Dean R. Koontz - The Dark Of Summer

Dean Koontz (Deanna Dwyer) – The Dark of Summer

[Version 2.0 by BuddyDk – august 17 2003]

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CAN THE DEAD RETURN?

“Gwyn . . .”

The voice was soft, feminine, as hollow as an echo, as fragile as blown

glass. She flailed at the covers around her, trying to shake off the dream.

“I'm here, Gwyn . . .”

She sat up in bed. The room was no longer completely dark, but illuminated

by the flick-ering of a single candle. She looked to the open doorway . . .

And saw herself standing there!

“Don't you know me, Gwyn?”

“No . . .” A chill welled up inside. She pushed back the covers, got up and

ran to the door. The hallway was dark, but for the moon-light that filtered

through the windows at either end. There was no candle . . . the corridor was

deserted.

It couldn't be Ginny . . .

Ginny Keller was seven years dead!

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#75-364, DARK MUSIC, Charlotte Russell

#75-365, CHILDREN OF THE STORM, Deanna Dwyer

#75-379, DANGEROUS LEGACY, Willo Davis Roberts

#75-381, DRUMBUIE HOUSE, Marianne de Jay Scott

#75-394, DEADLY SEA, DEADLY SAND, Iris Foster

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EDITIONS

LANCER BOOKS

NEW YORK

A LANCER BOOK

THE DARK OF SUMMER

Printed in the U.S.A.

LANCER BOOKS, INC. • 1560 BROADWAY

NEW YORK, N.Y. 10036

BOOK ONE

ONE

Gwyn was not expecting anything unusual in that day's mail, and was certainly not expecting a letter that

would change the course of her entire life . . .

She got up at eight o'clock, to the insistent shrill of her radio-alarm, went straightaway into the

kitchenette where she tried to coax herself all the way awake with a cup of strong, black coffee. Sunlight

streamed through the one large window over the sink and splashed on the tiny, round table where she

sat. She squinted and hunched forward like a gypsy woman straining to cast a spell, her face puffy and

lined with sleep. She had gone to bed rather late, for she'd stayed up studying for a Creative Drama

exam; now, she was quite tired, bone tired. For a moment, as she closed her eyes against the warm

fingers of the morning sun, she seriously considered re-setting her alarm to give herself another hour

between the sheets, just sixty more minutes of lovely . . .

She snapped her head up as if she had been hit, and she forced herself to drink the rest of the bitter

coffee. She dared not return to bed. For one thing, she'd miss the exam which she'd spent so much time

preparing for. And for another, she knew how easily she could again slip into the sick, unnatural routine

which had possessed her for six months af-ter her parents died.

A temporary breakdown, Dr. Recard had said, an understandable psychological reaction to the

tragedy. Yet, no matter how understandable it had been, she did not want to go through something like

that again, for that had been the worst period of her life: it had been more horrible than the months after

her sister's death when they'd both been twelve years old and inseparable, worse even than the morning

the police had come around to tell her about her parents' accident. An under-standable psychological

reaction to tragedy . . . She had begun to sleep away the better part of each day. Anything but sleep

became a chore, an unbearably arduous task. She began to get out of bed just before lunch, napping

away part of the af-ternoon, retiring early after a meager supper, sleep-ing, sleeping, sleeping. In sleep,

there was no agony, no fear, no desperate loneliness. Her days passed in sleep, until it seemed as if she

would never get out of bed, could not get out of bed ex-cept when she grew very hungry or thirsty. She

had realized that something was terribly wrong with her, but she had not gone to a doctor for nearly six

months. Then, when she had gone, it was only be-cause she slept a whole day through without get-ting

up for any meals at all and, the following morning, could not remember anything about the lost day. That

terrified her. That sent her, thin and drawn and weeping, to see what Dr. Recard could do for her.

Now, for eight months, she had been able to resist the lure of lengthy sleep, and she felt she was

gradually making solid contacts with life again, achieving, growing, putting her loss and her agony behind

her. One moment of weakness, one extra nap when she really needed no nap, would send her spiraling

back down into the bleak despair that had made her so cherish that unneeded sleep.

By nine o'clock, she'd showered, dressed and was on her way to the college campus which lay on a

hill only six blocks from her efficiency apart-ment. The day was warm, bright, almost like a painting

entitled “Spring,” with the cherry trees in blossom along Hudson Street, and birds darting like tiny kites

between the eaves of the quaint old buildings which, though well-kept and attractive, had ceased to be

single family homes and had been divided into student apartments much like her own. The walk, amidst

all this bustling life and col-or, revived her spirits and made her forget about bed altogether.

The exam went well, and she knew that she had gotten a high grade, one that would insure the A for

the course, which she had been working so hard to get. She stopped for a time in the student union

building, but she did not remain long after she'd finished her Coke and sandwich. She had many

ac-quaintances, but no real friends, for all her ener-gies had been put toward re-making herself,

rehabilitating herself. She had little or no time, these days, for friends. But that would change soon, when

a week passed and there was no morn-ing that she wanted to stay in bed unnecessarily long. Then she

would know that she was better, was healthy again, and she would be able to open herself more fully to

the world around her.

When she reached the apartment house at quar-ter past two o'clock, she stopped at the hall table to

examine the stack of mail there, and she found only one thing addressed to her: a letter from her Uncle

William, an impossible letter that, because it was the last thing in the world she was expecting, left her

somewhat tense. She was frightened and shaking by the tune she had let herself into her three room

apartment on the third floor of the old house.

She put the letter on the small kitchen table, went to change clothes, poured herself a tall glass of

soda over two ice cubes, and sat down to read the daily paper which she'd picked up on campus.

She tried not to think about the letter.

That wasn't easy.

She finished the paper, folded it and stuffed it in-to the trashcan, rinsed out her glass and put that on

the drainboard of the sink.

When she turned, the first thing that caught her eye was the white envelope lying in the center of the

blue, formica tabletop. It was a beacon, a flare, and it simply would not be ignored.

Sighing, beginning to tremble a bit again, she sat down at the table, picked up the letter, ripped it

open, extracted two sheets of fine vellum paper on which were neatly typewritten lines followed by her

uncle's unfamiliar, bold signature. This was the first time in nearly fifteen years she had heard from

him—encounters having anything to do with her mother's brother, William Barnaby, were exceed-ingly

rare—and she did not know what to expect, though she expected the worst.

The letter said:

“Dearest Gwyn,

“There is but one way to begin a letter of this sort, after all this time—and after all that has happened

between us—and that is with a sincere and heartfelt apology. I apologize. I cannot be-gin to explain

how genuine and important to me this apology is, but I must plead that you not pass it off as some

shallow devise used to gain your attention. I do apologize. I have been a fool. And though I have

required so very, very long to understand my foolishness, I see now that nothing in the past was

anyone's fault but my own.

“You know that I was quite against the marriage of my sister to Richard Keller, your father. At that

time, twenty-two years ago now, I was frightfully class conscious, and I felt that your mother was

marrying far below her station in life. Indeed, my own father felt this way too, and he eventually cut

your mother out of the family inheritance because of her marriage; the family's holdings devolved to

me, on Father's death, some ten years ago.”

Gwyn looked up from the letter, stared out of the window at the incredibly blue spring sky, and she

thought, somewhat bitterly, How simple and undramatic he makes it sound—how sterile in the

recounting!

Though the biggest fight and the bitterest scenes between her Grandfather Barnaby and her parents

had occurred before Gwyn was five years old, she still remembered those awful events as if they had

transpired just last week. A few times, at her mother's insistence, Old Man Barnaby and William, who

was eight years his sister's senior, would come to the Keller house for dinner; Louise, Gwyn's mother,

was always certain that a good family get-together would help iron out their dif-ferences—especially with

Gwyn and Ginny, the old man's only granddaughters, to lend an air of enchantment to the afternoon. But

the old man never liked Richard Keller, looked upon him as an inferior, and always fomented a serious

and roar-ing argument to end the visit. Gwyn remembered her mother's tears, and finally, the day the old

man had left for good and notified them that they were forever cut out of his will.

The loss of the money did not upset her mother, though the loss of the old man's love most surely did.

Still, she adapted to these new circumstances and devoted more time than ever to her own family, giving

them all her love. In four years, she had gotten over her loss—and then her father had died. And her

brother, William Barnaby, did not even notify her of the old man's passing until he had been buried for

nearly a month. This delay, William insisted on the phone, was at his father's command, a clause in the

old man's will. Her mother, aware that old man Barnaby could be ex-tremely vindictive, even carrying a

grudge to the grave, was still not satisfied with William's flimsy explanation. But she was more content,

after this final insult, to let the estrangement between her and her brother continue—an arrangement that

William was not only willing, but eager, to see perpetuated. He still professed a great dislike for Richard

Keller and told his sister she would yet one day regret the marriage, despite her lovely twins.

The letter continued with this:

“Of course, your father proved himself a man of admirable wit, cunning and rare business acumen.

His success, I must admit, was a great surprise to me. But you must believe that it was a pleasant

surprise, and that I was always so very glad for Louise.”

Sitting in her small kitchen, in the pleasant apartment which her trust fund allowances easily paid for,

Gwyn smiled sadly at what, without realizing it, her Uncle William had just said. Mon-ey makes the man .

. . Keller was worthless, an unpedigreed bum, an outcast compared to the so-daily conscious Barnaby

family—until he'd started making big money. With a fortune, he was more acceptable. And, of course, he

was easier to accept now that he was dead and gone . . .

“I did not learn that Louise and Richard were killed in the airplane accident until six months after they

were gone. I was stunned, Gwyn, and horribly depressed for some time afterward. I could not

understand why you didn't imme-diately inform me of the disaster, Gwyn. That was two years ago,

but you were seventeen and old enough to understand that relatives should be contacted, that certain

priorities in . . .”

She skipped over the remainder of that paragraph. She did not think Uncle William was so dense as

to misunderstand her motives for not in-forming him, post haste, of his sister's death. Could he really have

forgotten how badly he had hurt Louise when he withheld the news of old man Barnaby's death?

“I waited six additional months, after getting the belated news of the tragedy, and I finally con-tacted

the bank that I knew would be managing your father's inheritance until you come of age. They graciously

provided me with your address, there at school, but I have required nearly another year to gather the

nerve to write these few lines.”

She turned to the second page of the letter:

“Gwyn, let's let the past bury itself. Let's do what should have been done so long ago; let's reunite

what's left of the descendants of my father. I have apologized by letter, a very cowardly beginning,

but a beginning none-theless. If you can find it in your heart to forgive me, and to forgive, by

association, my father, perhaps these years of pointless animosity can be done away with.

“I would like you to spend your summer here in Massachusetts, at the homestead, Barnaby Manor,

with me and my wife, Elaine, whom you have never met. I am fifty years old, Gwyn, finally mature

enough to admit my mistakes. I pray that you are mature enough to have learned the value of

forgiveness, and that we can make a start of repairing old bridges. I will anxiously await your reply.

“Love to you,

“Uncle Bill Barnaby.”

Gwyn did not know at what point during the let-ter she had begun to cry, but now fat tears rolled

down her cheeks like jewels of water, fell off the end of her chin, leaving a trace of saltiness at the

corners of her mouth. She wiped at them with her hand, and she knew what her answer would be. She

hadn't realized, until now, how much alone she was, how cut off from people, how without love and

protection. She wanted a family, someone to turn to, someone to confide in, and she was more than

willing to forgive old angers, old prejudices.

She got paper and pen from the desk in the liv-ing room and sat down to compose the reply.

She had no trouble with it. The words came as easily as if they were familiar lines of a favorite verse

that she had memorized. In two weeks, when the semester ended, she would go to Calder,

Massa-chusetts, to Barnaby Manor, to her Uncle William.

And life would start all over again.

She posted the letter that same afternoon and, in a better mood than any she had experienced since

before her parents' death two long years ago, she treated herself to a movie that she'd been wanting to

see for some time. And she went shopping for some new summer clothes—light dresses, swim-suits,

shorts and airy blouses, sneakers—that might be suitable for the social life and the leisure time on the

beach of the Massachusetts seacoast

That night, she had a nightmare which was old and familiar but which, for the first time did not terrify

her. In the dream, she was standing alone on a barren plain with nothing but grotesque, stark rock

formations twisting up on every side . . . The sky was flat gray and high, and she knew that no other living

thing existed in all this world . . . She sat down on the sandy earth of the plain over-whelmed by the

soul-deadening emptiness of the world, and she knew that the sky would soon lower (as it always did

without fail), and that the rocks would close in (as they always did without fail), eventually crushing her to

death while she screamed and screamed—knowing that there would be no answer to her calls for help.

This time Uncle William appeared out of nowhere and reached for her smiling broadly. And this time she

was not crushed and she was not alone.

In the morning, waking refreshed, she knew that now she was not without friends, without family or

without hope. This one contact, yet so brief, with someone who might love her was enough to drive off

the nightmare.

During the following two weeks, she did not have a single urge to sleep late or to take naps in the

afternoon, and she knew that when her night-mare had gone away, her sickness had disappeared too.

She looked forward to the summer at Barnaby Manor with the enthusiasm of a small child pre-paring

for Christmas morning. In her free time she did more shopping—not only for clothes for herself, but for

gifts that she wanted to bring her aunt and uncle, small things given not so much be-cause of their value

but because they represented her own ardent desire to give in order to make their relationship a good

and lasting one. These were gifts of care, gifts of sentiment, and she shopped especially carefully for

each.

Finally on the first day of June, which was a Thursday, she packed her four large suitcases in her

Opel coupe locked her apartment for the sum-mer, paid her landlady three months' rent in ad-vance and

set out for the drive from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to the small town of Calder, Massa-chusetts where a

bright, new future awaited her, a chance to re-establish contacts with people who wanted to love her in a

world where, she had learned the hard way, love was at a premium.

TWO

When she first saw Barnaby Manor, still more than a quarter of a mile away at the top of the nar-row

and badly paved macadam driveway she stopped her car along the berm. She sat there, peer-ing through

the bright windshield against which the afternoon sun reflected, and she took time to carefully examine

this place where she would spend the following three months and where, perhaps an old grudge would

finally be laid to rest. . .

At first the house did not look particularly promising and seemed to threaten rather than to welcome.

It was huge, with at least thirty rooms on three different levels, spotted with railed porches and balconies

its slate roof precipitously steep and decorated with the blank eyes of attic windows which looked like

nothing so much as observation posts in some fortress. The house was painted in those familiarly

reversed colors that one sees along the New England seacoast: predominately royal blue, with a bright

white trim rather than mostly white. This gave it a rich—and a decidedly sinister—look.

The driveway edged the cliff from the moment it turned off the public road half a mile behind her, and

it fed directly into the loop before the man-sion's large oaken doors. On the right as she faced the house

the lawn sloped down and came to the cliff where it stopped without guard rails or wall. She could see

from here that a set of steps had been carved into the cliff to give the people in the house easy access to

the beach. To the left of the house, the Barnaby estate thickly forested, ran on out of sight.

Gwyn had lived in a mansion herself, when her parents were still alive and she was accustomed to

money and what money could buy. However, even she was quite impressed with Barnaby Manor,

im-pressed by its formidable dimensions and by the well-kept, ornately planted grounds around it. If the

house were not so brooding, so foreboding —

But then she told herself, she was being foolish. A house was not a living and breathing entity. A

house was merely a house. It could not have about it a mood, could project no aura, neither good nor

bad. Rather, she was seeing in the house a projec-tion of her own doubts and her own fears. Would her

Uncle William be as pleasant in person as he had sounded in his letter? Would he really have forgotten all

those years of enmity, and would he truly be sorry for the way he had treated his sister, Gwyn's mother?

Because she had no concrete answers to any of these questions, she was seeing only danger in the lines

of the perfectly harmless old house. It was she who was to blame, then, not the inanimate dwelling.

She put the car in gear, pulled onto the driveway, accelerated up along the cliffs edge toward the

mansion. She stopped before the massive oaken doors and was surprised to see them open even before

the sound of the car's engine had died away.

As she stepped out of the car she saw a thin wiry man walking toward her. He was sixty years old

perhaps, with a leathery face that might have done well for the captain of an ancient sailing ship: all

creases and lines, darkly tanned, grizzled. He was wearing a dark suit, blue shirt and dark tie and looked

not unlike a funeral director.

“Miss Keller?” he asked rounding the front of her car, his gait swift but stiff-legged.

“Yes?”

“Fritz Helman,” he said, introducing himself with an incomplete bow in her direction. She thought that

she detected the slightest trace of an accent in his precise voice, though he had ob-viously made English

his native language decades ago. He said, “I'm the family's houseman. I serve as butler, official greeter,

secretary to Mr. Bar-naby—and in half a dozen other capacities. Wel-come to the manor.”

He smiled at her warmly, though he seemed to be holding something back, keeping some other

ex-pression locked behind that smile. It was not quite that the smile was insincere, just that it did not

completely show what he was feeling.

She said, 'Thank you, Mr. Helman.”

“Please call me Fritz.”

“Fritz, then. And you call me Gwyn.”

He nodded, still smiling, still withholding part of himself from her. “Your luggage?” he asked.

“Two suitcases in the trunk, and two on the back seat.”

“I'll have Ben get them shortly,” he said.

“Ben?”

“The handyman and chauffeur.” He took her arm in a very courtly manner and escorted her to the

open doors, through them into a marble-floored entrance foyer where the walls were starkly white and

hung with two flaring oil paintings by an artist she felt she should recognize but could not.

“Mr. and Mrs. Barnaby were hoping that you might arrive in time for lunch,” Fritz said. “They

delayed as long as they reasonably could, and they've both only just finished.”

“I'm sorry if I held things up with—”

“Not at all,” he said quickly. “But would you like me to see about putting together a plate of leftovers

for you?”

“I stopped for something on the way,” she said. “But thank you just the same, Fritz.”

She had taken two days for the drive, and she had enjoyed stopping at restaurants along the

way—even those that had a decidedly plastic at-mosphere and served food that she found barely

passable and not always digestible. No matter what the quality of the meal, she was at least out among

other people once more, away from the familiar academic background which had been the only place she

had been able to function for quite some time. Now, free from school for a few months, no longer

bothered by a need for excessive sleep, with some excitement for the summer ahead, she felt as if she

were a jigsaw puzzle that had finally been put together. All of the missing pieces were in place, and she

was again a complete woman.

While her thoughts were wandering, Fritz had led her down a darkly paneled corridor laid with a

deep wine-colored carpet. Other original oil paint-ings hung on both sides. He stopped before a heavy,

handcarved door decorated with wooden fruit and leaves, and told her: “Mr. and Mrs. Bar-naby are in

the library having a bit of brandy to help settle their lunch.”

He rapped once, shortly and sharply.

A man's voice, strong, even, and resonant, said, “Come in, please.”

Fritz opened the door and ushered Gwyn in before him.

He said, “Miss Keller has arrived, sir.” He sounded genuinely pleased to bring the news.

In the same instant he turned, rather abruptly, and left the room, closing the fruit bedecked door

behind him and leaving her alone with the Bar-nabys.

The library was lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling, and all of them were filled with

hardbound volumes tooled in expensive leather or in good, sturdy cloth. A mammoth desk rested at one

end of the room, and three large easy chairs at the other. In between was open carpet, a sort of no-man's

land into which Fritz had led her and aban-doned her. Though she had been feeling quite secure and

competent moments earlier, she now felt full of doubts, uneasy, waiting for some in-definable disaster . . .

In two of the reading chairs, beneath the antique floor lamps, sat William and Elaine Barnaby. He was

a large man, though lean, dressed in gray slacks, a burgundy blazer and a blue shirt with a dark blue

ascot at his neck. His hair was gray and combed full at the sides in British fashion, and he had about him

a look of near nobility. His face was somewhat soft, but not so little lined as to appear weak. His wife,

Elaine, was younger than he, no more than forty, and quite beautiful in a cold, high-fashion way. She was

dressed in a floor-length skirt and a ruffled blouse, holding a brandy snifter in her hand with the casual

elegance that bespoke good breeding and the finest preparatory schools. She was brunette, with a dark

complexion and huge, dark eyes that seemed to penetrate straight through Gwyn like twin knives.

No one spoke.

It was as if time had stopped flowing.

Gwyn felt awkward and clumsy as she compared herself to the older woman, though she knew she

was neither of these things. Her bright blonde hair now seemed brassy and cheap next to Elaine's dark

Dean R. Koontz - The Dark Of Summer

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