Dean R. Koontz - Moonlight Bay 2 - Seize The Night

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Seize The Night [067-011-066-5.0]

By: Dean R. Koontz

Synopsis:

Chris Snow, the light-phobic, oddball hero of Dean Koontz's Fear

Nothing, is once again caught in the middle of something ugly.

The children (and pets) of Moonlight Bay, California, are disappearing.

The first to go is Jimmy Wing, the son of Snow's former girlfriend,

Lilly. Then Snow's own hyper-intelligent dog goes missing. Snow decides

that he will find them, but what he uncovers is more than just a simple

kidnapping, before he can turn back, he's up against an age-old

vendetta, an active time machine, and a genetic experiment gone awry.

Seize the Night offers up the same eclectic mix of characters that

appeared in Fear Nothing, board head Bobby, disc jockey Sasha, Snow, and

all of their friends band together to find the missing kids and figure

out why the people of Moonlight Bay are morphing into demonic versions

of their former selves. They outsmart corrupt cops, outrun genetically

enhanced monkeys, and outlive a time warp with a vengeance--all between

nightfall and sunrise, the only time that Snow can be outside.

Though the premise is a little bit hard to believe, and the surf lingo

occasionally irritating, Seize the Night is ultimately fun to read.

Koontz successfully draws you in and keeps you entertained through an

unexpected climax and an enlightening resolution.

ALSO BY DEAN KOONTZ Fear Nothing Mr. Murder Dragon Tears Hideaway Cold

Fire The Bad Place Midnight Lightning Watchers Strangers Twilight Eyes

Dark fall Phantoms Whispers The Mask The Vision The Face of Fear Night

Chills Shattered The Voice of the Night The Servants of Twilight The

House of Thunder The Key to Midnight The Eyes of Darkness Shadowfieres

Winter Moon The Door to December Dark Rivers of the Heart Icebound

Strange Highways Intensity Sole Survivor Ticktock The Fun house Demon

Seed DEON SOONTI BANTAM BOOKS new york toronto london sydney auckland

This second Christopher Snow adventure is dedicated to Richard

Aprahamian and to Richard Heller, who bring honor to the law and who so

far have kept me out of jail!

This is a work of fiction. The characters, names, incidents, places, and

plot are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual persons, companies, or events is purely

coincidental.

of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any

means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or

by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in

writing from the publisher. For information address, Bantam Books.

ISBN 0-553-10665-1

Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada Bantam Books

are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its

trademark, consisting of the words "Bantam Books" and the portrayal of a

rooster, is Registered in U. S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other

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countries. Marca registration. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York,

New York 10036.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Friendship is precious, not only

in the shade, but in the sunshine of life. And thanks to a benevolent

arrangement of things, the greater part of life is sunshine.

Thomas Jefferson First My name is Christopher Snow. The following

account is an installment in my personal journal. If you are reading it,

I am probably dead.

If I am not dead, then because of the reportage herein, I am now or soon

will be one of the most famous people on the planet. If no one ever

reads this, it will be because the world as we know it has ceased to

exist and human civilization is gone forever. I am no more vain than the

average person, and instead of universal recognition, I prefer the peace

of anonymity. Nevertheless, if the choice is between Armageddon and

fame, I'd prefer to be famous.

Elsewhere, night falls, but in Moonlight Bay it steals upon us with

barely a whisper, like a gentle dark-sapphire surf licking a beach. At

dawn, when the night retreats across the Pacific toward distant Asia, it

is reluctant to go, leaving deep black pools in alleyways, under parked

cars, in culverts, and beneath the leafy canopies of ancient oaks.

According to Tibetan folklore, a secret sanctuary in the sacred

Himalayas is the home of all wind, from which every breeze and raging

storm throughout the world is born. If the night, too, has a special

home, our town is no doubt the place.

On the eleventh of April, as the night passed through Moonlight Bay on

its way westward, it took with it a five-year-old boy named Jimmy Wing.

Near midnight, I was on my bicycle, cruising the residential streets in

the lower hills not far from Ashdon College, where my murdered parents

had once been professors. Earlier, I had been to the beach, but although

there was no wind, the surf was mushy, the sloppy waves didn't make it

worthwhile to suit up and float a board. Orson, a black Labrador mix,

trotted at my side.

Fur face and I were not looking for adventure, merely getting some fresh

air and satisfying our mutual need to be on the move. A restlessness of

the soul plagues both of us more nights than not.

Anyway, only a fool or a madman goes looking for adventure in

picturesque Moonlight Bay, which is simultaneously one of the quietest

and most dangerous communities on the planet. Here, if you stand in one

place long enough, a lifetime's worth of adventure will find you.

Lilly Wing lives on a street shaded and scented by stone pines.

In the absence of lampposts, the trunks and twisted branches were as

black as char, except where moonlight pierced the feathery boughs and

silvered the rough bark.

I became aware of her when the beam of a flashlight swept back and forth

between the pine trunks. A quick pendulum of light arced across the

pavement ahead of me, and tree shadows jumped. She called her son's

name, trying to shout but defeated by breathlessness and by a quiver of

panic that transformed Jimmy into a six-syllable word.

Because no traffic was in sight ahead of or behind us, Orson and I were

traveling the center of the pavement, kings of the road. We swung to the

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curb.

As Lilly hurried between two pines and into the street, I said, "What's

wrong, Badger? " For twelve years, since we were sixteen, "Badger" has

been my affectionate nickname for her. In those days, her name was Lilly

Travis, and we were in love and believed that a future together was our

destiny.

Among our long list of shared enthusiasms and passions was a special

fondness for Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, in which the

wise and courageous Badger was the stalwart defender of all the good

animals in the Wild Wood. "Any friend of mine walks where he likes in

this country, " Badger had promised Mole, "or I'll know the reason why!

" Likewise, those who shunned me because of my rare disability, those

who called me vampire because of my inherited lack of tolerance for more

than the dimmest light, those teenage psychopaths who plotted to torture

me with fists and flashlights, those who spoke maliciously of me behind

my back, as if I'd chosen to be born with xeroderma pigmentosumall had

found themselves answering to Lilly, whose face flushed and whose heart

raced with righteous anger at any exhibition of intolerance. As a young

boy, out of urgent necessity, I learned to fight, and by the time I met

Lilly, I was confident of my ability to defend myself, nevertheless, she

had insisted on coming to my aid as fiercely as the noble Badger ever

fought with claw and cudgel for his friend Mole.

Although slender, she is mighty. Only five feet four, she appears to

tower over any adversary. She is as formidable, fearless, and fierce as

she is graceful and good-hearted.

This night, however, her usual grace had deserted her, and fright had

tortured her bones into unnatural angles. When I spoke, she twitched

around to face me, and in her jeans and untucked flannel shirt, she

seemed to be a bristling scarecrow now magically animated, confused and

terrified to find itself suddenly alive, jerking at its supporting

cross.

The beam of her flashlight bathe my face, but she considerately directed

it toward the ground the instant she realized who I was.

"Chris.

Oh, God."

"What's wrong? " I asked again as I got off my bike.

"Jimmy's gone."

"Run away? "

"No." She turned from me and hurried toward the house.

"This way, here, look." Lilly's property is ringed by a white picket

fence that she herself built. The entrance is flanked not by gate posts

but by matched bougainvillea that she has pruned into trees and trained

into a canopy.

Her modest Cape Cod bungalow lies at the end of an intricately patterned

brick walkway that she designed and laid after teaching herself masonry

from books.

The front door stood open. Enticing rooms of deadly brightness lay

beyond.

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Instead of taking me and Orson inside, Lilly quickly led us off the

bricks and across the lawn. In the still night, as I pushed my bike

through the closely cropped grass, the tick of wheel bearings was the

loudest sound. We went to the north side of the house.

A bedroom window had been raised. Inside, a single lamp glowed, and the

walls were striped with amber light and faint honey-brown shadows from

the folded cloth of the pleated shade. To the left of the bed, Star Wars

action figures stood on a set of bookshelves. As the cool night air

sucked warmth from the house, one panel of the curtains was drawn across

the sill, pale and fluttering like a troubled spirit reluctant to leave

this world for the next.

"I thought the window was locked, but it mustn't have been, " Lilly said

frantically. "Someone opened it, some sonofabitch, and he took Jimmy

away."

"Maybe it's not that bad."

"Some sick bastard, " she insisted.

The flashlight jiggled, and Lilly struggled to still her trembling hand

as she directed the beam at the planting bed alongside the house.

"I don't have any money, " she said.

"Money? "

"To pay ransom. I'm not rich. So no one would take Jimmy for ransom.

It's worse than that." False Solomon's seal, laden with feathery sprays

of white flowers that glittered like ice, had been trampled by the

intruder. Footprints were impressed in trodden leaves and soft damp

soil. They were not the prints of a runaway child but those of an adult

in athletic shoes with bold tread, and judging by the depth of the

impressions, the kidnapper was a large person, most likely male.

I saw that Lilly was barefoot.

"I couldn't sleep, I was watching TV, some stupid show on the TV, " she

said with a note of self-flagellation, as if she should have anticipated

this abduction and been at Jimmy's bedside, ever vigilant.

Orson pushed between us to sniff the imprinted earth.

"I didn't hear anything, " Lilly said. "Jimmy never cried out, but I got

this feeling ..." Her usual beauty, as clear and deep as a reflection

of eternity, was now shattered by terror, crazed by sharp lines of an

anguish that was close to grief. She was held together only by desperate

hope.

Even in the dim backwash of the flashlight, I could hardly bear the

sight of her in such pain.

"It'll be all right, " I said, ashamed of this facile lie.

"I called the police, " she said. "They should be here any second.

Where are they? " Personal experience had taught me to distrust the

authorities in Moonlight Bay. They are corrupt. And the corruption is

not merely moral, not simply a matter of bribe-taking and a taste for

power, it has deeper and more disturbing origins.

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No siren shrieked in the distance, and I didn't expect to hear one. In

our special town, the police answer calls with utmost discretion,

without even the quiet fanfare of flashing emergency lights, because as

often as not, their purpose is to conceal a crime and silence the

complainant rather than to bring the perpetrator to justice.

"He's only five, only five, " Lilly said miserably. "Chris, what if this

is that guy on the news? "

"The news? "

"The serial killer. The one who ... burns kids."

"That's not around here."

"All over the country. Every few months. Groups of little kids burned

alive. Why not here? "

"Because it isn't, " I said. "It's something else." She swung away from

the window and raked the yard with the flashlight beam, as though she

hoped to discover her tousle-haired, pajama-clad son among the fallen

leaves and the curled strips of papery bark that littered the grass

under a row of tall eucalyptus trees.

Catching a troubling scent, Orson issued a low growl and backed away

from the planting bed. He peered up at the windowsill, sniffed the air,

put his nose to the ground again, and headed tentatively toward the rear

of the house.

"He's got something, " I said.

Lilly turned. "Got what? "

"A trail." When he reached the backyard, Orson broke into a trot.

"Badger, " I said, "don't tell them Orson and I were here." A weight of

fear pressed her voice thinner than a whisper, "Don't tell who? "

"The police."

"Why? "

"I'll be back. I'll explain. I swear I'll find Jimmy. I swear I will." I

could keep the first two promises.

The third, however, was something less meaningful than wishful thinking

and was intended only to provide a little hope with which she might keep

herself glued together.

In fact, as I hurried after my strange dog, pushing the bicycle at my

side, I already believed that Jimmy Wing was lost forever. The most I

expected to find at the end of the trail was the boy's dead body and,

with luck, the man who had murdered him.

When I reached the rear of Lilly's house, I couldn't see Orson.

He was so coaly black that even the light of a full moon was not

sufficient to reveal him.

From off to the right came a soft woof then another, and I followed his

call.

At the end of the backyard was a freestanding garage that could be

entered by car only from the alley beyond. A brick walkway led alongside

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the garage to a wooden gate, where Orson stood on his hind legs, pawing

at the latch.

For a fact, this dog is radically smarter than ordinary mutts.

Sometimes I suspect that he is also considerably smarter than I am.

If I didn't have the advantage of hands, no doubt I would be the one

eating from a dish on the floor. He would have control of the most

comfortable easy chair and the remote control for the television.

Demonstrating my single claim to superiority, I disengaged the bolt

latch with a flourish and pushed open the creaking gate.

A series of garages, storage sheds, and backyard fences lay along this

flank of the alley. On the farther side, the cracked and runneled

blacktop gave way to a narrow dirt shoulder, which in turn led to a line

of massive eucalyptuses and a weedy verge that sloped into a canyon.

Lilly's house is on the edge of town, and no one lives in the canyon

behind her place. The wild grass and scattered scrub oaks on the

descending slopes provide homes for hawks, coyotes, rabbits, squirrels,

field mice, and snakes.

Following his formidable nose, Orson urgently investigated the weeds

along the edge of the canyon, padding north and then south, softly

whining and grumbling to himself.

I stood at the brink, between two trees, peering down into a darkness

that not even the fat moon could dispel. No flashlight moved in those

depths. If Jimmy had been carried into that gloom, the kidnapper must

have uncanny night vision.

With a yelp, Orson abruptly abandoned his search along the canyon rim

and returned to the center of the alleyway. He moved in a circle, as

though he might start chasing his tail, but his head was raised and he

was excitedly sniffing spoor.

To him, the air is a rich stew of scents. Every dog has a sense of smell

thousands of times more powerful than yours or mine.

The medicinal pungency of the eucalyptus trees was the only aroma that I

could detect. Drawn by another and more suspicious scent, as if he were

but a bit of iron pulled inexorably toward a powerful magnet, Orson

raced north along the alley.

Maybe Jimmy Wing was still alive.

It's my nature to believe in miracles. So why not believe in this one?

I climbed on my bike and pedaled after the dog. He was swift and

certain, and to match his pace, I really had to make the drive chain

hum.

In block after block, only a few widely spaced security lamps glowed at

the back of the residential properties that we passed. By habit I

steered away from those radiant pools, along the darker side of the

alleyway, even though I could have sailed through each patch of

lamplight in less than a second or two, without significant risk to my

health.

Xeroderma pigmentosumxp for those who aren't able to tie their tongues

in knots is an inherited genetic disorder that I share with an exclusive

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club of only one thousand other Americans. One of us per 250, 000

citizens. XP renders me highly vulnerable to skin and eye cancers caused

by exposure to any ultraviolet radiation. Sunshine.

Incandescent or fluorescent bulbs. The shining, idiot face of a

television screen.

If I dared to spend just half an hour in summer sun, I would burn

severely, though a single searing wouldn't kill me. The true horror of

XP, however, is that even minor exposure to ultraviolet radiation

shortens my life, because the effect is cumulative. Years of

imperceptible injuries accumulate until they manifest as visible lesions,

malignancies. Six hundred minutes of exposure, spread one by one over an

entire year, will have the same ultimate effect as ten continuous hours

on a beach in brightest July. The luminosity of a streetlamp is less

dangerous to me than the full ferocity of the sun, but it's not entirely

safe.

Nothing is.

You, with your properly functioning genes, are able routinely to repair

the injury to your skin and eyes that you unknowingly suffer every day.

Your body, unlike mine, continuously produces enzymes that strip out the

damaged segments of nucleotide strands in your cells, replacing them

with undamaged DNA.

I must exist in shadows, while you live under exquisitely blue skies,

and yet I don't hate you. I don't resent you for the freedom that you

take for granted although I do envy you.

I don't hate you because, after all, you are human, too, and therefore

have limitations of your own. Perhaps you are homely, slow-witted or too

smart for your own good, deaf or mute or blind, by nature given to

despair or to self-hatred, or perhaps you are unusually fearful of Death

himself. We all have burdens. On the other hand, if you are better

looking and smarter than I am, blessed with five sharp senses, even more

optimistic than I am, with plenty of self-esteem, and if you also share

my refusal to be humbled by the Reaper ... well, then I could almost

hate you if I didn't know that, like all of us in this imperfect world,

you also have a haunted heart and a mind troubled by grief, by loss, by

longing.

Rather than rage against XP, I regard it as a blessing. My passage

through life is unique.

For one thing, I have a singular familiarity with the night. I know the

world between dusk and dawn as no one else can know it, for I am a

brother to the owl and the bat and the badger. I am at home in the

darkness. This can be a greater advantage than you might think.

Of course, no number of advantages can compensate for the fact that

death before the age of consent is not uncommon for those with XP.

Survival far into adulthood isn't a reasonable expectation at least not

without progressive neurological disorders such as tremors of the head

and hands, hearing loss, slurred speech, even mental impairment.

Thus far I have tweaked Death's cold nose without retribution.

I've also been spared all the physical infirmities that my physicians

have long predicted.

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I am twenty-eight years old.

To say that I am living on borrowed time would be not merely a cliche

but also an understatement. My entire life has been a heavily mortgaged

enterprise.

But so is yours. Eventual foreclosure awaits all of us. More likely than

not, I'll receive my notice before you do, though yours, too, is in the

mail.

Nevertheless, until the postman comes, be happy. There is no other

rational response but happiness. Despair is a foolish squandering of

precious time.

Now, here, on this cool spring night, past the witching hour but with

dawn still far away, chasing my sherlock hound, believing in the miracle

of Jimmy Wing's survival, I cycled along empty alleys and deserted

avenues, through a park where Orson did not pause to sniff a single

tree, past the high school, onto lower streets. He led me eventually to

the Santa Rosita River, which bisects our town from the heights to the

bay.

In this part of California, where annual rainfall averages a mere

fourteen inches, rivers and streams are parched most of the year. The

recent rainy season had been no wetter than usual, and this riverbed was

entirely exposed, a broad expanse of powdery silt, pale and slightly

lustrous in the lunar light. It was as smooth as a bedsheet except for

scattered knots of dark driftwood like sleeping homeless men whose limbs

were twisted by nightmares.

In fact, though it was sixty to seventy feet wide, the Santa Rosita

looked less like a real river than like a man-made drainage channel or

canal. As part of an elaborate federal project to control the flash

floods that could swell suddenly out of the steep hills and narrow

canyons at the back door of Moonlight Bay, these riverbanks had been

raised and stabilized with wide concrete levees from one end of town to

the other.

Orson trotted off the street, across a barren strip of land, to the

levee.

Following him, I coasted between two signs, sets of which alternated

with each other for the entire length of the watercourse. The first

declared that public access to the river was restricted and that

anti-trespassing ordinances would be enforced. The second, directed at

those lawless citizens who were undeterred by the first sign, warned

that high water at a storm's peak could be so powerful and fast-moving

that it would overwhelm anyone who dared to venture into it.

In spite of all the warnings, in spite of the obvious turbulence of the

treacherous currents and the well-known tragic history of the Santa

Rosita, a thrill seeker with a homemade raft or a kayak or even just a

pair of water wings is swept to his death every few years. In a single

winter, not long ago, three drowned.

Human beings can always be relied upon to assert, with vigor, their

God-given right to be stupid.

Orson stood on the levee, burly head raised, gazing east toward the

Pacific Coast Highway and the serried hills beyond. He was stiff with

tension, and a thin whine escaped him.

This night, neither water nor anything else moved along the moonlit

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channel. Not enough of a breeze slipped off the Pacific even to stir a

dust ghost from the silt.

I checked the radiant dial of my wristwatch. Worried that every minute

might be Jimmy Wing's last if, indeed, he was still alive i nudged

Orson, "What is it? " He didn't acknowledge my question. Instead, he

pricked his ears, sniffed the becalmed night almost daintily, and seemed

to be transfixed by emanations of one kind or another from some quarry

farther up the arid river.

As usual, I was uncannily attuned to Orson's mood. Although I possessed

only an ordinary nose and mere human senses but, to be fair to myself, a

superior wardrobe and bank account i could almost detect those same

emanations.

Orson and I are closer than dog and man. I am not his master. I am his

friend, his brother.

When I said earlier that I am brother to the owl, to the bat, and to the

badger, I was speaking figuratively. When I say I'm the brother of this

dog, however, I mean to be taken more literally.

Studying the riverbed as it climbed and dwindled into the hills, I

asked, "Something spooking you? " Orson glanced up. In his ebony eyes

floated twin reflections of the moon, which at first I mistook for me,

but my face is neither that round nor that mysterious.

Nor that pale. I am not an albino. My skin is pigmented, and my

complexion somewhat dusky even though the sun has rarely touched me.

Orson snorted, and I didn't need to understand the language of dogs to

interpret his precise meaning. The pooch was telling me that he was

insulted by my suggestion that he could be so easily spooked.

Indeed, Orson is even more courageous than most of his kind.

During the more than two and a half years that I've known him, from

puppyhood to the present, I have seen him frightened of only one thing,

monkeys.

"Monkeys? " I asked.

He chuffed, which I interpreted as no.

Not monkeys this time.

Not yet.

Orson trotted to a wide concrete access ramp that descended along the

levee wall to the Santa Rosita. In June and July, dump trucks and

excavators would use this route when maintenance crews removed a year's

worth of accumulated sediment and debris from below, restoring a flood

preventing depth to the dry watercourse before the next rainy season.

I followed the dog down to the riverbed. On the darkly mottled concrete

slope, his black form was no more substantial than a shadow.

On the faintly luminous silt, however, he appeared to be stone solid

even as he drifted eastward like a homeward-bound spirit crossing a

waterless Styx.

Because the most recent rainfall had occurred three weeks in the past,

the floor of the channel wasn't damp. It was still well compacted,

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however, and I was able to ride the bicycle without struggle.

At least as far as the pearly moonlight revealed, the bike tires made

few discernible marks in the hard-packed silt, but a heavier vehicle had

passed this way earlier, leaving clear tracks. Judging by the width and

depth of the tread impressions, the tires were those of a van, a light

truck, or a sports utility vehicle.

Flanked by twenty-foot-high concrete ramparts, I had no view of any of

the town immediately around us. I could see only the faint angular lines

of the houses on higher hills, huddled under trees or partially revealed

by streetlamps. As we ascended the watercourse, the townscape ahead also

fell away from sight beyond the levees, as though the night were a

powerful solvent in which all the structures and citizens of Moonlight

Bay were dissolving.

At irregular intervals, drainage culverts yawned in the levee walls,

some only two or three feet in diameter, a few so large that a truck

could have been driven into them. The tire tracks led past all those

tributaries and continued up the riverbed, as straight as typed

sentences on a sheet of paper, except where they curved around a

punctuation of driftwood.

Although Orson's attention remained focused ahead, I regarded the

culverts with suspicion. During a cloudburst, torrents gushed out of

them, carried from the streets and from the natural drainage swales high

in the grassy eastern hills above town. Now, in fair weather, these

storm drains were the subterranean lanes of a secret world, in which one

might encounter exceptionally strange travelers. I half expected someone

to rush at me from one of them.

I admit to having an imagination feverish enough to melt good judgment.

Occasionally it has gotten me into trouble, but more than once it has

saved my life.

Besides, having roamed all the storm drains large enough to accommodate

a man my size, I've encountered a few peculiar tableaux. Oddities and

enigmas. Sights to wring fright from even the driest rag of imagination.

Because the sun rises inevitably every day, my night life must be

conducted within the town limits, to ensure that I'm always close to the

safely darkened rooms of my house when dawn draws near.

Considering that our community has a population of twelve thousand and a

student population, at Ashdon College, of an additional three thousand,

it offers a reasonably large board for a game of life, it can't fairly

be called a jerkwater burg. Nevertheless, by the time I was sixteen, I

knew every inch of Moonlight Bay better than I knew the territory inside

my own head. Consequently, to fend off boredom, I am always seeking new

perspectives on the slice of the world to which XP confines me, for a

while I was intrigued by the view from below, touring the storm drains

as if I were the Phantom prowling the realms beneath the Paris Opera

House, though I lacked his cape, cloche hat, scars, and insanity.

Recently, I've preferred to keep to the surface. Like everyone born into

this world, I'll take up permanent residence underground soon enough.

Now, after we passed another culvert without being assaulted, Orson

suddenly picked up his pace. The trail had gotten hot.

As the riverbed rose toward the east, it gradually grew narrower, until

it was only forty feet wide where it passed under Highway 1. This tunnel

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Dean R. Koontz - Moonlight Bay 2 - Seize The Night

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