Dean Koontz - By the Light of the Moon

Darkness ruled the first floor, but light shone behind the curtains of half the upstairs windows. Someone was home. He wondered if they were aware of his approach, if they were waiting for him – or if his appearance at their doorstep would come as a surprise to them. Perhaps they instinctively sensed something rushing toward them as Dylan himself had been aware of being drawn to an unknown place, by a power inexplicable.

He heard a noise that seemed to come from the right, at the side of the house.

Halfway along the front walk toward the porch, he veered off the herringbone bricks. He crossed the lawn to the driveway.

Attached to the house: a carport. Under the carport, an aging Buick stood beyond the reach of the waning moonlight as during the day it would shelter from the fierce desert sun.

Hot metal pinged and ticked as it cooled. The vehicle had arrived here only recently.

Past the open end of the carport, toward the back of the house, a noise arose: a jangling, as of keys on a ring.

Though a sense of urgency continued to plague him undiminished, Dylan stood motionless beside the car. Listening. Waiting. Uncertain what to do next.

He didn't belong here. He felt as if he were a lurking thief, although as far as he knew, he hadn't come to this place to steal anything.

On the other hand, the operative phrase was as far as he knew . Under the influence of the injected stuff , he might discover himself driven to commit heinous acts of which he would previously have been incapable. Theft might be the least of the crimes from which he would be powerless to turn away.

He thought of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , the inner beast released and sent roaming.

From the moment he had succumbed to the urgent need to drive west, his fear had been sharp, but also it had been sheathed in a blunting thickness of compulsion and confusion. Now he wondered if the substance circulating in him might be the chemical equivalent of a demon saddling his soul and digging spurs into his heart. He shuddered, and an icy blade of fear flayed his nerves and caused the skin to prickle with dread on his arms and on the nape of his neck.

Again, not far away, he heard the soft brass ring of keys on keys. Hinges creaked, perhaps those of a door.

At the back of the house, light bloomed behind daisy-patterned curtains at the ground-floor windows.

He didn't know what to do, and then he did: He touched the handle on the driver's door of the Buick. Cascades of sparks whirled across his vision, phantom fireflies in flight behind his eyes.

Inside his head, he heard a fizzing-crackling electrical sound, the same as he had heard earlier in the Expedition, when he'd touched the button that bore the cartoon toad's grinning face. Some kind of seizure afflicted him, frightening but fortunately less severe than full convulsions, and as his tongue vibrated against the roof of his mouth, he heard himself make that queer, half-mechanical sound again. 'Hunnn-na-na-na-na-na-na-na!'

This episode proved to be briefer than the first, and when he attempted to quell the stutter, he at once fell silent, instead of having to let it run its course, as had been the case previously.

With the final na , he was on the move again. Quietly, quietly through the carport, around the corner of the house.

Shallower than the veranda at the front of the house, the back porch also featured plainer posts. The steps were concrete instead of brick.

When his hand enfolded the knob on the back door, fireflies flew inside his head, but this bright swarm numbered fewer than the two that had flown in advance of it. The accompanying electric crackle sounded less cataclysmic than before. Clenching his teeth, pressing his tongue firmly against the roof of his mouth, he avoided making any sound this time.

The lock was not engaged. The knob turned when he tried it, and the door opened when he pushed inward.

Dylan O'Conner crossed a threshold that was not his to cross, entered uninvited, appalled by this bold trespass, yet compelled to proceed.

The plump, white-haired woman in the kitchen wore a candy-striped uniform. She looked weary and troubled, different from the fresh and cheerful Mrs. Santa Claus that she'd been when, a couple hours ago, she had taken his order for burgers and had fixed the toad pin to his shirt.

A large white bag of takeout, discount dinner from her job, stood on the counter near the cooktop. This potpourri of grease and onion and cheese and charbroiled meat had already flooded the room with a delicious melange of aromas.

She stood beside the kitchen table, her once-pink face fading toward gray, captured by an expression between worry and despair. She stared down at an arrangement of objects on the Formica tabletop, a still life unlike any that the old masters had ever painted: two empty cans of Budweiser, one upright, one on its side, both partly crushed; a scattered collection of pills and capsules, many white, some pink, a few green giants; an ashtray containing two roaches – not the kind that had ever crawled or nested under the warm motor of a refrigerator, but the butt ends of two marijuana joints.

The woman didn't hear Dylan enter, didn't glimpse the movement of the door from the corner of her eye, and for a moment she remained unaware of him. When she realized that she had a visitor, she shifted her gaze from the table to his face, but she seemed to have been too numbed by the tableau on the Formica to be immediately surprised or alarmed by his unexpected arrival.

He saw her alive, dead, alive, dead, and the faint cold fear that thrilled through his veins thickened into terror.

Dylan crossing in front of the Expedition, through the headlight beams, his yellow-and-blue shirt as bright as any afternoon on Maui, might have vanished before Jilly's eyes, stepping out of this world into an alternate reality, and she would have been surprised but not astonished. The hazardous return drive to town had been a high-speed journey squarely into the Twilight Zone, and after her vision in the desert and the river of spirit doves, she might not be capable of astonishment again this side of the grave.

When Dylan didn't vanish in front of the truck, when he reached the brick walkway and started toward the house, Jilly turned her head to look at Shepherd in the backseat.

She caught him watching her. They locked stares. His green eyes widened at the shock of contact, and then he closed them.

'You stay here, Shep.'

He didn't answer.

'Don't move out of that seat. We'll be right back.'

Under his pale lids, his eyes twitched, twitched.

When Jilly glanced toward the house, she saw Dylan angling from the brick walk toward the driveway.

Leaning across the console, she doused the headlights. Switched off the engine. Plucked the keys from the ignition.

'Did you hear me, Shep?'

His shuttered eyes appeared to be full of dreams, marked by more REM than those of a sleeping man thrashed by nightmares.

'Don't move, stay here, don't move, we'll be right back,' she counseled as she opened the passenger's door and swiveled on her seat, keeping her legs up to spare Fred from injury.

Olives littered the sidewalk and squished underfoot, as though recently the neighbors had gathered here for an outdoor martini party but had discarded their cocktail garnishes instead of eating them.

Dylan followed the driveway into the layered tarps of shadow that draped the sedan in the carport, though he remained in sight.

A breath of breeze as dry as stirred gin with a single drop of vermouth inspired a subtle silken rustle from the olive trees. Over this seductive swish, Jilly heard Hunnn-na-na-na-na-na-na-na!

His eerie stutter spiraled down her cochleae to the bottom of her ears and seemed to leap from there into her spine, vibrating from vertebra to vertebra, shaking shivers from her.