The Servants of Twilight

by Dean Koontz

  She couldn’t tell either him or Joey that she was soon going to head toward the woods, for the wind made conversation impossible. When she faced into the wind, her words were driven back into her throat even as she spoke them, and when she faced away from it, her words were torn like fragile cloth and scattered in meaningless syllables.

  For long minutes she lost sight of Chewbacca, and several times she was certain she’d never see the dog again, but he always reappeared, bedraggled and obviously weak, but alive. His fur was crusted with ice, and when he appeared out of the surging rivers of snow, he seemed like a revenant journeying back from the far side of the grave.

  The wind swept broad areas of the meadow almost clean of snow, leaving just a few well-packed inches in some places, but drifts piled up against even the smallest windbreaks and filled in gullies and depressions, creating traps that could not be seen or avoided. They had abandoned Charlie’s snowshoes with his backpack, partly because his wounded shoulder prevented him from carrying them any longer and partly because he was no longer sufficiently surefooted to use them. As a result, she and Joey couldn’t use their snowshoes to go across the drifts because they had to follow a route Charlie could negotiate with them. At times she found herself suddenly wading in snow up to her knees, then up to mid-thigh and getting deeper, and she had to backtrack and find a way around the drift, which wasn’t easy when she couldn’t see where the hell she was going. At other times, she stepped into holes that the snow had filled in; with no warning at all, from one step to the other, she was waist-deep.

  She was afraid there might be an abrupt drop-off or a really deep sinkhole somewhere in the meadow. Sinkholes were not uncommon in mountain country like this; they had passed a few earlier in the day, seemingly bottomless holes, some ancient and ringed with water-smoothed limestone. If she took one misplaced step and plunged down into snow over her head, Charlie might not be able to get her out again, even if she didn’t break a leg in the process. By the same token, she wasn’t sure she could extricate them from a similar trap if they fell into it.

  She became so concerned about this danger that she stopped and untied the tether from her waist. She was afraid of dragging Joey into a chasm with her. She coiled the line around her right hand; she could always let go, let it unravel, if she actually did sink into a trap.

  She told herself that the things we fear most never happen to us, that it’s always something else that brings us down, something totally unexpected—like Grace Spivey’s chance encounter with them in the South Coast Plaza parking lot last Sunday afternoon. But when they were well into the meadow, when she was almost ready to lead them back toward the eastern forest again, the worst happened, after all.

  Charlie had just found new reserves of strength and had let go of her arm when she put her foot down into suddenly deep snow and realized she had found the very thing she feared. She tried to throw herself backward, but she had been leaning forward to begin with, bent by the wind, and her momentum was all forward, and she couldn’t change her balance in time. Unleashing a loud scream that the wind softened to a quiet cry, she dropped into snow over her head, struck bottom eight feet down, crumpling, with her left leg twisted painfully under her.

  She looked up, saw the snow caving in above her. It was filling the hole she’d made when she’d fallen through it.

  She was going to be buried alive.

  She had read newspaper stories about workmen buried alive, suffocated or crushed to death, in caved-in ditches, no deeper than this. Of course, snow wasn’t as heavy as dirt or sand, so she wouldn’t be crushed, and she would be able to claw her way through it, and even if she couldn’t get all the way out, she would still be able to breathe under the snow, for it wasn’t as compact and suffocating as earth, but that realization did not alleviate her panic.

  She jackknifed onto her feet an instant after hitting bottom, in spite of the pain in her leg, and she clawed for firm handholds, for the hidden side of the gully or pit into which she had stepped. But she couldn’t find it. Just snow. Soft, yielding snow, infuriatingly insubstantial.

  She was still screaming. A clump of snow fell into her open mouth, choking her. The pit was caving in above her, on all sides, pouring down around her, up to her shoulders, then up to her chin, Jesus, and she kept pushing the snow away from her head, desperate to keep her face and arms free, but it closed over her faster than she could dig it away.

  Above, Charlie’s face appeared. He was lying on the ground, leaning over the edge of the drop, looking down at her. He was shouting something. She couldn’t understand what he was saying.

  She flailed at the snow, but it weighed down on her, an ever-increasing cascade, pouring in from the drift all around, until at last her aching arms were virtually pinned at her sides. No! And still the snow collapsed inward, up to her chin again, up to her mouth. She sealed her lips, closed her eyes, sure that she was going under altogether, that it would cover her head, that Charlie would never be able to get her out, that this would be her grave. But then the cave-in ceased before her nose was buried.

  She opened her eyes, looked up from the bottom of a white funnel, toward Charlie. The walls of snow were still, but at any moment they might tremble and continue to collapse on top of her.

  She was rigid, afraid to move, breathing hard.

  Joey. What about Joey?

  She had released the tether (and Joey) as soon as she’d felt herself going into the pit. She hoped Charlie had stopped Joey before he, too, had plunged over the edge. In his trancelike state, the boy would not necessarily have halted just because she had gone under. If he had fallen into the drift, they would probably never find him. The snow would have closed over him, and they wouldn’t be able to locate him by listening to his screams, not in this howling wind, not when his cries would be muffled by a few feet of snow.

  She wouldn’t have believed her heart could beat this fast or hard without bursting.

  Above, Charlie reached down with his good arm, his hand open, making a come-to-me gesture with his fingers.

  If she dug her arms free of the snow that now pinned them, she could grab hold of him, and together they could try to work her up and out of the hole. But in freeing her arms, she might trigger another avalanche that would cover her head with a couple of feet of snow. She had to be careful, move slowly and deliberately.

  She twisted her right arm back and forth under the snow, packing the snow away from it, making a hollow space, then turned her palm up and clawed at the stuff with her fingers, loosening it, letting it slide back into the hollow by her arm, and in seconds she had made a tunnel up to the surface. She snaked her arm through the tunnel, and it came into sight, unhampered from fingertips to above the elbow. She reached straight up, gripped Charlie’s extended hand. Maybe she would make it, after all. She clawed her other arm free, grabbed Charlie’s wrist.

  The snow around her shifted. Just a little.

  Charlie began to pull, and she heaved herself up.

  The white walls started falling in again. The snow sucked at her as if it were quicksand. Her feet left the ground as Charlie hauled her up, and she kicked out, frantically searching for the wall of the gully, struck it, tried to dig her feet in against it and use it to shove herself toward the top. He eased backward, pulling her farther up. This must be agony for him, as the strain passed through his good arm and shoulder into his wounded shoulder, sapping whatever strength he had left. But it was working. Thank God. The sucking snow was letting go of her. She was now high enough to risk holding on to Charlie’s arm with only one hand, while she grabbed at the brink of the gully with the other. Ice and frozen earth gave way under her clutching fingers, but she grabbed again, and this time she gripped something solid. With both Charlie and solid earth to cling to, she was able to lever herself up and out and onto her back, gasping, whimpering, with the unnerving feeling that she was escaping the cold maw of a living creature and had nearly been devoured by a beast composed of ice and snow.

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nbsp; Suddenly she realized that the shotgun, which had been slung from her shoulder when she’d fallen into the trap, had slipped off, or the strap had broken. It must still be in the pit. But the hole had closed up behind her when Charlie had pulled her out. It was lost.

  It didn’t matter. Spivey’s people wouldn’t be following them through the blizzard.

  She got onto her hands and knees and crawled away from the snow trap, looking for Joey. He was there, on the ground, curled on his side, in a fetal position, knees drawn up, head tucked down.

  Chewbacca was with him, as if he knew the boy needed his warmth, though the animal seemed to have no warmth to give. His coat was crusted with snow and ice, and there was ice on his ears. He looked at her with soulful brown eyes full of confusion, suffering, and fear.

  She was ashamed she had blamed him, in part, for Joey’s withdrawal and that she had wished she’d never seen him. She put one hand on his large head, and, even as weak as he was, he nuzzled her affectionately.

  Joey was alive, conscious, but hurting bad. Impacted snow clogged his ski mask. If she didn’t get him out of this wind soon, he would be frost-bitten. His eyes were even more distant than before.

  She tried to get him to stand, but he couldn’t. Although she was exhausted and shaky, although her left leg still hurt from the fall she had taken, she would have to carry him.

  She dug the compass out of her pocket, studied it, and turned to face east-northeast, toward the section of woodland where the caves ought to be. She could see only five or six feet, and then the storm fell like a heavy drapery.

  Surprised by the extent of her own stamina, she scooped Joey up, held him in both arms. A mother’s instinct was to save her child, regardless of the cost to herself, and her maternal desperation had loosed some last meager store of adrenaline.

  Charlie moved in beside her. He was on his feet, but he looked bad, almost as terrible as Joey.

  “Got to get into the forest!” she shouted. “Out of this wind!”

  She didn’t think he could have heard her, not with the banshee storm shrieking across the meadow, but he nodded as if he understood her intention, and they moved into the whiteout, trusting in the compass to lead them to the comparative shelter of the mammoth trees, shuffling with exaggerated caution to avoid falling into another snow trap.

  Christine looked back at Chewbacca. The dog was getting up to follow, but creakily. Even if he could regain his feet, there was almost no chance that he would make it to the trees with them. This would probably be the last glimpse she ever had of him; the storm would swallow him just as the snow-filled pit had tried to swallow her.

  Each step was an ordeal.

  Wind. Snow. Cruel cold.

  Dying would be easier than going on.

  That thought scared her and gave her the will to take a few more steps.

  One good thing: There was no doubt that their trail would be completely erased. The raging wind and arcticfierce snowfall would make it impossible for Spivey’s fanatics to follow them.

  Snow dropped from the sky as if it were being dumped out of huge bins, came hurtling down in sheets and clumps.

  Another step. Another.

  As if plating them with suits of armor, the wind welded the snow to their arms and legs and backs and chests, until their clothes were the same color as the landscape around them.

  Something ahead. A dark shape. It materialized in the storm, then was blotted out by an even more furious squall of snow. It appeared again. Didn’t fade away this time. And another one. Huge blobs of darkness, shadowy formations rising up beyond snowy curtains. Gradually they became clearer, better defined. Yes. A tree. Several trees.

  They trudged at least fifty yards into the forest before they found a place where the interlacing branches of the evergreens were so thick overhead that a significant amount of snow was shut out. Visibility improved. They were free of the wind’s brutal fists, as well.

  Christine stopped, put Joey down, peeled off his snowcaked ski mask. Her heart twisted when she saw his face.

  67

  Kyle Barlowe, Burt Tully, and Edna Vanoff gathered around Grace at the edge of the forest, under the last of the evergreens. The wind licked at them from the meadow, as if hungry for their warmth. With her gloves off, Grace held her arms out, palms spread toward the meadow beyond the trees, receiving psychic impressions. The others waited silently for her to decide what to do next.

  Out on the open floor of the valley, the fulminating blizzard was like an endless chain of dynamite detonations, a continuous roar, the violent waves of wind like concussions, the snow as thick as smoke. It was appropriate weather for the end of the world.

  “They went this way,” Mother Grace said.

  Barlowe already knew their quarry had left the forest here, for their tracks told him as much. Which direction they had gone after heading into the open was another question; although they had left here only a short while ago, their footprints had not survived much past the perimeter of the woods. He waited for Mother Grace to tell him something he could not discern for himself.

  Worriedly studying the snow-lashed field in front of them, Burt Tully said, “We can’t go out there. We’d die out there.”

  Suddenly Grace lowered her hands and backed away from the meadow, farther into the trees.

  They moved with her, alarmed by the look of terror on her face.

  “Demons,” she said hoarsely.

  “Where?” Edna asked.

  Grace was shaking. “Out there . . .”

  “In the storm?” Barlowe asked.

  “Hundreds . . . thousands . . . waiting for us . . . hiding in the drifts . . . waiting to rise up . . . and destroy us . . .”

  Barlowe looked out at the open fields. He could see nothing but snow. He wished he had Mother Grace’s Gift. There were malevolent spirits near, and he could not detect them, and that made him feel frighteningly vulnerable.

  “We must wait here,” Grace said, “until the storm passes.”

  Burt Tully was clearly relieved.

  Barlowe said, “But the boy—”

  “Grows stronger,” Grace admitted.

  “And Twilight?”

  “Grows near.”

  “If we wait—”

  “We might be too late,” she said.

  Barlowe said, “Won’t God protect us if we go into the meadow? Aren’t we armored with His might and mercy?”

  “We must wait,” was the only answer she gave him. “And pray.”

  Then Kyle Barlowe knew how late it really was. So late that they must be more vigilant than they had ever been before. So late that they could no longer be bold. Satan was now as strong and real a presence in this world as God Himself. Maybe the scales had not yet tipped in the devil’s direction, but the balance was delicate.

  68

  Christine peeled off the boy’s ice-crusted ski mask, and Charlie had to look away from the child’s face when it was revealed.

  I’ve failed them, he thought.

  Despair flooded into him and brought tears to his eyes.

  He was sitting on the ground, with his back to a tree. He rested his head against the trunk, too, closed his eyes, took several deep breaths, trying to stop shaking, trying to think positively, trying to convince himself that everything would turn out all right, failing. He had been an optimist all his life, and this recent acquaintance with soul-shaking doubt was devastating.

  The Tylenol and the anaesthetic powder had only slight effect on his pain, but even that minimal relief was fading. The pain in his shoulder was gaining strength again, and it was beginning to creep outward, as before, across his chest and up his neck and into his head.

  Christine was talking softly and encouragingly to Joey, though she must have wanted to weep at the sight of him, as Charlie had done.

  He steeled himself and looked at the boy again.

  The child’s face was red, lumpy, and badly misshapen from hives caused by the fierce cold. His eyes were nearly swol
len shut; the edges of them were caked with a gummy, mucous-like substance, and the lashes were matted with the same stuff. His nostrils were mostly swollen shut, so he was breathing through his mouth, and his lips were cracked, puffy, bleeding. Most of his face was flushed an angry red, but two spots on his cheeks and one on the tip of his nose were gray-white, which might indicate frostbite, though Charlie hoped to God it wasn’t.

  Christine looked at Charlie, and her own despondency was evident in her troubled eyes if not in her voice. “Okay. We’ve got to move on. Got to get Joey out of this cold. We’ve got to find those caves.”

  “I don’t see any sign of them,” Charlie said.

  “They must be near,” she said. “Do you need help getting up?”

  “I can make it,” he said.

  She lifted Joey. The boy didn’t hold on to her. His arms hung down, limp. She glanced at Charlie.

  Charlie sighed, gripped the tree, and got laboriously to his feet, quite surprised when he made it all the way up.

  But he was even more surprised when, a second later, Chewbacca appeared, cloaked in snow and ice, head hung low, a walking definition of misery. When he had last seen the dog, out in the meadow, Charlie had been sure the animal would collapse and die in the storm.

  “My God,” Christine said when she saw the dog, and she looked as startled as Charlie was.

  It’s important, Charlie thought. The dog pulling through—that means we’re all going to survive.

  He wanted very much to believe it. He tried hard to convince himself. But they were a long way from home.

  The way things had been going for them, Christine figured they would be unable to find the caves and would simply wander through the forest until they dropped from exhaustion and exposure to the cold. But fate finally had a bit of luck in store for them, and they found what they were looking for in less than ten minutes.