Dean Koontz - (1989)

by Midnight(Lit)

  degeneration, he would be lost.

  The weight of his fear was as real as a slab of iron, crushing the life

  out of him. At times he had difficulty drawing breath, as though his

  lungs were banded by steel and restricted from full expansion.

  The dimensions of the black-and-white seemed to shrink, until he felt

  almost as confined as he would have been in a straitjacket. The

  metronomic thump of the windshield wipers grew louder, at least to his

  ears, until the volume was as thunderous as an endless series of cannon

  volleys. Repeatedly during the morning and early afternoon, he pulled

  off the road, flung open - 357 the door, and scrambled out into the

  rain, drawing deep breaths - of the cool air.

  Of As the day progressed, however, even the world outside of the car

  began to seem smaller than it had been. He stopped on Holliwell Road,

  half a mile west of New Wave's headquarters, and got out of the cruiser,

  but he felt no better. The low roof of storm clouds denied him the

  sight of the limitless sky. Like semitransparent curtains of tinsel and

  thinnest silk, the rain and fog hung between him and the rest of the

  world. The humidity was cloying, stifling. Rain overflowed gutters,

  churned in muddy torrents through roadside ditches, dripped from every

  branch and leaf of every tree, pattered on the macadam pavement, tapped

  hollowly on the patrol car, sizzled, gurgled, chuckled, snapped against

  his face, beat upon him with such force that it seemed he was being

  driven to his knees by thousands of tiny hammers, each too small to be

  effective in itself but with brutal cumulative effect.

  Neil clambered back into the car with as much eagerness as he had

  scrambled out of it.

  He understood that it was neither the claustrophobic interior of the

  cruiser nor the enervating enwrapment of the rain that he was

  desperately trying to escape. The actual oppressor was his life as a

  New Person. Able to feel only fear, he was locked in an emotional

  closet of such unendurably narrow dimensions that he could not move at

  all. He was not suffocating because of external entanglements and

  constrictions; rather, he was bound from within, because of what

  Shaddack had made of him.

  Which meant there was no escape.

  Except, perhaps, by regression.

  Neil could not bear life as he must now live it. On the other hand he

  was repelled and terrified by the thought of devolution into some

  subhuman form.

  His dilemma appeared irresoluble.

  He was as distressed by his inability to stop thinking about his

  predicament as he was by the predicament itself. It pried constantly at

  his mind. He could find no surcease.

  The closest he came to being able to put his worry-and some of his

  fear-out of mind was when he was working with the mobile VDT in the

  patrol car. When he checked the computer bulletin board to see if

  messages awaited him, when he accessed the Moonhawk schedule to learn

  how conversions were progressing, or undertook any other task with the

  computer, his attention became so focused on the interaction with the

  machine that briefly his anxiety subsided and his nagging clostrophobia

  faded.

  From adolescence, Neil had been interested in computing, although he had

  never become a hacker. His interest was more

  obsessive than that. He'd started with computer games, of course but

  later had been given an inexpensive PC. Later still he had bought a

  modern with some of the money earned at a job. Though he could not

  afford much long-distance time and never spent leisurely hours using the

  modern far from the backwaters of Moonlight Cove into the data nets

  available in the outside world, he found his on-line systems engrossing

  and fun.

  Now, as he sat in the parked car along Holliwell Road, and used the VDT,

  he thought that the inner world of the computer was admirably clean,

  comparatively simple, predictable, and sane. So unlike human

  existence-whether that of New People or Old In there, logic and reason

  ruled. Cause and effect and side-effects were always analyzed and made

  perfectly clear. In there, all black and white-or, when gray, the gray

  was carefully ensured, quantified and qualified. Cold facts were easier

  to deal with than feelings. A universe formed purely of data, abstract

  from matter and event, seemed so much more desirable than real universe

  of cold and heat, sharp and blunt, smooth rough, blood and death, pain

  and fear.

  Calling up menu after menu, Neil probed ever deeper into the Moonhawk

  research files within Sun. He needed none of the data that he summoned

  forth but found solace in the process of obtaining it.

  He began to see the terminal screen not as a cathode-ray tube on which

  information was displayed, but as a window into another world. A world

  of facts. A world free of troubling contradictions . . . and

  responsibility. In there, nothing could be felt. there was only the

  known and the unknown, either an abundant n of facts about a particular

  subject or a dearth of them, but feeling; never feeling; feeling was the

  curse of those whose existence was dependent upon flesh and bone.

  A window into another world.

  - 359 He touched the screen.

  He wished the window could be opened and that he could go through it to

  that place of reason, order, peace.

  With the fingertips of his right hand, he traced circles across the warm

  glass screen.

  Strangely, he thought of Dorothy, swept up from the plains of Kansas

  with her dog Toto, spun high into the tornado, and d out of that

  depression-era grayness into a world far more intriguing. If only some

  electronic tornado could erupt from the VDT and carry him to a better

  place . . .

  His fingers passed through the screen.

  He snatched his hand back in astonishment.

  The glass had not ruptured. Chains of words and numbers glowed on the

  tube, as before.

  At first he tried to convince himself that what he had seen had been a

  hallucination. But he did not believe that.

  He flexed his fingers. They appeared unhurt.

  He looked out at the storm-swept day. The windshield wipers were not

  switched on. Rain rippled down the glass, distorting the world beyond;

  everything out there looked twisted, mutated, strange. There could

  never be order, sanity, and peace in such a place as that.

  Tentatively he touched the computer screen once more. It felt solid.

  Again, he thought of how desirable the clean, predictable world of the

  computer would be-and as before his hand slipped through the glass, up

  to the wrist this time. The screen had opened around him and sealed

  tight to him, as if it were an organic membrane. The data continued to

  blaze on the tube, the Words and numbers forming lines around his

  intruding hand.

  His heart was racing. He was afraid but also excited.

  He tried to wiggle his fingers in that mysterious, inner warmth. He

  could not feel them. He began to think they had dissolved or been cut

  off, and that when he withdrew his hand from the m
achine, the stump of

  his wrist would spout blood.

  He withdrew it anyway.

  His hand was whole.

  But it was not quite a hand any more. The flesh on the upper sides from

  the tips of his fingernails to his wrist, appeared to be veined with

  copper and threads of glass. In those glass filaments beat a steady and

  luminous pulse.

  He turned his hand over. The undersides of his fingers and his palm

  resembled the surface of a cathode-ray tube. DataM burned there, green

  letters on a background glassy and dark. When he compared the words and

  numbers on his hand to those on the car's VDT, he saw they were

  identical. The information on the VDT changed; simultaneously, so did

  that on his hand.

  Abruptly, he understood that regression into bestial form was not the

  only avenue of escape open to him, that he could enter, into the world

  of electronic thought and magnetic memory, Of knowledge without fleshly

  desire, of awareness without feeling, This was not an insight

  strictly-or even primarily-intellectual in nature. It wasn't just

  instinctive understanding, either. On some level more profound than

  either intellect or instinct, he knew that he could remake himself more

  thoroughly than even Shaddack had remade him.

  He lowered his hand from the tilted computer screen to the

  data-processing unit in the console between the seats. As easily,' as

  he had penetrated the glass, he let his hand slide through the keyboard

  and cover plate, into the guts of the machine.

  He was like a ghost, able to pass through walls, ectoplasmic.

  A coldness crept up his arm.

  The data on the screen were replaced by cryptic patterns of light.

  He leaned back in his seat.

  The coldness had reached his shoulder. It flowed into his neck, He

  sighed.

  He felt something happening to his eyes. He wasn't sun what. He could

  have looked at the rearview mirror. He didn't care. He decided to

  close his eyes and let them become whatever, was necessary as part of

  this second and more complete conversion.

  This altered state was infinitely more appealing than that of the

  regressive. Irresistible.

  The coldness was in his face now. His mouth was numb. and Something

  also was happening inside his head. He was becoming as aware of the

  inner geography of his brain circuits an% synapses as he was of the

  exterior world. His body was not As much a part of him as it had once

  been; he sensed less throng - 361 as if his nerves had been mostly

  abraded away; he could not tell if it was warm or chilly in the car

  unless he concentrated on accumulating that data. His body was just a

  machine after all, and a rack for sensors, designed to protect and serve

  the inner him, the calculating mind.

  The coldness was inside his skull.

  It felt like scores. then hundreds, then thousands of ice-cold spiders

  scurrying over the surface of his brain, burrowing into it.

  Suddenly he remembered that Dorothy had found Oz to be a living

  nightmare and ultimately had wanted desperately to find her way back to

  Kansas. Alice, too, had found madness and terror down the rabbit hole,

  beyond the looking-glass. . . .

  A million cold spiders.

  inside his skull.

  A billion.

  Cold, cold.

  Scurrying.

  Still circling through Moonlight Cove, seeking Shaddack, Loman saw

  two regressives sprint across the street.

  He was on Paddock Lane, at the southern end of town, where the

  Properties were big enough for people to keep horses. Ranch houses lay

  on both sides, with small private stables beside or behind them. The

  homes set back from the street, behind splitrail or white ranch fencing,

  beyond deep and lushly landscaped lawns.

  . The pair of regressives erupted from a dense row of mature -foot-high

  azaleas that were still bushy but flowerless this in the season. They

  streaked on all fours across the roadway, leaped a ditch, and crashed

  through a hedgerow, vanishing behind it.

  Although immense pines were lined up along both sides of Paddock Lane,

  adding their shadows to the already darkish day, Loman was sure of what

  he had seen. They had been modeled after dream creatures rather than

  any single animal of the real world part wolf, perhaps, part cat, part

  reptile. They were swift and looked powerful. One of them had turned

  its head toward him, and in the shadows its eyes had glowed as pink-red

  as those of a rat.

  He slowed but did not stop. He no longer cared about identifying and

  apprehending regressives. For one thing, he'd already identified them

  to his satisfaction all of the converted. He knew ,4.1 that stopping

  them could be accomplished only by stopping Shaddack. He was after much

  bigger game.

  However, he was unnerved to see them brazenly on the prow in daylight,

  at two-thirty in the afternoon. Heretofore, they had been secretive

  creatures of the night, hiding the shame of their regression by seeking

  their altered states only well after sunset If they were prepared to

  venture forth before nightfall, the Moonhawk Project was disintegrating

  into chaos even faster than he had expected. Moonlight Cove was not

  merely teetering on the brink of hell but had already tipped over the

  edge and into the pit.

  They were in Harry's third-floor bedroom again, where they passed the

  last hour and a half, brainstorming and urgently discussing their

  options. No lamps were on. Watery afternoon light washed the room,

  contributing to the somber mood.

  "So we're agreed there are two ways we might send a message out of

  town," Sam said.

  - 363 "But in either case," Tessa said uneasily, "you have to go away

  there and cover a lot of ground to get where you need to go. Sam

  shrugged.

  Tessa and Chrissie had taken off their shoes and sat on the bed, their

  backs against the headboard. The girl clearly intended to stay Close to

  Tessa; she seemed to have imprinted on her the way a baby chick, freshly

  hatched from the egg, imprints on the t adult bird, whether it's the

  mother or not.

  Tessa said, "It's not going to be as easy as Slipping two doors to the

  Coltrane house. Not in daylight. You think I ought to wait until it

  gets dark?" Sam asked.

  "Yes. The fog will come in more heavily, too, as the afternoon fades."

  She meant what she said, though she was worried about the delay. During

  the hours that they bided their time, more people be converted.

  Moonlight Cove would become an increasing* alien, dangerous, and

  surprise-filled environment.

  Turning to Harry, Sam said, 'What time's it get dark?"

  Harry was in his wheelchair. Moose had returned to his master,

  thrusting his burly head under the arm of the chair and onto Harry's

  lap, content to sit for long stretches in that awkward posture in return

  for just a little petting and scratching and an occasional reassuring

  word.

  Harry said, "These days, twilight comes before six o'clock."

  Sam was sitting at the telescope, though at the moment
he was not using

  it. A few minutes ago he had surveyed the streets and reported seeing

  more activity than earlier-plenty of car and foot patrols- As steadily

  fewer local residents remained unconverted, the conspirators behind

  Moonhawk were growing bolder in their Policing actions, less concerned

  than they'd once been about calling attention to themselves.

  Glancing at his watch, Sam said, "I can't say I like the idea Of wasting

  three hours or more. The sooner we get the word out, the more people

  we'll save from . . . from whatever's being done to them. "But if YOU

  get caught because you didn't wait for nightfall,"

  "then the chances of saving anyone become a hell of A lot Slimmer.

  " ."The lady has a Point," Harry said.

  "A good one," Chrissie said.

  "Just because they're not aliens doesn't mean they're going to be any

  easier to deal with."

  Because even the working telephones would allow a caller to dial only

  approved numbers within town, they'd given up on hope. But Sam had

  realized that any PC connected by modern with the supercomputer at New

  Wave-Harry said they called Sun-might provide a way out of town, an

  electronic high-way on which they could circumvent the current

  restrictions on the phone lines and the roadblocks.

  As Sam had noted last night while using the VDT in the police car, Sun

  maintained direct contacts with scores of other computers-including