The Face

by Dean Koontz

  He played Call 31 more times than he could remember. In that one, she reminded him that she loved him, and when he listened to her, five years seemed no time at all, and even cancer had no power, or the grave.

  He was opening a box of cookies left by Mrs. McBee when his phone rang.

  Fric always set the alarm clock early on Christmas morning, not because he was eager to discover what had been left under the tree for him but because he wanted to open the stupid gifts and be done with it.

  He knew what the fancy wrappings concealed: everything on the list that he had been required to give to Mrs. McBee on the fifth of December. He had never been denied the things for which he’d asked, and each time that he asked for less, he had been required to amend his list until it was at least as long as the list from the previous year. Downstairs, under the drawing-room tree would be a shitload of fabulous stuff, and no surprises.

  On this Christmas morning, however, he woke to a sight that he had never seen before. While he had slept, someone had crept into his room and left a gift on his nightstand, beside the clock.

  A small box wrapped in white with a white bow.

  The card was bigger than the box. No one had signed it, but the sender had written these words: This be magic. If there be no blink, you will have great adventures. If there be no tear shed, you will have a long and happy life. If there be no sleeping of it, you will grow up to be the man you want to be.

  This was such an amazing note, so mysterious and so rich in possibilities, that Fric read it several times, puzzling over its meaning.

  He hesitated to open the white box, for he did not believe that anything it contained could equal the promise of this note.

  When at last he peeled away the glossy paper, lifted the lid, and folded aside the tissue paper, he found that—oh!—the contents were the equal of the note.

  On a new gold chain hung a glass pendant, a sphere, and in the sphere floated an eye! He had seen nothing like this in his life and knew that he never would again. A souvenir from the lost continent of Atlantis, perhaps, the jewelry of a sorcerer, or the protective amulet worn by knights of the Round Table fighting for justice under the protection of Merlin.

  If there be no blink, you will have great adventures.

  No blink, no blink ever, for this eye had no lid.

  If there be no tear shed, you will have a long and happy life.

  No tear, no tear from now until time immemorial, for this eye could not cry.

  If there be no sleeping of it, you will grow up to be the man you want to be.

  No sleep, no shortest nap, for this eye was always open wide with magical meaning, and needed no rest.

  Fric examined the pendant by sunlight, by lamplight, by the glow of a penlight in his otherwise dark closet.

  He studied the orb under a powerful magnifying glass and then by indirection through an arrangement of mirrors.

  He put it in the shirt pocket of his pajamas and knew that it was not blinded.

  He held it in his closed right hand and felt its wise gaze on the pads of his cupped fingers, and knew that if he kept his heart pure and dedicated his mind to the defense of what is good, just as knights were supposed to do, then one day this eye would show him the future if he wished to see it and would guide him in the path of Camelot.

  After Fric had thought of a thousand things that he might say and had rejected nine hundred ninety-nine of them, he returned the pendant to the box and, while meeting its patch-eyed-pirate gaze, placed his phone call.

  He grinned, hearing in his mind the first nine notes of the Dragnet theme song.

  When the call was answered, Fric said, “Merry Christmas, Mr. Truman.”

  “Merry Christmas, Fric.”

  With only those words, they hung up by mutual unspoken consent, for at this moment in time, no more needed to be said.

  NOTE

  In Chapter 32, Mr. Typhon counsels Dunny Whistler that he should take inspiration from Saint Duncan, for whom he was named. No Saint Duncan has ever been canonized. We can only speculate on Mr. Typhon’s motives for this seemingly minor deception.

  —DK

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DEAN KOONTZ, the author of many #1 New York Times bestsellers, lives with his wife, Gerda, and the enduring spirit of their golden retriever, Trixie, in southern California.

  Correspondence for the author should be addressed to:

  Dean Koontz

  P.O. Box 9529

  Newport Beach, California 92658

  ALSO BY DEAN KOONTZ

  Odd Thomas

  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

  Darkfall

  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 of Darkness

  Shadowfires

  Winter Moon

  The Door to December

  Dark Rivers of the Heart

  Icebound

  Strange Highways

  Intensity

  Sole Survivor

  Ticktock

  The Funhouse

  Demon Seed

  Dean Koontz delivers a novel of surpassing suspense and visceral terror, a small-town slice-of-doomsday thriller that will take the summer by storm.

  THE TAKING

  by

  DEAN KOONTZ

  #1 New York Times Bestselling Author

  Available Now

  wherever hardcover books are sold

  Please turn the page for a preview chapter.

  THE TAKING

  by Dean Koontz

  Available Now

  A FEW MINUTES PAST ONE O’CLOCK IN THE morning, a hard rain fell without warning. No thunder preceded the deluge, no wind.

  The abruptness and the ferocity of the downpour had the urgent quality of a perilous storm in a dream.

  Lying in bed beside her husband, Molly Sloan had been restless before the sudden downpour. She grew increasingly fidgety as she listened to the rush of rain.

  The voices of the tempest were legion, like an angry crowd chanting in a lost language. Torrents pounded and pried at the cedar siding, at the shingles, as if seeking entrance.

  September in southern California had always before been a dry month in a long season of predictable drought. Rain rarely fell after March, seldom before December.

  In wet months, the rataplan of raindrops on the roof had sometimes served as a reliable remedy for insomnia. This night, however, the liquid rhythms failed to lull her into slumber, and not just because they were out of season.

  For Molly, sleeplessness had too often in recent years been the price of thwarted ambition. Scorned by the sandman, she stared at the dark bedroom ceiling, brooding about what might have been, yearning for what might never be.

  By the age of twenty-eight, she had published four novels. All were well received by reviewers, but none sold in sufficient numbers to make her famous or even to guarantee that she would find an eager publisher for the next.

  Her mother, Thalia, a writer of luminous prose, had been in the early years of an acclaimed career when she died of cancer at thirty. Now, sixteen years later, Thalia’s books were out of print, her mark upon the world all but erased.

  Molly lived with a quiet dread of following her mother into obscurity. She didn’t suffer from an inordinate fear of death; rather, she wa
s troubled by the thought of dying before achieving any lasting accomplishment.

  Beside her, Neil snored softly, oblivious of the storm.

  Sleep always found him within a minute of the moment when he put his head on the pillow and closed his eyes. He seldom stirred during the night; after eight hours, he woke in the same position in which he had gone to sleep—rested, invigorated.

  Neil claimed that only the innocent enjoyed such perfect sleep.

  Molly called it the sleep of the slacker.

  Throughout their seven years of marriage, they had conducted their lives by different clocks.

  She dwelled as much in the future as in the present, envisioning where she wished to go, relentlessly mapping the path that ought to lead to her high goals. Her strong mainspring was wound tight.

  Neil lived in the moment. To him, the far future was next week, and he trusted time to take him there whether or not he planned the journey.

  They were as different as mice and moonbeams.

  Considering their contrasting natures, they shared a love that seemed unlikely. Yet love was the cord that bound them together, the sinewy fiber that gave them strength to weather disappointment, even tragedy.

  During Molly’s spells of insomnia, Neil’s rhythmic snoring, although not loud, sometimes tested love almost as much as infidelity might have done. Now the sudden crash of pummeling rain masked the noise that he made, giving Molly a new target upon which to focus her frustration.

  The roar of the storm escalated until they seemed to be inside the rumbling machinery that powered the universe.

  Shortly after two o’clock, without switching on a light, Molly got out of bed. At a window that was protected from the rain by the overhanging roof, she looked through her ghostly reflection, into a windless monsoon.

  Their house stood high in the San Bernardino Mountains, embraced by sugar pines, knobcone pines, and towering ponderosas with dramatic fissured bark.

  Most of their neighbors were in bed at this hour. Through the shrouding trees and the incessant downpour, only a single cluster of lights could be seen on these slopes above Black Lake.

  The Corrigan place. Harry Corrigan had lost Calista, his wife of thirty-five years, back in June.

  During a weekend visit to her sister, Nancy, in Redondo Beach, Calista parked her Honda near an ATM to withdraw two hundred dollars. She’d been robbed, then shot in the face.

  Subsequently, Nancy had been pulled from the car and shot twice. She had also been run over when the two gunmen escaped in the Honda. Now, three months after Calista’s funeral, Nancy remained in a coma.

  While Molly yearned for sleep, Harry Corrigan strove every night to avoid it. He said his dreams were killing him.

  In the tides of the storm, the luminous windows of Harry’s house seemed like the running lights of a distant vessel on a rolling sea: one of those fabled ghost ships, abandoned by passengers and crew, yet with lifeboats still secured. Untouched dinners would be found on plates in the crew’s mess. In the wheelhouse, the captain’s favorite pipe, warm with smoldering tobacco, would await discovery on the chart table.

  Molly’s imagination had been engaged; she couldn’t easily shift into neutral again. Sometimes, in the throes of insomnia, she tossed and turned into the arms of literary inspiration.

  Downstairs in her study were five chapters of her new novel, which needed to be polished. A few hours of work on a manuscript might soothe her nerves enough to allow sleep.

  Her robe draped the back of a nearby chair. She shrugged into it and knotted the belt.

  Crossing to the door, she realized that she was navigating with surprising ease, considering the absence of lamplight. Her sureness in the gloom couldn’t be explained entirely by the fact that she had been awake for hours, staring at the ceiling with dark-adapted eyes.

  The faint light at the windows, sufficient to dilute the bedroom darkness, could not have traveled all the way from Harry Corrigan’s house, three doors to the south. The true source at first eluded her.

  Storm clouds hid the moon.

  Outside, the landscape lights were off; the porch lights, too.

  Returning to the window, she puzzled over the tinseled glimmer of the rain. A curious wet sheen made the bristling boughs of the nearest pines more visible than they should have been.

  Ice? No. Stitching through the night, needles of sleet would have made a more brittle sound than the susurrant drumming of this autumn downpour.

  She pressed fingertips to the windowpane. The glass was cool but not cold.

  When reflecting ambient light, falling rain sometimes acquires a silvery cast. In this instance, however, no ambient light existed.

  The rain itself appeared to be faintly luminescent, each drop a light-emitting crystal. The night was simultaneously veiled and revealed by skeins of vaguely fluorescent beads.

  When Molly stepped out of the bedroom into the upstairs hall, the soft glow from two domed skylights bleached the gloom from black to gray, revealing the way to the stairs. Overhead, the rainwater sheeting down the curved Plexiglas was enlivened by radiant whorls that resembled spiral nebulae wheeling across the vault of a planetarium.

  She descended the stairs and proceeded to the kitchen by the guidance of the curiously storm-lit windows.

  Some nights, embracing rather than resisting insomnia, she brewed a pot of coffee to take to her desk in the study. Thus stoked, she wrote jagged, caffeine-sharpened prose with the realistic tone of police-interrogation transcripts.

  This night, however, she intended to return eventually to bed. After switching on the light in the vent hood above the cooktop, she flavored a mug of milk with vanilla extract and cinnamon, then heated it in the microwave.

  In her study, volumes of her favorite poetry and prose—Louise Gluck, Donald Justice, T. S. Eliot, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Conner, Dickens—lined the walls. Occasionally she took comfort and inspiration from a humble sense of kinship with these writers.

  Most of the time, however, she felt like a pretender. Worse, a fraud.

  Her mother had said that every good writer needed to be her own toughest critic. Molly edited her work with both a red pen and a metaphorical hatchet, leaving evidence of bloody suffering with the former, reducing scenes to kindling with the latter.

  More than once, Neil suggested that Thalia had never said—and had not intended to imply—that worthwhile art could be carved from raw language only with self-doubt as sharp as a chisel. To Thalia, her work had also been her favorite form of play.

  In a troubled culture where cream often settled on the bottom and the palest milk rose to the top, Molly knew that she was short on logic and long on superstition when she supposed that her hope for success rested upon the amount of passion, pain, and polish that she brought to her writing. Nevertheless, regarding her work, Molly remained a Puritan, finding virtue in self-flagellation.

  Leaving the lamps untouched, she switched on the computer but didn’t at once sit at her desk. Instead, as the screen brightened and the signature music of the operating system welcomed her to a late-night work session, she was once more drawn to a window by the insistent rhythm of the rain.

  Beyond the window lay the deep front porch. The railing and the overhanging roof framed a dark panorama of serried pines, a strangely luminous ghost forest out of a disturbing dream.

  She could not look away. For reasons that she wasn’t able to articulate, the scene made her uneasy.

  Nature has many lessons to teach a writer of fiction. One of these is that nothing captures the imagination as quickly or as completely as does spectacle.

  Blizzards, floods, volcanoes, hurricanes, earthquakes: they fascinate because they nakedly reveal that mother nature, afflicted with bipolar disorder, is as likely to snuff us as she is to succor us. An alternately nurturing and destructive parent is the stuff of gripping drama.

  Silvery cascades leafed the bronze woods, burnishing bark and bough with sterling highlights.

  An u
nusual mineral content in the rain might have lent it this slight phosphorescence.

  Or…having come in from the west, through the soiled air above Los Angeles and surrounding cities, perhaps the storm had washed from the atmosphere a witch’s brew of pollutants that in combination gave rise to this pale, eerie radiance.

  Sensing that neither explanation would prove correct, seeking a third, Molly was startled by movement on the porch. She shifted focus from the trees to the sheltered shadows immediately beyond the glass.

  Low, sinuous shapes moved under the window. They were so silent, fluid, and mysterious that for a moment they seemed to be imagined: formless expressions of primal fears.

  Then one, three, five of them lifted their heads and turned their yellow eyes to the window, regarding her inquisitively. They were as real as Molly herself, though sharper of tooth.

  The porch swarmed with wolves. Slinking out of the storm, up the steps, onto the pegged-pine floor, they gathered under the shelter of the roof, as though this were not a house but an ark that would soon be set safely afloat by the rising waters of a cataclysmic flood.

  THE FACE

  A Bantam Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Bantam hardcover edition published June 2003

  Bantam export edition / January 2004

  Bantam paperback edition / May 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 © 2003 by Dean Koontz

  Cover art copyright © 2003 by Tom Hallman

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2002018396

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Bantam Books, New York, New York.