Dean Koontz - (1989)

by Midnight(Lit)

  carpeted in the same hideous orange nylon as was the upper hall. The

  decorator had a clown's taste for bright colors. It made her squint.

  She would have preferred to be a more successful filmmaker, if only

  because she could have afforded lodgings that did not assault the

  senses. Of course, this was the only motel in Moonlight Cove, so even

  wealth could not have saved her from that eye-blistering orange glare.

  By the time she walked to the end of the hall, pushed through another

  fire door, and stepped into the bottom of the north stairwell, the sight

  of gray concrete block walls and concrete steps was positively restful

  and appealing.

  There, the ice-maker was working. She slid open the top of the chest

  and dipped the plastic bucket into the deep bin, filling it with

  half-moon pieces of ice. She set the full bucket atop the machine. As

  she closed the chest, she heard the door at the head of the stairs open

  with a faint but protracted squeak of hinges.

  She stepped to the soda vendor to get her Coke, expecting someone to

  descend from the second floor. Only as she dropped a third quarter into

  the slot did she realize something was sneaky about the way the overhead

  door opened the long, slow squeak . . . as if someone knew the hinges

  were unoiled, and was trying to minimize the noise.

  With one finger poised over the Diet Coke selection button, Tessa

  hesitated, listening.

  Nothing.

  Cool concrete silence.

  She felt exactly as she had felt on the beach earlier in the evening,

  when she had heard that strange and distant cry. Now, as then, her

  flesh prickled.

  She had the crazy notion that someone was on the landing above, holding

  the fire door open now that he had come through it. He was waiting for

  her to push the button, so the squeak of the upper door's hinges would

  be covered by the clatter-thump of the can rolling into the dispensing

  trough.

  Many modern women, conscious of the need to be tough in a tough world,

  would have been embarrassed by such apprehension and would have shrugged

  off the intuitive chill. But Tessa knew herself well. She was not

  given to hysteria or paranoia, so she did not wonder for a moment if

  Janice's death had left her overly sensitive, did not doubt her mental

  image of a hostile presence at the upper landing, out of sight around

  the turn.

  Three doors led from the bottom of that concrete shaft. The first was

  in the south wall, through which she had come and through which she

  could return to the ground-floor corridor. The second was in the west

  wall, which opened to the back of the motel, where a narrow walk or

  service passage evidently lay - 85 between the building and the edge of

  the sea-facing bluff, and the third was in the east wall, through which

  she probably could reach the parking lot in front of the motel. Instead

  of pushing the vendor button to get her Coke, leaving her full ice

  bucket as well, she stepped quickly and quietly to the south door and

  pulled it open.

  She glimpsed movement at the distant end of the ground-floor hall.

  Someone ducked back through that other fire door into the south

  stairwell. She didn't see much of him, only his shadowy form, for he

  had not been on the orange carpet in the corridor itself but at the far

  threshold, and therefore able to slip out of sight in a second. The

  door eased shut in his wake.

  At least two men-she presumed they were men, not women were stalking

  her.

  overhead, in her own stairwell, the unoiled hinges of that door produced

  a barely audible, protracted rasp and squeal. The other man evidently

  had tired of waiting for her to make a covering noise.

  She could not go into the hallway. They'd trap her between them.

  Though she could scream in the hope of calling forth other guests and

  frightening these men away, she hesitated because she was afraid the

  motel might be as deserted as it seemed. Her scream might elicit no

  help, while letting the stalkers know that she was aware of them and

  that they no longer had to be cautious.

  Someone was stealthily descending the stairs above her.

  Tessa turned away from the corridor, stepped to the east door, and ran

  out into the foggy night, along the side of the building, into the

  parking lot beyond which lay Cypress Lane. Gasping, she sprinted past

  the front of Cove Lodge to the motel office, which was adjacent to the

  now closed coffee shop.

  The office was open, the doorstep was bathed in a mist-diffused glow of

  pink and yellow neon, and the man behind the counter was the same one

  who had registered her hours ago. He was tall and slightly plump, in

  his fifties, clean-shaven and neatly barbered if a little rumpled

  looking in brown corduroy slacks and a green and red flannel shirt. He

  put down a magazine, lowered the volume of the country music on the

  radio, got up from his spring-backed desk chair, and stood at the

  counter, frowning at her while she told him, a bit too breathlessly,

  what had happened.

  "Well, this isn't the big city, ma'am," he said when she had finished.

  "It's a peaceful place, Moonlight Cove. You don't have to worry about

  that sort of thing here."

  "But it happened," she insisted, nervously glancing out at the

  neon-painted mist that drifted through the darkness beyond the office

  door and window.

  "Oh, I'm sure you saw and heard someone, but you put the wrong spin on

  it. We do have a couple other guests. That's who you saw and heard,

  and they were probably just getting a Coke or some ice, like you.

  " He had a warm, grandfatherly demeanor when he smiled. "This place can

  seem a little spooky when there aren't many guests. "Listen, mister . .

  ."

  "Quinn. Gordon Quinn."

  "Listen, Mr. Quinn, it wasn't that way at all." She felt like a

  skittish and foolish female, though she knew she was no such thing.

  "I didn't mistake innocent guests for muggers and rapists. I'm not an

  hysterical woman. These guys were up to no damn good. Well . . . all

  right. I think you're wrong, but let's have a look." Quinn came

  through the gate in the counter, to her side of the office.

  "Are you just going like that?" she asked.

  "Like what?"

  "Unarmed?"

  He smiled again. As before, she felt foolish.

  "Ma'am," he said, "in twenty-five years of motel management, I haven't

  yet met a guest I couldn't handle."

  Though Quinn's smug, patronizing tone angered Tessa, she did not argue

  with him but followed him out of the office and through the eddying fog

  to the far end of the building. He was big, and she was petite, so she

  felt somewhat like a little kid being escorted back to her room by a

  father determined to show her that no monster was hiding either under

  the bed or in the closet.

  He opened the metal door through which she had fled the north service

  stairs, and they went inside. No one waited there.

  The soda-vending machine purred, and a faint clinking arose - 87 from

  the ice-maker's laboring m
echanism. Her plastic bucket still stood atop

  the chest, filled with half-moon chips.

  Quinn crossed the small space to the door that led to the ground-floor

  hall, pulled it open.

  "Nobody there," he said, nodding toward the silent corridor. He opened

  the door in the west wall, as well, and looked outside, left and right.

  He motioned her to the threshold and insisted that she look too.

  She saw a narrow, railing-flanked serviceway that paralleled the back of

  the lodge, between the building and the edge of the bluff, illuminated

  by a yellowish night-light at each end. Deserted "You said you'd

  already put your money in the vendor but hadn't got your soda?" Quinn

  asked, as he let the door swing shut.

  "That's right.

  "What did you want?"

  "Well . . . Diet Coke.

  " At the vending machine, he pushed the correct button, and a can rolled

  into the trough. He handed it to her, pointed at the plastic container

  that she had brought from her room, and said, "Don't forget your ice."

  Carrying the ice bucket and Coke, a hot blush on her cheeks and cold

  anger in her heart, Tessa followed him up the north stairs. No one

  lurked there. The unoiled hinges of the upper door squeaked as they

  went into the second-floor hallway, which was also deserted.

  The door to her room was ajar, which was how she left it. She was

  hesitant to enter.

  "Let's check it out," Quinn said.

  The small room, closet, and adjoining bath were untenanted.

  "Feel better?" he asked.

  "I wasn't imagining things."

  "I'm sure you weren't," he said, still patronizing her.

  As Quinn returned to the hallway, Tessa said, "They were there, and they

  were real, but I guess they've gone now. Probably ran away when they

  realized I was aware of them and that I went for help - "

  "Well, all's well then," he said - "You're safe. If they're gone,

  that's almost as good as if they'd never existed in the first place.

  " Tessa required all of her restraint to avoid saying more than, "Thank

  you," then she closed the door. On the knob was a lock button, which

  she depressed. Above the knob was a dead-bolt lock, which she engaged.

  A brass security chain was also provided; she used it.

  She went to the window and examined it to satisfy herself that it

  couldn't be opened easily by a would-be assailant. Half of it slid to

  the left when she applied pressure to a latch and pulled, but it could

  not be opened from outside unless someone broke it and reached through

  to disengage the lock. Besides, as she was on the second floor, an

  intruder would need a ladder.

  For a while she sat in bed, listening to distant noises in the motel.

  Now every sound seemed strange and menacing. She wondered what, if any,

  connection her unsettling experience had with Janice's death more than

  three weeks ago.

  After a couple of hours in the storm drain under the sloping meadow,

  Chrissie Foster was troubled by claustrophobia. She had been locked in

  the kitchen pantry a great deal longer than she had been in the drain,

  and the pantry had been smaller, yet the grave-black concrete culvert

  was by far the worse of the two. Maybe she began to feel caged and

  smothered because of the cumulative effect of spending all day and most

  of the evening in cramped places.

  From the superhighway far above, where the drainage system began, the

  heavy roar of trucks echoed down through the tunnels, giving rise in her

  mind to images of growling dragons. She put her hands over her ears to

  block out the noise. Sometimes the trucks were widely spaced, but on

  occasion they came in trains of six or eight or a dozen, and the

  continuous rumble became oppressive, maddening.

  Or maybe her desire to get out of the culvert had something - 89 to do

  with the fact that she was underground. Lying in the dark, listening to

  the trucks, searching the intervening silences for the return of her

  parents and Tucker, Chrissie began to feel she was in a concrete coffin,

  a victim of premature burial.

  Reading aloud from the imaginary book of her own adventures, she said,

  "Little did young Chrissie know that the culvert was about to collapse

  and fill with earth, squishing her as if she were a bug and trapping her

  forever."

  She knew she should stay where she was. They might still be prowling

  the meadow and woods in search of her. She was safer in the culvert

  than out of it.

  But she was cursed with a vivid imagination. Although she was no doubt

  the only occupant of the lightless passageway in which she sprawled, she

  envisioned unwanted company in countless grisly forms slithering snakes;

  spiders by the hundreds; cockroaches; rats; colonies of blood-drinking

  bats. eventual she began to wonder if over the years a child might have

  crawled into the tunnels to play and, getting lost in the branching

  culverts, might have died there, undiscovered. His soul, of course,

  would have remained restless and earthbound, for his death had been

  unjustly premature and there had been no proper burial service to free

  his spirit. Now perhaps that ghost, sensing her presence, was animating

  those hideous skeletal remains, dragging the decomposed and age-dried

  corpse toward her, scraping off pieces of leathery and half-petrified

  flesh as it came. Chrissie was eleven years old and levelheaded for her

  age, and she repeatedly told herself that there were no such things as

  ghosts, but then she thought of her parents and Tucker, who seemed to be

  some kind of werewolves, for God's sake, and when the big trucks passed

  on the interstate, she was afraid to cover her ears with her hands for

  fear that the dead child was using the cover of that noise to creep

  closer, closer.

  She had to get out.

  When he left the dark garage where he had taken refuge from the pack of

  drugged-out delinquents (which is what he had to believe they were; he

  knew no other way to explain them), Sam Booker went straight to Ocean

  Avenue and stopped in Knight's Bridge Tavern just long enough to buy a

  six-pack of Guinness Stout to go.

  Later, in his room at Cove Lodge, he sat at the small table and drank

  beer while he pored over the facts of the case. On September 5, three

  National Farmworkers Union organizers Julio Bustamante, his sister Maria

  Bustamante, and Maria's fiance, Ramon Sanchez-were driving south from

  the wine country, where they had been conducting discussions with

  vineyard owners about the upcoming harvest. They were in a

  four-year-old, tan Chevy van. They stopped for dinner in Moonlight

  Cove. They'd eaten at the Perez Family Restaurant and had drunk too

  many margaritas (according to witnesses among the waiters and customers

  at Perezs that night), and on their way back to the interstate, they'd

  taken a dangerous curve too fast; their van had rolled and caught fire.

  None of the three had survived.

  That story might have held up and the FBI might never have been drawn

  into the case, but for a few inconsistencies. For one thing, according

  to the Moonlight Cove police de
partment's official report, Julio

  Bustamante had been driving. But Julio had never driven a car in his

  life; furthermore, he was unlikely to do so after dark, for he suffered

  from a form of night blindness. Furthermore, according to witnesses

  quoted in the police report, Julio and Maria and Ramon were all

  intoxicated, but no one who knew Julio or Ramon had ever seen them drunk

  before; Maria was a lifelong teetotaler.

  The Sanchez and Bustamante families, of San Francisco, also - 91 were

  made suspicious by the behavior of the Moonlight Cove authorities. None

  of them were told of the three deaths until September 10, five days

  after the accident. Police chief Loman Watkins had explained that

  Julio's, Maria's, and Ramon's paper IDs had been destroyed in the

  intense fire and that their bodies had been too completely burned to

  allow swift identification by fingerprints. What of the van's license

  plates? Curiously, Loman had not found any on the vehicle or torn loose

  and lying in the vicinity of the crash. Therefore, with three badly

  mangled and burned bodies to deal with and no way to locate next of kin

  on a timely basis, he had authorized the coroner, Dr. Ian Fitzgerald,

  to fill out death certificates and thereafter dispose of the bodies by

  cremation.

  "We don't have the facilities of a big-city morgue, you understand,"

  Watkins had explained.

  "We just can't keep cadavers long tenn, and we had no way of knowing g

  how much time we'd need to identify these people. We thought they might