Fear Nothing By Dean R. Koontz
Fear Nothing By Dean R. Koontz
Synopsis:
Christopher Snow is different from all the other residents of Moonlight
Bay, different from anyone You’ve ever met. For Christopher Snow has
made his peace with a very rare genetic disorder shared by only one
thousand other Americans, a disorder that leaves him dangerously
vulnerable to light. His life is filled with the fascinationg rituals
of one who must embrace the dark. He knows the night as no one else
ever will, ever can-the mystery, the beauty, the many terrors, and the
eerie, silken rhythms of the night-for it is only at night that he is
free. Until the night he witnesses a series of disturbing incidents
that sweep him into a violent mystery only he can solve, a mystery that
will force him to rise above all fears and confront the many-layered
strangeness of Moonlight Bay and its residents.
We have a weight to carry, a destination we can’t know.
We have a weight to carry and can put it down nowhere.
We are the weight we carry from there to here to there.
-The Book of Counted Sorrows
On the desk in my candlelit study, the telephone rang, and I knew that
a terrible change was coming.
I am not psychic. I do not see signs and portents in the sky. To my
eye, the lines in my palm reveal nothing about my future, and I don’t
have a Gypsy’s ability to discern the patterns of fate in wet tea
leaves.
My father had been dying for days, however, and after spending the
previous night at his bedside, blotting the sweat from his brow and
listening to his labored breathing, I knew that he couldn’t hold on
much longer. I dreaded losing him and being, for the first time in my
twenty-eight years, alone.
I am an only son, an only child, and my mother passed away two years
ago. Her death had been a shock, but at least she had not been forced
to endure a lingering illness.
Last night just before dawn, exhausted, I had returned home to sleep.
But I had not slept much or well.
Now I leaned forward in my chair and willed the phone to fall silent,
but it would not.
The dog also knew what the ringing meant. He padded out of the shadows
into the candleglow, and stared sorrowfully at me.
Unlike others of his kind, he will hold any man’s or woman’s gaze as
long as he is interested. Animals usually stare directly at us only
briefly-then look away as though unnerved by something they see in
human eyes. Perhaps Orson sees what other dogs see, and perhaps he,
too, is disturbed by it, but he is not intimidated.
He is a strange dog. But he is my dog, my steadfast friend, and I love
him.
On the seventh ring, I surrendered to the inevitable and answered the
phone.
The caller was a nurse at Mercy Hospital. I spoke to her without
looking away from Orson.
My father was quickly fading. The nurse suggested that I come to his
bedside without delay.
As I put down the phone, Orson approached my chair and rested his burly
black head in my lap. He whimpered softly and nuzzled my hand. He did
not wag his tail.
For a moment I was numb, unable to think or act. The silence of the
house, as deep as water in an oceanic abyss, was a crushing,
immobilizing pressure. Then I phoned Sasha Goodall to ask her to drive
me to the hospital.
Usually she slept from noon until eight o’clock. She spun music in the
dark, from midnight until six o’clock in the morning, on KBAY, the only
radio station in Moonlight Bay. At a few minutes past five on this
March evening, she was most likely sleeping, and I regretted the need
to wake her.
Like sad-eyed Orson, however, Sasha was my friend, to whom I could
always turn. And she was a far better driver than the dog.
She answered on the second ring, with no trace of sleepiness in her
voice. Before I could tell her what had happened, she said, “Chris,