Midnight (43 page)

By 4:55, 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 trouble seeing how intimately flesh and machine had joined.

Fear was the only emotion Dora had felt in weeks. She thought she had known it in all its shades and degrees. But now it fell over her with greater force, darker and more intense, than anything she had experienced before.

A glistening probe erupted from the wall to Dora’s right. It was more metallic than not, yet it dripped what appeared to be yellowish mucus. The thing shot straight to one of the secretaries and bloodlessly pierced the back of her head. From the top one of the other women’s heads, another probe erupted, like a snake to the music of a charmer’s flute, hesitated, then with tremendous speed snapped to the ceiling, piercing the acoustic tile without disturbing it, and vanished toward the room above.

Dora sensed that all of the computers and people of Nev Wave had somehow linked into a single entity and that the building itself was swiftly being incorporated into it. She wanted to but couldn’t move—maybe because she knew any escape attempt would prove futile.

A moment later they plugged her into the network.

* * *

Betsy Soldonna was carefully taping up a sign on the wall behind the front desk at the Moonlight Cove Town Library. It was part of Fascinating Fiction Week, a campaign to get kids to read more fiction.

She was the assistant librarian, but on Tuesdays, when her boss, Cora Danker, was off, Betsy worked alone. She liked Cora, but Betsy also liked being by herself. Cora was a talker, filling every free minute with gossip or her boring observations on the characters and plots of her favorite TV programs. Betsy, a lifelong bibliophile obsessed with books, would have been delighted to talk endlessly about what she’d read, but Cora, though head librarian, hardly read at all.

Betsy tore a fourth piece of Scotch tape off the dispenser and fixed the last corner of the poster to the wall. She stepped back to admire her work.

She had made the poster herself. She was proud of her modest artistic talent. In the drawing, a boy and a girl were holding books and staring bug-eyed at the open pages before them. Their hair was standing on end. The girl’s eyebrows appeared to have jumped off her face, as had the boy’s ears. Above them was the legend BOOKS ARE PORTABLE FUNHOUSES, FILLED WITH THRILLS AND SURPRISES.

From back in the stacks at the other end of the library came a curious sound—a grunt, a choking cough, and then what might have been a snarl. Next came the unmistakable clatter of a row of books falling from a shelf to the floor.

The only person in the library, other than Betsy, was Dale Foy, a retiree who’d been a cashier at Lucky’s supermarket until three years ago when he’d turned sixty-five. He was always searching for thriller writers he had never read before and complaining that none of them was as good as the really old-time tale-spinners, by which he meant John Buchan rather than Robert Louis Stevenson.

Betsy suddenly had the terrible feeling that Mr. Foy had suffered a heart attack in one of the aisles, that she had heard him gurgling for help, and that he had pulled the books to the floor when he’d grabbed at a shelf. In her mind she could see him writhing in agony, unable to breathe, his face turning blue and his eyes bulging, a bloody foam bubbling at his lips… .

Years of heavy reading had stropped Betsy’s imagination until it was as sharp as a straight razor made from fine German steel.

She hurried around the desk and along the head of the aisles looking into each of the narrow corridors, which were flanked by nine-foot-high shelves. “Mr. Foy? Mr. Foy, are you alright?”

In the last aisle she found the fallen books but no sign of Dale Foy. Puzzled, she turned to go back the way she had come, and
there
was Foy behind her. But changed. And even Betsy Soldonna’s sharp imagination could not have conceived of the thing that Foy had become—or of the things that he was about to do to her. The next few minutes were as filled with surprises as a hundred books she had ever read, though there was not a happy ending.

* * *

Because of the dark storm clouds that clotted the sky, an dead twilight crept over Moonlight Cove, and the entire town seemed to be celebrating Fascinating Fiction Week at the library. The dying day was, for many, filled with thrills and surprises, just like a funhouse in the most macabre carnival that had ever pitched its tents.

37

Sam swept the beam of the flashlight around the attic. It had a rough board floor but no light fixture. Nothing was stored there except dust, spider webs, and a multitude of dead, dry bees that had built nests in the rafters during the summer and had died due to the work of an exterminator or at the end of their span.

Satisfied, he returned to the trapdoor and went backward down wooden rungs, into the closet of Harry’s third-floor bedroom. They had removed many of the hanging clothes to be able to open the trap and draw down the collapsible ladder.

Tessa, Chrissie, Harry, and Moose were waiting for him just outside the closet door, in the steadily darkening bedroom.

Sam said, “Yeah, it’ll do.”

“I haven’t been up there since before the war,” Harry said.

“A little dirty, a few spiders, but you’ll be safe. If you’re not at the end of their list, if they
do
come for you early, they’ll find the house empty, and they’ll never think of the attic. Because how could a man with two bad legs and one bad arm drag himself up there?”

Sam was not sure that he believed what he was saying. But for his own peace of mind as well as Harry’s, he wanted to believe.

“Can I take Moose up there with me?”

“Take that handgun you mentioned,” Tessa said, “but not Moose. Well-behaved as he is, he might bark at just the wrong moment.”

“Will Moose be safe down here … when
they
come?” Chrissie wondered.

“I’m sure he will be,” Sam said. “They don’t want dogs. Only people.”

“We better get you up there, Harry,” Tessa said. “It’s twenty Past five. We’ve got to be out of here soon.”

The bedroom was filling with shadows almost as rapidly as a glass filling with blood-dark wine.

Part Three
THE NIGHT BELONGS TO THEM

Montgomery told me about the Law … became oddly weakened about nightfall; that then the animal was at its strongest; a spirit of adventure sprang up in them at the dusk; they would dare things they never seemed to dream about by day.

—H. G. WELLS,
The Island of Dr. Moreau

1

In the scrub-covered hills that surrounded the abandoned Icarus Colony, gophers and field mice and rabbits and a few foxes scrambled out of their burrows and shivered in the rain, listening. In the two nearest stands of pine, sweet gum, and autumn-stripped birch, one just to the south and one immediately east of the old colony, squirrels and raccoons stood to attention.

The birds were the first to respond. In spite of the rain, they flew from their sheltered nests in the trees, in the dilapidated old barn, and in the crumbling eaves of the main building itself. Cawing and screeching, they spiraled into the sky, darted and swooped, then streaked directly to the house. Starlings, wrens, crows, owls, and hawks all came in shrill and flapping profusion. Some flew against the walls, as if struck blind, battering insistently until they broke their necks, or until they snapped their wings and fell to the ground where they fluttered and squeaked until they were exhausted or had perished. Others, equally frenzied, found open doorways and windows through which they entered without damaging themselves.

Though wildlife within a two-hundred-yard radius had heard the call, only the nearer animals responded obediently. Rabbits leaped, squirrels scurried, coyotes loped, foxes dashed, and raccoons waddled in that curious way of theirs, through wet grass and rain-bent weeds and mud, toward the source of the siren song. Some were predators and some, by nature, were timid prey, but they moved side by side without conflict. It might have been a scene from an animated Disney film—the neighborly and harmonious folk of field and forest responding to the sweet guitar or harmonica music of some elderly black man who, when they gathered around him, would tell them stories of magic and great adventure. But there was no kindly, tale-spinning Negro where they were going, and the music that drew them was dark, cold, and without melody.

2

While Sam struggled to lift Harry up the ladder and into the attic, Tessa and Chrissie took the wheelchair to the basement garage. It was a heavy-duty motorized model, not a light collapsible chair, and would not fit through the trap. Tessa and Chrissie parked it just inside the big garage door, so it looked as if Harry had gotten this far in his chair and had left the house, perhaps in a friend’s car.

“You think they’ll fall for it?” Chrissie asked worriedly.

“There’s a chance,” Tessa said.

“Maybe they’ll even think Harry left town yesterday before the roadblocks went up.”

Tessa agreed, but she knew—and suspected Chrissie knew—that the chance of the ruse working was slim. If Sam and Harry really had been as confident in the attic trick as they pretended, they would have wanted Chrissie to be tucked up there, too, instead of sent out into the storm-lashed, nightmare world of Moonlight Cove.

They rode the elevator back to the third floor, where Sam was just folding the ladder and pushing the trapdoor into place. Moose watched him curiously.

“Five forty-two,” Tessa said, checking her watch.

Sam snatched up the closet pole, which he’d had to remove to pull down the trap, and he reinserted it into its braces. “Help me put the clothes back.”

Shirts and slacks, still on hangers, had been transferred to the bed. Working together, passing the garments like amateur firemen relaying pails of water, they quickly restored the closet to its former appearance.

Tessa noticed that traces of fresh blood were soaking through the thick gauze bandage on Sam’s right wrist. His wounds were pulling open from the exertion. Although they weren’t mortal injuries, they must hurt a lot, and anything that weakened or distracted him during the ordeal ahead decreased their chances of success.

Closing the door, Sam said, “God, I hate to leave him there.”

“Five forty-six,” Tessa reminded him.

While Tessa pulled on a leather jacket, and while Chrissie slipped into a too-large but waterproof blue nylon windbreaker that belonged to Harry, Sam reloaded his revolver. He had used up all the rounds in his pockets while at the Coltranes’. But Harry owned a .45 revolver and a .38 pistol, both of which he had taken with him into the attic, and he had a box of ammunition for each, so Sam had taken a score or so of the .38 cartridges.

Holstering the gun, he went to the telescope and studied the streets that lay west and south toward Central School. “Still lots of activity,” he reported.

“Patrols?” Tessa asked.

“But also lots of rain. And fog’s coming in faster, thicker.”

Thanks to the storm, an early twilight was upon them and already fading. Although some bleak light still burned above the churning clouds, night might as well have fallen, for cloaks of gloom lay over the wet and huddled town.

“Five fifty,” Tessa said.

Chrissie said, “If Mr. Talbot’s at the top of their list, they could be here any minute.”

Turning from the telescope, Sam said, “All right. Let’s go.”

Tessa and Chrissie followed him out of the bedroom. They took the stairs down to the first floor.

Moose used the elevator.

3

Shaddack was a child tonight.

Circling repeatedly through Moonlight Cove, from the sea to the hills, from Holliwell Road on the north to Paddock Lane on the south, he could not remember ever having been in a better mood. He altered the patterns of his patrol, largely to be sure that eventually he would cover every block of every street in town; the sight of each house and every citizen on foot in the storm affected him in a way they never had previously, because soon they would be his to do with as he pleased.

He was filled with excitement and anticipation, the likes of which he had not felt since Christmas Eve when he was a young boy. Moonlight Cove was a huge toy, and in a few hours, when midnight struck, when this dark eve ticked over into the holiday, he would be able to have so much fun with his marvelous toy. He would indulge in games which he had long wanted to play but which he had denied himself. Henceforth, no urge or desire would be denied, for despite the bloodiness or outrageousness of whatever game he chose, there would be no referees, no authorities, to penalize him.

And like a child sneaking into a closet to filch coins from his father’s coat to buy ice cream, he was so completely transported by contemplation of the rewards that he had virtually forgotten there was a potential for disaster. Minute by minute, the threat of the regressives faded from his awareness. He did not entirely forget about Loman Watkins, but he no longer was able to remember exactly why he had spent the day hiding from the police chief in the garage at the Parkins house.

More than thirty years of unrelenting self-control, strenuous and undeviating application of his mental and physical resources, beginning with the day he had murdered his parents and Runningdeer, thirty years of repressing his needs and desires and of sublimating them in his work, had at last led him to the brink of his dream’s realization.
He could not doubt.
To doubt his mission or worry about its outcome would be to question his sacred destiny and insult the great spirits who had favored him. He was now incapable of even seeing a downside; he turned his mind away from any incipient thought of disaster.

He sensed the great spirits in the storm.

He sensed them moving secretly through his town.

They were there to witness and approve his ascension to the throne of destiny.

He had eaten no cactus candy since the day he had killed his mother, father, and the Indian, but over the years he had been subject to vivid flashbacks. They came upon him unexpectedly. One moment he would be in this world, and the next instant he would be in that other place, the eerie world parallel to this one, where the cactus candy had always conveyed him, a reality in which colors were simultaneously more vivid and more subtle, where every object seemed to have more angles and dimensions than in the ordinary world, where he seemed to be strangely weightless—buoyant as a helium-filled balloon—and where the voices of spirits spoke to him. The flashbacks had been frequent during the year following the murders, striking him about twice a week, then had gradually declined in number—though not in intensity—through his teenage years. Those dreamy, fuguelike spells, which usually lasted an hour or two but could occasionally last half a day, were responsible in part for his reputation, with family and teachers, of being a somewhat detached child. They all had sympathy for him, naturally, because they assumed that whatever detachment he displayed was a result of the shattering trauma that he had endured.

Now, cruising in his van, he was phasing slowly into that cactus-candy condition. This flashback was unexpected, too, but it didn’t
snap
upon him as all the others had. He sort of … drifted into it, deeper, deeper. And the further he went, the more he suspected that this time he would not be pulled rudely back from that realm of higher consciousness. From now on he would be a resident of both worlds, which was how the great spirits themselves lived, with awareness of both the higher and the lower states of existence. He even began to think that what he was undergoing now, spiritually, was a conversion of his own, a thousand times more profound than that the citizens of Moonlight Cove had undergone.

In this exalted state, everything was special and wondrous to Shaddack. The twinkling lights of the rainswept town seemed like jewels sprinkled through the descending darkness. The molten, silvery beauty of the rain itself astonished him, as did the swiftly dimming, gorgeously turbulent gray sky.

As he braked at the intersection of Paddock Lane and Saddleback Drive, he touched his breast, feeling the telemetry device he wore from a chain around his neck, unable for a moment to remember what it was, and
that
seemed mysterious and wonderful, as well. Then he recalled that the device monitored and broadcast his heartbeat, which was received by a unit at New Wave. It was effective over a distance of five miles, and worked even when he was indoors. If the reception of his heartbeat was interrupted for more than one minute, Sun was programmed to feed a destruct order, via microwave, to the microsphere computers in all of the New People.

A few minutes later, on Bastenchurry Road, when he touched the device, the memory of its purpose again proved elusive. He sensed that it was a powerful object, that whoever wore it held the lives of others in his hands, and the fantasy-tripping child in him decided that it must be an amulet, bestowed upon him by the great spirits, one more sign that he stood astride the two worlds, one foot in the ordinary plane of ordinary men and one foot in the higher realm of the great spirits, the gods of the cactus candy.

His slowly phased-in flashback, like time-released medication, had carried him back into the condition of his youth, at least to those seven years when he’d been in the thrall of Runningdeer. He was a child. And he was a demigod. He was the favored child of the moonhawk, so he could do anything he wanted to anyone,
anyone,
and as he continued to drive, he fantasized about just what he might want to do … and to whom.

Now and then he laughed softly and slightly shrilly, and his eyes gleamed like those of a cruel and twisted boy studying the effects of fire on captive ants.