Darkfall (43 page)

Sweating, gasping, squeezing his sphincter muscles to keep his bowels from loosening in terror, Jack wanted to run away from the pit. He wanted to flee into the night, into the storm and the sheltering city. But he knew that was no solution. If he didn’t stop it now, the pit would widen until it grew large enough to swallow him no matter where he hid.

With his uninjured right hand, he pulled and squeezed and clawed at the wounds in his left hand until they had opened farther, until his blood was flowing much faster. Fear had anesthetized him; he no longer felt any pain. Like a Catholic priest swinging a sacred vessel to cast holy water or incense in a ritual of sanctification, he sprayed his blood into the yawning mouth of Hell.

The light dimmed somewhat but pulsed and struggled to maintain itself. Jack prayed for it to be extinguished, for if this did not do the trick, there was only one other course of action: He would have to sacrifice himself entirely; he would have to go down into the pit. And if he went down there ... he knew he would never come back.

The last evil energy seemed to have drained out of the clumps of soil on the altar steps. The dirt had been still for a minute or more. With each passing second, it was increasingly difficult to believe that the stuff had ever really been alive.

At last Father Walotsky picked up a clod of earth and broke it between his fingers.

Penny and Davey stared in fascination. Then the girl turned to Rebecca and said, “What happened?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “But I think your daddy accomplished what he set out to do. I think Lavelle is dead.” She looked out across the immense cathedral, as if Jack might come strolling in from the vestibule, and she said softly, “I love you, Jack.”

The light faded from orange to yellow to blue.

Jack watched tensely, not quite daring to believe that it was finally finished.

A grating-creaking sound came out of the earth, as if enormous gates were swinging shut on rusted hinges. The faint cries rising from the pit had changed from expressions of rage and hatred and triumph to pitiful moans of despair.

Then the light was extinguished altogether.

The grating and creaking ceased.

The air no longer had a sulphurous stench.

No sounds at all came from the pit.

It wasn’t a doorway any longer. Now, it was just a hole in the ground.

The night was still bitterly cold, but the storm seemed to be passing.

Jack cupped his wounded hand and packed it full of snow to slow the bleeding now that he no longer needed blood. He was still too high on adrenalin to feel any pain.

The wind was barely blowing now, but to his surprise it brought a voice to him. Rebecca’s voice. Unmistakable. And four words that he much wanted to hear: “I love you, Jack.”

He turned, bewildered.

She was nowhere in sight, yet her voice seemed to have been at his ear.

He said, “I love you, too,” and he knew that, wherever she was, she heard him as clearly as he had heard her.

The snow had slackened. The flakes were no longer small and hard but big and fluffy, as they had been at the beginning of the storm. They fell lazily now, in wide, swooping spirals.

Jack turned away from the pit and went back into the house to call an ambulance for Carver Hampton.

NEW AFTERWORD
BY DEAN KOONTZ

During the first fifteen years of my career, my income per novel was so small that I might have done better trying to sell hamburgers to Hindus. The proceeds from one novel per year would have sustained me only if I had crafted all my clothes from leaves, wild grass, and bird feathers—with no concern for the cruel stares that rude people would direct at me, and with a willingness to tolerate the pain from being pecked by all of those angry, bald birds. A strict diet of peat moss and beef bouillon would have been within my one-novel-per-year budget, because peat costs mere pennies per pound when bought at a discount garden-supply center. And if I had found an occasional entrée of fresh roadkill, first-rate nutrition would have been assured.

Because I prefer classic vegetables rather than peat moss, and because I believe the main course at dinner should be processed by professional food-handlers rather than by drunken drivers, I was motivated to write more than a single novel every twelve months. Out went the corn-husk shirts and grass pants; in came cotton pullovers and jeans. A modest apartment proved far more comfortable than either a cave or the interior of a big hollow log. And in an apartment, my wife, Gerda, didn’t have to pedal furiously on a bicycle ten hours a day to generate power for my electric typewriter—a task that creates a huge appetite and dramatically increases the peat-moss bill, ironically reducing the positive budgetary effect of relying on a cheap garden-store food source.

In those days, when a young and unknown writer routinely completed more than one book per year, publishers urged him to use a pen name—or names—for what they viewed as excess production. They believed that critics would dismiss the work of a prolific writer without even reading it, assuming it was piffle. Many critics do, indeed, respond this way, even though Henry James—the litterateur’s litterateur—produced more than 120 books in his lifetime, and though writers from Shakespeare to Dickens to Joyce Carol Oates have proved that one can produce quantity with quality.

Publishers also recommend—often insist—that pen names be used on books the writer creates outside of the genre in which he first began publishing. If one begins writing adventure novels about trout fishing, then delivers a romance with not a trout to be found in its chapters, one will be pressured to use a pen name for this suspect, fishless fiction. Because I enjoyed writing in a variety of genres—international intrigue, romantic suspense, psychological suspense, tales of terror, science fiction, humorous suspense—I ultimately published under several pseudonyms before finally forsaking all false identities.

One of my early pen names, Owen West, wrote horror novels for Jove Books, a sub-imprint of Berkley Books, my primary paperback publisher at that time. Owen’s first shuddery tale was a novelization of a motion-picture screenplay, The
Funhouse,
to which Jove owned the book rights. I was beginning to build a reputation as a suspense novelist, and I didn’t want to be known as a horror writer. Some of my novels had, I admit, enough of a macabre edge to be tagged with that label by critics who didn’t like to think too much. (Most critics are responsible and thoughtful, but a significant minority resents thinking, because the time devoted to thinking inevitably means fewer hours in the day for swilling down booze and torturing kittens). Although I enjoyed the horror genre both as reader and writer, I didn’t want to doom myself to that limiting label by publishing novels of the supernatural under my name. Consequently, also because Jove wanted to build a new name in the horror genre, I wrote The Funhouse under my Owen West persona—he had shorter hair than mine, delft-blue eyes, and a lapdog named Pookie that slept draped across his thighs while he worked—and I signed a contract to do two more West novels.

Although the film of
The Funhouse
flopped, Owen’s novelization sold more than a million paperbacks and became a
New York Times
bestseller. The second novel under the West pen name,
The Mask,
was also a bestseller. Fortunately, during this same period, books under my real name began selling better than Owen’s. By the time I delivered the third of these supernatural tales,
The Pit,
the publisher and I agreed to poison Owen’s morning tea, bury him, steal his final novel, release it under my name, and later reissue his previous two novels under my name, as well. Because we realized that the title
The Pit
would thrill reviewers looking to take an easy shot at me, we changed the title to
Darkfall,
and subsequently the book received only good notices. It also became a bestseller; thus this murder of a pen name and the looting of his literary estate proved to be rewarding both creatively and financially.

I do not rate
Darkfall
among my best work, but I’ll be immodest enough to say that I think it’s a fun read. The only ambition here was to produce a page-turning entertainment; I wanted to cross the horror novel with the police procedural, while mixing in a love story and a measure of comic dialogue. I was not yet well known for the cross-genre books that later became my trademark, but in
Darkfall,
I was continuing to experiment with this new form, blending several types of fiction in one story. This
combining
of genres did not always meet with agents’ and publishers’ approval, but I found great delight in trying to make these exotic blends work.

Shortly after
Darkfall
was published, I was visiting a local bookstore, chatting with the manager, and we happened to be standing in the paperback aisle where my novels were racked—only five titles in those days. A young woman rushed past us, directly to the Koontz section, grabbed every book except
Darkfall,
without reading the ad copy or checking the price, and headed for the cash register. The manager asked this obviously intelligent and sensitive person why she was loading up on four titles by the same writer, and she replied that she had finished
Darkfall
only an hour earlier and had enjoyed it so much that she wanted to read everything else by this author. At that time, I had not yet done a book signing and had never bumped into a satisfied reader on the street. This woman’s kind words sent me home in a preternatural glow that must have dazzled everyone who looked at me. I returned to my word processor and had an extremely productive afternoon, because one of the greatest thrills any writer can experience is not the payment of a large royalty check, not the appearance of a rave review, but knowing that a reader has received great pleasure from a book.

I do not use pen names any longer. Most of the books first published under pseudonyms have been reissued under my by-line. Mr. Owen West remains dead. Pookie, his lapdog, is still alive, though now arthritic. And I hope that
Darkfall,
after all these years, still gives pleasure.