It is at this point that Dusty and Martie come together and stop having parallel stories. The paralleling technique has worked so well for Koontz, though, that he decides to keep using it, but with someone else. The someone else, for now, is Susan, but we will skip her story for now. Suffice it to say that Dusty and Martie will be together for the rest of the novel.
Dusty drives in as Martie is wielding the crowbar. She flees throughout the house, warning him to stay away, into the bedroom. There she realizes that there is a gun in the dresser that she never bothered to get rid of when getting rid of all the other dangerous things. She fears that Other Martie inside her cunningly led her to the gun just as Dusty was there and she could hurt him. She gets it out. The chapter ends at this point, with lots of suspense as to whether she will shoot. She doesn't, just unloads it, reciting the Hail Mary.
Now that's interesting. Apparently Martie is a Catholic, or at least was brought up as one. Dean Koontz is himself a Catholic. His characters, however, generally have strong moral compasses and vague spiritual beliefs, but do not belong to any specific religion. Certainly, in this book Martie reciting the Hail Mary is the only reference to any particular religion. Dusty believes in God and that he has a benevolent plan and everything happens for a reason, but there is nothing to suggest that he goes to church.
Anyhow, Martie flees and tries to lock herself in the bathroom. Dusty forces his way in and holds her until she calms down. He serves her two glasses of Scotch to calm her down and has two himself. That is another interesting point in the story, by the way, the characters' regular consumption of alcohol, and not just as a flavored beverage, but as a mood-altering chemical. Martie has already had beer for lunch. When trying to Martie-proof the house she threw out a half-empty bottle of Chardonay from dinner last night and two unopened bottles of Chablis, presumably soon to be consumed. We will see them drinking many times as the story proceeds. Apparently Koontz has no problem with alcohol in moderation, even if used as a mild drug.
But I digress. Dusty brings back the kitchen ware and puts them in the dishwasher. He prepares dinner and they eat, although Martie uses a spoon only. He also comes across the book in her raincoat pocket and expresses surprise that she is still reading it. Martie says, "The plot is entertaining. The characters are colorful. I'm enjoying it." This seems very odd to Dusty, but Martie is too exhausted to discuss it further. She fears that she will sleepwalk and do something violent, so she takes three sleeping pills and insists on being tied up. He tries saying Dr. Yen Lo and reciting the Clear Cascades poem, but Martie just says, "Either you're making no sense or this stuff is kicking in."
As Martie sleeps, Dusty lies beside her, understandably insomnic. He tries to sort through the strange things that have happened, convinced that it can't be a coincidence that the two people dearest to him both broke down on the same day. He looks for commonalities. First, he considers Skeet's complete failure to remember anything that happened when he was in the odd trance. Martie, too, believes that she is missing pieces of time. Then he remembers answering the phone call, telling Valet the dog that it was someone trying to sell him the Los Angeles Times and seeing Valet asleep, "as though" ten minutes had passed. Having a perfect photographic memory, he scans the scene and realizes that he still can't remember anything about the conversation, and that dog falling asleep during the conversation means that it really did go on for ten minutes. He's having memory lapses, too! This is our first definite clue that Dusty, too, is under mind control. They will start coming on hard and fast soon.
Speaking of Valet, he starts getting restless, too, looking up, raising his hackles and growling, just the way he did in New Life Clinic. Clearly he senses a hostile presence, as does Dusty. The animal with keen intuition far beyond what humans can command is a classic literary trope. And relax, this particular clue will later be well explained.
Dusty manages to sleep a little and has a strange nightmare. He dreams he is lying on the bed with an IV attached to his arm. Some invisible presence is taking his blood pressure. Martie is sitting to the side, motionless. Lightening flashes, without rain or thunder. The lightening and a shrieking heron enter the room, menace him, and then go into his IV bag and from there into his blood stream. Martie opens her eyes that are now heron eyes and says, "Welcome."
Dusty wakes, terrified, and soon goes back to trying to understand his odd exchange with Skeet. Thinking it over, he realizes that Skeet responded to all his questions with questions of his own, asking what he should do or think. He treated statements as commands and commands as -- well, he fell asleep on command. What more can one say? Dusty thinks of the haiku, first as a tool for operating Skeet and later as software programmed into him. He also thinks of Skeet's statement that the pine needles are missions. He tries thinking of synonyms for missions. The one that makes most sense is instructions. And then he realizes that when Skeet stood on the roof, he said that the angel of death had instructed him to jump. Suddenly the suicide attempt starts looking less like typical addict behavior and more like some sort of instruction from his controller.
And I must say for Dusty that all of this is a brilliant deduction and extremely relevant to understanding what is going on. It works well. Or rather, it would work if Koontz hadn't spoiled the whole thing in his parallel narrative (Susan, remember?) by explaining the whole think and thereby taking away the mystery and suspense.
My next post on the subject will discuss that.
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