Dean Koontz - (1989)

by Midnight(Lit)

  were fighting for, always will, and sometimes when I think of how we

  abandoned Moln to the killing fields, the mass graves, I lay awake at

  night and cry because they depended on me, and to the extent that I was

  a part of the process, I'm responsible for failing them."

  They were all silent.

  Chrissie felt a peculiar pressure in her chest, the same feeling she

  always got in school when a teacher-any teacher, any subject began to

  talk about something which had been previously unknown to her and which

  so impressed her that it changed the way she looked at the world. It

  didn't happen often, but it was always both a scary and wonderful

  sensation. She felt it now, because of what Harry had said, but the

  sensation was ten times or a hundred times stronger than it had ever

  been when some new insight or idea had been passed to her in geography

  or math or science.

  Tessa said, "Harry, I think your sense of responsibility in this case is

  excessive."

  He finally looked up from his fist.

  "No. it can never be. Your sense of responsibility to others can never

  be excessive." He smiled at her.

  "But I know you just well enough to suspect you're already aware of

  that, Tessa, whether you realize it or not." He looked at Sam and said,

  "Some of those who came out of the war saw no good at all in it. When I

  meet up with them, I always suspect they were the ones who never learned

  the lesson, and I avoid them-though I suppose that's unfair. Can't help

  it. But when I meet a man from the war and see he learned the lesson,

  then I'd trust him with my life. Hell, I'd trust him with my soul,

  which in this case seems to be what they want to steal. You'll get us

  out of this, Sam." At last he opened his fist. "I've no doubt of that."

  Tessa seemed surprised. To Sam she said, "You were in Vietnam?

  " Sam nodded.

  "Between junior college and the Bureau."

  "But You never mentioned it. This morning, when we were eating

  breakfast, when you told me all the reasons you saw the world so

  differently from the way I saw it, you mentioned your wife's death, the

  murder of your partners, your situation with your son, but not that."

  Sam stared at his bandaged wrist for a while and finally said, "The war

  is the most personal experience of my life."

  "What an odd thing to say."

  "Not odd at all," Harry said.

  "The most intense and the= most personal."

  Sam said, "If I'd not come to terms with it, I'd probably still talk

  about it, probably run on about it all the time. But I have come to

  terms with it. I've understood. And now to talk about it casually with

  someone I've just met would . . . well, cheapen it, I guess."

  Tessa looked at Harry and said, "But you knew he was ill Vietnam?

  "Yes. I "Just knew it somehow."

  "Yes." Sam had been leaning over the table. Now he settled back in his

  chair.

  "Harry, I swear I'll do my best to get us out of this. But I wish I had

  a better grasp of what we're up against. It all,' comes from New Wave.

  But exactly what have they done, and how can it be stopped? And how can

  I hope to deal with it when, I don't even understand it?"

  To that point Chrissie had felt that the conversation had been way over

  her head, even though all of it had been fascinating and though some of

  it had stirred the Teaming feeling in her But now she felt that she had

  to contribute "Are you really sure .

  it's not aliens?"

  "We're sure," Tessa said, smiling at her, and Sam ruffled her hair.

  "Well," Chrissie said, "what I mean is, maybe what went wrong at New

  Wave is that aliens landed there and used it as a base, and maybe they

  want to turn us all into machines, like the Coltranes, so we can serve

  them as slaves-which, when you think about it, is more sensible than

  wanting to eat us. They're aliens, after all, which means they have

  alien stomachs and alien digestive juices, and we'd probably be real

  hard to digest, giving them heartburn, maybe even diarrhea."

  Sam, who was sitting in the chair beside Chrissie, took both - 351 her

  hands and held them gently in his, as aware of her abraded palm as he

  was aware of his own injured wrist.

  "Chrissie, I don't know if you've been paying too much attention to what

  Harry'sbeen saying-" -'Oh, yes," she said at once.

  "All of it."

  "Well, then you'll understand when I tell you that wanting to . blame

  all these horrors on aliens is yet another way of shifting the

  responsibility from where it really belongs-on us, on people, on our

  very real and very great capacity to do harm to one another. it's hard

  to believe that anybody, even crazy men, would want to make the

  Coltranes into what they became, but somebody evidently did want just

  that. If we try to blame it on aliens or the devil or God or trolls or

  whatever-we won't be likely to see the situation clearly enough to

  figure out how to save ourselves. You understand?

  "Sort of."

  He smiled at her. He had a very nice smile, though he didn't flash it

  much.

  "I think you understand it more than sort of."

  "More than sort of," Chrissie agreed.

  "It'd sure be nice if it was aliens, because we'd just have to find

  their nest or their hive or whatever, burn them out real good, maybe

  blow up their spaceship, and it would be over and done with. But if

  it's not aliens, if it's us-people like us-who did all this, then maybe

  it's never quite over and done with."

  With increasing frustration, Loman Watkins cruised from one end Of

  Moonlight Cove to the other, back and forth, around and around in the

  rain, seeking Shaddack. He had revisited the house on the north point

  to be sure Shaddack had not returned there, and also to check the garage

  to see which vehicle was missing.

  Now he was looking for Shaddack's charcoal-gray van with tinted windows,

  but he was unable to locate it.

  Wherever he went, conversion teams and search parties were at work.

  Though the unconverted were not likely to notice anything too unusual

  about those men's passage through town, Loman was constantly aware of

  them.

  At the north and south roadblocks on the county route and at the main

  blockade on the eastern end of Ocean Avenue, out toward the interstate,

  Loman's officers were continuing to deal with outsiders wanting to enter

  Moonlight Cove. Exhaust plumes rose from the idling patrol cars,

  mingling with the wisps of fog that had begun to slither through the

  rain. The red and blue emergency beacons were reflected in the wet

  macadam, so it seemed as if streams of blood, oxygenated and

  oxygen-depleted, n flowed along the pavement.

  There weren't many would-be visitors because the town was neither the

  county seat nor a primary shopping center for people in outlying

  communities. Furthermore, it was close to the end of the county road,

  and there were no destinations beyond it, so no one wanted to pass

  through on the way to somewhere else. Those who did want to come into

  town were turned away, if at all possible, with a s
tory about a toxic

  spill at New Wave. Those,' who seemed at all skeptical were arrested,

  conveyed to the jail, and locked in cells until a decision could be made

  either to kill, or convert them. Since the establishment of the

  quarantine in the early hours of the morning, only a score of people had

  been stopped at the blockades, and only six had been Jailed.

  Shaddack had chosen his proving ground well. Moonlight Cove was

  relatively isolated and therefore easier to control.

  Loman was of a mind to order the roadblocks dismantled, and to drive

  over to Aberdeen Wells, where he could spill their whole story to the

  county sheriff. He wanted to blow the Moon-, hawk Project wide open.

  He was no longer afraid of Shaddack's rage or of dying. well . . .

  not true. He was afraid of Shaddack and of death, but they'll held less

  fear for him than the prospect of becoming somethi like Denny had

  become. He would have as soon entrusted him] self to the mercies of the

  sheriff in Aberdeen and the federal authorities-even scientists who,

  while cleaning up the mess in Moonlight Cove, might be sorely tempted to

  dissect him-than stay in - 353 town and inevitably surrender the last

  few fragments of his humanity either to regression or to some nightmare

  wedding of his body and mind with a computer.

  But if he ordered his officers to stand down, they would be suspicious,

  and their loyalty lay more with Shaddack than with him, for they were

  bound to Shaddack by terror. They were still more frightened of their

  New Wave master than of anything else, for they had not seen what Denny

  had become and did not yet guess that their future might hold in store

  something even worse than regression to a savage state. Like Moreau's

  beastmen, they kept The Law as best they could, not daring-at least for

  now to betray their maker. They would probably try to stop Loman from

  sabotaging the Moonhawk Project, and he might wind up dead or, worse,

  locked in a jail cell.

  He couldn't risk revealing his counterrevolutionary commitment, for then

  he might never have a chance to deal with Shaddack. In his mind's eye

  he saw himself caged at the jail, with Shaddack smiling coldly at him

  through the bars, as they wheeled in a computer with which they somehow

  intended to fuse him.

  Molten silver eyes . . .

  He kept on the move in the rain-hammered day, squinting through the

  streaked windshield. The wipers thumped steadily, as though ticking off

  time. He was acutely aware that midnight was drawing nearer.

  He was the puma-man, on the prowl, and Moreau was out there in the

  island jungle that was Moonlight Cove.

  Initially the protean creature was content to feed on the things it

  found when it extended thin tendrils of itself down the drain in the

  cellar floor or through fine cracks in the walls and into the moist

  surrounding earth. Beetles. Grubs. Earthworms. It no longer knew the

  names of those things, but it avidly consumed them.

  Soon, however, it depleted the supply of insects and worms within ten

  yards of the house. It needed a more substantial meal.

  It churned, seethed, perhaps striving to marshal its amorphous tissues

  into a shape in which it could leave the cellar and seek prey. But it

  had no memory of previous forms and no desire whatsoever to impose

  structural order on itself.

  The consciousness which inhabited that jellied mass no longer had more

  than the dimmest sense of self-awareness, yet it was still able to

  remake itself to an extent that would satisfy its needs. Suddenly a

  score of lipless, toothless mouths opened in that fluid form. A blast

  of sound, mostly beyond the range of human hearing, erupted from it.

  Throughout the moldering structure above the shapeless beast, dozens of

  mice were scurrying, nibbling at food, nest-building!.

  and grooming themselves. They stopped, as one, when the call.

  blared up from the cellar.

  The creature could sense them above, in the crumbling walls, though it

  thought of them not as mice but as small warm masses of living flesh.

  Food. Fuel. It wanted them. It needed them.

  It attempted to express that need in the form of a wordless but

  compelling summons.

  In every corner of the house, mice twitched. They brushed at, their

  faces with forepaws, as if they'd scurried through cobwebs and were

  trying to scrape those clingy, gossamer strands out of their fur.

  A small colony of eight bats lived in the attic, and they also reacted

  to the urgent call. They dropped from the rafters on which they hung,

  and flew in frenzied, random patterns in the long upper room, repeatedly

  swooping within a fraction of an inch of the walls and one another.

  But nothing came to the creature in the basement. Though the call had

  reached the small animals for which it had been intended, it did not

  have the desired effect.

  The shapeless thing fell silent.

  Its many mouths closed.

  One by one the bats returned to their perches in the attic.

  The mice sat as if in shock for a moment, then resumed their usual

  activities.

  - 355 A couple of minutes later, the protean beast tried again with a

  different pattern of sounds, still pitched beyond human hearing but more

  alluring than before.

  The bats flung themselves from their perches and rolled through the

  attic in such turmoil that an observer might have thought they numbered

  a hundred instead of only eight. The beating of their wings was louder

  than the rush of rain on the roof.

  Everywhere, mice rose on their hind feet, sitting at attention, ears

  pricked. Those in the lower reaches of the house, nearer the source of

  the summons, shivered violently, as though they saw before them a

  crouched and grinning cat.

  Screeching, the bats swooped through a hole in the attic floor, into an

  empty room on the second story, where they circled and soared and dove

  ceaselessly.

  Two mice on the ground floor began to creep toward the kitchen, where

  the door to the basement stood open. But both stopped on the threshold

  of that room, frightened and confused.

  Below, the shapeless entity tripled the power of its call.

  One of the mice in the kitchen suddenly bled from the ears and fell

  dead.

  Upstairs, the bats began to bounce off walls, their radar shot.

  The cellar dweller cut back somewhat on the force of its summons.

  The bats immediately swooped out of the upstairs room, into the hallway,

  down the stairwell, and along the ground-floor hall. As they went, they

  flew over a double score of scurrying mice.

  Below, the creature's many mouths had connected, forming one large

  orifice in the center of the pulsing mass.

  In swift succession the bats flew straight into that gaping maw like

  black playing cards being tossed one at a time into a waste can. They

  embedded themselves in the oozing protoplasm and were swiftly dissolved

  by powerful digestive acids.

  An army of mice and four rats-even two chipmunks that eagerly abandoned

  their nest inside the dining-room walls swarmed
down the steep cellar

  steps, falling over one another, squeaking excitedly. They fed

  themselves to the waiting entity.

  After that flurry of movement, the house was still.

  The creature stopped its siren song. For the moment.

  Officer Neil Penniworth was assigned to patrol the northwest quadrant of

  Moonlight Cove. He was alone in the car because even with the hundred

  New Wave employees detailed to the police department during the night,

  their manpower was stretched thin.

  Right now, he preferred to work without a partner. Since the episode at

  Peyser's house, when the smell of blood and the sight of Peyser's

  altered form had enticed Penniworth to regress, he had been afraid to be

  around other people. He had avoided total degeneration last night . .

  . but only by the thinnest of margins. If he witnessed someone else in

  the act of regression, the urge might stir within him, too, and this

  time he was not sure that e could successfully repress that dark

  yearning.

  He was equally afraid to be alone. The struggle to hold fast to his

  remaining shreds of humanity, to resist chaos, to be responsible, was

  wearying, and he longed to escape this new, hard life. Alone, with no

  one to see him if he began to surrender the very form and substance of

  himself, with no one to talk him out of it or even to protest his