Beatles and Rolling Stones were coming on the scene, and his parents had
railed against that music and predicted it would lead Sam and his entire
generation into perdition. He'd turned out all right in spite of John,
Paul, George, Ringo, and the Stones. He was the product of an
unparalleled age of tolerance, and he did not want his mind to close up
as tight as his parents' minds had been.
"Well, I guess I better go," Sam said.
The boy was silent.
"If any unexpected problems come up, you call your Aunt Edna.
- 55 "There's nothing she could do for me that I couldn't do myself. She
loves you, Scott."
"Yeah, sure."
"She's your mother's sister; she'd like to love you as if you were her
own. All you have to do is give her the chance." After more silence,
Sam took a deep breath and said, "I love you, too, Scott'' "Yeah? What's
that supposed to do-turn me all gooey inside? No."
" 'Cause it doesn't."
"I was just stating a fact."
Apparently quoting from one of his favorite songs, the boy said'.
"Nothing lasts forever; even love's a lie, a toolfor manipulation;
there's no God beyond the sky.
Click. the dial tone.
"Per Sam stood for a moment, listening to the effect.
" He returned the receiver to its cradle His frustration was exceeded
only by his fury. He wanted to kick the shit out of something,
anything, and pretend that he was savaging whoever or whatever had
stolen his son from him.
He also had an empty, achy feeling in the pit of his stomach, because he
did love Scott. The boy's alienation was devastating.
He knew he could not go back to the motel yet. He was not ready to
sleep, and the prospect of spending a couple of hours in front of the
idiot box, watching mindless sitcoms and dramas, was intolerable.
When he opened the phone-booth door, tendrils of fog slipped inside and
seemed to pull him out into the night. For an hour he walked the
streets of Moonlight Cove, deep into the residential neighborhoods,
where there were no streetlamps and where trees and houses seemed to
float within the mist, as if they were not rooted to the earth but
tenuously tethered and in danger of breaking loose.
Four blocks north of Ocean Avenue, on Iceberry Way, as Sam walked
briskly, letting the exertion and the chilly night air leech the anger
from him, he heard hurried footsteps. Someone running. Three people,
maybe four. It was an unmistakable sound, though curiously stealthy,
not the straightforward slap-slap-slap of joggers' approach.
He turned and looked back along the gloom-enfolded street.
The footsteps ceased.
Because the partial moon had been engulfed by clouds, gu the scene was
brightened mostly by light fanning from the windows of Bavarian-,
Monterey-, English-, and Spanish-style houses nestled among pines and
junipers on both sides of the street. The neighborhood was
long-established, with great character, but the lack of big-windowed
modern homes contributed to the murkiness. Two properties in that block
had hooded, downcast Malibu landscape lighting, and a few had carriage
lamps at the ends of front walks, but the fog damped those pockets of
illumination. As far as Sam could see, he was alone on Iceberry Way.
He began to walk again but went less than half a block before he heard
the hurried footfalls. He swung around, but as before saw no one. This
time the sound faded, as though the runners had moved off a paved
surface onto soft earth, then between two of the houses.
Perhaps they were on another street. Cold air and fog could play tricks
with sound.
He was cautious and intrigued, however, and he quietly stepped off the
cracked and root-canted sidewalk, onto someone's front lawn, into the
smooth blackness beneath an immense cypress. He studied the
neighborhood, and within half a minute he saw furtive movement on the
west side of the street. Four shadowy figures appeared at the corner of
a house, running low, in a crouch. When they crossed a lawn that was
patchily illuminated by a pair of hurricane lamps on iron poles, their
freakishly distorted shadows leaped wildly over the front of a white
stucco house. They went to ground again in dense shrubbery before he
could ascertain their size or anything else about them.
Kids, Sam thought, and they're up to no good.
He didn't know why he was so sure they were kids, perhaps because
neither their quickness nor behavior was that of adults. They were
either engaged on some prank against a disliked neighbor-or they were
after Sam. Instinct told him that he was being stalked.
Perhaps they - 57 Were juvenile delinquents a problem in a community as
small and closely knit as Moonlight Cove?
Every town had a few bad kids. But in the semirural atmosphere of a
place like this, juvenile crime rarely included gang activities like
assault and battery, armed robbery, mugging, or thrill killing.
in the country, kids got into trouble with fast cars, booze, girls, and
a little unsophisticated theft, but they did not prowl the streets in
packs the way their counterparts did in the inner cities.
Nevertheless, Sam was suspicious of the quartet that crouched,
invisible, among shadow-draped ferns and azaleas, across the street and
three houses west of him. After all, something was wrong in Moonlight
Cove, and conceivably the trouble was related to juvenile delinquents.
The police were concealing the truth about several deaths in the past
couple of months, and perhaps they were protecting someone; as unlikely
as it seemed, maybe they were covering for a few kids from prominent
families, kids who had taken the privileges of class too far and had
gone beyond permissible, civilized behavior.
Sam was not afraid of them. He knew how to handle himself, and he was
carrying a .38. Actually he would have enjoyed teaching the brats a
lesson. But a confrontation with a group of teenage hoods would mean a
subsequent scene with the local police, and he preferred not to bring
himself to the attention of the authorities, for fear of jeopardizing
his investigation.
He thought it peculiar that they would consider assaulting him in a
residential neighborhood like this. One shout of alarm from him would
bring people to their front porches to see what was happening. Of
course, because he wanted to avoid calling even that much notice to
himself, he would not cry out.
The old adage about discretion being the better part of valor was in no
circumstance more applicable than in his. He moved back from the
cypress under which he had taken shelter, away from the street and
toward the lightless house behind him. Confident that those kids were
not sure where he had gone, he planned to slip out of the neighborhood
and lose them altogether. and entered a rear He reached the house,
hurried alongside it, yard, where a looming swing set was so distorted
by shadows and mist that it looked like a giant spider stilting toward
him through the gloom. At the end of the ya
rd he vaulted a rail fence,
beyond which was a narrow alley that serviced the block's detached
garages. He intended to go south, back toward Ocean Avenue and the
heart of town, but a shiver of prescience shook him toward another
route. Stepping straight across the narrow back street, past a row of
metal garbage cans, he vaulted another low fence, landing on the back
lawn of another house that faced out on the street parallel to Iceberry
Way.
No sooner had he left the alley than he heard soft, running footsteps on
that hard surface. The juvies-if that's what they were sounded as swift
but not quite as stealthy as they had been.
They were coming in Sam's direction from the end of the block. He had
the odd feeling that with some sixth sense they would be able to
determine which yard he had gone into and that they would be on him
before he could reach the next street. Instinct told him to stop
running and go to ground. He was in good shape, yes, but he was
forty-two, and they were no doubt seventeen or younger, and any
middle-aged man who believed he could outrun kids was a fool.
Instead of sprinting across the new yard, he moved swiftly to a side
door on the nearby clapboard garage, hoping it would be unlocked. It
was. He stepped into total darkness and pulled the door shut, just as
he heard four pursuers halt in the alleyway in front of the big roll-up
door at the other end of the building. They had stopped there not
because they knew where he was, but probably because they were trying to
decide which way he might have gone.
In tomblike blackness Sam fumbled for a lock button or dead-bolt latch
to secure the door by which he had entered. He found nothing.
He heard the four kids murmuring to one another, but he could not make
out what they were saying. Their voices sounded strange whispery and
urgent.
Sam remained at the smaller door. He gripped the knob with both hands
to keep it from turning, in case the kids searched around the garage and
gave it a try.
They fell silent.
He listened intently.
Nothing.
The cold air smelled of grease and dust. He could see nothing, but he
assumed a car or two occupied that space.
Although he was not afraid, he was beginning to feel foolish.
- 59 How had he gotten himself into this predicament? He was a grown
man, an FBI agent trained in a variety of self-defense techniques,
carrying a revolver with which he possessed considerable expertise, yet
he was hiding in a garage from four kids. He had gotten there because
he had acted instinctively, and he usually trusted instinct implicitly
but this was He heard furtive movement along the outer wall of the
garage. He tensed. Scraping footsteps. Approaching the small door at
which he stood. As far as Sam could tell, he was hearing only one of
the kids.
Leaning back, holding the knob in both hands, Sam pulled the door tight
against the jamb.
The footsteps stopped in front of him.
He held his breath.
A second ticked by, two seconds, three.
Try the damn lock and move on, Sam thought irritably.
He was feeling more foolish by the second and was on the verge of
confronting the kid. He could pop out of the garage as if he were a
jack-in-the-box, probably scare the hell out of the punk, and send him
screaming into the night.
Then he heard a voice on the other side of the door, inches from him,
and although he did not know what in God's name he was hearing, he knew
at once that he had been wise to trust to instinct, wise to go to ground
and hide. The voice was thin, raspy, utterly chilling, and the urgent
cadences of the speech were those of a frenzied psychotic or a junkie
long over-due for a fix "Burning, need, need. . .
" He seemed to be talking to himself and was perhaps unconscious of
speaking, as a man in a fever might babble deliriously.
A hard object scraped down the outside of the wooden door. Sam tried to
imagine what it was.
"Feed the fire, fire, feed it, feed, " the kid said in a thin, frantic
voice that was partly a whisper and partly a whine and partly a low and
menacing growl. It was not much like the voice of any teenager Sam had
ever heard-or any adult, for that matter.
In spite of the cold air, his brow was covered with sweat.
The unknown object scraped down the door again.
Was the kid armed? Was it a gun barrel being drawn along the wood? The
blade of a knife? Just a stick?
". . . burning, burning .
A claw?
That was a crazy idea. Yet he could not shake it. In his mind was the
clear image of a sharp and hornlike claw-a talon-gouging splinters from
the door as it carved a line in the wood.
Sam held tightly to the knob. Sweat trickled down his temples.
At last the kid tried the door. The knob twisted in Sam's grip, but he
would not let it move much.
". . . oh, God, it burns, hurts, oh God .
Sam was finally afraid. The kid sounded so damned weird. Like a PCP
junkie flying out past the orbit of Mars somewhere, only worse than
that, far stranger and more dangerous than any angel-dust freak. Sam
was scared because he didn't know what the hell he was up against.
The kid tried to pull the door open.
Sam held it tight against the jamb.
Quick, frenetic words ". . . feed the fire, feed the fire .
I wonder if he can smell me in here? Sam thought, and under the
circumstances that bizarre idea seemed no crazier than the image of the
kid with claws.
Sam's heart was hammering. Stinging perspiration seeped into the
corners of his eyes. The muscles in his neck, shoulders, and arms ached
fiercely; he was straining much harder than necessary to keep the door
shut.
After a moment, apparently deciding that his quarry was not in the
garage after all, the kid gave up. He ran along the side of the
building, back toward the alley. As he hurried away, a barely audible
keening issued from him; it was a sound of pain, need . . . and
animal excitement. He was struggling to contain that low cry, but it
escaped him anyway.
Sam heard cat-soft footsteps approaching from several directions. The
other three would-be muggers rejoined the kid in the alley, and their
whispery voices were filled with the same frenzy that had marked his,
though they were too far away now for Sam to hear what they were saying.
Abruptly, they fell silent and, a moment later, as if they were members
of a wolfpack responding instinctively to the scent of game or danger,
they ran as one along the alleyway, heading north. Soon their sly
footsteps faded, and again the night was grave-still.
For several minutes after the pack left, Sam stood in the dark garage,
holding fast to the doorknob.
The dead boy was sprawled in an open drainage ditch along the county
road on the southeast side of Moonlight Cove. His frostwhite face was
spotted with blood. In the glare of the two tripodmounted police lamps
flanking the ditc
h, his wide eyes stared unblinkingly at a shore
immeasurably more distant than the nearby Pacific.
Standing by one of the hooded lamps, Loman Watkins looked down at the
small corpse, forcing himself to bear witness to the death of Eddie
Valdoski because Eddie, only eight years old, was his godson. Loman had
gone to high school with Eddie's father, George, and in a strictly
platonic sense he had been in love with Eddie's mother, Nella, for
almost twenty years. Eddie had been a great kid, bright and inquisitive
and well behaved. Had been. But now . . . Hideously bruised,
savagely bitten, scratched and torn, neck broken, the boy was little
more than a pile of decomposing trash, his promising potential
destroyed, his flame snuffed, deprived of life-and life of him.
Of the innumerable terrible things Loman had encountered in twenty-one
years of police work, this was perhaps the worst. And because of his
personal relationship with the victim, he should have been deeply shaken
if not devastated. Yet he was barely affected by the sight of the
small, battered body. Sadness, regret, anger, and a flurry of other
emotions touched him, but only lightly and briefly, the way unseen fish
might brush past a swimmer in a dark sea. Of grief, which should have
pierced him like nails, he felt nothing.
Barry Sholnick, one of the new officers on the recently expanded
Dean Koontz - (1989) Page 8