Twilight.Eyes

VIP免费

2024-11-29 0 0 665.01KB 282 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Twilight Eyes [011 5.0]

By Dean R. Koontz

Synopsis:

There really are goblins in the world, hideous, loathsome creatures

bent on the slow, painful destruction of mankind.

THEY'RE OUT THERE Waiting. Watching. Unseen by normal eyes, but all

too visible to Slim MacKenzie, a young man blessed-or cursed-by

TwilightEyes...

THEY'RE OUT THERE Lurking in the darkest shadows of an eerie, moonlit

carnival. Feeding their twisted needs with human suffering. And

fiendishly plotting the downfall of the human race...

THEY'RE OUT THERE But don't scream.

They'll hear you...

Berkley Books by Dean Koontz THE BAD PLACE

COLD FIRE

DARKFALL

THE FACE OF FEAR

THE HOUSE OF THUNDER

LIGHTNING

THE MASK

MIDNIGHT

NIGHT CHILLS

PHANTOMS

THE SERVANTS OF TWILIGHT

SHATTERED

STRANGERS

TWILIGHT EYES

THE VISION

THE VOICE OF THE NIGHT

WATCHERS

WHISPERS

BERKLEY BOOKS, NEW YORK

If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that

this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and

destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher

has received any payment for this "stripped book."

A slightly different version of Part One of TWILIGHT EYES was published

in a special illustrated hardcover edition for collectors by The Land

of Enchantment in November 1985. This is the first publication of the

complete story.

TWILIGHT EYES

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author PRINTING

HISTORY Berkley edition / September 1987

Jerry Bauer.

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or

any other means, without permission.

For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison

Avenue, New York, NY 10016.

ISBN: 0-425-10065-0

This book is dedicated to Tim and Serena Powers and Jim and Viki

Blaylock because they are fellow toilers in the vineyards and because

it seems fining that such a strange story should be dedicated to

strange peopk.

A BERKLEY BOOK @ TM 757,375

Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, 200

Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016.

The name "BERKLEY" and the "B" logo are trademarks belonging to Berkley

Publishing Corporation.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

20 19 18 17 16 15

I had thought some of nature's journeymen had made men and not made

them well, for they imitated humanity so abominably.

-Shakespeare Hope is the pillar that holds up the world.

Hope is the dream of a waking man.

-Pliny the Elder I am on the side of the unregenerate to affirm the

worth of life as an end in itself.

-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

PART ONE TWILIGHT EYES . . . the still sad music of humanity ...

-William Wordsworth

Humanity ain't always what's pretty. Some of the worst killers are

pretty. Humanity ain't always what sounds nice and falls smooth on the

ear, 'cause any pitchman can charm a snake, but some pitchmen ain't too

humane. A person shows humanity when he's there you need him, when be

takes you in, when he has a genuine kind word, when he makes you feel

not alone, when he makes your fight his fight. That's what humanity

is, if you want to know. And-if we had a little more of it in this

world, maybe we could get ourselves out of the handbasket we're in ...

or at least stop carrying that handbasket straight to Hell, the way we

have been for so long.

-an anonymous carnival pitchman

The Carnival

That was the year they murdered our president in Dallas. It was the

end of innocence, the end of a certain way of thinking and being, and

some were despondent and said it was the death of hope, as well. But

though falling autumn leaves may reveal skeletal branches, spring

reclothes the wood; a beloved grandmother dies, but as compensation for

the loss, her grandchild enters the world strong and curious; when one

day ends, the next begins, for in this infinite universe there is no

final conclusion to anything, definitely not to hope. From the ashes

of the old age, another age is born, and birth is hope. The year that

followed the assassination would bring us the Beatles, new directions

in modern art that would alter the way we viewed our environment, and

the beginning of a refreshing distrust of government. If it also

contained the germinating seeds of war, this should only serve to teach

us that-like hope-terror and pain and despair are constant companions

in this life, a lesson that is never without value.

I came to the carnival in the sixth month of my seventeenth year, in

the darkest hours of the night, on a Thursday in August, more than

three months before that death in Dallas.

During the following week, what happened to me would change my life as

profoundly as assassination could transform the future of a nation,

though upon my anval the shuttered

and deserted midway seemed an unlikely place for destiny to be waiting.

At four o'clock in the morning, the county fairgrounds had been closed

for almost four hours. The carnies had shut down the Ferris wheel,

Dive Bomber, Tilt-a-Whirl, and other rides.

"They had closed up their hanky-panks, grab-joints, pitch-anddunks,

pokerino parlors, had turned off the lights and killed the music and

folded up the gaudy glamour. With the departure of the marks, the

carnies had gone to their travel trailers, which were parked in a large

meadow south of the midway.

Now the tattooed man, the midgets, dwarves, hustlers, the women from

the girly shows, the pitchmen, the bottle-pitch and ring-toss

operators, the man who made cotton candy for a living, the woman who

dipped apples in caramel sauce, the bearded lady, the three-eyed man,

and all the others were asleep or fighting insomnia or making love as

if they were ordinary citizens-which, in this world, they were.

A three-quarter moon, sliding down one side of the sky, was still high

enough to shed a pale wintry glow that seemed anachronistic in the hot,

humid, graveyard hours of an August night in Pennsylvania. As I

strolled through the lot, getting a feel for the place, I noticed how

strangely white my own hands looked in that frosty luminescence, like

the hands of a dead man or ghost. That was when I first perceived the

lurking presence of Death among the rides and hanky-panks, and sensed

dimly that the carnival would be the site of murder and much blood.

Overhead, lines of plastic pennants hung limp in the muggy air; they

were bright triangles when touched by sunshine or splashed in the

dazzling glow of ten thousand carnival lights but were bled of color

now, so they seemed like scores of sleeping bats suspended above the

sawdust-carpeted concourse.

As I passed by the silent carousel a frozen stampede was halted in

mid-gallop-black stallions, white mares, pintos, palominos,

mustangs-charging forward without proceeding, as if the river of time

had parted around them. Like a thin spray of metallic paint, traces of

moonlight adhered to the brass poles that transfixed the horses, but in

that eerie radiance the brass was silver and cold.

I had jumped the high fence that ringed the county fairgrounds, for the

gates had been closed when I arrived. Now I felt vaguely guilty, a

thief in search of booty, which was odd, for I was no thief and

harbored no criminal intentions toward anyone in the carnival.

I was a murderer, wanted by the police in Oregon, but I felt no guilt

about the blood I had spilled out there at the other end of the

continent. I killed my Uncle Denton with an ax because I wasn't strong

enough to finish him with my bare hands. Neither remorse nor guilt

pursued me, for Uncle Denton had been one of them.

The police, however, did pursue me, and I couldn't be sure that even

three thousand miles of flight had won me any safety. I no longer used

my real name, Carl Stanfeuss. At first I had called myself Dan Jones,

then Joe Dann, then Harry Murphy. Now I was Slim MacKenzie, and I

figured I would stay Slim for a while; I liked the sound of it. Slim

MacKenzie. It was the kind of name a guy might have if he were John

Wayne's best buddy in one of the Duke's Westerns. I had let my hair

grow longer, though it was still brown.

There was not much else I could do to alter my appearance, other than

stay free long enough for time to make a different man of me.

What I hoped to get from the carnival was sanctuary, anonymity, a place

to sleep, three square meals a day, and pocket money, all of which I

intended to earn. In spite of being a murderer, I was the least

dangerous desperado ever to ride out of the West.

Nevertheless, I felt like a thief that first night, and I expected

someone to raise an alarm, to come running at me through the maze of

rides, hamburger stands, and cotton candy kiosks. A couple of security

guards must have been cruising the fairgrounds, but when I made my

entrance they were nowhere in sight. Listening for the sound of their

car, I continued my nocturnal tour of the famous midway of the Sombra

Brothers Carnival, the second largest road show in the country.

At last I stopped by the giant Ferris wheel, to which darkness brought

a chilling transformation: In the glow of the moon, at this dead hour,

it did not resemble a machine, especially not a machine designed for

amusement, but gave the impression of being the skeleton of a huge

prehistoric beast. The girders and beams and cross-supports might not

have been wood and metal but bony accretions of calcium and other

minerals, the last remains of a decomposed leviathan washed up on the

lonely beach of an ancient sea.

Standing in the complex pattern of moon-shadows cast by that imagined

paleolithic fossil, I peered up at the black two-seat baskets all

hanging motionless, and I knew this wheel would play a role in a

pivotal event in my life. I did not know how or why or when, but I

knew without doubt that something momentous and terrible would happen

here. I knew.

Reliable premonitions are part of my gift. Not the most important

part. Not the most useful, startling, or frightening part, either. I

possess other special talents that I use but do not understand. They

are talents that have shaped my life but which I cannot control or

employ at will. I have Twilight Eyes.

Looking up at the Ferris wheel, I did not actually see details of the

dreadful event that lay in the future, but I was drenched in a wave of

morbid sensations, flooding impressions of terror, pain, and death. I

swayed and nearly fell to my knees. I could not breathe, and my heart

hammered wildly, and my testicles drew tight, and for an instant I felt

as if lightning had struck me.

Then the squall passed, and the last of the psychic energies sluiced

through me, and there remained nothing but the low, barely detectable

vibrations that could have been sensed only by someone like me, ominous

vibrations emanating from the wheel, as if it were radiating scattered

particles of the death-energy stored within it, much the way a storm

sky charges the day with uneasy expectation even before the first bolt

of lightning or clap of thunder.

I could breathe again. My heart slowed. The hot, thick August night

had raised a greasy film of perspiration on my face long before I had

entered the midway, but now sweat poured from me. I pulled up the

T-shirt I was wearing and blotted my face.

Partly in the hope that I could somehow clarify those foggy,

clairvoyant perceptions of danger and see exactly what violence lay

ahead, and partly because I was determined not to be intimidated by the

aura of evil that clung to the big machine, I shrugged off the backpack

I had been carrying, unrolled my sleeping bag, and made ready to pass

the last hours of the night right there in the faint patchwork of

purple-black shadows and ash-gray moonlight, with the wheel looming

over me. The air was so heavy and warm that I used the sleeping bag

only as a mattress. I lay on my back, staring up at the towering

amusement ride, then at the stars visible beyond the curve of it and

between its beams. Although I tried, I sensed nothing more of the

future, but I did see a humbling plenitude of stars and thought about

the immensity of space and felt lonelier than ever.

Less than a quarter of an hour passed before I grew drowsy, and just as

my eyes were about to flutter shut, I heard movement on the abandoned

midway, not far from me. It was a crisp, crackling sound, as of

someone stepping on discarded candy wrappers. I raised up and

listened. The crackling stopped, but it was followed by the thump of

heavy footsteps on hard-packed earth.

A moment later a gloom-shrouded figure moved out from beside a tent

that housed one of the kootch shows, hurried across the concourse,

slipped into the darkness on the far side of the Ferris wheel, no more

than twenty feet away from me, reappeared in the moonlight by the

Caterpillar. It was a man, quite big-unless the shadows, like

voluminous cloaks, gave him a deceptively large appearance. He hurried

away, unaware of me. I had only a glimpse of him, saw nothing of his

face, but I shot to my feet, shaking, suddenly cold in spite of the

August heat, for what little I had seen of him was enough to generate a

current of fear that sizzled the length of my spine.

It was one of them.

I withdrew the knife hidden in my boot. As I turned the blade in my

hand, lambent moonbeams licked along the cutting edge.

I hesitated. I told myself to pack up and leave, get out, seek shelter

elsewhere.

Oh, but I was weary of running and needed a place to call home. Weary

and disoriented by too many highways, too many towns, too many

strangers, too-many changes. During the past few months I had worked

in half a dozen gillys and ragbags, the bottom of the carnival

business, and I had heard how much better the life was when you were

hooked up with an organization like E. James Strates, the Vivona

Brothers, Royal American, or the Sombra Brothers Shows. And now that I

had walked this midway in the dark, soaking up both physical and

psychic impressions, I wanted to stay. In spite of the bad aura around

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

TwilightEyes[0115.0]ByDeanR.KoontzSynopsis:Therereallyaregoblinsintheworld,hideous,loathsomecreaturesbentontheslow,painfuldestructionofmankind.THEY'REOUTTHEREWaiting.Watching.Unseenbynormaleyes,butalltoovisibletoSlimMacKenzie,ayoungmanblessed-orcursed-byTwilightEyes...THEY'REOUTTHERELurkinginthedark...

展开>> 收起<<

Twilight.Eyes.pdf

共282页,预览5页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Twilight.Eyes

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: