RELENTLESS

DEAN KOONTZ

To Gerda for everything

Trifles make the sum of life.

—CHARLES DICKENS, David Copperfield

The issue is clear. It is between light and darkness, and everyone must choose his side.

—G. K. CHESTERTON

All men are tragic…All men are comic…Every man is important if he loses his life; and every man is funny if he loses his hat.

—G. K. CHESTERTON, Charles Dickens

Table of Contents

Epigraph

Part One - Penny Boom Says Let It Go

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Part Two - I Am My Brothers’ Reaper

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Part Three - Zazu, Who’s Who, Here Dog, There Dog, Doom, Zoom, Boom

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

About the Author

Also by Dean Koontz

Copyright

About the Publisher

Part One Penny Boom Says Let It Go

Chapter 1

This is a thing I’ve learned: Even with a gun to my head, I am capable of being convulsed with laughter. I am not sure what this extreme capacity for mirth says about me. You’ll have to decide for yourself.

Beginning one night when I was six years old and for twenty-seven years thereafter, good luck was my constant companion. The guardian angel watching over me had done a superb job.

As a reward for his excellent stewardship of my life, perhaps my angel—let’s call him Ralph—was granted a sabbatical. Perhaps he was reassigned. Something sure happened to him for a while during my thirty-fourth year, when darkness found us.

In the days when Ralph was diligently on the job, I met and courted Penny Boom. I was twenty-four and she was twenty-three.

Women as beautiful as Penny previously looked through me. Oh, occasionally they looked at me, but as though I reminded them of something they had seen once in a book of exotic fungi, something they had never expected—or wished—to see in real life.

She was also too smart and too witty and too graceful to waste her time with a guy like me, so I can only assume that a supernatural power coerced her into marrying me. In my mind’s eye, I see Ralph kneeling beside Penny’s bed while she slept, whispering, “He’s the one for you, he’s the one for you, no matter how absurd that concept may seem at this moment, he really is the one for you.”

We were married more than three years when she gave birth to Milo, who is fortunate to have his mother’s blue eyes and black hair.

Our preferred name for our son was Alexander. Penny’s mother, Clotilda—who is named Nancy on her birth certificate—threatened that if we did not call him Milo, she would blow her brains out.

Penny’s father, Grimbald—whose parents named him Larry—insisted that he would not clean up after such a suicide, and neither Penny nor I had the stomach for the job. So Alexander became Milo.

I am told that the family’s surname really is Boom and that they come from a long line of Dutch merchants. When I ask what commodity his ancestors sold, Grimbald becomes solemn and evasive, and Clotilda pretends that she is deaf.

My name is Cullen Greenwich—pronounced gren-itch, like the town in Connecticut. Since I was a little boy, most people have called me Cubby.

When I first dated Penny, her mom tried calling me Hildebrand, but I would have none of it.

Hildebrand is from the Old German, and means “battle torch” or “battle sword.” Clotilda is fond of power names, except in the case of our son, when she was prepared to self-destruct if we didn’t give him a name that meant “beloved and gentle.”

Our friend and internist, Dr. Jubal Frost, who delivered Milo, swears that the boy never cried at birth, that he was born smiling. In fact, Jubal says our infant softly hummed a tune, on and off, in the delivery room.

Although I was present at the birth, I have no memory of Milo’s musical performance because I fainted. Penny does not remember it either, because, although conscious, she was distracted by the post-partum hemorrhaging that had caused me to pass out.

I do not doubt Jubal Frost’s story. Milo has always been full of surprises. For good reason, his nickname is Spooky.

On his third birthday, Milo declared, “We’re gonna rescue a doggy.”

Penny and I assumed he was acting out something he had seen on TV, but he was a preschooler on a mission. He climbed onto a kitchen chair, plucked the car keys from the Peg-Board, and hurried out to the garage as if to set off in search of an endangered canine.

We took the keys away from him, but for more than an hour, he followed us around chanting, “We’re gonna rescue a doggy,” until to save our sanity, we decided to drive him to a pet shop and redirect his canine enthusiasm toward a gerbil or a turtle, or both.

En route, he said, “We’re almost to the doggy.” Half a block later, he pointed to a sign—ANIMAL SHELTER. We assumed wrongly that it was the silhouette of a German shepherd that caught his attention, not the words on the sign. “In there, Daddy.”

Scores of forlorn dogs occupied cages, but Milo walked directly to the middle of the center row in the kennel and said, “This one.”

She was a fifty-pound two-year-old Australian shepherd mix with a shaggy black-and-white coat, one eye blue and the other gray. She had no collie in her, but Milo named her Lassie.

Penny and I loved her the moment we saw her. Somewhere a gerbil and a turtle would remain in need of a home.

In the next three years, we never heard a single bark from the dog. We wondered whether our Lassie, following the example of the original, would at last bark if Milo fell down an abandoned well or became trapped in a burning barn, or whether she would instead try to alert us to our boy’s circumstances by employing urgent pantomime.

Until Milo was six and Lassie was five, our lives were not only free of calamity but also without much inconvenience. Our fortunes changed with the publication of my sixth novel, One O’Clock Jump.

My first five had been bestsellers. Way to go, Angel Ralph.

Penny Boom, of course, is the Penny Boom, the acclaimed writer and illustrator of children’s books. They are brilliant, funny books.

More than for her dazzling beauty, more than for her quick mind, more than for her great good heart, I fell in love with her for her sense of humor. If she ever lost her sense of humor, I would have to dump her. Then I’d kill myself because I couldn’t live without her.

The name on her birth certificate is Brunhild, which means someone who is armored for the fight. By the time she was five, she insisted on being called Penny.

At the start of World War Waxx, as we came to call it, Penny and Milo and Lassie and I lived in a fine stone-and-stucco house, under the benediction of graceful phoenix palms, in Southern California. We didn’t have an ocean view, but didn’t need one, for we were focused on one another and on our books.

Because we’d seen our share of Batman movies, we knew that Evil with a capital E stalked the world, but we never expected that it would suddenly, intently turn its attention to our happy household or that this evil would be drawn to us by a book I had written.

Having done a twenty-city tour for each of my previous novels, I persuaded my publisher to spare me that ordeal for One O’Clock Jump.

Consequently, on publication day, a Tuesday in early November, I got up at three o’clock in the morning to brew a pot of coffee and to repair to my first-floor study. Unshaven, in pajamas, I undertook a series of thirty radio interviews, conducted by telephone, between 4:00 and 9:30 A.M., which began with morning shows on the East Coast.

Radio hosts, both talk-jocks and traditional tune-spinners, do better interviews than TV types. Rare is the TV interviewer who has read your book, but eight of ten radio hosts will have read it.

Radio folks are brighter and funnier, too—and often quite humble. I don’t know why this last should be true, except perhaps the greater fame of facial recognition, which comes with regular television exposure, encourages pridefulness that ripens into arrogance.

After five hours on radio, I felt as though I might vomit if I heard myself say again the words One O’Clock Jump. I could see the day coming when, if I was required to do much publicity for a new book, I would write it but not allow its publication until I died.

If you have never been in the public eye, flogging your work like a carnival barker pitching a freak show to the crowd, this publish-only-after-death pledge may seem extreme. But protracted self-promotion drains something essential from the soul, and after one of these sessions, you need weeks to recover and to decide that one day it might be all right to like yourself again.

The danger in writing but not publishing was that my agent, Hudson “Hud” Jacklight, receiving no commissions, would wait only until three unpublished works had been completed before having me killed to free up the manuscripts for marketing.

And if I knew Hud as well as I thought I did, he would not arrange for a clean shot to the back of the head. He would want me to be tortured and dismembered in such a flamboyant fashion that he could make a rich deal for one of his true-crime clients to write a book about my murder.

If no publisher would pay a suitably immense advance for a book about an unsolved killing, Hud would have someone framed for it. Most likely Penny, Milo, and Lassie.

Anyway, after the thirtieth interview, I rose from my office chair and, reeling in self-disgust, made my way to the kitchen. My intention was to eat such an unhealthy breakfast that my guilt over the cholesterol content would distract me from the embarrassment of all the self-promotion.

Dependable Penny had delayed her breakfast so she could eat with me and hear all of the incredibly witty things I wished I had said in those thirty interviews. In contrast to my tousled hair, unshaven face, and badly rumpled pajamas, she wore a crisp white blouse and lemon-yellow slacks, and as usual her skin glowed as though it were translucent and she were lit from inside.

As I entered the room, she was serving blueberry pancakes, and I said, “You look scrumptious. I could pour maple syrup on you and eat you alive.”

“Cannibalism,” Milo warned me, “is a crime.”

“It’s not a worldwide crime,” I told him. “Some places it’s a culinary preference.”

“It’s a crime,” he insisted.

Between his fifth and sixth birthdays, Milo had decided on a career in law enforcement. He said that too many people were lawless and that the world was run by thugs. He was going to grow up and do something about it.

Lots of kids want to be policemen. Milo intended to become the director of the FBI and the secretary of defense, so that he would be empowered to dispense justice to evildoers both at home and abroad.

Here on the brink of World War Waxx, Milo perched on a dinette chair, elevated by a thick foam pillow because he was diminutive for his age. Blue block letters on his white T-shirt spelled COURAGE.

Later, the word on his chest would seem like an omen.

Having finished his breakfast long ago, my bright-eyed son was nursing a glass of chocolate milk and reading a comic book. He could read at college level, though his interests were not those of either a six-year-old or a frat boy.

“What trash is this?” I asked, picking up the comic.

“Dostoyevsky,” he said.

Frowning at the cover illustration, I wondered, “How can they condense Crime and Punishment into a comic book?”

Penny said, “It comes as a boxed set of thirty-six double-thick issues. He’s on number seven.”

Returning the comic to Milo, I said, “Maybe the question should be—why would they condense Crime and Punishment into a comic book?”

“Raskolnikov,” Milo solemnly informed me, tapping a page of the illustrated classic with one finger, “is a totally confused guy.”

“That makes two of us,” I said.

I sat at the table, picked up a squeeze bottle of liquid butter, and hosed my pancakes.

“Trying to bury the shame of self-promotion under cholesterol guilt?” Penny asked.

“Exactly.”

From across the dinette, Lassie watched me butter the flapjacks. She is not permitted to sit at the table with us; however, because she refuses to live entirely at dog level, she is allowed a chair at a four-foot remove, where she can observe and feel part of the family at mealtimes.

For such a cute dog, she is often surprisingly hard to read. She has a poker face. She was not drooling. She rarely did. She was less obsessed with food than were most dogs.

Instead, she cocked her head and studied me as if she were an anthropologist and I were a member of a primitive tribe engaged in an inscrutable ritual.

Maybe she was amazed that I proved capable of operating as complex a device as squeeze-bottle butter with a flip-up nozzle. I have a reputation for incompetence with tools and machines.

For instance, I am no longer permitted to change a punctured tire. In the event of a flat, I am required to call the automobile club and get out of their way when they arrive.

I will not explain why this is the case, because it’s not a particularly interesting story. Besides, when I got to the part about the monkey dressed in a band uniform, you would think I was making up the whole thing, even though my insurance agent could confirm the truth of every detail.

God gave me a talent for storytelling. He didn’t think I would also need to have the skill to repair a jet engine or build a nuclear reactor from scratch. Who am I to second-guess God? Although…it would be nice to be able to use a hammer or a screwdriver at least once without a subsequent trip to the hospital emergency room.

Anyway, just as I raised the first bite of butter-drenched pancakes to my mouth, the telephone rang.

“Third line,” Penny said.

The third is my direct business line, given only to my editors, publishers, agents, and attorneys.

I put down the still-laden fork, got up, and snared the wall phone on the fourth ring, before the call went to voice mail.

Olivia Cosima, my editor, said, “Cubby, you’re a trouper. I hear from publicity, the radio interviews were brilliant.”

“If brilliant means I made a fool of myself slightly less often than I expected to, then they were brilliant.”

“Every writer now and then makes a fool of himself, dear. What’s unique about you is—you’ve never made a total ass of yourself.”

“I’m working on it.”

“Listen, sweetheart, I just e-mailed you three major reviews that appeared this morning. Read the one by Shearman Waxx first.”

I held my breath. Waxx was the senior critic for the nation’s premier newspaper. He was feared, therefore revered. He had not reviewed any of my previous novels.

Because I didn’t subscribe to that newspaper, I had never read Waxx. Nevertheless, I knew he was the most influential book critic in the country.

“And?” I asked.

Olivia said, “Why don’t you read it first, and then we’ll talk.”

“Uh-oh.”

“He favors boring minimalism, Cubby. The qualities he dislikes in your work are the very things readers hunger for. So it’s really a selling review.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Call me after you’ve read it. And the other two, which are both wonderful. They more than compensate for Waxx.”

When I turned away from the telephone, Penny was sitting at the table, holding her knife and fork not as if they were dining utensils but as if they were weapons. Having heard my side of the conversation with my editor, she had sensed a threat to her family, and she was as armored for the fight as the Brunhild whom she had once been.

“What?” she asked.

“Shearman Waxx reviewed my book.”

“Is that all?”

“He didn’t like it.”

“Who gives a flying”—she glanced at Milo before finishing her question with a nonsense word instead of a vulgarity—“furnal.”

“What’s a flying furnal?” Milo asked.

“A kind of squirrel,” I said, fully aware that my gifted son’s intellectual genius lay in fields other than biology.

Penny said, “I thought the book was terrific, and I’m the most honest critic you’re ever going to have.”

“Yeah, but a couple hundred thousand people read his reviews.”

“Nobody reads his reviews but geeky aficionados of snarkiness.”

“You mean it has wings?” Milo asked.

I frowned at him. “Does what have wings?”

“The flying furnal.”

“No. It has air bladders.”

“Do yourself a favor,” Penny advised. “Don’t read the review.”

“If I don’t read it, I won’t know what he said.”

“Precisely.”

“What do you mean—air bladders?” Milo asked.

I said, “Inflatable sacs under its skin.”

“Has any review, good or bad, ever changed the way you write?” Penny asked.

“Of course not. I’ve got a spine.”

“So there’s nothing to be gained from reading this one.”

Milo said, “It doesn’t fly. What it must do—it must just float.”

“It can fly,” I insisted.

“But air bladders, no wings—it’s a squirrel blimp,” Milo said.

“Blimps fly,” I said. “They have an engine and a big propeller behind the passenger gondola.”

Milo saw the weakness of my contention: “Squirrels don’t have engines.”

“No, but once it inflates its bladders, the furnal kicks its hind feet very fast, like a swimmer, and propels itself forward.”

Lassie remained poker-faced, but I knew that she had not been convinced by my lecture on the biology of the flying furnal.

Milo wasn’t buying it either. “Mom, he’s doing it again. Dad’s lying.”

“He’s not lying,” Penny assured him. “He’s exercising the strong and limber imagination of a fine novelist.”

“Yeah? What’s the difference from lying?”

As if curious about her mistress’s reply, Lassie leaned forward in her chair and cocked her head toward Penny.

“Lies hurt people,” Penny explained. “Imagination makes life more fun.”

“Like right now,” I said, “I’m imagining Shearman Waxx being attacked and killed by a flying furnal with rabies.”

“Let it go,” Penny advised.

“I told Olivia I’d call her back after I read the review.”

“Don’t read it,” Penny warned.

“I promised Olivia I’d call her.”

Mouth full of pancake, Penny shook her head ruefully.

“I’m a big boy,” I said. “This kind of thing doesn’t get to me. I have to read it. But don’t worry—I’ll laugh it off.”

I returned to my study and switched on the computer.

Rather than scroll through Olivia’s e-mail on the screen, I printed out her opening comment and the three reviews.

First, I read the one from USA Today, and then the one from the Washington Post. They were raves, and they fortified me.

With professional detachment, I read Shearman Waxx’s review.

The syphilitic swine.

Chapter 2

In New York, my editor, Olivia Cosima, had delayed going to lunch until I called her.

Slumped in my office chair, bare feet propped on my desk, I said, “Olivia, this Waxx guy doesn’t understand my book is in part a comic novel.”

“No, dear, he doesn’t. And you should be grateful for that, because if he realized it was funny, he would have said that it failed as a comic novel.”

“He thinks a solid metaphor is ‘ponderous prose.’”

“He’s a product of the modern university, Cubby. Figures of speech are considered oppressive.”

“Oppressive? Who do they oppress?”

“Those who don’t understand them.”

“What—I’m supposed to write to please the ignorant?”

“He wouldn’t put it that way, dear.”

Staring at my bare feet, I decided that my toes were ugly. Whatever inspired Penny to marry me, it hadn’t been my feet.

“But, Olivia, this review is full of errors—character details, plot points. I counted eleven. He calls my female lead Joyce when her name is Judith.”

“That was one we all missed, dear.”

“Missed?”

“The publicity letter that accompanied each reviewer’s advance-reading copy mistakenly referred to her as Joyce.”

“I proofread that letter. I approved it.”

“Yes, dear. So did I. Probably six of us proofed and okayed it, and we all missed the Joyce thing. It happens.”

I felt stupid. Humiliated. Unprofessional.

Then my mind cleared: “Wait, wait. He’s reviewing the book, not the publicity letter that went with it. In the book, it’s Judith.”

“Do you know the British writer J. G. Ballard?”

“Yes, of course. He’s wonderful.”

“He reviewed books for—I think it was The Times of London. Years after he stopped reviewing, he said he’d had a policy of giving only good reviews to books he didn’t have time to read. Would that everyone were so fair.”

After a silence for reflection on her words, I said, “Are you saying Shearman Waxx might not have read One O’Clock Jump?”

“Sometimes you’re so naïve, I want to pinch your cute pink cheeks,” Olivia said. “Dear, I’m sure he skimmed parts of it, and perhaps an assistant read the whole thing.”

“But that’s…that’s…dishonest.”

“You’ve had an easy ascent, Cubby, your first book a major bestseller. You don’t realize that the literary community has a few charming little islands, but they’re floating in a huge cesspool.”

My insteps were as ugly as my toes. Swinging my feet off the desk, hiding them under my chair, I said, “His syntax isn’t good.”

Olivia said, “Yes, I often take a red pencil to his reviews.”

“Have you ever sent one to him—corrected?”

“I am not insane, dear.”

“I meant anonymously.”

“I like my face as it’s currently arranged.”

“How can he be considered the premier critic in the country?”

“He’s respected in the literary community.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s vicious, dear. People fear him.”

“Fear isn’t respect.”

“In our community, it’s close enough.”

“Olivia, what should I do?”

“Do? Do nothing. You’ve always received ninety percent good reviews, and you will this time. The book is strong. It will sell.”

“But this rankles. The injustice.”

“Injustice is hyperbole, Cubby. It’s not as if you’ve been packed off to a gulag.”

“Well, it’s frustrating.”

After a silence, she said, “You aren’t thinking of responding to him, are you? That would be a terrible mistake, Cubby.”

“I know.”

“You would only look like a defensive whiner.”

“It’s just that he made so many mistakes. And his syntax is so bad. I could really eviscerate him.”

“Dear, the man can’t be eviscerated because he has no viscera. He’s a walking colon. If you cut him open, you only end up covered in crap.”

By the time I returned to the kitchen, Milo and Lassie were no longer there, and Penny had finished eating. She stood at the sink, rinsing her plate before putting it in the dishwasher.

Now that they were cold and glistening with milky liquid butter, my pancakes looked as unappetizing as the deflated air bladders of a flying furnal. No longer hungry, I decided to skip breakfast.

Turning from the sink, drying her hands on a towel, Penny said, “So you read the review?”

“But he didn’t read my book. Maybe he skimmed it. He’s got so much wrong.”

“What did Olivia think?”

“She says he’s a walking colon.”

“You shouldn’t have let him into your head, Cubby. But now that he’s in there, flush him out.”

“I will.”

She put her arms around me. “You’re a sweet, talented man, and I love you.”

Holding her tight, I said, “Don’t look at my feet.”

“What’s wrong with your feet?”

“Everything. I should never go barefoot. Let’s have dinner at Roxie’s, celebrate publication day.”

“That’s my boy. You went off the track for a bit, but now you’re on it again.”

“Maybe I am.”

“Let it go. Remember what Gilbert said.”

She was an admirer of the late G. K. Chesterton, the English writer, and she made me an admirer of his, as well.

“‘Nothing,’” she quoted, “‘can do a man harm unless he fears it.’ There’s no reason to fear a weasel like Shearman Waxx.”

“If I had shaved, brushed my teeth, and didn’t have sour-coffee breath, I’d kiss you so hard.”

Pinching my lower lip between her thumb and forefinger, and pulling it into a pout, she said, “I’ll be around when you’ve cleaned up your act.”

In the first-floor hallway, heading toward the stairs, I passed the open door of my study and saw Milo and Lassie sitting side by side in my office chair, boosted by a sofa pillow. This was a Norman Rockwell moment for the twenty-first century: a boy and his dog surfing the Internet.

Stepping behind the chair, I saw on the monitor an aerial view of a seaside house with an orange barrel-tile roof.

“What’s that?” I asked.

Milo said, “Google Earth. I googled the guy, where he lives.”

“What guy?”

“The Waxx guy.”

When I was six years old, my technological prowess amounted to helping my buddy Ned Lufferman build a tin-can rocket powered by firecrackers that he stole from his big brother’s Fourth of July stash. Ned lost the little finger on his left hand, and I was rushed to the hospital with a second-degree burn on the nose. There was also some concern that my eyebrows would not grow back, but they did.

Milo clicked the mouse, and a street view of the Waxx property replaced the aerial shot.

With cream-colored walls and terra-cotta window surrounds, the Spanish Mediterranean residence was both handsome and romantic. Twin forty-foot magnolias canopied the front yard, and red bougainvillea all but concealed the flanking property walls.

“I thought he was in New York,” I said.

“No,” said Milo. “Laguna Beach.”

Barring heavy traffic, Laguna lay only twenty minutes away.

In this e-mail age, Waxx could live as far from his publisher as I lived from mine, yet meet his weekly deadlines. His presence in the vicinity was a surprise, though surely nothing but a coincidence.

Nevertheless, I was pricked by either intuition or imagination, and through me bled a cold premonition that the critic’s proximity to me might be more significant than it seemed.

“Did you read the review?” I asked Milo.

“No. Mom told you—let it go. She’s smart about this stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“Most stuff.”

“So if you didn’t read the review, why did you google him?”

“It was Lassie’s idea.”

The dog turned her head to look back and up at me.

“Shearman Waxx is an enema,” Milo informed me.

As I gently rubbed my thumbs behind Lassie’s ears, I said, “While that may be true, it’s not a nice thing to say.”

“Wasn’t me who said it.”

Milo’s small hands moved cat-quick from mouse to keyboard to mouse. He bailed from the current website and went to an online encyclopedia, to the biographical entry on Shearman Waxx.

Leaning over my son, I read aloud the first sentence on the screen: “‘Shearman Thorndike Waxx, award-winning critic and author of three enormously successful college textbooks on creative writing, is something of an enema.’”

Milo said, “See?”

“It’s an error,” I explained. “They meant to write enigma”

“Enigma? I know what that is.”

“A mystery, something obscure and puzzling.”

“Yeah. Like Grandma Clotilda.”

I continued reading: “‘Waxx declines honorary doctorates and other awards requiring his attendance at any pubic event.’”

“What’s a pubic event?” Milo asked.

“The word should be public.” Scanning the screen, I said, “According to this, there’s only one known photograph of Waxx.”

“He’s really, really old,” said Milo.

“He is? How old?”

“He was born in 1868.”

“They probably mean 1968.”

“Do real-book ’cyclopedias make so many mistakes?”

“No.”

“Could we buy a real-book ’cyclopedia?”

“Absolutely.”

“So when will we get Waxx?” Milo asked.

“What do you mean—get him?”

“Vengeance,” Milo said, and Lassie growled softly. “When will we make him sorry he messed with you, Dad?”

Dismayed that Milo could read my anger so clearly and that it inspired him to talk of vengeance, I moved from behind his chair to his side, and with the mouse I clicked out of the encyclopedia.

“Revenge isn’t a good thing, Milo.” I switched off the computer. “Besides, Mr. Waxx was only doing what he’s paid to do.”

“What is he paid to do?”

“Read a book and tell his audience whether he liked it or not.”

“Can’t his audience read?”

“Yes, but they’re busy, and they have so many books to choose from, so they trust his judgment.”

“Why do they trust his judgment?”

“I have no idea.”

The phone on my desk rang. The third line.

When I answered, Hud Jacklight, my literary agent, said, “The Waxx review. Great thing. You’ve arrived, Cubster.”

“What do you mean—I’ve arrived? Hud, he gutted me.”

Milo rolled his eyes and whispered to Lassie, “It’s the Honker.”

Because he doesn’t understand children, Hud thinks they love it when he pinches their noses—their ears, their chins—while making a loud honking noise.

“Doesn’t matter,” Hud assured me. “It’s a Waxx review. You’ve arrived. He takes you seriously. That’s big.”

Breaking her characteristic silence, Lassie issued a low growl while staring at the phone in my hand.

“Hud,” I said, “apparently he didn’t even read the book.”

“Irrelevant. It’s coverage. Coverage sells. You’re a Waxx author now. That matters. A Waxx author. That’s huge.”

Although Hud pretends to read each of my novels, I know that he has never read any of them. He praises them without mentioning a plot point or a character.

Sometimes he selects a manuscript page at random and raves about the writing in a sentence or a paragraph. He reads it aloud over the telephone, as if my prose will sound fresh and limpid and magical to me by virtue of being delivered in his insistent cadences, but his voice is less that of a Shakespearean actor than that of a livestock auctioneer. By emphasizing the wrong words, he often reveals that he has no understanding of the context of the passage with which he has chosen to hector me.

“A Waxx author. Proud of you, Cubman. Celebrate tonight. You earned it.”

“This is nothing to celebrate, Hud.”

“Get a good wine. On me. Keep the receipt. I’ll reimburse.”

“Even Lassie thinks this review requires vengeance rather than celebration.”

“A hundred-dollar bottle. Or eighty. There’s good stuff at sixty. Wait. You said vengeance?”

“Milo said it and Lassie agreed. I explained it was a bad idea.”

“Don’t respond to Waxx.”

“I won’t.”

“Don’t respond, Cubman.”

“I won’t. I said I won’t.”

“Bad move. Very bad move.”

“I’m already over it.”

Milo had switched on the computer and returned to Google Earth, to the aerial photograph of the critic’s house.

Leaning forward in the office chair, Lassie sniffed as though, even through an electronic medium, she could detect Waxx’s infernal scent.

“Think positive,” Hud Jacklight encouraged me. “You’re a Waxx author now. You’re literary.”

“I’m so impressed with myself.”

“Great exposure. A Waxx author forever.”

“Forever?”

“From now on. He’ll review every book. You caught his eye. He’s committed to you.”

“Forever is a long time.”

“Other writers would kill for this. To be recognized. At the highest level.”

“I wouldn’t kill for it,” I assured him.

“Because you’ve already got it. What a day. A Waxx author. My client. This is so good. Better than Metamucil.”

The fiber-supplement reference was not a joke. Hud Jacklight had no sense of humor.

Humorless, without scruples, not much of a reader, Hud had been the most successful literary agent in the country for two decades. This said less about Hud than it did about the publishing industry.

“A Waxx author,” Hud gushed again. “Incredible. Fabulous. Son. Of. A. Gun.”

“It’s November,” I said in a perky voice, “but, gee, it feels like spring.”

Before Penny and I left for Roxie’s Bistro that evening, I had received calls from my publisher, my audio publisher, my film agent, and three friends, regarding the Waxx review. All of them said in various ways the same thing that Penny had advised: Let it go.

When Vivian Norby, Milo’s baby-sitter, arrived, she said as she stepped into the foyer, “Saw the review, Cubby. He’s an ignorant egg-sucker. Don’t pay him any mind.”

“I’ve already let it go,” I assured her.

“If you want me to sit down with him and have a talk, I will.”

That was an intriguing concept. “What would you say to him?”

“Same thing I say to every kid too big for his britches. I’d lay out the rules of polite society and make it clear that I know how to enforce them.”

Vivian was fiftyish, solid but not fat, steely-eyed but warm-hearted, as confident as a grizzly bear but feminine. Her husband, a former marine and homicide detective—now deceased—had never won an arm-wrestling contest with her.

As usual, she wore pink: pink sneakers with yellow laces, a pink skirt, and a pink-and-cream sweater. Her dangling earrings featured silver kittens climbing silver chains.

“I’m sure you could make him properly contrite,” I said.

“You just give me his address.”

“I would—except I’m not dwelling on what he said. I’ve already let it go.”

“If you change your mind, just call.”

After closing the door behind her, she took my arm as if this were her house and she were welcoming a guest, and she escorted me out of the foyer, into the living room, almost lifting me onto my toes as we went. Shoulders back, formidable bosom raised, Vivian moved as forcefully as an icebreaker cracking through arctic seas.

Three years previous, she had been sitting for the Jameson kids on Lamplighter Way when two masked thugs attempted a home-invasion robbery. The first intruder—who turned out to be a disgruntled former employee of Bob Jameson’s—wound up with a broken nose, split lips, four cracked teeth, two crushed fingers, a fractured knee, and a puncture in his right buttock.

Vivian suffered a broken fingernail.

The second thug, who fared worse than the first, developed such a disabling fear of fifty-something women who wore pink that in court, when the prosecutor showed up one day wearing a neck scarf of that fateful color, the accused began to sob uncontrollably and had to be carried out of the courthouse on a stretcher, by paramedics.

In the living room, Vivian let go of me and put her cloth carryall beside the armchair in which she would spend the evening.

“Your book is wonderful, Cubby.” She had read an advance copy. “I may not be as educated as a certain hoity-toity critic, but I know truth when I see it. Your book is full of truth.”

“Thank you, Vivian.”

“Now where is Prince Milo?”

“In his room, building some kind of radio to communicate with extraterrestrials.”

“The time machine didn’t work out?”

“Not yet.”

“Is Lassie with him?”

“She’s never anywhere else,” I said.

“I’ll go give him a tickle.”

“Penny and I are having dinner at Roxie’s. If Milo makes contact with space aliens, it’s okay to call us.”

I followed Vivian out of the living room and watched as she ascended the stairs with a majesty only slightly less awesome than the looming presence of the mother ship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

When I entered the kitchen, Penny was fixing a Post-it to the refrigerator door, providing heating instructions for the lasagna that would be Milo’s dinner.

“Vivian,” I reported, “has assumed command of the premises.” Penny said, “Thank God we found her. I never worry about Milo when Vivian’s here.”

“Me neither. But I’m worried about her. Milo’s tinkering again.”

“Vivian will be fine. Milo only blew something up that once, and it was an accident.”

“He could accidentally blow something up again.”

She frowned at me, a disapproving expression with which I was familiar. Even then she looked scrumptious enough that I would have eaten her alive had we been in a country that mandated compassionate tolerance for cannibals.

“Never,” she said. “Milo learns from his mistakes.”

As I followed her through the connecting door between the kitchen and the garage, I said, “Is that a slighting remark about my experiences with fireworks?”

“How many times have you burned off your eyebrows?”

“Once. The other three times, I just singed them.” Regarding me over the roof of the car, she raised her eyebrows. Their pristine condition mocked me.

“You singed them so well,” she said, “the smell of burning hair blanketed the entire neighborhood.”

“Anyway, the last time was more than five years ago.”

“So you’re overdue for a repeat performance,” she said, and got into the car.

Settling behind the steering wheel, I protested: “On the contrary.

As any behavioral psychologist will tell you, if you can go five years without repeating the same mistake, you’ll never make it again.”

“I wish I had a behavioral psychologist here right now.”

“You think he’d contradict me, but he wouldn’t. They call it the five-year rule.”

As I started the engine, Penny used the remote control to raise the garage door. “Wait until it’s all the way up before you drive through it.”

“I never drove forward through a garage door,” I reminded her. “I reversed through it once, which is a whole different thing.”

“Maybe. But considering it happened less than five years ago, I’m not taking any chances.”

“You know, for someone whose parents call themselves Clotilda and Grimbald, you’re remarkably funny.”

“I would have to be, wouldn’t I? Don’t run down the mailbox.”

“I will if I want.”

We were having a fine time. The evening ahead was full of promise: good food, wine, laughter, and love.

Soon, however, Fate would bring me to a cliff. Although I would see the precipice before me, I would nevertheless step into thin air, taking not merely a pratfall but a plunge.

Chapter 3

In Newport Beach, on Balboa Peninsula, in a building near one of the town’s two piers, Roxie’s Bistro has low lighting, medium-Deco decor, and high culinary standards.

Most restaurants these days are as noisy as a drum-and-cymbal factory invaded by two hundred chimpanzees intent on committing percussion. Those establishments eschew sound-suppressing designs and materials under the pretense that cacophony gives the patrons a sense of being in a hip, happening place.

In truth, such restaurants seek and attract a type of customer whose very existence, in such numbers, proves our civilization is dying: boisterous and free-spending egotists taught since infancy that self-esteem matters more than knowledge, that manners and etiquette are merely tools of oppression. They like the sound of their own braying, and they seem to be convinced that the louder they are, the more desperately every onlooker wants to be in their clique.

Roxie’s Bistro offered, instead, quiet intimacy. The murmur of conversation sometimes rose, though never became distracting. Combined with the soft silvery clink of flatware and an occasional surge of laughter, these voices made a pleasing music from the news of the day, gossip, and stories of times past.

Penny and I talked about publishing, politics, pickles, art, Milo, dogs in general, Lassie in particular, fleas, Flaubert, Florida, alliteration, ice dancing, Scrooge McDuck, the role of dark matter in the universe, and tofu, among other things.

In the golden glow of recessed lighting and in the flicker of candles in faceted amber-glass cups, radiant Penny looked like a beautiful queen, and I probably resembled Rumpelstiltskin scheming to take her next-born child. At least my ugly feet were hidden in socks and shoes.

After we finished our entrées but before we ordered dessert, Penny went to the lavatory.

Seeing me alone at the table, Hamal Sarkissian stopped by to keep me company.

Roxie Sarkissian had established the restaurant fifteen years earlier and was the award-winning chef. Although charming, she seldom ventured out from the kitchen.

Hamal, her husband, was the ideal frontman. He liked people, had an irresistible smile, and was diplomatic enough to soothe and win over the most unreasonable customer.

Standing by the table, he regarded me not with his trademark smile but instead with grave concern. “Is everything okay, Cubby?”

“Fabulous dinner,” I assured him. “Perfect. As always.”

Still solemn, he said, “Are you going on tour for the new book?”

“No. I needed a break this time.”

“Don’t worry about him, what he says.”

Perplexed, I asked, “Worry about who, what?”

“He’s a strange man, the critic.”

“Oh. So…you saw the Shearman Waxx review, huh?”

“Two paragraphs. Then I spit on his column and turned the page.”

“It doesn’t faze me. I’ve already let it go.”

“He’s a strange man. He always makes his reservation in the name Edmund Wilson.”

Surprised, surveying the room, I said, “He comes here?”

“Seldom dinner. More often lunch.”

“How about that.”

“He’s always alone, pays cash.”

“You’re sure it’s him? Nobody seems to know what he looks like.”

“Twice he was short of cash,” Hamal said. “He used a credit card. Shearman Waxx. He’s a very strange man.”

“Well, rest assured, if he had a reservation for tonight and I were to run into him, there wouldn’t be a scene. Criticism doesn’t bother me.”

“In fact, he has a twelve-thirty lunch reservation tomorrow,” said Hamal.

“Criticism comes with the territory.”

“He’s a damned strange man.”

“A review is only one person’s opinion.”

Hamal said, “He creeps me out a little.”

“I’ve already let it go. You know what it’s like. The restaurant gets a bad review—c’est la vie. You just keep on keepin’ on.”

“We’ve never had a bad review,” Hamal said.

Embarrassed by the assumption I had made, I said, “Why would you? This place is perfection.”

“Do you get many bad reviews?”

“I don’t keep track. Maybe ten percent aren’t good. Maybe twelve percent. My third book—that was like fourteen percent. I don’t dwell on the negative. Ninety percent good reviews is gratifying.”

“Eighty-six percent,” said Hamal.

“That was only for my third book. Some critics didn’t think the dwarf was necessary.”

“I like dwarfs. I have a cousin in Armenia, he’s a dwarf.”

“Even if you use a dwarf as your hero, you have to call him a ‘little person.’ The word dwarf just incenses some critics.”

“This critic of yours, he always reminds me of my cousin.”

“You mean Shearman Waxx is a dwarf?”

“No. He’s about five feet eight. But he’s stumpy.”

The front door opened, a party of four entered, and Hamal went to greet them.

A moment later, Penny returned from the lavatory. Settling in her chair, she said, “I’m going to finish this delightful wine before deciding on dessert.”

“That reminds me—Hud wants to buy our wine this evening. He says send him the receipt.”

“That would be wasting a perfectly good stamp.”

“He might pay for half the bottle. He sent us champagne that time.”

“It wasn’t champagne. It was sparkling cider. Anyway, why would he suddenly want to buy our wine?”

“To celebrate the Waxx review.”

“The man is criminally obtuse.”

“He’s not that bad. Just clueless.”

“I don’t like how he’s always pushing to be my agent, too.”

“He negotiates killer deals,” I said.

“But he doesn’t know squat about children’s books.”

“He has to know something. He was a child at one time.”

“I doubt that very much. I said something about Dr. Seuss once, and Hud thought I was talking about a physician.”

“A misunderstanding. He was concerned about you.”

“I mention Dr. Seuss and somehow Hud gets the idea I’ve got a terminal disease.”

Being defense attorney for Hud Jacklight is a thankless job. I gave it up.

Penny said, “He happened to have lunch in the same restaurant as my editor, so he asked her—does she know how long I’ve got to live. The man is a total—”

“Flying furnal?” I suggested.

“I wish a furnal would fly up his—”

“Buckaboody?” I suggested, inventing a word of my own.

“Exactly,” Penny said. “This wine is lovely. I’m not going to ruin the memory of it by having to pester Hud for reimbursement.”

As far as I can remember, in ten years I had never kept secret from Penny anything that occurred in my daily life. At that moment, I could not have explained why I failed to share with her that Shearman Waxx sometimes ate at Roxie’s Bistro. Later, I figured it out.

“Are you thinking about the Waxx review again?” she asked.

“No. Not exactly. Maybe a little. Sort of.”

“Let it go,” she said.

“I am. I’m letting it go.”

“No. You’re dwelling on it. Distract yourself.”

“With what?”

“With life. Take me home and make love to me.”

“I thought we were getting dessert.”

“Aren’t I sweet enough for you?”

“There it is,” I said.

“What?”

“That crooked little smile you get sometimes. I love that crooked little smile.”

“Then take me home and do something with it, big boy.”

Chapter 4

Having gotten up at three in the morning to do thirty radio interviews, I had no difficulty falling asleep that Tuesday night.

I endured one of my lost-and-alone dreams. Sometimes it is set in a deserted department store, sometimes in a vacant amusement park or in a train terminal where no trains depart and none arrive.

This time, I roamed a vast and dimly lighted library, where the shelves soared high overhead. The intersecting aisles were not perpendicular to one another, but serpentine, as if reflecting the manner in which one area of knowledge can lead circuitously and unexpectedly to a seemingly unrelated field of inquiry.

This library of the slumbering mind was buried in a silence as solid and as sinuous as the drifted sands of Egypt. No step I took produced a sound.

The wandering passageways were catacombs without the mummified remains, harboring instead lives and the work of lifetimes set down on paper, bound with glue and signature thread.

As always in a lost-and-alone dream, I remained anxious but not afraid. I proceeded in expectation of a momentous discovery, a thing of wonder and delight, although the possibility of terror remained.

When the dream is in a labyrinthine train station, the silence is sometimes broken by footsteps that lure me before they fade. In a department store, I hear a faraway feminine laugh that draws me from kitchenware through bed-and-bath and down a frozen escalator.

In this library, the thrall of silence allowed a single crisp sound now and then, as if someone in an adjacent aisle was paging through a book. Searching, I found neither a patron nor a librarian.

An urgency gripped me. I walked faster, ran, turned a corner into what might have been a reading alcove. Instead of armchairs, the space offered a bed, and in it slept Penny, alone. The covers on my side of the bed were undisturbed, as though I had never rested there.

Alarmed at the sight of her alone, I sensed in her solitude an omen of some event that I dared not contemplate.

I approached the bed—and woke in it, beside her, where I had not been lying in the dream. Gone were the nautilus spirals of books, replaced by darkness and the pale geometry of curtained windows.

Penny’s soft rhythmic breathing was a mooring to which I could tether myself in the gloom; her respiration should have settled me but did not. I continued to feel adrift, and anxious.

Wanting something, not knowing what I wanted, I eased out of bed and, barefoot in pajamas, left the master suite.

Moonlight through skylights frosted the longer run of the L-shaped upstairs hallway. Passing a thus twice-silvered mirror, I glanced at my reflection, which appeared as diaphanous as a ghost.

I was awake but felt still dreambound. This venue, though it was my own house, seemed more sinister than the deserted library or than the department store haunted by an elusive laughing spirit.

My rising anxiety focused on Milo. I hurried the length of the main hall and turned right into the darker short arm.

From the gap between the threshold and the bottom of Milo’s bedroom door, a fan of radiance continuously fluttered between a sapphire-blue intensity and an icy gunmetal blue, not the light of fire or television but suggesting mortal danger nonetheless.

We have a policy of knocking, but I opened the door without announcing myself—and was relieved to find Milo safe and asleep.

The dimmer switch on the bedside lamp had been dialed down to an approximation of candlelight. He lay supine, head raised on a pillow. Behind his closed eyelids, rapid eye movement signified dream sleep.

With him lay Lassie, her chin resting on his abdomen. She was as awake as any guardian charged with a sacred task. She rolled her eyes to watch me without moving her head.

On the U-shaped desk, intermingling clouds of color—each a shade of blue—billowed in slow motion across the computer monitor, like a kaleidoscope with amorphous forms instead of geometric shapes.

I had never seen such a screen saver. Because Milo’s computer had no Internet access, this couldn’t have been downloaded from the Web.

The Internet is more a force for evil than for good. It offers the worst of humankind absolute license and anonymity—and numerous addictive pursuits over which to become obsessive. Kids are having innocence and willpower—if not free will itself—stolen from them.

When Milo wanted to go online, he had to use my computer or Penny’s. We have installed serious site-blocking software.

The wing of the desk to the left of the computer was covered with circuit boards, carefully labeled microchips in small plastic bags, a disassembled alphanumeric keypad, a disassembled radio, dozens of arcane items I had purchased for him at RadioShack and elsewhere, and a scattering of miniature tools.

I had no idea what my boy might be creating with any of those things. However, I trusted him to obey the rules and to avoid doing anything that might electrocute him, burn down the house, or transport him to the Jurassic Era with no way of getting back to us.

In movies, raising a prodigy is always an exhilarating and uplifting journey to triumphant accomplishment. In reality, it is also exhausting and even sometimes terrifying.

I suppose that would not be true if his genius expressed itself as a talent for the piano and for musical composition. Even Mozart couldn’t play the piano with such brilliance that it would explode and kill bystanders with ivory shrapnel.

Unfortunately—or fortunately, as only time would tell—Milo’s talent was for theoretical and applied mathematics, also theoretical and applied physics, with a deep intuitive understanding of magnetic and electromagnetic fields.

This we were told by the experts who studied and tested Milo for two weeks. I have only a dim idea of what their assessment means.

For a while we hired graduate students to tutor him, but they tended only to inhibit his learning. He is a classic autodidact, self-motivated, and already in possession of his high-school GED.

I am as proud of the little guy as I am intimidated. Given his brainpower, he’ll probably never be interested in having me teach him a pastime as boring as baseball. Which is all right, I guess, because I’ve always been rotten at sports.

The wing of the desk to the right of the computer held a large tablet open to a working drawing of some device requiring an array of microprocessors, instruction caches, data caches, bus connections, and other more mysterious items—all linked by a bewildering maze of circuit traces.

If microsoldering was required, neither Milo nor I would be permitted to do it. Such work must be left to Penny. She has, after all, the steady hands of an artist, the emotional maturity that Milo lacks, and a mechanical competence of which I can only dream.

The ever-changing forms on the monitor, like a churning mass of blue protoplasm, had begun to seem ominous to me, as if this were a living thing that, by applying pressure, might crack the screen and surge into the room. I wanted to switch off the computer, but I did not. Milo had left it on not inadvertently but for some reason.

At the bed once more, I gazed at him for a while in the low lamplight. A beautiful child.

Although blessed with a vivid imagination, I could not begin to envision the topography of Milo’s mindscape.

I worried about him a lot.

He had no friends his age because kids bored him. Penny, Lassie, Vivian Norby, Clotilda, Grimbald, and I were his social universe.

I hoped he could live as normally as his gifts would allow, but I felt inadequate to show him the way. I wanted my son to know much laughter and more love, to appreciate the grace of this world and the abiding mystery of it, to know the pleasure of small achievements, of trifles and of follies, to be always aware of the million wonderful little pictures in the big one, to be a humble master of his gift and not the servant of it. Because I could not imagine what it must be like to be him, I could not lead on every issue; much of the time, we would have to find our way together.

I loved him enough to endure any horror for him and to die that he might be spared.

No matter how much you care for another person, however, you can’t guarantee him a happy life, not with love or money, not with sacrifice. You can only do your best—and pray for him.

I kissed Milo on the forehead without disturbing his sleep. Impulsively, I kissed Lassie on the head, as well. She seemed to be pleased by this affection, but I got some fur on my lips.

The bedside clock read 5:00 A.M. In seven and a half hours, the dog would be sitting in the living-room window seat, watching the street and wondering when I would return with her cherished companion—and Milo and I would be having lunch at Roxie’s Bistro, spying on the nation’s premier literary critic.

Chapter 5

At 12:10, the lunch crowd in Roxie’s Bistro was slightly noisier than the dinner customers, but the ambience remained relaxing and conducive to quiet conversation.

Hamal Sarkissian seated us at a table for two at the back of the long rectangular room. He provided a booster pillow for Milo.

“Will you want wine with lunch?” Hamal asked the boy.

“A glass or two,” Milo confirmed.

“I will have it for you in fifteen years,” Hamal said.

I had told Penny that I was taking Milo to the library, to an electronics store to buy items he needed for his current project, and finally to lunch at Roxie’s. All this was true. I don’t lie to Penny.

I neglected, however, to tell her that at lunch I would get a glimpse of the elusive Shearman Waxx. This is deception by omission, and it is not admirable behavior.

Considering that I had no intention of either approaching the critic or speaking to him, I saw no harm in this small deception, no need to concern Penny or to have to listen to her admonition to “Let it go.”

Only once before had I deceived her by omission. That previous instance involved an issue more serious than this one. At the start of our courtship, and now for ten years, I had carefully avoided revealing to her the key fact about myself, the most formative experience of my life, for it seemed to be a weight she should not have to carry.

Because Milo and I arrived before Waxx, I was not at risk of running a variation of my garage-door stunt, accidentally driving through the restaurant, killing the critic at his lunch, and thus being wrongly suspected of premeditated murder.

Having conspired with me earlier on the phone, Hamal pointed to a table at the midpoint of the restaurant. “He will be seated there, by the window. He always reads a book while he dines. You will know him. He is a strange man.”

Earlier, on the Internet, I sought out the only known photograph of Shearman Waxx, which proved to be of no use. The image was as blurry as all those snapshots of Big Foot striding through woods and meadows.

When Hamal left us alone, Milo said, “What strange man?”

“Just a guy. A customer. Hamal thinks he’s strange.”

“Why?”

“He’s got a third eye in his forehead.”

Milo scoffed: “Nobody has an eye in his forehead.”

“This guy does. And four nostrils in his nose.”

“Yeah?” He was as gimlet-eyed as a homicide detective. “What kind of pet does he have—a flying furnal?”

“Two of them,” I said. “He’s taught them stunt flying.”

While we studied our menus and enjoyed our lemony iced tea, in no hurry to order food, Milo and I discussed our favorite cookies, Saturday-morning cartoon shows, and whether extraterrestrials are more likely to visit Earth to enlighten us or to eat us. We talked about dogs in general, Lassie in particular, and anomalies of current flow in electromagnetic fields.

With the last subject, my half of the conversation consisted of so many grunts and snorts that I might have been the aforementioned Sasquatch.

Promptly at 12:30, a stumpy man carrying an attaché case entered the restaurant. Hamal escorted him to the previously specified window table.

To be fair, the guy appeared less stumpy than solid. Although perhaps half as wide as he was tall, Waxx was not overweight. He seemed to have the density of a lead brick.

His neck looked thick enough to support the stone head of an Aztec-temple god. His face was so at odds with the rest of the man that it might have been grafted to him by a clever surgeon: a wide smooth brow, bold and noble features, a strong chin—a face suitable for a coin from the Roman Empire.

He was about forty, certainly not 140, as the online encyclopedia claimed. His leonine hair had turned prematurely white.

In charcoal-gray slacks, an ash-gray hound’s-tooth sport coat with leather elbow patches, a white shirt, and a red bow tie, he seemed to be part college professor and part professional wrestler, as though two men of those occupations had shared a teleportation chamber and—à la the movie The Fly—had discovered their atoms intermingled at the end of their trip.

From his attaché case, he withdrew a hardcover book and what appeared to be a stainless-steel torture device. He opened the book and fitted it into the jaws of this contraption, which held the volume open and at a slant for comfortable hands-free reading.

Evidently, the critic was a man of reliable habits. A waiter came to his table with a glass of white wine that he hadn’t ordered.

Waxx nodded, seemed to utter a word or two, but did not glance up at his server, who at once departed.

He put on half-lens, horn-rimmed reading glasses and, after a sip of wine, turned his attention to the steel-entrapped book.

Because I did not want to be caught staring, I continued my conversation with Milo. I focused mostly on my son and glanced only occasionally toward the critic.

Before long, my spy mission began to seem absurd. Shearman Waxx might be a somewhat odd-looking package, but after the mystery of his appearance had been solved, nothing about him was compelling.

I did not intend to approach him or speak to him. Penny, Olivia Cosima, and even Hud Jacklight had been right to say that responding to an unfair review was generally a bad idea.

As the tables between ours and Waxx’s filled with customers, my view of him became obstructed. By the time we finished our main course and ordered dessert, I lost interest in him.

After I paid the bill and tipped the waiter, as we were rising from the table to leave, Milo said, “I gotta pee, Dad.”

The restrooms were at our end of the premises, off a short hall, and as we crossed the room, I glanced toward Waxx. I couldn’t see his table clearly through the throng, but his chair stood empty. He must have finished lunch and left.

The sparkling-clean men’s room featured one stall wide enough for a wheelchair, two urinals, and two sinks. Redolent of astringent pine-scented disinfectant, the air burned in my nostrils.

Someone occupied the stall, but Milo wasn’t tall enough to use one of the urinals unassisted. After he unzipped his pants, fumbled in his fly, and produced himself, I clamped my hands around his waist and lifted him above the porcelain bowl.

“Ready,” he said.

“Aim,” I said.

“Fire,” he said, and loosed a stream.

When Milo was more than half drained, the toilet flushed and the stall door opened.

I glanced sideways, saw Shearman Waxx not six feet from me, and as if my throat were the pinched neck of a balloon, I let out a thin “Eeee” in surprise.

In the restaurant, his table had been at such a distance from ours that I had not been able to see the color of his eyes. They were maroon.

Although I have thought about that moment often in the days since, I still do not know whether, startled, I turned toward the critic or whether Milo, held aloft in my hands, twisted around to see what had made me gasp. I suspect it was a little of both.

The boy’s stream arced to the tile floor.

For a man as solid as a concrete battlement, Waxx proved to be agile. He danced adroitly backward, out of the splash zone, and his gray Hush Puppies remained entirely dry.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I chanted, and turned Milo toward the urinal.

Without a word, Waxx stepped over the puddle, went to one of the sinks, and began to wash his hands.

“He’s a little guy,” I said. “I have to lift him up.”

Although Waxx did not respond, I imagined I could feel his gaze boring into my back as he watched me in the mirror above the sinks.

I knew that the more I apologized, the more it might seem that I had intended to use Milo like a squirt gun, but I couldn’t shut up.

“Nothing like that ever happened before. If he’d nailed you, I would have paid the dry-cleaning bill.”

Waxx pulled paper towels from the dispenser.

As he finished peeing, Milo giggled.

“He’s a good kid,” I assured Waxx. “He saved a dog from being euthanized.”

The only sound was the rustle of paper as the critic dried his hands.

Although Milo could read at a college level, he was nonetheless a six-year-old boy. Six-year-old boys find nothing funnier than pee and fart jokes.

After giggling again, Milo said, “I shook and zipped, Dad. You can put me down.”

A squeak of hinges revealed that Waxx had opened the door to the hallway.

Putting Milo on his feet, I turned toward the exit.

My hope was that Waxx had not recognized me from my book-jacket photograph.

The eminent critic was staring at me. He said one word, and then he departed.

He had recognized me, all right.

After using paper towels to mop up Milo’s small puddle, I washed my hands at a sink. Then I lifted Milo so he could wash up, too.

“Almost sprinkled him,” Milo said.

“That’s nothing to be proud of. Stop giggling.”

When we returned to the restaurant, Shearman Waxx sat once more at his table. The waiter was just serving the entrée.

Waxx did not look our way. He seemed determined to ignore us.

As we passed his table, I saw the device that imprisoned the book was clever but wicked-looking, as though the critic were holding the work—and its author—in bondage.

Outside, the November afternoon waited: mild, still, expectant. The unblemished sky curved to every horizon like an encompassing sphere of glass, containing not a single cloud or bird, or aircraft.

Along the street, the trees stood as motionless as the fake foliage in an airless diorama. No limb trembled, no leaf whispered.

No traffic passed. Milo and I were the only people in sight.

We might have been figures in a snow-globe paperweight, sans snow.

I wanted to look back at the restaurant, to see if Shearman Waxx watched us from his window seat. Restraining myself, I didn’t turn, but instead walked Milo to the car.

During the drive home, I could not stop brooding about the single word the critic had spoken before he stepped out of the men’s room. He transfixed me with those terrible maroon eyes and in a solemn baritone said, “Doom.”

Chapter 6

That afternoon, while Penny finished a painting for her next children’s book, while Milo and Lassie worked on a time machine or a death ray, or whatever it might be, I sat in an armchair in my study, reading “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor, a short story that I much admired.

One of the most disturbing pieces of fiction ever written, it remains as affecting on the tenth pass as on the first. This might have been my twentieth reading, but Miss O’Connor inspired in me a greater dread than ever before.

I did not understand why phantom spiders crawled the nape of my neck, why chills shivered through my bowels and stomach, why my palms grew damp and my fingers sometimes trembled when I turned a page—all to a degree that I had never experienced previously with this work of fiction or any other. Later, I figured it out.

After I finished the story and as I sat staring at the page, where the words blurred out of focus, a disquiet rose in me that had nothing to do with “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” I told myself that my uneasiness related to my career, to concern about what Waxx would write in his review of my next novel, which he seemed to have promised to savage when he spoke the word doom in a portentous tone.

But surely that could not be the entire cause of the nameless worry that crawled my mind. I had not yet finished my next novel. It would not be published for a year. At my request, my publisher would withhold an advance review copy from Waxx. We had time to devise a strategy to thwart him. Yet my current uneasiness seemed to anticipate a more immediate jeopardy.

Peripheral vision alerted me to movement. I raised my eyes from the page, turned my head toward the open study door, and saw Shearman Waxx pass by in the downstairs hall.

I do not recall rising from the armchair or letting the book of short stories fall from my hands. I seemed to have imagined myself onto my feet in a thousandth of a second.

Now erect, I couldn’t imagine myself moving. Shock paralyzed me.

My heart continued to beat at the pace of a man reading in an armchair. Disbelief forestalled a sense of jeopardy.

O’Connor’s story had cast over me a pall of apprehension. In that altered state, my mind must have played a trick on me, must have conjured an intruder where none existed.

This phantom Waxx had not even glanced at me, as certainly he would have if he had been real and had come here to confront me for whatever reason. Perhaps Penny passed by in the hall, and the limber imagination of a novelist remade her into the critic.

The possibility that I could mistake my luminous and slender Penny for the dour hulk of Shearman Waxx was so absurd that my disbelief dissolved. I broke my paralysis.

Suddenly my heart mimicked iron on turf, the frantic thud of racing horses’ heels. I hurried to the open door, hesitated at the threshold, but then crossed it. The hallway was deserted.

Waxx had been headed toward the back of the house. I followed the shorter length of the hall to the kitchen, half expecting to find him selecting a blade from the knife drawer beside the cooktop.

Even as that image crossed my mind, I was embarrassed by my near hysteria. Shearman Waxx would surely disdain such melodrama in real life as much as he scorned it in fiction.

He lurked neither in the kitchen nor in the adjacent family room that flowed from it. One of the French doors to the back patio stood open, suggesting that he had departed by that exit.

Standing in the doorway, I surveyed the patio, the swimming pool, and the backyard. No sign of Waxx.

That eerie stillness had befallen the world again. The water in the pool lay as smooth as a sheet of glass.

While I had been reading, gunmetal clouds had armored the sky. They did not billow, neither did they churn, but looked as flat and motionless as a coat of paint.

Because we lived in the safest neighborhood of a low-crime community, we were in the habit of leaving our most-used doors unlocked during the day. That would change.

Bewildered by Waxx’s intrusion, I closed the French door and engaged the deadbolt.

Abruptly, I realized that the critic might have done more than pass through the house. If he had left by the family room, he could have entered elsewhere—and could have done some kind of damage.

Engaged in strange science, Milo was upstairs in his bedroom with Lassie.

In her second-floor studio, Penny painted the wide-eyed, sharp-beaked owl that hunted the band of heroic mice in her current book.

Although the dog had not barked and though no one had cried out in pain or terror, my mind insisted on the most unlikely scenario, on bludgeoned heads and cut throats. Our modern world is, after all, full of flamboyant violence; as often as not, the evening news is as disturbing as any slasher film.

I climbed the back stairs two at a time.

Chapter 7

Milo’s bedroom door stood open, and he sat at his desk, alive and beguiled by electronic gizmos that meant less to me than would ancient tablets of stone carved with runes.

On the desk, watching her master at work, sat Lassie. She looked up as I entered, but Milo did not.

“Did you see him?” I asked.

Milo, who can multitask better than a Cray supercomputer, stayed focused on the gizmos but said, “See who?”

“The man…a guy wearing a red bow tie. Did he come in here?”

“You mean the man with three eyes and four nostrils?” he asked, revealing that perhaps he had been more aware of my spy game at the restaurant than I had realized.

“Yes, him,” I confirmed. “Did he come in here?”

“Nope. We would have freaked if he did.”

“Shout if you see him. I’ll be right back.”

The door to Penny’s studio was closed. I flung it open, rushed inside, and found her at the easel.

So dimensional was the image of the villain owl that it seemed to be flying at me from out of the canvas, beak wide to rend and eyes hot for blood.

Certain that she knew the cause of my breathless entrance, Penny spoke before I could say a word: “Did the coffeemaker assault you or have you used the dishwasher again and flooded the kitchen?”

“Big problem,” I said. “Milo. Come quick.”

She put down her brush and hurried after me. When she saw Milo tinkering in peace and Lassie without hackles raised, Penny sighed with relief and said to me, “The punch line better be hilarious.”

“Stay here with him. Brace the door with that chair when I leave.”

“What? Why?”

“If someone asks you to open the door, even if it sounds like me, don’t open it.”

“Cubby—”

“Ask something only I would know—like where we went on our first date. He probably can’t imitate my voice—I mean, he’s not a comic-book supercriminal, for God’s sake—but you never know.”

“He who? What’s wrong with you?”

“There was an intruder. I think he’s gone, but I’m not sure.”

Her eyes widened as might those of a mouse in the sudden shadow of a swooping owl. “Call 911.”

“He’s not that kind of intruder.”

“There isn’t any other kind.”

“Besides, I might have imagined him.”

“Did you see him or not?”

“I saw something.”

“Then it’s 911.”

“I’m a public figure. The media will follow the cops, it’ll be a publicity circus.”

“Better than you dead.”

“I’ll be okay. Use the chair as a brace.”

“Cubby—”

Stepping into the shorter of the two upstairs hallways, I pulled the door shut. I waited until I heard the headrail of the straight-backed chair knock against the knob as she jammed it into place.

Dependable Penny.

Reason argued that a renowned critic and textbook author like Shearman Waxx was not likely to be a psychopath. Eccentric, yes, and perhaps even weird. But not homicidal. Reason, in its true premodern meaning, had served me well for many years.

Nevertheless, from a hall table, I seized a tall, heavy vase with a fat bottom and a narrow neck. Flat-footed athlete that I am, I held it as I would have held a tennis racket—awkwardly.

In addition to Milo’s quarters, this back hall served two small guest rooms, a bath, and a utility closet. Quickly, quietly, I opened doors, searched, found no one.

As I turned toward the longer of the two second-floor hallways—off which lay the master suite, Penny’s studio, and another bedroom that we used for storage—I heard a noise downstairs. The short-lived clatter rose through the back stairwell, from the kitchen, and the silence in its wake had an ominous quality.

Ceramic vase held high, as if I were a contestant in a Home and Garden Television version of a reality show like Survivor, defending my home with any available decorative item, I cautiously descended the stairs.

Waxx wasn’t in the kitchen or in the family room beyond. All appeared to be in order.

The swinging door between the kitchen and the downstairs hall was closed. I didn’t think it had been closed earlier.

As I eased open the door, I saw Waxx at the far end of the hallway, exiting my study on the right, crossing the foyer.

“Hey,” I called to him. “What’re you doing?”

He didn’t reply or glance at me, but disappeared into the library.

Chapter 8

I considered calling 911, after all, but the nonchalance with which Shearman Waxx toured our house began to seem more weird than menacing. When Hamal Sarkissian called Waxx strange, he most likely meant eccentric.

In his reviews he assaulted with words, but that did not mean he was capable of real violence. In fact, the opposite was usually true: Those who trafficked in hostile rhetoric might inspire others to commit crimes, but they were usually cowards who would take no risk themselves.

Still armed with the vase, I followed the hallway to the foyer and pursued Waxx into the library.

In some higher-end Southern California neighborhoods, a library is considered as necessary as a kitchen, a symbol of the residents’ refinement. About a third of these rooms contain no books.

In those instances, the shelves are filled with collections of bronze figurines or ceramics. Or with DVDs. But the space is still referred to as the library.

In another third, the books have been bought for their handsome bindings. They are meant to imply erudition, but a visitor’s attempt to have a conversation about any title on display will inspire the host either to talk about the movie based on the book or to retreat to the bar to mix another drink.

Our library contained books we had read or intended to read, a desk, a sofa, two armchairs, and side tables, but it did not contain Shearman Waxx. Evidently he had gone through the door between the library and the living room.

As I stepped into that adjacent chamber, I saw movement beyond the double doors to the dining room. Waxx entered the china pantry that insulated the dining room from the kitchen, and the door swung shut behind him.

By the time I crossed the living room and half the dining room, I saw Waxx through a window. He was outside now, walking toward the front of the house.

When I dashed to the next window and rapped on a pane as he passed, the critic did not deign to look at me.

I put down the vase and hurried into the living room once more. Waxx was not running, just walking briskly, but he passed the windows before I could get to one of them to rap for his attention.

In the library, through a window that faced the street, I saw him crossing the front lawn toward a black Cadillac Escalade parked at the curb.

Library to foyer to front door, I said, “No, no, no. No you don’t, you syntax-challenged sonofabitch.”

As I came out of the house onto the stoop, I saw Waxx behind the wheel of the SUV.

Again the day was becalmed. The dead air felt thick, compressed under the flat leaden sky. In the gray light of late afternoon, the fronds of the phoenix palms hung as motionless as if they were cast iron.

Later, I could not recall hearing the engine of the Escalade. The SUV pulled slowly into the street and began to glide away like a ghost ship glimpsed cruising a strange sea.

On the lawn, a flock of large black crows appeared not to have been disturbed by the critic’s passage. As I stepped from the stoop onto the walkway, the birds erupted from the grass in a tribulation of wings so great that my eardrums shivered.

Hoping to catch up with Waxx when he braked for the stop sign at the corner, I ran into the street. Without pause, he accelerated through the intersection, and pursuit was pointless.

The crows shrieked into the sullen sky, but were silenced by altitude, and as I returned to the house, a single black feather floated down past my face.

Stepping through the front door, I smelled a thin but repulsive metallic odor. In the hallway, the odor swelled into a stink. In the kitchen, it was a stench.

The Advantium oven was set on SPEED COOK at the highest power level. Tendrils of gray smoke slithered from the vent holes on the bottom of the unit.

I stooped down, switched it off, and peered through the view window. Within a cowl of pale smoke, fire flickered.

Deprived of oxygen, the flames quickly died out. I opened the door, waving away the fumes that plumed into my face.

In the oven, a silver frame held a five-by-seven photograph. The fabric-covered backing board had caught fire. The glass was cracked, and the photo under it was slightly discolored.

The frame should have been on the desk in my study. The photo was of Penny, Milo, Lassie, and me.

In the men’s room at the restaurant, Waxx had said the word doom without punctuation. This business with the photo seemed to add an exclamation point.

Chapter 9

After walking the house to lock every window and door, after setting the security alarm, I felt safe enough to leave Milo in his room with Lassie, while Penny and I huddled at the kitchen table, at the center of which stood the damaged photo in the silver frame.

“So you knew Waxx would be there for lunch,” she said. “But you didn’t tell me. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I wondered about that at the time.”

“Are you still wondering about it?”

“No, I’ve figured it out.”

“Share with me.”

“I didn’t want you to talk me out of going.”

“You knew better than to confront him.”

She wasn’t angry, just disappointed in me.

I wished that she would get angry instead.

“I didn’t confront him,” I assured her.

“Seems like something must have happened.”

“I just wanted to get a look at him. He’s so reclusive.”

Her blue gaze is as direct as the aim of an experienced bird hunter in his blind, her double-barreled eyes tracking the truth. My determination always to meet her extraordinary gaze has made a better man of me over the years.

“So what does he look like?” she asked.

“Like a walking slab of concrete with white hair and a bow tie.”

“What did you say to him?”

“I didn’t approach him. I watched him from a distance. But then at the end of lunch, after I paid the check, Milo needed to pee.”

“Is the pee germane to the story, or are you vamping to delay telling me about the confrontation with Waxx?”

“It’s germane.” I told her the rest of the tale.

Frowning, she said, “And Milo didn’t sprinkle him?”

“No. Not even a drop.”

“Waxx said ‘Doom’? What do you think he meant by it?”

“At first I thought he meant he’ll rip my next book even worse.”

Indicating the framed photo that I had rescued from the oven, she said, “Now what do you think?”

“I don’t know. This is crazy.”

For a moment we sat in silence.

Night had fallen. Evidently, Penny distrusted the darkness at the windows as much as I did. She got up to shut the pleated shades.

I almost told her that she should stand to the side of the window when she pulled the cord. Backlit, she made an easy target.

Instead, I got up and dropped two of the shades.

She said, “I need a cookie.”

“Before dinner? What if Milo sees you?”

“He already knows I’m a hypocrite when it comes to the cookie rules. He loves me anyway. You want one?”

“All right. I’ll pour the milk.”

In times of trouble, in times of stress, in times of doubt, in times when even a vague sense of misgiving overcomes her, Penny turns to the same mood elevator: cookies. I don’t know why she doesn’t weigh five hundred pounds.

She once said just being married to me burns up seven thousand calories a day. I pretended to believe she meant I was a total stud. I love to make her laugh.

At the table once more, with glasses of cold milk and chocolate-chip-pecan cookies as big as saucers, we restored our confidence.

“Most critics are principled,” she said. “They love books. They have standards. They tend to be gentle people.”

“This guy isn’t one of them.”

“Even the biased and mean ones—they don’t generally wind up in prison for violent crimes. Words are their only weapons.”

I said, “Remember Josh McGintry and the magazine?”

Josh is a friend and writer. His Catholicism is an implicit part of his novels.

Over the course of a year, he received a venomous hate letter once a week from an anti-Catholic bigot. He never responded to them.

When his new novel came out, the same hater reviewed it in a national weekly magazine for which he was a staff writer. The guy did not reveal his prejudice, but he mocked the book and Josh’s entire career in an outrageously dishonest fashion.

Josh is married to Mary, and Mary said, “Let it go.”

Women have been saying “Let it go” since human beings lived in caves; and men responded then pretty much as they respond today.

Instead of letting it go, Josh wrote the editor in chief of the magazine, copying him on the hate letters. The editor defended his staff writer and suggested Josh could have forged the correspondence.

Emboldened, the bigot wrote to Josh on magazine stationery. The envelopes were stamped with one of the magazine’s postage meters.

When Josh copied the editor on this new evidence, he received no reply. But a year later, when his subsequent book was published, the review in the magazine was not written by the same man.

This vicious review was written by a different bigot, a friend of the first one, who began also to send hate letters to Josh.

Again, Mary told him to let it go. Josh listened to her this time, though ever since he’d been grinding his teeth in his sleep so assiduously that he needed to wear a soft-acrylic bite guard.

“Neither of those guys showed up at Josh’s house,” Penny said. “They prove my contention—their only weapons were words.”

“So you don’t think Waxx will come back?”

“If he were a true nut, wouldn’t he have already shot you?”

“It would be nice to think so.”

“Anyway, you can’t report him to the cops. I didn’t see him. Only you saw him. He’ll deny having been here.”

“It’s just—the whole thing was so freaky.”

“Clearly, he’s arrogant and eccentric,” she said. “Some little thing you said set him off.”

“All I did was apologize for Milo nearly peeing on him.”

“He misinterpreted something. So he’s had his payback. Probably the worst he’ll do now is trash every book you ever write.”

“Swell.” I locked eyes with her. “You really think it’s over?”

She hesitated but then said, “Yes.”

As a truth detector, her double-barreled gaze works both ways. When she did not blink, I knew she was being a straight shooter.

“Cubby, he thinks you were spying on him, you violated his personal space. So he violated yours. Now, sweetie, let it go.”

I sighed. “I will. I’ll let it go.”

Penny’s smile could power a small city.

Together, we prepared salads, ravioli, and meatballs. Milo never knew that we had indulged in cookies and milk before dinner. But I’m pretty sure Lassie, with her exceptional sense of smell, detected the truth on our breath, because her mismatched eyes said guilty.

Later that night, I had difficulty falling asleep. When at last I slept, I found myself in another lost-and-alone dream: the infinite library with the winding aisles.

I had been prowling those byways for a while, in anticipation of a momentous discovery, when a serpentine turn in the stacks brought me to a place where the shelves held no books. Displayed instead, in big jars sealed with corks and wax, was a collection of severed heads in preservative fluid.

From floor to ceiling, onward past another turn and another, men and women peered out of their glass ossuaries, eyes wide but fixed. None wore an expression of agony or horror. Instead, they appeared to be either astonished or contemplative.

These bodiless multitudes, breathless in formaldehyde, disturbed me for obvious reasons but also for a reason I could not identify. As I began to realize that I knew them—or at least some of them—my heart raced in rebellion against the pending revelation.

Suspecting that the way ahead would never bring me again to any books, but only to additional heads in jars, I turned back toward the true library out of which I had wandered. Although I hurried farther than I had come, I found only heads behind me.

I first recognized Charles Dickens, bearded behind a curve of glass, and then Truman Capote. Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Heinlein, Zane Grey, Raymond Chandler. The creator of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs. Virginia Woolf. Somerset Maugham. Mickey Spillane.

A premonition chilled mere anxiety into a colder fear: I knew that I would recognize my face in a jar. And when I met my dead eyes, I would cease to exist in either the dream or the waking world, but would forevermore be only a severed head drowned in formaldehyde.

As I tried to run out of the dream, I strove not to look at the jars, but my eyes were repeatedly drawn to them. When the lights went off, the darkness was a blessing until, as I blindly progressed, I heard Shearman Waxx speak nearby: “Doom.”

With my breath caught in my throat, I sat up in bed, in a room as dark as the lightless maze of the nightmare library. For a moment, I half believed that Waxx had spoken not in the dream but here in the waking world.

I exhaled, inhaled, and oriented myself by the feel of the entangling sheets, by the residual smell of fabric softener, by the familiar faint whistle of forced air coming through the heating vent, by the palest blush of moonlight at the edges of the heavy draperies.

The room was blacker than it should have been. The green numbers on my digital clock were not lit. The clock on Penny’s nightstand had been extinguished, as well.

The luminescent numerals of the alarm-system keypad should have been visible on the wall, only a few steps from my side of the bed. They were not glowing.

Furthermore, a tiny green indicator lamp should have confirmed that the system was powered. And a red indicator of the same size should have noted that the alarm was set on HOME mode, which meant that the motion detectors were not engaged but that all of the window and door circuits were activated to warn of any attempted intrusion. Neither the green nor the red was lit.

The power-company service had failed. Perhaps a drunk driver had sheared off a utility pole. A transformer might have blown up. Such interruptions were rare and usually short-lived, nothing to worry about.

As the last clouds of sleep lifted from my mind, I remembered that the security system included a backup battery that should keep it operative for three hours. And when the main power supply was cut off, as the system switched to battery, a recorded voice should announce “power failure” throughout the house.

Apparently, the battery had gone dead. The recorded voice had never spoken.

I cautioned myself not to leap to conclusions. Coincidence is seldom credible in a work of fiction, but it is a primary thread in the tapestry of real life. An accident at a power station was a more likely explanation than was the return of the bow-tied critic.

From somewhere in the pitch-black bedroom, Shearman Waxx said again, “Doom.”

Chapter 10

The temptation was great to believe that I had passed from the dream of the library into a dream of blindness and had not yet come awake.

As a writer, I succeed by deceiving readers into accepting that the story I’m telling is as true as their lives, that what happens to my characters should intellectually and emotionally involve them no less than they should be concerned about their real-world neighbors. But I have never been good at self-deception.

I was awake, all right, and Waxx stood or crouched, or roamed, somewhere in the bedroom.

My first impulse was to scream like a little girl. Fortunately, I repressed the urge. Waxx was one of those critics with crocodile genes; he would find most delicious any prey that was saturated with the pheromones of fear.

My nightstand—like the one on the farther side of the bed—was an antique Chinese chest with numerous small drawers of different sizes. In the top drawer closest to me, I kept a flashlight, which allowed me to find my way to the bathroom at night without switching on a lamp and waking Penny.

Each evening, before going to bed, I pulled this drawer partway out of the nightstand, so I could get the flashlight without making a disturbance. I am an incompetent handyman but a considerate husband.

Now I groped in the darkness, found the open drawer, and reached into it. The flashlight wasn’t there.

I knew I had not misplaced it earlier. Waxx must have removed it before he woke me.

Penny also kept a flashlight in a drawer of her nightstand. Most likely Waxx had confiscated that one, as well.

Evidently, he had a flashlight of his own, with which he had stealthily prowled the room as we slept. If I wanted one, I would have to take his away from him.

Although I fully understood the wisdom of owning a gun, I didn’t keep one in the house. Penny had been raised in a virtual armory and had no objection to firearms. But I had a covenant with Death to spare others as once I had been spared.

I assumed Shearman Waxx possessed a gun—as well as a butcher knife, a switchblade, an axe, a chain saw, a power drill with an assortment of bits, and a wood chipper.

Within reach, I had a couple of pillows and a bedside lamp.

As far as I could tell, Penny still slept. I saw no value in waking her at once.

Until Waxx switched on his light and revealed his position, he and I were equally blind. Because I knew the bedroom so much better than he did, the darkness counted slightly to my advantage.

He had heard me sit up in bed and gasp for breath when I broke out of my dream. But the noises I’d made might as likely have been those of a man thrashing at the sheets and turning over in his troubled sleep.

The first doom seemed to me to have been spoken in the lightless aisles of the dream library, and Waxx could not be sure that I heard him say it the second time.

Letting out a soft groan, then murmuring wordlessly, I pretended to be negotiating a nightmare. Using this anxious muttering as cover, I eased off the bed and, falling silent, crouched beside it.

Breathing through my open mouth, I made no slightest sound. If I decided to move, I felt confident that my pajamas were too soft to betray me with a rustle.

Although silent to the intruder’s ears, I was not quiet to my own. My heart knocked like a savage fist upon all the doors of my defenses, chasing out my expectations of civilization and letting in the fear of anarchy and barbaric violence.

If Waxx made subtle sounds, I was not certain that I could hear them above this inner drumming. The rhythmic pressure waves of hard-pumped blood raised surf sounds in the nautilus turns of my inner ears.

The longer Waxx waited to speak again, the more I wondered what his game might be. I had no doubt that he had come here to harm us. That he wanted first to terrorize us seemed obvious, as well. But his boldness, the risks he took, and his eerie patience in the dark gave me the impression that his purpose was more complex than the psychotic thrill of torment and murder.

Before he spoke again, and especially before he switched on a flashlight, I needed to put some distance between myself and the bed. He would expect to find me there, and when he did not, when his light revealed his position but not mine, I might be able to catch him off guard, rushing at him from the side or from behind as he initially regarded the tangle of abandoned sheets.

Crouched and barefoot, in a slow-motion shamble that required tension in every muscle and that tested balance, I ape-walked toward where I expected to find an armchair. It ought to be just to the right of that point on the wall where the alarm-system keypad should have been softly glowing.

Shoulders slumped, arms low, I let my fingertips slide lightly, soundlessly across the carpet. If a knee buckled or a muscle cramped, I could steady myself with my hands.

I feared making a sound less than I dreaded colliding with Waxx in the blackness. My strategy would then be worthless, though I would still surprise him and might be able to overpower him before he shot or stabbed me.

I am five feet eleven and in acceptable physical condition. But I did not delude myself that his formidable bulk would prove to be flab. He would be difficult to take down.

In retrospect, I realize that in my desperation, I thought I could plot the scene as if I were writing fiction. Suspense novels are not my genre. Fate had dropped me into a real-life tale of peril, however, and because I lacked tough-guy experience, I had fallen back on imagination and craftsmanship to sculpt this narrative toward a twist that would not leave me dead in an early chapter.

Blinded, I nevertheless found the armchair where I expected it would be, which gave me hope that I remained the protagonist and had not become a supporting character destined for a bloody end in Part 1.

Elsewhere in the room, his position impossible to fix from a single word, the critic said quietly, “Hack.”

He might be describing what he intended to do to me with an axe or cleaver, but I suspected that instead the word was intended as an insult, a judgment of my writing skills.

Separating the first armchair from another was an art-deco sideboard. The highly lacquered amboina wood felt cool against my fingertips as I aped onward.

Our sleigh bed stood against the east wall of the room. Logic suggested that Waxx had positioned himself at the foot of the bed, where his flashlight, when he switched it on, could cover both me and Penny.

Now near the south wall, I hoped to circle to the west, where I most likely would be behind him when at last he revealed himself.

Wondering at Waxx’s failure to take quick and deadly action after penetrating the house so effectively, I halted at the second armchair, suddenly fearful of proceeding. I began to suspect that I had missed something, that the implicit meaning of the moment was different from what I imagined it to be.

This happens often when writing fiction. Outlines are a waste of time. If you give your characters free will, they will grow in ways you never anticipated, and they will take the story places you could not have predicted, raising themes you might or might not have intended to explore. Characters shape events; events illuminate the characters. The people in a story begin as seeds, become buds, and blossom in ways that surprise the author, precisely as real people frequently surprise him with their intentions and capacities.

As I crouched by the second armchair, Shearman Waxx electrocuted me.

Chapter 11

Out of the darkness, something thrust against the nape of my neck—two metal pegs, positive and negative poles. Before I could flinch away, hot needles stitched the length of my spine and then sewed through every branch of my peripheral nervous system to toes, to fingertips, to scalp.

My eyes rolled back in my skull, dazzled by an inner vision of gold and crimson fireworks, and I dropped out of my crouch. Facedown on the carpet, I twitched as a puppeteer jerked on the threads that the needles had sewn through me.

The words that came from me were none that I intended, slurred and meaningless.

Although coherent speech eluded me, I clearly heard Penny, who had been awakened by my cry.

“Cubby?” The click-click of her lamp switch. “What’s happening?”

I resisted the twitching, but spasmed all the more for my resistance. Yet I marshalled the clarity of mind and tongue to tell her what seemed most important: “He can see in the dark.”

The bronze hardware on her nightstand rattled as Penny jerked open drawers in search of the flashlight that Waxx had confiscated.

She let out a thin shriek, like the plaint a bird in flight might issue if pierced by an arrow. The hard knock of her fall suggested that she might have struck her head on furniture.

The physical effects of the shock faded quickly. The twitching diminished to a nervous trembling, which was not a consequence of extreme voltage but an expression of my terror at Penny’s suffering.

From full collapse, I rose onto all fours, then to my knees, my mind a jigsaw-puzzle box full of fragmented thoughts from which I could not fit together a defensive tactic.

The word Taser sizzled into my mind. And Waxx Tasered me again.

I fell from my knees onto my right side. My skull rapped the floor. I bit my tongue, tasted blood.

For a moment, I thought Waxx was tearing at my pajama shirt, but the clawing hands were mine. I tried to close them into fists.

Stuttering Penny’s name, infuriated by my inability to protect her, I tried to jackknife off my side, onto my knees. The post-shock spasms facilitated this change of position. Probing the darkness, I found an armchair, used it for support, got to my feet.

I cursed myself that I was not prepared for this—not for Waxx in particular, but for someone lethal in the night. I knew well the capacity for cruelty in the human heart.

A groan of convulsive misery came from Penny as she was Tasered a second time.

A homicidal rage, of which I would never have imagined myself capable, focused me. Murderous fury more than terror cracked the dam of adrenaline, flooding me with sudden strength, animal determination.

I moved unsteadily toward where I thought Penny might be.

As invisible as the wind—and like the wind revealed only by his effects—Waxx came in from my left side, stinging me in the neck. The shocks were no longer hot but as cold as driven sleet.

Although I struck him, it seemed to be a glancing blow. My legs buckled, and I knew I would not get another chance to hit him.

As I struggled to stay on my hands and knees, he bent down and Tasered me a fourth time, again on the nape of the neck.

I lay prone and shaking, a coiled snake of nausea flexing in my gut. My mouth flooded with saliva, and I thought I would vomit.

He Tasered me again before the previous shock had begun to wear off. I wondered if the effects were cumulative, if enough of them could fry the nerves, induce a stroke, cause death.

He spoke only one more word to me: “Scribbler.”

For a while, I seemed to be floating in the blackness of deep space, the floor under me no longer a floor but a spiral galaxy slowly turning.

My sense of time had been temporarily short-circuited. When I discovered that I had the capacity to crawl, and in fact to rise to my feet, I did not know whether one minute or ten had passed since my last Tasering.

I was surprised to be alive. If, like a cat, I had nine lives, I had used up eight of them one night a long time ago.

The taste of blood remained from my bitten tongue, yet when I called Penny’s name, my voice broke as if my mouth and throat were not only dry but desiccated.

She did not answer.

Chapter 12

Waxx must have taken Penny with him, to what purpose I could imagine, to what end I refused to consider.

One moment more of blindness was intolerable. Faint moonglow at the edges of the blackout draperies led me to the windows. I found the cord, revealed the glass, the night, the looming lunar face.

“Cubby?”

Either she had been unconscious when I called to her or she had not heard me because my voice was even weaker than I thought.

After the unrelieved gloom, the merest moonlight was sunshine to my eyes, and I saw her pulling herself to her feet at the dresser.

I went to her, speechless with gratitude. Her breath against my throat, the graceful curve of her back under my right hand, and the sweet smell of her hair were poetry that words could never equal.

She said the only thing worth saying: “Thank God.”

On the nightstands, the digital clocks came back to life and began flashing to indicate that they needed to be reset.

The alarm keypad brightened. A yellow indicator light announced a functioning system, and a red bulb confirmed that it was armed.

The recorded voice that reported on status changes remained silent, as though the alarm had never been disabled.

Neither Penny nor I said “Milo,” but we hurried to his room, switching on lights as we went.

As my hand closed on the knob, a growl rose from the far side of the door. Lassie greeted us with raised hackles and bared teeth. As if we were not the real Penny and Cubby but evil replicants, she continued to threaten violence if we crossed the threshold.

Dogs have a sense of shame, in fact stronger than most people do these days. Penny played to it, disappointment in her voice: “Growling at me but not one bark to warn us about that lunatic?”

Lassie stopped growling but continued to bare her teeth.

“Not one bark for the lunatic?” Penny repeated.

The dog’s flews quivered with what seemed to be embarrassment and relaxed to cover her teeth. Her tail wagged tentatively.

I came to Lassie’s defense: “She was ready to protect Milo. Good girl.”

The boy lay in bed, snoring softly. He didn’t wake when Lassie sprang onto the mattress and curled beside him.

“Stay here,” I whispered. “I’ll search the house.”

Voice hushed but adamant, Penny said, “Not alone. Call the cops.”

“It’s all right. He’s gone. I’m just making sure.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Call the cops.”

“And tell them what? Did you see Waxx?”

“No. But—”

“I didn’t see him, either.”

Her eyes narrowed. “He said something, a word.”

“Three words. Doom. Hack. Scribbler.”

She bristled. “He called you a hack?”

“Yeah.”

“He should die hard. Point is—you heard him speak at the restaurant.”

“Only one word. I hardly know his voice.”

“But you know this was him.”

“Evidence, Penny. Isn’t any.”

She pointed to a pair of red marks on her left forearm, like two spider bites. “The Taser.”

“That’s not enough. That’s nothing. How often did he sting you?”

“Twice. You?”

“Five, maybe six times.”

“I’d like to castrate him.”

“That doesn’t sound like the creator of the Purple Bunny books.”

“Call the cops,” she insisted.

“He’ll say we made it up, to get back at him for his review.”

“He didn’t review me. Why am I going to lie about him?”

“For me. That’s what they’ll say. You know the media—if you give them a stick, they love to knock you down.”

I couldn’t say there was an event in my past about which I never told her. If I made accusations about Waxx that he denied, tabloid TV would start digging. They probably wouldn’t be able to learn who I had been, as a child, but I didn’t want to test their skills.

I said, “Besides, I have a feeling like…he wants us to call the cops.”

“Why would he want that?”

“Either he wants us to call them or he doesn’t care if we do. This is so screwy. I haven’t done anything to him. There’s something about this we don’t understand.”

“I don’t understand any of it,” she declared.

“Exactly. Trust me on this. No cops just yet.”

Leaving her with Milo and the dog, I searched the house, found no one. Nothing had been damaged. Everything seemed to be in order.

All the doors were locked, and the security chains were engaged. The window latches were secure. No panes had been broken.

Christmas was little more than six weeks away; but Waxx had not come down a chimney and had not departed through one. All the dampers were closed tight.

In the master bathroom, I stripped off my pajamas and quickly dressed. I retrieved my wristwatch from the vanity, where I had left it before retiring for the night. The time was 4:54 A.M.

Catching sight of myself in a mirror, I didn’t like what I saw. Face pale and damp with sweat, skin gray and grainy around the eyes, lips bloodless, mouth tight and grim.

My eyes were especially disturbing. I didn’t see myself in them. I saw someone I had once been.

When I returned to Milo’s room, he still slept.

Lassie had gotten over her shame. From the bed, she stared at us imperiously and issued a long-suffering sigh, as though we were keeping her awake.

Penny said, “I’m gonna scream if I don’t have a cookie.”

Chapter 13

This time: oatmeal-raisin with macadamia nuts.

Penny was too agitated to sit at the table. She paced the kitchen as she nibbled the cookie.

“You want milk?” I asked.

“No. I want to blow up something.”

“I’m having Scotch. Blow up what?”

“Not just a tree stump, that’s for sure.”

“We don’t have any stumps. Just trees.”

“Like a hotel. Something at least twenty stories.”

“Is that satisfying—blowing up a hotel?”

“You’re so relaxed afterward,” she said.

“Then let’s do it.”

“We blew up a church once. That was just sad.”

“I’m angry and scared. I don’t need sad on top of that.”

I sat on a stool, my back to the breakfast bar, and watched her pace as I sipped the Scotch. The whiskey was just a prop; what calmed and fortified me was watching Penny.

“Blowing things up,” she said, “relieves stress better than cookies.”

“Plus it’s less fattening,” I noted, “and doesn’t lead to diabetes.”

“I’m thinking maybe we’ve made a mistake not involving Milo in all that.”

“I’m sure he’d enjoy blowing up buildings. What kid wouldn’t? But what about the effect on his personality development?”

“I turned out okay, didn’t I?” she asked.

“So far, you’re the nicest abnormal person I know. But if the cookies stop working for you…”

Grimbald, her father, was a demolitions expert. In Las Vegas alone, he had brought down four old hotels to clear the land for bigger and glitzier enterprises. From the time Penny—then Brunhild—was five years old until she married me, he had taken her with him to watch his controlled blasts implode enormous structures.

On a DVD that her folks produced for us, we have TV-news footage of young Penny at numerous events, clapping her hands in delight, giggling, and mugging for the camera as, behind her, huge hotels and office buildings and apartment towers and sports stadiums collapsed into ruins. She looked adorable.

Grimbald and Clotilda titled the DVD Memories, and for the soundtrack they used Streisand singing “The Way We Were” as well as an old Perry Como tune, “Magic Moments.” They got teary-eyed when they played it every Christmas.

“I’ve learned something about myself tonight,” Penny said.

“Oh, good. Then it’s all been worthwhile.”

“I didn’t know I could get this pissed off.”

Penny dropped her half-eaten cookie in the kitchen sink.

“Uh-oh,” I said.

With a spatula, she shoved the cookie into the drain. She turned on the cold water, and then she thumbed the garbage-disposal button.

In an instant, whirling steel obliterated the cookie, but she did not at once push the button again. She stared at the drain as the water spilled down through the churning blades.

I began to suspect that in the theater of her mind, she was feeding pieces of Shearman Waxx to the disposal.

After a minute, I raised my voice to be heard above the motor, the whistling blades, and the running water: “You’re beginning to freak me out.”

Shutting off the disposal and the water, she said, “I’m freaking myself out.” She turned away from the sink. “How could he see in the dark?”

“Maybe night-vision goggles, the infrared spectrum.”

“Sure, everybody has a pair of those lying around. So how could he take control of our alarm system?”

“Babe, remember when we got a car with a satellite-navigation system? The first day, I kept responding to the woman who was giving me directions because I thought she was talking to me live from orbit?”

“Okay, I’m asking the wrong guy. But you’re the only guy I’ve got to ask.”

As I started to reply, Penny put a finger to her lips, warning me to be silent.

Cocking my head, listening to the house, I wondered what she had heard.

She came to me, took my glass of Scotch, and put it on the counter.

Raising my eyebrows, I silently mouthed the question What?

She grabbed my hand, led me into the food pantry, closed the door behind us, and said sotto voce, “What if he can hear us?”

“How could he hear us?”

“Maybe he bugged the house.”

“How could he have done that?”

“I don’t know. How did he take control of our alarm system?”

“Let’s not get totally paranoid,” I said.

“Too late. Cubby, who is this guy?”

The standard online encyclopedia answer that had been adequate only a day earlier—award-winning critic, author of three college textbooks, enema—no longer seemed complete.

“After his weird walk-through yesterday,” Penny said, “I told you it was over, he’d made his point. But it wasn’t over. It still isn’t.”

“Maybe it is,” I said with less conviction than a guy cowering in the rubble of a city only half destroyed by Godzilla.

“What does he want from us? What do you think?”

“I don’t know. I can’t figure how his head works.”

Her eyes were no less lovely for being haunted. “He wants to destroy us, Cubby.”

“He can’t destroy us.”

“Why can’t he?” she asked.

“Our careers depend on talent and hard work—not just on a critic’s opinions.”

“Careers? I’m not talking about careers. You’re in denial.”

For some reason—maybe to avoid her gaze—I plucked a can of beets off a pantry shelf. Then I didn’t know what to do with it.

“In the mood for beets?” she asked. When I returned the can to the shelf without comment, she said, “Cubby, he’s going to kill us.”

“I didn’t do anything to him. Neither did Milo. You haven’t even seen him yet.”

“He has some reason. I don’t much care what it is. I just know what he’s going to do.”

I found myself looking at a can of corn, but I didn’t pick it up. “Let’s be real. If he wanted to kill us, he could have done it tonight.”

“He’s sadistic. He wants to torment us, terrify us, totally dominate us—and then kill us.”

I was surprised by the words that came from me: “I’m not a magnet for monsters.”

“Cubby? What does that mean?”

I know Penny so well that her tone of voice told me precisely what expression now shaped her face: furrowed brow, eyes squinted in calculation, nose lifted as if to catch a scent, lips still parted in expectation after she had spoken—the quizzical look of an acutely perceptive woman who recognizes a moment of revelation hidden in the folds of a conversation.

“What does that mean?” she repeated.

Rather than lie to her, I said, “I think I should apologize.”

“Are you talking to me or the corn?”

I dared to look at her, which was not easy considering what I said as I met her eyes: “I mean—apologize to Waxx.”

“Like hell. You don’t have anything to apologize for.”

“For going to lunch just to get a look at him.” I couldn’t explain myself to her. For ten years, I deceived her by omission, and now was not the time to confess. “For violating his privacy.”

Incredulous, she said, “It’s a public restaurant. This is a. private residence. You looked at him, he Tasered us.”

“An apology can’t do any harm.”

“Yes, it can. An apology won’t placate him. It’ll encourage him. He’ll feed on any concession. Apologizing to such a man—it’s like baring your throat to a vampire.”

Hard experience supported what she said, but it was experience that I had long repressed and on which I was loath to act.

“All right,” I said. “So what do you think we should do?”

“Locks and alarms didn’t stop him tonight. They won’t stop him tomorrow night. This place isn’t safe.”

“I’ll have the alarm company upgrade the system.”

She shook her head. “That’ll take days. And it won’t matter. He’s too clever for upgrades. We have to get to a safe place, where he can’t find us.”

“We can’t run forever. I’ve got a book deadline.”

“And, good golly,” she said, “we haven’t even begun to do our Christmas shopping.”

“Well, I do have a deadline,” I said defensively.

“I didn’t say run forever. Just buy time to do some research.”

“What research?”

“Shearman Waxx. Where does he come from? What’s his story, his past, his associations?”

“He’s an enigma.”

She picked up the can of beets in which I had previously shown an interest. “Take the label off this can, the contents are a mystery—but only until you open it.”

“I can open a can,” I said, because we had an electric opener that required of me no mechanical skill.

“And if Waxx is this freaking weird with us,” Penny said, “he has to have been totally bizarro with someone else, maybe with a lot of people, so at the very least we should be able to find someone to support our claim that he’s harassing us.”

I acquiesced. “All right. We’ll get someplace safe, then we’ll go on the hunt.”

“Still no cops?”

“Not till we know more about Waxx. I don’t want a media circus.”

“Cops can be discreet.”

“They’d have to talk to Waxx. He won’t be discreet. Come on. I’ll help you pack.”

“I’d rather you took Lassie out to poop. Fix breakfast for Milo. Deal with your morning e-mails. I’ll pack after I shower.”

“I don’t know why that can of shaving cream detonated in the suitcase. It didn’t have anything to do with me.”

“Nobody said that it did, sweetie. Not either time. I just pack faster than you do.”

“Because I like to make the maximum use of space. You can take fewer suitcases if you don’t waste a cubic inch.”

She kissed me on the nose and quoted Chesterton: “‘A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke. Each has discovered that the other is not only a fool, but a great fool.’”

We drew on each other’s strengths, but perhaps more important, we found our strength increased and our love enriched by being able to laugh at our own and at each other’s weaknesses.

As Penny opened the pantry door, I suddenly knew

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