Velocity - Dean Koontz

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lined one wall of the living room from floor to ceiling. For most of his life, Billy had been a voracious reader.

      He had lost interest in reading three years, ten months, and four days previously. A mutual love of books, of fiction in all genres, had brought him and Barbara together.

      On one shelf stood a set of Dickens in matched bindings, which Barbara had given him for Christmas. She’d had a passion for Dickens.

      These days, he needed to keep busy. Just sitting in a chair with a book made him restless. He felt vulnerable somehow.

      Besides, some books contained disturbing ideas. They started you thinking about things you wanted to forget, and though your thoughts became intolerable, you could not put them to rest.

      The coffered ceiling of the living room was a consequence of his need to remain busy. Every coffer was trimmed with dentil molding. The center of each featured a cluster of acanthus leaves hand-carved from white oak, stained to match the surrounding mahogany.

      The style of this ceiling suited neither a cabin nor a bungalow. He didn’t care. The project had kept him occupied for months.

      In his study, the coffered ceiling was even more ornate than the ceiling in the living room.

      He did not go to the desk, where the unused computer mocked him. Instead, he sat at a worktable arrayed with his carving tools.

      Here also were stacks of white-oak blocks. They had a sweet wood smell. The blocks were raw material for the ornamentations that would decorate the bedroom ceiling, which was currently bare plaster.

      On the table stood a CD player and two small speakers. The disc deck was loaded with zydeco music. He switched it on.

      He carved until his hands ached and his vision blurred. Then he turned off the music and went to bed.

      Lying on his back in the dark, staring at a ceiling that he could not see, he waited for his eyes to fall shut. He waited.

      He heard something on the roof. Something scratching at the cedar-shake shingles. The owl, no doubt.

      The owl did not hoot. Perhaps it was a raccoon. Or something.

      He glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand. Twenty minutes past midnight.

       You have six hours to decide. The choice is yours.

      Everything would be all right in the morning. Everything always was. Well, not all right, but good enough to encourage perseverance.

       I want to know what it says, the sea. What it is that it keeps on saying.

      A few times, he closed his eyes, but that was no good. They had to fall shut on their own for sleep to follow.

      He looked at the clock as it changed from 12:59 to 1:00.

      The note had been under the windshield wiper when he had come out of the tavern at seven o’clock. Six hours had passed.

      Someone had been murdered. Or not. Surely not.

      Below the scratching talons of the owl, if it was an owl, he slept.

       5

      The tavern had no name. Or, rather, its function was its name. The sign at the top of the pole, as you turned from the state highway into the elm-encircled parking lot, said only TAVERN.

      Jackie O’Hara owned the place. Fat, freckled, kind, he was to everyone a friend or honorary uncle.

      He had no desire to see his name on the sign.

      As a boy, Jackie had wanted to be a priest. He wanted to help people. He wanted to lead them to God.

      Time had taught him that he might not be able to master his appetites. While still young, he had arrived at the conclusion that he would be a bad priest, which hadn’t been the nature of his dream.

      He found self-respect in running a clean and friendly taproom, but it seemed to him that simple satisfaction in his accomplishments would sour into vanity if he named the tavern after himself.

      In Billy Wiles’s opinion, Jackie would have made a fine priest. Every human being has appetites difficult to control, but far fewer have humility, gentleness, and an awareness of their weaknesses.

      Vineyard Hills Tavern. Shady Elm Tavern. Candlelight Tavern. Wayside Tavern.

      Patrons regularly offered names for the place. Jackie found their suggestions to be either awkward or inappropriate, or twee.

      When Billy arrived at 10:45 Tuesday morning, fifteen minutes before the tavern opened, the only cars in the lot were Jackie’s and Ben Vernon’s. Ben was the day cook.

      Standing beside his Explorer, he studied the low serried hills in the distance, on the far side of the highway. They were dark brown where scalped by earthmovers, pale brown where the wild grass had been faded from green by the arid summer heat.

      Peerless Properties, an international corporation, was building a world-class resort, to be called Vineland, on nine hundred acres. In addition to a hotel with golf course, three pools, tennis club, and other amenities, the project included 190 multimillion-dollar getaway homes for sale to those who took their leisure seriously.

      Foundations had been poured in early spring. Walls were rising.

      Much closer than the palatial structures on the higher hills, less than a hundred feet from the highway, a dramatic mural neared completion in a meadow. Seventy feet high, 150 feet long, three-dimensional, it was of wood, painted gray with black shadowing.

      In the Art Deco tradition, the mural presented a stylized image of powerful machinery, including the drive wheels and connecting rods of a locomotive. There also were huge gears, strange armatures, and arcane mechanical forms that had nothing to do with a train.

      A giant, stylized figure of a man in work clothes was featured in the section that suggested a locomotive. Body angled left to right as if leaning into a stiff wind, he appeared to be pushing one of the enormous drive wheels, as if caught up in the machine and pressing forward with as much panic as determination, as though if he rested for an instant he would slip out of sync and be torn to pieces.

      None of the animated mural’s moving parts was yet operational; nevertheless, it fostered a convincing illusion of movement, speed.

      On commission, a famous artist with a single name—Valis—had designed the thing and had built it with a crew of sixteen.

      The mural was meant to symbolize the hectic pace of modern life, the harried individual overwhelmed by the forces of society.

      On the day when the resort opened for business, Valis himself would set the thing afire and burn it to the ground to symbolize the freedom from the mad pace of life that the new resort represented.

      Most locals in Vineyard Hills and the surrounding territory mocked the mural, and when they called it art, they pronounced the word with quotation marks.

      Billy rather liked the hulking thing, but burning it down didn’t make sense to him.

      The same artist had once fixed twenty thousand helium-filled red balloons to a bridge in Australia, so it appeared to be supported by them. With a remote control, he popped all twenty thousand at once.

      In that case, Billy didn’t understand either the “art” or the point of popping it.

      Although not a critic, he felt this mural was either low art or high craftsmanship. Burning it made no more sense to him than would a museum tossing Rembrandt’s paintings on a bonfire.

      So many things about contemporary society dismayed him that he wouldn’t lose sleep over this small issue. But on the night of burning, he wouldn’t come to watch the fire, either.

      He went into the tavern.

      The

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