Valium, swallowing the capsules with several swigs from a can of Diet
Coke. Then she had stripped off her clothes and had swum out toward far
Japan. Losing consciousness because of the drugs, she soon slipped into
the cold embrace of the sea, and drowned.
"Bullshit," Tessa said softly, as if speaking to her own vague
reflection in the cool glass.
Janice Lockland Capshaw had been a hopeful person, unfailingly
optimistic-a trait so common in members of the Lockland clan as to be
genetic. Not once in her life had Janice sat in a corner feeling sorry
for herself; if she had tried it, within seconds she would have begun
laughing at the foolishness of selfpity and would have gotten up and
gone to a movie, or for a psychologically therapeutic run. Even when
Richard died, Janice had not allowed grief to metastasize into
depression, though she loved him greatly.
So what would have sent her into such a steep emotional spiral?
Contemplating the story the police wanted her to believe, Tessa was
driven to sarcasm. Maybe Janice had gone out to a restaurant, been
served a bad dinner, and been so crushed by the "experience that suicide
had been her only possible response. Yeah. Or maybe her television
went on the blink, and she missed her favorite soap opera, which plunged
her into irreversible despair. Sure. Those scenarios were about as
plausible as the nonsense that the Moonlight Cove police and coroner had
put in their reports.
Suicide.
"bullshit," Tessa repeated.
From the window of her motel room, she could see only a narrow band of
the beach below, where it met the churning surf. The sand was dimly
revealed in the wintry light of a newly risen quarter moon, a pale
ribbon curving southwest and northwest around the cove.
Tessa was overcome by the desire to stand on the beach from which her
sister had supposedly set out on that midnight swim to the graveyard,
the same beach to which the tide had returned her bloated, ravaged
corpse days later. She turned from the window and switched on a bedside
lamp. She removed a brown leatherjacket from a hanger in the closet,
pulled it on, slung her purse over her shoulder, and left the room,
locking the door behind her. She was certain-irrationally so-that
merely by going to the beach and standing where Janice supposedly had
stood, she would uncover a clue to the true story, through an amazing
insight or flicker of intuition.
As the hammered-silver moon rose above the dark eastern hills,
Chrissie raced along the tree line, looking for a way into the woods
before her strange pursuers found her. She quickly arrived at Pyramid
Rock, thus named because the formation, twice as tall as she was, had
three sides and came to a weather-rounded point; when younger, she had
fantasized that it had been constructed ages ago by a geographically
displaced tribe of inchhigh Egyptians. Having played in this meadow and
forest for years, she was as familiar with the terrain as with the rooms
of her own house, certainly more at home there than her parents or
Tucker would be, which gave her an advantage. She slipped past Pyramid
Rock, into the gloom beneath the trees, onto a narrow deer trail that
led south.
She heard no one behind her and did not waste time squinting back into
the darkness. But she suspected that, as predators, her parents and
Tucker would be silent stalkers, revealing themselves only when they
pounced.
The coastal woodlands were comprised mostly of a wide variety of pines,
although a few sweet gums flourished, too, their leaves a scarlet blaze
of autumn color in daylight but now as black as bits of funeral shrouds.
Chrissie followed the winding trail as the land began to slope into a
canyon. In more than half the forest, the trees grew far enough apart
to allow the cold glow of the partial moon to penetrate to the
underbrush and lay an icy crust of light upon the trail. The incoming
fog was still too thin to filter out much of that wan radiance, but at
other places the interlacing branches blocked the lunar light.
Even where moonlight revealed the way, Chrissie dared not run, for she
would surely be tripped by the surface roots of the trees, which spread
across the deer-beaten path. Here and there low-hanging branches
presented another danger to a runner, but she hurried along.
As if reading from a book of her own adventures, a book like one of
those she so much liked, she thought, Young Chrissie was as surefooted
as she was resourceful and quick-thinking, no more intimidated by the
darkness than by the thought of her monstrous pursuers. What a girl she
was!
Soon she would reach the bottom of the slope, where she could turn west
toward the sea or east toward the county rout, which bridged the canyon.
Few people lived in that area, more than two miles from the outskirts of
Moonlight Cove; fewer still lived by the sea, since portions of the
coastline were protected by state law and were closed to construction.
Though she had little chance of finding help toward the Pacific, her
prospects to the east were not noticeably better, because the county
road was lightly traveled and few houses were built along it; besides,
Tucker might be patrolling that route in his Honda, expecting her to
head that way and flag down the first passing car she saw.
Frantically wondering where to go, she descended the last hundred feet.
The trees flanking the trail gave way to low, impenetrable tangles of
bristly scrub oaks called chaparral. A few immense ferns, ideally
suited to the frequent coastal fogs, overgrew the path, and Chrissie
shivered as she pushed through them, for she felt as if scores of small
hands were grabbing at her.
A broad but shallow stream cut a course through the bottom of the
canyon, and she paused by its bank to catch her breath. Most of the
stream bed was dry. At this time of year, only a couple of inches of
water moved lazily through the center of the channel, glimmering darkly
in the moonlight.
The night was windless.
Soundless.
Hugging herself, she realized how cold it was. In jeans and a
blue-plaid flannel shirt, she was adequately dressed for a crisp October
day, but not for the cold, damp air of an autumn night.
She was chilled, breathless, scared, and unsure of what her next move
ought to be, but most of all she was angry with herself for those
weaknesses of mind and body. Ms. Andre Norton's wonderful adventure
stories were filled with dauntless young heroines who could endure far
longer chases-and far greater - 35 cold and other hardships-than this,
and always with wits intact, able to make quick decisions and, usually,
right ones.
Spurred by comparing herself to a Norton girl, Chrissie stepped off the
bank of the stream. She crossed ten feet of loamy soil eroded from the
hills by last season's heavy rains and tried to jump across the shallow,
purling band of water. She splashed down a few inches short of the
other side, soaking h
er tennis shoes. Nevertheless she went on through
more loam, which clumped to her wet shoes, ascended the far bank, and
headed neither east nor west but south, up the other canyon wall toward
the next arm of the forest.
Though she was entering new territory now, at the extremity of the
section of the woods that had been her playground for years, she was not
afraid of getting lost. She could tell east from west by the movement
of the thin, incoming fog and by the position of the moon, and from
those signs she could stay on a reliably southward course. She believed
that within a mile she would come to a score of houses and to the
sprawling grounds of New Wave Microtechnology, which lay between Foster
Stables and the town of Moonlight Cove. There she would be able to find
help.
Then, of course, her real problems would begin. She would have to
convince someone that her parents were no longer her parents, that they
had changed or been possessed or been somehow taken over by some spirit
or . . . force. And that they wanted to turn her into one of them.
Yeah, she thought, good luck.
She was bright, articulate, responsible, but she was also just an
eleven-year-old kid. She would have a hard time making anyone believe
her. She had no illusions about that. They would I listen and nod
their heads and smile, and then they would call her parents, and her
parents would sound more plausible than she did. . . .
But I've got to try, she told herself, as she began to ascend the sloped
southern wall of the canyon. If I don't try to convince someone, what
else can I do? Just surrender? No chance.
Behind her, a couple of hundred yards away, from high on the far canyon
wall down which she had recently descended, something shrieked. It was
not an entirely human cry-not that of any animal, either. The first
shrill call was answered by a second a third, and each shriek was
clearly that of a different creature, for each was in a noticeably
variant voice.
Chrissie halted on the steep trail, one hand against the deeply fissured
bark of a pine, under a canopy of sweet-scented boughs. She looked back
and listened as her pursuers simultaneously began to wail, an ululant
cry reminiscent of the baying of a pack of coyotes . . . but stranger,
more frightening. The sound was so cold, it penetrated her flesh and
pierced like a needle to her marrow.
Their baying was probably a sign of their confidence They were certain
they would catch her, so they no longer needed to be quiet.
"What are you?" she whispered.
She suspected they could see as well as cats in the dark.
Could they smell her, as if they were dogs?
Her heart began to slam almost painfully within her breast.
Feeling vulnerable and alone, she turned from the pulling hunters and
scrambled up the trail toward the southern rim of the canyon.
At the foot of Ocean Avenue, Tessa Lockland walked through the empty
parking lot and onto the public beach. The night breeze off the Pacific
was just cranking up, faint but chilly enough that she was glad to be
wearing slacks, a wool sweater, and her leather jacket.
She crossed the soft sand, toward the seaside shadows that lay beyond
the radius of the glow from the last streetlamp, past a tall cypress
growing on the beach and so radically shaped by ocean winds that it
reminded her of an erte sculpture, all curved lines and molten for7n. On
the damp sand at the surf's edge, with the tide lapping at the strand
inches from her shoes, Tessa - 37 stared westward. The partial moon was
insufficient to light the vast, rolling main; all she could see were the
nearest three lines of low, foam-crested breakers surging toward her
from out of the foam She tried to picture her sister standing on this
deserted beach, washing down thirty or forty Valium capsules with a Diet
Coke, then stripping naked and plunging into the cold sea. No. Not
Janice.
With growing conviction that the authorities in Moonlight Cove were
incompetent fools or liars, Tessa walked slowly south along the curving
shoreline. In the pearly luminescence of the immature moon, she studied
the sand, the widely separated cypresses farther back on the beach, and
the time-worn formations of rock. She was not looking for physical
clues that might tell her what had happened to Janice; those had been
erased by wind and tide during the past three weeks. instead, she was
hoping that the very landscape itself and the elements of
night-darkness, cool wind, and arabesques of pale but slowly thickening
fog-would inspire her to develop a theory about what had really happened
to Janice and an approach she might use to prove that theory.
She was a filmmaker specializing in industrials and documentaries of
various kinds. When in doubt about the meaning and purpose of a
project, she often found that immersion in a particular geographical
locale could inspire narrative and thematic approaches to making a film
about it. In the developmental stages of a new travel film, for
instance, she often spent a couple Of days casually strolling around a
city like Singapore or Hong Kong or Rio, just absorbing details, which
was more productive than thousands of hours of background reading and
brainstorming, though of course the reading and brainstorming had to be
a part of it too.
She had walked less than two hundred feet south along the beach, when
she heard a shrill, haunting cry that halted her. The sound was
distant, rising and falling, rising and falling, then fading.
Chilled more by that strange call than by the brisk October air, she
wondered what she had heard. Although it had been partly a canine howl,
she was certain it was not the voice of a dog. Though it was also
marked by a feline whine and wail, she was equally certain it had not
issued from a cat; no domestic cat could produce such volume, and to the
best of her knowledge, no cougars roamed the coastal hills, certainly
not in or near a town the size of Moonlight Cove.
Just as she was about to move on, the same uncanny cry cut the night
again, and she was fairly sure it was coming from atop the bluff that
overlooked the beach, farther south, where the lights of sea-facing
houses were fewer than along the middle of the cove. This time the howl
ended on a protracted and more guttural note, which might have been
produced by a large dog, though she still felt it had to have come from
some other creature. Someone living along the bluff must be keeping an
exotic pet in a cage a wolf, perhaps, or some big mountain cat not
indigenous to the northern coast.
That explanation did not satisfy her, either, for there was some
peculiarly familiar quality to the cry that she could not place, a
quality not related to a wolf or mountain cat. She waited for another
shriek, but it did not come.
Around her the darkness had deepened. The fog was clotting, and a
lumpish cloud slid across half of the two-pointed moon.
She decided she could better absorb the details of the scene in the
&n
bsp; morning, and she turned back toward the mist-shrouded streetlamps it the
bottom of Ocean Avenue. She didn't realize she was walking so
fast-almost running-until she had left the shore, crossed the beach
parking lot, and climbed half the first steep block of Ocean Avenue, at
which point she became aware of her pace only because she suddenly heard
her own labored breathing.
Thomas Shaddack drifted in a perfect blackness that was neither warm
nor cool, where he seemed weightless, where he had - 39 ceased to feel
any sensation against his skin, where he seemed limbless and without
musculature or bones, where he seemed to have no physical substance
whatsoever. A tenuous thread of thought linked him to his corporeal
self, and in the dimmest reaches of his mind, he was still aware that he
was a man-an Ichabod Crane of a man, six feet two, one hundred and
sixty-five pounds, lean and bony, with a too-narrow face, a high brow,
and brown eyes so light they were almost yellow.
He was also vaguely aware that he was nude and afloat in a
state-of-the-art sensory-deprivation chamber, which looked somewhat like
an old-fashioned iron lung but was four times larger. The single
low-wattage bulb was not lit, and no light penetrated the shell of the
tank. The pool in which Shaddack floated was a few feet deep, a
ten-percent solution of magnesium sulfate in water for maximum buoyancy.
Monitored by a computer-as was every element of that environment-the
water cycled between ninety-three degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature at
which a floating body was least affected by gravity, and ninety eight
degrees, at which the heat differential between human body temperature
and surrounding fluid was marginal.
t He suffered from no claustrophobia. A minute or two after he stepped
Dean Koontz - (1989) Page 5