Koontz, Dean R. - Hideaway
Page 1
Hideaway [067-011-5.0]
by: dean r. koontz.
Synopsis:
Hatchford harrison is pronounced dead after drowning in an automobile
accident. When he is resuscitated after eighty minutes of freezing
death, he finds himself psychically linked to a sociopathic killer.
Through the killer's eyes, Hatch sees a grewsome world, including a
collection of cadavers hidden in an abandoned amusement park.
Gradually, Hatch comes to know something else. The killer is also aware
of him and he's coming for Hatch's wife and adopted daughter.
Publisher unknown
Copyright unknown
Isbn unknown
Life is a gift that must be given back, and joy should arise from its
possession.
It is too damned short, and that is a fact.
Hard to accept, this earthly procession to final darkness is a journey
done, circle completed, work of art sublime, a sweet melodic rhyme, a
battle won.
An entire world hummed and bustled beyond the dark ramparts of the
mountains, yet to Lindsey Harrison the night seemed empty, as hollow as
the vacant chambers of a cold, dead heart. Shivering, she slumped
deeper in the passenger seat of the Honda.
Serried ranks of ancient evergreens receded up the slopes that flanked
the highway, parting occasionally to accommodate sparse stands of
winter-stripped maples and birches that poked at the sky with jagged
black branches. However, that vast forest and the formidable rock
formations to which it clung did not reduce the emptiness of the bitter
March night.
As the Honda descended the winding blacktop, the trees and stony
outcroppings seemed to float past as if they were only dream images
without real substance.
Harried by fierce wind, fine dry snow slanted through the headlight
beams. But the storm could not fill the void, either.
The emptiness that Lindsey perceived was internal, not external. The
night was brimming, as ever, with the chaos of creation. Her own soul
was the only hollow thing.
She glanced at Hatch. He was leaning forward, hunched slightly over the
steering wheel, peering ahead with an expression which might be flat and
inscrutable to anyone else but which, after twelve years of marriage,
Lindsey could easily read. An excellent driver, Hatch was not daunted
by poor road conditions. His thoughts, like hers, were no doubt on the
long weekend they had just spent at Big Bear Lake.
Yet again they had tried to recapture the easiness with each other that
they had once known. And again they had failed.
The chains of the past still bound them.
The death of a five-year-old son had incalculable emotional weight. It
pressed on the mind, quickly deflating every moment of buoyancy,
crushing each new blossom of joy. Jimmy had been dead for more than
four and a half years, nearly as long as he had lived, yet his death
weighed as heavily on them now as on the day they had lost him, like
some colossal moon looming in a low orbit overhead.
Squinting through the smeared windshield, past snow-caked wiper blades
that stuttered across the glass, Hatch sighed softly. He glanced at
Lindsey and smiled. It was a pale smile, just a ghost of the real
thing, barren of amusement, tired and melancholy. He seemed about to
say something, changed his mind, and returned his attention to the
highway.
The three lanes of black tone descending, two ascending-were
disappearing under a shifting shroud of snow. The road slipped to the
bottom of the slope and entered a short straightaway leading into a
wide, blind curve. In spite of that flat stretch of pavement, they were
not out of the San Bernardino Mountains yet. The state route eventually
would turn steeply downward once more.
As they followed the curve, the land changed around them: the slope to
their right angled upward more sharply than before, while on the far
side of the road, a black ravine yawned. White metal guardrails marked
that precipice, but they were barely visible in the sheeting snow.
A second or two before they came out of the curve, Lindsey had a
premonition of danger. She said, "Hatch..
Perhaps Hatch sensed trouble, too, for even as Lindsey spoke, he gently
applied the brakes, cutting their speed slightly.
A downgrade straightaway lay beyond the bend, and a beer distributor's
large truck was halted at an angle across two lanes, just fifty or sixty
feet in front of them.
Lindsey tried to say, oh God, but her voice was locked within her.
While making a delivery to one of the area ski resorts, the trucker
evidently had been surprised by the blizzard, which had set in only a
short while ago but half a day ahead of the forecasters' predictions.
Without benefit of snow chains, the big truck tires churned
ineffectively on the icy pavement as the driver struggled desperately to
bring his rig around and get it moving again.
Cursing under his breath but otherwise as controlled as ever, Hatch
eased his foot down on the brake pedal. He dared not jam it to the
floor and risk sending the Honda into a deadly spin.
In response to the glare of the car headlights, the trucker looked
through his side window. Across the rapidly closing gap of night and
snow, Lindsey saw nothing of the man's face but a pallid oval and twin
charry holes where the eyes should have been, a ghostly countenance, as
if some malign spirit was at the wheel of that vehicle. Or Death
himself Hatch was heading for the outermost of the two ascending lanes,
the only part of the highway not blocked.
Lindsey wondered if other traffic was coming uphill, hidden from them by
the truck. Even at reduced speed, if they collided headn, they would
not survive.
In spite of Hatch's best efforts, the Honda began to slide. The tail
end came around to the left, and Lindsey found herself swinging away
from the stranded truck. The smooth, greasy, out-of control motion was
like the transition between scenes in a bad dream. Her stomach twisted
with nausea, and although she was restrained by a safety harness, she
instinctively pressed her right hand against the door and her left
against the dashboard, bracing herself.
"Hang on," Hatch said, turning the wheel where the car wanted to go,
which was his only hope of regaining control.
But the slide became a sickening spin, and the Honda rotated three
hundred and sixty degrees, as if it were a carousel without callio:
around .around.. . until the truck began to come into view again. For
an instant, as they glided downhill, still turning, Lindsey was certain
the car would slip safely past the other vehicle. She could see beyond
the big rig now, and the road below was free of traffic.
Then the front bumper on Hatch's side caught the back of the truck.
Tor
tured metal shrieked.
The Honda shuddered and seemed to explode away from the point of
collision, slamming backward into the guardrail. Lindsey's teeth
clacked together hard enough to ignite sparks of pain in her jaws, all
the way into her temples, and the hand braced against the dashboard bent
painfully at the wrist. Simultaneously, the strap of the shoulder
harness, which stretched diagonally across her chest from right shoulder
to left hip, abruptly cinched so tight that her breath burst from her.
The car rebounded from the guardrail, not with sufficient momentum to
reconnect with the truck but with so much torque that it pivoted three
hundred and sixty degrees again. As they spun-glided past the truck,
Hatch fought for control, but the steering wheel jerked erratically back
and forth, tearing through his hands so violently that he cried out as
his palms were abraded.
Suddenly the moderate gradient appeared precipitously steep, like the
water-greased spillway of an amusement-park flume ride. Lindsey would
have screamed if she could have drawn breath. But although the safety
strap had loosened, a diagonal line of pain still cut across her chest,
making it impossible to inhale. Then she was rattled by a vision of the
Honda skating in a long glissade to the next bend in the road, crashing
through the guardrail, tumbling out into the void-and the image was so
horrifying that it was like a blow, knocking breath back into her.
As the Honda came out of the second rotation, the entire driver's side
slammed into the guardrail, and they slid thirty or forty feet without
losing contact. To the accompaniment of a grinding-screeching-scraping
of metal against metal, showers of yellow sparks plumed up, mingling
with the falling snow, like swarms of summer fireflies that had flown
through a time warp into the wrong season.
The car shuddered to a halt, canted up slightly at the front left
corner, evidently hooked on a guard post. For an instant the resultant
silence was so deep that Lindsey was half stunned by it; she shattered
it with an explosive exhalation.
She had never before experienced such an overwhelming sense of relief.
Then the car moved again.
It began to tilt to the left. The guardrail was giving way, perhaps
weakened by corrosion or by the erosion of the highway shoulder beneath
it.
"Out!" Hatch shouted, frantically fumbling with the release on his
safety harness.
Lindsey didn't even have time to pop loose of her own harness or grab
the door handle before the railing cracked apart and the Honda slipped
into the ravine. Even as it was happening, she couldn't believe it.
The brain acknowledged the approach of death, while the heart stubbornly
insisted on immortality. In almost five years she had not adjusted to
Jimmy's death, so she was not easily going to accept the imminence of
her own demise.
In a jangle of detached posts and railings, the Honda slid sideways
along the ice-rusted slope, then flipped over as the embankment grew
steeper.
Gasping for breath, heart pounding, wrenched painfully from side to side
in her harness, Lindsey hoped for a tree, a rock outcropping, anything
that would halt their fall, but the embankment seemed clear.
She was not sure how often the car rolled-maybe only twice-because up
and down and left and right lost all meaning. Her head banged into the
ceiling almost hard enough to knock her out. She didn't know if she'd
been thrown upward or if the roof had caved in to meet her, so she tried
to slump in her seat, afraid the roof might crumple further on the next
roll and crush her skull. The headlights slashed at the night, and from
the wounds spouted torrents of snow. Then the windshield burst,
showering her with minutely fragmented safety glass, and abruptly she
was plunged into total darkness. Apparently the headlights blinked off
and the dashboard lights, reflected in Hatch's sweat-slicked face. The
car rolled onto its roof again and stayed there. In that inverted
posture it sledded farther into the seemingly bottomless ravine, with
the thunderous noise of a thousand tons of coal pouring down a steel
chute.
The gloom was utterly tenebrous, seamless, as if she and Hatch were not
outdoors but in some windowless funhouse, rocketing down a rollercoaster
track. Even the snow, which usually had a natural phosphorescence, was
wind drove them through the empty windshield frame, but she could not
see them even as they frosted her lashes.
Struggling to quell a rising panic, she wondered if she had been blinded
by the imploding glass.
Blindness.
That was her special fear. She was an artist. Her talent took
inspiration from what her eyes observed, and her wonderfully dexterous
hands rendered inspiration into art with the critical judgment of those
eyes to guide them. What did a blind painter paint? What could she
hope to create if suddenly deprived of the sense that she relied upon
the most?
Just as she started to scream, the car hit bottom and rolled back onto
its wheels, landing upright with less impact than she had anticipated.
It came to a halt almost gently, as if on an immense pillow.
"Hatch?" Her voice was hoarse.
After the cacophonous roar of their plunge down the ravine wall, she
felt half deaf, not sure if the preternatural silence around her was
real or only perceived.
"Hatch?"
She looked to her left, where he ought to have been, but she could not
see him-or anything else.
She was blind.
"Oh, God, no. Please."
She was thirsty, too. The car seemed to be turning, wallowing like an
airborne kite dipping and rising in the thermal currents of a summer
sky.
"Hatch!"
No response.
Her light-headedness increased. The car rocked and wallowed worse than
ever. Lindsey was afraid she would faint. If Hatch was injured, he
might bleed to death while she was unconscious and unable to help him.
She reached out blindly and found him crumpled in the driver's seat.
His head was bent toward her, resting against his own shoulder. She
touched his face, and he did not move. Something warm and sticky
covered his right cheek and temple. Blood. From a head injury. With
trembling the hot exhalation of his breath between his slightly parted
lips.
He was unconscious, not dead.
Fumbling in frustration with the release mechanism on her safety
harness, Lindsey heard new sounds that she could not identify. A soft
slapping. Hungry licking. An eerie, liquid chuckling. For a moment
she froze, straining to identify the source of those unnerving noises.
Without warning the Honda tipped forward, admitting a cascade of icy
water through the broken windshield onto Lindsey's lap. She gasped in
surprise as the arctic bath chilled her to the marrow, and red she was
not lightheaded after all. The car was moving. It was afloat. They
had landed in a lake or river. Probably a river. The placid surface of
a lake would not have been so active.
The shock of the cold water briefly paralyzed her and made her wince
with pain, but when she opened her eyes, she could see again. The
Honda's headlights were, indeed, extinguished, but the dials and gauges
in the dashboard still glowed. She must have been suffering from
hysterical blindness rather than genuine physical damage.
She couldn't see much, but there was not much to see at the bottom of
the night-raped ravine. Splinters of dimly glimmering glass rimmed the
broken-out windshield. Outside, the oily water was revealed only by a
sinuous, silvery phosphorescence that highlighted its purling surface
and imparted a dark obsidian sparkle to the jewels of ice that floated
in tangled necklaces atop it. The riverbanks would have been lost in
absolute blackness but for the ghostly raiments of snow that cloaked the
otherwise naked rocks, earth, and brush. The Honda appeared to be
motoring through the river: water poured halfway up its hood before
parting in a "V" and streaming away to either side as it might from the
prow of a ship, lapping at the sills of the side windows. They were
being swept downstream, where eventually the currents were certain to
turn more turbulent, bringing them to rapids or rocks or worse. At a
glance, Lindsey grasped the extremity of their situation, but she was
still so relieved by the remission of her blindness that she was