Koontz Dean-2004-Life Expectancy
Life Expectancy
By: Dean R. Koontz
"Koontz [is] working at his pinnacle, providing terrific entertainment
that deals seriously with some of the deepest themes of human
existence: the nature of evil, the grip of fate and the power of love.
"Publishers Weekly (starred review)
With his best selling blend of nail-biting intensity, daring artistry,
and storytelling magic, Dean Koontz returns with an emotional roller
coaster of a tale filled with enough twists, turns, shocks, and
surprises for ten ordinary novels. Here is the story of five days in
the life of an ordinary man born to an extraordinary legacy-a story
that will challenge the way you look at good and evil, life and death,
and everything in between.... Life Expectancy
Jimmy Tock comes into the world on the very night his grandfather
leaves it. As a violent storm rages outside the hospital, Rudy Tock
spends long hours walking the corridors between the expectant fathers'
waiting room and his dying father's bedside. It's a strange vigil made
all the stranger when, at the very height of the storm's fury, Josef
Tock suddenly sits up in bed and speaks coherently for the first and
last time since his stroke.
What he says before he dies is that there will be five dark days in the
life of his grandson- five dates whose terrible events Jimmy will have
to prepare himself to face. The first is to occur in his twentieth
year; the second in his twenty-third year; the third in his
twenty-eighth; the fourth in his twenty-ninth; the fifth in his
thirtieth.
Rudy is all too ready to discount his father's last words as a dying man's
delusional rambling.
But then he discovers that Josef also predicted the time of his
grandson's birth to the minute, as well as his exact height and weight,
and the fact that Jimmy would be born with syndactyly-the unexplained
anomaly of fused digits-on his left foot. Suddenly the old man's
predictions take on a chilling significance.
What terrifying events await Jimmy on these five dark days? What
nightmares will he face? What challenges must he survive? As the
novel unfolds, picking up Jimmy's story at each of these crisis points,
the path he must follow will defy every expectation. And with each
crisis he faces, he will move closer to a fate he could never have
imagined. For who Jimmy Tock is and what he must accomplish on the
five days when his world turns is a mystery as dangerous as it is
wondrous-a struggle against an evil so dark and pervasive, only the
most extraordinary of human spirits can shine through.
"Koontz is a superb plotter and wordsmith. He chronicles the hopes and
fears of our time in broad strokes and fine detail, using popular
fiction to explore the human condition. "USA Today
"The Dean of Suspense. "People
DEAN KOONTZ is the author of many #1 New York Times bestsellers. He
lives with his wife, Gerda, and their dog, Trixie, in southern
California.
A Main Selection of The Literary Guild, Mystery Guild, Doubleday Book
Club, and Doubleday Large Print Book Club
Cover art Tom Hallman
Visit Bantam's website at www.bantamdell.com.
Visit Dean Koontz at www.deankoontz.com.
Bantam Books
LIFE EXPECTANCY.
ALSO BY DEAN KOONTZ
The Taking
Odd Thomas
The Face
By the Light of the Moon
One Door Away From Heaven
From the Corner of His Eye
False Memory
Seize the Night
Fear Nothing
Mr. Murder
Dragon Tears
Hideaway
Cold Fire
The Bad Place
Midnight
Lightning
Watchers
Strangers
Twilight Eyes
Dark fall
Phantoms
Whispers
The Mask
The Vision
The Face of Fear
Night Chills
Shattered
The Voice of the Night
The Servants of Twilight
The House of Thunder
The Key to Midnight
The Eyes ofDarkhess
Shadowfires
Winter Moon
The Door to December
Dark Rivers of the Heart
Icebound
Strange Highways
Intensity
Sole Survivor
Ticktock
The Fun house
Demon Seed
LIFE EXPECTANCY
A Bantam Book / December 2004
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents
either are the product of the author's imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Copyright 2004 by Dean Koontz
Book design by Virginia Norey
A signed, limited edition has been privately published by Charnel
House. Charnelhouse.com
Bantam Books is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc." and the
colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Koontz, Dean R. Life
expectancy / Dean Koontz.
p. cm. ISBN: 0-553-80414-6
1. Cerebrovascular disease-Patients-Fiction. 2. Fathers and
sons-Fiction. 3. Terminally ill-Fiction. 4. Grandfathers-Fiction. 5.
Forecasting-Fiction.
PS3561.O55L49 2004b 813'.54dc-22 2004059476
Printed in the United States of America Published simultaneously in
Canada www.bantamdell.com
BVG 10 987654321
To Laura Albano,
who has such a good heart.
Strange brain, but good heart.
But he that dares not grasp the thorn Should never crave the rose.
-Anne Bronte, "The Narrow Way"
Here's a sigh to those who love me, And a smile to those who hate; And,
whatever sky's above me, Here's a heart for every fate.
-Lord Byron, "To Thomas Moore"
PART ONE
Welcome to the World,
Jimmy Tock
in the night that I was born, my paternal grandfather, Josef Tock, made
ten predictions that shaped my life. Then he died in the very minute
that my mother gave birth to me.
Josef had never previously engaged in fortune-telling. He was a pastry
chef. He made eclairs and lemon tarts, not predictions.
Some lives, conducted with grace, are beautiful arcs bridging this
world to eternity. I am thirty years old and can't for certain see the
course of my life, but rather than a graceful arc, my passage seems to
be a herky-jerky line from one crisis to another.
I am a lummox, by which I do not mean stupid, only that I am biggish
> for my size and not always aware of where my feet are going.
This truth is not offered in a spirit of self-deprecation or even
humility. Apparently, being a lummox is part of my charm, an almost
winsome trait, as you will see.
No doubt I have now raised in your mind the question of what I in
tend to imply by "biggish for my size." Autobiography is proving to be
a trickier task than I first imagined.
I am not as tall as people seem to think I am, in fact not tall at all
by the standards of professional-or even of high school-basketball. I
am neither plump nor as buff as an iron-pumping fitness fanatic. At
most I am somewhat husky.
Yet men taller and heavier than I am often call me "big guy." My
nickname in school was Moose. From childhood, I have heard people joke
about how astronomical our grocery bills must be.
The disconnect between my true size and many people's perception of my
dimensions has always mystified me.
My wife, who is the linchpin of my life, claims that I have a presence
much bigger than my physique. She says that people measure me by the
impression I make on them.
I find this notion ludicrous. It is bullshit born of love.
If sometimes I make an outsized impression on people, it's as likely as
not because I fell on them. Or stepped on their feet.
In Arizona, there is a place where a dropped ball appears to roll
uphill in defiance of gravity. In truth, this effect is a trick of
perspective in which elements of a highly unusual landscape conspire to
deceive the eye.
I suspect I am a similar freak of nature. Perhaps light reflects oddly
from me or bends around me in a singular fashion, so I appear to be
more of a hulk than I am.
On the night I was born in Snow County Hospital, in the community of
Snow Village, Colorado, my grandfather told a nurse that I would be
twenty inches long and weigh eight pounds ten ounces.
The nurse was startled by this prediction not because eight pounds ten
is a huge newborn-many are larger-and not because my grandfather was a
pastry chef who suddenly began acting as though he were a crystal-ball
gazer. Four days previously he had suffered a massive stroke that left
him paralyzed on his right side and unable to speak; yet
from his bed in the intensive care unit, he began making
prognostications in a clear voice, without slur or hesitation.
He also told her that I would be born at 10:46 p.m. and that I would
suffer from syndactyly.
That is a word difficult to pronounce before a stroke, let alone after
one.
Syndactyly-as the observing nurse explained to my father-is a
congenital defect in which two or more fingers or toes are joined. In
serious cases, the bones of adjacent digits are fused to such an extent
that two fingers share a single nail.
Multiple surgeries are required to correct such a condition and to
ensure that the afflicted child will grow into an adult capable of
giving the F-you finger to anyone who sufficiently annoys him.
In my case, the trouble was toes. Two were fused on the left foot,
three on the right.
My mother, Madelaine-whom my father affectionately calls Maddy or
sometimes the Mad One-insists that they considered forgoing the surgery
and, instead, christening me Flipper.
Flipper was the name of a dolphin that once starred in a hit TV
show-not surprisingly titled Flipper-in the late 1960s. My mother
describes the program as "delightfully, wonderfully, hilariously
stupid." It went off the air a few years before I was born.
Flipper, a male, was played by a trained dolphin named Suzi. This was
most likely the first instance of transvestism on television.
Actually, that's not the right word because transvestism is a male
dressing as a female for sexual gratification. Besides, Suzi-alias
Flipper-didn't wear clothes.
So it was a program in which the female star always appeared nude and
was sufficiently butch to pass for a male.
Just two nights ago at dinner, over one of my mother's infamous
cheese-and-broccoli pies, she asked rhetorically if it was any wonder
that such a dire collapse in broadcast standards, begun with Flipper,
should lead to the boring freak-show shock that is contemporary
television.
Playing her game, my father said, "It actually began with Lassie. In
every show, she was nude, too."
"Lassie was always played by male dogs," my mother replied.
"There you go," Dad said, his point made.
I escaped being named Flipper when successful surgeries restored my
toes to the normal condition. In my case, the fusion involved only
skin, not bones. The separation was a relatively simple procedure.
Nevertheless, on that uncommonly stormy night, my grandfather's
prediction of syndactyly proved true.
If I had been born on a night of unremarkable weather, family legend
would have transformed it into an eerie calm, every leaf motionless in
breathless air, night birds silent with expectation. The Tock family
has a proud history of self-dramatization.
Even allowing for exaggeration, the storm must have been violent enough
to shake the Colorado mountains to their rocky foundations. The
heavens cracked and flashed as if celestial armies were at war.
Still in the womb, I remained unaware of all the thunderclaps. And
once born, I was probably distracted by my strange feet.
This was August 9, 1974, the day Richard Nixon resigned as President of
the United States.
Nixon's fall has no more to do with me than the fact that John Denver's
"Annie's Song" was the number-one record in the country at the time. I
mention it only to provide historical perspective.
Nixon or no Nixon, what I find most important about August 9, 1974, is
my birth-and my grandfather's predictions. My sense of perspective has
an egocentric taint.
Perhaps more clearly than if I had been there, because of vivid
pictures painted by numerous family stories of that night, I can see my
father, Rudy Tock, walking back and forth from one end of County
Hospital to the other, between the maternity ward and the I.C.U,
between joy at the prospect of his son's pending arrival and grief over
his beloved father's quickening slide into death.
With blue vinyl-tile floor, pale-green wainscoting, pink walls, a
yellow ceiling, and orange-and-white stork-patterned drapes, the
expectant-fathers' lounge churned with the negative energy of color
overload. It would have served well as the nervous-making set for a
nightmare about a children's-show host who led a secret life as an ax
murderer.
The chain-smoking clown didn't improve the ambience.
Rudy stood birth watch with only one other man, not a local but a
performer with the circus that was playing a one-week engagement in a
meadow at the Halloway Farm. He called himself Beezo. Curiously, this
proved not to be his clown name but one that he'd been born with:
Kon-rad Beezo.
Some say there is no such thing as destiny, that what happens ju
st
happens, without purpose or meaning. Konrad's surname would argue
otherwise.
Beezo was married to Natalie, a trapeze artist and a member of a
renowned aerialist family that qualified as circus royalty.
Neither of Natalie's parents, none of her brothers and sisters, and
none of her high-flying cousins had accompanied Beezo to the hospital.
This was a performance night, and as always the show must go on.
Evidently the aerialists kept their distance also because they had not
approved of one of their kind taking a clown for a husband. Every
subculture and ethnicity has its objects of bigotry.
As Beezo waited nervously for his wife to deliver, he muttered unkind