Dean Koontz - (1989)

by Midnight(Lit)

  free, so they went ahead, crossing a hard-surface road, slinking up into

  higher hills, staying away from the few houses in the area.

  Dawn was coming, not yet on the eastern horizon but coming, and Tucker

  knew that they had to find a haven, a den, before daylight, a place

  where they could curl up around one another, down in darkness, sharing

  warmth, darkness and warmth, safely curled up with memories of blood and

  rutting, darkness and warmth and blood and rutting. They would be out

  of danger there, safe from a world in which they were still alien, safe

  also from the necessity to return to human form. When night fell again,

  they could venture forth to roam and kill, kill, bite and kill, and

  maybe the day would come when there were so many of their kind in the

  world that they would no longer be outnumbered and could venture forth

  in bright daylight as well, but not now, not yet.

  They came to a dirt road, and Tucker had a dim memory of where ,re he

  was, a sense that the road would quickly lead him to a place that could

  provide the shelter that he and his pack needed. He followed it farther

  into the hills, encouraging his companions with low growls of

  reassurance. In a couple of minutes they came to a building, a huge old

  house fallen to ruin, with the windows smashed in and the front door

  hanging open on halfbroken hinges. Other gray structures loomed out of

  the rain a barn in worse shape than the house, several outbuildings that

  had mostly collapsed.

  Large, hand-painted signs were nailed to the house, between two of the

  second-floor windows, one sign above the other, in different styles of

  lettering, as though a lot of time had passed between the hanging of the

  first and the second. He knew they had meaning, but he couldn't read

  them, though he strained to recall the lost language used by the species

  to ..which he had once belonged.

  The two members of his pack flanked him. They, too, stared up at the

  dark letters on the white background. Murky symbols in the rain and

  gloom. Eerily mysterious runes.

  ICARUS COLONY And under that THE OLD ICARUS COLONY RESTAURANT NATURAL

  FOODS On the dilapidated barn was another sign-FLEA MARKET-but that

  meant nothing more to Tucker than the signs on the house, and after a

  while he decided it didn't matter if he understood them. The important

  thing was that no people were nearby, no fresh scent or vibration of

  human beings, so the refuge that he 245 sought might be found here, a

  burrow, a den, A warm and dark place, warm and dark, safe and dark.

  With one blanket and pillow, Sam had made his bed on a long sofa in

  the living room, just off the front hall downstairs. He wanted to sleep

  on the ground floor so he might be awakened by the sound of an intruder.

  According to the schedule that Sam had seen on the VDT in the patrol

  car, Harry Talbot wouldn't be converted until the following evening. He

  doubted that they should accelerate their schedule simply because they

  knew an FBI man was in Moonlight Cove. But he was taking no unnecessary

  chances.

  Sam often suffered from insomnia, but it did not trouble him that night.

  After he took off his shoes and stretched out on the sofa, he listened

  to the rain for a couple of minutes, trying not to think. Soon he slept.

  His was not a dreamless sleep. It seldom was.

  He dreamed of Karen, his lost wife, and as always in nightmares, she was

  spitting up blood and emaciated, in the final stages of her cancer,

  after the chemotherapy had failed. He knew that he must save her. He

  could not. He felt small, powerless, and terribly afraid.

  But that nightmare did not wake him.

  Eventually the dream shifted from the hospital to a dark and crumbling

  building. It was rather like a hotel designed by Salvador Dali The

  corridors branched off randomly; some were very short and some were so

  long that the ends of them could not be seen; the walls and floors were

  at surreal angles to one another, and the doors to the rooms were of

  different sizes, some so small that only a mouse could have passed

  through, others large enough for a man, and still others on a scale

  suitable to a thirty-foot giant.

  He was drawn to certain rooms. When he entered them he found in each a

  person from his past or current life.

  He encountered Scott in several rooms and had unsatisfactory, disjointed

  conversations with him, all ending in unreasoning hostility on Scott's

  part. The nightmare was made worse by the variation in Scott's age

  Sometimes he was a sullen sixteen-year-old and sometimes ten or just

  four or five. But in every incarnation he was alienated, cold, quick to

  anger, and seething with hatred.

  "This isn't right, this isn't true, you weren't like this when you were

  younger," Sam told a seven-year-old Scott, and the boy made an obscene

  reply.

  In every room and regardless of his age, Scott was surrounded by huge

  posters of black-metal rockers dressed in leather and chains, displaying

  satanic symbols on their foreheads and in the palms of their hands. The

  light was flickering and strange. In a dark corner Sam saw something

  lurking, a creature of which Scott was aware, something the boy did not

  fear but which scared the hell out of Sam.

  But that nightmare did not wake him, either.

  In other chambers of that surreal hotel, he found dying men, the same

  ones every time-Arnie Taft and Carl S(,ibin they were two agents with

  whom he had worked and whom he had seen gunned down.

  The entrance to one room was a car door-the gleaming door of a blue '54

  Buick, to be exact. Inside he found an enormous, gray-walled chamber in

  which was the front seat, dashboard, and steering wheel, nothing else of

  the car, like parts of a prehistoric skeleton lying on a vast expanse of

  barren sand. A woman in a green dress sat behind the wheel, her head

  turned away from him. Of course, he knew who she was, and he wanted to

  leave the room at once, but he could not. In fact he was drawn to her.

  He sat beside her, and suddenly he was seven years old, as he had been

  on the day of the accident, though he spoke with his grown-up voice

  "Hello, Mom." She turned to him, revealing that the right side of her

  face was caved in, the eye gone from the socket, bone punching through

  torn flesh. Broken teeth were exposed in her cheek, so she favored him

  with half of a hideous grin.

  Abruptly they were in the real car, cast back in time. Ahead of them on

  the highway, coming toward them, was the drunk in the white pickup

  truck, weaving across the double yellow line, bearing down on them at

  high speed. Sam cried out-"mongrels"'but she couldn't evade the pickup

  this time any more than she had been able to avoid it thirty-five years

  ago. It came at them as if they were a magnet and slammed into them

  head-on. He thought it must be like that at the center of a bomb blast

  a great roar pierced by the shriek of shredding metal. Everything went

  black. Then, when he swam up from that gloom, he found himself pinned

  in the wreckage. He was face to face with his dead mother, peer
ing into

  her empty eye socket. He began to scream.

  That nightmare also failed to wake him.

  Now he was in a hospital, as he'd been after the accident, for that had

  been the first of the six times he'd nearly died. He was no longer a

  boy, however, but a grown man, and he was on the operating table,

  undergoing emergency surgery because he had been shot in the chest

  during the same gun battle in which Carl Sorbino had died. As the

  surgical team labored over him, he rose out of his body and watched them

  at work on his carcass. He was amazed but not afraid, which was just

  how he had felt when it had not been a dream.

  Next he was in a tunnel, rushing toward dazzling light, toward the Other

  Side. This time he knew what he would find at the other end because he

  had been there before, in real life instead of in a dream. He was

  terrified of it, didn't want to face it again, didn't want to look

  Beyond. But he moved faster, faster, faster through the tunnel,

  bulleted through it, his terror escalating with his speed. Having to

  look again at what lay on the Other Side was worse than his dream

  confrontations with Scott, worse than the battered and one-eyed face of

  his mother, infinitely worse (faster, faster), intolerable, so he began

  to scream (faster) and scream (faster) and scream That one woke him.

  He sat straight up on the sofa and pinched off the cry before it left

  his throat, An instant later he became aware that he was not alone in

  the unlighted living room. He heard something move in front of him, and

  he moved simultaneously, snatching his .38 revolver from the holster,

  which he had taken off and laid beside the sofa.

  It was Moose.

  "Hey, boy.

  " The dog churned softly.

  Sam reached out to pat the dark head, but already the Labrador was

  moving away. Because the night outside was marginally less black than

  the interior of the house, the windows were visible as fuzzy-gray

  rectangles. Moose went to one at the side of the house, putting his

  paws on the sill and his nose to the glass.

  "Need to go out?" Sam asked, though they had let him out for ten

  minutes just before they'd gone to bed.

  The dog made no response but stood at the window with a peculiar

  rigidity.

  "Something out there?" Sam wondered, and even as he asked the question,

  he knew the answer.

  Quickly and gingerly he crossed the dark room. He bumped into furniture

  but didn't knock anything down, and joined the dog at the window.

  The rain-battered night seemed at its blackest in this last hour before

  dawn, but Sam's eyes were adjusted to darkness. He could see the side

  of the neighboring house, just thirty feet away. The steeply sloping

  property between the two structures was not planted with grass but with

  a variety of shrubs and several starburst pines, all of which swayed and

  shuddered in the gusty wind.

  He quickly spotted the two Boogeymen because their movement was in

  opposition to the direction of the wind and therefore in sharp contrast

  to the storm dance of the vegetation. They were about fifteen feet from

  the window, heading downslope toward Conquistador. Though Sam could

  discern no details of them, he could see by their hunchbacked movement

  and shambling yet queerly graceful gait that they were not ordinary men.

  As they paused beside one of the larger pines, one of them looked toward

  the Talbot house, and Sam saw its softly radiant, utterly alien amber

  eyes. For a moment he was transfixed, frozen not by fear so much as by

  amazement. Then he realized that the creature seemed to be staring

  straight at the window, as if it could see him, and suddenly it loped

  straight toward him.

  Sam dropped below the sill, pressing against the wall under the window,

  and pulled Moose down with him. The dog must have had some sense of the

  danger, for he didn't bark or whine - 249 or resist in any way, but lay

  with his belly to the floor and allowed himself to be held there, still

  and silent.

  A fraction of a second later, over the sounds of wind and rain, Sam

  heard furtive movement on the other side of the wall against which he

  crouched. A soft scuttling sound. Scratching.

  He held his .38 in his right hand, ready in case the thing was bold

  enough to smash through the window.

  A few seconds passed in silence. A few more.

  Sam kept his left hand on Moose's back. He could feel the dog

  shivering.

  After long seconds of silence, the sudden ticking startled Sam, for he

  had just about decided that the creature had gone away.

  Tick-tick-tick-tick.

  it was tapping the glass, as if testing the solidity of the pane or

  calling to the man it had seen standing there.

  Tick-tick. Pause. Tick-tick-tick.

  Tucker led his pack out of the mud and rain, onto the sagging porch of

  the decrepit house. The boards creaked under their weight. One loose

  shutter was banging in the wind; all the others had rotted and torn off

  long ago.

  He struggled to speak of his intentions, but he found it very difficult

  to remember or produce the necessary words. Midst snarls and growls and

  low brute mutterings, he only managed to say, ". . . here . . . hide

  . . . here . . . safe . . .

  " The other male seemed to have lost his speech entirely, for he could

  produce no words at all.

  With considerable difficulty, the female said, safe . . .

  here . . . home. . . .

  " Tucker studied his two companions for a moment and realized they had

  changed during their night adventures. Earlier, the female had

  possessed a feline quality-sleek, sinuous, with cat ears and sharply

  pointed teeth that she revealed when she hissed either in fear, anger,

  or sexual desire. Though something of the cat was still in her, she had

  become more like Tucker, wolfish, with a large head drawn forward into a

  muzzle more canine than feline. She had lupine haunches, as well, and

  feet that appeared to have resulted from the crossbreeding of man and

  wolf, not paws but not hands either, tipped with claws longer and more

  murderous than those of a real wolf. The other male, once unique in

  appearance, combining a few insectile features with the general form of

  a hyena, had now largely conformed to Tucker's appearance.

  By unspoken mutual agreement, Tucker had become the leader of the pack.

  Upon submitting to his rule, his followers evidently had used his

  appearance as a model for their own. He realized that this was an

  important turn of events, maybe even an ominous one.

  He did not know why it should spook him, and he no longer had the mental

  clarity to concentrate on it until understanding came to him. The more

  pressing concern of shelter demanded his attention.

  . . . here . . . safe . . . here .

  He led them through the broken, half-open door, into the front hall of

  the moldering house. The plaster was pocked and cracked, and in some

  places missing altogether, with lath showing through like the rib cage

  of a half-decomposed corpse. In the empty living room, long strips o
f

  wallpaper were peeling off, as if the place was shedding its skin in the

  process of a metamorphosis as dramatic as any that 'Tucker and his pack

  had undergone.

  He followed scents through the house, and that was interesting, not

  exciting but definitely interesting. His companions followed as he

  investigated patches of mildew, toadstools growing in a dank corner of

  the dining room, colonies of vaguely luminescent fungus in a room on the

  other side of the hall, several deposits of rat feces, the mummified

  remains of a bird that had flown in through one of the glassless windows

  and broken a wing against a wall, and the still ripe carcass of a

  diseased coyote that had crawled into the kitchen to die.

  During the course of that inspection, Tucker realized the house (' - 251

  did not offer ideal shelter. The rooms were too large and drafty,

  especially with windows broken out. Though no human scent lingered on

  the air, he sensed that people still came here, not frequently but often

  enough to be troublesome.

  In the kitchen, however, he found the entrance to the cellar, and he was

  excited by that subterranean retreat. He led the others down the

  creaking stairs into that deeper darkness, where cold drafts could not

  reach them, where the floor and walls were dry, and where the air had a

  clean, lime smell that came off the concrete-block walls.

  He suspected that trespassers seldom ventured into the basement. And if

  they did . . . they would be walking into a lair from which they

  could not possibly escape.

  It was a perfect, windowless den. Tucker prowled the perimeter of the