Koontz, Dean - Night Chills

VIP免费
2024-12-04 0 0 1.19MB 280 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
1
NIGHT CHILLS
DEAN KOONTZ
Author’s Introduction
BY THE TIME they have finished this book, many readers will be uneasy, frightened,
perhaps even horrified. Once entertained, however, they will be tempted to dismiss Night
Chills as quickly as they might a novel about demonic possession or reincarnation.
Although this story is intended primarily to be a “good read,” I cannot stress strongly
enough that the basic subject matter is more than merely a fantasy of mine; it is a reality
and already a major influence on all our lives.
Subliminal and subaudial advertising, carefully planned manipulation of our
subconscious minds, became a serious threat to individual privacy and freedom at least as
long ago as 1957. In that year Mr. James Vicary gave a public demonstration of the
tachistoscope, a machine for flashing messages on a motion picture screen so fast that
they can be read only by the subconscious mind. As discussed in chapter two of this
book, the tachistoscope has been replaced, for the most part, by more sophisticated—and
shocking—devices and processes. The science of behavior modification, as achieved
through the use of subliminal advertising, is coming into a Golden Age of technological
breakthroughs and advancements in theory.
Particularly sensitive readers will be dismayed to learn that even such details as the
infinity transmitter (chapter ten) are not figments of the author’s imagination. Robert
Farr, the noted electronic security expert, discusses wiretapping with infinity transmitters
in his The Electronic Criminals, as noted in the reference list at the end of this novel.
The drug that plays a central role in Night Chills is a novelist's device. It does not exist. It
is the only piece of the scientific background that I have allowed myself to create from
whole cloth. Countless behavioral researchers have conceived of it. Therefore, when I say
that it does not exist, perhaps I should add one cautionary word—yet.
Those who are studying and shaping the future of subliminal advertising will say that
they have no intention of creating a society of obedient robots, that such a goal would be
in violation of their personal moral codes. However, as have thousands of other scientists
in this century of change, they will surely learn that their concepts of right and wrong will
not restrict the ways in which more ruthless men will use their discoveries.
D. R. K.
2
THE BEGINNING
Saturday, August 6, 1977
THE DIRT TRAIL was narrow. Drooping boughs of tamarack, spruce, and pine
scraped the roof and brushed the side windows of the Land Rover.
“Stop here,” Rossner said tensely.
Holbrook was driving. He was a big, stem-faced man in his early thirties. He
gripped the wheel so tightly that his knuckles were bloodless. He braked, pulled
the Rover to the right, and coasted in among the trees. He switched off the
headlamps and turned on a dash light.
“Check your gun,” Rossner said.
Each man wore a shoulder holster and carried a SIC-Petter, the finest automatic
pistol in the world. They pulled the magazines, checked for a full complement of
bullets, slammed the magazines back into the butts, and holstered the guns. Their
movements seemed to be choreographed, as if they had practiced this a thousand
times.
They got out and walked to the back of the car.
At three o’clock in the morning, the Maine woods were ominously dark and still.
Holbrook lowered the tailgate. A light winked on inside the Rover. He threw aside
a tarpaulin, revealing two pairs of rubber hip boots, two flashlights, and other
equipment.
Rossner was shorter, slimmer, and quicker than Holbrook.
He got his boots on first. Then he dragged the last two pieces of their gear from the
car.
The main component of each device was a pressurized tank much like an aqualung
cylinder, complete with shoulder straps and chest belt. A hose led from the tank to
a stainless-steel, pinspray nozzle.
They helped each other into the straps, made certain their shoulder holsters were
accessible, and paced a bit to get accustomed to the weight on their backs.
At 3:10 Rossner took a compass from his pocket, studied it in his flashlight beam,
put it away, and moved off into the forest.
3
Holbrook followed, surprisingly quiet for such a large man. The land rose rather
steeply. They had to stop twice in the next half hour to rest.
At 3:40 they came within sight of the Big Union sawmill. Three hundred yards to
their right, a complex of two- and three-story clapboard and cinder-block buildings
rose out of the frees. Lights glowed at all the windows, and arc lamps bathed the
fenced storage yard in fuzzy purplish-white light. Within the huge main building,
giant saws stuttered and whined continuously. Logs and cut planks toppled from
conveyor belts and boomed when they landed in metal bins.
Rossner and Holbrook circled around the mill to avoid being seen. They reached
the top of the ridge at four o’clock.
They had no difficulty locating the man-made lake. One end of it shimmered in the
wan moonlight, and the other end was shadowed by a higher ridge that rose behind
it. It was a neat oval, three hundred yards long and two hundred yards wide, fed by
a gushing spring. It served as the reservoir for both the Big Union mill and the
small town of Black River that lay three miles away in the valley.
They followed the six-foot-high fence until they came to the main gate. The fence
was there to keep out animals, and the gate was not even locked. They went inside.
At the shadowed end of the reservoir, Rossner entered the water and walked out
ten feet before it rose nearly to the tops
of his hip boots. The walls of the lake slanted sharply, and the depth at the center
was sixty feet.
He unraveled the hose from a storage reel on the side of the tank, grasped the steel
tube at the end of it, and thumbed a button. A colorless, odorless chemical
exploded from the nozzle. He thrust the end of the tube underwater and moved it
back and forth, fanning the fluid as widely as possible.
In twenty minutes his tank was empty. He wound the hose around the reel and
looked toward the far end of the lake. Holbrook had finished emptying his tank and
was climbing out onto the concrete apron.
They met at the gate. “Okay?” Rossner asked.
“Perfect.”
By 5:10 they were back at the Land Rover. They got shovels from the back of the
car and dug two shallow holes in the rich black earth. They buried the empty tanks,
boots, holsters, and guns.
For two hours Holbrook drove along a series of rugged dirt trails, crossed St. John
River on a timber bridge, picked up a graveled lane, and finally connected with a
paved road at half past eight.
4
From there Rossner took the wheel. They didn’t say more than a dozen words to
each other.
At twelve thirty Holbrook got out at the Starlite Motel on Route 15 where he had a
room. He closed the car door without saying good-by, went inside, locked the
motel door, and sat by the telephone.
Rossner had the Rover’s tank filled at a Sunoco station and picked up Interstate 95
south to Waterville and past Augusta. From there he took the Maine Turnpike to
Portland, where he stopped at a service area and parked near a row of telephone
booths.
The afternoon sun made mirrors of the restaurant windows and flashed off the
parked cars. Shimmering waves of hot air rose from the pavement.
He looked at his watch. 3:35.
He leaned back and closed his eyes. He appeared to be nap
ping, but every five minutes he glanced at his watch. At 3:55 he got out of the car
and went to the last booth in the row.
At four o’clock the phone rang.
“Rossner.”
The voice at the other end of the line was cold and sharp:
“I am the key, Mr. Rossner.”
“I am the lock,” Rossner said dully.
“How did it go?”
“As scheduled.”
“You missed the three-thirty call.”
“Only by five minutes.”
The man at the other end hesitated. Then: “Leave the turnpike at the next exit Turn
right on the state route. Put the Rover up to at least one hundred miles an hour.
Two miles along, the road takes a sudden turn, hard to the right; it’s banked by a
fieldstone wall. Do not apply your brakes when you reach the curve. Do not turn
with the road. Drive straight into that wall at a hundred miles an hour.”
Rossner stared through the glass wall of the booth. A young woman was crossing
from the restaurant toward a little red sports car. She was wearing fight white
shorts with dark stitching. She had nice legs.
5
“Glenn?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you understand me?”
“Repeat what I’ve said.”
Rossner went through it, almost word for word.
“Very good, Glenn. Now go do it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Rossner returned to the Land Rover and drove back onto the busy turnpike.
Holbrook sat quietly, patiently in the unlighted motel room. He switched on the
television set, but he didn’t watch it. He got up once to use the bathroom and to get
a drink of water, but that was the only break in his vigil.
At 4:10 the telephone rang.
He picked it up. “Holbrook.”
“I am the key, Mr. Holbrook.”
“I am the lock.”
The man on the other end of the line spoke for half a minute. “Now repeat what
I’ve said.”
Holbrook repeated it.
“Excellent. Now do it.”
He hung up, went into the bathroom, and began to draw a tub full of warm water.
When he turned right onto the state route, Glenn Rossner pressed the accelerator
all the way to the floor. The engine roared. The car’s frame began to shimmy.
Trees and houses and other cars flashed past, mere blurs of color. The steering
wheel jumped and vibrated in his hands.
For the first mile and a half, he didn’t look away from the road for even a second.
When he saw the curve ahead, he glanced at the speedometer and saw that he was
doing slightly better than a hundred miles per hour.
He whimpered, but he didn’t hear himself. The only things he could hear were the
tortured noises produced by the car. At the last moment he gritted his teeth and
shuddered.
The Land Rover hit the four-foot-high stone wall so hard that the engine was
6
jammed back into Rossner’s lap. The car plowed part of the way through the wall.
Stones shot up and rained back down. The Rover tipped onto its crushed front end,
rolled over on its roof, slid across the ruined wall, and burst into flames.
Holbrook undressed and climbed into the tub. He settled down in the water and
picked up the single-edge razor blade that lay on the porcelain rim. He held the
blade by the blunt end, firmly between the thumb and first finger of his right hand,
then slashed open the veins in his left wrist.
He tried to cut his right wrist. His left hand could not hold the blade. It slipped
from his fingers.
He plucked it out of the darkening water, held it in his right hand once more, and
cut across the bridge of his left foot.
Then he leaned back and closed his eyes.
Slowly, he drifted down a lightless tunnel of the mind, into ever deepening
darkness, getting dizzy and weak, feeling surprisingly little pain. In thirty minutes
he was comatose. In forty minutes he was dead.
Sunday, August 7, 1977
AFTER WORKING ALL WEEK on the midnight shift, Buddy Pellineri was
unable to change his sleeping habits for the weekend. At four o’clock Sunday
morning, he was in the kitchen of his tiny, two-room apartment. The radio, his
most prized possession, was turned down low: music from an all-night Canadian
station. He was sitting at the table, next to the window, staring fixedly at the
shadows on the far side of the street. He had seen a cat running along the walk over
there, and the hairs had stood up on the back of his neck.
There were two things that Buddy Pellineri hated and feared more than all else in
life: cats and ridicule.
For twenty-five years he had lived with his mother, and for twenty years she had
kept a cat in the house, first Caesar and then Caesar the Second. She had never
realized that the cats were quicker and far more cunning than her son and,
therefore, a bane to him. Caesar—first or second; it made no difference— liked to
lie quietly atop bookshelves and cupboards and high-boys, until Buddy walked
past. Then he leaped on Buddy’s back. The cat never scratched him badly; for the
most part it was concerned with getting a good grip on his shirt so that he could not
shake it loose. Every time, as if following a script, Buddy would panic and run in
7
circles or dart from room to room in search of his mother, with Caesar spitting in
his ear. He never suffered much pain from the game; it was the sudden-
ness of the attack, the surprise of it that terrified him. His mother said Caesar was
only being playful. At times he confronted the cat to prove he was unafraid. He
approached it as it sunned on a window sill and tried to stare it down. But he was
always the first to look away. He couldn’t understand people all that well, and the
alien gaze of the cat made him feel especially stupid and inferior.
He was able to deal with ridicule more easily than he could deal with cats, if only
because it never came as a surprise. When he was a boy, other children had teased
him mercilessly. He had learned to be prepared for it, learned how to endure it.
Buddy was bright enough to know that he was different from others. If his
intelligence quotient had been several points lower, he wouldn’t have known
enough to be ashamed of himself, which was what people expected of him. If his
I.Q. had been a few points higher, he would have been able to cope, at least to
some extent, with both cats and cruel people. Because he fell in between, his life
was lived as an apology for his stunted intellect— a curse he bore as a result of a
malfunctioning hospital incubator where he had been placed after being born five
weeks prematurely.
His father had died in a mill accident when Buddy was five, and the first Caesar
had entered the house two weeks later. If his father hadn’t died, perhaps there
would have been no cats. And Buddy liked to think that, with his father alive, no
one would dare ridicule him.
Ever since his mother had succumbed to cancer ten years ago, when he was
twenty-five, Buddy had worked as an assistant night watchman at the Big Union
Supply Company mill. If he suspected that certain people at Big Union felt
responsible for him and that his job was make-work, he had never admitted it, not
even to himself. He was on duty from midnight to eight, five nights a week,
patrolling the storage yards, looking for smoke, sparks, and flames. He was proud
of his position. In the last ten years he had come to enjoy a measure of self-respect
that would have been inconceivable before he had been hired.
Yet theme were times when he felt like a child again, humiliated by other children,
the brunt of a joke he could not understand. His boss at the mill, Ed McGrady, the
chief watchman on the graveyard shift, was a pleasant man. He was incapable of
hurting anyone. However, he smiled when others did the teasing. Ed always told
them to stop, always rescued his friend Buddy—but always got a laugh from it.
That was why Buddy hadn’t told anyone what he had seen Saturday morning,
nearly twenty-four hours ago. He didn’t want them to laugh.
Around that time he left the storage yard and walked well off into the trees to
relieve himself. He avoided the lavatory whenever he could because it was there
8
the other men teased him the most and showed the least mercy. At a quarter to five,
he was standing by a big pine tree, shrouded in darkness, taking a pee, when he
saw two men coming down from the reservoir. They carried hooded flashlights that
cast narrow yellow beams. In the backwash of the lights, as the men passed within
five yards of him, Buddy saw they were wearing rubber hip boots, as if they had
been fishing. They couldn’t fish in the reservoir, could they? There were no fish up
there. Another thing .
each man wore a tank on his back, like skin divers wore on television. And they
were carrying guns in shoulder holsters. They looked so out of place in the woods,
so strange.
They frightened him. He sensed they were killers. Like on the television. If they
knew they had been seen, they would kill him and bury him out here. He was sure
of it. But then Buddy always expected the worst; life had taught him to think that
way.
He stood perfectly still, watched them until they were out of sight, and ran back to
the storage yard. But he quickly realized he couldn’t tell anyone what he had seen.
They wouldn’t believe him. And by God, if he was going to be ridiculed for telling
what was only the truth, then he would keep it secret!
Just the same he wished he could tell someone, if not the watchmen at the mill. He
thought and thought about it but still could not make sense of those skin divers or
whatever they were. -In fact, the more he thought about it, the more bizarre it
seemed. He was frightened by what he could not understand. He was certain that if
he told someone, it could be explained to him. Then he wouldn’t be afraid. But if
they laughed .
Well, he didn’t understand their laughter either, and that was even more
frightening than the mystery men in the woods.
On the far side of Main Street, the cat scampered from the heavy purple shadows
and ran east toward Edison’s General Store, startling Buddy out of his reverie. He
pressed against the windowpane and watched the cat until it turned the corner.
Afraid that it would try to sneak back and climb up to his third floor rooms, he kept
a watch on the place where it had vanished. For the moment he had forgotten the
men in the woods because his fear of cats was far greater than his fear of guns and
strangers.
9
PART ONE:
Conspiracy
1
Saturday, August 13, 1977
WHEN HE DROVE AROUND THE CURVE, into the small valley, Paul
Annendale felt a change come over him. After five hours behind the wheel
yesterday and five more today, he was weary and tense—but suddenly his neck
stopped aching and his shoulders unknotted. He felt at peace, as if nothing could
go wrong in this place, as if he were Hugh Conway in Lost Horizon and had just
entered Shangri-La.
Of course, Black River was not Shangri-La, not by any stretch of the imagination.
It existed and maintained its population of four hundred solely as an adjunct of the
mill. For a company town it was quite clean and attractive. The main street was
lined with tall oak and birch trees. The houses were New England colonials, white
frame and brick saltboxes. Paul supposed he responded to it so positively because
he had no bad memories to associate with it, only good ones; and that could not be
said of many places in a man’s life.
“There’s Edison’s store! There’s Edison’s!” Mark Annendale leaned over from the
back seat, pointing through the windshield.
Smiling, Paul said, “Thank you, Coonskin Pete, scout of the north.”
Rya was as excited as her brother, for Sam Edison was like a grandfather to them.
But she was more dignified than Mark.
At eleven she yearned for the womanhood that was still years ahead of her. She sat
up straight in her safety harness beside Paul on the front seat. She said, “Mark,
sometimes I think you’re five years old instead of nine.”
“Oh, yeah? Well, sometimes I think you’re sixty instead of eleven!”
“Touché,” Paul said.
Mark grinned. Usually, he was no match for his sister. This sort of quick response
was not his style.
Paul glanced sideways at Rya and saw that she was blushing. He winked to let her
know that he wasn’t laughing at her.
10
Smiling, sure of herself again, she settled back in her seat. She could have topped
Mark’s line with a better one and left him mumbling. But she was capable of
generosity, not a particularly common quality in children her age.
The instant the station wagon stopped at the curb, Mark was out on the pavement
He bounded up the three concrete steps, raced across the wide roofed veranda, and
disappeared into the store. The screen door slammed shut behind him just as Paul
switched off the, engine.
Rya was determined not to make a spectacle of herself, as Mark had done. She
took her time getting out of the car, stretched and yawned, smoothed the knees of
her jeans, straightened the collar of her dark blue blouse, patted her long brown
hair, closed the car door, and went up the steps. By the time she reached the porch,
however, she too had begun to run.
Edison’s General Store was an entire shopping center in three thousand square feet.
There was one room, a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide, with an ancient
pegged pine floor. The east end of the store was a grocery. The west end held dry
goods and sundries as well as a gleaming, modem drug counter.
As his father had been before him, Sam Edison was the town’s only licensed
pharmacist.
In the center of the room, three tables and twelve oak chairs were grouped in front
of a wood-burning country stove. Ordinarily, you could find elderly men playing
cards at one of
those tables, but at the moment the chairs were empty. Edison's store was not just a
grocery and pharmacy; it was also Black River’s community center.
Paul opened the heavy lid on the soda cooler and plucked a bottle of Pepsi from the
icy water. He sat down at one of the tables.
Rya and Mark were standing at an old-fashioned glass-fronted candy counter,
giggling at one of Sam’s jokes. He gave them sweets and sent them to the
paperback and comic book racks to choose presents for themselves; then he came
over and sat with his back to the cold stove.
They shook hands across the table.
At a glance, Paul thought, Sam looked hard and mean. He was very solidly built,
five eight, one hundred sixty pounds, broad in the chest and shoulders. His short-
sleeved shirt revealed powerful forearms and biceps. His face was tanned and
creased, and his eyes were like chips of gray slate. Even with his thick white hair
and beard, he looked more dangerous than grandfatherly, and he could have passed
as a decade younger than his fifty-five years.
But that forbidding exterior was misleading. He was a warm and gentle man, a
摘要：

1NIGHTCHILLSDEANKOONTZAuthor’sIntroductionBYTHETIMEtheyhavefinishedthisbook,manyreaderswillbeuneasy,frightened,perhapsevenhorrified.Onceentertained,however,theywillbetemptedtodismissNightChillsasquicklyastheymightanovelaboutdemonicpossessionorreincarnation.Althoughthisstoryisintendedprimarilytobea“g...

展开>> 收起<<
Koontz, Dean - Night Chills.pdf

共280页,预览10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！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：280 页 大小：1.19MB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-04

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 280
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注