Dean Koontz - Tick Tock

From behind him, she reached around to his forehead, drawing light circles on his brow with her fingers. ‘You’re such a wise guy.’

‘I write detective novels.’

‘Maybe you’ve even been abducted,’ she said.

‘Not me.’

‘You wouldn’t remember.’

‘I’d remember,’ he assured her.

‘Not if the aliens didn’t want you to.’

‘Just a wild shot in the dark here - but I bet you think you've been abducted.’

She stopped massaging his brow and pulled him around to face her again. Her murmur fell to a con-spiratorial whisper: ‘What if I told you there are a few nights when I’ve had missing hours, blank spots, where I just seem to have blacked out, gone into a fugue state or something. All abductees report these missing hours,

these holes in their memories where their abduction experiences have been erased or suppressed.’

‘Del, dear sweet loopy Del, please don’t be offended, please understand that I say this with affection: I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that you had a couple of these missing hours every day of the week.’

Puzzled, she said, ‘Why would I be offended?’

‘Never mind.’

‘Anyway, I don’t have them every day of the week -only one or two days a year.’

‘What about ghosts?’ he asked.

‘What about them?’

‘Do you believe in ghosts?’

‘I’ve even met a few,’ she said brightly. ‘What about the healing power of crystals?’ She shook her head. ‘They can’t heal, but they can focus your psychic power.’

‘Out-of-body experiences?’

‘I’m sure it can be done, but I like my body too much to want to leave it even for a short time.’

‘Remote viewing?’

‘That’s easy. Pick a town.’

‘What?’

‘Name a town.’

‘Fresno,’ he said.

With bubbly confidence, she said, ‘I could describe any room in any building in Fresno - where I’ve never been in my life, by the way - and if we drove up there tomorrow, you’d see it was just like I said.’

‘What about Big Foot?’

She put a hand over her mouth to stifle her giggle. ‘You’re such a goof, Tuong Tommy. Big Foot is bull-shit, invented by the tabloids to sell newspapers to gullible fools.’

He kissed her.

She kissed him too. She kissed him better than he had ever been kissed before. She had a talent for it, like throwing knives.

When at last he pulled back from her, Tommy said, ‘I’ve never met anyone remotely like you, Deliverance Payne - and I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.’

‘One thing’s for sure. If it had been any other woman who picked you up from your burning car, you wouldn’t have lived half this long.’

That was inarguably true. No other woman - no other person - he had ever met would have reacted with such equanimity when the demon had slammed against the window and fastened itself to the glass with its hideous sucker pads. No one else could have done the stunt driving necessary to detach the repulsive beast from the van - and perhaps no one else, even having seen the creature, would have accepted Tommy’s devil-doll story so unequivocally.

‘There is such a thing as fate,’ she told him.

‘I suppose there might be.’

‘There is. Destiny. It’s not written in stone, however. On a spiritual level, completely unconsciously, we make our destinies for ourselves.’

Bewilderment and joy swelled in Tommy, and he felt as though he were a child just beginning to unwrap a wonderful gift. ‘That doesn’t sound as totally crazy to me as it would have an hour or two ago.’

‘Of course, it doesn’t. I suspect that while I wasn’t looking, I’ve made you my destiny, and it’s beginning to seem as if you’ve made me yours.’

Tommy had no answer to that. His heart was pound-ing. He had never felt this way before. Even if he’d had a computer keyboard in front of him and time to think, he would not easily have been able to put these new feelings into words.

Abruptly his joyful mood and sense of impending tran-scendence were diminished when a strange slithering sensation crept up the hollow of his spine. He shiv-ered.

‘Cold?’ she asked.

‘No.’

As sometimes happens along the coast, the air tem-perature had bottomed out after midnight; it was rising again. The sea was an efficient heat sink that stored up the warmth of the sun during the balmy day and gradually released it after darkness fell.

The slithering in the spine came again, and Tommy said, ‘It’s just a weird feeling..

‘Oooh, I like weird feelings.’

‘... maybe a premonition.’

‘Premonition? You’re getting more interesting by the moment, Tuong Tommy. Premonition of what?’

He looked around uneasily at the tenebrous forms of the carousel horses. ‘I… don’t quite… know…

Then he suddenly became aware that his neck and shoulders were no longer sore. His headache had pas-sed too.

Astonished, he said, ‘That was an incredible massage.’

‘You’re welcome.’

In fact, no pain lingered in any muscle in his body, not even in those that he had bruised when he had been tackled on the concrete patio. He was not sleepy, either, and his eyes no longer itched and burned as before. Indeed, he felt wide-awake, energetic, and better than he had felt before this entire pursuit had begun.

Frowning at Del in the gloom, he said, ‘Hey, how did-’

Scootie interrupted, thrusting his head between them and whining fearfully.

‘It’s coming,’ Del said, rising from the chariot.

Tommy snatched the Mossberg off the carousel floor.

Already Del was easing between the horses, using them for cover but moving closer to the edge of the platform for a better view of the promenade.

Tommy joined her behind a great black stallion with bared teeth and wild eyes.

Standing almost on point and utterly still, like a hunt-ing dog in a field where a pheasant had been spotted in the brush, Scootie stared east along lamp lit Edgewater Avenue, past Anchors Away Boat Rentals and Original Harbour Cruises toward Balboa Beach Treats. Except for his smaller size, he might have been one of the carved animals waiting in mid-stampede for sunshine and for the riders who would come with it.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Tommy whispered.

‘Wait.’

‘Why?’

‘I want to see it better,’ she said, indicating the three-globe streetlamp past which the fat man would have to come. Her words were almost as faint as exhalations.

‘I have no desire to see it better.’

‘Anyway, we have the guns. We can knock it down again.’

‘We might not be lucky this time.’

‘Scootie can try to misdirect it.’

‘You mean lead it away from us?’

Del didn’t reply.

Ears pricked, head held high, Scootie was clearly ready to do whatever his mistress demanded of him.

Maybe the dog could outrun the creature. Although the thing posing as the portly Samaritan apparently was a supernatural entity, immortal and ultimately unstoppable, it too seemed bound by some of the laws of physics, which was why the hard impact of high-calibre ammunition could halt it, knock it down, delay it; consequently, there was no reason to assume that it could move as fast as Scootie, who was smaller, lower to the ground, and designed by nature for speed.

‘But the thing won’t be lured away by the dog,’ Tommy whispered. ‘Del, it isn’t interested in the dog. It only wants me… and maybe you now.’

‘Hush,’ she said.

In the wintry light from the frosted globes on the nearest lamp, the falling rain appeared to be sleet. The concrete walkway glistened as though coated with ice.

Beyond the light, the rain darkened to tarnished silver and then to ash grey, and out of the greyness came the fat man, walking slowly along the centre of the deserted promenade.