Dean Koontz: The Servants of Twilight

Both the cruise and the shop had radically changed her life.

And if spending too many evenings doing paperwork was better than working as a waitress, it was immeasurably better than the two years of her life that had preceded her jobs at the diner and Chez Lavelle. The Lost Years. That was how she thought of that time, now far in the past: the bleak, miserable, sad and stupid Lost Years.

Compared to that period of her life, paperwork was a pleasure, a delight, a veritable carnival of fun…

She had been at her desk more than an hour when she realized that Joey had been exceptionally quiet ever since she'd come into the den. Of course, he was never a noisy child. Often he played by himself for hours, hardly making a sound. But after the unnerving encounter with the old woman this afternoon, Christine was still a little jumpy, and even this perfectly ordinary silence suddenly seemed strange and threatening. She wasn't exactly frightened. Just anxious. If anything happened to Joey.

She put down her pen and switched off the softly humming adding machine.

She listened.

Nothing.

In an echo chamber of memory, she could hear the old woman's voice: He's got to die, he's got to die.

She rose, left the den, quickly crossed the living room, went down the hall to the boy's bedroom.

The door was open, the light on, and he was there, safe, playing on the floor with their dog, Brandy, a sweet-faced and infinitely patient golden retriever.

"Hey, Mom, wanna play Star Wars with us? I'm Han Solo, and Brandy's my buddy, Chewbacca the Wookie. You could be the princess if you want."

Brandy was sitting in the middle of the floor, between the bed and the sliding closet doors. He was wearing a baseball cup emblazoned with the words RETURN OF THE JEDI, and his long furry ears hung out from the sides of it. Joey had also strapped a bandoleer of plastic bullets around the pooch, plus a holster containing a futuristic-looking plastic gun. Panting, eyes bright, Brandy was taking it all in stride; he even seemed to be smiling.

"He makes a great Wookie," Christine said.

"Wanna play?"

"Sorry, Skipper, but I've got an awful lot of work to do. I just stopped by to see if. if you were okay."

"Well, what happened is that we almost got vaporized by an empire battle cruiser," Joey said." But we're okay now."

Brandy snuffled in agreement.

She smiled at Joey." Watch out for Darth Vader."

"Oh, yeah, sure, always. We're being super careful cause we know he's in this part of the galaxy somewhere."

"See you in a little while."

She took only one step toward the door before Joey said, "Mom? Are you afraid that crazy old lady's going to show up again?

Christine turned to him." No, no, she said, although that was precisely what had been in her mind." She can't possibly know who we are or where we live."

Joey's eyes were even a more brilliant shade of blue than usual; they met her own eyes unwaveringly, and there was disquiet in them." I told her my name, Mom. Remember? She asked me, and so I told her my name."

"Only your first name."

He frowned." Did I?"

"You just said, 'Joey."

'Yeah. That's right."

"Don't worry, honey. You'll never see her again. That's all over and done with. She was just a sad old woman who-"

"What about our license plate?"

" What about it?"

"Well, see, if she got the number, maybe there's some way she can use it. To find out who we are. Like they sometimes do on those detective shows on TV."

That possibility disconcerted her, but she said, "I doubt it. I think only policemen can track down a car's owner from the license number."

" But just maybe," the boy said worriedly.

"We pulled away from her so fast she didn't have time to memorize the number. Besides, she was hysterical. She wasn't thinking clearly enough to study the license plate. Like I told you, it's all over and done with. Really. Okay?"

He hesitated a moment, then said, "Okay. But, Mom, I been thinking.

"

"What?"

"That crazy old lady. could she've been. a witch?"

Christine almost laughed, but she saw that he was seriout She suppressed all evidence of her amusement, put on a sober expression that matched the grave look on his face, and said, "Oh, I'm sure she wasn't a witch."

"I don't mean like Broom Hilda. I mean a real witch. A real witch wouldn't need our license number, you know? She wouldn't need anything.

She'd sniff us out. There's no place in the whole universe where you can hide when there's a witch after you. Witches have magic powers."

He was either already certain that the old woman was a witch or was rapidly convincing himself of it. Either way, he was scaring himself unnecessarily because, after all, they really never would see her again.

Christine remembered the way that strange woman had clung to the car, jerking at the handle of the locked door, keeping pace with them as they pulled away, screeching crazy accusations at them. Her eyes and face had radiated both fury and a disturbing power that made it seem as if she might really be able to stop the Firebird with her bare hands. A witch? That a child might think she had supernatural powers was certainly understandable.

" A real witch," Joey repeated, a tremor in his voice.

Christine was aware that she had to snip this line of thought right away, before he became obsessed with witches. Last year, for almost two months, he had been certain that a magical white snake-like one he'd seen in a movie-was hiding in his room, waiting for him to go to sleep, so that it could slither out and bite him. She'd had to sit with him each evening until he'd fallen asleep. Frequently, when he awakened in the middle of the night, she had to take him into her own bed in order to settle him down.

He'd gotten over the snake thing the same day that she'd made up her mind to take him to a child psychologist; later, she'd cancelled the appointment. After a few weeks had passed, when she'd been sure that mentioning the snake wouldn't get him started on it again, she asked what had happened to it. He looked embarrassed and said, "It was only imagination, Mom. I sure was acting like a dumb little kid, huh?" He'd never mentioned the white snake again. He possessed a healthy, rampaging imagination, and it was up to her to rein it in when it got out of control. Like now.

Although she had to put an end to this witch stuff, she couldn't just tell him there was no such thing. If she tried that approach, he would think she was just babying him. She would have to go along with his assumption that witches were real, then use the logic of a child to make him see that the old woman in the parking lot couldn't possibly have been a witch.

She said, "Well, I can understand how you might wonder about her being a witch. Whew! I mean, she did look a little bit like a witch is supposed to look, didn't she?"

"More than a little bit."

"No, no, just a little bit. Let's be fair to the poor old lady."

"She looked exactly like a mean witch," he said." Exactly.

Didn't she, Brandy?"

The dog snorted as if he understood the question and was in full agreement with his young master.

Christine squatted, scratched the dog behind the ears, and said, "What do you know about it, fur-face? You weren't even there."

Brandy yawned.

To Joey, Christine said, "If you really think about it, she didn't look all that much like a witch."

"Her eyes were creepy," the boy insisted, "bugging out of her head like they did. You saw them, sort of wild, Jeez, and her frizzy hair just like a witch's hair."

"But she didn't have a big crooked nose with a wart on the tip of it, did she? "

"No," Joey admitted.

"And she wasn't dressed in black, was she?"

"No. But all in green," Joey said, and from his tone of voice it was clear that the old woman's outfit had seemed as odd to him as it had to Christine.