bitten and torn. In worse condition, the dead woman lay outside the
room, in the second-floor hall, a scarlet heap on the orange carpet.
The air reeked of blood, bile, feces, urine-a melange of odors with
which Loman was becoming increasingly familiar, as the victims of the
regressives turned up more frequently week by week and day by day. This
time, however, as never before, an alluring sweetness lay under the
acrid surface of the stench. He drew deep breaths, unsure why that
terrible redolence should have any appeal whatsoever. But he was unable
to deny-or resist-its attraction any more than a hound could resist the
fox's scent. Though he could not withstand the tempting fragrance, he
was frightened by his response to it, and the blood in his veins seemed
to grow colder as his pleasure in the biological stirring grew more
intense.
Barry Sholnick, the officer Loman had dispatched to Cove Lodge via
computer link to apprehend Samuel Booker, and who had found this death
and destruction instead of the Bureau agent, now stood in the corner by
the window, staring intently at the dead man. He had been at the motel
longer than anyone, almost half an hour, long enough to have begun to
regard the victims with the detachment that police had to cultivate, as
if dead and ravaged bodies were no more remarkable a part of the scene
than the furniture. Yet Sholnick could not shift his gaze from the
eviscerated corpse, the gore-spattered wreckage, and the blood-streaked
walls. He was clearly electrified by that horrendous detritus and the
violence of which it was a remembrance.
We hate what the regressives have become and what they do, Loman
thought, but in some sick way we're also envious of them, of their
ultimate freedom.
Something within him-and, he suspected, in all of the New People-cried
out to join the regressives. As at the Foster place, Loman felt the
urge to employ his newfound bodily control not to elevate himself, as
Shaddack had intended, but to devolve into a wild state. He yearned to
descend to a level of consciousness in which thoughts of the purpose and
meaning of life would not trouble him, in which intellectual challenge
would be nonexistent, in which he would be a creature whose existence
was defined almost entirely by sensation, in which every decision was
made solely on the basis of what would give him pleasure, a condition
untroubled by complex thought. Oh, God, to be freed from the burdens of
civilization and higher intelligence!
Sholnick made a low sound in the back of his throat.
Loman looked up from the dead man.
In Shoinick's brown eyes a wild light burned.
Am I as pale as he? Loman wondered. As sunken-eyed and strange?
For a moment Sholnick met the chiefs gaze, then looked away as if he had
been caught in a shameful act.
Loman's heart was pounding.
Sholnick went to the window. He stared out at the lightless sea. His
hands were fisted at his sides.
Loman was trembling.
The smell, darkly sweet. The smell of the hunt, the kill.
He turned away from the corpse and walked out of the room, into the
hallway, where the sight of the dead woman-half naked, gouged,
lacerated-was no relief. Bob Trott, one of several recent additions to
the force when it expanded to twelve men last week, stood over the
battered body. He was a big man, four inches taller and thirty pounds
heavier than Loman, with a face - 155 of hard planes and chiseled edges.
He looked down at the cadaver with a faint, unholy smile.
Flushed, his vision beginning to blur, his eyes smarting in the harsh
fluorescent glare, Loman spoke sharply "Trott, come with me." He set off
along the hall to the other room that had been broken into. With evident
reluctance, Trott finally followed him.
By the time Loman reached the shattered door of that unit, Paul
Amberlay, another of his officers, appeared at the head of the north
stairs, returning from the motel office where Loman had sent him to
check the register.
"The couple in room twenty-four were named Jenks, Sarah and Charles,"
Amberlay reported. He was twenty-five, lean and sinewy, intelligent.
Perhaps because the young officer's face was slightly pointed, with
deep-set eyes, he had always reminded Loman of a fox.
"They're from Portland."
"And in thirty-six here?"
"Tessa Lockland from San Diego."
Loman blinked.
"Lockland?"
Amberlay spelled it.
"When did she check in?"
"Just tonight."
"The minister's widow, Janice Capshaw," Loman said.
"Her maiden name was Lockland. I had to deal with her mother by phone,
and she was in San Diego. Persistent old broad. A million questions.
Had some trouble getting her to consent to cremation. She said her
other daughter was out of the country, somewhere really remote, couldn't
be reached quickly, but would come around within a month to empty the
house and settle Mrs.
Capshaw's affairs. So this is her, I guess."
Loman led them into Tessa Lockland's room, two doors down from unit
forty, in which Booker was registered. Wind huffed at the open window.
The place was littered with broken furniture, torn bedding, and the
glass from a shattered TV set, but unmarked by blood. Earlier they had
checked the room for a body and found none; the open window indicated
that the occupant fled before the regressives had managed to smash
through the door.
"So Booker's out there," Loman said, "and we've got to assume he saw the
regressives or heard the killing. He knows something's wrong here. He
doesn't understand it, but he knows enough . . . too much."
"You can bet he's busting his ass to get a call out to the damn Bureau,"
Trott said.
Loman agreed.
"And now we've also got this Lockland bitch, and she's got to be
thinking her sister never committed suicide, that she was killed by the
same things that killed the couple from Portland-"
"Most logical thing for her to do," Amberlay said, "is come straight to
us-to the police. She'll walk right into our arms. Maybe," Loman said,
unconvinced. He began to pick through the rubble.
"Help me find her purse. With them bashing down the door, she'd have
gone out the window without pausing to grab her purse."
Trott found it wedged between the bed and one of the nightstands.
Loman emptied the contents onto the mattress. He snatched up the
wallet, flipped through the plastic windows full of credit cards and
photographs, until he found her driver's license. According to the
license data, she was five-four, one hundred and four pounds, blond,
blue-eyed. Loman held up the ID so Trott and Amberlay could see the
photograph.
"She's a looker," Amberlay said.
"I'd like to get a bite of that," Trott said.
His officer's choice of words gave Loman a chill. He couldn't help
wondering whether Trott meant "bite" as a euphemism for sex or whether
he was expressing a very real subconscious desire to savage the woman as
"We know what she looks like," Loman said.
"That helps."
Trott's hard, sharp features were inadequate for the expression of
gentler emotions like affection and delight, but they perfectly conveyed
the animal hunger and urge to violence that seethed deep within him.
"You want us to bring her in?"
"Yes. She doesn't know anything, really, but on the other hand she
knows too much. She knows the couple down the hall were killed, and she
probably saw a regressive."
"Maybe the regressives followed her through the window and got her,"
Amberlay suggested.
"We might find her body somewhere outside, on the grounds of the lodge."
- 157 "Could be," Loman said.
"But if not, we have to find her and bring her in. You called Callan?"
"Yeah," Amberlay said.
"We've got to get this place cleaned up," Loman said.
"We've got to keep a lid on until midnight, until everyone in town's
been put through the Change. Then, when Moonlight Cove's secure, we can
concentrate on finding the regressives and eliminating them."
Trott and Amberlay met Loman's eyes, then looked at each other. In the
glances they exchanged, Loman saw the dark knowledge that they all were
potential regressives, that they, too, felt the call toward that
unburdened, primitive state. It was an awareness of which none of them
dared speak, for to give it voice was to admit that Moonhawk was a
deeply flawed project and that they might all be damned.
Mike Peyser heard the dial tone and fumbled with the buttons, which
were too small and closely set for his long, tine-like fingers. Abruptly
he realized that he could not call Shaddack, dared not call Shaddack,
though they had known each other for more than twenty years, since their
days together at Stanford, could not call Shaddack even though it was
Shaddack who had made him what he was, because Shaddack would consider
him an outlaw now, a regressive, and Shaddack would have him restrained
in a laboratory and either treat him with all the tenderness that a
vivisectionist bestowed upon a white rat or destroy him because of the
threat he posed to the ongoing conversion of Moonlight Cove. Peyser
shrieked in frustration. He tore the telephone out of the wall and
threw it across the bedroom, where it hit the dresser mirror, shattering
the glass.
His sudden perception of Shaddack as a powerful enemy rather than a
friend and mentor was the last entirely clear-land rational thought that
Peyser had for a while. His fear was a trapdoor that opened under him,
casting him down into the darkness of the primeval mind that he had
unleashed for the pleasure of a night hunt. He moved back and forth
through the house, sometimes in a frenzy, sometimes in a sullen slouch,
not sure why he was alternately excited, depressed, or smoldering with
savage needs, driven more by feelings than intellect.
He relieved himself in a corner of the living room, sniffed his own
urine, then went into the kitchen in search of more food. Now and then
his mind cleared, and he tried to call his body back to its more
civilized form, but when his tissues would not respond to his will, he
cycled down into the darkness of animal thought again. Several times he
was clearheaded enough to appreciate the irony of having been reduced to
savagery by a process-the Change-meant to elevate him to superhuman
status, but that line of thought was too bleak to be endured, and a new
descent into the savage mind was almost welcome.
Repeatedly, both when in the grip of a primitive consciousness and when
the clouds lifted from his mind, he thought of the boy, Eddie Valdoski,
the boy, the tender boy, and he thrilled to the memory of blood, sweet
blood, fresh blood steaming in the cold night air.
Physically and mentally exhausted, Chrissie nevertheless was not able
to sleep. In the burlap tarps in the back of Mr. Eulane's truck, she
hung from the thin line of wakefulness, wanting nothing more than to let
go and fall into unconsciousness.
She felt incomplete, as though something had been left undone-and
suddenly she was crying. Burying her face in the fragrant and slightly
scratchy burlap, she bawled as she'd not done in years, with the abandon
of a baby. She wept for her mother and father, perhaps lost forever,
not taken cleanly by death but by something foul, dirty, inhuman,
satanic. She wept for the adolescence that would have been hers-horses
and seaside pastures and books read on the beach-but that had been
shattered beyond repair. She wept, as well, over some loss she felt but
could not quite identify, though she suspected it was innocence or maybe
faith in the triumph of good over evil.
None of the fictional heroines she admired would have indulged in
uncontrolled weeping, and Chrissie was embarrassed by her torrent of
tears. But to weep was as human as to err, and perhaps she needed to
cry, in part, to prove to herself that no monstrous seed had been
planted in her of the sort that had germinated and spread tendrils
through her parents. Crying, she was still Chrissie. Crying was proof
that no one had stolen her soul.
She slept.
Sam had seen another pay phone at a Union 76 service station one
block north of Ocean. The station was out of business. The windows
were filmed with gray dust, and a hastily lettered FOR SALE sign hung in
one of them, as if the owner actually didn't care whether the place was
sold or not and had made the sign only because it was expected of him.
Crisp, dead leaves and dry pine needles from surrounding trees had blown
against the gasoline pumps and lay in snow-like drifts.
The phone booth was against the south wall of the building and visible
from the street. Sam stepped through the open door but did not pull it
shut, for fear of completing a circuit that would turn on the overhead
bulb and draw him to the attention of any cops who happened by.
The line was dead. He deposited a coin, hoping that would activate the
dial tone. The line was still dead.
He jiggled the hook from which the handset hung. His coin was returned.
He tried again but to no avail.
He believed that pay phones in or adjacent to a service station or
privately owned store were sometimes joint operations, the income shared
between the telephone company and the businessman who allowed the phone
to be installed. Perhaps they had turned off the phone when the Union
76 had closed up.
However, he suspected the police had used their access to the
telephone-company's computer to disable all coin-operated phones in
Moonlight Cove. The moment they had learned an undercover federal agent
was in town, they could have taken extreme measures to prevent him from
contacting the world outside.
Of course he might be overestimating their capabilities. He had to try
another phone before giving up hope of contacting the Bureau.
On his walk after dinner, he had passed a coin laundry half a block
north of Ocean Avenue
and two blocks west of this Union 76. He was
pretty sure that when glancing through the plate glass window, he had
seen a telephone on the rear wall, at the end of a row of
industrial-size dryers with stainless-steel fronts.
He left the Union 76. As much as possible staying away from the
streetlamps-which illuminated side streets only in the first block north
and south of Ocean-using alleyways where he could, he slipped through
the silent town, toward where he remembered having seen the laundry. He
wished the wind would die and leave some of the rapidly dissipating fog.
At an intersection one block north of Ocean and half a block from the
laundry, he almost walked into plain sight of a cop driving south toward
the center of town. The patrolman was half a block from the
intersection, coming slowly, surveying both sides of the street.
Fortunately he was looking the other way when Sam hurried into the
unavoidable fall of lamplight at the corner.
Sam scrambled backward and pressed into a deep entrance way on the side
of a three-story brick building that housed some of the town's
professionals A plaque in the recess, to the left of - 161 the door,
listed a dentist, two lawyers, a doctor, and a chiropractor. If the
patrol turned left at the corner and came past him, he'd probably be
spotted. But if it either went straight on toward Ocean or turned right
and headed west, he would not be seen.
Dean Koontz - (1989) Page 21