a coffin, and she foresaw the conditions of the grave so clearly that she could actually feel the cold, damp embrace of eternity.
“Close your eyes,” Alex said urgently.
“No!” That would be intolerable. If she closed her eyes, she would be surrendering to the grave. She would never be able to open her eyes again. The darkness would seize her and drag her down, the cold and the dampness, the silence, down into the bottomless black maw of forever. “Oh, my God,” she groaned miserably.
“Close your eyes,” Alex insisted.
He put one hand on her shoulder, and she tried to pull away, but his grip tightened.
“Let me alone. Get away,” she demanded.
“Trust me.”
“I know what you are.”
“I’m your best hope.”
She found the strength to draw herself into a sitting position from which she could confront him. For the moment she was able to bear up under the colossal weight of the descending ceiling. The most important thing was to get rid of him. “Get out.”
“No, Joanna.”
“Now. I mean it. Get out.”
“No.”
“I don’t want you here. I don’t need you. Get out!”
“No.”
“This is my place, you sonofabitch. I hate you, get out, get out, damn you!”
“It’s not your place. It’s Joanna’s place. Right now you aren’t Joanna. You don’t act like her at all.”
She knew that what he said was true. She was behaving like a woman possessed. In her heart, she didn’t want to argue with him or drive him away, but she could not stop herself. She struck at his face, and he blocked the blow, so she tried to claw at his eyes, but he seized her wrist.
“You creep, you sick sonofabitch!”
They struggled on the couch. She was atop him, trying to hurt him, so badly needing to hurt him, but he was holding her off, and the longer that he prevented her from drawing his blood the more enraged she became.
“I know what you are,” she shrieked, “I know exactly what you are, oh, yes, you rotten bastard.”
Her heart was thudding with terror that she couldn’t understand. Her vision blurred with a fierce anger that wasn’t real, for she had nothing to be angry about, yet her fury was so powerful that it was shaking her to pieces.
“You’re one of Them!” she cried, and she had no idea what she meant by that.
“Who?”
“Them! ”
“Who?”
“I hate your guts,” she said, trying to jam her knee into his crotch and break his hold on her.
“Listen, listen to me,” he demanded, holding both her wrists, struggling against her determined assault. “Listen, damn it!”
But she dared not listen, because if she listened, the walls would complete their inward journey, and she would be crushed. Listening to him was what had gotten her into this trouble in the first place.
“Stop it, Joanna!”
She rolled off the couch, pulling him with her, kicking at him, twisting in his grasp. She tore loose and scrambled to her feet. “Get out! I’ll call the police. Get the hell out of my house,” she shouted, and she could feel that her face was wrenched into a mask of blind fury.
It was an inexplicable rage—except somehow she knew that she would be all right if she could force him to leave. When he was gone, when she was alone, the walls would roll back. The air would no longer be so thick, so difficult to breathe. The terror would subside when at last he went away, and thereafter she would find peace again.
“You don’t really want me to go,” he said, getting to his own feet, calmly challenging her.
She slapped his face so hard that her hand stung as if an electrical current had blasted through it.
He didn’t move.
She slapped him again, harder, leaving the imprint of her hand on his cheek.
With no anger in his face, with an infuriating compassion in his eyes, he reached out to touch her.
She shrank back.
“Give me your hand,” he pleaded.
“Get away.”
“I’m going to lead you through this.”
“Get out of my life.”
“Give me your hand.”
She backed into one corner of the living room. Nowhere to go. He stood in front of her. Trapped.
She was shaking violently with fear. Her heart was knocking in her breast. She couldn’t get her breath; each inhalation was shaken out of her before she could draw it all the way into her lungs.