Dean Koontz - (1989)

by Midnight(Lit)

  He was the child of the moonhawk.

  He turned onto the county road and headed toward town.

  He was the child of the moonhawk, their to the crown of light, and at

  midnight he would ascend the throne.

  Pack Martin-his name was actually Packard because his mother named

  him after a car that had been her father's pride-lived in a house

  trailer on the southeast edge of town. It was an old trailer,. its

  enameled finish faded and crackled like the glaze on Ian ancient vase.

  It was rusted in a few spots, dented, and set on a concrete-block

  foundation in a lot that was mostly weeds. Pack knew that many people

  in Moonlight Cove thought his place was an eyesore, but he just plain

  did not give a damn.

  The trailer had AN electrical hookup, an oil furnace, and plumbing,

  which was enough to meet his needs. He was warm, dry, and had a place

  to keep his beer. It was a veritable palace.

  Best of all, the trailer had been paid for twenty-five years ago, *with

  money he had inherited from his mother, so no mortgage hung over him. He

  had a little of the inheritance left, too, and rarely touched the

  principal. The interest amounted to nearly three hundred dollars a

  month, and he also had his disability check, earned by virtue of a fall

  he had taken three weeks after being inducted into the Army. The only

  real work in which Pack had ever engaged was all the reading and

  studying he had done to learn and memorize all of the subtlest and most

  complex symptoms of serious back injury, before reporting per the

  instructions on his draft notice.

  He was born to be a man of leisure. He had known that much about

  himself from a young age. Work and him had nothing for each other. He

  figured he'd been scheduled to be born into a wealthy family, but

  something had gotten screwed up and he'd wound up as the son of a

  waitress who'd been just sufficiently industrious to provide him with a

  minimum inheritance.

  But he envied no one. Every month he bought twelve or fourteen cases of

  cheap beer at the discount store out on the highway, and he had his TV,

  and with a bologna and mustard sandwich now and then, maybe some Fritos,

  he was happy enough.

  By four o'clock that Tuesday afternoon, Pack was well into his second

  six-pack of the day, slumped in his tattered armchair, watching a game

  show on which the prize girl's prime hooters, always revealed in low-cut

  dresses, were a lot more interesting than the MC, the contestants, or

  the questions.

  The MC said, "So what's your choice? Do you want what's behind screen

  number one, screen number two, or screen number three?"

  Talking back to the tube, Pack said, "I'll take what's in that cutie's

  Maidenforrn, thank you very much," and he swigged more beer.

  Just then someone knocked on the door.

  Pack did not get up or in any way acknowledge the knock. He had no

  friends, so visitors were of no interest to him. They were always

  either community do-gooders bringing him a box of food that he didn't

  want, or offering to cut down his weeds and clean up his property, which

  he didn't want, either, because he liked his weeds.

  They knocked again.

  Pack responded by turning up the volume on the TV.

  They knocked harder.

  "Go away," Pack said.

  - 373 They really pounded on the door, shaking the whole damn trailer.

  ..What the hell?" Pack said. He clicked off the TV and got UP.

  The pounding was not repeated, but Pack heard a strange scraping noise

  against the side of the trailer.

  - And the place creaked on its foundation, which it sometimes did when

  the wind was blowing hard. Today, there was no wind.

  "Kids," Pack decided.

  The Aikhorn family, which lived on the other side of the county road and

  two hundred yards to the south, had kids so ornery they ought to have

  been put to sleep with injections, pickled in formaldehyde, and

  displayed in some museum of criminal behavior. Those brats got a kick

  out of pushing cherry bombs through chinks in the foundation blocks,

  under the trailer, waking him with a bang in the middle of the night.

  The scraping at the side of the trailer stopped, but now a couple of

  kids were walking around on the roof.

  That was too much. The metal roof didn't leak, but it had seen better

  days, and it was liable to bend or even separate at the seams under the

  weight of a couple of kids.

  Pack opened the door and stepped out into the rain, shouting obscenities

  at them. But when he looked up he didn't see any kids on the roof. What

  he saw, instead, was something out of a fifties bug movie, big as a man,

  with clacking mandibles and multifaceted eyes, and a mouth framed by

  small pincers. The weird thing was that he also saw a few features of a

  human face in that . monstrous countenance, just enough so he thought

  he recognized Daryl aikhorn, father of the brats. "Neeeeeeeeeeed, it

  said, in a voice half Aikhorn's and half an insectile keening.

  It leaped at him, and as it came, a wickedly sharp stinger telescoped

  from its repulsive body. Even before that yard-long serrated spear

  skewered his belly and thrust all the way through him, Pack knew that

  the days of beer and bologna sandwiches and Fritos and disability checks

  and game-show girls with perfect hooters were over.

  Randy Hapgood, fourteen, sloshed through the dirty calf-deep water in an

  overflowing gutter and sneered contemptuously, as IF to say that nature

  would have to come up with an obstacle a thousand times more formidable

  than that if she hoped to daunt him. He refused to wear a raincoat and

  galoshes because such gear was not fashionably cool. You didn't see rad

  blondes hanging on the arms of nerds who carried umbrellas, either.

  There were no rad girls hanging on Randy, as far as that went, but he

  figured they just hadn't yet noticed how cool he was, how indifferent to

  weather and everything else that humbled other guys.

  He was soaked and miserable-but whistling jauntily to conceal it-when he

  got home from Central at twenty minutes till five, after band practice,

  which had been cut short because of the bad weather. He stripped out of

  his wet denim Jacket and hung it on the back of the pantry door. He

  slipped out of his soggy tennis shoes, as well.

  "I'm heeeeerrreeeee," he shouted, parodying the little girl in

  Poltergeist.

  No one answered him.

  He knew his parents were home, because THE lights were on, and the door

  was unlocked. Lately they'd been working at home more and more. They

  were in some sort of product research at New Wave, and they were able to

  put in a full day on their dual terminals upstairs, in the back room,

  without actually going in to the office.

  Randy got a Coke out of the refrigerator, popped the tab, took a swig,

  and headed upstairs to dry out while he told Pete and Marsha about his

  day. He didn't call them mom and dad, and that was all right with them;

  they were cool. Sometimes he thought they were even too cool. They

  drove a Porsche, and their clothes were always six months ahead of what


  everyone else was wearing, and they'd talk about anything with him,

  anything, including sex, as frankly as if they were his pals. If HE ever

  did find a rad blonde who wanted to hang on him, he'd be afraid to bring

  her home to meet his folks, for fear she'd think his dad was infinitely

  cooler than he was. Sometimes he wished Pete and Marsha were fat,

  frumpy, dressed out of date, and stuffily insisted on being called mom

  and dad. Competition in school for grades and popularity was fierce

  enough without having to feel that he was also in competition at home

  with his PARENTS.

  As he reached the top of the stairs, he called out again, "In p - 375

  immortal words of the modern American intellectual, John 'YO! They "

  still didn't answer him.

  Randy reached the open door to the workroom at the end of the hall, a

  case of the creeps hit him. He shivered and didn't stop, however,

  because his self-image of ul did not allow him to be spooked.

  across the threshold, ready with a wisecrack about failure to respond to

  his calls. Too late, he was flash-frozen in place by fear.

  Pete and Marsha were sitting on opposite sides of the large table, where

  their computer terminals stood back to back. No, they were not exactly

  sitting there; they were wired into the and the computers by scores of

  hideous, segmented cables that grew out of them-or out of the machine;

  it was hard to tell which-and not only anchored them to their computers

  but to their chairs and, finally, to the floor, into which the cables

  disappeared. Their faces were still vaguely recognizable, though wildly

  altered, half pale flesh and half metal, with a slightly melted look.

  Randy could not breathe.

  But abruptly he could move, and he scrambled backward.

  The door slammed behind him.

  He whirled.

  Tentacles-half organic, half metallic-erupted from the wall. The entire

  room seemed weirdly, malevolently alive, or maybe - the walls were

  filled with alien machinery. The tentacles were quick. They lashed

  around him, pinned his arms, thoroughly him, and turned him toward his

  parents.

  They were still in their chairs but were no longer facing their

  computers- They stared at him with radiant green eyes that appeared to

  be boiling in their sockets, bubbling and churning.

  Randy screamed. He thrashed, but the tentacles held him.

  Pete opened his mouth, and half a dozen silvery spheres, like kill ball

  bearings, shot from him and struck Randy in the chest.

  Pain exploded through the boy. But it didn't last more than a COUPle of

  seconds. Instead, the hot pain became an icy-cold, ling sensation that

  worked through his entire body and up his face.

  He tried to scream again. No sound escaped him.

  The tentacles shrank back into the wall, pulling him with them, until

  his back was pinned tightly against the plaster.

  The coldness was in his head now. Crawling, crawling.

  Again, he tried to scream. This time a sound came from him.

  A thin, electronic oscillation.

  Thursday afternoon, wearing warm wool slacks and a sweatshirt and a

  cardigan over the sweatshirt because she found it hard to stay warm

  these days, Meg Henderson sat at the kitchen table by the window, with a

  glass of chenin blanc, a plate of onion crackers, a wedge of Gouda, and

  a Nero Wolfe novel by Rex Stout. She had read all of the Wolfe novels

  ages ago, but she was rereading them. Returning to old novels was

  comforting because the people in them never changed. Wolfe was still a

  genius and gourmet. Archie was still a man of action. Fritz still ran

  the best private kitchen in the world. None of them had aged since last

  she'd met them, either, which was a trick she wished she had learned.

  Meg was eighty years old, and she looked eighty, every minute of it; she

  didn't kid herself. Occasionally, when she saw herself in a mirror, she

  stared in amazement, as if she had nol lived with that face for the

  better part of a century and wasn't looking at a stranger. Somehow she

  expected to see a reflection of her youth because inside she was still

  that girl. fortunately she didn't feel eighty. Her bones were creaky,

  and her muscles had about as much tone as those of Jabba the Hut in the

  Star Wars movie she'd watched on the VCR last week, She was free of

  arthritis and other major complaints, thank God. She still lived in her

  bungalow on Concord Circle, an odd little hal moon street that began and

  ended from Serra Avenue on the east end of town. She and Frank had

  bought the place forty years ago, when they had both been teachers at

  Thomas Jefferson School, in the days when it had been a combined school

  for all grades. Moonlight Cove had been much smaller then. For

  fourteen years, since Frank died, she had lived in the bungalo alone.

  She could get around, clean, and cook for herself, for which she was

  grateful.

  She was even more grateful for her mental acuity. More than physical

  infirmity, she dreaded senility or a stroke that, while leaving her

  physically functional, would steal her memory an alter her personality.

  She tried to keep her mind flexible by reading a lot of books of all

  different kinds, by renting a variety of videos for her VCR, and by

  avoiding at all costs the mind-numbing slop that passed for

  entertainment on television.

  By four-thirty Tuesday afternoon, she was halfway through the novel,

  though she paused at the end of each chapter to look out at the rain.

  She liked rain. She liked whatever weather God chose to throw at the

  world-storms, hail, wind, cold, heat because the variety and extremes of

  creation were what made it so beautiful While looking at the rain, which

  earlier had declined from a fierce downpour to a drizzle but was once

  more falling furiously, she saw three large, dark, and utterly fantastic

  creatures appear out of the stand of trees at the rear of her property,

  fifty feet from the window at which she sat. They halted for a moment as

  a thin mist eddied around their feet, as if they were dream monsters

  that had taken shape from those scraps of fog and might melt away as

  suddenly as they had arisen. But then they raced toward her back porch.

  As they drew swiftly nearer, Meg's first impression of them was

  reinforced. They were like nothing on this earth . . . unless

  perhaps gargoyles could come alive and climb down from cathedral roofs.

  She knew at once that she must be in the early stages of a truly massive

  stroke, because that was what she had always feared would at last claim

  her. But she was surprised that it would begin like this, with such a

  weird hallucination.

  That was all it could be, of course-halucination preceding the bursting

  of a cerebral blood vessel that must be already swelling and pressing on

  her brain. She waited for a painful exploding sensation inside her

  head, waited for her face and body to twist to the left or right as one

  side or the other was paralyzed.

  Even when the first of the gargoyles crashed through the window,

  Showering the table with glass, spilling the chenin blanc, knocking M
eg

  off her chair, and falling to the floor atop her, a I and claws, she

  marveled that a stroke could produce such Vivid, convincing illusions,

  though she was not surprised by the intensity of the pain. She'd always

  known that death would hurt.

  Dora Hankins, the receptionist in the main lobby at New Wave, was

  accustomed to seeing people leave work as early as four-thirty. Though

  the official quitting time was five o'clock, a lot of workers put in

  hours at home, on their own PCs, so no one strictly enforced the

  eight-hour office day. Since they'd been converted, there had been no

  need for rules, anyway, because they were all working for the same goal,

  for the new world that was coming, and the only discipline they needed

  was their fear of Shaddack, of which they had plenty.

  By 455, when no one at all had passed through the lobby, Dora was

  apprehensive. The building was oddly silent, though hundreds of people

  were working there in offices and labs farther back on the ground floor

  and in the two floors overhead. In fact the place seemed deserted.

  At five o'clock no one had yet left for the day, and Dora had decided to

  see what was going on. She abandoned her post at the main reception

  desk, walked to the end of the large marble lobby, through a brass door,

  into a less grand corridor floored with vinyl tile. Offices lay on both

  sides. She went into the first room on the left, where eight women

  served as a secretarial pool for minor department heads who had no

  personal secretaries of their own.

  The eight were at their VDTS. In the fluorescent light, Dora had no