Dean Koontz - By the Light of the Moon

Returning to the kitchen, she discovered much to her dismay that in a crunch, image and reality were not, in her case, the same thing. As she searched quickly for a weapon, drawer to drawer, cupboard to cupboard, the bones in her legs jellified, while her heart hardened into a sledge that hammered against her ribs.

By any standard of law or combat, a butcher knife qualified as a weapon. But the nearly arthritic stiffness with which her right hand closed on the handle convinced her that she'd never be comfortable wielding it on anything more responsive than a chuck roast.

Besides, to use a knife, you had to get in close to your enemy. Assuming that she might have to thump Kenny enough to stop him, if not actually waste him, Jilly preferred to thump him from as great a distance as possible, preferably with a high-powered rifle from a neighboring rooftop.

The pantry was just a pantry, not also an armory. The heaviest weaponry on its shelves were cans of cling peaches in heavy syrup.

Then Jilly noticed that Marj apparently had been plagued by an ant problem, and with a flash of inspiration, she said, 'Ah.'

Neither the baseball bat nor his righteous anger made Dylan sufficiently brave or sufficiently foolish to crash into a dark room in search of a dope-crazed, hormone-crazed, just-plain-crazed teenager with more types of edge weapons than Death himself could name. After easing the door open – and feeling the tingle of psychic spoor – he waited in the hallway, his back to the wall, listening.

He heard enough nothing to suggest that he might be adrift in the vacuum of deep space, and as he began to wonder if he had gone deaf, he decided that Kenny must be no less patient than he was full-on psychotic.

Although Dylan wanted to do this about as much as he wanted to wrestle a crocodile, he edged into the open doorway, reached around the casing into the room, and felt the wall for the light switch. He assumed that Kenny stood poised to respond to such a maneuver, and his expectations of having his hand pinned to the wall with a knife were so high that he was not far short of astonished when he still had all his fingers after flipping the switch.

Grandma's room didn't have a ceiling fixture, but one of two night-stand lamps came on: a ginger jar painted with tulips, crowned by a pleated yellow shade in the shape of a coolie hat. Soft light and soft shadows shared the space.

Two other doors served the room. Both were closed. One most likely led to a closet. A bathroom might lie behind the other.

The drapes at the three windows were neither long enough nor full enough to conceal anyone.

A freestanding, full-length, oval-shaped mirror occupied one corner. No one lurked behind it, but Dylan's reflection occupied its face, looking less frightened than he felt, bigger than he thought of himself.

The queen-size bed was positioned so that Kenny might be hiding on the far side, lying on the floor, but no other furniture offered concealment.

Of more immediate concern was the figure on the bed. A thin chenille spread, a blanket, and a top sheet were tossed in disarray, but someone appeared to be lying under them, concealed head to foot.

As in countless prison-escape movies, this might actually have been pillows arranged to mimic the human form, except that the bedclothes trembled slightly.

By opening the door and switching on the light, Dylan already had announced his presence. Cautiously approaching the bed, he said, 'Kenny?'

Under the tumbled bedding, the ill-defined figure stopped shaking. For a moment it froze and lay as still as any cadaver beneath a morgue sheet.

Dylan gripped the baseball bat with both hands, ready to swing for the fences. 'Kenny?'

The hidden form began to twitch, as though with uncontainable excitement, with nervous energy.

The door that might lead to a closet: still closed. The door that might lead to a bathroom: still closed.

Dylan glanced over his shoulder, toward the hall door.

Nothing.

He grappled for the name that the shackled boy mentioned, the name of the threatened girl from down the street, and then he had it: 'Becky?'

The mysterious figure twitched, twitched, so alive beneath the covers, but it did not reply.

Although he dared not club what he could not see, Dylan was loath to put his hand to the bedclothes to toss them aside, for the same reason that he would have been reluctant to pull back the tarp on a woodpile if he suspected that a rattlesnake coiled among the cords.

He also wasn't eager to use the fat end of the baseball bat to lift the bedclothes out of the way. While entangled with the covers, the bat would be an ineffective weapon, and although this maneuver would leave Dylan vulnerable for only the briefest moment, a moment would be all that Kenny needed if he shot off the bed and out from under the rising covers, armed with a specialty knife well designed for evisceration.

Soft light, soft shadows.

House hushed.

The shape, twitching.

Jilly in the downstairs hall, archway to archway, past three lightless rooms, listened at each threshold, detected nothing, and moved onward to the foyer, past the lamp table, to the foot of the stairs.

Starting to climb, she heard a metallic plink behind her, and halted on the second step. Plink was followed by tat-a-tat and by a quick strumming – zzziiinnnggg – and then by utter stillness.

The noises had seemed to come from the first room inside the front door, directly opposite the foyer. Probably the living room.

When you were trying to avoid a run-in with a young man whose own grandmother's best assessment of him boiled down to crazy-drugs-knives , you didn't want to hear peculiar metallic sounds coming out of a dark room at your back. The subsequent silence did not have – could never possibly have – the innocent quality of the silence that had preceded plink .

With the unknown ahead, but now also behind her, Jilly did not suddenly discover the elusive inner Amazon, but she didn't freeze or cringe in fear, either. Her stoic mother and a few bad breaks long ago had taught her that adversity must be faced forthrightly, without equivocation; Mom counseled that you must tell yourself that every misfortune was custard, that it was cake and pie, and you must eat it up and be done with it. If grinning Kenny lurked in the pitch-black living room, stropping knives against each other loud enough to be confident that she would hear him, Jilly had an entire picnic of trouble laid out for her.

She retreated from the stairs into the foyer once more.

Plink, plink. Tick-tick-tick. Zing… zzziiinnnggg!

Short of inhaling a gale like the big bad wolf in the fairy tale and blowing the covers off the bed, Dylan either had to stand here waiting for the shrouded figure to make the first move, which invited disaster more certainly than did taking action, or he must unveil the twitching form to learn its name and intentions.

Holding the baseball bat upraised in his right hand, he seized the bedclothes with his free hand and whipped them aside, revealing a black-haired, blue-eyed, barefoot teenage girl in cut-off jeans and a sleeveless blue-checkered blouse.

'Becky?'

Fright possessed her face, her electroshock-wide eyes. Tremors of fear flowed through her in plentiful rillets that repeatedly backed up into an overspilling twitch, jerking her head, her entire body, with the force he'd seen translated through the covers.

Her stricken gaze remained fixed on the ceiling as if she were unaware that help had arrived. Her obliviousness had the quality of a trance.

As he repeated her name, Dylan wondered if she might have been drugged. She seemed to be in a semiparalytic state and unaware of her surroundings.