Dean Koontz - (1989)

by Midnight(Lit)

  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