Dean Koontz - (1989)

by Midnight(Lit)

  lying with his head in her lap.

  Harry was in his wheelchair nearby. He used a penlight to study a

  spiral-bound notebook in which he had kept a record of the unusual

  activities at the mortuary.

  "First one-at least the first unusual one I noticed-was on minutes to

  midnight. They brought four bodies at once, using the hearse and the

  city ambulance. Police accompanied them. The corpses were in body

  bags, so I couldn't see anything about them, but the cops and the

  ambulance attendants and the people at Callan's were visibly . . .

  well . . . upset. I saw it in their faces. Fear. They kept looking

  around at the neighboring houses and the alleyway, as if they were

  afraid someone was going to see what they were up to, which seemed

  peculiar because they were only doing their jobs. Right? Anyway,

  later, in the county paper, I read about the Mayser family dying in a

  fire, and I knew that was who'd been brought to Callan's that night. I

  supposed they didn't die in a fire any more than your sister killed

  herself.

  "Probably not," Tessa said.

  Still watching the back of the funeral home, Sam said, "I have the

  Maysers on my list. They were turned up in the investigation of the

  Sanchez-Bustamante case."

  Harry cleared his throat and said, "Six days later, September third, two

  bodies were brought to Callan's shortly after midnight. And this was

  even weirder because they didn't come in a hearse or an ambulance. Two

  police cars pulled in at the back of Callan's, and they unloaded a body

  from the rear seat of each of them, wrapped in blood-streaked sheets."

  "September third?" Sam said.

  "There's no one on my list for that date. Sanchez and the Bustamantes

  were on the fifth. No death certificates were issued on the third. They

  kept those two off the official records."

  "Nothing in the county paper about anyone dying then, either," Harry

  said.

  Tessa said, "So who were those two people?"

  "Maybe they were out-of-towners who were unlucky enough to stop in

  Moonlight Cove and stumble into something dangerous," Sam said. "People

  whose deaths could be completely covered up, so no one would know where

  they'd died. As far as anyone knows, they just vanished on the road

  somewhere."

  "Sanchez and the Bustamantes were on the night of the fifth," Harry

  said, "and then Jim Armes on the night of the seventh."

  "Armes disappeared at sea," Sam said, looking up from the telescope and

  frowning at the man in the wheelchair.

  "They brought the body to Callan's at eleven o'clock at night," Harry

  said, consulting his notebook for details.

  "The blinds weren't drawn at the crematorium windows, so I could see

  straight in there, almost as good as if I'd been right there in that

  room. I saw the body . the mess it was in. And the face. Couple of

  days later, when the paper ran a story about Armes's disappearance, I

  recognized him as the guy they'd fed to the furnace.

  " The large bedroom was dressed in cloaks of shadow except for the

  narrow beam of the penlight, which was half shielded by Harry's hand and

  confined to the open notebook. Those white pages seemed to glow with

  light of their own, as if they were the leaves of a magic or holy-or

  unholy-book.

  Harry Talbot's careworn countenance was more dimly illumined by the

  backwash from those pages, and the peculiar light emphasized the lines

  in his face, making him appear older than he was. Each line, Sam knew,

  had its provenance in tragic experience and pain. Profound sympathy

  stirred in him. Not pity. He could never pity anyone as determined as

  Talbot. But Sam appreciated the sorrow and loneliness of Harry's

  restricted life. Watching the wheelchair-bound man, Sam grew angry with

  the neighbors. Why hadn't they done more to bring Harry into their

  lives? Why hadn't they invited him to dinner more often, drawn him into

  their holiday celebrations? Why had they left him so much on his own

  that his primary means of participating in the life of his community was

  through a telescope and binoculars?

  Sam was cut by a pang of despair at people's reluctance to reach out to

  one another, at the way they isolated themselves and one another. With

  a jolt, he thought of his inability to communicate with his own son,

  which only left him feeling bleaker still.

  - 193 To Harry, he said, "What do you mean when you say Armes's body was

  a mess?"

  "Cut. Slashed."

  "He didn't drown?"

  "Didn't look it."

  "Slashed . . . Exactly what do you mean?" Tessa asked.

  Sam knew that she was thinking about the people whose screams she had

  heard at the motel-and about her own sister.

  Harry hesitated, then said "Well, I saw him on the table in the

  crematorium, just before they slipped him into the furnace. He'd been .

  . . disemboweled. Nearly decapitated. Horribly . . .

  torn. He looked as bad as if he'd been standing on an antipersonnel

  mine when it went off and been riddled by shrapnel."

  They sat in mutual silence, considering that description.

  Only Moose seemed unperturbed. He made a soft, contented sound as Tessa

  gently scratched behind his ears.

  Sam thought it might not be so bad to be one of the lower beasts, a

  creature mostly of feelings, untroubled by a complex intellect. Or at

  the other extreme . . . a genuinely intelligent computer, all

  intellect and no feelings whatsoever. The great dual burden of emotion

  and high intelligence was singular to humankind, and it was what made

  life so hard; you were always thinking about what you were feeling

  instead of just going with the moment, or you were always trying to feel

  what you thought you should feel in a given situation. Thoughts and

  judgment were inevitably colored by emotions-some of them on a

  subconscious level, so you didn't even entirely understand why you made

  certain decisions, acted in certain ways. Emotions clouded your

  thinking; but thinking too hard about your feelings took the edge off

  them. Trying to feel deeply and think perfectly clearly at the same

  time was like simultaneously juggling six Indian clubs while riding a

  unicycle backward along a high wire.

  "After the story in the paper about Artnes disappearing," Harry said, "I

  kept waiting for a correction, but none was printed, and that's when I

  began to realize that the odd goingson at Callan's weren't just odd but

  probably criminal, as well and that the cops were part of it."

  "Paula Parkins was torn apart too," Sam said.

  Harry nodded.

  "Supposedly by her Dobermans."

  "Dobermans?" Tessa asked.

  At the laundry Sam had told her that her sister was one of many curious

  suicides and accidental deaths, but he had not gone into any details

  about the others. Now he quickly told her about Parkins.

  "Not her own dogs," Tessa agreed.

  "She was savaged by whatever killed Armes. And the people tonight at

  Cove Lodge."

  This was the first that Harry Talbot had heard about the murders at Cove

  Lodge. Sam had
to explain about that and about how he and Tessa had met

  at the laundry.

  A strange expression settled on Harry's prematurely aged face. To

  Tessa, he said, "Uh . . . you didn't see these things at the motel?

  Not even a glimpse?"

  "Only the foot of one of them, through the crack under the door. " Harry

  started to speak, stopped, and sat in thoughtful silence.

  He knows something, Sam thought. More than we do.

  For some reason Harry was not ready to share what he knew, for he

  returned his scrutiny to the notebook on his lap and said, "Two days

  after Paula Parkins died, there was one body taken to Callan's, around

  nine-thirty at night."

  "That would be September eleventh?" Sam asked.

  "Yes.There's no record of a death certificate issued that day."

  "Nothing about it in the paper, either."

  "Go on."

  Harry said, "September fifteenth-Steve Heinz, Laura Dalcoe. He

  supposedly killed her, then took his own life," Sam said.

  "Lovers' quarrel, we're to believe. Another quick cremation," Harry

  noted. "And three nights later, on the eighteenth, two more bodies

  delivered to Callan's shortly after one in the morning, just as I was

  about to go to bed.

  "No public record of those, either," Sam said.

  "Two more out-of-towners who drove off the interstate for a visit or

  just dinner?" Tessa wondered.

  "Or maybe someone from another part of the county, passing on the county

  road along the edge of town?"

  "Could even have been locals," Harry said.

  "I mean, there're always a few people around who haven't lived here a

  long time, - 195 newcomers who rent instead of own their houses, don't

  have many ties to the community, so if you wanted to cover their

  murders, you could maybe concoct an acceptable story about them moving

  away suddenly, for a new job, whatever, and their neighbors might buy

  it."

  if their neighbors weren't already "converted" and participating in the

  cover-up, Sam thought.

  "Then September twenty-third," Harry said.

  "That would have been your sister's body, Tessa."

  " Yes. By then I knew I had to tell someone what I'd seen. Someone in

  authority. But who? I didn't trust anyone local because I'd watched

  the cops bring in some of those bodies that were never reported in the

  newspaper. County Sheriff. He'd believe Watkins before he'd believe

  me, wouldn't he? Hell, everyone thinks a cripple is a little strange

  anyway-strange in the head, I mean-they equate physical disabilities

  with mental disabilities at least a little, at least subconsciously. So

  they'd be predisposed not to believe me. And admittedly it is a wild

  story, all these bodies, secret cremations. . . ." He paused. His

  face clouded.

  "The fact that I'm a decorated veteran wouldn't have made me any more

  believable. That was a long time ago, ancient history for some of them.

  In fact . . . no doubt they'd hold the war against me in a way.

  Post-Vietnam stress syndrome, they'd call it. Poor old Harry finally

  went crackers-don't you see?-from the war."

  Thus far Harry had been speaking matter-of-factly, without much emotion.

  But the words he had just spoken were like a piece of glass held against

  the surface of a rippled pool, revealing realms below-in his case,

  realms of pain, loneliness, and alienation.

  Now emotion not only entered his voice but, a few times, made it crack

  "And I've got to say, part of the reason I didn't try to tell anyone

  what I'd seen was because . . . I was afraid. I didn't know what the

  hell was going on. I couldn't be sure how big the stakes were. I

  didn't know if they'd silence me, feed me to the furnace at Callan's one

  night. You'd think that having lost so much I'd be reckless now,

  unconcerned about losing more, about dying, but that's not the way it

  is, not at all. Life's probably more precious to me than to men whore

  whole and healthy.

  This broken body slowed me down so much that I've spent the last twenty

  years out of the whirl of activity in which most of you exist, and I've

  had time to really see the world, the beauty and intricacy of it. In

  the end my disabilities have led me to appreciate and love life more. So

  I was afraid they'd come for me, kill me, and I hesitated to tell anyone

  what I'd seen. God help me, if I'd spoken out, if I'd gotten in touch

  with the Bureau sooner, maybe some people might have been saved. Maybe .

  . .

  your sister would've been saved."

  "Don't even think of that," Tessa said at once.

  "If you'd done anything differently, no doubt you'd be ashes now,

  scraped out of the bottom of Callan's furnace and thrown in the sea. My

  sister's fate was sealed. You couldn't unseal it."

  Harry nodded, then switched off the penlight, plunging the room into

  deeper darkness, though he had not yet finished going through the

  information in his notebook. Sam suspected that Tessa's unhesitating

  generosity of spirit had brought tears to Harry's eyes and that he did

  not want them to see.

  "On the twenty-fifth," he continued, not needing to consult the notebook

  for details, "one body was brought to Callan's at ten-fifteen at night.

  Weird, too, because it didn't come in either an ambulance or hearse or

  police car. It was brought by Loman Watkins-Chief of police," Sam said

  for Tessa's benefit.

  "-but he was in his private car, out of uniform," Harry said. "They took

  the body out of his trunk. It was wrapped in a blanket. The blinds

  weren't shut at their windows that night, either, and I was able to get

  in tight with the scope. I didn't recognize the body, but I did

  recognize the condition of it-the same as Armes."

  "Tom?" Sam asked.

  "Yes. Then the Bureau did come to town on the Sanchez Bustamante thing,

  and when I read about it in the newspaper, I was so relieved because I

  thought it was all going to come out in the open at last, that we'd have

  revelations, explanations. But then there were two more bodies disposed

  of at Callan's on the night of October fourth-Our team was in town

  then," Sam said, "in the middle of their investigation. They didn't

  realize any death certificates were - 197 filed during that time. You're

  saying this happened under their noses?

  " ,Yeah. I don't have to look in the notebook; I remember it clearly.

  The bodies were brought around in Reese Dorn's camper truck. He's a

  local cop, but he was out of uniform that night. They hauled the stiffs

  into Callan's, and the blind at one window was open, so I saw them shove

  both bodies into the crematorium together, as if they were in a real

  sweat to dispose of them. And there was more activity at Callan's late

  on the night of the seventh, but the fog was so thick, I can't swear

  that it was more bodies being taken in. And finally . . . earlier

  tonight. A child's body. A small child."

  "Plus the two who were killed at Cove Lodge," Tessa said.

  "That makes twenty-two victims, not the twelve that brought Sam here.

  This town's become a slaughterhouse."

  "Could be even more than we
think," Harry said.

  "How so?"

  "Well, after all, I don't watch the place every evening, all evening

  long. And I go to bed by one-thirty, no later than two. Who's to say

  there weren't visits I missed, that more bodies weren't brought in

  during the dead hours of the night?

  " Brooding about that, Sam looked through the eyepiece again. The rear

  of Callan's remained dark and still. He slowly moved the scope to the

  right, shifting the field of vision northward through the neighborhood.

  "But why were they killed?" Tessa said, No one had an answer.

  "And by what?" she asked.

  Sam studied a cemetery farther north on conquistador, then sighed and

  looked up and told them about his experience earlier in the night, on

  Iceberry Way.

  "I thought they were kids, delinquents, but now what I think is that

  they were the same things that killed the people at Cove Lodge, the same

  as the one whose foot you saw through the crack under the door."

  He could almost feel Tessa frowning with frustration in the darkness

  when she said, "But what are they?"

  Harry Talbot hesitated. Then "Boogeymen."

  Not daring to use sirens, dousing headlights on the last quarter mile of

  the approach, Loman came down on Mike Peyser's place at three-ten in the

  morning, with two cars, five deputies, and shotguns. Loman hoped they