Breathless. Dean Koontz

of her.

      She called him Claude, but he quickly corrected her. He never used his first name, but instead answered to his middle.

      When she kissed his cheek, her breath smelled cinnamony. She said she’d been nibbling a sweetroll when she heard the Land Rover.

      Inside, on the kitchen table, beside the sweetroll plate were what Henry assumed to be five utility knives, useful for farm tasks.

      As Nora poured coffee, she said nothing about the knives. Neither did Jim as he moved them – and two slotted sharpening stones – from the table to a nearby counter.

      Nora insisted that Henry stay with them, though she warned him that a sofa bed was all they had by way of accommodations, in the claustrophobic room that Jim called an office.

      “Haven’t had a houseguest in nine years,” Jim said, and it seemed to Henry that a knowing look passed between husband and wife.

      The three of them fell into easy conversation around the kitchen table, over homemade cinnamon rolls and coffee.

      Nora proved charming, and her laugh was infectious. Her hands were strong and rough from work, yet feminine and beautifully shaped.

      She had nothing in common with the sharky women who cruised in Henry’s circle in the city. He was happy for his brother.

      Even as he marveled at how warmly they welcomed him, at how they made him feel at home and among family, as he had never felt with Jim before, Henry was not entirely at ease.

      His vague disquiet arose in part from his perception that Jim and Nora were in a private conversation, one conducted without words, with furtive looks, nuanced gestures, and subtle body language.

      Jim expressed surprise that someone had drawn Henry’s attention to his poetry. “Why would they think we were related?”

      They didn’t share the name Rouvroy. Following their parents’ divorce, Jim had legally taken his mother’s maiden name, Carlyle.

      “Well,” Henry said drily, “maybe it was your photo on the book.”

      Jim laughed at his thickheadedness, and although he seemed to be embarrassed by his brother’s praise, they talked about his poems. Henry’s favorite, “The Barn,” described the humble interior of that structure with such rich images and feeling that it sounded no less beautiful than a cathedral.

      “The greatest beauty always is in everyday things,” Jim said. “Would you like to see the barn?”

      “Yes, I would.” Henry admired his brother’s poetry more than he had yet been able to say. Jim’s verses had an ineffable quality so haunting it was not easy to discuss. “I’d like to see the barn.”

      Clearly in love with this piece of the world that he and Nora had made their own, Jim grinned, nodded, and rose from the table.

      Nora said, “I’ll put linens on the sofa bed and start thinking about what’s for dinner.”

      Following Jim from the kitchen, Henry glanced at the knives on the counter. On second consideration, they looked less like ordinary task knives than like thrust-and-cut weapons. The four- and five-inch blades had nonreflective finishes. Two seemed to feature assisted-opening mechanisms for quick blade release.

      Then again, Henry knew nothing about farming. These knives might be standard stock at any farm-supply store.

      Outside, the afternoon air remained mild. From the split cords of pine came the scent of raw wood.

      Overhead, two magnificent birds with four-foot wingspans glided in intersecting gyres. The ventral feathers of the first were white with black wing tips. The second was boldly barred in white and brown.

      “Northern harriers,” Jim said. “The white one with the black tips is the male. Harriers are raptors. When they’re hunting, they fly low over the fields and kill with a sudden pounce.”

      He worked the axe loose from the tree-stump chopping block.

      “Better put this away in the barn,” he said, “before I forget and leave it overnight.”

      “Harriers,” Henry said. “They’re so beautiful, you don’t think of them as killing anything.”

      “They eat mostly mice,” Jim said. “But also smaller birds.”

      Henry grimaced. “Cannibalism?”

      “They don’t eat other harriers. Their feeding on smaller birds is no more cannibalism than us feeding on other mammals – pigs, cows.”

      “Living in the city, I guess we idealize nature,” Henry said.

      “Well, when you accept the way of things, there’s a stark kind of beauty in the dance of predators and prey.”

      Heading to the barn, Jim carried the axe in both hands, as if to raise and swing it should he see something that needed to be chopped.

      The harriers had fled the sky.

      When Henry glanced back toward the house, he saw Nora watching them from a window. With her pale hair and white blouse, she looked like a ghost behind the glass. She turned away.

      “Life and death,” Jim said as they drew near the barn.

      “Excuse me?”

      “Predators and prey. The necessity of death, if life is to have meaning and proportion. Death as a part of life. I’m working on a series of poems with those themes.”

      Jim opened the man-size entrance beside the pair of larger barn doors. Henry followed his brother into the wedge of sunshine that the door admitted to this windowless and otherwise dark space.

      Inside, in the instant before the lights came on, Henry was gripped by the expectation that before him would be some sight for which Jim’s poem had not prepared him, that the poem was a lie, that the truck farming and the quilting and the simple-folks image were all lies, that the reality of this place and these people was more terrible than anything he could imagine.

      When Jim threw a switch, a string of bare light bulbs brightened the length of that cavernous space, revealing the barn to be nothing more than a barn. A tractor and a backhoe were garaged on the left. Two horses occupied stalls on the right. The air was fragrant with the scents of hay and feed grain.

      Although Henry’s alarming premonition had proved false, and although he knew that fearing his brother was as absurd as fearing the tractor or the horses, or the smell of hay, his sense of a nameless impending horror did not abate.

      Behind him, the barn door swung shut of its own weight.

      Jim turned to him with the axe, and Henry shrank back, and Jim stepped past him to hang the axe on a rack of tools.

      Heart racing, breath suddenly ragged, Henry drew the SIG P245 from the snugly fit shoulder rig under his jacket and shot his twin point-blank, twice in the chest and once in the face.

      Henry had come here with the hope that his relationship with his brother would change, and his hope had been fulfilled. Claude Henry Rouvroy was in the process of becoming James Carlyle.

      The pistol was fitted with a sound suppressor, and the shots were no louder than a horse cutting wind. Indeed, neither of the horses had been spooked by the gunfire.

      Standing over the corpse, Henry strove to quiet his breathing. His tremors forced him to holster the pistol to avoid accidentally squeezing off another round.

      He had worried that his brother would grow suspicious of him, and he had feared that he would not be able to pull the trigger when the time came. In the process of assiduously repressing those fears so that he could carry out his plan, he projected his motivations onto Jim, imagining a conspiracy between him and Nora, finding in everyday objects – the knives, the axe – proof of sinister intentions. He had misread menace in innocent actions: Nora watching them from the window, Jim talking about the harriers, about predators and prey.

      After