One Door Away From Heaven

Chapter 27

SNAKE KILLED, mother patched, prayers said, Leilani retired to bed in the blessed dark.

Since the age of three or four, she hadn't wanted a night-light. As a little little girl, she'd thought that a luminous Donald Duck or a radiant plastic Tweetie Bird would ward off hungry demons and spare her from all sorts of supernatural unpleasantness, but she had soon learned that night-lights were more likely to draw the demon than repel it.

Old Sinsemilla sometimes rambled in the most wee of the wee hours, restless because she craved drugs or because she had stuffed herself with too many drugs, or maybe just because she was a haunted woman. Though she had no respect for her children's need to sleep, she was inexplicably less inclined to wake them when the room was dark than when a plug-in cartoon character watched over them.

Scooby Doo, Buzz Lightyear, the Lion King, Mickey Mouse— they all drew Sinsemilla into their light. She'd often awakened Luki and Leilani from sound sleep to tell them bedtime stories, and she had seemed to deliver these narratives as much to Scooby or to Buzz as to her children, as though these were not molded-plastic lamps made in Taiwan, but graven images of benign gods that listened and that were moved by her tears.

Tears always punctuated the conclusions of her bedtime stories. When she told fairy tales, the classic yarns on which they were based could be recognized, although she fractured the narratives so badly that they made no sense. Snow White was likely to wind up dwarfless in a carriage that turned into a pumpkin pulled by dragons; and poor Cinderella might dance herself to death in a pair of red shoes while baking blackbirds in a pie for Rumpelstiltskin. Loss and calamity were the lessons of her stories. Sinsemilla's versions of Mother Goose and the Brothers Grimm were deeply disturbing, but some-limes she recounted instead her true-life adventures before Lukipela and Leilani were born, which had more hair-raising effect than any tales ever written about ogres, trolls, and goblins.

So goodbye to Scooby, goodbye to Buzz, to Donald in his sailor suit — and hello, Darkness, my old friend. The only light visible was the ambient suburban glow at the open window, but it didn't penetrate the bedroom.

No slightest draft sifted through the screen, either, and the hot night was nearly as quiet as it was windless. For a while, no sound disturbed the trailer park except for the steady hum of freeway traffic, but this white noise was so constant and so familiar that you heard it only if you listened for it.

Even by the time the midnight hour had passed, the distant drone of cars and trucks had not lulled Leilani to sleep. Lying with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling, she heard the Dodge Durango pull up in front of the house.

The engine had a distinctive timbre that she would never fail to recognize. In this Durango, Luki had been taken away into the Montana mountains on that slate-gray November afternoon when she'd last seen him.

Dr. Doom didn't slam the driver's door, but closed it with such care that Leilani could barely detect the discreet sound even though her bedroom window faced the street. Wherever their travels led them, he treated their neighbors with utmost consideration.

Animals elicited his kindness, as well. Whenever he saw a stray dog, Preston always coaxed it to him, checked for a license, and then tracked down its owner if the address was on the collar, regardless of the time and effort involved. Two weeks ago, on a highway in New Mexico, he'd spotted a car-struck cat lying on the shoulder of the road, both rear legs broken, still alive. He carried a veterinary kit for such emergencies, and he tenderly administered an overdose of tranquilizer to that suffering animal. As he'd knelt on the graveled verge, watching the cat slip into sleep and then into death, he'd wept quietly.

He tipped generously in restaurants, too, and always stopped to assist a stranded motorist, and never raised his voice to anyone. Without fail, he would help an arthritic old lady across a busy street — unless he decided to kill her instead.

Now Leilani rolled onto her right side, putting her back to the door. A single sheet covered her, and she pulled it under her chin.

She had removed her leg brace for comfort, but as usual, she had kept the apparatus in bed with her. She reached out to touch it under the sheet. The metal felt cool beneath her exploring fingers.

A few times over the years, when she'd left the brace on the floor beside her bed, she had awakened to discover that it had been moved during the night. More accurately, hidden.

No game was less amusing than find-the-brace, though Sinsemilla thought it entertaining and also professed to believe that it taught Leilani self-reliance, sharpened her wits, and reminded her that life "throws more stones at you than buttered cornbread," whatever that might mean.

Leilani never rebuked her mother for this cruelty, or for any other, because Sinsemilla would not tolerate a thankless child. When forced into this hateful game,she proceeded with grim determination and without comment, aware that either a harsh word or refusal to play would bring down upon her the shrillest, most accusative, and most unrelenting of her mother's upbraidings. And in the end, she would have to find the brace anyway.

Now her open window admitted the sound of Preston at the front door. The jingle of keys. The clack as the dead-bolt lock disengaged. The quiet scrape of metal weatherstripping against the threshold as he gently closed the door behind him.

Perhaps he would visit the kitchen for a glass of water or a late-night snack.

Drawn by the red light spilling into the hall, perhaps he would go directly to the master bedroom.

What would he make of the dead snake, the discarded closet pole, and Sinsemilla's bandaged hand?

Most likely he wouldn't stop in Leilani's room. He would respect her privacy and her need for rest.

On a daily basis, Preston treated her with the same kindness that always he exhibited toward neighbors and waitresses and animals. On the eve of her tenth birthday, next February, if she had not yet escaped him or devised an effective defense, he would kill her with the selfsame regret and sadness that he had shown when euthanizing the crippled cat. He might even weep for her.

He traveled silently on the matted orange shag, and she didn't hear him coming through the house until he opened her door. No stop for water or a snack. No curiosity about the red glow in the master bedroom. Directly to Leilani.

Because her back was to him, she hadn't closed her eyes. A pale rectangle of hall light projected on the wall opposite the entrance, and in that image of the door stood the effigy of Preston Maddoc.

"Leilani?" he whispered. "Are you awake?"

She remained dead-cat still and didn't reply.

As considerate as ever, lest the hallway lamp wake her, Preston entered. He soundlessly closed the door behind him.

In addition to the bed, the room contained little furniture. One nightstand. A dresser. A cane chair.

Leilani knew that Preston had moved the chair close to the bed when she heard him sit on it. The interlaced strips of cane protested when they received his weight.

For a while he was mum. The cane, which would creak and rasp with the slightest shift of his body, produced no faintest noise. He remained perfectly motionless for a minute, two minutes, three.

He must be meditating, for it was too much to hope that he had been turned to stone by one of the gods in whom he didn't believe.

Although Leilani could see nothing in the darkness and though Preston was behind her, she kept her eyes open.

She hoped he couldn't hear her thudding heart, which seemed to clump up and down and up the staircase of her ribs.

"We did a fine thing tonight," he said at last.

Preston Maddoc’s voice, an instrument of smoke and steel, could ring with conviction or express steadfast belief equally well in a murmur. Like the finest actor, he was able to project a whisper to the back wall of a theater. His voice flowed as molten and as rich as hot caramel but not as sweet, and Leilani was reminded of one of those caramel-dipped tart green apples that you could sometimes buy at a carnival. In his university classes, students had surely sat in rapt attention; and if he had ever been inclined to prey upon naive coeds, his soft yet reverberant voice would have been one of his principal tools of seduction.

He spoke now in a hushed tone, although not exactly a whisper: "Her name was Tetsy, an unfortunate variant of Elizabeth. Her parents were well meaning. But I can't imagine what they were thinking. Not that they seem to think all that much. Both are somewhat dense, if you ask me. Tetsy wasn't a diminutive, but her legal name. Tetsy — it sounds more like a little lap dog or a cat. She must have been teased mercilessly. Oh, perhaps the name might have worked if she'd been sprightly, cute, and elfin. But of course, she wasn't any of that, poor girl."

In Leilani's vital coils, a chill arose. She prayed that she wouldn't shiver and, by shivering, alert Preston to the fact that she was awake.

"Tetsy was twenty-four, and she'd had some good years. The world is full of people who've never known a good year."

Starvation, disease, Leilani thought grimly.

"Starvation, disease," Preston said, "desperate poverty—"

War and oppression, Leilani thought.

"— war, and oppression," Preston continued. "This world is the only Hell we need, the only Hell there is."

Leilani much preferred Sinsemilla's screwed-up fairy tales to Preston's familiar soft-spoken rant, even if, when Beauty and the Beast came to the rescue of Goldilocks, Beauty was torn to pieces by the bears, and the Beast's dark side was thrilled by the bears' savagery, motivating him to slaughter Goldilocks and to eat her kidneys, and even if the bears and the maddened Beast then joined forces with the Big Bad Wolf and launched a brutal attack on the home of three very unfortunate little pigs.

The silken voice of Preston Maddoc slipped through the darkness, as supple as a strangler's scarf: "Leilani? Are you awake?"

The chill at the core of her grew colder, spreading loop to loop through her bowels.

She. closed her eyes and concentrated on remaining still. She thought that she heard him move on the thatched seat of the chair. Her eyes snapped open.

The cane was quiet.

"Leilani?"

Under the sheets, her good hand still rested on the detached brace. Earlier, the steel had felt cool to the touch. Now it was icy.

"Are you awake?"

She clutched the brace.

Still speaking quietly, he said, "Tetsy had more than her share of good years, so it would have been greedy for the poor girl to want still more."

As Preston rose from the chair, the stretched cane flexed with considerable noise, as though he had been more difficult to support than would have been any man of equal size.

"Tetsy collected miniatures. Only penguins. Ceramic penguins, glass penguins, carved wood, cast metal, all kinds."

He eased closer to the bed. Leilani sensed him hulking over her.

"I brought one of her penguins for you."

If she threw back the sheet, rolled off her side and up, all in one motion, she could swing the brace like a club, toward that darker place in the darkness where she imagined his face to be.

She wouldn't strike at him unless he touched her.

Looming, Preston said nothing. He must be gazing down at her, though he couldn't possibly see anything but the vaguest shape in the gloom.

He always avoided touching Leilani, as though her deformities might be contagious. Contact with her at least disturbed him and, she believed, filled him with disgust that he struggled to conceal. When the aliens failed to come, when the time finally arrived for baking a birthday cake and for buying party hats, when he had to touch her to kill her, he would surely wear gloves.

"I brought you one little penguin in particular because it reminds me of Luki. It's very sweet. I'll put it on your nightstand."

A faint click. Penguin deposited.

She didn't want his souvenir, stolen from a dead girl.

As if this house had been built to defeat the laws of gravity, Preston seemed not to be standing by the bed, but to hang from the floor like a bat adapted to strange rules, wings furled and silently watchful, a suspensefully suspended presence.

Perhaps he was already wearing gloves.

She tightened her grip on the steel bludgeon.

After what seemed an interminable time, he broke this latest silence in a voice hushed by the importance of the news that he delivered: "We burst her heart."

Leilani knew that he was speaking of the stranger named Tetsy, who had loved and been loved, who laughed and cried, who collected miniature animals to brighten her life, and who never expected to die at twenty-four.

"We did it without fanfare, just family. No one will know. We burst her heart, but I'm confident she felt no pain."

How satisfying it must be to live with unshakable confidence, to know beyond doubt that your intentions are honorable, that your reasoning is always correct, that therefore the consequences of your actions, no matter how extreme, are beyond judgment.

God, take her home, Leilani thought, referring to the dead woman who had been a stranger moments ago, but to whom she herself was now forever linked through the heartless mercy of Preston Maddoc. Take her home now where she belongs.

With supreme confidence even in the darkness, he returned the cane chair to the spot from which he'd moved it. Surefooted, he went to the door.

If earlier the snake had spoken to Leilani, while coiled upon her mother's bed or from its refuge under the chest of drawers, this would have been its voice, not wickedly sibilant but a honeyed croon: "I would never have caused her pain, Leilani. I'm the enemy of pain. I've devoted my life to relieving it."

When Preston opened the bedroom door, a ghostly portal of light appeared on the wall opposite him, as before, and his phantom form on that threshold, looking back at her. Then his shadow appeared to cross into another reality, distorting as it went, and a slab of blackness swung shut upon the exit he had taken.

Leilani wished that the shadow show represented reality and that Preston had indeed stepped out of this world and forever into another place better suited to him, perhaps a world in which everyone would be born dead and therefore could never be subjected to pain. He was but a wall or two away, however, still sharing the breath of life with her, still abiding under the same vault of stars that were, to her, filled with wonder and mystery, but that were, to him, nothing more than distant balls of fire and cataclysm.