Dean Koontz - (1989)

by Midnight(Lit)

around, maybe he wouldn't be diligent enough to be t probing every

  corner of the place. When he saw bare walls and a flurry of spiders on

  his first sweep of the flash, maybe he would click off the beam and

  retreat.

  0 the attic at all would look into it properly, exploring every cormer.

  But whether that hope was absurd or not, Harry clung to it; he was good

  at nurturing hope, making hearty stew from the thinnest broth of it,

  because for half his life, hope was mostly what had sustained him.

  He was not uncomfortable. As preparation for the unheated atic with

  Sam's help to speed the dressing process, he had put on wool socks,

  warmer pants than what he had been wearing, .and two sweaters.

  r Funny, how a lot of people seemed to think that a paralyzed man could

  feel nothing in his unresponsive extremities. In some that was true;

  all nerves were blunted, all feeling lost.

  out spinal injuries came in myriad types; short of a total severing of

  the cord, the range of sensations left to the victim varied widely.

  In Harry's case, though he had lost all use of one arm and leg and

  nearly all use of the other leg, he could still feel hot and cold. When

  something pricked him he was aware-if not of pain-at least of a blunt

  pressure.

  Physically, he felt much less than when he'd been a whole Man; no

  argument about that. But all feelings were not physical. oddly enough,

  though he was sure that few people would believe him, his handicap

  actually had enriched his emotional life. Though by necessity something

  of a recluse, he had learned to compensate for a dearth of human

  contact. Books had helped. Books opened the world to him. And the

  telescope. But mostly his unwavering will to lead as full a life as

  possible was what had kept him Whole in mind and heart.

  If these were his final hours, he would blow out the candle with no

  bitterness when the time came to extinguish it. He re it harder to put

  each foot down after he lifted it, so instead-was absurd, of course.

  Anyone who went to the trouble to look Harry's waited in the attic,

  hoping for the best, expecting the worst.

  He was propped against the outer wall of the long, unlighted chamber,

  tucked in the corner at the extreme far end from the trapdoor through

  which he had been lifted. Wtted what he had lost, but more important,

  he treasured what There was nothing had kept. In the last analysis, he

  felt that he had lived a life in that upper room behind which he could

  hide.

  But if someone went so far as to empty out the closet rnasl was in the

  balance was good, worthwhile, precious.

  He had two guns with him. A .45 revolver. A .38 pistol. If they came

  into the attic after him, he would use the pistol on them until it was

  empty. Then he would make them eat all but one of the rounds in the

  revolver. That last cartridge would be for himself.

  He had brought no extra bullets. In a crisis, a man wit only one good

  hand could not reload fast enough to make the effort more than a comic

  finale.

  The drumming of rain on the roof had subsided. He wondered if this was

  just another lull in the storm or if it was ending.

  It would be nice to see the sun again.

  He worried more about Moose than about himself. The pool damn dog was

  down there alone. When the Boogeymen or the makers came at last, he

  hoped they wouldn't hal And if they came into the attic and forced him

  to shoot he hoped that Moose would not be long without To Loman, as he

  cruised, Moonlight Cove seemed both dea and teeming with life.

  Judged by the usual signs of life in a small town, the bur was an empty

  husk, as defunct as any sun-dried ghost town in the heart of the Mohave.

  The shops, bars, and restaurants closed. Even the usually crowded Perez

  Family restaurant shuttered, dark; no one had showed up to open for

  business The only pedestrians out walking in the aftermath were foot

  patrols or conversion teams. Likewise, t and two-man patrols in private

  cars had the streets However, the town seethed with perverse life.

  he saw strange, swift figures moving through the fog, still secretive

  but far bolder than they had been for nights. When he stopped or slowed

  to study those mar udefl 407 them paused in deep shadows to gaze at him

  with blue or green or smoldering red eyes, as if they were recconing

  their chances of attacking his black-and-white and pulling him out of it

  before he could take his foot off the brake and get out of there.

  Watching them, he was filled with an urge to abandon his car, his

  clothes, and the rigidity of his form, to join them in their simpler

  world of hunting, and rutting. Each time he quickly turned away from

  them and drove on before they-or he-could act upon such impulses. Here

  and there he passed houses in which eerie lights wed, and against the

  windows of which moved shadows so grotesque and unearthly that his heart

  quickened and his palms got damp, though he was well removed from them

  and probably beyond their reach. He did not stop to investigate what

  creatures might inhabit those places or what tasks they were engaged

  upon, for he sensed that they were kin to the thing he had become and

  that they were more dangerous, in many ways than the prowling

  regressives.

  He now lived in a Lovecraftian world of primal and cosmic kingdoms, of

  monstrous entities stalking the night, where human beings were reduced

  to little more than cattle, where the JudeoChristian universe of a

  love-motivated God had been replaced by the creation of the old gods who

  were driven by dark lusts, a need for cruelty, and a never-satisfied

  thirst for power. In the air, in the eddying fog, in the shadowed and

  dripping trees, in unlighted streets, and even in the sodium-yellow

  glare of the lamps on the main streets, there was the pervasive sense

  that nothing good could happen that night . . . but that anything

  else could happen, no matter how fantastical or bizarre.

  Having read uncounted paperbacks over the years, he was familiar with

  Lovecraft. He had not liked him a hundredth as well as Louis L'Amour,

  largely because L'Amour had dealt in reality, while H.P. Lovecraft had

  traded in the impossible.

  It had seemed to Loman at the time. Now he knew that "'SU could create,

  in the real world, hells equal to any that the most imaginative writer

  could dream up.

  LOvecraftian despair and terror flooded through Moonlight in greater

  quantities than those in which the recent rain fall As he drove through

  those transmuted streets, Loman kept his service revolver on the car

  seat beside him, within easy reach.

  Shaddack he must find Shaddack.

  Going south on Juniper, he stopped at the intersection of Ocean Avenue.

  At the same time another black-and-white passed by Loman, headed north.

  at the stop sign directly opposite No traffic was moving on Ocean.

  Rolling his window down, Loman pulled slowly across the intersection and

  braked with no more than a foot separated the other cruiser, ore From

  the number on the door, above the police-department shield, Loman knew


  it was Neil Penniworth's patrol car. when he looked through the side

  window, he did not see the young officer. He saw something that might

  once have been Penniworth, still vaguely human, illuminated by the gas

  gauge and speedometer lights but more directly by the glow of the mobile

  VDT in there. Twin cables, like the one that had erupted from Denny's

  forehead to join him more intimately with his PC, sprouted from

  Penniworth's skull; and although the light was poor, it appeared as if

  one of those extrusions snaked into the dashboard, while the other

  looped through the steering wheel and down toward the console-mounted

  computer. The shape of Penniworth's skull had changed dramatically,

  too, drawing forward.

  bristling with spiky features that must have been sensors of son kind

  and that gleamed softly like burnished metal in the light of the VDT;

  his shoulders were larger, queerly scalloped pointed; he appeared

  earnestly to have sought the form of a baroque robot. His hands were

  not on the steering wheel, or perhaps he did not even have hands any

  more; Loman suspected that Penniworth had not just become one with his

  mobile computer terminal but with the patrol car itself.

  Penniworth slowly turned his head to face Loman.

  In his eyeless sockets, crackling white fingers of electricity wiggled

  and jittered ceaselessly.

  Shaddack had said that the New People's freedom from emotion had given

  them the ability to make far greater use of their innate brain power,

  even to the extent of exerting mental control over the form and function

  of matter. Their consciousness dictated their form; to escape a world

  in which they were ne permitted emotion, they could become whatever they

  chose. - 409 they could not return to the Old People they had been.

  Evidently life as a cyborg was free of anxiety, for Penniworth had

  sought release from fear and longing-perhaps some kind of iteration, as

  well-in this monstrous incarnation.

  But what did he feel now? What purpose did he have? And he remain in

  that altered state because he truly preferred it?

  was he like Peyser-trapped either for physical reasons or an aberrant

  aspect of his own psychology would not allow him to reassume the human

  form to which, otherwise, he preferred to return?

  Loman reached for the revolver on the seat beside him.

  A segmented cable burst from the driver's door of Penniworth's car,

  without shredding Metal, extruding as if a part of the door had melted

  and re-formed to produce it-except that it looked at least semiorganic.

  The probe struck Loman's side window with a snap.

  The revolver eluded Loman's sweaty hand, for he could not take his eyes

  off the probe to look for the gun.

  The glass did not crack, but a quarter-size patch bubbled and transmuted

  in an instant, and the probe weaved into the car, straight at Loman's

  face. It had a fleshy sucker mouth, like an eel, but the tiny, sharply

  pointed teeth within it looked like steel.

  He ducked his head, forgot about the revolver, and tramped the

  accelerator to the floor. The Chevy almost seemed to rear a fraction of

  a second; then with a surge of power that slammed Loman into the seat,

  it shot forward, south on Juniper. For a moment the probe between the

  cars stretched to main brushed the bridge of Loman's nose-and abruptly

  eled back into the vehicle from which it had come.

  He drove fast all the way to the end of Juniper before slowing down to

  make a turn. The wind of his passage whistled at the hole that the

  probe had melted in his window.

  Loman's worst fear seemed to be unfolding. Those New people* Who didn't

  choose regression were going to transform themselves-or be transformed

  at the demand of Shaddack-into hybrids of man and machine.

  Find Shaddack, Murder the maker and release the anguished hunters he had

  made.

  Preceded by Sam and followed by Tessa, Chrissie squirmed through the

  mushy turf of the athletic field. In places the grass gave way to gluey

  mud, which pulled noisily at her shoes and she thought she sounded like

  a sort of goofy alien plodding along on big, sucker-equipped feet. Then

  it occurred to her that in a way she was an alien in Moonlight Cove to a

  different sort of creature from what the majority of the citizens had

  become.

  They were two-thirds of the way across the field when they were halted

  by a shrill cry that split the night as cleanly as a sharp ax would

  split a dry cord of wood. That unhuman cry rose and fell and rose

  again, savage and uncanny but the call of one of those beasts that she'd

  thought were aliens. Though the rain had stopped, the air was laden

  with moisture, and in that humidity, the unearthly shriek carried wel

  like the bell-clear notes of a distant trumpet.

  Worse, the call at once was answered by the beast's excited kin. At

  least half a dozen equally chilling shrieks arose perhaps as far south

  as Paddock Lane and as far north as Holliwell Road, from the high hills

  in the east end of town and the beach-facing bluffs only a couple of

  blocks to the west.

  All of a sudden Chrissie longed for the cold, lightless cul churning

  with waist-deep water so filthy that it might have come from the devil's

  own bathtub. This open ground seemed dangerous by comparison.

  A new cry arose as the others faded, and it was closer than any that had

  come before it. Too close.

  "Let's get inside," Sam said urgently.

  Chrissie was beginning to admit to herself that she might make a good

  Andre Norton heroine, after all. She was sex - 411 grainy-eyed with

  exhaustion, starting to feel sorry for herself and hungry again. She

  was sick and tired of adventure. She longed for warm rooms and lazy

  days with good books and going to movie theaters and wedges of

  double-fudge cake. By this time a true adventure-story heroine would

  have worked out a ks of brilliant stratagems that would have brought the

  beasts of moonlight Cove to ruin, would have found a way to turn the

  -people into harmless car-washing machines, and would be on her way to

  being crowned princess of the kingdom by acclaimation of the respectful

  and grateful citizenry.

  They hurried to the end of the field, rounded the bleachers, sed the

  deserted parking lot to the back of the school.

  The thing attacked them.

  Okay you, God. Your friend, Chrissie.

  the thing howled again.

  mes even God seemed to have a perverse streak.

  There were six doors at different places along the back of the school.

  They moved from one to another, as Sam tried them all examineding the

  locks in the hand-hooded beam of his flashlight. He apparently couldn't

  pick any of them, which disappointed her, because she'd imagined FBI men

  were so well ed that in an emergency they could open a bank vault with

  Oft and a hairpin.

  He also tried a few windows and spent what seemed a long time peering

  through the panes with his flashlight. He was examining not the rooms

  beyond but the inner sills and frames of the windows.

  ' At the last door-which was the
only one that had glass in the top of

  it, the others being blank rectangles of metal-Sam clicked Off the

  flashlight, looked solemnly at Tessa, and spoke to her in it low voice.

  "I don't think there's an alarm system here. Could be wrong. But

  there's no alarm tape on the glass and, as far as I can see, no

  hard-wired contacts along the frames or at the window latches."

  "Are those the only two kinds of alarms they might have?" she whispered.

  "Well, there're motion-detection systems, either employing electronic

  transmitters or electric eyes. But they'd be too elaborate for just a

  school, and probably too sensitive for a building like this."

  "So now what?"

  "Now I break a window."

  Chrissie expected him to withdraw a roll o from a pocket of his coat and

  tape one of the par sound of shattering glass and to prevent the sha

  noisily to the floor inside. That was how they usually diid it in

  books. But he just turned sideways to the door, drew h forward, then

  rammed it back and drove his elbow thro eight-inch-square pane in the

  lower-right corner of the window grid. Glass broke and clattered to the

  floor with an awful racket. Maybe he had forgotten to bring his tape.

  He reached through the empty pane, felt for the locks, engaged them, and

  went inside first. Chrissie followed him, trying not to step on the

  broken glass.

  Sam switched on the flashlight. He didn't hood it quite 1 much as he

  had done outside, though he was obviously trying to keep the backwash of

  the beam off the windows.