Dean Koontz - Tick Tock

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Dean Koontz - TICKTOCK
Hope you enjoy this book
START
Dean Koontz
TICKTOCK
To see what we have never seen,
to be what we have never been,
to shed the chrysalis and fly,
depart the earth, kiss the sky,
to be reborn, be someone new:
is this a dream or is it true?
Can our future be cleanly shorn
from a life to which we’re born?
Is each of us a creature free -
or trapped at birth by destiny?
Pity those who believe the latter.
Without freedom, nothing matters.
-The Book of Counted Sorrows
In the real world
as in dreams
nothing is quite
what it seems.
-The Book of Counted Sorrows
ONE
Out of a cloudless sky on a windless November day came a sudden shadow that swooped
across the bright aqua Corvette. Tommy Phan was standing beside the car, in pleasantly warm
autumn sunshine, holding out his hand to accept the keys from Jim Shine, the salesman, when
the fleeting shade touched him. He heard a brief thrumming like frantic wings. Glancing up, he
expected to glimpse a sea gull, but not a single bird was in sight.
Unaccountably, the shadow had chilled him as though a cold wind had come with it, but the air
was utterly still. He shivered, felt a blade of ice touch his palm, and jerked his hand back, even as
he realized, too late, that it wasn’t ice but merely the keys to the Corvette. He looked down in time
to see them hit the pavement.
He said, ‘Sorry,’ and started to bend over.
Jim Shine said, ‘No, no. I’ll get ‘em.’
Perplexed, frowning, Tommy raised his gaze to the sky again. Unblemished blue. Nothing in
flight.
The nearest trees, along the nearby street, were phoenix palms with huge crowns of fronds,
offering no branches on which a bird could alight. No birds were perched on the roof of the car
dealership either.
‘Pretty exciting,’ Shine said.
Tommy looked at him, slightly disoriented. ‘Huh?’
Shine was holding out the keys again. He resembled a
pudgy choirboy with guileless blue eyes. Now, when he winked, his face squinched into a leer
that was meant to be comic but that seemed disconcertingly like a glimpse of genuine and
usually well-hidden decadence. ‘Getting that first ‘vette is almost as good as getting your first
piece of ass.’
Tommy was trembling and still inexplicably cold. He accepted the keys. They no longer felt like
ice.
The aqua Corvette waited, as sleek and cool as a high mountain spring slipping downhill over
polished stones. Overall length: one hundred seventy-eight and a half inches. Wheelbase: ninety-
six-point-two inches. Seventy-point-seven inches in width at the dogleg, forty-six-point-three
inches high, with a minimum ground clearance of four-point-two inches.
Tommy knew the technical specifications of this car better than any preacher knew the details of
any Bible story. He was a Vietnamese-American, and America was his religion; the highway was
his church, and the Corvette was about to become the sacred vessel by which he partook of
communion.
Although he was no prude, Tommy was mildly offended when Shine compared the transcendent
experience of Corvette ownership to sex. For the moment, at least, the Corvette was better than
any bedroom games, more exciting, purer, the very embodiment of speed and grace and
freedom.
Tommy shook Jim Shine’s soft, slightly moist hand and slid into the driver’s seat. Thirty-six and a
half inches of headroom. Forty-two inches of leg room.
His heart was pounding. He was no longer chilled. In fact, he felt flushed.
He had already plugged his cellular phone into the cigarette lighter. The Corvette was his.
Crouching at the open window, grinning, Shine said, ‘You’re not just a mere mortal anymore.’
Tommy started the engine. A ninety-degree V8. Cast-iron block. Aluminium heads with hydraulic
lifters.
Jim Shine raised his voice. ‘No longer like other men. Now you’re a god.’
Tommy knew that Shine spoke with a good-humoured mockery of the cult of the automobile - yet
he half believed that it was true. Behind the wheel of the Corvette, with this childhood dream
fulfilled, he seemed to be full of the power of the car, exalted.
With the Corvette still in park, he eased his foot down on the accelerator, and the engine
responded with a deep-throated growl. Five-point-seven litres of displacement with a ten-and-a-
half-to-one compression ratio. Three hundred horsepower.
Rising from a crouch, stepping back, Shine said, ‘Have fun.’
‘Thanks, Jim.’
Tommy Phan drove away from the Chevrolet dealership, into a California afternoon so blue and
high and deep with promise that it was possible to believe he would live forever. With no purpose
except to enjoy the Corvette, he went west to Newport Beach and then south on the fabled
Pacific Coast Highway, past the enormous harbour full of yachts, through Corona Del Mar, along
the newly developed hills called Newport Coast, with beaches and gently breaking surf and the
sun-dappled ocean to his right, listening to an oldies radio station that rocked with the Beach
Boys, the Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Roy Orbison.
At a stoplight in Laguna Beach, he pulled beside a classic Corvette: a silver 1963 Sting Ray with
boat-tail rear end and split rear window. The driver, an aging surfer type with blond hair and a
walrus moustache, looked at the new aqua ‘vette and then at Tommy. Tommy made a circle of
his thumb and forefinger, letting the stranger know that the Sting Ray was a fine machine,
and the guy replied with a smile and a thumbs-up sign, which made Tommy feel like part of a
secret club.
As the end of the century approached, some people said that the American dream was almost
extinguished and that the California dream was ashes. Nevertheless, for Tommy Phan on this
wonderful autumn afternoon, the promise of his country and the promise of the coast were
burning bright.
The sudden swooping shadow and the inexplicable chill were all but forgotten.
He drove through Laguna Beach and Dana Point to San Clemente, where at last he turned and,
as twilight fell, headed north again. Cruising aimlessly. He was getting a feel for the way the
Corvette handled. Weighing three thousand two hundred and ninety-eight pounds, it hugged the
pavement, low and solid, providing sports car intimacy with the road and incomparable
responsiveness. He wove through a number of tree-lined residential streets merely to confirm
that the Corvette’s curb-to-curb turning diameter was forty feet, as promised.
Entering Dana Point from the south this time, he switched off the radio, picked up his cellular
phone, and called his mother in Huntington Beach. She answered on the second ring, speaking
Vietnamese, although she had immigrated to the United States twenty-two years ago, shortly
before the fall of Saigon, when Tommy had been only eight years old. He loved her, but
sometimes she made him crazy.
‘Hi, Mom.’
‘Tuong?’ she said.
‘Tommy,’ he reminded her, for he had not used his Vietnamese name for many years. Phan Tran
Tuong had long ago become Tommy Phan. He meant no disrespect
for his family, but he was far more American now than Vietnamese.
His mother issued a long-suffering sigh because she would have to use English. A year after they
arrived from Vietnam, Tommy had insisted that he would speak only English; even as a little kid,
he had been determined to pass eventually for a native-born American.
‘You sound funny,’ she said with a heavy accent.
‘It’s the cellular phone.’
‘Whose phone?’
‘The car phone.’
‘Why you need car phone, Tuong?’
‘Tommy. They’re really handy, couldn’t get along without one. Listen, Mom, guess what-’
‘Car phones for big shots.’
‘Not anymore. Everybody’s got one.’
‘I don’t. Phone and drive too dangerous.’ Tommy sighed - and was slightly rattled by the
realization that his sigh sounded exactly like his mother’s. ‘I’ve never had an accident, Mom.’
‘You will,’ she said firmly.
Even with one hand, he was able to handle the Corvette with ease on the long straightaways and
wide sweeps of the Coast Highway. Rack and pinion steering with power assist. Rear-wheel
drive. Four-speed automatic transmission with torque converter. He was gliding.
His mother changed the subject: ‘Tuong, haven’t seen you in weeks.’
‘We spent Sunday together, Mom. This is only Thursday.’
They had gone to church together on Sunday. His father was born a Roman Catholic, and his
mother converted before marriage, back in Vietnam, but she also kept a small Buddhist shrine in
one corner of their living room. There was usually fresh fruit on the red altar, and sticks of
incense bristled from ceramic holders.
‘You come to dinner?’ she asked.
‘Tonight? Gee, no, I can’t. See, I just-’
‘We have com tay cam.’
‘-just bought-’
‘You remember what is com tay cam - or maybe forget all about your mother’s cooking?’
‘Of course, I know what it is, Mom. Chicken and rice in a clay pot. It’s delicious.’
‘Also having shrimp and watercress soup. You remember shrimp and watercress soup?’
‘I remember, Mom.’
Night was creeping over the coast. Above the rising land to the east, the heavens were black and
stippled with stars. To the west, the ocean was inky near the shore, striped with the silvery foam
of incoming breakers, but indigo toward the horizon, where a final blade of bloody sunlight still
cleaved the sea from the sky.
Cruising through the falling darkness, Tommy did feel a little bit like a god, as Jim Shine had
promised. But he was unable to enjoy it because, at the same time, he felt too much like a
thoughtless and ungrateful son.
His mother said, ‘Also having stir fry celery, carrots, cabbage, some peanuts - very good. My
Nuoc Mam sauce.’
‘You make the best Nuoc Mam in the world, and the best com tay cam, but I-’
‘Maybe you got wok there in car with phone, you can drive and cook at same time?’
In desperation he blurted, ‘Mom, I bought a new Corvette!’
‘You bought phone and Corvette?’
‘No, I’ve had the phone for years. The-’
‘What’s this Corvette?’
‘You know, Mom. A car. A sports car.’
‘You bought sports car?’
摘要：

DeanKoontz-TICKTOCKHopeyouenjoythisbookSTARTDeanKoontzTICKTOCKToseewhatwehaveneverseen,tobewhatwehaveneverbeen,toshedthechrysalisandfly,departtheearth,kissthesky,tobereborn,besomeonenew:isthisadreamorisittrue?Canourfuturebecleanlyshornfromalifetowhichwe’reborn?Iseachofusacreaturefree-ortrappedatbirt...

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