Dean Koontz - (1989)

by Midnight(Lit)

  she had a minute's head start, but at least she intended to give herself

  a chance to try.

  The night chill had deepened during the time she'd taken refuge in the

  culvert. Her flannel shirt seemed hardly more warming than a

  short-sleeved summer blouse. If she were an adventurer-heroine of the

  breed that Ms. Andre Norton created, she would know how to weave a coat

  out of available grass and other plants, with a high insulation factor.

  Or she would know how to trap, painlessly kill, and skin fur-bearing

  animals, how to tan their hides and stitch them together, clothing

  herself in garments as astonishingly stylish as they were practical.

  She simply had to stop thinking about the heroines of those books. Her

  comparative ineptitude depressed her.

  She already had enough to be depressed about. She'd been driven from

  her home. She was alone, hungry, cold, confused, afraid-and stalked by

  weird and dangerous creatures. But more to the point . . . though her

  mother and father always had been a bit distant, not given to easy

  displays of affection, Chrissie had loved them, and now they were gone,

  perhaps gone forever, changed in some way she did not understand, alive

  but soulless and, therefore, as good as dead.

  When she was less than a hundred feet from the two-lane county route,

  paralleling the long driveway at about the same distance, she heard a

  car engine. She saw headlights on the road, coming from the south. Then

  she saw the car itself, for the fog was thinner in that direction than

  toward the sea, and visibility - 107 was reasonably good. Even at that

  distance she identified it as a police cruiser; though no siren wailed,

  blue and red lights were revolving on its roof. The patrol car slowed

  and turned in the driveway by the sign for Foster Stables.

  Chrissie almost shouted, almost ran toward the car, because she always

  had been taught that policemen were her friends. She actually raised

  one hand and waved, but then realized that in a world where she could

  not trust her own parents, she certainly could not expect all policemen

  to have her best interests in mind.

  Spooked by the thought that the cops might have been "converted" the way

  Tucker had intended to convert her, the way her parents had been

  converted, she dropped down, crouching in the tall grass. The

  headlights had not come anywhere near her when the car had turned into

  the driveway. The darkness on the meadow and the fog no doubt made her

  invisible to the occupants of the cruiser, and she was not exactly so

  tremendously tall that she stood out on the flat land. But she did not

  want to take any chances.

  She watched the car dwindle down the long driveway. It paused briefly

  beside Tucker's car, which was abandoned halfway along the lane, then

  drove on. The thicker fog in the west swallowed it.

  She rose from the grass and hurried eastward again, toward the county

  route. She intended to follow that road south, all the way into

  Moonlight Cove. If she remained watchful and alert, she could scramble

  off the pavement into a ditch or behind a patch of weeds each time she

  heard approaching traffic.

  She would not reveal herself to anyone she did not know. Once she

  reached town, she could go to Our Lady of Mercy and seek help from

  Father Castelli. (He said he was a modern priest and preferred to be

  called Father Jim, but Chrissie had never been able to address him so

  casually.) Chrissie had been an indefatigable worker at the church's

  summer festival and had expressed a desire to be an altar girl next

  year, much to Father Castelli's delight. She was sure he liked her and

  would believe her story, no matter how wild it was. If he didn't

  believe her . . . well, then she would try Mrs. Tokawa, her

  sixth-grade teacher.

  She reached the county road, paused, and looked back toward the distant

  house, which was only a collection of glowing points in the fog.

  Shivering, she turned south toward Moonlight Cove.

  The front door of the Foster house stood open to the night.

  Loman Watkins went through the place from bottom to top and down again.

  The only odd things he found were an overturned chair in the kitchen and

  Jack Tucker's abandoned black bag filled with syringes and doses of the

  drug with which the Change was effected-and a spray-can of WD-40 on the

  floor of the downstairs hall.

  Closing the front door behind him, he went out onto the porch, stood at

  the steps that led down to the front yard, and listened to the

  ethereally still night. A sluggish breeze had risen and fallen fitfully

  during the evening, but now it had abated entirely. The air was

  uncannily still. The fog seemed to dampen all sounds, leaving a world

  as silent as if it had been one vast graveyard.

  Looking toward the stables, Loman called out "Tucker! Foster! Is anyone

  here?"

  An echo of his voice rolled back to him. It was a cold and lonely

  sound.

  No one answered him.

  "Tucker? Foster?"

  Lights were on at one of the long stables, and a door was open at the

  nearest end. He supposed he should go have a look.

  Loman was halfway to that building when an ululant cry, like the

  wavering note of a distant horn, came from far to the south, faint but

  unmistakable. It was shrill yet guttural, filled with anger, longing,

  excitement, and need. The shriek of a regressive in mid-hunt.

  He stopped and listened, hoping that he had misheard.

  - 109 The.sound came again. This time he could discern at least two

  voices, perhaps three. They were a long way off, more than a mile, so

  their eerie keening could not be in reply to Loman's shouts.

  Their cries chilled him.

  And filled him with a strange yearning.

  No.

  He made such tight fists of his hands that his fingernails dug into his

  palms, and he fought back the darkness that threatened to well up within

  him. He tried to concentrate on police work, the problem at hand.

  If those cries came from Alex Foster, Sharon Foster, and Jack Tucker-as

  was most likely the case-where was the girl, Christine?

  Maybe she escaped as they were preparing her for conversion. The

  overturned kitchen chair, Tucker's abandoned black bag, and the open

  front door seemed to support that unsettling explanation. In pursuit of

  the girl, caught up in the excitement of the chase, the Fosters and

  Tucker might have surrendered to a latent urge to regress. Perhaps not

  so latent. They might have regressed on other occasions, so this time

  they had slipped quickly and eagerly into that altered state. And now

  they were stalking her in the wildlands to the south-or had long ago run

  her down, torn her to pieces, and were still regressed because they got

  a dark thrill from being in that debased condition.

  The night was cool, but suddenly Loman was sweating.

  He wanted . . . needed. . . .

  No!

  Earlier in the day, Shaddack had told Loman that the Foster girl had

  missed her school bus and, returning home from the bus stop at the

  county road, had walked in on
her parents as they were experimenting

  with their new abilities. So the girl had to be conducted through the

  Change slightly sooner than planned, the first child to be elevated. But

  maybe "experimenting" was a lie that the Fosters had used to cover their

  asses. Maybe they had been in deep regression when the girl had come

  upon them, which they could not reveal to Shaddack without marking

  themselves as degenerates among the New People.

  The Change was meant to elevate mankind; it was forced evolution.

  Willful regression, however, was a sick perversion of the power bestowed

  by the Change. Those who regressed were outcasts. And those

  regressives who killed for the primal thrill of blood sport were the

  worst of all psychotics who had chosen devolution over evolution.

  The distant cries came again.

  A shiver crackled the length of Loman's spine. It was a pleasant

  shiver. He was seized by a powerful longing to shed his clothes, drop

  closer to the ground, and race nude and unrestrained through the night

  in long, graceful strides, across the broad meadow and into the woods,

  where all was wild and beautiful, where prey waited to be found and run

  down and broken and torn . . .

  No.

  Control.

  Self-control.

  The faraway cries pierced him.

  He must exhibit self-control.

  His heart pounded.

  The cries. The sweet, eager, wild cries . . .

  Loman began to tremble, then to shake violently, as in his mind's eye he

  saw himself freed from the rigid posture of Homo erectus freed from the

  constraints of civilized form and behavior. If the primal man within

  him could be set loose at long last and allowed to live in a natural

  state No. Unthinkable.

  His legs became weak, and he fell to the ground, though not onto all

  fours, no, because that posture would encourage him to surrender to

  these unspeakable urges; instead he curled into the fetal position, on

  his side, knees drawn up to his chest, and struggled against the

  swelling desire to regress. His flesh grew as hot as if he had been

  lying for hours in midday summer sun, but he realized that the heat was

  coming not from any external source but from deep within him; the fire

  arose not merely from vital organs or the marrow of his bones, but from

  the material within the walls of his cells, from the billions of nuclei

  that harbored the genetic material that made him what he was. Alone in

  the dark and fog in front of the Foster house, seduced by the echoey cry

  of the regressives, he longed to exercise the control of his physical

  being that the Change had granted him. But he ' - knew if once he

  succumbed to that temptation, he would never be Loman Watkins again; he

  would be a degenerate masquerading as Loman Watkins, Mr. Hyde in a body

  from which he had banished Dr. Jekyll forever.

  With his head tucked down, he was looking at his hands, which were

  curled against his chest, and in the dim light from the windows of the

  Foster house, he thought he saw several of his fingers begin to change.

  Pain flashed through his right hand. He felt the bones crunching and

  re-forming, knuckles swelling, digits lengthening, the pads of his

  fingers growing broader, sinews and tendons thickening, nails hardening

  and sharpening into talonlike points.

  He screamed in stark terror and denial, and he willed himself to hold

  fast to his born identity to what remained of his humanity. He resisted

  the lava-like y movement of his living tissue. Through clenched teeth

  he repeated his name-"Loman Watkins, Loman Watkins, Loman Watkins"-as if

  that were a spell that would prevent this evil transformation.

  Time passed. Perhaps a minute. Perhaps ten. An hour. He didn't know.

  His struggle to retain his identity had conveyed him into a state of

  consciousness beyond time.

  Slowly, he returned to awareness. With relief he found himself still on

  the ground in front of the house, unchanged. He was drenched in sweat.

  But the white-hot fire in his flesh had subsided. His hands were as

  they'd always been, with no freakish elongation of the fingers.

  For a while he listened to the night. He heard no more of the distant

  cries, and he was grateful for that silence.

  Fear, the only emotion that had not daily lost vividness and power since

  he had become one of the New People, was now as sharp as knives within

  him, causing him to cry out. For some time he had been afraid that he

  was one of those with the potential to become a regressive, and now that

  dark speculation was proven true. But if he had surrendered to the

  yearning, he would have lost both the old world he had known before he'd

  been converted and the brave new world Shaddack was making; he would

  belong in neither.

  Worse He was beginning to suspect that he was not unique, that in fact

  all of the New People had within them the seeds of devolution. Night by

  night, the regressives seemed to be increasing in number.

  Shakily, he got to his feet.

  The film of sweat was like a crust of ice on his skin now that his inner

  fires had been banked.

  Moving dazedly toward his patrol car, Loman Watkins wondered if

  Shaddack's research-and the technological application of it-was so

  fundamentally flawed that there was no benefit whatsoever in the Change.

  Maybe it was an unaligned- curse. If the regressives were not a

  statistically insignificant percentage of the New People, if instead

  they were all doomed to drift toward regression sooner or later. . . .

  He thought of Thomas Shaddack out there in the big house on the north

  point of the cove, overlooking the town where beasts of his creation

  roamed the shadows, and a terrible bleakness overcame him. Because

  reading for pleasure had been his favorite pastime since he was a boy,

  he thought of H. G. Wells's Dr.

  Moreau, and he wondered if that was who Shaddack had become. Moreau

  reincarnate. Shaddack might be a Moreau for the age of microtechnology,

  obsessed with an insane vision of transcendence through the forced

  melding of man and machine. Certainly he suffered from delusions of

  grandeur, and had the hubris to believe that he could lift mankind to a

  higher state, just as the original Moreau had believed he could make men

  from savage animals and beat God at His game. If Shaddack was not the

  genius of his century, if he was an overreacher like Moreau, then they

  were all damned.

  Loman got in the car and pulled the door shut. He started the engine

  and turned on the heater to warm his sweat-chilled body.

  The computer screen lit, awaiting use.

  For the sake of protecting the Moonhawk Project-which, flawed or not,

  represented the only future open to him-he had to assume the girl,

  Christine, had escaped, and that the Fosters and Tucker hadn't caught

  her. He must arrange for men to stand watch surreptitiously along the

  county road and on the streets entering the north end of Moonlight Cove.

  If the girl came into town seeking help, they could intercept her. More

  likely than not, she would unknowingly approach one of the New Peopl
e

  with her tale of possessed parents, and that would be the end of - 113

  her. Even if she got to people not yet converted, they weren't likely

  to believe her wild story. But he could take no chances.

  He had to talk to Shaddack about a number of things, and attend to

  several pieces of police business.

  He also had to get something to eat.

  He was inhumanly hungry.

  Something was wrong, something was wrong, something, something.

  Mike Peyser had slipped through the dark woods to his house on the

  southeast edge of town, down through the wild hills and trees, stealthy

  and alert, slinking and quick, naked and quick, returning from a hunt,

  blood in his mouth, still excited but tired after two hours of playing

  games with his prey, cautiously bypassing the homes of his neighbors,

  some of whom were his kind and some of whom were not. The houses in

  that area were widely separated, so he found it relatively easy to creep

  from shadow to shadow, tree to tree, through tall grass, low to the

  ground, cloaked in the night, swift and sleek, silent and swift, naked

  and silent, powerful and swift, straight to the porch of the

  single-story house where he lived alone, through the unlocked door, into

  the kitchen, still tasting the blood in his mouth, blood, the lovely

  blood, exhilarated by the hunt though also glad to be home, but then

  Something was wrong.

  Wrong, wrong, God, he was burning up, full of fire, hot, burning up, in

  need of food, nourishment, fuel, fuel, and that was normal, that was to