Dean R. Koontz - Demon Child

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Dean Koontz (Deanna Dwyer) – Demon child
[Version 2.0 by BuddyDk – August 2 2003]
[Completely new scan]
COLD WELCOME
“What exactly was the curse?” asked Jenny. Her hands were so cold that they looked like white
porcelain. '
Her aunt spoke slowly. “Sarah pledged that every generation of the Brucker family would contain a
child haunted—a child possessed. This child would seek the wolfbane, would howl at the full moon, and
find a craving for blood.”
“A werewolf? That's . . . silly.” But she did not feel much like laughing.
“That night Sarah's father died . . . strangely. He grabbed at his own neck, as if struggling against
someone . . . or something . . . invisible. He drew his own blood . . . but he died.”
Jenny's eyes strayed to the red volumes of demonic lore. Was this really the answer to Freya's
strange spells? Impossible though it seemed . . . could the child really be a were-wolf?
PUT PLEASURE IN YOUR READING Larger type makes the difference
This EASY EYE Edition is set in large, clear type—at least 30 percent larger than usual. It is
printed on scientifically tinted non-glare paper for better con-trast and less eyestrain.
Deanna Dwyer
LANCER BOOKS NEW YORK
A LANCER BOOK
DEMON CHILD
Copvright © 1971 by Deanna Dwyer
All rigjts reserved
Printed In Canada.
DEDICATION: To Ann, Oracle, Dan, Leonard, Ely and K. B.
LANCER BOOKS, INC. • 1560 BROADWAY
NEW YORK, N.Y. 10036
1
The sky was low and gray as masses of thick clouds scudded southward, pulling cold air down from
the north as they went. Jenny huddled against the chill as she entered the quiet graveyard where it seemed
ten degrees colder yet. That was her imagination, of course. Still, she hunched her shoulders and walked
faster.
She stopped before three similar tombstones, one of which had only recently been set before an
unsodded grave. In the entire cemetery, she was the only mourner. She was thankful for that, for she
preferred to be alone. Turning her eyes to the stones, she read the names cut in them: Lee Brighton,
Sandra Brighton and Leona Pitt Brighton. Her father, mother and pa-ternal grandmother. As always,
reading the names to-gether, she found it difficult to believe they were all gone and that she was alone
without even a brother or sister to share the burdens she carried. She wiped at the tears in her eyes.
Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw someone. When she turned to look, there was no
one there. But when she directed her gaze back to the stones, she saw him again, a large man, gray and
indis-tinct, approaching her. She turned to stare at him.
He was gone. The cemetery was empty, but for the fog and the tombstones.
Suddenly, she could hear ghostly footsteps on the flagstone walk.
Run, Jenny! the voices of her dead loved ones cried. Run, run! Look how suddenly and
unexpectedly we died.
A drunken driver ran a red light, killing Lee and Sandra in an instant. Grandmother Brighton
died in seconds of a stroke.
Now you must run or the unexpected, the unknown, will catch you too!
She looked all around but still could not see anyone. Softly, the echo of footsteps grew closer.
“Who is it?” she asked.
The dead voices only answered, Run!
The footsteps were almost on top of her now. Any moment, a hand would reach out and touch her, a
cold, wet hand.
“Who's there?” she asked again.
Its the unknown, the dead told her. You can never anticipate what it will do, when it will take
you. All you can do is run, Jenny. Hurry!
She turned away from the stones and ran, her heels clicking on the walk. Despite the sounds of her
own flight, the heavy panic in her harsh breathing, she could hear the gentle footsteps following her. She
ran faster, dashed through the iron gates of the cemetery entrance.
To her right, a car horn blared. She looked up in time to see the automobile rushing the last few feet
toward her! Behind the windshield, the driver's face was a mask of terror. She threw up her hand for
what little protection that would bring her, and—
There was a screech of brakes and a loud rattling noise which woke her from her troubled sleep.
She looked out of the bus window at the terminal, at the concrete veranda and the old wooden
benches. For a moment, she was not able to remember where she was. The nightmare had seemed so
real that the real world now seemed like a dream by comparison.
Around her, people struggled to their feet, took bags down from the overhead luggage racks and
made their way up the aisle toward the door, joking with one another about the incredible heat.
Even as she got a better grasp on things, her fear re-mained. Just as in the dream, she was running,
though not from some invisible, faceless force. At least she didn't think she was running from anything but
loneli-ness. Her nerves quieted somewhat by the time the bus was nearly deserted; she picked up her
purse and went outside.
The bus driver, seeing she had no one to handle her two large suitcases for her, took them just inside
the terminal door. In moments, everyone had been picked up by friends and relatives, leaving the terminal
in a sleepy malaise again. Richard Brucker should have been waiting for her. She hoped that nothing was
wrong. She waited for him inside the air-conditioned old terminal, by a front window where she could
com-mand a complete view of the parking lot.
Dark clouds were shoving across the bright sky, as black as onyx, low and rain-filled. Such severe
heat and humidity all day could only result in thunder-storms by evening. At least that was the general
feeling on the bus where the air-conditioning had mal-functioned and the passengers had grown talkative
hi order to make the leaden minutes pass more swiftly.
Jagged, yellow lightning cracked down the back-drop of the clouds, followed almost instantly by
hard, loud thunder that sounded like nothing so much as cannons, dozens of cannons firing
simultaneously.
Jenny leaped back from the window, frightened by the violent display. She back-stepped a bit, even
though there was no serious threat to her.
You are a big girl now, she chided herself. You kept a stiff upper lip when mom and dad died seven
years ago. You handled grandma's funeral all by yourself, settled the old woman's estate without much
help. You've worked your way through college, and you're twenty-one years old. Now stop being
frightened by a little old flash of lightning!
Where on earth was her cousin? Richard Brucker was fifteen minutes late already. She wondered if
he might have had an accident, for she thought of the rain-slicked pavement on which her mother and
father had died. She felt guilty for even nourishing the start of impatience.
Just then, the storm broke over the terminal. Light-ning struck down, seemed to smash into the
surface of the parking lot, as if attracted by the aerials of the cars parked there.
Impulsively, Jenny turned away from the glass.
Rain hissed across the concrete veranda, driven by stiff gusts of wind. It darkened the veranda floor,
spat-tered on the windows. It sounded like someone whis-pering a warning to her, over and over.
She left her two suitcases where the driver had put them, crossed the terminal building to the far wall
where a waitress wiped the top of a small lunch coun-ter. She took a stool and ordered a cup of coffee.
“Looks like it finally broke,” the waitress said.
“Do you think it'll last all day?”
“Supposed to go on all night too!” The waitress put the coffee down. “Want a doughnut with that?”
“No thank you.”
“Moving in or visiting?” the waitress asked. She did not seem to be a busybody, just friendly.
“Visiting,” Jenny said. “I graduated from college last week. I used to live with my grandmother, but
she passed on two months ago. I have an aunt here who wants to have me until my first teaching job
starts in the fall.”
“A teacher!” the waitress said. “I never was any good with books myself. That's why I'm just a
wait-ress. Right now, though, I wish I was home in bed with a book. This place gets spooky when there
ain't many people about.”
Jenny looked at the open-beam ceiling, dark and mysterious, at the dim corners where old, hooded
lights didn't cast much cheer. “I sure wouldn't want to work here!” She sipped her coffee. “But I guess
you meet a good many different types of people.”
The waitress nodded. “Some you'd like to know, others you'd give anything never to see again.” She
looked over Jenny's shoulder toward the front doors. “And here comes one I could do without. He's
from that house where poor little Freya lives. If there's a curse, then he's the cause of it.” Her voice fell as
the man drew nearer the counter. “Half the child's troubles, if you ask me, stem from this one. No good
at all; too quiet and too dark and too unwilling to talk with anyone.”
Jenny looked at the man who, a moment later, stepped up to the counter. He was tall and slim, with
very large hands that moved rapidly. They pressed at his lapels, searched his pockets, flicked at dirt on
the countertop. He was a handsome man, scholarly in ap-pearance except for his black, curly hair which
he wore full and rather long. It was this last detail which kept her from recognizing him immediately.
When he smiled at her, she saw that it was Richard.
“Hello, Jenny,” he said.
She got up and hugged him. He had been four years her senior when her parents died, and, in the
midst of sympathetic adults, he had been the only one to whom she could communicate her grief. His
own mother had died when Richard was two years old. And though he had been too young to remember
it, he had learned the loneliness of the world in the years after. When she had needed consolation, it was
Richard who, clumsily but earnestly, had given it to her.
The waitress moved off, disapproving, scowling at them when she thought they could not see.
“We can talk more in the car,” Richard said, heft-ing her suitcases. “After that, we have the whole
summer.”
At the front door, she said, “You'll get drenched!”
“Don't worry about me. Pull your coat over your head and run for it. I left both doors slightly ajar, so
you can get in quickly. It's the maroon Corvette there. Ready?”
Lightning snapped across the low clouds, making the darkening afternoon momentarily brighter.
Jenny jumped as the clap of thunder rattled the windows.
“Lightning always strikes the highest object in the area,” Richard said, sensing her fright. “I'm a good
foot taller than you.”
“Don't say that!” she snapped, gripping his arm.
He had meant it as a joke, was surprised she took him so earnestly. “The car's only a dozen yards
away. No trouble. Now?”
“Now,” she said, resigned to it.
He shouldered open the door, lead her onto the veranda. Richard ran into the downpour. A moment
later, her coat pulled over her head, slightly hunched to make herself a smaller target, she ran too.
The pavement lighted with a reflection of a wide, jagged run of lightning.
She almost slipped and fell on the slick macadam, regained her balance only by the sheerest luck.
She found the passenger's door, opened it and slid into the small, low-slung sportscar.
Again, yellow light shattered the even black glaze of the sky, but she felt safe from it now. She had
heard that the four tires of an automobile grounded it in a storm. She was careful, though, not to touch
any of the metal fixtures. She still remembered the nightmare she had had on the bus. That was an omen
of some kind.
Richard was soaked by the time he had the luggage in the compartment behind the seat and had
slipped behind the wheel.
“I feel awful, putting you through this,” Jenny said. She took a clean handkerchief out of her purse
and wiped his face and neck.
“Why?” he asked, grinning broadly. “Were you the one who made it rain?”
She made a face at him. “Here,” she said, “let me dry your hair,” When he bent toward her, she
toweled it until her handkerchief was sopping.
“Don't worry,” he said, “I'm as healthy as a horse— as two horses!” He started the car, raced the
engine once or twice, then drove away.
“The waitress didn't think much of you,” Jenny said to start a conversation beyond mere pleasantries.
besides, she was curious to know why the waitress seemed to fear a gentle man like Richard Brucker.
“Catherine? Really? I've noticed that she treats me cooly these days, though I haven't bothered to
find out why.” He drove off the main highway onto a second-ary, less well-paved road where Dutch elms
grew on both sides and formed a canopy above them, making the way even darker. “What'd she say?”
“That you were responsible for some curse over a girl named Freya.”
Richard smiled, leaned forward and turned on the headlights. If lightning still cracked above, it did not
penetrate these lush branches.
“You haven't been involved in some public scandal, have you?” she asked, teasing him.
“Not woman troubles,” he said. “In this town, any-thing can make a scandal. Rural life is charming,
ex-cept for its lack of privacy. In small towns, everyone's business becomes public. Freya is my cousin,
from my father's side of the family. She's seven years old, has a twin brother, Frank, and she's presently
having what I call psychiatric problems. Cora calls it a family curse.”
Jenny had been surprised the first time she had heard Richard refer to his mother by her Christian
name, even though she understood it was a custom among some of the very wealthy. Still, it seemed to
lack respect. “A curse?”
“Psychiatric problems,” he corrected. He sighed as if weary with the story. “The twins came from a
bro-ken home. Lena Brucker, my father's sister, married a good-for-nothing who eventually ran off with
half her money. She drinks too much, likes the jet-set life too well. When Cora found that Lena planned
on board-ing the two seven-year-olds in separate schools, she asked Lena to leave them here. Lena
didn't care one way or the other, as long as she had her freedom. That was a year ago; they've been with
us since.”
“Aunt Cora didn't say you had guests!” Jenny said. “I don't want to inconvenience anyone.”
Richard laughed. “Jenny, sweets, the Brucker estate mansion has eighteen bedrooms.”
“Eighteen!”
“Our ancestors were fond of parties that lasted whole weekends, especially around Thanksgiving and
Christmas. People came from all over. These days, we're all too hurried to have such a leisurely
celebra-tion.”
“You still haven't told me about the curse,” she re-minded him. “Excuse me—about the psychiatric
problems.”
Ahead of them, a great road construction truck, smeared with mud, jounced into view around a curve
in the road. It was traveling at better than sixty miles an hour. Richard had barely enough time to climb
part of the steep bank alongside the road as the mam-moth vehicle roared by, rattling and banging as
each ripple in the macadam carried the length of it.
“What a fool way to drive!” Jenny said. She was re-membering the nightmare, all the nightmares she
had had since Grandmother Brighton had died. If Rich-ard's reflexes had been just a hair less sharp, or if
the truck had been moving the slightest bit faster, they both might be badly hurt or dead.
Richard grumbled. “Foolish, but average for that lot.”
“They use this road frequently?”
He backed off the embankment and drove ahead once more. “Ever since the superhighway
construction began, fairly near the edge of Brucker property.”
“All that dirt and noise,” Jenny said. Then she re-membered that Aunt Cora would surely have a
maid.
“It's not so bad,” Richard said. “The house sits well into the estate, away from the construction. It's
the real-estate speculators and their constant offers for our land that drive us crazy.”
They turned onto a narrower, better paved road, stopped before an iron gate that said: BRUCKER
ES-TATE. PRIVATE, KEEP OUT. Richard tapped the car's horn in a rhythm Jenny didn't catch. The
gates swung open, let them by, closed behind them.
She would have been delighted with such gadgetry if the iron gates had not reminded her of iron
cemetery gates.
They passed neatly kept stables and riding rings fenced with white-washed boards. A small lake lay
to the right, a coppice of pine trees by its far shore. Under the trees were picnic tables and children's
swings. In the rain and fog, the swings looked like the skeletons of long-dead creatures.
“The house,” Richard said as they rounded a small knoll.
The house had three floors plus a half attic whose windows were set in a black slate roof. Two wings
formed an L with a courtyard and fountain in the nook of the arms. The stone cherubs in the fountain
were not spouting any water at the moment.
Richard parked before the front steps, a leisurely flight of eight, wide marble risers that ended on a
gran-ite stoop before tall, oaken main doors. Almost before the sound of the engine died, a rather elderly
man in a raincoat came out of those doors. He was shielded by a black umbrella and was carrying a
second umbrella which he gave Richard. He rushed around to Jenny's door, opened it and helped her
under the protection of his own bumbershoot.
He was about sixty, lean and wizened with white hair and deep, blue eyes. “I'm Harold, the
manservant. You must be Jenny, for you have the Brighton beauty, dark hair and eyes. Will you come
with me out of this dreadful weather?”
“Yes!” she gasped as thunder rumbled in the ever-lowering clouds and the rain seemed to fall twice
as fast as it had. Her feet were soaked, and her legs were splattered with mud and water.
As they stepped onto the first of the marble stairs, someone moaned nearby, loud and prolonged, as
if in some terrible sort of agony. It was not exactly the cry of a human being. It was too deep and too
loud for that, touched with something that spoke of the super-natural.
“What is that?” she asked.
Abruptly, the moan rose to a shrill, wild shriek that cut off without reason in the middle of a note.
Jenny shivered. She could see no one about who could have made the weird call.
“Just the wind,” Harold told her. He pointed past the edge of the umbrella at the eaves of the
mansion. “If the wind comes too fast from the south, it whistles in the eaves. It can keep you awake
nights. Fortu-nately, the wind hardly ever blows this way.”
The explanation should have quieted her nerves, but it did not. That cry seemed too filled with
emotion to be made by something inanimate. Suddenly, she re-membered things that she should have
asked Richard. Why had he been late? Why did Catherine, the wait-ress, fear him so? What was this
curse that Aunt Cora talked about and which he called a “psychiatric problem"?
Lightning threw the front of the house into strange shadows; thunder shook the many windows.
Again, the wind moaned horribly in the eaves.
That uncontrollable fear of the unknown and the unexpected rose in Jenny. She thought of her mother
and father, of Grandmother Brighton. She wished, oh so very much, that she had found something else to
oc-cupy her summer. But she realized there was no back-ing out now.
She went with Harold into that bleak and forebod-ing house . . .
2
If the exterior of the house had been foreboding, the interior made up for that. It was warm and
comfort-able with an air of well-being that could very nearly be touched. The walls of the entry foyer
were richly pa-pered in a gold and white antique print. The closet doors were heavy, dark oak. The few
pieces of furni-ture were all heavy pine styled in a rustic, colonial mode that bespoke usefulness and
sensibility. In such a house, one could feel protected, shielded, away from the cares of the rest of the
world. The moan of the wind in the eaves was distant and unfrightening.
Yet, even as she gave less thought to the fears that had bothered her only moments ago, Jenny
wondered if this were not a false sense of security that prevailed in the house. At times, you had to be
careful, cautious. Just when you turned your back on some danger, smug in your certainty of safety, it
might spring up anew and attack you when you least expected it.
A car on a rain-slicked highway . . .
A burst blood vessel in an old woman's brain . . .
She shivered.
“Cold?” Harold asked as he took her coat and hung it in the closet.
“A little.”
“A touch of brandy should clear that up,” he said. “Would you like a drop or two in your coffee?”
Under normal circumstances, Jenny did not ap-prove of liquor. She felt that it was a crutch against
the burdens of the world. But at this moment, she could see little harm in giving in to Harold's suggestion.
She really was quite cold and nervous. She nodded her consent.
“Good,” Harold said, slipping his own coat into the closet. “Your aunt should be in the drawing
room. Straight down this corridor, on your left through the curtained arch. If you will excuse me, I'll take
the back hall to the kitchen and get the coffee ready. You look positively chilled to the bone!”
He left her standing there, alone in the house for the first time. Abruptly, the front door opened behind
her, admitting the throbbing moan of the wind in the eaves and the hiss of rain drumming the driveway.
Richard fought inside with the umbrella and the suitcase, set the bag down.
“One more,” he said.
“I should have helped you with those!”
“I've got my bumbershoot,” he said.
“And it isn't doing you a bit of good.”
“You hurry along to Cora. She'll be waiting for vou”
He plunged back into the downpour. The rain slashed under the rim of his umbrella and soaked his
clothes.
She supposed there was nothing she could do for him. She turned and followed the corridor,
fascinated by the rich oil paintings hung against the polished ma-hogany paneling. The frames alone were
more expen-sive than the framed lithographs she had been used to in her own home as a child.
Cora's family had warned her against the marriage. They had been as opposed to her marrying to a
higher station in life as many families might have been against a girl marrying beneath herself. The
Brightons had a fierce pride and a stubborn insistence that a Brighton should earn his way and not marry
or inherit wealth. Fortunately, Aunt Cora had followed the dic-tates of her own heart and had ignored
them all.
The marriage had been happy. Alex and Cora Brucker behaved like newlyweds throughout the
years, right up until his death two years before. Money was never a problem. Neither was his business,
for he had inherited it when it was running smoothly and needed to spend only one or two days a week
attending to the larger details. Richard presented no source of conflict for his step-mother. Though not of
Cora's blood, he was always polite to her, obedient, free with his love. He remained their only child, and
the years passed un-marred.
Engaged in such thoughts, she came to the archway into the drawing room before she realized it.
Aunt Cora was placing a silver tray of sandwiches and chips upon a low cocktail table, engrossed in
making the decorative garnish as well-placed as possible. Behind her, on a deep green sofa, two
blonde-haired and blue-eyed children sat. Though one was a boy and one a girl, they were quite
obviously twins. They saw her in the doorway and stared at her. They did not smile or speak, but
watched her cautiously.
Like shy children, she told herself.
Yet she couldn't stop wondering if their silence and their inspection of her were more than that.
But what?
Neither Freya nor Frank looked like a child who was supposedly under the sinister influence of some
mysterious family curse—nor like a child with deep psychological problems. They were healthy, tending
toward chubbiness, with eyes that were quick and alert and almost too blue to be real. She smiled at
them to show her own desire to make friends.
Neither child returned her smile.
In that instant, Cora caught sight of her and stood abruptly erect, startled. She was a lovely woman
who looked a decade younger than her fifty-one years. Her dark hair was tinted with gray that she chose
not to conceal with some artificial rinse. There were no wrin-kles in her face, no weariness of age in her
eyes. She took three quick steps from the table and embraced her niece.
For the first time in months, Jenny felt as if she were safe. Here were arms to encircle her and
someone to love and be loved by. Since Grandmother Brighton's death, the world had seemed more and
more in-hospitable as time went by. She had the silly, impossi-ble wish never to have to leave the
Brucker Estate again.
Richard joined them when he had changed to dry clothes, and they had a delightful mid-afternoon tea
with cucumber and cream cheese sandwiches, wedges of cheese, crackers and potato chips. Frank and
Freya, the twins, seemed to come out of their cocoons somewhat, offered a few words of response to
ques-tions she asked them. They even smiled once or twice. She decided that their original coolness was
more the result of their training in manners and behavior than it was any conscious effort to make her feel
ill at ease.
At last, shortly after four o'clock, Cora said, “But we're being very rude to you, dear. You've had a
long bus ride. You'll want a bath and a few hours of rest before supper. Harold serves us at seven-thirty
in the small family room just a few steps further down the corridor.” She turned to Richard. “Have you
put her bags upstairs?”
“In the blue room, Cora,” he said, finishing his tea.
“Come along then, Jenny,” Cora said. “I'll show you where you'll be spending these summer nights.”
As they walked up the long, central staircase from the entrance foyer, Jenny began to notice, for the
first time, the barely checked case of bad nerves in her aunt. Cora played with her long, dark hair as she
walked, winding strands of it in her fingers, releasing those strands, winding others. She spoke too
quickly, with a nervous, forced gaiety that could no longer be attributed to her seeing her niece for the
first time since Grandmother Brighton's funeral.
Too, for the first time since she had entered the house, Jenny was aware of the storm again. It banged
on the slate roof. It pattered rain against the windows. Flickers of lightning played through the glass and
danced on the dark steps for brief, unpleasant mo-ments.
“We'll do some riding this summer,” Cora said as they topped the stairs and left them for the second
floor corridor. “Do you like horses?”
“I've ridden them once or twice,” Jenny said. “But you'll make me look like a city slicker in the
saddle.”
“Richard is marvelous with horses,” Cora said. “He can teach you what you don't know. He handles
the family business, but it leaves him a great deal of spare time.”
At the end of the corridor, Cora opened a heavy, dark-stained pecan door which had been
hand-carved with the forms of dragons and elves. It might once have been destined to be a child's room.
It was large, airy, with two windows curtained with umber velvet. The bed was large, spread over with a
white satin quilt. There were two dressers, a full-length mirror, a night-stand and two bookcases half
filled with various kinds of books, from classic to modern fiction.
摘要：

DeanKoontz(DeannaDwyer)–Demonchild[Version2.0byBuddyDk–August22003][Completelynewscan]COLDWELCOME“Whatexactlywasthecurse?”askedJenny.Herhandsweresocoldthattheylookedlikewhiteporcelain.'Herauntspokeslowly.“SarahpledgedthateverygenerationoftheBruckerfamilywouldcontainachildhaunted—achildpossessed.This...

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