carried Toby to the stone house, gave Heather the keys, and returned
for the ten gallons of gasoline.
By the time Jack reached the fieldstone house again, :
464 DEAN
KOONTZ
Heather had opened the door. The rooms inside were dark. He hadn’t
had time to discover the reason for the malfunctioning lights.
Nevertheless, now he knew why Paul Youngblood couldn’t get power to the
house on Monday. The dweller within hadn’t wanted them to enter.
The rooms were still dark because the windows were boarded over, and
there was no time to pry off the plywood that shielded the glass.
Fortunately, Heather had remembered the lack of power and come
prepared. From two pockets of her ski suit, she produced, instead of
bullets, a pair of flashlights.
It always seems to come down to this, Jack thought: going into a dark
place.
Basements, alleyways, abandoned houses, boiler rooms, crumbling
warehouses.
Even when a cop was chasing a perp on a bright day and the chase led
only outdoors, in the final confrontation, when you came face-to-face
with evil, it was always a dark place, as if the sun could not find
that one small patch of ground where you and your potential murderer
tested fate.
Toby walked into the house ahead of them, either unafraid of the gloom
or eager to do the deed.
Heather and Jack each took a flashlight and a can of gasoline, leaving
two cans just outside the front door.
Harlan Moffit brought up the rear with two cans. “What’re these
buggers like?
They all hairless and bigeyed like those geeks who kidnapped Whitley
Strieber?”
In the unfurnished and unlighted living room, Toby was standing in
front of a dark figure, and when their flashlight beams found what the
boy had found before
WINTER MOON 465
them, Harlan Moffit had his answer. Not hairless and big-eyed. Not
the cute little guys from a Spielberg movie. A decomposing body stood
with legs spread, swaying but in no danger of crumpling to the floor.
A singularly repulsive creature was draped across the cadaver’s back,
bound to it by several greasy tentacles, intruded into its rotting
body, as though it had been trying to become one with the dead flesh.
It was quiescent but obviously alive: queer pulses were visible beneath
its wet-silk skin, and the tips of some appendages quivered.
The dead man with which the alien had combined was Jack’s old friend
and partner Tommy Fernandez.
Heather realized, too late, that Jack had never actually seen one of
the walking dead with its puppetmaster in full saddle. That sight
alone was sufficient to undermine a lot of his assumptions about the
inherently benign-or at least neutral–character of the universe and
the inevitability of justice. There was nothing benign or just about
what had been done with Tommy Fernandez’s remains–or about what the
Giver would do to her, Jack, Toby, and the rest of humanity while they
were still alive, if it had the opportunity.
The revelation had more sting because these were Tommy’s remains in
this condition of profound violation, rather than those of a
stranger.
She turned her flashlight away from Tommy and was relieved when Jack
lowered his own quickly, as well. It would not have been like him to
dwell on such a horror. She liked to believe that, in spite of
anything he might
466 DEAN KOONTZ have to endure, he would always hold
fast to the optimism and love of life that made him special.
“This thing has gotta die,” Harlan said coldly. He had lost his
natural ebullience. He was no longer Richard Dreyfuss excitedly
chasing his close encounter of the third kind. The most ominous
apocryphal fantasies of evil aliens that the cheap tabloids and science
fiction movies had to offer were not merely proved foolish by the
grotesquerie that stood in the caretaker’s house, they were proved
naive as well, because their portrayals of extraterrestrial malevolence
were shabby fun-house spookery compared to the endlessly imaginative
abominations and tortures that a dark, cold universe held in store.
“Gotta die right now.”
Toby walked away from Tommy Fernandez’s body, into the shadows.
Heather followed him with her flashlight beam. “Honey?”
“No time,” he said.