Dean R. Koontz - Midnight

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Midnight

Dean R. Koontz

The citizens of Moonlight Cove, California, are changing. Some are

losing touch with their deepest emotions. Others are surrendering to

their wildest urges. And the few who remain unchanged are absolutely

terrified - if not brutally murdered in the dead of night.

Dean Koontz, the bestselling master of suspense, invites you into the

shocking world of Moonlight Cove - where four unlikely survivors

confront the darkest realms of human nature.

Here is the ultimate masterpiece of fear by the one and only Dean Koontz

"BLOOD-CHILLING.. . KOONTZ PLOWS NEW, EVEN MORE CHILLING GROUND."

MORE THAN 100 MILLION COPIES OF DEAN KOONTZ NOVELS IN PRINT!

DON'T MISS HIS new NOVEL DRAGON TEARS AVAILABLE FROM G P PUTNAM'S SONS

MIDNIGHT A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

PRINTING HISTORY

G. P. Putnam's Son,; edition / January 1989 Berkley edition / November

ISBN 0-425-11870-3

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

"To Ed and Pat 'Thomas of the Book Carnival, who are such nice people

that sometimes I suspect they're not really human but aliens from

another, better world

Part One

ALONG THE NIGHT COAST Where eerie figures caper to some midnight music

that only they can hear.

-The Book of Counted Sorrows

Janice Capshaw liked to run at night.

Nearly every evening between ten and eleven o'clock, Janice put on her

gray sweats with the reflective blue stripes across the back and chest,

tucked her hair under a headband, laced up her New Balance shoes, and

ran six miles. She was thirty-five but could have passed for

twenty-five, and she attributed her glow of youth to her

twenty-year-long commitment to running.

Sunday night, September 21, she left her house at ten o'clock and ran

four blocks north to Ocean Avenue, the main street through Moonlight

Cove, where she turned left and headed downhill toward the public beach.

The shops were closed and dark. Aside from the faded-brass glow of the

sodium-vapor streetlamps, the only lights were in some apartments above

the stores, at Knight's Bridge Tavern, and at Our Lady of Mercy Catholic

Church, which was open twenty-four hours a day. No cars were on the

street, and not another person was in sight. Moonlight Cove always had

been a quiet little town, shunning the tourist trade that other coastal

communities so avidly pursued. Janice liked the slow, measured pace of

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life there, though sometimes lately the town seemed not merely sleepy

but dead.

As she ran down the sloping main street, through pools of amber light,

through layered night shadows cast by wind-sculpted cypresses and pines,

she saw no movement other than her own and the sluggish, serpentine

advance of the thin fog through the windless air. The only sounds were

the soft slap-slap of her rubber-soled running shoes on the sidewalk and

her labored breathing. From all available evidence, she might have been

the last person on earth, engaged upon a solitary post-Armageddon

marathon.

She disliked getting up at dawn to run before work, and in the summer it

was more pleasant to put in her six miles when the heat of the day had

passed, though neither an abhorrence of early hours nor the heat was the

real reason for her nocternal preference; she ran on the same schedule

in the winter. She exercised at that hour simply because she liked the

night.

Even as a child, she had preferred night to day, had enjoyed sitting out

in the yard after sunset, under the star-speckled sky, listening to

frogs and crickets. Darkness soothed. It softened the sharp edges of

the world, toned down the too-harsh colors. With the coming of

twilight, the sky seemed to recede; the universe expanded. The night was

bigger than the day, and in its realm, life seemed to have more

possibilities.

Now she reached the Ocean Avenue loop at the foot of the hill, sprinted

across the parking area and onto the beach. Above the thin fog, the sky

held only scattered clouds, and the full moon's silver-yellow radiance

penetrated the mist, providing sufficient illumination for her to see

where she was going. Some nights the fog was too thick and the sky too

overcast to permit running on the shore. But now the white foam of the

incoming breakers surged out of the black sea in ghostly phosphorescent

ranks, and the wide crescent of sand gleamed palely between the lapping

tide and the coastal hills, and the mist itself was softly aglow with

reflections of the autumn moonlight.

As she ran across the beach to the firmer, damp sand at the water's edge

and turned south, intending to run a mile out to the point of the cove,

Janice felt wonderfully alive.

Richard-her late husband, who had succumbed to cancer three years

ago-had said that her circadian rhythms were so post-midnight focused

that she was more than just a night person.

"You'd probably love being a vampire, living between sunset and dawn,"

he'd said, and she'd said, "I vant to suck your blood." God, she had

loved him. Initially she worried that the life of a Lutheran minister's

wife would be boring, but it never was, not for a moment. Three years

after his death, she still missed him every day-and even more at night.

He had been suddenly, as she was passing a pair of forty-foot, twisted

cypresses that had grown in the middle of the beach, halfway between the

hills and the waterline, Janice was sure that she was not alone in the

night and fog. She saw no movement, and she was unaware of any sound

other than her own footsteps, raspy - 5 breathing, and thudding

heartbeat; only instinct told her that she had company.

She was not alarmed at first, for she thought another runner was sharing

the beach. A few local fitness fanatics occasionally ran at night, not

by choice, as was the case with her, but of necessity. Two or three

times a month she encountered them along her route.

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But when she stopped and turned and looked back the way she had come,

she saw only a deserted expanse of moonlit sand, a curved ribbon of

luminously foaming surf, and the dim but familiar shapes of rock

formations and scattered trees that thrust up here and there along the

strand. The only sound was the low rumble of the breakers.

Figuring that her instinct was unreliable and that she was alone, she

headed south again, along the beach, quickly finding her rhythm. She

went only fifty yards, however, before she saw movement from the corner

of her eye, thirty feet to her left a swift shape, cloaked by night and

mist, darting from behind a sandbound cypress to a weather-polished rock

formation, where it slipped out of sight again.

Janice halted and, squinting toward the rock, wondered what she had

glimpsed. It had seemed larger than a dog, perhaps as big as a man, but

having seen it only peripherally, she had absorbed no details. The

formation-twenty feet long, as low as four feet in some places and as

high as ten feet in others-had been shaped by wind and rain until it

resembled a mound of half-melted wax, more than large enough to conceal

whatever she had seen.

"Someone there?" she asked.

She expected no answer and got none.

She was uneasy but not afraid. If she had seen something more than a

trick of fog and moonlight, it surely had been an animal-and not a dog

because a dog would have come straight to her and would not have been so

secretive. As there were no natural predators along the coast worthy of

her fear, she was curious rather than frightened.

Standing still, sheathed in a film of sweat, she began to feel the chill

in the air. To maintain high body heat, she ran in place, watching the

rocks, expecting to see an animal break from that cover and sprint

either north or south along the beach.

Some people in the area kept horses, and the Fosters even ran a breeding

and boarding facility near the sea about two and a half miles from

there, beyond the northern flank of the cove. Perhaps one of their

charges had gotten loose. The thing she'd seen from the corner of her

eye had not been as big as a horse, though it might have been a pony. On

the other hand, wouldn't she have heard a pony's thudding hoofbeats even

in the soft sand? Of course, if it was one of the Fosters' horses-or

someone else's-she ought to attempt to recover it or at least let them

know where it could be found.

At last, when nothing moved, she ran to the rocks and circled them.

Against the base of the formation and within the clefts in the stone

were a few velvet-smooth shadows, but for the most part all was revealed

in the milky, shimmering, lunar glow, and no animal was concealed there.

She never gave serious thought to the possibility that she had seen

someone other than another runner or an animal, that she was in real

danger. Aside from an occasional act of vandalism or burglary-which was

always the work of one of a handful of disaffected teenagers-and traffic

accidents, local police had little to occupy them. Crimes against

person-rape, assault, murder-were rare in a town as small and tightly

knit as Moonlight Cove; it was almost as if, in this pocket of the

coast, they were living in a different and more benign age from that in

which the rest of California dwelt.

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Rounding the formation and returning to the firmer sand near the roiling

surf, Janice decided that she had been snookered by moonlight and mist,

two adept deceivers. The movement had been imaginary; she was alone on

the shore.

She noted that the fog was rapidly thickening, but she continued along

the crescent beach toward the cove's southern point. She was certain

that she would get there and be able to return to the foot of Ocean

Avenue before visibility declined too drastically.

A breeze sprang up from the sea and churned the incoming fog, which

seemed to solidify from a gauzy vapor into a white sludge, as if it were

milk being transformed into butter. By the time Janice reached the

southern end of the dwindling strand, the breeze was stiffening and the

surf was more agitated as well, casting up sheets of spray as each wave

hit the piled rocks of - 7 the man-made breakwater that had been added

to the natural point of the cove.

Someone stood on that twenty-foot-high wall of boulders, looking down at

her. Janice glanced up just as a cloak of mist shifted and as moonlight

silhouetted him.

Now fear seized her.

Though the stranger was directly in front of her, she could not see his

face in the gloom. He seemed tall, well over six feet, though that

could have been a trick of perspective.

Other than his outline, only his eyes were visible, and they were what

ignited her fear. They were a softly radiant amber like the eyes of an

animal revealed in headlight beams.

For a moment, peering directly up at him, she was transfixed by his

gaze. Backlit by the moon, looming above her, standing tall and

motionless upon ramparts of rock, with sea spray exploding to the right

of him, he might have been a carved stone idol with luminous jewel eyes,

erected by some demon-worshiping cult in a dark age long passed. Janice

wanted( to turn and run, but she could not move, was rooted to the sand,

in the grip of that paralytic terror she had previously felt only in

nightmares.

She wondered if she were awake. Perhaps her late-night run was indeed

part of a nightmare, and perhaps she was actually asleep in bed, safe

beneath warm blankets.

Then the man made a queer low growl, partly a snarl of anger but also a

hiss, partly a hot and urgent cry of need but also cold, cold.

And he moved.

He dropped to all fours and began to descend the high breakwater, not as

an ordinary man would climb down those Jumbled rocks but with catlike

swiftness and grace. In seconds he would be upon her.

Janice broke her paralysis, turned back on her own tracks, and ran

toward the entrance to the public beach-a full mile away. Houses with

lighted windows stood atop the steep-walled bluff that overlooked the

cove, and some of them had steps leading down to the beach, but she was

not confident of finding those stairs in the darkness. She did not

waste any energy on a scream, for she doubted anyone would hear her.

Besides, if screaming slowed her down, even only slightly, she might be

overtaken and silenced before anyone from town could respond to her

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cries.

Her twenty-year commitment to running had never been more important than

it was now; the issue was no longer good health but, she sensed, her

very survival. She tucked her arms close to her sides, lowered her

head, and sprinted, going for speed rather than endurance, because she

felt that she only needed to get to the lower block of Ocean Avenue to

be safe. She did not believe the man-or whatever the hell he was-would

continue to pursue her into that lamplit and populated street.

High-altitude, striated clouds rushed across a portion of the lunar

face. The moonlight dimmed, brightened, dimmed, and brightened in an

irregular rhythm, pulsing through the rapidly clotting fog in such a way

as to create a host of phantoms that repeatedly startled her and

appeared to be keeping pace with her on all sides. The eerie, palpitant

light contributed to the dreamlike quality of the chase, and she was

half convinced that she was really in bed, fast asleep, but she did not

halt or look over her shoulder because, dream or not, the man with the

amber eyes was still behind her.

She had covered half the strand between the point of the cove and Ocean

Avenue, her confidence growing with each step, when she realized that

two of the phantoms in the fog were not phantoms after all. One was

about twenty feet to her right and ran erect like a man; the other was

on her left, less than fifteen feet away, splashing through the edge of

the foam-laced sea, loping on all fours, the size of a man but certainly

not a man, for no man could be so fleet and graceful in the posture of a

dog. She had only a general impression of their shape and size, and she

could not see their faces or any details of them other than their oddly

luminous eyes.

Somehow she knew that neither of these pursuers was the man whom she had

seen on the breakwater. He was behind her, either running erect or

loping on all fours. She was nearly encircled.

Janice made no attempt to imagine who or what they might be. Analysis of

this weird experience would have to wait for later; now she simply

accepted the existence of the impossible, for as the widow of a preacher

and a deeply spiritual woman, she had the flexibility to bend with the

unknown and unearthly when confronted by it.

- 9 Powered by the fear that had formerly paralyzed her, she picked up

her pace. But so did her pursuers.

She heard a peculiar whimpering and only slowly realized that she was

listening to her own tortured voice.

Evidently excited by her terror, the phantom forms around her began to

keen. Their voices rose and fell, fluctuating between a shrill,

protracted bleat and a guttural gnarl. Worst of all, punctuating those

ululant cries were bursts of words, too, spoken raspily, urgently "Get

the bitch, get the bitch, get the bitch - - - " What in God's name were

they? Not men, surely, yet they could stand like men and speak like

men, so what else could they be but men?

Janice felt her heart swelling in her breast, pounding hard.

"Get the bitch . . .

" The mysterious figures flanking her began to draw closer, and she

tried to put on more speed to pull ahead of them, but they could not be

shaken. They continued to narrow the gap. She could see them

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peripherally but did not dare look at them directly because she was

afraid that the sight of them would be so shocking that she would be

paralyzed again and, frozen by horror, would be brought down.

She was brought down anyway. Something leaped upon her from behind. She

fell, a great weight pinning her, and all three creatures swarmed over

her, touching her, plucking and tugging at her clothes.

Clouds slipped across most of the moon this time, and shadows fell in as

if they were swatches of a black cloth sky.

Janice's face was pressed hard into the damp sand, but her head was

turned to one side, so her mouth was free, and she screamed at last,

though it was not much of a scream because she was breathless. She

thrashed, kicked, flailed with her hands, desperately trying to strike

them, but hitting mostly air and sand She could see nothing now, for the

moon was completely lost.

She heard fabric tearing. The man astride her tore off her Nike jacket,

ripped it to pieces, gouging her flesh in the process. She felt the hot

touch of a hand, which seemed rough but human.

His weight briefly lifted from her, and she wriggled forward, trying to

get away, but they pounced and crushed her into the sand. This time she

was at the surf line, her face in the water.

alternately keening, panting like dogs, hissing and snarling, her

attackers loosed frantic bursts of words as they grabbed at herù . .

get her, get her, get, get, get .

ù . . want, want, want it, want it .

". . . now, now, quick, now, quick, quick, quick .

They were pulling at her sweat pants, trying to strip her, but she

wasn't sure if they wanted to rape or devour her; perhaps neither; what

they wanted was, in fact, beyond her comprehension. She just knew they

were overcome by some tremendously powerful urge, for the chilly air was

as thick with their need as with fog and darkness.

One of them pushed her face deeper into the wet sand, and the water was

all around her now, only inches deep but enough to drown her, and they

wouldn't let her breathe. She knew she was going to die, she was pinned

now and helpless, going to die, and all because she liked to run at

night.

On Monday, October 13, twenty-two days after the death of Janice

Capshaw, Sam Booker drove his rental car from the San Francisco

International Airport to Moonlight Cove. During the trip, he played a

grim yet darkly amusing game with himself, making a mental list of

reasons to go on living. Although he was on the road for more than an

hour and a half, he could think of only four things Guinness Stout,

really good Mexican food, Goldie Hawn, and fear of death.

That thick, dark, Irish brew never failed to please him and to provide a

brief surcease from the sorrows of the world. Restaurants consistently

serving first-rate Mexican food were more difficult to locate than

Guinness; its solace was therefore more elusive. Sam had long been in

love with Goldie Hawn-or the screen image she projected-because she was

beautiful and cute, - 1 1 earthy and intelligent, and seemed to find

life so much damn fun. His chances of meeting Goldie Hawn were about a

million times worse than finding a great Mexican restaurant in a

northern California coastal town like Moonlight Cove, so he was glad

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that she was not the only reason he had for living.

As he drew near his destination, tall pines and cypresses crowded

Highway 1, forming a gray-green tunnel, casting long shadows in the

late-afternoon light. The day was cloudless yet strangely forbidding;

the sky was pale blue, bleak in spite of its crystalline clarity, unlike

the tropical blue to which he was accustomed in Los Angeles. Though the

temperature was in the fifties, hard sunshine, like glare bouncing off a

field of ice, seemed to freeze the colors of the landscape and dull them

with a haze of imitation frost.

Fear of death. That was the best reason on his list. Though he was

just forty-two years old-five feet eleven, a hundred and seventy pounds,

and currently healthy-Sam Booker had skated along the edge of death six

times, had peered into the waters below, and had not found the plunge

inviting.

A road sign appeared on the right side of the highway OCEAN AVENUE,

MOONLIGHT COVE, 2 MILES.

Sam was not afraid of the pain of dying, for that would pass in a

flicker. Neither was he afraid of leaving his life unfinished; for

several years he had harbored no goals or hopes or dreams, so there was

nothing to finish, no purpose or meaning. But he was afraid of what lay

beyond life.

Five years ago, more dead than alive on an operating-room table, he had

undergone a near-death experience. While surgeons worked frantically to

save him, he had risen out of his body and, from the ceiling, looked

down on his carcass and the medical team surrounding it. Then suddenly

he'd found himself rushing through a tunnel, toward dazzling light,

toward the Other Side the entire near-death cliche that was a staple of

sensationalistic supermarket tabloids. At the penultimate moment, the

skillful physicians had pulled him back into the land of the living, but

not before he had been afforded a glimpse of what lay beyond the mouth

of that tunnel. What he'd seen had scared the crap out of him. Life,

though often cruel, was preferable to confronting what he now suspected

lay beyond it.

He reached the Ocean Avenue exit. At the bottom of the ramp, as Ocean

Avenue turned west, under Pacific Coast Highway, another sign read

MOONLIGHT COVE '/2 MILE.

A few houses were tucked in the purple gloom among the trees on both

sides of the two-lane blacktop; their windows glowed with soft yellow

light even an hour before nightfall. Some were of that half-timbered,

deep-eaved, Bavarian architecture that a few builders, in the 1940s and

'50s, had mistakenly believed was in harmony with the northern

California coast. Others were Monterey-style bungalows with white

clapboard or shingle-covered walls, cedar-shingled roofs, and rich-if

fairy-tale rococo-architectural details. Since Moonlight Cove had

enjoyed much of its growth in the past ten years, a large number of

houses were sleek, modern, many-windowed structures that looked like

ships tossed up on some unimaginably high tide, stranded now on these

hillsides above the sea.

When Sam followed Ocean Avenue into the six-block-long commercial

district, a peculiar sense of wrongness immediately overcame him. Shops,

restaurants, taverns, a market, two churches, the town library, a movie

theater, and other unremarkable establishments lined the main drag,

which sloped down toward the ocean, but to Sam's eyes there was an

indefinable though powerful strangeness about the community that gave

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him a chill.

He could not identify the reasons for his instant negative reaction to

the place, though perhaps it was related to the somber interplay of

light and shadow. At this dying end of the autumn day, in the cheerless

sunlight, the gray stone Catholic church looked like an alien edifice of

steel, erected for no human purpose. A white stucco liquor store

gleamed as if built from time-bleached bones. Many shop windows were

cataracted with ice-white reflections of the sun as it sought the

horizon, as if painted to conceal the activities of those who worked

beyond them. The shadows cast by the buildings, by the pines and

cypress, were stark, spiky, razor-edged.

Sam braked at a stoplight at the third intersection, halfway through the

commercial district. With no traffic behind him, he paused to study the

people on the sidewalks. Not many were in sight, eight or ten, and they

also struck him as wrong, though his reasons for thinking ill of them

were less definable than those that fanned his impression of the town

itself. They walked - 13 briskly, purposefully, heads up, with a

peculiar air of urgency that seemed unsuited to a lazy, seaside

community of only three thousand souls.

He sighed and continued down Ocean Avenue, telling himself that his

imagination was running wild. Moonlight Cove and the people in it

probably would not have seemed the least unusual if he had just been

passing by on a long trip and turned off the coast highway only to have

dinner at a local restaurant. Instead, he had arrived with the

knowledge that something was rotten there, so of course he saw ominous

signs in a perfectly innocent scene.

At least that was what he told himself. But he knew better.

He had come to Moonlight Cove because people had died there, because the

official explanations for their deaths were suspicious, and he had a

hunch that the truth, once uncovered, would be unusually disturbing.

Over the years he had learned to trust his hunches; that trust had kept

him alive.

He parked the rented Ford in front of a gift shop.

To the west, at the far end of a slate-gray sea, the anemic sun sank

through a sky that was slowly turning muddy red. Serpentine tendrils of

fog began to rise off the choppy water.

In the pantry off the kitchen, sitting on the floor with her back

against a shelf of canned goods, Chrissie Foster looked at her watch. In

the harsh light of the single bare bulb in the ceiling socket, she saw

that she had been locked in that small, windowless chamber for nearly

nine hours. She had received the wristwatch on her eleventh birthday,

more than four months ago, and she had been thrilled by it because it

was not a kid's watch with cartoon characters on the face; it was

delicate, ladylike, goldplated, with roman numerals instead of digits, a

real Timex like her mother wore. Studying it, Chrissie was overcome by

sadness. The watch represented a time of happiness and family

togetherness that was lost forever.

Besides feeling sad, lonely, and a little restless from hours of

captivity, she was scared. Of course, she was not as scared as she had

been that morning, when her father had carried her through the house and

thrown her into the pantry. Then, kicking and screaming, she had been

terrified because of what she had seen. Because of what her parents had

become. But that whitehot terror could not be sustained; gradually it

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subsided to a lowgrade fever of fear that made her feel flushed and

chilled at the same time, queasy, headachy, almost as if she were in the

early stages of flu.

She wondered what they were going to do to her when they finally let her

out of the pantry. Well, no, she didn't worry about what they were

going to do, for she was pretty sure she already knew the answer to that

one They were going to change her into one of them. What she wondered

about, actually, was how the change would be effected-and what, exactly,

she would become. She knew that her mother and father were no longer

ordinary people, that they were something else, but she had no words to

describe what they had become.

Her fear was sharpened by the fact that she lacked the words to explain

to herself what was happening in her own home, for she had always been

in love with words and had faith in their power. She liked to read just

about anything poetry, short stories, novels, the daily newspaper,

magazines, the backs of cereal boxes if nothing else was at hand. She

was in sixth grade at school, but her teacher, Mrs. Tokawa, said she

read at a tenthgrade level. When she was not reading, she was often

writing stories of her own. Within the past year she had decided she

was going to grow up to write novels like those of Mr. Paul Zindel or

the sublimely silly Mr. Daniel Pinkwater or, best of all, those of Ms.

Andre Norton.

But now words failed; her life was going to be far different from what

she had imagined. She was frightened as much by the loss of the

comfortable, bookish future she had foreseen as she was by the changes

that had taken place in her parents. Eight months shy of her twelfth

birthday, Chrissie had become acutely - 15 aware of life's uncertainty,

grim knowledge for which she was ill prepared.

Not that she had already given up. She intended to fight. She was not

going to let them change her without resistance. Soon after she had

been thrown into the pantry, once her tears had dried, she had looked

over the contents of the shelves, searching for a weapon. The pantry

contained mostly canned, bottled, and packaged food, but there were also

laundry and first-aid and handyman supplies. She had found the perfect

thing a small aerosol-spray can of WD-40, an oil-based lubricant. It

was a third the size of an ordinary spray can, easily concealed. If she

could surprise them, spray it in their eyes and temporarily blind them,

she could make a break for freedom.

As though reading a newspaper headline, she said, "Ingenious Young Girl

Saves Self with Ordinary Household Lubricant.

" She held the WD-40 in both hands, taking comfort from it.

Now and then a vivid and unsettling memory recurred her father's face as

it had looked when he had thrown her into the pantry-red and swollen

with anger, his eyes darkly ringed, nostrils flared, lips drawn back

from his teeth in a feral snarl, every feature contorted with rage.

"I'll be back for you," he had said, spraying spittle as he spoke.

"I'll be back."

He slammed the door and braced it shut with a straight-backed kitchen

chair that he wedged under the knob. Later, when the house fell silent

and her parents seemed to have gone away, Chrissie had tried the door,

pushing on it with all her might, but the tilted chair was an immovable

barricade.

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I 71 be back for you. I'll be back.

His twisted face and bloodshot eyes had made her think of Mr. Robert

Louis Stevenson's description of the murderous Hyde in the story of Dr.

Jekyll, which she had read a few months ago. There was madness in her

father; he was not the same man that he once had been.

More unsettling was the memory of what she had seen in the upstairs hall

when she had returned home after missing the school bus and had

surprised her parents. No. They were not really her parents any more.

They were . . . something else.

She shuddered.

She clutched the can of WD-40.

Suddenly, for the first time in hours, she heard noise in the kitchen.

The back door of the house opened. Footsteps. At least two, maybe three

or four people.

"She's in there," her father said.

Chrissie's heart stuttered, then found a new and faster beat.

"This isn't going to be quick," said another man. Chrissie did not

recognize his deep, slightly raspy voice.

"You see, it's more complicated with a child. Shaddack's not sure we're

even ready for the children yet. It's risky. She's got to be

converted, Tucker." That was Chrissie's mother, Sharon, though she did

not sound like herself. It was her voice, all right, but without its

usual softness, without the natural, musical quality that had made it

such a perfect voice for reading fairy tales.

"Of course, yes, she's got to be done," said the stranger, whose name

was evidently Tucker.

"I know that. Shaddack knows it too. He sent me here, didn't he? I'm

just saying it might take more time than usual. We need a place where

we can restrain her and watch over her during the conversion."

"Right here. Her bedroom upstairs."

Conversion ?

Trembling, Chrissie got to her feet and stood facing the door.

With a scrape and clatter, the tilted chair was removed from under the

knob.

She held the spray can in her right hand, down at her side and half

behind her, with her forefinger on top of the nozzle.

The door opened, and her father looked in at her.

Alex Foster. Chrissie tried to think of him as Alex Foster, not as her

father, just Alex Foster, but it was difficult to deny that in some ways

he was still her dad. Besides, "Alex Foster" was no more accurate than

"father" because he was someone altogether new.

His face was no longer warped with rage. He appeared more like himself

thick blond hair; a broad, pleasant face with bold features; a

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Dean R. Koontz - Midnight

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