Midnight by Dean R. Koontz

“Probably not,” Tessa said.

Still watching the back of the funeral home, Sam said, “I have the Maysers on my list. They were turned up in the investigation of the Sanchez-Bustamante case.”

Harry cleared his throat and said, “Six days later, September third, two bodies were brought to Callan’s shortly after midnight. And this was even weirder because they didn’t come in a hearse or an ambulance. Two police cars pulled in at the back of Callan’s, and they unloaded a body from the rear seat of each of them, wrapped in blood-streaked sheets.”

“September third?” Sam said. “There’s no one on my list for that date. Sanchez and the Bustamantes were on the fifth. No death certificates were issued on the third. They kept those two off the official records.”

“Nothing in the county paper about anyone dying then, either,” Harry said.

Tessa said, “So who were those two people?”

“Maybe they were out-of-towners who were unlucky enough to stop in Moonlight Cove and stumble into something dangerous,” Sam said. “People whose deaths could be completely covered up, so no one would know where they’d died. As far as anyone knows, they just vanished on the road somewhere.”

“Sanchez and the Bustamantes were on the night of the fifth,” Harry said, “and then Jim Armes on the night of the seventh.”

“Armes disappeared at sea,” Sam said, looking up from the telescope and frowning at the man in the wheelchair.

“They brought the body to Callan’s at eleven o’clock at night,” Harry said, consulting his notebook for details. “The blinds weren’t drawn at the crematorium windows, so I could see straight in there, almost as good as if I’d been right there in that room. I saw the body the mess it was in. And the face. Couple of days later, when the paper ran a story about Armes’s disappearance, I recognized him as the guy they’d fed to the furnace.”

The large bedroom was dressed in cloaks of shadow except for the narrow beam of the penlight, which was half shielded by Harry’s hand and confined to the open notebook. Those white pages seemed to glow with light of their own, as if they were the leaves of a magic or holy—or unholy—book.

Harry Talbot’s careworn countenance was more dimly illumined by the backwash from those pages, and the peculiar light emphasized the lines in his face, making him appear older than he was. Each line, Sam knew, had its provenance in tragic experience and pain. Profound sympathy stirred in him. Not pity. He could never pity anyone as determined as Talbot. But Sam appreciated the sorrow and loneliness of Harry’s restricted life. Watching the wheelchair-bound man, Sam grew angry with the neighbors. Why hadn’t they done more to bring Harry into their lives? Why hadn’t they invited him to dinner more often, drawn him into their holiday celebrations? Why had they left him so much on his own that his primary means of participating in the life of his community was through a telescope and binoculars?

Sam was cut by a pang of despair at people’s reluctance to reach out to one another, at the way they isolated themselves and one another. With a jolt, he thought of his inability to communicate with his own son, which only left him feeling bleaker still.

To Harry, he said, “What do you mean when you say Armes’s body was a mess?”

“Cut. Slashed.”

“He didn’t drown?”

“Didn’t look it.”

“Slashed … Exactly what do you mean?” Tessa asked.

Sam knew that she was thinking about the people whose screams she had heard at the motel—and about her own sister.

Harry hesitated, then said: “Well, I saw him on the table in the crematorium, just before they slipped him into the furnace. He’d been … disemboweled. Nearly decapitated. Horribly … torn. He looked as bad as if he’d been standing on an antipersonnel mine when it went off and been riddled by shrapnel.”

They sat in mutual silence, considering that description.

Only Moose seemed unperturbed. He made a soft, contented sound as Tessa gently scratched behind his ears.

Sam thought it might not be so bad to be one of the lower beasts, a creature mostly of feelings, untroubled by a complex intellect. Or at the other extreme … a genuinely intelligent computer, all intellect and no feelings whatsoever. The great dual burden of emotion and high intelligence was singular to humankind, and it was what made life so hard; you were always thinking about what you were feeling instead of just going with the moment, or you were always trying to feel what you thought you should feel in a given situation. Thoughts and judgment were inevitably colored by emotions—some of them on a subconscious level, so you didn’t even entirely understand why you made certain decisions, acted in certain ways. Emotions clouded your thinking; but thinking too hard about your feelings took the edge off them. Trying to feel deeply and think perfectly clearly at the same time was like simultaneously juggling six Indian clubs while riding a unicycle backward along a high wire.