they could just take her. There was a fight. Five against my two
brothers, they beat one to death with a tire iron. The other will never
walk again. They took my brother's wife with them, used her."
Tommy was stunned by this revelation.
At last the boy said, " I hate white men."
Runningdeer laughed.
"I really do," Tommy said.
"What happened to those guys who did it? Are they in prison now?"
"No prison." Runningdeer smiled at the boy. A fierce, humorless smile.
"Their fathers were powerful men. Money. Influence. So the judge let
them off for 'insufficient evidence. My father should've been the
judge. He wouldn't let them off - Wouldn't he?" the Indian said.
"Never. Are you so sure?"
Uneasily, Tommy said, "Well The Indian was silent.
"I hate white men," Tommy repeated, this time motivated more by a desire
to curry favor with the Indian than by conviction.
Runningdeer laughed again and patted Tommy's hand.
Near the end of that same summer, Runningdeer came to Tommy late on a
blazing August day and, in a portentous and ominous voice, said, "There
will be a full moon tonight, Little Chief. Go into the backyard and
watch it for a while. I believe that tonight the sign will finally
come, the most important sign of all."
After moonrise, which came shortly after nightfall, Tommy went out and
stood on the pool apron, where Runningdeer had shown him the
self-devouring snake seven years earlier. He stared up at the lunar
sphere for a long time, while an elongated reflection of it shimmered on
the surface of the water in the swimming pool. It was a swollen yellow
moon, still low in the sky and immense.
Soon the judge came out onto the patio, calling to him, and Tommy said,
"Here."
The judge joined him by the pool.
"What're you doing, Thomas?"
"I m "Watching for.
"For what?"
Just then Tommy saw the hawk silhouetted by the moon. For years he had
been told he would see it one day, had been prepared for it and all that
it would mean, and suddenly there it was, frozen for a moment in
midflight against the round lunar lamp.
"There!" he said, for the moment having forgotten that he could trust
no one but the Indian.
"There what?" the judge asked.
"Didn't you see it?"
"Just the moon."
"You weren't looking or you'd have seen it."
"Seen what?"
His father's blindness to the sign only proved to Tommy that he was,
indeed, special and that the portent had been meant for his eyes
only-which reminded him that he could not trust his own father. He
said, "Uh . . . a shooting star."
"You're standing out here watching for shooting stars?"
"They're actually meteors," Tommy said, talking too fast.
" See, tonight the earth's supposed to be passing through a meteor belt,
so there'll be lots of them."
"Since when are you interested in astronomy?"
"I'm not." Tommy shrugged.
"Just wondered what it'd look like. Pretty boring.
" He turned away from the pool and started back toward the house, and
after a moment the judge accompanied him.
The next day, Wednesday, the boy told Runningdeer about the moonhawk.
"But I didn't get any messages from it. I don't know what the great
spirits want me to do to prove myself." The Indian smiled and stared at
him in silence for what began to be an uncomfortably long time. Then he
said, "Little Chief, we'll talk about that at lunch."
Miss Karval had Wednesdays off, and Runningdeer and Tommy were at home
alone. They sat side by side on patio chairs for lunch. The Indian
seemed to have brought nothing but cactus candy, and Tommy had no
appetite for anything else.
Long ago the boy had ceased to eat the candy for its flavor but devoured
it eagerly for its effect. And over the years its impact on him had
grown constantly more profound.
- 275 soon the boy was in that much-desired dreamlike plane, where
colors were bright and sounds were loud and odors were sharp and all
things were comforting and appealing. He and the Indian talked for
nearly an hour, and at the end of that time Tommy came to understand
that the great spirits expected him to kill his father four days hence,
Sunday morning.
"That's my day off," said Runningdeer, "so I will not be here to offer
you support. But in fact that's probably the spirits' intention-that
you should have to prove yourself all on your own. At least we'll have
the next few days to plan it together, so that when Sunday comes you'll
be prepared.
,Yes," the boy said dreamily.
"Yes. We'll plan it together."
Later that afternoon, the judge came home from a business meeting that
had followed his court session. Complaining of the heat, he went
straight upstairs to take a shower. Tommy's mother had come home half
an hour earlier. She was in an armchair in the living room, feet on a
low upholstered stool, reading the latest issue of Town Country and
sipping at what she called a "precocktail-hour cocktail." She barely
looked up when the judge leaned in from the hall to announce his
intention of showering.
As soon as his father went upstairs, Tommy went to the kitchen and got a
butcher's knife from the rack by the stove.
Runningdeer was outside, mowing the lawn.
Tommy went into the living room, walked up to his mother, and kissed her
on the cheek. She was surprised by the kiss but more surprised by the
knife, which he rammed into her chest three times. He carried the same
knife upstairs and buried it in the judge's stomach as he stepped out of
the shower.
He went to his room and took off his clothes. There was no blood on his
shoes, little on his jeans, but a lot on his shirt. After he quickly
washed up in his bathroom sink and sluiced all traces of blood down the
drain, he dressed in fresh jeans and shirt. He carefully bundled his
bloody clothes in an old towel and carried them into the attic, where he
hid them in a corner behind a seaman's trunk. He could dispose of them
later.
Downstairs he passed the living room without looking in at his dead
mother. He went straight to the desk in the judge's study and opened
the right bottom drawer. From behind a stack of files, he withdrew the
judge's revolver.
In the kitchen he turned off the overhead fluorescents, so the only
light was what came through the windows, which was bright enough but
left some parts of the room in cool shadows. He put the butcher's knife
on the counter by the refrigerator, squarely in some of those shadows.
He put the revolver on one of the chairs at the table, and pulled the
chair only partway out, so the gun could be reached but not easily seen.
He went out through the French doors that connected the kitchen to the
patio, and yelled for Runningdeer. The Indian did not hear the boy over
the roar of the lawnmower, but happened to look up and see him waving.
Frowning, he shut off the mower and crossed the half-cut
lawn to the
patio.
"Yes, Thomas?" he said, because he knew that the judge and Mrs.
Shaddack were at home.
"My mother needs your help with something," Tommy said.
"She asked me to fetch you."
"My help?"
"Yeah. In the living room."
"What's she want?"
"She needs some help with . . . well, it's easier to show you than to
talk about it."
The Indian followed him through the French doors, into the large
kitchen, past the refrigerator, toward the hall door.
Tommy halted abruptly, turned, and said, "O! yeah, Mother says you'll
need that knife, that one there behind you on the counter, by the
refrigerator.
" Runningdeer turned, saw the knife lying on the shadowed tile top of
the counter, and picked it up. His eyes went very wide.
"Little Chief, there's blood on this knife. There's blood-" Tommy had
already plucked the revolver off the kitchen chair. As the Indian
turned toward him in surprise, Tommy held the gun in both hands and
fired until he emptied the cylinder, though the recoil slammed painfully
through his arm and shoulders, nearly knocking him off his feet. At
least two of the rounds hit Runningdeer, and one of them tore out his
throat.
The Indian went down hard. The knife clattered out of his hand and spun
across the floor.
With one shoe, Tommy kicked the knife closer to the corpse, so it would
definitely look as if the dying man had been wielding it.
- 277 The boy's understanding of the great spirits' message had been
clearer than his mentor's. They wanted him to free himself at once from
everyone who had more than a little power over him the judge, his
mother, and Runningdeer. Only then could he achieve his own lofty
destiny of power.
He had planned the three murders with the coolness of a computer and had
executed them with machinelike determination and efficiency. He felt
nothing. Emotions had not interfered with his actions. Well, in truth,
he was scared and a little excited even exhilarated-but those feelings
had not distracted him.
After staring for a moment at Runningdeer's body, Tommy went to the
kitchen phone, dialed the police, and hysterically reported that the
Indian, shouting of revenge, had killed his parents and that he, Tommy,
had killed the Indian with his father's gun. But he didn't put it so
succinctly. He was so hysterical, they had to pry it from him. In fact
he was so shattered and disoriented by what had happened that they had
to work patiently with him for three or four tedious minutes to get him
to stop babbling and give them his name and address. In his mind he had
practiced hysteria all afternoon, since lunch with the Indian. Now he
was pleased that he sounded so convincing.
He walked out to the front of the house and sat in the driveway and wept
until the police arrived. His tears were more genuine than his
hysteria. He was crying with relief.
He'd seen the moonhawk twice again, later in life. He saw it when he
needed to see it, when he wanted to be reassured that some course of
action he wished to follow was correct.
But he never killed anyone again-because he never needed to.
His maternal grandparents took him into their home and raised him in
another part of Phoenix. Because he had endured such tragedy, they more
or less gave him everything that he wanted, as if to deny him anything
would be unbearably cruel and, just possibly, might be the additional
straw of burden that would break him at last. He was the sole their of
his father's estate, which was fattened by large life-insurance
policies; therefore he was guaranteed a first-rate education and plenty
of capital with which to start out in life after graduation from the
university. The world lay before him, filled with opportunity. And
thanks to Runningdeer, he had the additional advantage of knowing beyond
a doubt that he had a great destiny and that the forces of fate and
heaven wanted him to achieve tremendous power over other men.
Only a madman killed without a compelling need.
With but rare exception, murder simply was not an efficient method of
solving problems.
Now, curled up in the back of the van in Paula Parkins's dark garage,
Shaddack reminded himself that he was destiny's child, that he had seen
the moonhawk three times. He put all fear of Loman Watkins and of
failure out of his mind. He sighed and slipped over the edge of sleep.
He dreamed the familiar dream. The vast machine. Half metal and half
flesh. Steel pistons stroking. Human hearts dependably pumping
lubricants of all kinds. Blood and oil, iron and bone, plastic and
tendon, wires and nerves.
Chrissie was amazed that priests ate so well. The table in the
rectory kitchen was heavily laden with food an immense plateful of
sausages, eggs, a stack of toast, a package of sweetrolls, another of
blueberry muffins, a bowl of hash-brown potatoes that had been warming
in the oven, fresh fruit, and a bag of marshmallows for the hot cocoa.
Father Castelli was pudgy, sure, but Chrissie had always thought of
priests as abstemious in all things, denying themselves at least some of
the pleasures of food and drink just as they denied themselves marriage.
If Father Castelli consumed as much at every meal, he ought to weigh
twice what he did. No, three times as much!
As they ate, she told him about the aliens taking over her folks. In
deference to Father Castelli's predisposition toward spiritual answers,
and as a means of keeping him hooked, she left the door open on demonic
possession, though personally she - 279 much favored the alien-invasion
explanation. She told him what she'd seen in the upstairs hall
yesterday, how she'd been locked in the pantry and, later, had been
pursued by her parents and Tucker in their strange new shapes.
The priest expressed astonishment and concern, and several times he
demanded more details, but he did not once pause significantly in his
eating. In fact he ate with such tremendous gusto that his table
manners suffered. Chrissie was as surprised by his sloppiness as she
was by the size of his appetite. A couple of times he had egg yolk on
his chin, and when she got up the nerve to point it out to him, he made
a joke about it and immediately wiped it off. But a moment later she
looked up, and there was more egg yolk. He dropped a few miniature
marshmallows and didn't seem to care. The front of his black shirt was
speckled with toast crumbs, a couple of tiny pieces of sausage, flecks
of potatoes, sweetroll crumbs, muffin crumbs. . . .
Really, she was beginning to think that Father Castelli was as guilty as
any man had ever been of the sin of gluttony.
But she loved him in spite of his eating habits because he' never once
doubted her sanity or expressed a lack of belief in her wild story. He
listened with interest and utmost seriousness, and seemed genuinely
concerned, even frightened, by what she told him.
"Well, Chrissie, they've made maybe a thousand movie
s about alien
invasions, hostile creatures from other worlds, and they've written
maybe ten thousand books about it, and I've always said that man's mind
can't imagine anything that isn't possible in God's world. So who
knows, hmmmm? Who's to say they might not have landed here in Moonlight
Cove? I'm a film buff, and I've always liked scary movies best, but I
never imagined that I'd find myself in the middle of a real-life scary
movie. He was sincere. He never patronized her.
Although Father Castelli continued to eat with undiminished appetite,
Chrissie finished breakfast and her story at the same time. Because the
kitchen was warm, she was rapidly drying out, and only the seat of her
pants and her running shoes were still really wet. She felt
sufficiently reinvigorated to consider what lay ahead of her now that
she had reached help.
"What next7 We've got to call in the Army, don't you think, Father?"
"Perhaps the Army and the Marines," he said after a moment of
deliberation.
"The Marines might be better at this sort of thing.
" 'Do you think .
'What is it, dear girl?"
"Do you think there's any chance . . . well, any chance of getting my
folks back? The way they were, I mean?"
Dean Koontz - (1989) Page 37