Koontz, Dean - Nightchills

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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.
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
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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.
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.
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
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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.
“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
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.
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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 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,
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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
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.
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
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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.
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
push-over for children. Most likely, he gave away more candy than he sold. Paul
had never seen him angry, had never heard him raise his voice.
“When did you get in town?”
“This is our first stop.”
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“You didn’t say in your letter how long you’d be staying this year. Four weeks?”
“Six, I think.”
“Wonderful!” His gray eyes glittered merrily; but in that very craggy face, the
expression might have appeared to be malice to anyone who didn’t know him well.
“You’re staying the night with us, as planned? You aren’t going up into the
mountains today?”
Paul shook his head: no. “Tomorrow will be soon enough. We’ve been on the road
since nine this morning. I don’t have strength to pitch camp this afternoon.”
“You’re looking good, though.”
“I’m feeling good now that I’m in Black River.”
“Needed this vacation, did you?”
“God, yes.” Paul drank some of the Pepsi. “I’m sick to death of hypertense
poodles and Siamese cats with ringworms.”
Sam smiled. “I’ve told you a hundred times. Haven’t I? You can’t expect to be an
honest veterinarian when you set up shop in the suburbs of Boston. Down there
you’re a nursemaid for neurotic house pets—and their neurotic owners. Get out
into the country, Paul.”
“You mean I ought to involve myself with cows calving and mares foaling?”
“Exactly.”
Paul sighed. “Maybe I will one day.”
“You should get those kids out of the suburbs, out where the air is clean and
the water drinkable.”
“Maybe I will.” He looked toward the rear of the store, toward a curtained
doorway. “Is Jenny here?”
“I spent all morning filling prescriptions, and now she’s out delivering them. I
think I’ve sold more drugs in the past four days than I usually sell in four
weeks.”
“Epidemic?”
“Yeah. Flu, grippe, whatever you want to call it.”
“What does Doe Troutman call it?”
Sam shrugged. “He’s not really sure. Some new breed of flu, he thinks.”
“W/hat’s he prescribing?”
“A general purpose antibiotic. Tetracycline.”
“That’s not particularly strong.”
“Yes, but this flu isn’t all that devastating.”
“Is the tetracycline helping?”
“It’s too soon to tell.”
Paul glanced at Rya and Mark.
“They’re safer here than anywhere else in town,” Sam said. “Jenny and I are
about the only people in Black River who haven’t come down with it.”
“If I get up there in the mountains and find I’ve got two sick kids on my hands,
what should I expect? Nausea? Fever?”
“None of that. Just night chills.”
Paul tilted his head quizzically.
“Damned scary, as I understand it.” Sam’s eyebrows drew together in one bushy
white bar. “You wake up in the middle of the night, as if you’ve just had a
terrible dream. You shake so hard you can’t hold on to anything. You can barely
walk. Your heart is racing. You’re pouring sweat—and I mean sweating pints—like
you’ve got awfully high blood pressure. It lasts as much as an hour, then it
goes away as if it never was. Leaves you weak most of the next day.”
Frowning, Paul said, “Doesn’t sound like flu.”
“Doesn’t sound like much of anything. But it scares hell out of people. Some of
them got sick Tuesday night, and most of the others joined in on Wednesday.
Every night they wake up shaking, and every day they’re weak, a bit tired.
Damned few people around here have had a good night’s sleep this week.”
“Has Doe Troutman gotten a second opinion on any of these cases?”
“Nearest other doctor is sixty miles away,” Sam said. “He did call the State
Health Authority yesterday afternoon, asked for one of their field men to come
up and have a look. But they can’t send anyone until Monday. I guess they can’t
get very excited about an epidemic of night chills.”
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“The chills could be the tip of an iceberg.”
“Could be. But you know bureaucrats.” When he saw Paul glance at Rya and Mark
again, Sam said, “Look, don’t worry about it. We’ll keep the kids away from
everyone who’s sick.”
“I was supposed to take Jenny up the street to Ultman’s Cafe. We were going to
have a nice quiet dinner together.”
“If you catch the flu from a waitress or another customer, you’ll pass it on to
the kids. Skip the cafe. Have dinner here. You know I’m the best cook in Black
River.”
Paul hesitated.
Laughing softly, stroking his beard with one hand, Sam said, “We’ll have an
early dinner. Six o’clock. That’ll give you and Jenny plenty of time together.
You can go for a ride later. Or
I’ll keep myself and the kids out of the den if you’d rather just stay home.”
Paul smiled. “What’s on the menu?”
“Manicotti.”
“Who needs Ultman’s Cafe?”
Sam nodded agreement. “Only the Ultmans.”
Rya and Mark hurried over to get Sam’s approval of the gifts they had chosen for
themselves. Mark had two dollars’ worth of comic books, and Rya had two
paperbacks. Each of them had small bags of candy.
Rya’s blue eyes seemed especially bright to Paul, as if there were lights behind
them. She grinned and said, “Daddy, this is going to be the best vacation we’ve
ever had!”
2
Thirty-one Months Earlier:
Friday, January 10, 1975
OGDEN SALSBURY ARRIVED ten minutes early for his three o’clock appointment. That
was characteristic of him.
H. Leonard Dawson, president and principal stockholder of Futurex International,
did not at once welcome Salsbury into his office. In fact Dawson kept him
waiting until three fifteen. That was characteristic of him. He never allowed
his associates to forget that his time was inestimably more valuable than
theirs.
When Dawson’s secretary finally ushered Salsbury into the great man’s chambers,
it was as if she were showing him to the altar in a hushed cathedral. Her
attitude was reverent. The outer office had Muzak, but the inner office had pure
silence. The room was sparsely furnished: a deep blue carpet, two somber oil
paintings on the white walls, two chairs on this side of the desk, one chair on
the other side of it, a coffee table, rich blue velvet drapes drawn back from
seven hundred square feet of lightly tinted glass that overlooked midtown
Manhattan. The secretary bowed out almost like an altar boy retreating from the
sanctuary.
“How are you, Ogden?” He reached out to shake hands.
“Fine. Just fine—Leonard.”
Dawson’s hand was hard and dry; Salsbury’s was damp.
“How’s Miriam?” He noticed Salsbury’s hesitation. “Not ill?”
“We were divorced,” Salsbury said.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
Was there a trace of disapproval in Dawson’s voice? Salsbury wondered. And why
the hell should I care if there is?
“When did you split up?” Dawson asked.
“Twenty-five years ago—Leonard.” Salsbury felt as if he ought to use the other
man’s last name rather than his first, but he was determined not to be
intimidated by Dawson as he had been when they were both young men.
“It has been a long time since we’ve talked,” Dawson said. “That’s a shame. We
had so many great times together.”
They had been fraternity brothers at Harvard and casual friends for a few years
after they left the university. Salsbury could not remember a single “great”
time they might have shared. Indeed, he had always thought of the name H.
Leonard Dawson as a synonym for both prudery and boredom.
file:///F|/rah/Dean%20R.%20Koontz/Koontz,%20Dean%20-%20Night%20Chills.txt (8 of 154) [1/17/03 3:09:10 AM]
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file:///F|/rah/Dean%20R.%20Koontz/Koontz,%20Dean%20-%20Night%20Chills.tx NIGHTCHILLSDEANKOONTZAuthor’sIntroductionBYTHETIMEtheyhavefinishedthisbook,manyreaderswillbeuneasy,frightened,perhapsevenhorrified.Onceentertained,however,theywilletemptedtodismissNightChillsasquicklyastheymightanovelaboutd...

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