Dean Koontz - The Servants of Twilight

"Let them go," Grace Spivey repeated.

In a low, menacing voice, the giant said, "Get out. Fast."

Charlie and Henry did as they were told.

The florid-faced woman with the protruding green eyes was waiting at the front of the rectory. As they hurried down the hallway, she opened the door. The instant they stepped onto the porch, she slammed the door behind them and locked it.

Charlie went out into the rain without putting up his umbrella.

He turned his face toward the sky. The rain felt fresh and clean, and he let it hammer at him because he felt soiled by the madness in the house.

"God help us," Henry said shakily.

They walked out to the street.

Dirty water was churning to the top of the gutter. It formed a brown lake out toward the intersection, and bits of litter, like a flotilla of tiny boats, sailed on the wind-chopped surface.

Charlie turned and looked back at the rectory. Now its grime and deterioration seemed like more than ordinary urban decay; the rot was a reflection of the minds of the building's occupants.

In the dust-filmed windows, in the peeling paint and sagging porch and badly cracked stucco, he saw not merely ruin but the physical world's representation of human madness. He had read a lot of science fiction as a child, still read some now and then, so maybe that was why he thought of the Law of Entropy, which held that the universe and all things within it moved in only one basic direction-toward decay, collapse, dissolution, and chaos.

The Church of the TWilight seemed to embrace entropy as the ultimate expression of divinity, aggressively promulgating madness, unreason, and chaos, reveling in it.

He was scared.

After breakfast, Christine called Val Gardner and a couple of other people, assured them that she and Joey were all right, but didn't tell any of them where she was. Thanks to the Church of the Twilight, she no longer entirely trusted her friends, not even Val, and she resented that sad development.

By the time she finished making her phone calls, two new bodyguards arrived to relieve Vince and George. One of them, Sandy Breckenstein, was tall and lean, about thirty, with a prominent Adam's apple; he brought to mind Ichabod Crane in the old Disney cartoon version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

Sandy's partner was Max Steck, a bull of a man with bigknuckled hands, a massive chest, a neck almost as thick as his head-and a smile as sweet as any child's.

Joey took an immediate liking to both Sandy and Max and was soon running back and forth from one end of the small house to the other, trying to keep company with both of them, jabbering away, asking them what it was like to be a bodyguard, telling them his charmingly garbled version of George Swarthout's story about the giraffe who could talk and the princess who didn't have a horse.

Christine was not as quick as Joey to place her confidence in her new protectors. She was friendly but cautious, watchful.

She wished she had a weapon of her own. She didn't have her pistol any more. The police had kept it last night until they could verify that it was properly registered. She couldn't very well take a knife from the kitchen drawer and walk around with it in her hand; if either Sandy or Max was a follower of Grace Spivey, the knife might not forestall violence but precipitate it. And if neither of them was a Twilighter, she would only offend and alienate them by such an open display of distrust. Her only weapons were wariness and her wits, which wouldn't be terribly effective if she found herself confronted by a maniac with a 357 Magnum.

However, when trouble paid a visit, shortly after nine o'clock, it did not come from either Sandy or Max. In fact, it was Sandy, keeping watch from a chair by a living room window, who saw that something was wrong and called their attention to it.

When Christine came in from the kitchen to ask him if he wanted more coffee, she found him studying the street outside with visible tension.

He had risen from the chair, leaned closer to the window, and was holding the binoculars to his eyes.

"What is it?" she asked." Who's out there?"

He watched for a moment longer, then lowered the binoculars.

"Maybe nobody."

" But you think there is."

"Go tell Max to keep a sharp eye at the back," Sandy said, his Adam's apple bobbling." Tell him the same van has cruised by the house three times."

Her heartbeat accelerated as if someone had thrown a switch.

"A white van?"

"No," he said." Midnight blue Dodge with a surfing mural on the side.

Probably it's nothing. Just somebody who's not familiar with the neighborhood, trying to find an address. But.

uh. better tell Max, anyway."

She hurried into the kitchen, which was at the back of the house, and she tried to deliver the news to Max Steck calmly, but her voice had a tremor in it, and she couldn't control her hands, which made nervous, meaningless, butterfly gestures in the air.

Max checked the lock on the kitchen door, even though he had tested it himself when he'd first come on duty. He closed the blinds entirely on one window. He closed them halfway on the other.

Chewbacca had been lying in one corner, dozing. He raised his head and snorted, sensing the new tension in the air.

Joey was sitting at the table by the garden window, busily using his crayons to fill in a picture in a coloring book. Christine moved him away from the window, took him into the corner, near the humming refrigerator, out of the line of fire.

With the short attention span and emotional adaptability of a six-year-old, he had pretty much forgotten about the danger that had forced them to hide out in a stranger's house. Now it all came back to him, and his eyes grew big." Is the witch coming?"

"It's probably nothing to worry about, honey."

She stooped down, pulled up his jeans, and tucked in his shirt, which had come half out of his waistband. His fear made her heart ache, and she kissed him on the cheek.

"Probably just a false alarm," she said." But Charlie's men don't take any chances, you know."

"They're super," he said.

"They sure are," she said.

Now that it looked as if they might actually have to put their lives on the line for her and Joey, she felt guilty about being suspicious of them.

Max shoved the small table away from the window, so he wouldn't have to lean over it to look out.

Chewbacca made an interrogatory whining sound in the back of his throat, and began to pad around in a circle, his claws ticking on the kitchen tile.

Afraid that the dog would get in Max's way at a crucial moment, she called to it, and then so did Joey. The animal couldn't have learned its new name yet, but it responded to tone of voice.

It came to Joey and sat beside him.

Max peered through a chink between two of the slats in the blind and said, "This damn fog sure is hanging on this morning."

Christine realized that, in the fog and obscuring rain, the garden-with its azaleas, bushy oleander, veronicas, carefully shaped miniature orange trees, lilacs, bougainvillaea-draped arbor, and other shrubbery-would make it easy for someone to creep dangerously close to the house before being spotted.

In spite of his mother's reassurances, Joey looked up at the ceiling, toward the sound of rain on the roof, which was loud in this one-story house, and he said, "The witch is coming. She's coming."

Dr. Denton Boothe, both a psychologist and psychiatrist, was living proof that the heirs of Freud and Jung didn't have all the answers, either. One wall in Boothes office was covered with degrees from the country's finest universities, awards from his colleagues in half a dozen professional organizations, and honorary doctorates from institutions of learning in four countries.