DARKFALL By Dean R. Koontz
DARKFALL By Dean R. Koontz
Synopsis:
At first the police thought they were dealing with a psychopath or a
vicious gangland war. Then, they heard the eerie sounds in the
ventilation system and saw the silver eyes in the night. In a city
paralyzed by a blizzard, something watches–something whose ultimate
victims are young and innocent.
PROLOGUE
Wednesday, December 8, 1:12 A.M.
Penny Dawson woke and heard something moving furtively in the dark
bedroom.
At first she thought she was hearing a sound left over from her dream.
She had been dreaming about horses and about going for long rides in the
country, and it had been the most wonderful, special, thrilling dream
she’d ever had in all of her eleven-and-a-half dream-filled years. When
she began to wake up, she struggled against consciousness, tried to hold
on to sleep and prevent the lovely fantasy from fading. But she heard
an odd sound, and it scared her. She told herself it was only a horse
sound or just the rustle of straw in the stable in her dream. Nothing
to be alarmed about. But she couldn’t convince herself; she couldn’t
tie the strange Knead to her dream and she woke up all the way.
The peculiar noise was coming from the other side of the room, from
Davey’s bed. But it wasn’t ordinary, middle-of-the-night,
seven-year-old-boy, pizza-and-icecream-for-dinner noise. It was a
sneaky sound. Definitely sneaky.
What was he doing? What trick was he planning this time?
Penny sat up in bed. She squinted into the impenetrable shadows, saw
nothing, cocked her head, and listened intently.
A rustling, sighing sound disturbed the stillness. Then silence.
She held her breath and listened even harder.
Hissing. Then a vague, shuffling, scraping noise.
The room was virtually pitch-black. There was one window, and it was
beside her bed; however, the drape was drawn shut, and the alleyway
outside was especially dark tonight, so the window provided no relief
from the gloom.
The door was ajar. They always slept with it open a couple of inches,
so Daddy could hear them more easily if they called for him in the
night. But there were no lights on in the rest of the apartment, and no
light came through the partly open door.
Penny spoke softly: “Davey?”
He didn’t answer.
“Davey, is that you?”
Rustle-rustle-rustle.
“Davey, stop it.”
No response.
Seven-year-old boys were a trial sometimes. A truly monumental pain.
She said, “If you’re playing some stupid game, you’re going to be real
sorry.”
A dry sound. Like an old, withered leaf crunching crisply under
someone’s foot.
It was nearer now than it had been.
“Davey, don’t be weird.”
Nearer. Something was coming across the room toward the bed.
It wasn’t Davey. He was a giggler; he would have broken up by now and
would have given himself away.
Penny’s heart began to hammer, and she thought: Maybe this is just
another dream, like the horses, only a bad one this time.
But she knew she was wide awake.
Her eyes watered with the effort she was making to peer through the
darkness. She reached for the switch on the cone-shaped reading lamp
that was fixed to the headboard of her bed. For a terribly long while,
she couldn’t find it. She fumbled desperately in the dark.
The stealthy sounds now issued from the blackness beside her bed. The
thing had reached her.
Suddenly her groping fingers found the metal lampshade, then the switch.
A cone of light fell across the bed and onto the floor.
Nothing frightening was crouched nearby. The reading lamp didn’t cast
enough light to dispel all the shadows, but Penny could see there wasn’t
anything dangerous, menacing, or even the least bit out of place.
Davey was in his bed, on the other side of the room, Davey tangled in
his covers, sleeping beneath large posters of Chewbacca the Wookie, from
Star Wars, and E.T.
Penny didn’t hear the strange noise any more. She knew she hadn’t been
imagining it, and she wasn’t the kind of girl who could just turn off
the lights and pull the covers over her head and forget about the whole
thing. Daddy said she had enough curiosity to kill about a thousand