Dean R. Koontz - The Key to Midnight

The Key to

Midnight

Dean Koontz

Previously published as

THE KEY TO MIDNIGHT

by Leigh Nichols

Previously published as THE KEY TO MIDNIGHT

under the pseudonym Leigh Nichols

The right of Dean Koontz to be identified as the Author of

the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in the USA in 1979 by Pocket Books

First published in Great Britain in 1980

by Magnum Books

First published by Fontana Paperbacks in 1985

Reprinted in hardback in 1992

by HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING

Reprinted in paperback in 1992

by HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING

First printed in this revised edition in 1995

by HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING

A HEADLINE FEATURE paperback

10 9

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,

in any form or by any means without the prior written

permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated

in any form of binding or cover other than that in which

it is published and without a similar condition being

imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious

and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead,

is purely coincidental.

ISBN 0 7472 3646 1

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire

HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING

A division of Hodder Headline PLC

338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH

This better version

is for Gerda.

I can go back and improve

the earlier pen-name books

- but I'm afraid I don't

have enough energy to make

all the desperately needed

improvements in myself!

PART ONE

JOANNA

A sound of something;

The scarecrow

Has fallen down of itself.

—Boncho, 1670-1714

1

In the dark, Joanna Rand went to the window. Naked trembling, she peered between the wooden

slats of the blind.

Wind from the distant mountains pressed coldly against the glass and rattled a loose pane.

At four o'clock in the morning, the city of Kyoto was quiet, even in Gion, the entertainment quarter

crowded with nightclubs and geisha houses. Kyoto, the spiritual heart of Japan, was a thousand years old

yet as new as a fresh idea: a fascinating hodgepodge of neon signs and ancient temples, plastic

gimcrackery and beautifully hand-carved stone, the worst of modern architecture thrusting up next to

palaces and ornate shrines that were weathered by cen-turies of hot, damp summers and cold, damp

winters. By a mysterious combination of tradition and popular culture, the metropolis renewed her sense

of humanity's perma-nence and purpose, refreshed her sometimes shaky belief in the importance of the

individual.

The earth revolves around the sun; society continuously changes; the city grows; new

generations come forth ... and I'll go on just as they do.

That was always a comforting thought when she was in darkness, alone, unable to sleep, morbidly

energized by the powerful yet indefinable fear that came to her every night.

Calmed somewhat but not anxious to go to bed, Joanna dressed in a red silk robe and slippers. Her

slender hands were still shaking, but the tremors were not as severe as they had been.

She felt violated, used, and discarded - as though the hateful creature in her nightmare had assumed a

real physi-cal form and had repeatedly, brutally raped her while she'd slept.

The man with the steel fingers reaches for the hypodermic syringe...

That single image was all that she retained from the nightmare. It had been so vivid that she could

recall it at will, in unsettling detail: the smooth texture of those metal fingers, the clicking and whirring of

gears working in them, the gleam of light off the robotic knuckles.

She switched on the bedside lamp and studied the famil-iar room. Nothing was out of place. The air

contained only familiar scents. Yet she wondered if she truly had been alone all night.

She shivered.

2

Joanna stepped out of the narrow stairwell into her ground-floor office. She switched on the light and

studied the room as she had inspected those upstairs, half expecting the fear-some phantom of her dream

to be waiting somewhere in the real world. The soft glow from the porcelain lamp didn't reach every

corner. Purple shadows draped the book-shelves, the rosewood furniture, and the rice-paper scroll

paintings. Potted palms cast complex, lacy shadows across one wall. Everything was in order.

Unfinished paperwork littered the desk, but she wasn't in a bookkeeping frame of mind. She needed

a drink.

The outer door of the office opened on the carpeted area that encircled the long cocktail bar at one

end of the Moonglow Lounge. The club wasn't completely dark: Two low-wattage security lights glowed

above the smoky blue mirrors behind the bar and made the beveled edges of the glass gleam like the

blades of well-stropped knives. An eerie green bulb marked each of the four exits. Beyond the bar

stools, in the main room, two hundred chairs at sixty tables faced a small stage. The nightclub was silent,

deserted.

Joanna went behind the bar, took a glass from the rack, and poured a double shot of Dry Sack over

ice. She sipped the sherry, sighed - and became aware of movement near the open door to her office.

Mariko Inamura, the assistant manager, had come down-stairs from the apartment that she occupied

on the third floor, above Joanna's quarters. As modest as always, Mariko wore a bulky green bathrobe

that hung to the floor and was two sizes too large for her; lost in all that quilted fabric, she seemed less a

woman than a waif. Her black hair, usually held up by ivory pins, now spilled to her shoulders. She went

to the bar and sat on one of the stools.

'Like a drink?' Joanna asked.

Mariko smiled. 'Water would be nice, thank you.'

'Have something stronger.'

'No, thank you. Just water, please.'

'Trying to make me feel like a lush?'

'You aren't a lush.'

'Thanks for the vote of confidence,' Joanna said. 'But I wonder. I seem to wind up here at the bar

more nights than not, around this time.' She put a glass of ice water on the counter.

Mariko turned the glass slowly in her small hands, but she didn't drink from it.

Joanna admired the woman's natural grace, which trans-formed every ordinary act into a moment of

theater. Mariko was thirty, two years younger than Joanna, with big, dark eyes and delicate features. She

seemed to be unaware of her exceptional good looks, and her humility enhanced her beauty.

Mariko had come to work at the Moonglow Lounge one week after opening night. She'd wanted the

job as much for the opportunity to practice her English with Joanna as for the salary. She'd made it clear

that she intended to leave after a year or two, to obtain a position as an execu-tive secretary with one of

the larger American companies with a branch office in Tokyo. But six years later, she no longer found

Tokyo appealing, at least not by comparison with the life she now enjoyed.

The Moonglow had worked its spell on Mariko too. It was the main interest of her life as surely as it

was the only interest in Joanna's.

Strangely, the insular world of the club was in some ways as sheltering and safe as a Zen monastery

high in a remote mountain pass. Nightly, the place was crowded with cus-tomers, yet the outside world

did not intrude to any signific-ant extent. When the employees went home and the doors closed, the

lounge - with its blue lights, mirrored walls, silver-and-black art deco appointments, and appealing air of

mystery - might have been in any country, in any decade since the 1930s. It might even have been a

place in a dream. Both Joanna and Mariko seemed to need that peculiar sanctuary.

Besides, an unexpected sisterly affection and concern had developed between them. Neither made

friends easily. Mariko was warm and charming - but still surprisingly shy for a woman who worked in a

Gion nightclub. In part she was like the retiring, soft-spoken, self-effacing Japanese women of another

and less democratic age. By contrast, Joanna was vivacious, outgoing - yet she also found it difficult to

permit that extra degree of closeness that allowed an acquaintance to become a friend. Therefore, she'd

made a special effort to keep Mariko at the Moonglow, regularly increasing her responsibilities and her

salary; Mariko had reciprocated by working hard and diligently. Without once discussing their quiet

friendship, they had decided that separation was neither desirable nor necessary.

Now, not for the first time, Joanna wondered, Why Mariko?

Of all the people whom Joanna might have chosen for a friend, Mariko was not the obvious first

choice - except that she had an unusually strong sense of privacy and con-siderable discretion even by

Japanese standards. She would never press for details from a friend's past, never indulge in that gossipy,

inquisitive, and revelatory chatter that so many people assumed was an essential part of friendship.

There's never a danger that she'll try to find out too much about me.

That thought surprised Joanna. She didn't understand herself. After all, she had no secrets, no past of

which to be ashamed.

With the glass of dry sherry in her hand, Joanna came out from behind the bar and sat on a stool.

'You had a nightmare again,' Mariko said.

'Just a dream.'

'A nightmare,' Mariko quietly insisted. 'The same one you've had a thousand other nights.'

'Not a thousand,' Joanna demurred.

'Two thousand? Three?'

'Did I wake you?'

'It sounded worse than ever,' Mariko said.

'Just the usual.'

"Thought I'd left the TV on.'

'Oh?'

'Thought I was hearing some old Godzilla movie,' Mariko said.

Joanna smiled. 'All that screaming, huh?'

'Like Tokyo being smashed flat again, mobs running for their lives.'

'All right, it was a nightmare, not just a dream. And worse than usual.'

'I worry about you,' Mariko said.

'No need to worry. I'm a tough girl.'

'You saw him again ... the man with the steel fingers?'

'I never see his face,' Joanna said wearily. 'I've never seen anything at all but his hand, those

god-awful metal fingers. Or at least that's all I remember seeing. I guess there's more to the nightmare

than that, but the rest of it never stays with me after I wake up.' She shuddered and sipped some sherry.

Mariko put a hand on Joanna's shoulder, squeezed gently. 'I have an uncle who is—'

'A hypnotist.'

'Psychiatrist,' Mariko said. 'A doctor. He uses hypnotism only to—'

'Yes, Mariko-san, you've told me about him before. I'm really not interested.'

'He could help you remember the entire dream. He might even be able to help you learn the cause of

it.' Joanna stared at her own reflection in the blue bar mirror and finally said, 'I don't think I ever want to

know the cause of it.'

They were silent for a while.

Eventually Mariko said, 'I didn't like it when they made him into a hero.'

Joanna frowned. 'Who?'

'Godzilla. Those later movies, when he battles other monsters to protect Japan. So silly. We need our

monsters to be scary. They don't do us any good if they don't frighten us.'

'Am I about to get hit with some philosophy of the mysterious East? I didn't hear the Zen warning

siren.'

'Sometimes we need to be frightened,' Mariko said.

Joanna softly imitated a submarine diving alarm: 'Whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop.'

'Sometimes fear purges us, Joanna-san.'

'We're deep in the unfathomable waters of the Japanese mind,' Joanna whispered theatrically.

Mariko continued unfazed: 'But when we confront our demons—'

'Deeper and deeper in the Japanese mind, tremendous pressure building up—'

'—and rid ourselves of those demons—'

'—deeper and deeper—'

'—we don't need the fear any more—'

'—the weight of sudden enlightenment will crush me as though I'm just a bug—'

'—don't need it to purge us—'

'—I tremble on the edge of revelation—'

'—and we are then freed.'

' I’m surrounded by the light of reason,' Joanna said.

'Yes, you are, but you're blind to it,' said Mariko. 'You are too in love with your fear to see the truth.'

"That's me. A victim of phobophilia,' Joanna said, and drank the rest of her sherry in one long

swallow.

'And you call us Japanese inscrutable.'

'Who does?' Joanna said with mock innocence.

'I hope Godzilla comes to Kyoto,' Mariko said.

'Does he have a new movie to promote?'

'And if he does come, he'll be the patriotic Godzilla, seeking out new threats to the Japanese people.'

'Good for him.'

'When he sees all that long blond hair of yours, he'll go right for you.'

'I think you've got him confused with King Kong.'

'Squash you flat in the middle of the street, while the grateful citizens of Kyoto cheer wildly.'

Joanna said, 'You'll miss me.'

'On the contrary. It'll be messy, hosing all that blood and guts off the street. But the lounge should

reopen in a day or two, and then it'll be my place.'

'Yeah? Who's going to sing when I'm gone?'

"The customers.'

'Good God, you'd turn it into a karaoke bar!'

'All I need is a stack of old Engelbert Humperdinck tapes.'

Joanna said, 'You're scarier than Godzilla ever was.'

They smiled at each other in the blue mirror behind the bar.

3

If his employees back in the States could have seen Alex Hunter at dinner in the Moonglow Lounge,

they would have been astonished by his relaxed demeanour. To them, he was a demanding boss who

expected perfection and quickly dismissed employees who couldn't deliver to his standards, a man who

was at all times fair but who was given to sharp and accurate criticism. They knew him to be more often

silent than not, and they rarely saw him smile. In Chicago, his hometown, he was widely envied and

respected, but he was well liked only by a handful of friends. His office staff and field investigators would

gape in dis-belief if they could see him now, because he was chatting amiably with the waiters and smiling

nearly continuously.

He did not appear capable of killing anyone, but he was. A few years ago he had pumped five bullets

into a man named Ross Baglio. On another occasion, he had stabbed a man in the throat with the

wickedly splintered end of a broken broomstick. Both times he had acted in self-defense. Now he

appeared to be nothing more than a well-dressed business executive enjoying a night on the town.

This society, this comparatively depressurized culture, which was so different from the American

way, had a great deal to do with his high spirits. The relentlessly pleasant and polite Japanese inspired a

smile. Alex had been in their country just ten days, on vacation, but he could not recall another period of

his life during which he had felt even half as relaxed and at peace with himself as he did at that moment.

Of course, the food contributed to his excellent spirits. The Moonglow Lounge maintained a first-rate

kitchen. Japanese cuisine changed with the seasons more than any style of cooking with which Alex was

familiar, and late autumn provided special treats. It was also important that each item of food complement

the item next to it, and that everything be served on china that - both in pattern and color - was in

harmony with the food that it carried. He was enjoying a dinner perfectly suited to the cool November

evening. A delicate wooden tray held a bone-white china pot that was filled with thick slices of daikon

radish, reddish sections of octopus - and konnyaku, a jelly-like food made from devil's tongue. A fluted

green bowl contained a fragrant hot mustard with which each delicacy could be anointed. On a large gray

platter stood two black-and-red bowls: One contained akadashi soup with mush-rooms, and the other

was filled with rice. An oblong plate offered sea bream and three garnishes, plus a cup of finely grated

daikon for seasoning. It was a hearty autumn meal, of the proper somber colors.

When he finished the last morsel of bream, Alex admitted to himself that it was neither the hospitable

Japanese nor the quality of the food that made him feel so fine. His good humor resulted primarily from

the fact that Joanna Rand would soon appear on the small stage.

Promptly at eight o'clock, the house lights dimmed, the silvery stage curtains drew back, and the

Moonglow band opened with a great rendition of 'A String of Pearls.' Their playing wasn't the equal of

any of the famous orchestras, not a match for Goodman or Miller or either of the Dorsey brothers, but

surprisingly good for house musicians who had been born, raised, and trained many thousands of miles

and a few decades from the origin of the music. At the end of the number, as the audience applauded

enthusiastically, the band swung into 'Moonglow,' and Joanna Rand entered from stage right.

Alex's heartbeat quickened.

Joanna was slim, graceful, striking, though not beautiful in any classic sense. Her chin was feminine

but too strong - and her nose neither narrow enough nor straight enough - to be seen in any ancient

Grecian sculpture. Her cheekbones weren't high enough to satisfy the arbiters of beauty at Vogue, and

her startlingly blue eyes were shades darker than the washed-out blue of the ennui-drenched models

currently in demand for magazine covers and television commercials. She was a vibrant, golden vision,

with light amber skin and cascades of platinum-blond hair. She looked thirty, not six-teen, but her beauty

was inexpressibly enhanced by every mark of experience and line of character.

She belonged on a stage, not merely to be seen but to be heard. Her voice was first-rate. She sang

with a tremulous clarity that pierced the stuffy air and seemed to reverberate within Alex. Though the

lounge was crowded and everyone had been drinking, there was none of the expected night-club chatter

when Joanna Rand performed. The audience was attentive, rapt.

He knew her from another place and time, although he could not recall where or when they'd met.

Her face was hauntingly familiar, especially her eyes. In fact, he felt that he hadn't just met her once

before but had known her well, even intimately.

Ridiculous. He wouldn't have forgotten a woman as strik-ing as this one. Surely, had they met before,

he would be able to remember every smallest detail of their encounter.

He watched. He listened. He wanted to hold her.

4

When Joanna finished her last song and the applause finally faded, the band swung into a lively

number. Couples crowded onto the dance floor. Conversation picked up again, and the lounge filled with

sporadic laughter and the clatter of dinnerware.

As she did every night, Joanna briefly surveyed her domain from the edge of the stage, allowing

herself a moment of pride. She ran a damn good place.

In addition to being a restaurateur, she was a practical social politician. At the end of her first of two

hour-long performances, she didn't disappear behind the curtains until the ten o'clock show. Instead, she

stepped down from the stage in a soft swish of pleated silk and moved slowly among the tables,

acknowledging compliments, bowing and being bowed to, stopping to inquire if dinner had been

enjoyable, greeting new faces and chatting at length with regular, honored customers. Good food, a

romantic atmos-phere, and high quality entertainment were sufficient to establish a profitable nightclub,

but more than that was required for the Moonglow to become legendary. She wanted that extra degree

of success. People were flattered to receive personal attention from the owner, and the forty minutes that

she spent in the lounge between acts was worth uncountable yen in repeat business.

The handsome American with the neatly trimmed mus-tache was present for the third evening in a

row. The pre-vious two nights, they had exchanged no more than a dozen words, but Joanna had sensed

that they wouldn't remain strangers. At each performance, he sat at a small table near the stage and

watched her so intently that she had to avoid looking at him for fear that she would become distracted

and forget the words to a song. After each show, as she mingled with the customers, she knew without

looking at him that he was watching her every move. She imagined that she could feel the pressure of his

gaze. Although being scrutinized by him was vaguely disturbing, it was also sur-prisingly pleasant.

When she reached his table, he stood and smiled: Tall, broad-shouldered, he had a European

elegance in spite of his daunting size. He wore a three-piece, charcoal-gray Savile Row suit, what

appeared to be a hand-tailored Egyptian-cotton shirt, and a pearl-gray tie.

He said, 'When you sing "These Foolish Things" or "You Turned the Tables on Me," I'm reminded of

Helen Ward when she sang with Benny Goodman.'

'That's fifty years ago,' Joanna said. 'You're not old enough to remember Helen Ward.'

'Never saw her perform. But I have all her records, and you're better than she was.'

'You flatter me too much. You're a jazz buff?'

'Mostly swing music.'

'So we like the same corner of jazz.'

Looking around at the crowd, he said, 'Apparently, so do the Japanese. I was told the Moonglow

was the nightclub for transplanted Americans. But ninety percent of your customers are Japanese.'

'It surprises me, but they love the music - even though it comes from an era they otherwise prefer to

forget.'

'Swing is the only music I've developed a lasting enthusi-asm for.' He hesitated. 'I'd offer you a

cognac, but since you own the place, I don't suppose I can do that.'

'I’ll buy you one,' she said.

He pulled out a chair for her, and she sat.

A white-jacketed waiter approached and bowed to them.

Joanna said, 'Yamada-san, burande wo ima omegai, shimasu. Remy Martin.'

'Hai, hai,' Yamada said. 'Sugu.' He hurried toward the bar at the back of the big room.

The American had not taken his eyes off her. 'You really do have an extraordinary voice, you know.

Better than Martha Tilton, Margaret McCrae, Betty Van—'

'Ella Fitzgerald?'

He appeared to consider the comparison, then said, 'Well, she's really not someone you should be

compared to.'

'Oh?'

'I mean, her style is utterly different from yours. It'd be like comparing oranges to apples.'

Joanna laughed at his diplomacy. 'So I'm not better than Ella Fitzgerald.'

He smiled. 'Hell, no.'

'Good. I'm glad you said that. I was beginning to think you had no standards at all.'

'I have very high standards,' he said quietly.

His dark eyes were instruments of power. His unwavering stare seemed to establish an electrical

current between them, sending an extended series of pleasant tremors through her. She felt not only as

though he had undressed her with his eyes - men had done as much every night that she'd stepped onto

the stage - but as though he had stripped her mind bare as well and had discovered, in one minute,

everything worth knowing about her, every private fold of flesh and thought. She'd never before met a

man who concentrated on a woman with such intensity, as if everyone else on earth had ceased to exist.

Again she felt that pecul-iar combination of uneasiness and pleasure at being the focus of his undivided

attention.

When the two snifters of Remy Martin were served, she used the interruption as an excuse to glance

away from him. She closed her eyes and sipped the cognac as if to savor it without distraction. In that

self-imposed darkness, she realized that while he had been staring into her eyes, he had transmitted some

of his own intensity to her. She had lost all awareness of the noisy club around her: the clinking of glasses,

the laughter and buzz of conversation, even the music. Now all that clamor returned to her with the

gradualness of silence reasserting itself in the wake of a tremendous explosion.

Finally she opened her eyes. 'I'm at a disadvantage. I don't know your name.'

'You're sure you don't? I've felt... perhaps we've met before.'

She frowned. 'I'm sure not.'

'Maybe it's just that I wish we'd met sooner. I'm Alex Hunter. From Chicago.'

'You work for an American company here?'

'No. I'm on vacation for a month. I landed in Tokyo eight days ago. I planned on spending two days

in Kyoto, but I've already been here longer than that. I've got three weeks left. Maybe I'll spend them all

in Kyoto and cancel the rest of my schedule. Anata no machi wa hijo ni kyomi ga arimatsu.'

'Yes,' she said, 'it is an interesting city, the most beautiful in Japan. But the entire country is

fascinating, Mr. Hunter.'

'Call me Alex.'

'There's much to see in these islands, Alex.'

'Maybe I should come back next year and take in all those other places. Right now, everything I

could want to see in Japan is here.'

She stared at him, braving those insistent dark eyes, not certain what to think of him. He was quite

the male animal, making his intentions known.

Joanna prided herself on her strength, not merely in business but in her emotional life. She seldom

wept and never lost her temper. She valued self-control, and she was almost obsessively self-reliant.

Always, she preferred to be the dominant partner in her relations with men, to choose when and how a

friendship with a man would develop, to be the one who decided when - and if - they would become

more than friends. She had her own ideas about the proper, desirable pace of a romance. Ordinarily she

wouldn't have liked a man as direct as Alex Hunter, so she was surprised that she found his stylishly

aggressive approach to be appealing.

Nevertheless, she pretended not to see that he was more than casually interested in her. She glanced

around as if checking on the waiters and gauging the happiness of her customers, sipped the cognac, and

said, 'You speak Japanese so well.'

He bowed his head an inch or two. 'Arigato.'

'Do itashimashite.'

'Languages are a hobby of mine,' he said. 'Like swing music. And good restaurants. Speaking of

which, since the Moonglow is open only evenings, do you know a place that serves lunch?'

'In the next block. A lovely little restaurant built around a garden with a fountain. It's called Mizutani.'

'That sounds perfect. Shall we meet at Mizutani for lunch tomorrow?'

Joanna was startled by the question but even more sur-prised to hear herself answer without

hesitation. 'Yes. That would be nice.'

'Noon?'

'Yes. Noon.'

She sensed that whatever happened between her and this unusual man, whether good or bad, would

be entirely different from anything she'd experienced before.

5

The man with the steel fingers reaches for the hypodermic syringe...

Joanna sat straight up in bed, soaked in perspiration, gasping for breath, clawing at the unyielding

darkness before she regained control of herself and switched on the nightstand lamp.

She was alone.

She pushed back the covers and got out of bed with an urgency sparked by some deep-seated

anxiety that she could not understand. She walked unsteadily to the center of the room and stood there,

trembling in fear and con-fusion.

The air was cool and somehow wrong. She smelled a combination of strong antiseptics that hadn't

been used in that room: ammonia, Lysol, alcohol, a pungent brew of germicidal substances unpleasant

enough to make her eyes water. She drew a long breath, then another, but the vapors faded as she

attempted to pinpoint their source.

When the stink was gone altogether, she reluctantly admitted that the odors hadn't actually existed.

They were left over from the dream, figments of her imagination.

Or perhaps they were fragments of memory.

Although she had no recollection of ever having been seriously ill or injured, she half believed that

once she must have been in a hospital room that had reeked with an abnormally powerful odor of

antiseptics. A hospital... in which something terrible had happened to her, something that was the cause

of the repeating nightmare about the man with steel fingers.

Silly. But the dream always left her rattled and irrational.

She went into the bathroom and drew a glass of water from the tap. She returned to the bed, sat on

the edge of it, drank the water, and then slipped under the covers once more. After a brief hesitation, she

switched off the lamp.

Outside, in the predawn stillness, a bird cried. A large bird, a piercing cry. The flutter of wings. Past

the window. Feathers brushing the glass. Then the bird sailed off into the night, its thin screams growing

thinner, fainter.

6

Suddenly, as he sat in bed reading, Alex recalled where and when he'd previously seen the woman.

Joanna Rand wasn't her real name.

He had awakened at six-thirty Wednesday morning in his suite at the Kyoto Hotel. Whether

vacationing or working, he was always up early and to bed late, requiring never more than five hours of

rest to feel alert and refreshed.

He was grateful for his uncommon metabolism, because he knew that by spending fewer hours in

bed, he was at an advantage in any dealings with people who were greater slaves to the mattress than he

was. To Alex, who was an overachiever by choice as well as by nature, sleep was a detestable form of

slavery, insidious. Each night was a temporary death to be endured but never enjoyed. Time spent in

sleep was time wasted, surrendered, stolen. By saving three hours a night, he was gaining eleven hundred

hours of waking life each year, eleven hundred hours in which to read books and watch films and make

love, more than forty-five 'found' days in which to study, observe, learn - and make money.

It was a cliché but also true that time was money. And in Alex Hunter's philosophy, money was the

only sure way to obtain the two most important things in life: indepen-dence and dignity, either of which

meant immeasurably more to him than did love, sex, friendship, praise, or any-thing else.

He had been born poor, raised by a pair of hopeless alcoholics to whom the word 'dignity' was as

empty of meaning as the word 'responsibility.' As a child, he had resolved to discover the secret of

obtaining wealth, and he'd found it before he had turned twenty: time. The secret of wealth was time.

Having learned that lesson, he applied it with fervor. In more than twenty years of judiciously managed

time, his net worth had increased from a thousand dollars to more than twelve million. His habit of being

late to bed and early to rise, while half at odds with Ben Franklin's immortal advice, was a major factor in

his phenomenal success.

Ordinarily he would begin the day by showering, shaving, and dressing precisely within twenty

minutes of waking, but this morning he allowed himself the routine-shattering luxury of reading in bed. He

was on vacation, after all.

Now, as he sat propped up by pillows, with a book in his lap, he realized who Joanna Rand really

was. While he read, his subconscious mind, loath to squander time, apparently remained occupied with

the mystery of Joanna, for although he hadn't been consciously thinking of her, he suddenly made the

connection between her and an important face out of his past.

Dean R. Koontz - The Key to Midnight

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