WATCHERS by Dean R. Koontz
WATCHERS by Dean R. Koontz
PART ONE
Shattering the Past
The past is but the beginning of a beginning,
and all that is and has been
is but the twilight of the dawn.
—H. G. Wells
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances:
if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
—C. G. Jung
ONE
1
On his thirty-sixth birthday, May 18, Travis Cornell rose at five o’clock in the
morning. He dressed in sturdy hiking boots, jeans, and a long-sleeved,
blue-plaid cotton shirt. He drove his pickup south from his home in Santa
Barbara all the way to rural Santiago Canyon on the eastern edge of Orange
County, south of Los Angeles. He took only a package of Oreo cookies, a large
canteen full of orange-flavored Kool-Aid, and a fully loaded Smith & Wesson .38
Chiefs Special.
During the two-and-a-half-hour trip, he never switched on the radio. He never
hummed, whistled, or sang to himself as men alone frequently do. For part of the
drive, the Pacific lay on his right. The morning sea was broodingly dark toward
the horizon, as hard and cold as slate, but nearer shore it was brightly
spangled with early light the colors of pennies and rose petals. Travis did not
once glance appreciatively at the sun-sequined water.
He was a lean, sinewy man with deep-set eyes the same dark brown as his hair.
His face was narrow, with a patrician nose, high cheekbones, and a slightly
pointed chin. It was an ascetic face that would have suited a monk in some holy
order that still believed in self-flagellation, in the purification of the soul
through suffering. God knows, he’d had his share of suffering. But it could be a
pleasant face, too, warm and open. His smile had once charmed women, though not
recently. He had not smiled in a long time.
The Oreos, the canteen, and the revolver were in a small green nylon backpack
with black nylon straps, which lay on the seat beside him. Occasionally, he
glanced at the pack, and it seemed as if he could see straight through the
fabric to the loaded Chiefs Special.
From Santiago Canyon Road in Orange County, he turned onto a much narrower
route, then onto a tire-eating dirt lane. At a few minutes past eight-thirty, he
parked the red pickup in a lay-by, under the immense bristly boughs of a
big-cone spruce.
He slipped the harness of the small backpack over his shoulders and set Out into
the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains. From his boyhood, he knew every slope,
vale, narrow defile, and ridge. His father had owned a Stone cabin in upper Holy
Jim Canyon, perhaps the most remote of all the inhabited canyons, and Travis had
spent weeks exploring the wild land for miles around.
He loved these untamed canyons, When he was a boy, black bears had
roamed the woods; they were gone now. Mule deer could still be found, though not
in the great numbers he had seen two decades ago. At least the beautiful folds
and thrusts of land, the profuse and varied brush, and the trees were still as
they had been: for long stretches he walked beneath a canopy of California live
oaks and sycamores.
Now and then he passed a lone cabin or a cluster of them. A few canyon dwellers
were half-hearted survivalists who believed the end of civilization was
approaching, but who did not have the heart to move to a place even more
forbidding. Most were ordinary people who were fed up with the hurlyburly of
modern life and thrived in spite of having no plumbing or electricity.
Though the canyons seemed remote, they would soon be overwhelmed by encroaching
suburbs. Within a hundred-mile radius, nearly ten million people lived in the
interconnecting communities of Orange and Los Angeles counties, and growth was
not abating.
But now crystalline, revelatory light fell on the untamed land with almost as
much substance as rain, and all was clean and wild.
On the treeless spine of a ridge, where the low grass that had grown during the
short rainy season had already turned dry and brown, Travis sat upon a broad