Dean Koontz - The Servants of Twilight

"Please, please, stop her," Christine begged him.

"You shut up!" Grace warned, taking one threatening step toward Christine. Then, to Joey, she said, "And don't you try using those eyes on me. It won't work with me. You can't get at me that way, not any way, not me. I can resist."

The old woman was having some difficulty figuring how to fire the gun, and when she finally got a round off, it went high, smashed into the wall above Joey's head, almost striking the ceiling, the explosive report crashing back and forth in that confined area, one deafening echo laminated atop another. The thunderous noise and the recoil surprised Spivey, jolting her frail body. She stumbled backwards two steps, fired again without meaning to, and that second bullet &d strike the ceiling and ricocheted around the room.

Joey was screaming.

Christine was shouting, looking for something to throw, a weapon no matter how crude, but she could find nothing. The pain in her wounded leg was like a bolt fastening her to the stone, and she could only beat her hand on the floor in frustration.

The old woman moved in on Joey, holding the rifle awkwardly though with evident determination to finish the job this time.

But something was wrong. She was either out of ammunition or the gun had jammed, for she began to struggle with the weapon angrily.

As the echoes of the second shot faded, a mysterious sound arose from deeper in the mountain, adding to the confusion, rising up from other caverns, a strange and frightening racket that Christine could almost but not quite identify.

The gun had janimed. Spivey managed to eject an expended cartridge that had been wedged in the chamber. The brass cylinder popped into the air, reflecting the firelight, and hit the floor with a faint clink and ping.

Wicka-wicka-wicka-wicka: The strange, leathery, flapping sound drew nearer, approaching from deeper in the mountain.

The cool air vibrated with it.

Spivey half turned away from Joey to look at the entrance to the adjoining cave, through which she and the giant had entered a few minutes ago." No!" she said, and she seemed to know what was coming.

And in that instant Christine knew, too.

Bats.

A thunderous, flapping, whirling tornado of bats.

An instant later they swarmed out of the adjoining caverns and into this room, a hundred of them, two hundred, more, rising to the vaulted ceiling, screeching, industriously working their leathery wings, darting back and forth, a seething multitude of frenziedly whirling shadows at the upper reaches of the firelight.

The old woman stared at them. She was speaking, but her words were lost in the drumlike roar of the swarm.

As one, the bats stopped shrieking. Only the rustlingfluttering-hissing of wings sounded now. Their silence was so unnatural that it seemed worse than their screams.

No, Christine thought. Oh, no!

In the pall of this frightening assemblage, Spivey's maniacal self-confidence shattered. She fired two rounds at the nightmare flock, a senseless and, in fact, dangerous assault.

Whether provoked by the gunfire or otherwise motivated, the bats swooped down as if they were a single creature, a cloud of tiny black killing machines, all claws and teeth, and fell upon Grace Spivey. They slashed at her insulated ski suit, got tangled in her hair, sank their claws into her and hung on. She staggered across the cavern, flailing her arms and whirling about, as if performing a macabre dance, or as if she thought she could take flight with them. Squealing, gagging, retching, she collided with one wall, rebounded from it, and still the beasts clung to her, darted, nipped.

Kyle Barlowe took two tentative steps toward her, halted, looking not so much afraid as bewildered.

Christine did not want to look, but she could not help it. She was transfixed by the horrible battle.

Spivey appeared to be wearing a garment composed of hundreds of flapping black rags. Her face vanished entirely beneath that tattered cloth. But for the flutter and scrape and tick of their wings, the bats maintained their eerie silence, though they moved even more frantically now, with malign intent. They tore her to pieces.

At last the bats were still.

Spivey was motionless, too.

For perhaps a minute, the bats were a living, black funeral shroud covering the body, quivering slightly like wind-rustled cloth. By the second, their unnatural silence grew more remarkable and unnerving. They did not quite look, behave, or seem like ordinary bats. Besides the astonishing timeliness of their appearance and the purposefulness of their attack, they had a quality-an air-that was indefinably strange.

Christine saw some of the small, dark, evil heads lift up, turn left and right and left again, crimson eyes blinking, and it seemed as if they were awaiting an order from the leader of their flock. Then, as if the order came in a voice only they could hear, they rose as one, in a sudden fluttering cloud, and flew back into other cavems.

Kyle Barlowe and Charlie were silent, stunned.

Christine would not look at the dead woman.

And she could not look away from her son. He was aliveunbelievably, amazingly, miraculously alive. After all the terror and pain they had been through, after death had seemed inevitable, she had difficulty believing this last-minute reprieve was real. Irrationally, she felt that if she looked away from Joey, even for a moment, he would be dead when she looked back again, and their extraordinary salvation would prove to be a delusion, a dream.

More than anything, she wanted to hold him, touch his hair, his face, hug him tight, feel the beat of his heart and the warmth of his breath on her neck. But her injuries prevented her from going to him, and he appeared to be in a state of shock that rendered him temporarily oblivious of her.

Far away in other caves, the bats must have begun to resume their familiar perches, for they squeaked again as if contesting with one another for favored positions. The eerie sound of them, which soon faded into silence once more, sent a chill through Christine, a chill that intensified when she saw her halfmesmerized son cock his head as if in understanding of the shrill language of those nightmare creatures. He was disturbingly pale.

His mouth curved into what appeared to be a vague smile, but then Christine decided it was actually a grimace of disgust or horror engendered by the scene that he had just witnessed and that had left him in this semiparalytic stupor.

As the renewed cries of the bats gradually faded, fear uncoiled in Christine, though not because of what had happened to Grace Spivey. And she was not afraid that the bats would return and kill again. In fact, somehow, she knew they would not, and it was precisely that impossible knowledge that frightened her. She did not want to consider where it came from, to ponderjust how she knew. She did not want to think about what it mi lit mean.

Joey was alive. Nothing else mattered. The sound of the gun had drawn the bats, and by a stroke of luck-or through God's mercy-they had limited their attack to Grace Spivey. Joey was alive.

Alive. She felt tears of joy suddenly burning in her eyes.

Joey was alive. She must concentrate on that wonderful twist of fate, for it was from here that their future began, and she was determined that it would be a bright future full of love and happiness, with no sadness, no fear, and above all no doubts.

Doubt could eat at you, destroy happiness, turn love to bitremess. Doubt could even come between a mother and her much-loved son, producing an unbridgeable chasm, and she simply could not allow that to happen.

Nevertheless, unbidden and unwanted, a memory came to her.

Tiaesday, Laguna Beach, the Arco station service bay where they had waited for Charlie after barely escaping the bomb that destroyed Miriam Rankin's house; she and Joey and the two bodyguards standing by the stacks of tires, with the world outside caught in a fierce electrical storm so powerful that it seemed to signal the end of the world; Joey moving to the open garage doors, fascinated by the lightning, one devastating bolt after another, unlike anything Christine had seen before, especially in southern California where lightning was uncommon; Joey regarding it without fear, as if it were only fireworks, as if… as if he knew it could not harm him. As if it were a sign? As if the pretematural ferocity of the storm was somehow a message that he understood and took hope from?