Dean Koontz - (1989)

by Midnight(Lit)

  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.