Dean Koontz - By the Light of the Moon

Here in the land of the golden poppy and the redwood tree, the time ought to be four minutes till noon, not four till midnight.

'Why's it dark?' Jilly asked.

In the belly of the pig, the illuminated clock showed 9:26.

During the previous trips via folding, either no time elapsed in transit – or at most a few seconds. Dylan had not been aware of any significant period of time passing on this occasion, either.

If they truly had arrived at 9:26 in the evening, Vonetta should have left hours ago. She worked from nine o'clock until five. If she had gone, however, she would have taken the cake with her.

Likewise, she wouldn't have forgotten to turn off the light in the dining room. Vonetta Beesley had always been as reliable as the atomic clock at Greenwich, by which all the nations of the world set their timepieces.

The house stood in a funereal condition, hung with cerements of silence, draped in shrouds of stillness.

The wrongness involved something more than the darkness peering in at the windows, involved the house itself and something within the house. He could hear no evil breathing, no demon on the prowl, but he sensed that nothing here was right.

Jilly must have been alarmed by the same queer perception. She stood precisely on the spot where she had been unfolded, as though afraid to move, and her body language was so clearly written that her tension could easily be read even in these shadows.

The quality of light issuing from the dining room wasn't as it should be. The chandelier over the table, which Dylan couldn't see from this angle, was controlled by a switch with a dimming feature, but even at this low level of brightness, the glow had far too rich a butterscotch color and too moody an aspect to have been thrown off by the brass-and-crystal fixture. Besides, the light didn't originate from chandelier height; the ceiling in the next room was troweled in shadow, and the light appeared to fall to the floor from a point not far above the top of the table.

'Shep, buddy, what's happening here?' Dylan whispered.

Having been promised cake, Shep might have been expected to go directly to the cinnamon glory cooling in a pan under the clock, for it was his nature to be single-minded in all things, and not least of all in the matter of cake. Instead, he took one step toward the door to the dining room, hesitated, and said, 'Shep is brave,' although he sounded more fearful than Dylan had ever before heard him.

Dylan wanted to avoid venturing deeper into the house until he gained a better sense of their situation. He needed a good weapon, as well. The knife drawer offered a trove of wicked cutlery; but he'd had enough of knives lately. He longed for a baseball bat.

'Shep is brave,' Shep said, with even a greater tremor in his voice and with less confidence than before. Yet his head was raised to face the dining-room door rather than the floor at his feet, and as though defying an inner counsel that always advised him to retreat from any challenge, he shuffled forward.

Dylan quickly moved to his brother's side and placed one hand on his shoulder, intending to restrain him, but Shep shrugged it off and continued slowly but determinedly toward the dining room.

Jilly looked to Dylan for guidance. Her dark eyes shone with reflected clock light.

In a stubborn mood, Shep could be an inspiration for any mule; and Dylan detected here an infrequently seen but familiar obstinacy that experience had taught him could not be dealt with easily and certainly not quietly. Shep would do in this matter what he wanted to do, leaving Dylan no option but to follow him warily.

He surveyed the shadowy kitchen for a weapon but saw nothing immediately at hand.

At the threshold, in the burnt-ocher light, Shepherd hesitated, but only briefly, before stepping out of the kitchen. He turned left to face the dining-room table.

When Dylan and Jilly entered the dining room behind Shepherd, they found a boy sitting at the table. He appeared to be ten years old.

The boy did not look up at them, but remained focused on the large basket filled with adorable golden-retriever puppies, which lay before him. Much of the basket was complete, but many of the puppies lacked portions of their bodies and heads. The boy's hands flew, flew from the box of loose puzzle pieces to empty areas of the picture that waited to be filled.

Jilly might not have recognized the young puzzle worker, but Dylan knew him well. The boy was Shepherd O'Conner.

Dylan remembered this puzzle, which possessed a significance so special that he could have painted it from memory with a considerable degree of accuracy. And now he recognized the source of the burnt-ocher light: a pharmacy-style lamp that usually stood on a desk in the study. The lamp featured a deep-yellow glass shade.

On those occasions when Shepherd's autism expressed itself in a particular sensitivity to bright lights, he could not simply work a jigsaw puzzle in the reduced glare made possible by a dimmer switch. Although virtually inaudible to everyone else, the faint buzz of resistance produced by the restraint of electrical current in the rheostat shrieked through his skull as if it were a high-speed bone saw. Therefore, he resorted to the desk lamp with the heavily tinted shade, in which the regular bulb had been replaced with one of lower wattage.

Shepherd hadn't worked a puzzle in the dining room in the past ten years, having moved instead to the table in the kitchen. This basketful of puppies had been the last jigsaw that he had finished in this room.

'Shep is brave,' the standing Shepherd said, but the younger Shepherd at the table didn't look up.

Nothing that had happened heretofore had filled Dylan with a dread as terrible as the anxious fear that now seemed to shrink his heart. This time what lay ahead of him in the next few minutes was not unknown, as had been the case with all that had come before this, but in fact was known too well. He felt himself being swept toward that known horror as surely as a man in a small rowboat, on the brink of Niagara, would be helpless to avoid the falls.

From Jilly: 'Dylan!'

When he turned to her, she pointed at the floor.

Under them lay a Persian-style carpet. Around each foot, the Persian pattern had been blotted out by a glimmering blackness, as though their shoes rested in pools of ink. This blackness rippled subtly but continually. When he moved one foot, the inky puddle moved with it, and the portion of the rug that had seemed to be stained at once reappeared unmarred.

A dining-room chair stood near Dylan, and upon touching it, he saw another ink like stain at once spread out from his hand across the upholstery, larger than his palm and fingers but conforming to their shape. He slid his hand back and forth, and the surrounding black blot slid with it, leaving the fabric immaculate.

Dylan could feel the chair under his hand, but when he tried to grip it firmly, the upholstery didn't dimple. Applying greater force, he attempted to jerk it away from the table – and his hand passed through the chair as if it were an illusion.

Or as if he were a ghost with no material substance.

Aware of Jilly's shock and continuing confusion, Dylan put one hand on her arm to show her that this inky phenomenon didn't occur between them, only when they attempted to have an influence upon their surroundings.

'The boy at the table,' he told her, 'is Shepherd when he was ten years old.'

She seemed to have worked that much out for herself, for she showed no surprise at this revelation. 'This isn't… some vision Shep's sharing with us.'

'No.'

Her understanding came as a statement rather than a question, as though she had begun to put the clues together before Dylan revealed the young puzzle worker's identity: 'We folded not just to California but also to sometime in the past.'