Mr. Murder

Network, you think they’ll ever put it back together again?”

“It or something like it,” Karl said without hesitation.

Unsettled, Marty said, “I guess we’ll know if they do ... when they cancel all elections.”

“Oh, elections would never be canceled, at least not in any way that was ever apparent,” Karl said as he started the Rover. “They’d go on just as usual, with competing political parties, conventions, debates, bitter campaigns, all the hoopla and shouting. But every one of the candidates would be selected from Network loyalists. If they ever do take over, John, only they will know.”

Marty was suddenly as cold as he had ever been in the blizzard on Tuesday night.

Karl raised one hand in the split-finger greeting that Marty recognized from Star Trek. “Live long and prosper, ” he said, and left them.

Marty stood in the gravel driveway, watching the Rover until it reached the county road, turned left, and dwindled out of sight.

9

That December and throughout the following year, when the headlines screamed of the Network scandal, treason, political conspiracy, assassination, and one world crisis after another, John and Ann Gault didn’t pay as much attention to the newspapers and the television news as they had expected they would. They had new lives to build, which was not a simple undertaking.

Ann cut her blond hair short and dyed it brown. Before meeting any of their neighbors living in the scattered cabins and ranches of that rural area, John grew a beard; not to his surprise, it came in more than half gray, and a lot of gray began to show up on his head, as well.

A simple tint changed Rebecca’s hair from blond to auburn, and Suzie Lori was sufficiently transformed with a new and much shorter style. Both girls were growing fast. Time would swiftly blur the resemblance between them and whoever they once might have been.

Remembering to use new names was easy compared to creating and committing to memory a simple but credible false past. They made a game of it, rather like Look Who’s the Monkey Now.

The nightmares were persistent. Though the enemy they had known was as comfortable in daylight as not, they irrationally viewed each nightfall with an uneasiness that people had felt in ancient and more superstitious times. And sudden noises made everybody jump.

Christmas Eve had been the first time that John dared to hope they would really be able to imagine a new life and find happiness again. It was then that Suzie Lori inquired about the popcorn.

“What popcorn?” John asked.

“Santa’s evil twin put ten pounds in the microwave,” she said, “even though that much corn wouldn’t fit. But even if it would fit, what happened when it started to pop?”

That night, story hour was held for the first time in more than three weeks. Thereafter, it became routine.

In late January, they felt safe enough to register Rebecca and Suzie Lori in the public school system.

By spring, there were new friends and a growing store of Gault-family memories that were not fabricated.

Because they had seventy thousand in cash and owned their humble house outright, they were under little pressure to find work. They also had four boxes full of the first editions of the early novels of Martin Stillwater. The cover of Time magazine had asked a question that would never be answered—Where is Martin Stillwater?—and first editions that had once been worth a couple of hundred dollars each on the collectors’ market had begun selling, by spring, for five times that price; they would probably continue to appreciate faster than blue-chip investments in the years to come. Sold one or two at a time, in far cities, they would keep the family nest egg fat during lean years.

John presented himself to new neighbors and acquaintances as a former insurance salesman from New York City. He claimed to have come into a substantial though not enormous inheritance. He was indulging a lifelong dream of living in a rural setting, struggling to be a poet. “If I don’t start selling some poems in a few years, maybe I’ll write a novel,” he sometimes said, “and if that doesn’t turn out right—then I’ll start worrying.”

Ann was content to be seen as a housewife; however, freed from the pressures of the past—troubled clients and freeway commuting—she rediscovered a talent for drawing that she had not tapped since high school. She began doing illustrations for the poems and stories in her husband’s ring-bound notebook of original compositions, which he had been writing for years: Stories for Rebecca and Suzie Lori.

They had lived in Wyoming five years when Santa’s Evil Twin by John Gault with illustrations by Ann Gault became a smash Christmas bestseller. They allowed no jacket photo of author and artist. They politely declined offers of promotional tours and interviews, preferring a quiet life and the chance to do more books for children.

The girls remained healthy, grew tall, and Rebecca began selectively dating boys, all of whom Suzie Lori found wanting in one way or another.

Sometimes John and Ann felt they lived too much in a fantasy, and they made an effort to keep up with current events, watching for signs and portents that they didn’t even like to discuss with each other. But the world was endlessly troubled and tedious. Too few people seemed able to imagine life without the crushing hand of one government or another, one war or another, one form of hatred or another, so the Gaults always lost interest in the news and returned to the world they imagined for themselves.

One day a paperback novel arrived in the mail. The plain brown envelope bore no return address, and no note of any kind was included with the book. It was a science-fiction novel set in the far future, when humankind had conquered the stars but not all of its problems. The title was The Clone Rebellion. John and Ann read it. They found it to be admirably well-imagined, and they regretted that they would never have the opportunity to express their admiration to the author.

NEW AFTERWORD BY DEAN KOONTZ

AFTERWORD

The most frequently asked question posed to every writer by readers is May I commission you to embroider a complete set of bed linens with the imperial crest of Napoleon? Some writers, lacking any talent for embroidery, must regretfully decline the commission and resort to some other work— mayonnaise tasting, spider ranching, repackaging bulk lard for resale in small gift boxes—as a secondary source of income. Those who are wizards of embroidery sometimes wish that they didn’t have to spend so many hours with their threads and needles, and could devote more time to creating fiction; but then they remind themselves that they should be grateful to have a trade to fall back on in the event that their writing careers ever falter, and in a spirit of remorse, they flail themselves ferociously with brambles or chains or live snakes, whatever their particular social circle deems the appropriate whipping material.

The second most frequently asked question posed to every writer by readers (hereinafter “The Question”) is Where do you get your ideas? The noun ideas is frequently modified by an adjective like fascinating (which brings a smile to the author’s face), crazy (which inspires a wince), or hilarious (which occasions delight in the author if the book under discussion is one of his comedies, but plunges him into a foul mood if the book is one without a single comic line).

Because a wise writer is grateful to his readers, he politely answers The Question as best he can. A third of the time, the reader will not sincerely care where the writer gets his ideas; he has asked The Question only as a prelude to pitching an idea of his own, which he wants the target novelist to write for him. Frequently, this is not a genuine reader; he has not read a novel since some well-meaning teacher destroyed his love of literature by