Dean Koontz - By the Light of the Moon

Then, without glancing at him, she spoke urgently between teeth more than half clenched: 'Run.'

With the bat raised in his right hand, he remained acutely aware of the open hallway door and of the two closed doors, alert for any sound, movement, swell of shadow. No threat arose on any side, no brutish figure that clashed with the daisy wallpaper, the yellow drapes, and the luminously reflective collection of satin-glass perfume bottles on the dresser.

'Ill get you out of here,' he promised.

He reached for her with his free hand, but she didn't take it. She lay stiff and shaking, attention still focused fearfully on the ceiling as if it were lowering toward her, a great crushing weight, as in one of those old movie serials featuring a villain who built elaborate machines of death when a revolver would have done the job better.

'Run,' Becky whispered with a note of greater desperation, 'for God's sake, run.'

Her shaking, her paralysis, her frantic admonitions rattled his nerves, which were already rattling like hailstones on a tin roof.

In those old serials, a calculated dose of curare might reduce a victim to the helpless condition of this woman, but not in the real world. Her paralysis was probably psychological, though nonetheless hampering. To lift her off the bed and carry her from the room, he would have to put down the baseball bat.

'Where's Kenny?' he whispered.

At last her gaze lowered from the ceiling, toward the corner of the room in which one of the closed doors waited.

'There?' he pressed.

Becky's eyes met his for the first time… and then at once shifted again toward the door.

Warily Dylan moved around the foot of the bed, crossing the remainder of the room. Kenny might come at him from anywhere.

Bedsprings sang, and the girl grunted as she exerted herself.

Turning, Dylan saw Becky no longer lying face-up, saw her risen to her knees, and rising still, all the way to her feet upon the bed, with a knife in her right hand.

Tonk. Twang. Plink.

Eating up trouble as though it were custard, but not pleased by the taste, Jilly reached the archway on the tonk , found the light switch on the twang . On the plink , she bathed the threat in light.

The furious beating of wings almost caused her to reel backward. She expected the tumult of doves or pigeons that had spiraled around her by the side of the highway, or the blinding blizzard of birds that she alone had seen while in the Expedition. But the flock made no appearance, and after the briefest spate of flapping, the wings fell silent.

Kenny wasn't sharpening knives. Unless he proved to be crouched behind an armchair or a sofa, Kenny wasn't even present.

Another series of metallic sounds drew her attention to a cage. It hung five or six feet off the floor, supported by a base similar to that of a floor lamp.

With tiny taloned feet, a parakeet clung to the heavy-gauge wire that formed the bars of its habitat; using its beak, the feathered prisoner plucked at those same restraints. With a sweep of its fluid neck, the parakeet strummed its beak back and forth across a swath of bars as if it were a handless harpist playing a glissando passage: zzziiinnnggg, zzziiinnnggg .

Her tattered reputation as a warrioress having been further diminished by mistaking a parakeet for a mortal threat, Jilly retreated from this moment of humiliation. Returning to the stairs, she heard once more the bird's vigorously feathered drumming of the air, as though it were demanding the freedom to fly.

The rap and rustle of wings so vividly recalled her paranormal experiences that she resisted an urge to flee the house, and instead fled up toward Dylan. The bird grew quiet by the time she reached the midpoint landing, but remaining in flight from the memory of wings, she hurried to the upper floor with too little caution.

Fake fear had washed out of Becky's blue eyes, and a mad glee had flooded into them.

She launched herself off the bed in a frenzy, slashing wildly with the knife. Dylan twisted out of her way, and Becky proved to have more enthusiasm for murder than practice at it. She stumbled, nearly fell, barely escaped skewering herself, and shouted, 'Kenny!'

Here came Kenny through the door that Becky had not indicated. He had certain qualities of an eel: lithe and quick to the point of sinuousness, lean but muscular, with the mad pressure-pinched eyes of a creature condemned to live in cold, deep, rancid waters. Dylan half expected Kenny's teeth to be pointed and backward-hooked like the teeth of any serpent, whether on land or in water.

He was a young man with flair, dressed in black cowboy boots, black jeans, a black T-shirt, and a black denim jacket brightened by embroidered green Indian designs. The embroidery matched the shade of the feather in the cowboy hat that had been perched atop the suitcases in the bedroom across the hall.

'Who're you ?' Kenny asked Dylan, and without waiting for an answer, he demanded of Becky, 'Where the hell's the old bitch?'

The white-haired woman in the candy-striped uniform, home from a hard day's work, was no doubt the old bitch for whom these two had lain in wait.

'Who cares who he is,' Becky said. 'Just kill him, then we'll find the old pus bag and gut her.'

The shackled boy had misunderstood the relationship between his brother and the girl. Cold-blooded conspirators, they intended to slaughter Grandma and little brother, perhaps steal whatever pathetic trove of cash the woman had hidden in her mattress, toss Kenny's two suitcases in the car, and hit the road.

They might make a stop farther along the street at Becky's house to pick up her luggage. Maybe they intended to kill her family, too.

Whether or not their plan subsequent to this snafu would prove successful, right now they had Dylan in a pincer play. They were well positioned to dispatch him quickly.

Kenny held a knife with a twelve-inch blade and two wickedly sharp cutting edges. The rubber-coated, looped handle featured a finger-formed grip that appeared to be user-friendly and difficult to dislodge from a determined hand.

Less designed for war than for the kitchen, Becky's weapon would nevertheless chop a man as effectively as it might have been used to dismember a chicken for a stew pot.

Considerably longer than either blade, the baseball bat provided Dylan with the advantage of reach. And he knew from experience that his size warned off punks and drunks who might otherwise have taken a whack at him; most aggressive types assumed that only a brute could reside within the physique of a brute, when in fact he had the heart of a lamb.

Perhaps Kenny hesitated also because he didn't understand the situation any longer, and worried about murdering a stranger without knowing how many others might also be in the house. The homicidal meanness in those eely eyes was tempered by a cunning akin to that of the serpent in Eden.

Dylan considered trying to pass himself off as a police officer and claiming that backup was on the way, but even if the lack of a uniform could be explained, the use of a baseball bat instead of a handgun made the cop story a hard sell.

Whether or not a drop of prudence seasoned the drug-polluted pool of Kenny's mind, Becky was all intense animal need and demon glee, certain not to be dissuaded for long by the reach of the bat or by her adversary's size.

With one foot, Dylan feinted toward Kenny, but then spun more directly toward the girl and swung the bat at the hand in which she held the knife.

Becky was perhaps a high-school gymnast or one of the legions of ballerina wannabes on whom multitudes of loving American parents had squandered countless millions with the certainty that they were nurturing the next Margot Fonteyn. Although not talented enough for Olympic competition or for the professional dance theater, she proved to be quick, limber, and more coordinated than she had appeared to be when she'd flung herself off the bed. She fell back, avoiding the bat with a cry of premature triumph – 'Ha!' – and at once sprang to her right to get out of the way of the backswing, half crouching to contract her leg muscles, the better to move with power when she decided how to move.