Midnight by Dean R. Koontz

“There!” he said, for the moment having forgotten that he could trust no one but the Indian.

“There what?” the judge asked.

“Didn’t you see it?”

“Just the moon.”

“You weren’t looking or you’d have seen it.”

“Seen what?”

His father’s blindness to the sign only proved to Tommy that he was, indeed, special and that the portent had been meant for his eyes only—which reminded him that he could not trust his own father. He said, “Uh … a shooting star.”

“You’re standing out here watching for shooting stars?”

“They’re actually meteors,” Tommy said, talking too fast. “See, tonight the earth’s supposed to be passing through a meteor belt, so there’ll be lots of them.”

“Since when are you interested in astronomy?”

“I’m not.” Tommy shrugged. “Just wondered what it’d look like. Pretty boring.” He turned away from the pool and started back toward the house, and after a moment the judge accompanied him.

The next day, Wednesday, the boy told Runningdeer about the moonhawk. “But I didn’t get any messages from it. I don’t know what the great spirits want me to do to prove myself.”

The Indian smiled and stared at him in silence for what began to be an uncomfortably long time. Then he said, “Little Chief, we’ll talk about that at lunch.”

Miss Karval had Wednesdays off, and Runningdeer and Tommy were at home alone. They sat side by side on patio chairs for lunch. The Indian seemed to have brought nothing but cactus candy, and Tommy had no appetite for anything else.

Long ago the boy had ceased to eat the candy for its flavor but devoured it eagerly for its effect. And over the years its impact on him had grown constantly more profound.

Soon the boy was in that much-desired dreamlike plane, where colors were bright and sounds were loud and odors were sharp and all things were comforting and appealing. He and the Indian talked for nearly an hour, and at the end of that time Tommy came to understand that the great spirits expected him to kill his father four days hence, Sunday morning. “That’s my day off,” said Runningdeer, “so I will not be here to offer you support. But in fact that’s probably the spirits’ intention—that you should have to prove yourself all on your own. At least we’ll have the next few days to plan it together, so that when Sunday comes you’ll be prepared.”

“Yes,” the boy said dreamily.

“Yes. We’ll plan it together.”

Later that afternoon, the judge came home from a business meeting that had followed his court session. Complaining of the heat, he went straight upstairs to take a shower. Tommy’s mother had come home half an hour earlier. She was in an armchair in the living room, feet on a low upholstered stool, reading the latest issue of Town & Country and sipping at what she called a “precocktail-hour cocktail.” She barely looked up when the judge leaned in from the hall to announce his intention of showering.

As soon as his father went upstairs, Tommy went to the kitchen and got a butcher’s knife from the rack by the stove.

Runningdeer was outside, mowing the lawn.

Tommy went into the living room, walked up to his mother, and kissed her on the cheek. She was surprised by the kiss but more surprised by the knife, which he rammed into her chest three times. He carried the same knife upstairs and buried it in the judge’s stomach as he stepped out of the shower.

He went to his room and took off his clothes. There was no blood on his shoes, little on his jeans, but a lot on his shirt. After he quickly washed up in his bathroom sink and sluiced all traces of blood down the drain, he dressed in fresh jeans and shirt. He carefully bundled his bloody clothes in an old towel and carried them into the attic, where he hid them in a corner behind a seaman’s trunk. He could dispose of them later.

Downstairs he passed the living room without looking in at his dead mother. He went straight to the desk in the judge’s study and opened the right bottom drawer. From behind a stack of files, he withdrew the judge’s revolver.