Midnight
Dean R. Koontz
The citizens of Moonlight Cove, California, are changing. Some are
losing touch with their deepest emotions. Others are surrendering to
their wildest urges. And the few who remain unchanged are absolutely
terrified - if not brutally murdered in the dead of night.
Dean Koontz, the bestselling master of suspense, invites you into the
shocking world of Moonlight Cove - where four unlikely survivors
confront the darkest realms of human nature.
Here is the ultimate masterpiece of fear by the one and only Dean Koontz
"BLOOD-CHILLING.. . KOONTZ PLOWS NEW, EVEN MORE CHILLING GROUND."
MORE THAN 100 MILLION COPIES OF DEAN KOONTZ NOVELS IN PRINT!
DON'T MISS HIS new NOVEL DRAGON TEARS AVAILABLE FROM G P PUTNAM'S SONS
MIDNIGHT A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
G. P. Putnam's Son,; edition / January 1989 Berkley edition / November
1989 All rights reserved.
Copyright (C) 1989 by Nkui, Inc.
ISBN 0-425-11870-3
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
"To Ed and Pat 'Thomas of the Book Carnival, who are such nice people
that sometimes I suspect they're not really human but aliens from
another, better world
Part One
ALONG THE NIGHT COAST Where eerie figures caper to some midnight music
that only they can hear.
-The Book of Counted Sorrows
Janice Capshaw liked to run at night.
Nearly every evening between ten and eleven o'clock, Janice put on her
gray sweats with the reflective blue stripes across the back and chest,
tucked her hair under a headband, laced up her New Balance shoes, and
ran six miles. She was thirty-five but could have passed for
twenty-five, and she attributed her glow of youth to her
twenty-year-long commitment to running.
Sunday night, September 21, she left her house at ten o'clock and ran
four blocks north to Ocean Avenue, the main street through Moonlight
Cove, where she turned left and headed downhill toward the public beach.
The shops were closed and dark. Aside from the faded-brass glow of the
sodium-vapor streetlamps, the only lights were in some apartments above
the stores, at Knight's Bridge Tavern, and at Our Lady of Mercy Catholic
Church, which was open twenty-four hours a day. No cars were on the
street, and not another person was in sight. Moonlight Cove always had
been a quiet little town, shunning the tourist trade that other coastal
communities so avidly pursued. Janice liked the slow, measured pace of
life there, though sometimes lately the town seemed not merely sleepy
but dead.
As she ran down the sloping main street, through pools of amber light,
through layered night shadows cast by wind-sculpted cypresses and pines,
she saw no movement other than her own and the sluggish, serpentine
advance of the thin fog through the windless air. The only sounds were
the soft slap-slap of her rubber-soled running shoes on the sidewalk and
her labored breathing. From all available evidence, she might have been
the last person on earth, engaged upon a solitary post-Armageddon
marathon.
She disliked getting up at dawn to run before work, and in the summer it
was more pleasant to put in her six miles when the heat of the day had
passed, though neither an abhorrence of early hours nor the heat was the
real reason for her nocternal preference; she ran on the same schedule
in the winter. She exercised at that hour simply because she liked the
night.
Even as a child, she had preferred night to day, had enjoyed sitting out
in the yard after sunset, under the star-speckled sky, listening to
frogs and crickets. Darkness soothed. It softened the sharp edges of
the world, toned down the too-harsh colors. With the coming of
twilight, the sky seemed to recede; the universe expanded. The night was
bigger than the day, and in its realm, life seemed to have more
possibilities.
Now she reached the Ocean Avenue loop at the foot of the hill, sprinted
across the parking area and onto the beach. Above the thin fog, the sky
held only scattered clouds, and the full moon's silver-yellow radiance
penetrated the mist, providing sufficient illumination for her to see
where she was going. Some nights the fog was too thick and the sky too
overcast to permit running on the shore. But now the white foam of the
incoming breakers surged out of the black sea in ghostly phosphorescent
ranks, and the wide crescent of sand gleamed palely between the lapping
tide and the coastal hills, and the mist itself was softly aglow with
reflections of the autumn moonlight.
As she ran across the beach to the firmer, damp sand at the water's edge
and turned south, intending to run a mile out to the point of the cove,
Janice felt wonderfully alive.
Richard-her late husband, who had succumbed to cancer three years
ago-had said that her circadian rhythms were so post-midnight focused
that she was more than just a night person.
"You'd probably love being a vampire, living between sunset and dawn,"
he'd said, and she'd said, "I vant to suck your blood." God, she had
loved him. Initially she worried that the life of a Lutheran minister's
wife would be boring, but it never was, not for a moment. Three years
after his death, she still missed him every day-and even more at night.
He had been suddenly, as she was passing a pair of forty-foot, twisted
cypresses that had grown in the middle of the beach, halfway between the
hills and the waterline, Janice was sure that she was not alone in the
night and fog. She saw no movement, and she was unaware of any sound
other than her own footsteps, raspy - 5 breathing, and thudding
heartbeat; only instinct told her that she had company.
She was not alarmed at first, for she thought another runner was sharing
the beach. A few local fitness fanatics occasionally ran at night, not
by choice, as was the case with her, but of necessity. Two or three
times a month she encountered them along her route.
But when she stopped and turned and looked back the way she had come,
she saw only a deserted expanse of moonlit sand, a curved ribbon of
luminously foaming surf, and the dim but familiar shapes of rock
formations and scattered trees that thrust up here and there along the
strand. The only sound was the low rumble of the breakers.
Figuring that her instinct was unreliable and that she was alone, she
headed south again, along the beach, quickly finding her rhythm. She
went only fifty yards, however, before she saw movement from the corner
of her eye, thirty feet to her left a swift shape, cloaked by night and
mist, darting from behind a sandbound cypress to a weather-polished rock
formation, where it slipped out of sight again.
Janice halted and, squinting toward the ro
ck, wondered what she had
glimpsed. It had seemed larger than a dog, perhaps as big as a man, but
having seen it only peripherally, she had absorbed no details. The
formation-twenty feet long, as low as four feet in some places and as
high as ten feet in others-had been shaped by wind and rain until it
resembled a mound of half-melted wax, more than large enough to conceal
whatever she had seen.
"Someone there?" she asked.
She expected no answer and got none.
She was uneasy but not afraid. If she had seen something more than a
trick of fog and moonlight, it surely had been an animal-and not a dog
because a dog would have come straight to her and would not have been so
secretive. As there were no natural predators along the coast worthy of
her fear, she was curious rather than frightened.
Standing still, sheathed in a film of sweat, she began to feel the chill
in the air. To maintain high body heat, she ran in place, watching the
rocks, expecting to see an animal break from that cover and sprint
either north or south along the beach.
Some people in the area kept horses, and the Fosters even ran a breeding
and boarding facility near the sea about two and a half miles from
there, beyond the northern flank of the cove. Perhaps one of their
charges had gotten loose. The thing she'd seen from the corner of her
eye had not been as big as a horse, though it might have been a pony. On
the other hand, wouldn't she have heard a pony's thudding hoofbeats even
in the soft sand? Of course, if it was one of the Fosters' horses-or
someone else's-she ought to attempt to recover it or at least let them
know where it could be found.
At last, when nothing moved, she ran to the rocks and circled them.
Against the base of the formation and within the clefts in the stone
were a few velvet-smooth shadows, but for the most part all was revealed
in the milky, shimmering, lunar glow, and no animal was concealed there.
She never gave serious thought to the possibility that she had seen
someone other than another runner or an animal, that she was in real
danger. Aside from an occasional act of vandalism or burglary-which was
always the work of one of a handful of disaffected teenagers-and traffic
accidents, local police had little to occupy them. Crimes against
person-rape, assault, murder-were rare in a town as small and tightly
knit as Moonlight Cove; it was almost as if, in this pocket of the
coast, they were living in a different and more benign age from that in
which the rest of California dwelt.
Rounding the formation and returning to the firmer sand near the roiling
surf, Janice decided that she had been snookered by moonlight and mist,
two adept deceivers. The movement had been imaginary; she was alone on
the shore.
She noted that the fog was rapidly thickening, but she continued along
the crescent beach toward the cove's southern point. She was certain
that she would get there and be able to return to the foot of Ocean
Avenue before visibility declined too drastically.
A breeze sprang up from the sea and churned the incoming fog, which
seemed to solidify from a gauzy vapor into a white sludge, as if it were
milk being transformed into butter. By the time Janice reached the
southern end of the dwindling strand, the breeze was stiffening and the
surf was more agitated as well, casting up sheets of spray as each wave
hit the piled rocks of - 7 the man-made breakwater that had been added
to the natural point of the cove.
Someone stood on that twenty-foot-high wall of boulders, looking down at
her. Janice glanced up just as a cloak of mist shifted and as moonlight
silhouetted him.
Now fear seized her.
Though the stranger was directly in front of her, she could not see his
face in the gloom. He seemed tall, well over six feet, though that
could have been a trick of perspective.
Other than his outline, only his eyes were visible, and they were what
ignited her fear. They were a softly radiant amber like the eyes of an
animal revealed in headlight beams.
For a moment, peering directly up at him, she was transfixed by his
gaze. Backlit by the moon, looming above her, standing tall and
motionless upon ramparts of rock, with sea spray exploding to the right
of him, he might have been a carved stone idol with luminous jewel eyes,
erected by some demon-worshiping cult in a dark age long passed. Janice
wanted( to turn and run, but she could not move, was rooted to the sand,
in the grip of that paralytic terror she had previously felt only in
nightmares.
She wondered if she were awake. Perhaps her late-night run was indeed
part of a nightmare, and perhaps she was actually asleep in bed, safe
beneath warm blankets.
Then the man made a queer low growl, partly a snarl of anger but also a
hiss, partly a hot and urgent cry of need but also cold, cold.
And he moved.
He dropped to all fours and began to descend the high breakwater, not as
an ordinary man would climb down those Jumbled rocks but with catlike
swiftness and grace. In seconds he would be upon her.
Janice broke her paralysis, turned back on her own tracks, and ran
toward the entrance to the public beach-a full mile away. Houses with
lighted windows stood atop the steep-walled bluff that overlooked the
cove, and some of them had steps leading down to the beach, but she was
not confident of finding those stairs in the darkness. She did not
waste any energy on a scream, for she doubted anyone would hear her.
Besides, if screaming slowed her down, even only slightly, she might be
overtaken and silenced before anyone from town could respond to her
cries.
Her twenty-year commitment to running had never been more important than
it was now; the issue was no longer good health but, she sensed, her
very survival. She tucked her arms close to her sides, lowered her
head, and sprinted, going for speed rather than endurance, because she
felt that she only needed to get to the lower block of Ocean Avenue to
be safe. She did not believe the man-or whatever the hell he was-would
continue to pursue her into that lamplit and populated street.
High-altitude, striated clouds rushed across a portion of the lunar
face. The moonlight dimmed, brightened, dimmed, and brightened in an
irregular rhythm, pulsing through the rapidly clotting fog in such a way
as to create a host of phantoms that repeatedly startled her and
appeared to be keeping pace with her on all sides. The eerie, palpitant
light contributed to the dreamlike quality of the chase, and she was
half convinced that she was really in bed, fast asleep, but she did not
halt or look over her shoulder because, dream or not, the man with the
amber eyes was still behind her.
She had covered half the strand between the point of the cove and Ocean
Avenue, her confidence growing with each step, when she realized that
two of the phantoms in the fog were not phantoms after all. One was
about twenty feet to her right and ran erect lik
e a man; the other was
on her left, less than fifteen feet away, splashing through the edge of
the foam-laced sea, loping on all fours, the size of a man but certainly
not a man, for no man could be so fleet and graceful in the posture of a
dog. She had only a general impression of their shape and size, and she
could not see their faces or any details of them other than their oddly
luminous eyes.
Somehow she knew that neither of these pursuers was the man whom she had
seen on the breakwater. He was behind her, either running erect or
loping on all fours. She was nearly encircled.
Janice made no attempt to imagine who or what they might be. Analysis of
this weird experience would have to wait for later; now she simply
accepted the existence of the impossible, for as the widow of a preacher
and a deeply spiritual woman, she had the flexibility to bend with the
unknown and unearthly when confronted by it.
- 9 Powered by the fear that had formerly paralyzed her, she picked up
her pace. But so did her pursuers.
She heard a peculiar whimpering and only slowly realized that she was
listening to her own tortured voice.
Evidently excited by her terror, the phantom forms around her began to
keen. Their voices rose and fell, fluctuating between a shrill,
protracted bleat and a guttural gnarl. Worst of all, punctuating those
ululant cries were bursts of words, too, spoken raspily, urgently "Get
the bitch, get the bitch, get the bitch - - - " What in God's name were
they? Not men, surely, yet they could stand like men and speak like
men, so what else could they be but men?
Dean Koontz - (1989) Page 1
