with their mouths open. Some swallowed with such force that Sam could
actually hear them. They were red-faced and perspiring, no doubt from
jalapenio-spiced sauces, but not one offered a comment - 47 like, "Boy,
this is hot," or "Pretty good grub," or even the most elementary
conversational gambit to his companions.
To the third of the customers who were happily jabbering away at one
another and progressing through their meals at an ordinary pace, the
almost fevered eating of the majority apparently went unnoticed. Bad
table manners were not rare, of course; at least a quarter of the diners
in any town would give Miss Manners a stroke if she dared to eat with
them. Nevertheless, the gluttony of many of the customers in the Perez
Family Restaurant seemed astonishing to Sam. He supposed that the
polite diners were inured to the behavior of the other patrons because
they had witnessed it so many times before.
Could the cool sea air of the northern coast be that appetite enhancing?
Did some peculiar ethnic background or fractured social history in
Moonlight Cove mitigate against the universal development of commonly
accepted Western table manners?
What he saw in the Perez Family Restaurant seemed a puzzle for which any
sociologist, desperately seeking a doctoral thesis subject, would be
eager to find a solution. After a while, however, Sam had to turn his
attention away from the more ravenous patrons because their behavior was
killing his own appetite.
Later, when he was figuring the tip and putting money on the table to
cover his bill, he surveyed the crowd again, and this time realized that
none of the heavy eaters was drinking beer, margaritas, or anything
alcoholic. They had ice water or Cokes, and some were drinking milk,
glass after glass, but every last man and woman of these gourmands
seemed to be a teetotaler. He might not have noticed their temperance
if he had not been a cop-and a good one-trained not only to observe but
to think about what he observed.
He remembered the scarcity of drinkers at Knight's Bridge tavern.
What ethnic culture or religious group inculcated a disdain for alcohol
while encouraging mannerlessness and gluttony?
He could think of none.
By the time Sam finished his beer and got up to leave, he was telling
himself that he'd overreacted to a few crude people, that this queer
fixation on food was limited to a handful of patrons and not as
widespread as it seemed. After all, from his table in the back, he had
not been able to see the entire room and every last one of the
customers. But on his way out, he passed a table where three attractive
and well-dressed young women were eating hungrily, none of them
speaking, their eyes glazed; two of them had flecks of food on their
chins, of which they seemed oblivious, and the third had so many
com-chip crumbs sprinkled across the front of her royal-blue sweater
that she appeared to be breading herself with the intention of going
into the kitchen, climbing into an oven, and becoming food.
He was glad to get out in the clean night air.
Sweating both from the chili-spiced dishes and the heat in the
restaurant, he had wanted to take his jacket off, but he had not been
able to do so because of the gun he was packing in a shoulder holster.
Now he relished the chilling fog that was being harried eastward by a
gentle but steady breeze.
Chrissie saw them enter the drainage channel, and for a moment she
thought they were all going to clamber up the far side of it and off
across the meadow in the direction she had been heading. Then one of
them turned toward the mouth of the culvert. The figure approached the
drain on all fours, in a few stealthy and sinuous strides. Though
Chrissie could see nothing more of it than a shadowy shape, she had
trouble believing that this thing was either one of her parents or the
man called Tucker. But who else could it be?
Entering the concrete tunnel, the predator peered forward into the
gloom. Its eyes shone softly amber-green, not as bright here as in
moonlight, dimmer than glow-in-the-dark paint, but vaguely radiant.
Chrissie wondered how well it could see in absolute darkness. Surely its
gaze could not penetrate eighty or a hundred feet of - 49 lightless pipe
to the place where she crouched. Vision of that caliber would be
SUPERNATURAL.
it stared straight at her.
Then again, who was to say that what she was dealing with here was not
SUPERNATURAL? Perhaps her parents had become . . .
werewolves.
She was soaked in sour sweat. She hoped the stench of the dead animal
would screen her body odor.
Rising from all fours into a crouch, blocking most of the silvery
moonlight at the drain entrance, the stalker slowly came forward.
Its heavy breathing was amplified by the curved concrete walls of the
culvert. Chrissie breathed shallowly through her open mouth lest she
reveal her presence.
Suddenly, only ten feet into the tunnel, the stalker spoke in a raspy,
whispery voice and with such urgency that the words were almost run
together in a single long string of syllables "Chrissie, you there, you,
you? Come me, Chrissie, come me, come, want you, want, want, need, my
Chrissie, my Chrissie.
" That bizarre, frantic voice gave rise in Chrissie's mind to a
terrifying image of a creature that was part lizard, part wolf, part
human, part something unidentifiable. Yet she suspected that its actual
appearance was even worse than anything she could imagine.
"Help you, want help you, help, now, come me, come, come. You there,
there, you there?"
The worst thing about the voice was that, in spite of its cold hoarse
note and whispery tone, in spite of its alienness, it was familiar.
Chrissie recognized it as her mother's. Changed, yes, but her mother's
voice just the same.
Chrissie's stomach was cramped with fear, but she was filled with
another pain, too, that for a moment she could not identify. Then she
realized that she ached with loss; she missed her mother, wanted her
mother back, her real mother. If she'd had one of those ornate silver
crucifixes like they always used in the fright films, she probably would
have revealed herself, advanced on this hateful thing, and demanded that
it surrender possession of her mother. A crucifix probably would not
work because nothing in real life was as easy as in the movies; besides,
whatever had happened to her parents was far stranger than vampires and
werewolves and demons jumped up from hell. But if she'd had a crucifix,
she would have tried it anyway.
"Death, death, smell death, stink, death . . .
" The mother-thing quickly advanced into the tunnel until it came to the
place where Chrissie had stepped in a slippery, putrefying mass. The
brightness of the shining eyes was directly related to the nearness of
moonlight, for now they dimmed. Then the creature lowered its gaze to
the dead animal on the culvert floor.
From beyond the m
outh of the drain came the sound of something
descending into the ditch. Footfalls and the clatter of stones were
followed by another voice, equally as fearsome as that of the others the
stalker now hunched over the dead animal. Calling into the pipe, it
said, "She there, there, she? Whatfound, what, what?"
". . . raccoon .
"What, what it, what?
"Dead raccoon, rotten, maggots, maggots, " the first one said.
Chrissie was stricken by the macabre fear that she had left a
tennis-shoe imprint in the rotting muck of the dead raccoon.
"Chrissie ?
" the second asked as it ventured into the culvert Tucker's voice.
Evidently her father was searching for her across the meadow or in the
next section of the forest Both stalkers were fidgeting constantly.
Chrissie could hear them scraping-claws?-against the concrete floor of
the pipe. Both sounded panicky, too. No, not panicky, really, because
no fear was audible in their voices. Frantic. Frenzied. It was as if
an engine in each of them was racing faster, faster, almost out of
control.
"Chrissie there, she there, she?
" Tucker asked.
The mother-thing raised its gaze from the dead raccoon and peered
straight at Chrissie through the lightless tunnel.
You can't see me, Chrissie thought-prayed. I'm invisible.
The radiance of the stalker's eyes had faded to twin spots of finished
silver.
Chrissie held her breath.
'Tucker said, "Got to eat, eat, want eat.
The creature that had been her mother said, "Find girl, girl, find her
first, then eat, then.
" They sounded as if they were wild animals magically gifted with crude
speech.
- 51 "Now, now, burning it up, eat now, now, burning, " Tucker said
urgently, insistently.
Chrissie was shaking so badly that she was half afraid they would hear
the shudders that rattled her.
Tucker said, "Burning it up, little animals in meadow, hear them, smell
them, track, eat, eat, now.
Chrissie held her breath.
,Nothing here, " the mother-thing said.
"Only maggots, stink, go, eat, then find her, eat, eat, then find her,
go.
" Both stalkers retreated from the culvert and vanished.
Chrissie dared to breathe.
After waiting a minute to be sure they were really gone, she turned and
troll-walked deeper into the upsloping culvert, blindly feeling the
walls as she went, hunting a side passage. She must have gone two
hundred yards before she found what she wanted a tributary drain, half
the size of the main line. She slid into it, feetfirst and on her back,
then squirmed onto her belly and faced out toward the bigger tunnel.
That was where she would spend the night. If they returned to the
culvert to see if they could detect her scent in the cleaner air beyond
the decomposing raccoon, she would be out of the downdraught that swept
the main line, and they might not smell her. into She was heartened
because their failure to probe deeper the culvert was proof that they
were not possessed of SUPERNATURAL powers, neither all-seeing nor
all-knowing. They were abnormally strong and quick, strange and
terrifying, but they could make mistakes too. She began to think that
when daylight came she had a fifty-fifty chance of getting out of the
woods and finding help before she was caught.
In the lights outside of the Perez Family Restaurant, Sam Booker checked
his watch. Only 7 10.
He went for a walk along Ocean Avenue, building up the courage to call
Scott in Los Angeles. The prospect of that conversation with his son
soon preoccupied him and drove all thoughts of the mannerless,
gluttonous diners out of his mind.
At 730, he stopped at a telephone booth near a Shell service station at
the corner of Juniper Lane and Ocean Avenue. He used his credit card to
make a long-distance call to his house in Sherman Oaks.
At sixteen Scott thought he was mature enough to be home alone when his
father was away on an assignment. Sam did not entirely agree and
preferred that the boy stay with his Aunt Edna. But Scott won his way
by making life pure hell for Edna, so Sam was reluctant to put her
through that ordeal.
He had repeatedly drilled the boy in safety procedures-keep all doors
and windows locked; know where the fire extinguishers are; know how to
get out of the house from any room in an earthquake or other
emergency-and had taught him how to use a handgun. In Sam's judgment
Scott was still too immature to be home alone for days at a time; but at
least the boy was well prepared for every contingency.
The number rang nine times. Sam was about to hang up, guiltily relieved
that he'd failed to get through, when Scott finally answered.
"Hello. It's me, Scott. Dad."
"Y?"
Heavy-metal rock was playing at high volume in the background. He was
probably in his room, his stereo cranked up so loud that the windows
shook.
- 53 Sam said, "Could you turn the music down?"
"I can hear you," Scott mumbled.
"Maybe so, but I'm having trouble hearing you."
" I don't have anything to say, anyway."
"Please turn it down," Sam said, with emphasis on the "Please."
Scott dropped the receiver, which clattered on his nightstand. The sharp
sound hurt Sam's ear. The boy lowered the volume on the stereo but only
slightly. He picked up the phone and said, " Yeah?
"
" How're you doing?"
"Okay."
"Everything all right there?"
"Why shouldn't it be?"
"I just asked."
Sullenly "If you called to see if I'm having a party, don't worry. I'm
not."
Sam counted to three, giving himself time to keep his voice under
control. Thickening fog swirled past the glass-walled phone booth. "How
was school today?"
"You think I didn't go?"
"I know you went."
"You don't trust me."
"I trust you," Sam lied.
"You think I didn't go."
"Did you?"
,Yeah. So how was it?"
"Ridiculous. The same old shit."
"Scott, please, you know I've asked you not to use that kind of language
when you're talking to me," Sam said, realizing that he was being forced
into a confrontation against his will.
"So sorry. Same old poop," Scott said in such a way that he might have
been referring either to the day at school or to Sam.
"It's pretty country up here," Sam said.
The boy did not reply.
"Wooded hillsides slope right down to the ocean."
"So?"
Following the advice of the family counselor whom he and Scott had been
seeing both together and separately, Sam clenched his teeth, counted to
three again, and tried another approach. "Did you have dinner yet?"
"Yeah.
"Do your homework?"
"Don't have any."
Sam hesitated, then decided to let it pass. The counselor, Dr.
Adamski, would have been proud of such tolerance and cool self-control.
Beyond the phone
booth, the Shell station's lights acquired multiple
halos, and the town faded into the slowly congealing mist. At last Sam
said, "What're you doing this evening?"
"I was listening to music."
Sometimes it seemed to Sam that the music was part of what had turned
the boy sour. That pounding, frenetic, unmelodic heavy-metal rock was a
collection of monotonous chords and even more monotonous atonal rims, so
soul-less and mind-numbing that it might have been the music produced by
a civilization of intelligent machines long after man had passed from
the face of the earth. After a while Scott had lost interest in most
heavy-metal bands and switched allegiance to U2, but their simplistic
social consciousness was no match for nihilism. Soon he grew interested
in heavy-metal again, but the second time around he focused on black
metal, those bands espousing-or using dramatic trappings of-satanism; he
became increasingly selfinvolved, antisocial, and somber. On more than
one occasion, Sam had considered confiscating the kid's record
collection, smashing it to bits, and disposing of it, but that seemed an
absurd overreaction. After all, Sam himself had been sixteen when the
Dean Koontz - (1989) Page 7
