Wave/Moonhawk conspiracy. Evidently the bastards were tied into the
phone company's data banks and periodically swept those records to see
who had made calls from what numbers to what numbers-even from all of
the town's pay telephones, which in ordinary circumstances could have
been counted on to provide secure communications for a field agent. They
were paranoid and security conscious and electronically connected to an
extent and degree that proved increasingly astounding with each
revelation.
TIME OF CALL 731 P.M Monday, OCTOBER13.
At least they didn't keep a minute-by-minute or even hour-by-hour link
with the telephone company. Their computer obviously swept those
records on a programmed schedule, perhaps every four or six or eight
hours. Otherwise they would have been on the lookout for him shortly
after he had made the call to Scott earlier in the evening.
After the legend CALL PLACED TO, his home phone number appeared, then
his name and his address in Sherman Oaks. Followed by CALL placed BY
SAMUEL H. BOOKER.
MEANS OF PAYMENT telephone CREDIT CARD.
TYPE OF CARD EMPLOYER-billed.
BILLING ADDRESS FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, WASHINGTON, D.C.
They would start checking motels in the entire county, but as he was
staying in Moonlight Cove's only lodgings, the search would be a short
one. He wondered if he had time to sprint back to Cove Lodge, get his
car, and drive to the next town, Aberdeen Wells, where he could call the
Bureau office in San Francisco from an unmonitored phone. He had
learned enough to know that something damned strange was going on in
this town, enough to justify an imposition of federal authority and a
far-reaching investigation.
But the very next words that appeared on the VDT convinced him that if
he went back to Cove Lodge to get his car, he would be caught before he
could get out of town. And if they got their hands on him, he might be
just one more nasty accidental-death statistic.
They knew his home address, so Scott might be in danger too-not right
now, not down there in Los Angeles, but maybe by tomorrow.
DIALOGUE INVOKED WATKINS SHOLNICK, ARE YOU LINKED lii SHOLNICK HERE.
WATKINS TRY COVE LODGE. SHOLNICK ON MY WAY.
Already an officer, Shoinick, was on his way to see if Sam was a
registered guest at Cove Lodge. And the cover story that Sam had
established with the desk clerk-that he was a successful stockbroker
from Los Angeles, contemplating early retirement in one coastal town or
another-was blown.
WATKINS Peterson?
Peterson HERE.
They probably didn't have to type in their names. Each man's link would
identify him to the main computer, and his name would be automatically
printed in front of the brief input that he typed. Clean, swift, easy to
use.
- 139 WATKINS BACK UR SHOLNICK.
PETERSON DONE.
WATKINS DON'T KILL HIM UNTIL WE CAN QUESTION.
All over Moonlight Cove, cops in patrol cars were talking to one another
by computer, off the public airwaves, where they could not be easily
overheard. Even though Sam was eavesdropping on them without their
knowledge, he felt that he was up against a formidable enemy nearly as
omniscient as God.
WATKINS DANBERRY?
DANBERRY HERE. HQ.
WATKINS BLOCK OCEAN AVENUE TO IN interstate.
DANBERRY DONE.
SHADDACK WHAT ABOUT THE FOSTER GIRL?
Sam was startled to see Shaddack's name appear on the screen. The alert
apparently had flashed on his computer at home, perhaps also sounding an
audible alarm and waking him.
WATKINS STILL LOOSE.
SHADDACK CAN'T RISK BOOKER stumbling ACROSS HER.
WATKINS TOWN'S ringed WITH SENTRIES. THEY'LL CATCH HER COMING IN.
Shaddack SHE'S SEEN TOO MUCH.
Sam had read about Thomas Shaddack in magazines, newspapers. The guy
was a celebrity of sorts, the computer genius of the age, and somewhat
geeky looking besides.
Fascinated by this revealing dialogue, which incriminated the famous man
and his bought police force, Sam had not immediately picked up on the
meaning of the exchanges between Chief Watkins and Danberry Danberry ...
Here. HQ ... Block Ocean Avenue to interstate ... Done. He realized
that Officer Danberry was at headquarters, HQ, which was the municipal
building, and that any moment he was going to come out the back door and
rush to one of the four patrol cars in the parking lot.
"Oh, shit." Sam grabbed the ignition wires, tearing them apart. The
engine coughed and died, and the video-display went dark. A fraction of
a second later, Danberry threw open the rear door of the municipal
building and ran into the parking lot.
When the screaming stopped, Tessa broke out of a trance of terror and
went straight to the phone again. The line was still dead.
Where was Quinn? The motel office was closed at this hour, but didn't
the manager have an adjacent apartment? He would respond to the ruckus.
Or was he one of the savage pack in the corridor?
They had broken down one door. They could break down hers too.
She grabbed one of the straight-backed chairs from the table by the
window, hurried to the door with it, tilted it back, and wedged it under
the knob.
She no longer thought they were after her just because she was Janice's
sister and bent on uncovering the truth. That explanation didn't
account for their attack on the other guests, who had nothing to do with
Janice. It was nuts. She didn't understand what was happening, but she
clearly understood the implications of what she had heard a psychotic
killer-no, several psychotics, judging by the noise they had made, some
bizarre cult like the Manson family maybe, or worse-were loose in the
motel. They had already killed two people, and they could kill her,
too, evidently for the sheer pleasure of it. She felt as if she were in
a bad dream.
She expected the walls to bulge and flow in that amorphous - 141 fashion
of nightmare places, but they remained solid, fixed, and the colors of
things were too sharp and clear for this to be a dreamscape.
Frantically she pulled on her socks and shoes, unnerved being barefoot,
as earlier her near nakedness had made her feel vulnerable-as if death
could be foiled by an adequate wardrobe.
She heard those voices again. Not at the end of the hallway any more.
Near her own door. Approaching. She wished the door featured one of
those one-way, fisheye lenses that allowed a wide-angled view, but there
was none.
At the sill was a half-inch crack, however, so Tessa dropped to the
floor, pressed one side of her face against the carpet, and squinted out
at the corridor. From that limited perspective, she saw something move
past her room so quickly that her eyes could not quite track it, though
she caught a glimpse of its feet, which was enough to alter dramatically
her perception of what was happening. This was not an incidence of
human savagery akin to the bloodbath she had witnessed-and to which she
nearly had succumbed-in Northern Ireland. This was, instead, an
encounter with the unknown, a breach of reality, a sudden sideslip out
of the normal world into the uncanny. They were leathery, hairy,
dark-skinned feet, broad and flat and surprisingly long, with toes so
extrusile and multiple jointed that they almost seemed to have the
function of fingers.
Something hit the door. Hard.
Tessa scrambled to her feet and out of the foyer.
Crazed voices filled the hall that same weird mix of harsh animal sounds
punctuated by bursts of breathlessly spoken but for the most part
disconnected words.
She went around the bed to the window, disengaged the pressure latch,
and slid the movable pane aside.
Again the door shook. The boom was so loud that Tessa felt as if she
were inside a drum. It would not collapse as easily as the other
guests' door, thanks to the chair, but it would not hold for more than a
few additional blows.
She sat on the sill, swung her legs out, looked down. The fog-dampened
walk glistened in the dim yellow glow of the serviceway lamps about
twelve feet below the window. An easy jump.
They hit the door again, harder. Wood splintered.
Tessa pushed off the windowsill. She landed on the wet walkway and,
because of her rubber-soled shoes, skidded but did not fall.
Overhead, in the room she had left, wood splintered more noisily than
before, and tortured metal screeched as the lock on the door began to
disintigrate.
She was near the north end of the building. She thought she saw
something moving in the darkness in that direction. It might have been
nothing more than a clotting of fog churning eastward on the wind, but
she didn't want to take a chance, so she ran south, with the vast black
sea beyond the railing at her right side. By the time she reached the
end of the building, a crash echoed through the night-the sound of the
door to her room going down-which was followed by the howling of the
pack as it entered that place in search of her.
Sam could not have slipped out of the patrol car without drawing
Danberry's attention. Four cruisers awaited the cop's use, so there was
a seventy-five-percent chance that Sam would be undetected if he stayed
in the car. He slid down in the driver's seat as far as he could and
leaned to his right, across the computer keyboard on the console.
Danberry went to the next car in line.
With his head on the console, his neck twisted so he could look up
through the window on the passenger's side, Sam watched as Danberry
unlocked the door of that other cruiser. He prayed that the cop would
keep his back turned, because the interior of the car in which Sam
slouched was revealed by the sulfurous glow of the parking-lot lights.
If Danberry even glanced his way, Sam would be seen.
The cop got into the other black-and-white and slammed the door, and Sam
sighed with relief. The engine turned over. - 143 Danberry pulled out
of the municipal lot. When he hit the alley he gunned the engine, and
his tires spun and squealed for a moment before they bit in, and then he
was gone.
Though Sam wanted to hot-wire the car and switch on the computer again
to find out whether Watkins and Shaddack were still conversing, he knew
he dared not stay any longer. As the manhunt escalated, the police
department's offices in the municipal building were sure to become busy.
Because he didn't want them to know that he had been probing in their
computer or that he had eavesdropped on their VDT conversation-the
greater they assumed his ignorance to be, the less effective they would
be in their search for him-Sam used his tools to replace the ignition
core in the steering column. He got out, pushed the lock button down,
and closed the door.
He didn't want to leave the area by the alleyway because a patrol car
might turn in from one end or the other, capturing him in its
headlights. Instead he dashed straight across that narrow back street
from the parking lot and opened a gate in a simple wrought-iron fence.
He entered the rear yard of a slightly decrepit Victorian-style house
whose owners had let the shrubbery run so wild that it looked as if a
macabre cartoon family from the pen of Gahan Wilson might live in the
place. He walked quietly past the side of the house, across the front
lawn, to Pacific Drive, one block south of Ocean Avenue.
The night calm was not split by sirens. He heard no shouts, no running
footsteps, no cries of alarm. But he knew he had awakened a many-headed
beast and that this singularly dangerous Hydra was looking for him all
over town.
Mike Peyser didn't know what to do, didn't know, he was scared,
confused and scared, so he could not think clearly, though he needed
to think sharp and clear like a man, except the wild part of him kept
intruding; his mind worked quickly, and it was sharp, but he could not
hold to a single train of thought for more than a couple of minutes.
Quick thinking, rapid-fire thinking, was not good enough to solve a
problem like this; he had to think quick and deep. But his attention
span was not what it should have been.
When he finally was able to stop screaming and get up from the kitchen
floor, he hurried into the dark dining room, through the unlighted
living room, down the short hall to the bedroom, then into the master
bath, going on all fours part of the way, rising onto his hind feet as
he crossed the bedroom threshold, unable to rise all the way up and
stand entirely straight, but flexible enough to get more than halfway
erect. In the bathroom, which was lit only by the vague and somewhat
scintillant moonglow that penetrated the small window above the shower
stall, he gripped the edge of the sink and stared into the mirrored
front of the medicine cabinet, where he could see only a shadowy
reflection of himself, without detail.
He wanted to believe that in fact he had returned to his natural form,
that his feeling of being trapped in the altered state was pure
hallucination, yes, yes, he wanted to believe that, badly needed to
believe, believe, even though he could not stand fully erect, even
though he could feel the difference in his impossibly long-fingered
hands and in the queer set of his head on his shoulders and in the way
his back joined his hips. He needed to believe.
Turn on the light, he told himself. He could not do it.
Turn on the light.
He was afraid.
He had to turn on the light and look at himself.
But he gripped the sink and could not move.
Turn on the light.
Instead he leaned toward the tenebrous mirror, peering intently at the
indistinct reflection, seeing little more than the pale amber radiance
of strange eyes.
turn on the light.
He let out a thin mewl of anguish and terror.
Shaddack, he thought suddenly. Shaddack, he must tell Shaddack, Tom
Shaddack would know what to do, Shaddack was his best hope, maybe his
only hope, Shaddack.
- 145 He let go of the sink, dropped to the floor, hurried out of the
t)bathroom, into the bedroom, toward the telephone on the nightstand. As
he went, in a voice alternately shrill and guttural, piercing and
whispery, he repeated the name as if it were a word with magic power
"Shaddack, Shaddack, Shaddack, Shaddack .
Tessa Lockland took refuge in a twenty-four-hour coin-operated
laundry four blocks east of Cove Lodge and half a block off Ocean
Avenue. She wanted to be someplace bright, and the banks of overhead
fluorescents allowed no shadows. Alone in the laundry, she sat in a
badly scarred, yellow plastic chair, staring at rows of clothes-dryer
portals, as if understanding would be visited upon her from some cosmic
source communicating on those circles of glass.
As a documentarist, she had to have a keen eye for the patterns in life
that would give coherence to a film narratively and visually, so she had
no trouble seeing patterns of darkness, death, and unknown forces in
this deeply troubled town. The fantastic creatures in the motel surely
had been the source of the cries she'd heard on the beach earlier that
night, and her sister had no doubt been killed by those same beings,
whatever the hell they were. Which sort of explained why the
authorities had been so insistent that Marion okay the cremation of
Janice's body-not because the remains were corroded by seawater and
Dean Koontz - (1989) Page 19
