Dean Koontz - (1989)

by Midnight(Lit)

  Leaning against the locked door and as far back in the shadows as he

  could go, waiting for the infuriatingly slow car to reach the

  intersection, Sam had a moment for reflection and realized that even for

  one-thirty in the morning, Moonlight Cove was peculiarly quiet and the

  streets unusually deserted. Small towns had night owls as surely as did

  cities; there should have been a pedestrian or two, a car now and then,

  some signs of life other than police patrols.

  The black-and-white turned right at the corner, heading west and away

  from him.

  Although the danger had passed, Sam remained in the unlighted entrance

  way, mentally retracing his journey from Cove Lodge to the municipal

  building, from there to the Union 76, and finally to his current

  position. He could not recall passing a house where music was playing,

  where a television blared, or where the laughter of late revelers

  indicated a party in progress. He had seen no young couples sharing a

  last kiss in parked cars. The few restaurants and taverns were

  apparently closed, and the movie theater was out of business, and except

  for his movements and those of the police, Moonlight Cove might have

  been a ghost town. Its living rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens might have

  been peopled only by moldering corpses-or by robots that posed as people

  during the day and were turned off at night to save energy when it was

  not as essential to maintain the illusion of life.

  Increasingly worried by the word "conversion" and its mysterious meaning

  in the context of this thing they called the Moonhawk Project, he left

  the entrance way, turned the corner, and ran along the brightly lighted

  street to the laundry. He saw the phone as he was pushing open the

  glass door.

  He hurried halfway through the long room-dryers on the right, a double

  row of washers back-to-back in the middle, some chairs at the end of the

  washers, more chairs along the left wall with the candy and detergent

  machines and the laundry-foldin2 counter-before he realized the place

  was not deserted. A petite blonde in faded jeans and a blue pullover

  sweater sat on one of the yellow plastic chairs. None of the washers or

  dryers was running, and the woman did not seem to have a basket of

  clothes with her.

  He was so startled by her-a live person, a live civilian, in this

  sepulchral night-that he stopped and blinked.

  She was perched on the edge of the chair, visibly tense. Her eyes were

  wide. Her hands were clenched in her lap. She seemed to be holding her

  breath.

  Realizing that he had frightened her, Sam said, "Sorry."

  She stared at him as if she were a rabbit facing down a fox. Aware that

  he must look wild-eyed, even frantic, he added, "I'm not dangerous."

  "They all say that."

  "They do?"

  "But I am."

  Confused, he said, "You are what?"

  "Dangerous."

  "Really?"

  She stood up.

  "I'm a black belt."

  For the first time in days, a genuine smile pulled at Sam's face. "Can

  you kill with your hands?"

  She stared at him for a moment, pale and shaking. When she spoke, her

  defensive anger was excessive.

  "Hey, don't laugh at me, asshole, or I'll bust you up so bad that when

  you walk, you'll clink like a bag of broken glass."

  At last, astonished by her vehemency, Sam began to assimilate the

  observations he'd made on entering. No washers or dryers in operation.

  No clothes basket. No box of detergent or bottle of fabric softener.

  "What's wrong?" he asked, suddenly suspicious.

  "Nothing, if you keep your distance."

  He wondered if she knew somehow that the local cops were eager to get

  hold of him. But that seemed nuts. How could she know?

  "What're you doing here if you don't have clothes to wash? What's it

  your business? You own this dump?" she demanded.

  "No. And don't tell me you own it, either."

  She glared at him.

  He studied her, gradually absorbing how attractive she was.

  She had eyes as piercingly blue as a June sky and skin as clear - 163 as

  summer air, and she seemed radically out of place along this dark,

  October coast, let alone in a grungy Laundromat at one-thirty in the

  morning. When her beauty finally, fully registered with him, so did

  other things about her, including the intensity of her fear, which was

  revealed in her eyes and in the lines around them and in the set of her

  mouth. it was fear far out of proportion to any threat he could pose.

  If he had been a six-foot-six, three-hundred-pound, tattooed biker with

  a revolver in one hand and a ten-inch knife in the other, and if he had

  burst into the laundry chanting paeans to Satan, the utterly bloodless

  paleness of her face and the hard edge of terror in her eyes would have

  been understandable. But he was only Sam Booker, whose greatest

  attribute as an agent was his guy-next-door ordinariness and an aura of

  harmlessness.

  Unsettled by her unsettledness, he said, "The phone."

  "What?"

  He pointed at the pay phone.

  "Yes," she said, as if confirming it was indeed a phone.

  "Just came in to make a call."

  "Oh.

  " Keeping one eye on her, he went to the phone, fed it his quarter, but

  got no dial tone. He retrieved his coin, tried again. No luck.

  "Damn!" he said.

  The blonde had edged toward the door. She halted, as though she thought

  he might rush at her and drag her down if she attempted to leave the

  Laundromat.

  The Cove engendered in Sam a powerful paranoia. Increasingly over the

  past few hours he had come to think of everyone in town as a potential

  enemy. And suddenly he perceived that this woman's peculiar behavior

  resulted from a state of mind precisely like his.

  "Yes, of course-you're not from here, are you, from Moonlight Cove?"

  "So?"

  "Neither am I "So?"

  "And you've seen something."

  She stared at him.

  He said, "Something's happened, you've seen something, and you're

  scared, and I'll bet you've got damned good reason to be.

  " She looked as if she'd sprint for the door.

  "Wait," he said quickly.

  "I'm with the FBI." His voice cracked slightly.

  "I really am."

  Because he was a night person who had always preferred to sleep

  during the day, Thomas Shaddack was in his teak-paneled study, dressed

  in a gray sweat suit, working on an aspect of Moonhawk at a computer

  terminal, when Evan, his night servant, rang through to tell him that

  Loman Watkins was at the front door.

  "Send him to the tower," Shaddack said.

  "I'll join him shortly. " He seldom wore anything but sweat suits these

  days. He had more than twenty in the closet-ten black, ten gray, and a

  couple navy blue. They were more comfortable than other clothes, and by

  limiting his choices, he saved time that otherwise would be wasted

  coordinating each day's wardrobe, a task at which he was not skilled.

  Fashion was of no interest to him. Besides, he was gawky-big feet,

  lanky l
egs, knobby knees, long arms, bony shoulders-and too thin to look

  good even in finely tailored suits. Clothes either hung strangely on

  him or emphasized his thinness to such a degree that he appeared to be

  Death personified, an unfortunate image reinforced by his flour-white

  skin, nearly black hair, sharp features, and yellowish eyes.

  He even wore sweat suits to New Wave board meetings. If you were a

  genius in your field, people expected you to be eccentric. And if your

  personal fortune was in the hundreds of millions, they accepted all

  eccentricities without comment.

  His ultramodern, reinforced-concrete house at cliff's edge near the

  north point of the cove was another expression of his - 165 calculated

  nonconformity. The three stories were like three layers of a cake,

  though each layer was of a different size than the others-the largest on

  top, the smallest in the middle-and they were not concentric but

  misaligned, creating a profile that in daylight tent the house the

  appearance of an enormous piece of avant-garde sculpture. At night, its

  myriad windows aglow, it looked less like sculpture than like the

  star-traveling mothership of an invading alien force.

  The tower was eccentricity piled on eccentricity, rising offcenter from

  the third level, soaring an additional forty feet into the air. It was

  not round but oval, not anything like a tower in which a princess might

  pine for a crusade-bound prince or in which a king might have his

  enemies imprisoned and tortured, but reminiscent of the conning tower of

  a submarine. The large, glass-walled room at the top could be reached

  by elevator or by stairs that spiraled around the inside of the tower

  wall, circling the metal core in which the elevator was housed.

  Shaddack kept Watkins waiting for ten minutes, just for the hell of it,

  then chose to take the lift to meet him. The interior of the cab was

  paneled with burnished brass, so although the mechanism was slow, he

  seemed to be ascending inside a rifle cartridge.

  He had added the tower to the architect's designs almost as an

  afterthought, but it had become his favorite part of the huge house.

  That high place offered endless vistas of calm (or wind-chopped),

  sun-spangled (or night-shrouded) sea to the west. To the east and

  south, he looked out and down on the whole town of Moonlight Cove; his

  sense of superiority was comfortably reinforced by that lofty

  perspective on the only other visible works of man. From that room,

  only four months ago, he had seen the moonhawk for the third time in his

  life, a sight that few men were privileged to see even once-which he

  took to be a sign that he was destined to become the most influential

  man ever to walk the earth.

  The elevator stopped. The doors opened.

  When Shaddack entered the dimly lighted room that encircled the

  elevator, Loman Watkins rose quickly from an armchair and respectfully

  said, "Good evening, sir."

  "Please be seated, chief," he said graciously, even affably, but with a

  subtle note in his voice that reinforced their mutual understanding that

  it was Shaddack, not Watkins, who decided how formal or casual the

  meeting would be.

  Shaddack was the only child of James Randolph Shaddack, a former

  circuit-court judge in Phoenix, now deceased. The family had not been

  wealthy, though solidly upper middle-class, and that position on the

  economic ladder, combined with the prestige of a judgeship, gave James

  considerable stature in his community. And power. Throughout his

  childhood and adolescence, Tom had been fascinated by how his father, a

  political activist as well as a judge, had used that power not only to

  acquire material benefits but to control others. The control-the

  exercise of power for power's sake-was what had most appealed to James,

  and that was what had deeply excited his son, too, from an early age.

  Now Tom Shaddack held power over Loman Watkins and Moonlight Cove by

  reason of his wealth, because he was the primary employer in town,

  because he gripped the reins of the political system, and because of the

  Moonhawk Project, named after the thrice-received vision. But his

  ability to manipulate them was more extensive than anything old James

  had enjoyed as a judge and canny politico. He possessed the power of

  life and death over them-literally. If an hour from now he decided they

  all must die, they would be dead before midnight. Furthermore he could

  condemn them to the grave with no more chance of being punished than a

  god risked when raining fire on his creations.

  The only lights in the tower room were concealed in a recess under the

  immense windows, which extended from the ceiling to within ten inches of

  the floor. The hidden lamps ringed the chamber, subtly illuminating the

  plush carpet but casting no glare on the huge panes. Nevertheless, if

  the night had been clear, Shaddack would have flicked the switch next to

  the elevator button, plunging the room into near darkness, so his

  ghostly reflection and those of the starkly modern furnishings would not

  fall on the glass between him and his view of the world over which he

  held dominion. He left the lights on, however, because some milky fog

  still churned past glass walls, and little could be seen now that the

  horned moon had found the horizon.

  Barefoot, Shaddack crossed the charcoal-gray carpet. He set 7 - 167

  settled into a second armchair, facing Loman Watkins across a low,

  white-marble cocktail table.

  The policeman was forty-four, less than three years older than Shaddack,

  but he was Shaddack's complete physical opposite five-ten, a hundred and

  eighty pounds, large-boned, broad in the shoulders and chest,

  thick-necked. His face was broad, too, as open and guileless as

  Shaddack's was closed and cunning. His blue eyes met Shaddack's

  yellow-brown gaze, held it only for a moment, then lowered to stare at

  his strong hands, which were clasped so rigidly in his lap that the

  sharp knuckles seemed in danger of piercing the taut skin. His darkly

  tanned scalp showed through brush-cut brown hair.

  Watkins's obvious subservience pleased Shaddack, but he was even more

  gratified by the chief's fear, which was evident in the tremors that the

  man was struggling-with some success-to repress and in the haunted

  expression that deepened the color of his eyes. Because of the Moonhawk

  Project, because of what had been done to him, Loman Watkins was in many

  ways superior to most men, but he was also now and forever in Shaddack's

  thrall as surely as a laboratory mouse, clamped down and attached to

  electrodes, was at the mercy of the scientist who conducted experiments

  on him. In a manner of speaking, Shaddack was Watkins's maker, and he

  possessed, in Watkins's eyes, the position and power of a god.

  Leaning back in his chair, folding his pale, long-fingered hands on his

  chest, Shaddack felt his manhood swelling, hardening. He was not

  aroused by Loman Watkins, because he had no tendency whatsoever toward

  homosexuality; he was aroused not by anything in Watkins's physical

  appearanc
e but by the awareness of the tremendous authority he wielded

  over the man. Power aroused Shaddack more fully and easily than sexual

  stimuli. Even as an adolescent, when he saw pictures of naked women in

  erotic magazines, he was turned on not by the sight of bared breasts,

  not by the curve of a female bottom or the elegant line of long legs,

  but by the thought of dominating such women, totally controlling them,

  holding their very lives in his hands. If a woman looked at him with

  undisguised fear, he found her infinitely more appealing than if she

  regarded him with desire. And since he reacted more strongly to terror

  than to lust, his arousal was not dependent upon the sex or age or

  physical attractiveness of the person who trembled in his presence.

  Enjoying the policeman's submissiveness, Shaddack said, "You've got

  Booker?"

  "No, sir."

  "Why not?"

  "He wasn't at Cove Lodge when Sholnick got there."

  "He's got to be found."

  "We'll find him."

  "And converted. Not just to prevent him from telling anyone what he's

  seen . . . but to give us one of our own inside the Bureau. That'd be

  a coup. His being here could turn out to be an incredible plus for the

  project."

  "Well, whether Booker's a plus or not, there's worse than him.

  Regressives attacked some of the guests at the lodge. Quinn himself was

  either carried off, killed, and left where we haven't found him yet . .