Dean Koontz - By the Light of the Moon

With the utterance of the final syllable, Dylan disappeared toward the back of the carport.

Making olive paste underfoot as she crossed the public sidewalk, shuffling through the grass to clean her shoes, Jilly hurried toward the place where he'd been just before darkness swallowed him.

Her face plump and sweet, ideal for Christmas cards, was in the next instant drawn, bleak, fit for Halloween. In a quiver of shadow cast by something invisible, her white and glossy hair became tangled and matted with blood, but in a shimmer of light that had no apparent source, red tangles smoothed and clarified again into white glossy locks. A face pale pink under snowy hair withered into grainy gray when framed by clotted curls and snarls. Her eyes met Dylan's with bewilderment, but then shocked wide and filled with cold mortality – and yet an instant later were alert, aware, startled once more.

Dylan saw her alive, dead, alive, dead, one image rising out of the other, briefly asserting its reality, then submerging in its antithesis. He didn't know beyond doubt what this hideous apparition meant, if in fact it meant anything at all, but he glanced at his hands, expecting them to appear alternately clean and filthy with the woman's blood. When the vision of violence did not involve his hands, his innards nevertheless remained a clenched mass of dread, and he raised his eyes to her face once more, half convinced that whatever power had driven him to this place would eventually use him as the instrument of her death.

'Cheeseburgers, French fries, apple pies, and vanilla shakes,' she said, proving either that he had been memorable during his brief visit to the takeout counter or that her powers of recollection were formidable.

Instead of answering her, Dylan found himself stepping to the kitchen table and picking up one of the empty cans of Budweiser. The fireflies flew again within the bone cave of his skull, but he heard far less of the fizz-and-crackle of arcing electrical current than he had heard before, and behind his clenched teeth, not one convulsive spasm plagued his tongue.

'Get out of the house,' he advised the woman. 'You're not safe here. Hurry, go, now .' Whether she went or stayed, he didn't know, because even as he spoke, he dropped the beer can on the table and at once turned from her. He didn't look back. Could not.

He hadn't yet come to the end of this bizarre journey begun in the Expedition and continued here on foot. Beyond the kitchen, past an open door, lay a plank-floored hallway softened by a threadbare, rose-patterned runner. His sense of urgency renewed, Dylan was drawn forward toward some dark destination.

Reaching the carport, Jilly peered back toward the Expedition, where the streetlamps, filtered through olive branches, revealed Shepherd in silhouette, in the backseat where he had been told to stay.

Past the Buick, out of the carport, she hurried to the rear of the house, stirring up a cloud of pale moths when she brushed against a camellia bush with blooms as full and red as maidens' hearts.

The back door stood open. A rectangle of outfalling kitchen light revealed a porch floor painted pearl-gray and remarkably free of dust for the porch of a house in a desert town.

Even under these extraordinary circumstances, she might have halted at the threshold, might have politely rapped knuckles against the jamb of the open door. The sight of the familiar white-haired woman in the kitchen, lifting the receiver of a wall-mounted phone, alarmed and emboldened Jilly, however, and she stepped off the porch, onto the freshly polished yellow-and-green basket-weave linoleum.

By the time Jilly surprised her, the woman had pressed 9, pressed 1, on the telephone keypad. Jilly took the receiver from her grasp, and hung up before the second 1 could be entered.

If the police had been summoned, eventually the men in the black Suburbans would have followed.

No longer the cheerful purveyor of fast food and have-a-nice-day sentiments, wearied by a long day's work, haggard by worry, confused by the events of the past minute, this Disneyesque grandmother wrung her hands as though to squeeze the nervous tremors from them. With a note of amazed recognition, she said, 'You. Chicken sandwich, French fries, root beer.'

'Big man, Hawaiian shirt?' Jilly inquired.

The woman nodded. 'He said I wasn't safe here.'

'Not safe why?'

'He said get out of the house now .'

'Where did he go?'

Although well wrung, her hand remained sodden with tremors as she pointed shakily toward the open door to the downstairs hallway, where soft rose-colored light glowed at the far end, past a gauntlet of shadows.

Walking on roses, green leaves, and thorns, he passed openings arched like the entrances to arbors, with dark rooms beyond, where anything might be growing in the gloom. One room to the right and two on his left worried him, even though he was drawn to none of them and could most likely assume that his compulsion to keep moving meant the danger still lay ahead rather than to either side.

He had no doubt that something dangerous waited to be met. The mysterious attractant that had pulled him through the Arizona night would not prove to be a pot of gold, nor would this house likely ever lie at the end of any rainbow.

Toad pin to car door to beer can, he had followed a trail of strange energy left behind by the white-haired woman's touch.

Marjorie. Just now he knew she was Marjorie, though her uniform had not featured a name tag.

Toad pin to kitchen, he had been seeking Marjorie, for in the invisible residue that her touch left on inanimate objects, he had read the pattern of her destiny. He had felt the broken threads in the tapestry of her fate and had somehow known that they would be broken here, this night.

From the half-crushed beer can onward, he stalked a new quarry. Unknowingly, Marjorie had been prey when she'd entered her home; and Dylan sought her would-be killer.

Having arrived at even this half-formed understanding of the nature of the looming confrontation, he realized that pressing onward was an act of reckless valor, if not evidence of insanity, but yet he was not able to retreat a single step. He was constrained to proceed by the same unknown and overmastering power that had forced him to turn back from the promise of New Mexico and to drive westward at speeds in excess of a hundred miles per hour.

The hallway led to a modest front foyer, where a blown-glass lamp under a rose silk shade stood on a small table with a delicate carved fretwork skirt. This was the sole source of light beyond the kitchen, and it barely illuminated the rising staircase as far as the landing.

When Dylan put one hand on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs, he experienced again the predator's psychic spoor, the same that he had found upon the beer can, as clear to him as a fugitive's unique scent is unmistakable to a bloodhound. The character of these traces was different from the quality of those Marjorie had left on the toad pin and the car door, for in these he sensed a malignancy, as though they had been laid down by a spirit that passed this way on cloven hooves.

He took his hand off the newel cap and stared for a moment at the polished curve of darkly stained poplar, searching for evidence of any residue of either a physical or a supernatural nature, but finding none. His fingerprints and palm print overlaid those of the beer drinker, and though not one loop or arch or whorl could be seen by the unassisted eye, police-lab technicians would later be able to make visible – with fixative chemicals, powder, and oblique light – irrefutable proof that he'd once been here.

The certainty that fingerprints exist – all but invisible and yet sufficiently recoverable to convict a man of any crime from theft to murder – provided an analogy that allowed Dylan more easily to believe that with their very touch, people might leave behind something more peculiar but every bit as real as natural oils impressed with the patterns of skin ridges.