Dean Koontz - By the Light of the Moon

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Dean Koontz has surpassed his longtime reputation as "America's most popular suspense novelist"(Rolling Stone) to become one of the most celebrated and successful writers of our time. Reviewers hail his boundless originality, his art, his unparalleled ability to create highly textured, riveting drama, at once viscerally familiar and utterly unique.
Author of one #1 New York Times bestseller after another, Koontz is at the pinnacle of his powers, spinning mysteries and miracles, enthralling tales that speak directly to today's readers, balm for the heart and fire for the mind. In this stunning new novel, he delivers a tour de force of dark suspense and brilliant revelation that has all the Koontz trademarks: adventure, chills, riddles, humor, heartbreak, an unforgettable cast of characters, and a climax that will leave you clamoring for more.
Dylan O'Connor is a gifted young artist just trying to do the right thing in life. He's on his way to an arts festival in Santa Fe when he stops to get a room for himself and his twenty-year-old autistic brother, Shep. But in a nightmarish instant, Dylan is attacked by a mysterious "doctor," injected with a strange substance, and told that he is now a carrier of something that will either kill him...or transform his life in the most remarkable way. Then he is told that he must flee--before the doctor's enemies hunt him down for the secret circulating through his body. No one can help him, the doctor says, not even the police.
Stunned, disbelieving, Dylan is turned loose to run for his life...and straight into an adventure that will turn the next twenty-four hours into an odyssey of terror, mystery--and wondrous discovery. It is a journey that begins when Dylan and Shep's path intersects with that of Jillian Jackson. Before that evening Jilly was a beautiful comedian whose biggest worry was whether she would ever find a decent man. Now she too is a carrier. And even as Dylan tries to convince her that they'll be safer sticking together, cold-eyed men in a threatening pack of black Suburbans approach, only seconds before Jilly's classic Coupe DeVille explodes into thin air.
Now the three are on the run together, but with no idea whom they're running from--or why. Meanwhile Shep has begun exhibiting increasingly disturbing behavior. And whatever it is that's coursing through their bodies seems to have plunged them into one waking nightmare after another. Seized by sinister premonitions, they find themselves inexplicably drawn to crime scenes--just minutes before the crimes take place.
What this unfathomable power is, how they can use it to stop the evil erupting all around them, and why they have been chosen are only parts of a puzzle that reaches back into the tragic past and the dark secrets they all share: secrets of madness, pain, and untimely death. Perhaps the answer lies in the eerie, enigmatic messages that Shep, with precious time running out, begins to repeat, about an entity who does his work "by the light of the moon."
By the Light of the Moon is a novel of heart-stopping suspense and transcendent beauty, of how evil can destroy us and love can redeem us--a masterwork of the imagination in which the surprises come page after page and the spell of sublime storytelling triumphs throughout.

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'I guess I failed to vote when Lincoln Proctor was elected to be the new god.'

Taking her hands out of her armpits, Jilly opened her fists and looked at her palms. She was glad that she didn't know how to read them.

Dylan said, 'These colonies of nanomachines might be able to create new connections between various lobes of the brain, new neural pathways-'

She resisted the impulse to put her hands to her head, for fear that she would feel some faint strange vibration through her skull, evidence of a horde of nanomachines busily changing her from within.

'-better synapses. Synapses are the points of contact between neurons in a neural pathway inside the brain, and apparently they become fatigued when we think or just when we stay awake too long. When they're fatigued they slow down our thought processes.'

Dead serious, not reaching for a wisecrack, she said, 'I could use a little synapse fatigue right now. My thoughts are spinning way too fast.'

'There's more in the interview,' Dylan said, pointing again at the laptop screen. 'I skimmed some of it, and there was a lot that I just didn't understand, a lot of fumfuddle about something called the precentral gyrus, and the postcentral gyrus, Purkinje cells… on and on with the arcane words. But I understood enough to realize what a hole we're in.'

No longer able to resist pressing her fingertips to her temples, Jilly felt no vibrations. Nevertheless, she said, 'God, it doesn't bear thinking about. Millions of tiny nanomachines and nanocomputers salted through your head, squirming around in there like so many bees, busy ants, making changes… It's not tolerable, is it?'

Dylan's face had gone gray enough to suggest that if his usual optimism had not burned out, at least it had for the moment grown as dim as banked coals. 'It's got to be tolerable. We don't have any choice but to think about it. Unless we take the Shep option. But then who would cut our food into squares and rectangles?'

Indeed, Jilly couldn't decide whether talking about this machine infection or not talking about it would lead more surely and quickly to full-blown panic. She felt a dark winged terror perched within her, its feathers fluttering agitatedly, and she knew that if she didn't control it, didn't keep it firmly on its perch, if she allowed it to take flight, she might never bring it to roost again; and she knew that once it had flown long enough, frantically battering its pinions against the walls of every chamber in the mansion of her mind, her sanity would take flight with it.

She said, 'It's like being told you've got mad cow disease or brain parasites.'

'Except it's intended to be a boon to humanity.'

'Boon, huh? I'll bet somewhere in that interview, the nutcase used the term master race or super race , or something like it.'

'Wait'll you hear. From the day Proctor first conceived of using nanotechnology for the forced evolution of the brain, he knew exactly what the people who underwent it should be called. Proctorians.'

A thunderous bolt of anger was the ideal thing to distract Jilly from her terror and to keep it caged. 'What an egotistical, self-satisfied freak! '

'That's one apt description,' Dylan agreed.

Still apparently brooding about the superiority of square-cut snack crackers to the sucky-shapey Goldfish, Shep said, 'Cheez-Its.'

'Last night,' Dylan said, 'Proctor told me that if he weren't such a coward, he would have injected himself.'

'If he hadn't had the bad grace to get himself blown up,' Jilly declared, 'I'd inject the freak right now, get me an even bigger damn syringe than his, pump all those nanomachines straight into his brain through his ass.'

Dylan smiled a gray smile. 'You are an angry person.'

'Yeah. It feels good.'

'Cheez-Its.'

'Proctor told me he wasn't a fit role model for anyone,' Dylan said, 'that he had too much pride to be contrite. Kept rambling on about his character flaws.'

'What – that's supposed to make me go all gooey with compassion?'

'I'm just remembering what he said.'

Motivated partly by the twitchy feeling that she got from thinking about all those nanomachines roaming in her gray matter and partly by a sense of righteous outrage, Jilly became too agitated to sit still any longer. Supercharged with nervous energy, she wanted to go for a long run or perform vigorous calisthenics – or preferably, ideally, find someone whose ass needed kicking and then kick it until her foot ached, until she couldn't lift her leg anymore.

Jilly shot to her feet with such agitation that she startled Dylan into bolting off his chair, as well.

Between them, Shep stood, moving faster than Shep usually moved. He said, 'Cheez-Its,' raised his right hand, pinched a scrap of nothing between thumb and forefinger, tweaked, and folded all three of them out of the motel room.

29

Being an attractive, personable, and frequently amusing woman with no halitosis problem, Jillian Jackson had often been taken to lunch by young men who appreciated her fine qualities, but she had never before been folded to lunch.

She didn't actually witness herself folding, didn't see herself become the equivalent of a Playboy Playmate sans staples, nor did she feel any discomfort. The cheesy motel room and furnishings instantly rumpled into bizarrely juxtaposed fragments and then doubled-pleated-creased-crimped-ruckled-twilled-tucked away from her. Beveled shards of another place folded toward her, appearing somehow to pass through the receding motel room, the departure point shadowy and lamplit but the destination full of sunshine, so that for a moment she seemed to be inside a gigantic kaleidoscope, her world but a jumble of colorful mosaic fragments in the process of shifting from a dark pattern to a brighter one.

Objectively, transit time might have been nil; they might have gone from here to there instantaneously; but subjectively, she timed it at three or four seconds. Her feet slipped off motel-room carpet, the rubber soles of her athletic shoes stuttered a few inches across concrete, and she found herself standing with Dylan and Shepherd outside the front doors of a restaurant, a diner.

Shepherd had folded them back to the restaurant in Safford, where they had eaten dinner the previous night. This struck her as being a bad development because Safford was where Dylan had introduced the cowboy, Ben Tanner, to his lost granddaughter and, more important, where he had beaten the crap out of Lucas Crocker in the parking lot before calling the police to report that Crocker had been keeping his mother, Noreen, chained in the cellar. Even though the restaurant staff for the lunch shift probably didn't include any employees who'd been at work late the previous day, someone might recognize Dylan from a description, and in fact at least one cop might have returned today to examine the scene in daylight.

Then she realized that she was mistaken. They weren't all the way back in Safford. The establishment looked similar to the one in Safford because both shared the creatively bankrupt but traditional architecture of motel restaurants across the West, featuring a deep overhang on the roof to shield the big windows from the desert sun, low flagstone-faced walls supporting the windows, and flagstone-faced planters full of vegetation struggling to survive in the heat.

This was the coffee shop adjacent to the motel out of which they had just folded. Immediately south of them lay the motel registration office, and beyond the office, a covered walkway served a long wing of rooms, of which theirs was the next to last. Shepherd had folded them a grand distance of four or five hundred feet.

'Shep is hungry.'

Jilly turned, expecting to find an open gateway behind them, like the one Dylan had described on the hilltop in California, except that this one ought to provide a view not of the motel bathroom, but of the empty bedroom that they had a moment ago departed. Evidently, however, Shepherd had instantly closed the gate this time, for only the blacktop parking lot shimmered darkly in the noontime sun.

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