Dean Koontz: The Moonlit Mind: A Tale of Suspense

He races into the cemetery, weaving among the headstones, which in the moonlight appear to be carved of ice. He wishes this were as simple as a creepy comic book, wishes someone long buried would erupt from the ground, judge him with a few harsh words, seize him, pull him down, and bring him to his end. But the dead want nothing to do with him, they will not rise for him, neither will they speak.

At last, at the center of the cemetery, having passed through the arrangement of mausoleum walls where ashes rather than bodies are interred, in the center of the circular lawn, he clambers onto the circular mass of granite that serves as a bench, and lies on his back.

No slightest susurration of the city reaches here. His labored breathing and his sobbing are the only sounds. He cries himself to silence among these memorials to lost souls.

He thinks that he will never sleep again, that he is too wicked to deserve sleep. He lies on his back, staring at the moon, and the cratered face of the old man in the moon seems to stare back at him. The night sky grows deeper. The earlier stars call forth others. He sleeps.

Hard years of change, now Crispin thirteen, no longer quite a boy, not yet a man …

Good dog Harley sits on the booth bench beside Amity Onawa, as if the part of the story that the girl likes best is also the most appealing part to him. His eyes twinkle in the candlelight.

“Harley takes his paw off the empty box,” Crispin continues, “and I put the cards away. I’m able to get back to sleep for a while, with no bad dreams. In the morning, I expect to go upstairs to the magic-and-game shop before the start of the business day. I should be able to unlock the front door from inside, and if I can’t, me and Harley will wait until the old man and woman open the place, then we’ll dash out past them, no explanations.”

“Sounds easy,” Amity says, and smiles again.

“Totally easy. Except when we go upstairs from the basement storeroom, there isn’t any magic shop like there was the night before. The store is empty, bare, no business there of any kind.”

“No old man with green eyes and six emerald rings.”

“No one, nothing,” Crispin confirms. “Hasn’t been anything happening there for a long time, judging by the dust and cobwebs.”

“But the storeroom …”

“I go back down the stairs. Harley doesn’t bother coming with me, as if he already knows what I’ll find. Which is nothing. All the shelves and all the stock on them are gone. The storeroom is as empty as the store above it.”

“This is two days after you ran away from Theron Hall.”

“Two days but the third night. After everything that happened in Theron Hall, maybe I should have been scared half to death by the magic shop disappearing, but I wasn’t.”

She stares at him unblinking. He does not look away from her, because this is the hardest part for him to tell, and it means more if he can tell it eye to eye.

“I was able to unlock the door from inside, and we closed it behind us as we went. The day was warm for early October, the sky so blue, and birds singing in the streetside trees. I looked back at the shop and saw a FOR RENT sign taped to the inside of the door glass. At the bottom was a phone number and a Realtor’s contact name. The name was Miss Regina Angelorum. I was too young then to know that it was a name but also more than a name. Years would pass before I knew what it meant, but right then, at the start of my third day free of Theron Hall, I was certain that in spite of my many weaknesses, in spite of my cowardice and my failure to save Mirabell or Harley, I was meant to live, to grow and change, and to accomplish something in this world that mattered.”

They are silent together in the candlelight.

Amity’s eyes are worlds of mystery, as Crispin imagines his eyes must be to her.

Four candles in red-glass cups brighten the table. But for what comes next, Amity wants more light. Earlier she gathered four more candles for this moment. With a butane match, she sets the wicks afire.

Crispin opened the box of cards earlier. Now he shuffles three times, hesitates, then shuffles thrice again.

Amity wants him to deal, and yet she doesn’t. She reaches toward him with one hand, as if to stop him, but then crosses her arms on her chest once more and hugs herself.

With no false drama, dealing them quickly, Crispin turns up four sixes. They are clean cards when they leave his hand, but as he turns them over, they are dirty, creased, and moldy.

The time has come for him to return to Theron Hall.

Having dealt the four sixes on Sunday evening, he must wait until the first employees arrive on Monday to avoid triggering the perimeter alarm. Following a route described by Amity, boy and dog slip out of the department store without being seen by any of the early-arriving guards and maintenance people.

They have no reason to wait for nightfall before approaching Theron Hall. There is no safety in darkness and perhaps more risk.

The first snow of the season fell Saturday night through Sunday morning. Already another storm has moved in. As Crispin and Harley set out for Shadow Hill, Shadow Street, and the house at the crest, new snow begins to sift down upon the old.

Winter transforms the city, white petals floating through an almost windless day, and everywhere the mantles and plowed mounds of the weekend storm remain largely pristine, not yet badly soiled by a workday. How easy it might be to think that with the casting down of this crystal manna, the great metropolis has been sanctified, that it is as innocent as these bridal veils make it seem. Easy for others, perhaps, but not for Crispin.

They approach the grand house from the back street, which is too wide and — when the pavement is visible — too ornately cobbled to be called a mere alley.

A stately carriage house, which serves as a garage, stands at the rear of the property. The pathway that leads from garage to house hasn’t been shoveled, and no footprints disturb the coverlet of snow.

According to what Amity overheard when she served Clarette and friends tea in Eleanor’s a couple of weeks earlier, the family — if such a word applies — and most of the staff are by now in Brazil.

The few who remain have evidently kept busy inside rather than venture into the cold.

Crossing the exposed ground between garage and house, Crispin searches the three floors of windows. No pale face appears at any pane.

A part of him believes that the power that has saved him often in the past few years, the power that wants him to return to Theron Hall to conclude unfinished business, has armored him against harm and will lead him to the third floor and safely away again without a violent encounter. But another part of him, a less wishful Crispin and one who knows that journeying through the fields of evil is the price we pay for free will, expects the worst.

If they know that he stole one of the spare house keys on that September night, they might have changed the lock. Or they might leave it unchanged in anticipation of his return.

Of the three back doors, he chooses the one that opens into the mud room behind the kitchen. The key works. He eases the door open.

The space is dark but for the snow light that presses coldly through two small windows.

He stands listening to a house so silent that perhaps everyone went to Rio, leaving only ghosts behind.

Because he doesn’t want to take off his backpack to use a chair, Crispin leans against the cabinetry to use the mud room’s small whisk broom to brush the caked snow from his shoes and from the legs of his jeans.

The dog shakes his thick coat, flinging off melted snow and bits of icy slush. That noisy moment of grooming doesn’t raise an alarm, which must mean that no one on the skeleton staff is nearby.