Mr. Murder.

by Dean Koontz.

Winter that year was strange and gray.

The damp wind smelled of Apocalypse, and morning skies had a peculiar way of slipping cat-quick into midnight.

- The Book of Counted Sorrows

Life is an unrelenting comedy. Therein lies the tragedy of it.

-the Dead Bishop, Martin Stillwater

"I need..."

Leaning back in his comfortable leather office chair, rocking gently, holding a compact cassette recorder in his right hand and dictating a letter to his editor in New York, Martin Stillwater suddenly realized he was repeating the same two words in a dreamy whisper.

"* I need*...I need...*I need*"

Frowning, Marty clicked off the recorder.

His train of thought had clattered down a siding and chugged to a stop.

He could not recall what he had been about to say.

Needed what?

The big house was not merely quiet but eerily still. Paige had taken the kids to lunch and a Saturday matinee movie.

But this childless silence was more than just a condition. It had substance. The air felt heavy with it.

He put one hand to the nape of his neck. His palm was cool and moist.

He shivered.

Outside, the autumn day was as hushed as the house, as if all of southern California had been vacated. At the only window of his second-floor study, the wide louvers of the plantation shutters were ajar. Sunlight slanted between angled slats, imprinting the sofa and carpet with narrow red-gold stripes as lustrous as fox fur, the nearest luminous ribbon wrapped one corner of the U-shaped desk.

I need*

Instinct told him that something important had happened only a moment ago, just out of his sight, perceived subliminally.

He swiveled his chair and surveyed the room behind him. Other than the fasciae of coppery sunshine interleaved with louver shadows, the only light came from a small desk lamp with a stained-glass shade. Even in that gloom, however, he could see he was alone with his books, research files, and computer.

Perhaps the silence seemed unnaturally deep only because the house had been filled with noise and bustle since Wednesday, when the schools had closed for the Thanksgiving holiday. He missed the kids. He should have gone to the movie with them.

I need*...

The words had been spoken with peculiar tension-and long Now an ominous feeling overcame him, a keen sense of impending danger. It was felt in his novels, and which he always struggled to describe without resorting to cliches.

He had not actually experienced anything like it in years, not since Charlotte had been seriously ill when she was four and the doctor had prepared them for the possibility of cancer. All day in the hospital, as his little girl had been wheeled from one lab to another for tests, all that sleepless night, and during the long days that followed before the physicians ventured a diagnosis, Marty felt haunted by a malevolent spirit whose presence thickened the air, making it difficult to breathe, to move, to hope. As it turned out, his daughter had been threatened neither by supernatural malevolence nor malignancy. The problem was a treatable blood disorder. Within three months Charlotte recovered.

But he remembered that oppressive dread too well.

He was in its icy grip again, though for no discernible reason.

Charlotte and Emily were healthy, well-adjusted kids. He and Paige were happy together-absurdly happy, considering how many thirty-something couples of their acquaintance were divorced, separated, or cheating on each other. Financially, they were more secure than they had ever expected to be.

Nevertheless, Marty knew something was wrong.

He put down the tape recorder, went to the window, and opened the shutters all the way. A leafless sycamore cast stark, elongated shadows across the small side yard. Beyond those gnarled branches, the pale-yellow stucco walls of the house next door appeared to have soaked up the sunshine, gold and russet reflections painted the windows, the place was silent, seemingly serene.

To the right, he could see a section of the street. The houses on the other side of the block were also Mediterranean in style, stucco with clay-tile roofs, gilded by late-afternoon sun, filigreed by overhanging queen-palm fronds. Quiet, well landscaped, planned to the square inch, their neighborhood-and indeed the entire town of Mission Viejo seemed to be a haven from the chaos that ruled so much of the rest of the world these days.

He closed the shutters, entirely blocking the sun.

Apparently the only danger was in his mind, a figment of the same active imagination that had made him, at last, a reasonably successful mystery novelist.

Yet his heart was beating faster than ever.

Marty walked out of his office into the second-floor hall, as far as the head of the stairs. He stood as still as the newel post on which he rested one hand.

He wasn't certain what he expected to hear. The soft creak of a door, stealthy footsteps? The furtive rustles and clicks and muffled thumps of an intruder slowly making his way through the house?

Gradually, as he heard nothing suspicious and as his racing heart grew calmer, his sense of impending disaster faded. Anxiety became mere uneasiness.

"Who's there?" he asked, just to break the silence.

The sound of his voice, full of puzzlement, dispelled the portentous mood. Now the hush was only that of an empty house, devoid of menace.

He returned to his office at the end of the hall and settled in the leather chair behind his desk. With the shutters tightly closed and no lamps on except the one with the stained-glass shade, the corners of the room seemed to recede farther than the dimensions of the walls allowed, as if it were a place in a dream.

Because the motif of the lamp shade was fruit, the protective glass on the desk top reflected luminous ovals and circles of cherry-red, plum-purple, grape-green, lemon-yellow, and berry-blue. In its polished metal and Plexiglas surfaces, the cassette recorder, which lay on the glass, also reflected the bright mosaic, glimmering as if encrusted with jewels. When he reached for the recorder, Marty saw that his hand appeared to be sheathed in the pebbly, iridescent rainbow skin of an exotic lizard.

He hesitated, studying the faux scales on the back of his hand and the phantom jewels on the recorder. Real life was as layered with illusion as any piece of fiction.

He picked up the recorder and pressed the rewind button for a second or two, seeking the last few words of the unfinished letter to his editor.

The thin, high-speed whistle-shriek of his voice in reverse issued like an alien language from the small, tinny speaker.

When he thumbed the play button, he found that he had not reversed far enough, "* I need* I need* I need*"

Frowning, he switched the machine to rewind, taking the tape back twice as far as before.

But still, "* I need* I need*"

Rewind. Two seconds. Five. Ten. Stop. Play. * I need* I need* I need*"

After two more attempts, he found the letter, "* so I should be able to have the final draft of the new book in your hands in about a month.

I think this one is* this one is* uh* this one*"

The dictation stopped. Silence unreeled from the tape and the sound of his breathing.

By the time the two-word chant finally began to issue from the speaker, Marty had leaned forward tensely on the edge of the chair, frowning at the recorder in his hand.. * I need* I need*"

He checked his watch. Not quite six minutes past four o'clock.

Initially the dreamy murmur was the same as when he'd first come to his senses and heard soft chanting like the responses to an interminable, unimaginative religious litany. After about half a minute, however, his voice on the tape changed, became sharp with urgency, swelled with anguish, then with anger.

"* NEED* NEED* NEED* ".

Frustration seethed through those two words.

The Marty Stillwater on the tape-who might as well have been a total stranger to the listening Marty Stillwater-sounded in acute emotional pain for want of something that he could neither describe nor imagine.

Mesmerized, he scowled at the notched white spools of the cassette player turning relentlessly behind the plastic view window.

Finally the voice fell silent, the recording ended, and Marty consulted his watch again. More than twelve minutes past four.

He had assumed that he'd lost his concentration for only a few seconds, slipped into a brief daydream. Instead, he'd sat with the recorder gripped in his hand, the letter to his editor forgotten, repeating those two words for seven minutes or longer.

Seven minutes, for God's sake.

And he had remembered none of it. As if in a trance.

Now he stopped the tape. His hand was trembling, and when he put the cassette recorder on the desk, it rattled against the glass.

He looked around the office, where he had passed so many solitary hours in the concoction and solution of so many mysteries, where he had put uncounted characters through enormous travail and challenged them to find their way out of mortal danger. The room was so familiar, the overflowing bookshelves, a dozen original paintings that had been featured on the dust jackets of his novels, the couch that he had bought in anticipation of lazy plotting sessions but on which he had never had the time or inclination to lie, the computer with its oversize monitor.

But that familiarity was not comforting any more, because now it was tainted by the strangeness of what had happened minutes ago.

He blotted his damp palms on his jeans.

Having briefly lifted from him, dread settled again in the manner of Poe's mysterious raven perching above a chamber door.

Waking from the trance, perceiving danger, he had expected to find the threat outside in the street or in the form of a burglar roaming through the rooms below. But it was worse than that. The threat was not external. Somehow, the wrongness was within him.

The night is deep and free of turbulence.

Below, the clotted clouds are silver with reflected moonlight, and for a while the shadow of the plane undulates across that vaporous sea.

The killer's flight from Boston arrives on time in Kansas City, Missouri. He goes directly to the baggage-claim area.

Thanksgiving holiday travelers will not head home until tomorrow, so the airport is quiet. His two pieces of luggage-one of which contains a Heckler & Koch P7 pistol, detachable silencer, and expanded magazines loaded with 9mm ammunition-are first and second to drop onto the carrousel.

At the rental-agency counter he discovers that his reservation has not been misplaced or misrecorded, as often happens. He will receive the large Ford sedan that he requested, instead of being stuck with a subcompact.

The credit card in the name of John Larrington is accepted by the clerk and by the American Express verifying machine with no problem, although his name is not John Larrington.

When he receives the car, it runs well and smells clean. The heater actually works.

Everything seems to be going his way.

Within a few miles of the airport he checks into a pleasant if anonymous four-story motor hotel, where the red-haired clerk at the reception counter tells him that he may have a complimentary breakfast-pastries, juice, and coffee delivered in the morning simply by requesting it. His Visa card in the name of Thomas E. Jukovic is accepted, although Thomas E. Jukovic is not his name.

His room has burnt-orange carpet and striped blue wallpaper.

However, the mattress is firm, and the towels are fluffy.

The suitcase containing the automatic pistol and ammunition remains locked in the trunk of the car, where it will offer no temptation to snooping motel employees.

After sitting in a chair by the window for a while, staring at Kansas City by starlight, he goes down to the coffee shop to have dinner. He is six feet tall, weighs a hundred and eighty pounds, but eats as heartily as a much larger man. A bowl of vegetable soup with garlic toast. Two cheeseburgers, french fries. A slice of apple pie with vanilla ice cream. Half a dozen cups of coffee.

He always has a big appetite. Often he is ravenous, at times his hunger seems almost insatiable.

While he eats, the waitress stops by twice to ask if the food is prepared well and if he needs anything else. She is not merely attentive but flirting with him.

Although he is reasonably attractive, his looks don't rival those of any movie star. Yet women flirt with him more frequently than with other men who are handsomer and better dressed than he. Consisting of Rockport walking shoes, khaki slacks, a dark-green crew-neck sweater, no jewelry, and an inexpensive wristwatch, his wardrobe is unremarkable, unmemorable. Which is the idea. The waitress has no reason to mistake him for a man of means. Yet here she is again, smiling coquettishly.

Once, in a Miami cocktail lounge where he had picked her up, a blonde with whiskey-colored eyes had assured him that an intriguing aura surrounded him. A compelling magnetism arose, she said, from his preference for silence and from the stony expression that usually occupied his face. "You are," she'd insisted playfully, "the epitome of the strong silent type. Hell, if you were in a movie with Clint Eastwood and Stallone, there wouldn't be any dialogue at all. Later he had beaten her to death.

He had not been angered by anything she'd said or done. In fact, sex with her had been satisfying.

But he had been in Florida to blow the brains out of a man named Parker Abbotson, and he'd been concerned that the woman might somehow later connect him with the assassination. He hadn't wanted her to be able to give the police a description of him.

After wasting her, he had gone to see the latest Spielberg picture, and then a Steve Martin flick.

He likes movies. Aside from his work, movies are the only life he has.

Sometimes it seems his real home is a succession of movie theaters in different cities yet so alike in their shopping-center multiplexity that they might as well be the same dark auditorium.

Now he pretends to be unaware that the coffee-shop waitress is interested in him. She is pretty enough, but he wouldn't dare kill an employee of the restaurant in the very motel where he's staying. He needs to find a woman in a place to which he has no connections.

He tips precisely fifteen percent because either stinginess or extravagance is a sure way to be remembered.

After returning briefly to his room for a wool-lined leather jacket suitable to the late-November night, he gets in the rental Ford and drives in steadily widening circles through the surrounding commercial district. He is searching for the kind of establishment in which he will have a chance to find the right woman.