Janice felt her heart swelling in her breast, pounding hard.
"Get the bitch . . .
" The mysterious figures flanking her began to draw closer, and she
tried to put on more speed to pull ahead of them, but they could not be
shaken. They continued to narrow the gap. She could see them
peripherally but did not dare look at them directly because she was
afraid that the sight of them would be so shocking that she would be
paralyzed again and, frozen by horror, would be brought down.
She was brought down anyway. Something leaped upon her from behind. She
fell, a great weight pinning her, and all three creatures swarmed over
her, touching her, plucking and tugging at her clothes.
Clouds slipped across most of the moon this time, and shadows fell in as
if they were swatches of a black cloth sky.
Janice's face was pressed hard into the damp sand, but her head was
turned to one side, so her mouth was free, and she screamed at last,
though it was not much of a scream because she was breathless. She
thrashed, kicked, flailed with her hands, desperately trying to strike
them, but hitting mostly air and sand She could see nothing now, for the
moon was completely lost.
She heard fabric tearing. The man astride her tore off her Nike jacket,
ripped it to pieces, gouging her flesh in the process. She felt the hot
touch of a hand, which seemed rough but human.
His weight briefly lifted from her, and she wriggled forward, trying to
get away, but they pounced and crushed her into the sand. This time she
was at the surf line, her face in the water.
alternately keening, panting like dogs, hissing and snarling, her
attackers loosed frantic bursts of words as they grabbed at herù . .
get her, get her, get, get, get .
ù . . want, want, want it, want it .
". . . now, now, quick, now, quick, quick, quick .
They were pulling at her sweat pants, trying to strip her, but she
wasn't sure if they wanted to rape or devour her; perhaps neither; what
they wanted was, in fact, beyond her comprehension. She just knew they
were overcome by some tremendously powerful urge, for the chilly air was
as thick with their need as with fog and darkness.
One of them pushed her face deeper into the wet sand, and the water was
all around her now, only inches deep but enough to drown her, and they
wouldn't let her breathe. She knew she was going to die, she was pinned
now and helpless, going to die, and all because she liked to run at
night.
On Monday, October 13, twenty-two days after the death of Janice
Capshaw, Sam Booker drove his rental car from the San Francisco
International Airport to Moonlight Cove. During the trip, he played a
grim yet darkly amusing game with himself, making a mental list of
reasons to go on living. Although he was on the road for more than an
hour and a half, he could think of only four things Guinness Stout,
really good Mexican food, Goldie Hawn, and fear of death.
That thick, dark, Irish brew never failed to please him and to provide a
brief surcease from the sorrows of the world. Restaurants consistently
serving first-rate Mexican food were more difficult to locate than
Guinness; its solace was therefore more elusive. Sam had long been in
love with Goldie Hawn-or the screen image she projected-because she was
beautiful and cute, - 1 1 earthy and intelligent, and seemed to find
life so much damn fun. His chances of meeting Goldie Hawn were about a
million times worse than finding a great Mexican restaurant in a
northern California coastal town like Moonlight Cove, so he was glad
that she was not the only reason he had for living.
As he drew near his destination, tall pines and cypresses crowded
Highway 1, forming a gray-green tunnel, casting long shadows in the
late-afternoon light. The day was cloudless yet strangely forbidding;
the sky was pale blue, bleak in spite of its crystalline clarity, unlike
the tropical blue to which he was accustomed in Los Angeles. Though the
temperature was in the fifties, hard sunshine, like glare bouncing off a
field of ice, seemed to freeze the colors of the landscape and dull them
with a haze of imitation frost.
Fear of death. That was the best reason on his list. Though he was
just forty-two years old-five feet eleven, a hundred and seventy pounds,
and currently healthy-Sam Booker had skated along the edge of death six
times, had peered into the waters below, and had not found the plunge
inviting.
A road sign appeared on the right side of the highway OCEAN AVENUE,
MOONLIGHT COVE, 2 MILES.
Sam was not afraid of the pain of dying, for that would pass in a
flicker. Neither was he afraid of leaving his life unfinished; for
several years he had harbored no goals or hopes or dreams, so there was
nothing to finish, no purpose or meaning. But he was afraid of what lay
beyond life.
Five years ago, more dead than alive on an operating-room table, he had
undergone a near-death experience. While surgeons worked frantically to
save him, he had risen out of his body and, from the ceiling, looked
down on his carcass and the medical team surrounding it. Then suddenly
he'd found himself rushing through a tunnel, toward dazzling light,
toward the Other Side the entire near-death cliche that was a staple of
sensationalistic supermarket tabloids. At the penultimate moment, the
skillful physicians had pulled him back into the land of the living, but
not before he had been afforded a glimpse of what lay beyond the mouth
of that tunnel. What he'd seen had scared the crap out of him. Life,
though often cruel, was preferable to confronting what he now suspected
lay beyond it.
He reached the Ocean Avenue exit. At the bottom of the ramp, as Ocean
Avenue turned west, under Pacific Coast Highway, another sign read
MOONLIGHT COVE '/2 MILE.
A few houses were tucked in the purple gloom among the trees on both
sides of the two-lane blacktop; their windows glowed with soft yellow
light even an hour before nightfall. Some were of that half-timbered,
deep-eaved, Bavarian architecture that a few builders, in the 1940s and
'50s, had mistakenly believed was in harmony with the northern
California coast. Others were Monterey-style bungalows with white
clapboard or shingle-covered walls, cedar-shingled roofs, and rich-if
fairy-tale rococo-architectural details. Since Moonlight Cove had
enjoyed much of its growth in the past ten years, a large number of
houses were sleek, modern, many-windowed structures that looked like
ships tossed up on some unimaginably high tide, stranded now on these
hillsides above the sea.
When Sam followed Ocean Avenue into the six-block-long commercial
district, a peculiar sense of wrongness immediately overcame him. Shops,
restaurants, taverns, a market, two churches, the town library, a movie
theater, and other unremarkable establishments lined the main drag,
which sloped down toward the ocean, but to Sam's eyes there was an
indefinable though powerful strangeness about the c
ommunity that gave
him a chill.
He could not identify the reasons for his instant negative reaction to
the place, though perhaps it was related to the somber interplay of
light and shadow. At this dying end of the autumn day, in the cheerless
sunlight, the gray stone Catholic church looked like an alien edifice of
steel, erected for no human purpose. A white stucco liquor store
gleamed as if built from time-bleached bones. Many shop windows were
cataracted with ice-white reflections of the sun as it sought the
horizon, as if painted to conceal the activities of those who worked
beyond them. The shadows cast by the buildings, by the pines and
cypress, were stark, spiky, razor-edged.
Sam braked at a stoplight at the third intersection, halfway through the
commercial district. With no traffic behind him, he paused to study the
people on the sidewalks. Not many were in sight, eight or ten, and they
also struck him as wrong, though his reasons for thinking ill of them
were less definable than those that fanned his impression of the town
itself. They walked - 13 briskly, purposefully, heads up, with a
peculiar air of urgency that seemed unsuited to a lazy, seaside
community of only three thousand souls.
He sighed and continued down Ocean Avenue, telling himself that his
imagination was running wild. Moonlight Cove and the people in it
probably would not have seemed the least unusual if he had just been
passing by on a long trip and turned off the coast highway only to have
dinner at a local restaurant. Instead, he had arrived with the
knowledge that something was rotten there, so of course he saw ominous
signs in a perfectly innocent scene.
At least that was what he told himself. But he knew better.
He had come to Moonlight Cove because people had died there, because the
official explanations for their deaths were suspicious, and he had a
hunch that the truth, once uncovered, would be unusually disturbing.
Over the years he had learned to trust his hunches; that trust had kept
him alive.
He parked the rented Ford in front of a gift shop.
To the west, at the far end of a slate-gray sea, the anemic sun sank
through a sky that was slowly turning muddy red. Serpentine tendrils of
fog began to rise off the choppy water.
In the pantry off the kitchen, sitting on the floor with her back
against a shelf of canned goods, Chrissie Foster looked at her watch. In
the harsh light of the single bare bulb in the ceiling socket, she saw
that she had been locked in that small, windowless chamber for nearly
nine hours. She had received the wristwatch on her eleventh birthday,
more than four months ago, and she had been thrilled by it because it
was not a kid's watch with cartoon characters on the face; it was
delicate, ladylike, goldplated, with roman numerals instead of digits, a
real Timex like her mother wore. Studying it, Chrissie was overcome by
sadness. The watch represented a time of happiness and family
togetherness that was lost forever.
Besides feeling sad, lonely, and a little restless from hours of
captivity, she was scared. Of course, she was not as scared as she had
been that morning, when her father had carried her through the house and
thrown her into the pantry. Then, kicking and screaming, she had been
terrified because of what she had seen. Because of what her parents had
become. But that whitehot terror could not be sustained; gradually it
subsided to a lowgrade fever of fear that made her feel flushed and
chilled at the same time, queasy, headachy, almost as if she were in the
early stages of flu.
She wondered what they were going to do to her when they finally let her
out of the pantry. Well, no, she didn't worry about what they were
going to do, for she was pretty sure she already knew the answer to that
one They were going to change her into one of them. What she wondered
about, actually, was how the change would be effected-and what, exactly,
she would become. She knew that her mother and father were no longer
ordinary people, that they were something else, but she had no words to
describe what they had become.
Her fear was sharpened by the fact that she lacked the words to explain
to herself what was happening in her own home, for she had always been
in love with words and had faith in their power. She liked to read just
about anything poetry, short stories, novels, the daily newspaper,
magazines, the backs of cereal boxes if nothing else was at hand. She
was in sixth grade at school, but her teacher, Mrs. Tokawa, said she
read at a tenthgrade level. When she was not reading, she was often
writing stories of her own. Within the past year she had decided she
was going to grow up to write novels like those of Mr. Paul Zindel or
the sublimely silly Mr. Daniel Pinkwater or, best of all, those of Ms.
Andre Norton.
But now words failed; her life was going to be far different from what
she had imagined. She was frightened as much by the loss of the
comfortable, bookish future she had foreseen as she was by the changes
that had taken place in her parents. Eight months shy of her twelfth
birthday, Chrissie had become acutely - 15 aware of life's uncertainty,
grim knowledge for which she was ill prepared.
Not that she had already given up. She intended to fight. She was not
going to let them change her without resistance. Soon after she had
been thrown into the pantry, once her tears had dried, she had looked
over the contents of the shelves, searching for a weapon. The pantry
contained mostly canned, bottled, and packaged food, but there were also
laundry and first-aid and handyman supplies. She had found the perfect
thing a small aerosol-spray can of WD-40, an oil-based lubricant. It
was a third the size of an ordinary spray can, easily concealed. If she
could surprise them, spray it in their eyes and temporarily blind them,
she could make a break for freedom.
As though reading a newspaper headline, she said, "Ingenious Young Girl
Saves Self with Ordinary Household Lubricant.
" She held the WD-40 in both hands, taking comfort from it.
Now and then a vivid and unsettling memory recurred her father's face as
it had looked when he had thrown her into the pantry-red and swollen
with anger, his eyes darkly ringed, nostrils flared, lips drawn back
from his teeth in a feral snarl, every feature contorted with rage.
"I'll be back for you," he had said, spraying spittle as he spoke.
"I'll be back."
He slammed the door and braced it shut with a straight-backed kitchen
chair that he wedged under the knob. Later, when the house fell silent
and her parents seemed to have gone away, Chrissie had tried the door,
pushing on it with all her might, but the tilted chair was an immovable
barricade.
I 71 be back for you. I'll be back.
His twisted face and bloodshot eyes had made her think of Mr. Robert
Louis Stevenson's description of the murderous Hyde in the story of Dr.
Jekyll, which she had read a few months ago. There w
as madness in her
father; he was not the same man that he once had been.
More unsettling was the memory of what she had seen in the upstairs hall
when she had returned home after missing the school bus and had
surprised her parents. No. They were not really her parents any more.
They were . . . something else.
She shuddered.
She clutched the can of WD-40.
Suddenly, for the first time in hours, she heard noise in the kitchen.
The back door of the house opened. Footsteps. At least two, maybe three
or four people.
"She's in there," her father said.
Chrissie's heart stuttered, then found a new and faster beat.
"This isn't going to be quick," said another man. Chrissie did not
recognize his deep, slightly raspy voice.
"You see, it's more complicated with a child. Shaddack's not sure we're
even ready for the children yet. It's risky. She's got to be
converted, Tucker." That was Chrissie's mother, Sharon, though she did
not sound like herself. It was her voice, all right, but without its
usual softness, without the natural, musical quality that had made it
such a perfect voice for reading fairy tales.
"Of course, yes, she's got to be done," said the stranger, whose name
was evidently Tucker.
"I know that. Shaddack knows it too. He sent me here, didn't he? I'm
just saying it might take more time than usual. We need a place where
we can restrain her and watch over her during the conversion."
"Right here. Her bedroom upstairs."
Conversion ?
Trembling, Chrissie got to her feet and stood facing the door.
Dean Koontz - (1989) Page 2