Dean Koontz - The Moonlit Mind - A Tale of Suspense

With the pack on his back, with the dog on a leash, he sets out for the wide service alley behind the department store.

His breath plumes from him as if he’s exhaling ghosts. Snow is predicted before morning.

On this first Saturday in December, an hour before closing time, no deliveries are being made to or from the shipping-and-receiving center that occupies the uppermost garage level beneath the huge building.

At the bottom of the two-lane ramp, the automatic bay door is down, and the man-size door beside it is latched. Latched but not deadbolted.

Crispin carries with him an expired credit card that he found years earlier in a trash can. He slips it in the gap between door and jamb, puts pressure on the beveled latch bolt, and forces it out of the striker plate. The door opens inward.

If a guard in the security room happens to be looking at a monitor that provides a view from the camera above the large bay doors, Crispin will find himself in trouble or at least chased out.

But that never happens. A year previously, the Phantom of Broderick’s explained to him that during shopping hours, security guards charged with monitoring the store’s numerous cameras will be focused 99 percent of the time on store interiors, looking for shoplifters.

Once through the door, Crispin relies on the wise dog to guide him.

With the last of the day’s outgoing shipments completed by 5:00 P.M. and the final store-stock deliveries made by 6:00, the employees in shipping-and-receiving have all gone home, with the exception of the department’s assistant manager — Denny Plummer — who works from noon until closing time at 9:00.

If a dozen employees were busy in this area, Crispin would have little hope of slipping secretly into Broderick’s to stay the night. But with only Denny Plummer to avoid, he can rely on the dog’s keen sense of smell to locate the assistant manager and evade him.

A third of the huge garage contains a fleet of Broderick’s delivery vans in various sizes. In another third, crates of new merchandise stacked on pallets wait to be opened. The final third is unused.

In better economic times, the fleet of trucks numbered twice what it does now, the new merchandise was piled higher, and every inch of this space was needed. In those golden days, a night shift of stock boys replenished the store’s racks and shelves. In the current doldrums, no night shift is necessary. All restocking occurs during store hours. After closing time, one person remains in Broderick’s: the Phantom.

Harley leads Crispin on a serpentine route among the trucks and crates, to the service stairs, which lead up to a distribution room from which new merchandise is wheeled on carts to far points of the department store. A freight elevator is also available, but for the boy, the stairs are safer.

At this hour, the distribution room on the ground floor is deserted. With the shipping-and-receiving crew gone for the day, this space is dark except for a single light above the wide door that leads to the ground floor of the store.

Among the many carts and unopened cartons are numerous places where a boy and his dog can hunker down and hide. They shelter here until 9:32, when every speaker in the public-address system echoes with the machine voice of the security package, sternly announcing, “Perimeter control armed.”

This means that the last employee, a guard, has left by the door through which Crispin earlier entered from the alleyway. He has set the alarm for the night. Every exterior door and window is wired, and if any is breached, the police will be summoned.

In better days, Broderick’s maintained a four-man team of guards during the night. They were pink-slipped years previously. Without night watchmen, the store management for a while considered updating their security with motion detectors, but in the end that was another expense they could not justify in this new downsized America.

Until the store reopens on Monday morning, Crispin and Harley can go anywhere in its four sales floors without triggering an alarm. When Broderick’s is closed, the only security cameras that continue to record are those covering doors and operable windows, so no one will know that they were here.

In spite of high electricity costs, aisle lights are left on all night on the ground floor. The police stop by a few times each shift to peer through the display windows, to be certain that the alarm hasn’t been thwarted and that no bad guys are running amok inside.

Crispin unsnaps the leash from Harley’s collar, and they leave the distribution room. They take the public elevator to the fourth floor.

Up here are three departments — kitchenware, home furnishings, and bedding — plus Eleanor’s, which is a restaurant named after the wife of the store’s founder. Eleanor’s is more than a coffee shop, less than a fine-dining establishment. Open six days a week, it is popular with the ladies’-luncheon crowd and with those who enjoy tea and pastries in the late afternoon. Dinner is not served — at least not with the knowledge of management.

The restaurant is to the left of the public elevators. The pair of beveled-glass French doors, which should be closed and locked, stand open.

Past the hostess station, the dining room is dimly lit by the ambient glow of the great city, which enters by tall, west-facing windows. Beyond the tables, in one of the booths, a few candles in red-glass vessels flicker pleasantly.

Crispin is expected. With his disposable cell phone, he has called ahead to ask if he might be welcome for two nights. The phone comes with a limited number of minutes, but that is of no concern to him; the only number he ever calls is hers.

This side of the hostess station, in the open doorway, stands the Phantom of Broderick’s.

July 26, memorial day for Saints Anne and Joachim, memorial night , three years and four months earlier …

Nine-year-old Crispin in his sister’s empty closet is pierced by a sharp fear, not fear for himself — not yet — but for Mirabell.

Crispin, help me!

He doesn’t hear the voice again, but he remembers it clearly.

Something is terribly wrong, and it can’t be put right by one of Mr. Mordred’s jokes or by a kiss from Nanny Sayo.

At the thought of Nanny, the intense flavor of lemon candy fills his mouth. An impossible flood of saliva forces him to swallow once, twice, three times, and still a string of spittle escapes, drools down his chin. He wipes it away with a sleeve of his pajamas.

They have lived in Theron Hall for six weeks, and suddenly those days seem to have passed mostly in a haze. Looking back, he has only a vague sense of what happened on which day, as if time has no fixed meaning in this house.

They have gone to bed and risen according to their desires. They have eaten only what they wish. Every toy they’ve wanted — and many they never requested — have been provided for them. They have been entertained rather than schooled, and their tutor with the horsefly birthmark has indulged them at every turn, always excusing and even encouraging their laziness. They have never left the house. In their three separate rooms, they are gradually being isolated, one from the other, as they already have been isolated from the outside world.

None of that is how things ought to be. Crispin sees now that the past six weeks have been like a dream through which they have been drawn as though responding to invisible strings attached to all their limbs.

Crispin, help me!

The sense of being in a dream only intensifies as Crispin finds himself at the door to Clarette and Giles’s bedroom suite without realizing that he has left Mirabell’s room.

His mother and his new father have made it clear that they value their privacy and that their quarters are strictly off-limits. Until now, Crispin has never tried their door. He assumes that it must be locked, but it is not.