TO WAKE THE DEAD Read online

  Table of Contents

  To Wake the Dead: An Introduction

  EPIGRAPH

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  THE MEMOIRS OF ROBERT CALLAHAN THE FEARFUL DESCENT

  THE AWFUL PIT

  THE TOMB OF AMARA

  SALVATION

  VENGEANCE

  THE LIVING DEAD

  CONCLUSION

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  TO WAKE THE DEAD

  Richard Laymon

  To Wake the Dead:

  An Introduction

  by Dean Koontz

  As long as I have been on Earth, which is longer than Microsoft Word 5.0 but not longer than the English language, I’ve been involved in only two traffic accidents. They occurred a little more than a year apart, and the circumstances were eerily the same; I should not have survived either incident, and certainly should not have survived unscathed, but I did.

  In the first instance, my wife and I were in a large sedan, stopped at a controlled intersection, on our way to dinner, when a car hit us from behind at (the police estimated) 55 mph, without braking. That day, with spring approaching, I’d had the snow tires taken off the rear wheels and replaced with springtime rubber. The snow tires had been stored temporarily in the trunk of the car until I could tuck them aside in a corner of the garage for use the next winter. When we were hit from behind, the stored tires were two enormous shock absorbers; however, even with the protection they provided, the rear half of the sedan was spectacularly crushed, compacted into about two feet of mangled ruins that were shoved against our headrests. The back doors folded like accordions. The front doors buckled and would not open. The gasoline tank ruptured and sprayed fuel into the passenger’s compartment. Incredibly, the engine was still running—and wouldn’t shut off. Expecting fire or explosion, I needed perhaps a frantic half minute to wrench open a buckled door. Our sedan was totaled, but the car that hit us was totaled and quashed. We thought the driver of the other vehicle must be dead, but to our amazement, as we hurried to him, he struggled out of his demolished coupe, as unharmed as we were. As it turned out, he was a sixteen-year-old boy who had gotten his driver’s license a month previous; he had bought his first car that morning. Regarding the wreckage with disgust, he looked at us and said, “I didn’t need this,” as though he suspected that we, unlike him, had been driving around with no sane purpose but with the mad hope of being hit from behind and killed. We had just paid off our car loan that day.

  Fourteen months later, having moved three thousand miles from Pennsylvania to California, we were stopped at a traffic light, on our way to dinner (going out to a restaurant is seldom viewed as the extremely dangerous undertaking our experience has proved it to be) when a car hit us from behind at (the police estimated) 55 mph, without braking. This time we were in a small sports car, a Mercedes 450 SL, which had no backseat. Because the Mercedes was solidly constructed and brilliantly engineered, the fuel tank didn’t rupture and the doors didn’t buckle; we got out of the vehicle unscratched. The car that had hit us, a large sedan, looked as if it had been nuked. We were sure the occupant must be dead or seriously injured. We hurried to the driver’s door. The window was broken out. The door had buckled. The woman inside was alive—but obviously intoxicated. When we told her to stay calm, that we would get her out, she cursed us and said, “I didn’t need this,” putting the emphasis on the word need, precisely as the young driver had done fourteen months ago in Pennsylvania. I couldn’t get her out of the car, and even the police, who arrived within two minutes, had trouble extracting the woman, not because she was pinned in the wreckage but because she was determined to stay in there rather than get out and have to face a breathalyzer test. As had happened fourteen months earlier in Pennsylvania, Gerda had made the final payment on our car loan that very morning.

  The uncanny similarity of the details of these two accidents suggests to me—as do so many things in life—a world that operates not always according to the predictable laws of physics and chance, but also and perhaps as often under the influence of a mysterious power with a delightfully byzantine sense of story and with an agenda that is, though perhaps not inscrutable, challenging to analyze and understand. Pondering the significance of these two accidents, Gerda and I posited all sorts of possible meanings and messages to be derived from our experiences. I thought it logical, for example, never to halt at another traffic light or stop sign, but to cruise blithely through the intersection with the expectation that to stop would be to invite an inevitable rear-end collision. Eventually, however, we made only one change in our lives due to these events at opposite ends of the continent: Because we were finally able to afford to do so, we thereafter never took out another car loan but paid cash for each new vehicle we acquired. Granted, on any day that we paid for a new car, we assumed that we were at risk till midnight, but when we made it to that witching hour, the suspense was over!

  One evening a few years after the second of these two accidents, Gerda and I went to dinner with Dick and Ann Laymon. In our flivver, we picked them up at their house and buzzed off into the glamorous Angelean night, which glitters with film stars and carjackers, movie moguls and diseased streetwalkers, pop music divas and babbling urine-soaked hobos (some of whom had no doubt once been pop music divas). We had reservations at a sixteen-star restaurant, outside which even the richest titans of industry wrestle in the street like hooligans over a suddenly available table. We were exuberant at the prospect of superb food, fine wine, and the chance to share dozens of hilarious personal anecdotes about such subjects as the publishing business and dental surgery. Nothing, we thought, could taint this spectacular evening—and then I missed our
freeway exit.

  As a driver, one of my hallmarks is missing freeway exits, but only when chauffeuring particularly interesting and voluble people. Dick and Ann were so interesting and voluble on this occasion that Gerda was preparing syringes full of Thorazine to calm them down, and I suppose that rolled-up sock in her left hand was meant for my mouth. Anyway, as I regaled Dick and Ann with the story of our two nearly identical accidents, fourteen months apart, I zipped by our freeway exit and past another one before any of us realized what I had done. After consultation, we agreed that by switching freeways, we could eventually get back around to where we needed to be, so I switched, and switched again… and by some means that was mysterious to all of us, we found ourselves on what seemed to be an unopened section of an uncompleted freeway—and shortly thereafter on a surface street in a neighborhood so grim and forbidding that even the attack-trained pit bulls carried semiautomatic pistols and kept their heads down.

  We were familiar with the maze of streets and highways that form an all but infinite Gordian knot binding the limbs and bowels of this great city, yet we were uncertain of our location and flummoxed as to how to find our way out of what seemed about to become a vortex of terror. In a baffling and unconventional move, Gerda consulted a map, as if that would be of any help. Dick and I, on the other hand, voted for the sober and sensible approach: cruising at random into ever meaner streets, in the hope that we would stumble upon a freeway sign and a hasty exit route before we were all shot, stabbed, throttled, dismembered, set on fire, and offered up to the Beast of Beasts on a satanic altar. Naturally, as we were both writers who had been born with a generous measure of imagination, we saw threats at every turn, which we excitedly pointed out to each other, and we were able to envision—and vividly describe—a virtually endless series of hideous fates that might very well befall us before we found an escape route. Ann, for reasons beyond my comprehension, chose to lean forward from the backseat and consult with Gerda over the stupid map. Anyway, by eventually executing a series of turns that Gerda suggested based on—I suppose—her superior female intuition, we found a freeway and were able to arrive at dinner a tad late but with all of our extremities intact.

  After a delicious dinner accompanied by a superb Cabernet, after desserts even more likely than any Barney the Dinosaur performance to trigger a diabetic coma, and after many hilarious anecdotes about the publishing business and dental surgery, the four of us departed the restaurant, stepping between the wrestling titans of industry who thrashed upon the sidewalk, and presented our car check to the valet-parking attendant. Since I had begun the evening talking about our two strangely similar accidents at opposite ends of the country and then had driven the Laymons deep into harm’s way, it seemed fitting that the car should be returned with a long, deep scratch/crease on the passenger’s side, from front fender to rear—and that the valet parking attendant should, instead of apologizing, say, “I didn’t need this.”

  Dick and I exchanged a look, and neither of us needed to say that one of the greatest problems for novelists is that reality is not only stranger than fiction but generally funnier and more deeply disturbing. To get the true flavor of life, it seems to me, a writer has to let his imagination cruise not merely through the precincts of realism where you might find Hemingway but, more important, also into neighborhoods of the fantastic. Dick and I are radically different writers, but what I love about his work is his willingness to drive at high speed into the fantastic—and make it seem, for all its flamboyant qualities, as real as tomorrow’s newspaper. To Wake the Dead is one such. Enjoy.

  What may this mean

  That thou, dead corse,

  Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon,

  Making night hideous?

  —William Shakespeare

  Hamlet, Act I, Scene iv

  PROLOGUE

  Emil Saladat leaped down from the cab of the U-Haul van and rushed to the cover of bushes near the wall. He watched Metar run to join him. The van moved away, its taillights disappearing around a bend.

  Emil stepped into Metar’s cupped hands for a boost. He clutched the top of the brick wall and flung himself onto it.

  This was so easy.

  This American was a cinch.

  No broken bottles embedded in the wall. No electrified wire. No armed guards.

  This American, Callahan, was making it so easy that Emil should be ashamed to take money from his people. He would take it, though, just as he had always taken it before, no matter how simple the job. A man must put food into his belly. A man must buy fine gifts for his women.

  He reached down. Metar handed him the backpack. He set it on top of the wall, lowered his arms again, and this time pulled the smaller man off the ground.

  From his perch on the wall, Emil looked toward the house. He couldn’t see it. Too many trees in the way. He knew it was there, however. He and Metar had paid it a visit, just last week.

  He leaped from the wall. Metar dropped the pack down to him, then jumped. He held the pack while Metar slipped it on. Turning away from the wall, they started toward the trees.

  Out of the darkness sprinted a Doberman, its feet silent on the summer grass.

  This was Callahan’s security?

  It was laughable.

  The dog yelped and tripped over itself as a .22-caliber hollow-point slug crashed through its skull.

  Then three more Dobermans raced out of the darkness. Emil fired his silenced automatic, knocking a foreleg from under the lead dog. As it tumbled, the one beside it leaped at him, teeth bared. He stepped toward it, ignoring Metar’s cry of pain. The dog snapped, its teeth clattering on the silencer. With quick twitches of his middle finger, Emil pumped two bullets into its mouth. He sidestepped away from the lunging, dying animal, swung his pistol from its mouth, and dropped the dog he had previously hit in the leg.

  Then he whirled around. Metar, the incompetent fool, was on the ground fighting for his life as the last surviving dog savaged his arm, trying to get through it to his neck.

  Emil fired.

  The dog yelped as the bullet tore through its spinal cord.

  Then jerked and died.

  Metar rolled out from under the heavy body and stood up. He raised his bloody arm for Emil to see, like a child showing a scraped elbow to his mother for sympathy.

  Emil turned away in disgust. He hurried through the stand of pine, and saw the Callahan house across fifty yards of neatly groomed lawn. Floodlights illuminated the colonial’s pillared veranda. All the windows Emil could see, however, were dark. He ran to the left side of the house, staying far from the lighted front, and leaned against a wall.

  Metar, a handkerchief tied around his wounded forearm, ran to join him.

  With friction tape, Emil reinforced a panel of the window. His glass-cutter bit into the glass. He cut a rectangle.

  A neat job. A good job. That’s why his clients paid him well.

  Holding it in place with tape, he pounded it loose and withdrew it. He gave the neatly cut geometric lozenge of glass to Metar, then reached into the gap. Unlatched the window.

  It slid upward easily.

  Quietly.

  Emil climbed through. As planned, he found himself in Callahan’s study. He sat on a corner of the teak desk, and watched Metar climb awkwardly through the window.

  They crossed the study to the door. Emil eased it open. He peered into the dark hallway, and gestured for Metar to follow.

  In the foyer, Metar’s rubber-soled shoes made squeaking sounds on the marble. Emil glanced sharply at his young partner. The man shrugged, crouched. Removed his shoes.

  Emil flashed the beam of a small flashlight toward the front door. Next to it, on the wall, he found the speaker box and remote-control button.

  He pushed the button.

  In the U-Haul van parked nearby, Steve Bailey squinted through a haze of cigarette smoke at the iron gate. It began to swing open.

  Very good.

  In ten minutes, he would be
done with this business. He would be away from the house, and on the freeway to the airport. In a couple of hours or so, he’d be with Carla. It was always best with her, right after a job when he knew he was finally safe, and the fear was gone, and he had money… good money… in his pocket. His cock knew it was time to come out of hiding and celebrate.

  Easing his foot of the clutch, he rolled through the open gate. He steered up the driveway, swung left, and drove over the grass to the veranda.

  With a hissing sputter, the acetylene torch came alive. Emil watched his partner shoot its flame against the lock panel of the steel door. The metal bubbled and peeled back like the lips of a knife wound.

  Raising the goggle to his forehead, Emil stepped silently down the hall to the foyer. He squinted up the stairway.

  Perhaps he should go up and put a bullet into Callahan’s head? Then he could go about his work untroubled by the man’s presence. Murder, however, would increase official interest in the case. That was to be avoided, if possible.

  As long as the old man didn’t interfere, Emil would allow him to live.

  The torch shut off. Sparks winked out.

  Emil returned to the door and helped Metar remove the severed lock panel. As he set it aside, Metar loaded the torch into the backpack and slung the straps onto his shoulders.

  Slowly, Emil pushed the metal door open.

  Robert Callahan, asleep in his upstairs room, heard the quiet drone of his alarm and dreamed of sirens. An ambulance was bearing down on a heap of torn cars. Sarah, lying in the road, raised her bloody head and cried for help.

  “There she is,” shouted the ambulance driver.

  Robert, for some reason dreaming that he was sitting in the passenger seat, said, “Thank God she’s alive.”

  “We’ll soon fix that,” said the driver.

  The ambulance sped toward her. Lethal as a bullet.

  “Stop!”

  “It’s her due.”

  “No!”

  She stared with pleading eyes into the headlights. Stared into the face of death.