Midnight by Dean R. Koontz

“Don’t even think of that,” Tessa said at once. “If you’d done anything differently, no doubt you’d be ashes now, scraped out of the bottom of Callan’s furnace and thrown in the sea. My sister’s fate was sealed. You couldn’t unseal it.”

Harry nodded, then switched off the penlight, plunging the room into deeper darkness, though he had not yet finished going through the information in his notebook. Sam suspected that Tessa’s unhesitating generosity of spirit had brought tears to Harry’s eyes and that he did not want them to see.

“On the twenty-fifth,” he continued, not needing to consult the notebook for details, “one body was brought to Callan’s at ten-fifteen at night. Weird, too, because it didn’t come in either an ambulance or hearse or police car. It was brought by Loman Watkins—”

“Chief of police,” Sam said for Tessa’s benefit.

“—but he was in his private car, out of uniform,” Harry said. “They took the body out of his trunk. It was wrapped in a blanket. The blinds weren’t shut at their windows that night, either, and I was able to get in tight with the scope. I didn’t recognize the body, but I did recognize the condition of it—the same as Armes.”

“Torn?” Sam asked.

“Yes. Then the Bureau did come to town on the Sanchez Bustamante thing, and when I read about it in the newspaper, I was so relieved because I thought it was all going to come out in the open at last, that we’d have revelations, explanations. But then there were two more bodies disposed of at Callan’s on the night of October fourth—”

“Our team was in town then,” Sam said, “in the middle of their investigation. They didn’t realize any death certificates were filed during that time. You’re saying this happened under their noses?”

“Yeah. I don’t have to look in the notebook; I remember it clearly. The bodies were brought around in Reese Dorn’s camper truck. He’s a local cop, but he was out of uniform that night. They hauled the stiffs into Callan’s, and the blind at one window was open, so I saw them shove both bodies into the crematorium together, as if they were in a real sweat to dispose of them. And there was more activity at Callan’s late on the night of the seventh, but the fog was so thick, I can’t swear that it was more bodies being taken in. And finally … earlier tonight. A child’s body. A small child.”

“Plus the two who were killed at Cove Lodge,” Tessa said. “That makes twenty-two victims, not the twelve that brought Sam here. This town’s become a slaughterhouse.”

“Could be even more than we think,” Harry said.

“How so?”

“Well, after all, I don’t watch the place every evening, all evening long. And I go to bed by one-thirty, no later than two. Who’s to say there weren’t visits I missed, that more bodies weren’t brought in during the dead hours of the night?” Brooding about that, Sam looked through the eyepiece again. The rear of Callan’s remained dark and still. He slowly moved the scope to the right, shifting the field of vision northward through the neighborhood.

Tessa said, “But why were they killed?”

No one had an answer.

“And by what?” she asked.

Sam studied a cemetery farther north on conquistador, then sighed and looked up and told them about his experience earlier in the night, on Iceberry Way. “I thought they were kids, delinquents, but now what I think is that they were the same things that killed the people at Cove Lodge, the same as the one whose foot you saw through the crack under the door.”

He could almost feel Tessa frowning with frustration in the darkness when she said, “But what are they?”

Harry Talbot hesitated. Then: “Boogeymen.”

52

Not daring to use sirens, dousing headlights on the last quarter mile of the approach, Loman came down on Mike Peyser’s place at three-ten in the morning, with two cars, five deputies, and shotguns. Loman hoped they did not have to use the guns for more than intimidation. In their only previous encounter with a regressive—Jordan Coombs on the fourth of September—they had not been prepared for its ferocity and had been forced to blow its head off to save their own lives. Shaddack had been left with only a carcass to examine. He’d been furious at the lost chance to delve into the psychology—and the functioning physiology—of one of these metamorphic psychopaths. A tranquilizer gun would be of little use, unfortunately, because regressives were New People gone bad, and all New People, regressive or not, had radically altered metabolisms that not only allowed for magically fast healing but for the rapid absorption, breakdown, and rejection of toxic substances like poison or tranquilizers. The only way to sedate a regressive would be to get him to agree to be put on a continuous IV drip, which wasn’t very damn likely.