Midnight

by Dean R. Koontz

  Sam leaned forward with his elbows on the kitchen table and listened attentively to Chrissie Foster. Though Tessa had heard the Boogeymen in the middle of a kill at Cove Lodge and had glimpsed one of them under the door of her room, and though Harry had watched them at a distance in night and fog, and though Sam had spied two of them last night through a window in Harry's living room, the girl was the only one present who had seen them close up and more than once.

  But it was not solely her singular experience that held Sam's attention. He also was captivated by her sprightly manner, good humor, and articulateness. She obviously had considerable inner strength, real toughness, for otherwise she would not have survived the previous night and the events of this morning. Yet she remained charmingly innocent, tough but not hard. She was one of those kids who gave you hope for the whole damn human race.

  A kid like Scott used to be.

  And that was why Sam was fascinated by Chrissie Foster. He saw in her the child that Scott had been. Before he … changed. With regret so poignant that it manifested itself as a dull ache in his chest and a tightness in his throat, he watched the girl and listened to her, not only to hear what information she had to impart but with the unrealistic expectation that by studying her he would at last understand why his own son had lost both innocence and hope.

  21

  Down in the darkness of the Icarus Colony cellar, Tucker and his pack did not sleep, for they did not require it. They lay curled in the deep blackness. From time to time, he and the other male coupled with the female, and they tore at one another in savage frenzy, gashing flesh that began to heal at once, drawing one another's blood simply for the pleasure of the scent — immortal freaks at play.

  The darkness and the barren confines of their concrete-walled burrow contributed to Tucker's growing disorientation. By the hour he remembered less of his existence prior to the past night's exciting hunt. He ceased to have much sense of self. Individuality was not to be encouraged in the pack when hunting, and in the burrow it was even a less desirable trait; harmony in that windowless, claustrophobic space required the relinquishment of self to group.

  His waking dreams were filled with images of dark, wild shapes creeping through night-clad forests and across moonwashed meadows. When occasionally a memory of human form flickered through his mind, its origins were a mystery to him; more than that, he was frightened by it and quickly shifted his fantasies back to running-hunting-killing-coupling scenes in which he was just a part of the pack, one aspect of a single shadow, one extension of a larger organism, free from the need to think, having no desire but to be.

  At one point he became aware that he had slipped out of his wolflike form, which had become too confining. He no longer wanted to be the leader of a pack, for that position carried with it too much responsibility. He didn't want to think at all. Just be. Be. The limitations of all rigid physical forms seemed insufferable.

  He sensed that the other male and the female were aware of his degeneration and were following his example.

  He felt his flesh flowing, bones dissolving, organs and vessels surrendering form and function. He devolved beyond the primal ape, far beyond the four-legged thing that laboriously had crawled out of the ancient sea millennia ago, beyond, beyond, until he was but a mass of pulsing tissue, protoplasmic soup, throbbing in the darkness of the Icarus Colony cellar.

  22

  Loman rang the doorbell at Shaddack's house on the north point, and Evan, the manservant, answered.

  "I'm sorry, Chief Watkins, but Mr. Shaddack isn't here."

  "Where's he gone?"

  "I don't know."

  Evan was one of the New People. To be sure of dispatching him, Loman shot him twice in the head and then twice in the chest while he lay on the foyer floor, shattering both brain and heart. Or data-processor and pump. Which was needed now biological or mechanical terminology? How far had they progressed toward becoming machines?

  Loman closed the door behind him and stepped over Evan's body. After replenishing the expended rounds in the revolver's, cylinder, he searched the huge house room by room, floor by floor, looking for Shaddack.

  Though he wished that he could be driven by a hunger for revenge, could be consumed by anger, and could take satisfaction in bludgeoning Shaddack to death, that depth of feeling was denied him. His son's death had not melted the ice in his heart. He couldn't feel grief or rage.

  Instead he was driven by fear. He wanted to kill Shaddack before the madman made them into something worse than they'd already become.

  By killing Shaddack — who was always linked to the supercomputer at New Wave by a simple cardiac telemetry device Loman would activate a program in Sun that would broadcast a microwave death order. That transmission would be received by all the microsphere computers wedded to the innermost tissues of the New People. Upon receiving the death order, each biologically interactive computer in each New Person would instantly still the heart of its host. Every one of the converted in Moonlight Cove would die. He too would die.

  But he no longer cared. His fear of death was outweighed by his fear of living, especially if he had to live either as a regressive or as that more hideous thing that Denny had become.

  In his mind he could see himself in that wretched condition gleaming mercurial eyes, a wormlike probe bursting bloodlessly from his forehead to seek obscene conjugation with the computer. If skin actually could crawl, his own would have crept off his body.

  When he could not find Shaddack at home, he set out for New Wave, where the maker of the new world was no doubt in his office busily designing neighborhoods for this hell that he called Paradise.

  23

  Shortly after eleven o'clock, as Sam was leaving, Tessa stepped out onto the back porch with him and closed the door, leaving Harry and Chrissie in the kitchen. The trees at the rear of the property were just tall enough to prevent neighbors, even those uphill, from looking into the yard. She was sure they could not be seen in the deeper shadows of the porch.

  "Listen," she said, "it makes no sense for you to go alone."

  "It makes perfect sense."

  The air was chilly and damp. She hugged herself.

  She said, "I could ring the front doorbell, distract anyone inside, while you went in the back."

  "I don't want to have to worry about you."

  "I can take care of myself."

  "Yeah, I believe you can," he said.

  "Well?"

  "But I work alone."

  "You seem to do everything alone."

  He smiled thinly. "Are we going to get into another arguments about whether life is a tea party or hell on earth?"

  "That wasn't an argument we had. It was a discussion."

  "Well, anyway, I've shifted to undercover assignments for the ve very reason that I can pretty much work alone. I don't want a partner any more, Tessa, because I don't want to see any more of them die."

  She knew he was referring not only to the other agents who had been killed in the line of duty with him but also to his late wife.

  "Stay with the girl," he said. "Take care of her if anything happens. She's like you, after all."

  "What?"

  "She's one of those who knows how to love life. How to deeply love it, no matter what happens. It's a rare and precious talent."

  "You know too," she said.

  "No. I've never known."

  "Dammit, everyone is born with a love of life. You still have it, Sam. You've just lost touch with it, but you can find it again."

  "Take care of her," he said, turning away and descending the porch steps into the rain.

  "You better come back, damn you. You promised to tell me what you saw at the other end of that tunnel, on the Other Side. You just better come back."

  Sam departed through silver rain and thin patches of gray fog.

  As she watched him go, Tessa realized that even if he never told her about the Other Side, she wanted him to come back for many other reasons both complex and s
urprising.

  24

  The Coltrane house was two doors south of the Talbot place, on Conquistador. Two stories. Weathered cedar siding. A covered patio instead of a rear porch.

  Moving quickly along the back of the house, where rain drizzled off the patio cover with a sound exactly like crackling fire, Sam peered through sliding glass doors into a gloomy family room and then through French windows into an unlighted kitchen. When he reached the kitchen door, he withdrew his revolver from the holster under his leather jacket and held it down at his side, against his thigh.

  He could have walked around front and rung the bell, which Might have seemed less suspicious to the people inside. But that would mean going out to the street, where he was more likely to be seen not only by neighbors but by the men Chrissie said were patrolling the town.

  He knocked on the door, four quick raps. When no one responded, he knocked again, louder, and then a third time, louder still. If anyone was home, the knock would have been answered.

  Harley and Sue Coltrane must be at New Wave, where they worked.

  The door was locked. He hoped it had no dead bolt.

  Though he had left his other tools at Harry's, he had brought a thin, flexible metal loid. Television dramas had popularized the notion that any credit card made a convenient and unincriminating loid, but those plastic rectangles too often got wedged in the crack or snapped before the latch bolt was slipped. He preferred time-proven tools. He worked the loid between door and frame, below the lock, and slid it up, applying pressure when he met resistance. The lock popped. He tried the door and there was no dead bolt; it opened with a soft creak.

  He stepped inside and quietly closed the door, making sure that the lock did not engage. If he had to get out fast, he did not want to fumble with a latch.

  The kitchen was illuminated only by the dismal light of the rain-darkened day that barely penetrated the windows. Evidently the vinyl flooring, wall-covering, and tile were of the palest hues for in that dimness everything seemed to be one shade of green or another.

  He stood for almost a minute, listening intently.

  A kitchen clock ticked.

  Rain drummed on the patio cover.

  His soaked hair was pasted to his forehead. He pushed it aside, out of his eyes.

  When he moved, his wet shoes squished.

  He went directly to the phone, which was mounted on the wall above a corner secretary. When he picked it up, he got no dial tone, but the line was not dead, either. It was filled with strange sounds clicking, low beeping, soft oscillations — all of which blended into mournful and alien music, an electro threnody.

  The back of Sam's neck went cold.

  Carefully, silently, he returned the handset to its cradle.

  He wondered what sounds could be heard on a telephone that was being used as a link between two computers, with a modem. Was one of the Coltranes at work elsewhere in the house, tied in by a home computer to New Wave?

  Somehow he sensed that what he had heard on the line was not as simply explained as that. It had been damned eerie.

  A dining room lay beyond the kitchen. The two large windows were covered with gauzy sheers, which further filtered the ashen daylight. A hutch, buffet, table, and chairs were revealed as blocks of black and slate-gray shadows.

  Again he stopped to listen. Again he heard nothing unusual.

  The house was laid out in a classic California design, with no downstairs hall. Each room led directly to the next in an open and airy floorplan. Through an archway he entered the large living room, grateful that the house had wall-to-wall carpeting, on which his wet shoes made no sound.

  The living room was less shadowy than any other part of the house that he had seen thus far, yet the brightest color was a pearly gray. The west windows were sheltered by the front porch, but rain streamed over those facing north. Leaden daylight, passing through the panes, speckled the room with the watery-gray shadows of the hundreds of beads that tracked down the glass, and Sam was so edgy that he could almost feel those small ameboid phantoms crawling over him.

  Between the lighting and his mood, he felt as if he were in an old black-and-white movie. One of those bleak exercises in film noir.

  The living room was deserted, but abruptly a sound came from the last room downstairs. At the southwest corner. Beyond the foyer. The den, most likely. It was a piercing trill that made his teeth ache, followed by a forlorn cry that was neither the voice of a man nor that of a machine but something in between, a semi-metallic voice wrenched by fear and twisted with despair. That was followed by low electronic pulsing, like a massive heartbeat.

  Then silence.

  He had brought up his revolver, holding it straight out in front of him, ready to shoot anything that moved. But everything was as still as it was silent.

  The trill, the eerie cry, and the base throbbing surely could not be associated with the Boogeymen that he'd seen last night outside of Harry's house, or with the other shape-changers Chrissie described. Until now, an encounter with one of them had been the thing he feared most. But suddenly the unknown entity in the den was more frightening.

  Sam waited.

  Nothing more.

  He had the queer feeling that something was listening for his movements as tensely as he was listening for it.

  He considered returning to Harry's to think of some other way to send a message to the Bureau, because Mexican food and Guinness Stout and Goldie Hawn movies — even Swing Shift, now seemed precious beyond value, not pathetic reasons to live, but pleasures so exquisite that no words existed to adequately describe them.

  The only thing that kept him from getting the hell out of there was Chrissie Foster. The memory of her bright eyes. Her innocent face. The enthusiasm and animation with which she had, recounted her adventures. Perhaps he had failed Scott, and perhaps it was too late for the boy to be hauled back from the brink. But Chrissie was still alive in every vital sense of the word — physically, intellectually, emotionally — and she was dependent on him. No one else could save her from conversion.

  Midnight was little more than twelve hours away.

  He edged through the living room and quietly crossed the, foyer. He stood with his back against the wall beside the half-open door to the room from which the weird sounds had come.

  Something clicked in there.

  He stiffened.

  Low, soft clicks. Not the tick-tick-tick of claws like those he had heard tapping on the window last night. More like a long series of relays being tripped, scores of switches being closed dominoes falling against one another: click-click-click-clickety-clickety-click-click-clickety….

  Silence once more.

  Holding the revolver in both hands, Sam stood in front of the door and pushed it open with one foot. He crossed the threshold and assumed a shooter's stance just inside the room.

  The windows were covered by interior shutters, and the only light was from two computer screens. Both were fitted with monitors that resulted in black text on an amber background. Everything in the room not wrapped in shadows was touched by that golden radiance.

  Two people sat before the terminals, one on the right side of the room, the other on the left, their backs to each other.

  "Don't move," Sam said sharply.

  They neither moved nor spoke. They were so still that at first he thought they were dead.

  The peculiar light was brighter yet curiously less revealing from the half-burnt-out daylight that vaguely illuminated the other rooms. As his eyes adjusted, Sam saw that the two people at the computers were not only unnaturally still but were not really people any more. He was drawn forward by the icy grip of horror.

  Oblivious of Sam, a naked man, probably Harley Coltrane, sat in a wheeled, swivel-based chair at the computer to the right of the door, against the west wall He was connected to the VDT by a pair of inch-thick cables that looked less metallic than organic, glistening wetly in the amber glow. They extended from within the bowels of the da
ta-processing unit — from which the cover plate had been removed — and into the man's bare torso below his rib cage, melding bloodlessly with the flesh. They throbbed.

  "Dear God," Sam whispered.

  Coltrane's lower arms were utterly fleshless, just golden bones. The meat of his upper arms ended smoothly two inches above the elbows; from those stumps, bones thrust out as cleanly as robotic extrusions from a metal casing. The skeletal hands were locked tightly around the cables, as if they were merely a pair of clamps.

  When Sam stepped nearer to Coltrane and looked closer, he saw the bones were not as well differentiated as they should have been but had half melted together. Furthermore, they were veined with metal. As he watched, the cables pulsed with such vigor that they began to vibrate wildly. If not held fast by the clamping hands, they might have torn loose either from the man or the machine.

  Get out.

  A voice spoke within him, telling him to flee, and it was his own voice, though not that of the adult Sam Booker. It was the voice of the child he had once been and to which his fear was encouraging him to revert. Extreme terror is a time machine thousand times more efficient than nostalgia, hurtling us backward through the years, into that forgotten and intolerable condition of helplessness in which so much of childhood is spent.

  Get out, run, run, get out!

  Sam resisted the urge to bolt.

  He wanted to understand. What was happening? What had, these people become? Why? What did this have to do with the Boogeymen who prowled the night? Evidently through microtechnology Thomas Shaddack had found a way to alter, radically and forever, human biology. That much was clear to Sam, but knowing just that and nothing else was like sensing that something lived within the sea without ever having seen a fish. so much more lay beneath the surface, mysterious.

  Get out.

  Neither the man before him nor the woman across the room seemed remotely aware of him. Apparently he was in no imminent danger.