Dean Koontz - By the Light of the Moon

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Dean Koontz - By the Light of the Moon» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Город: London, Год выпуска: 2003, ISBN: 2003, Издательство: Bantam, Жанр: Ужасы и Мистика, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

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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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Shot fired, he returned the pistol to the shoulder holster under his leather jacket. He appeared to be confident of his marksmanship.

From a coat pocket he removed a pair of latex gloves and worked his hands into them, all the while watching ten-year-old Shep.

Even to Jilly, who knew how to read the subtleties of expression in Shepherd's guarded face, the boy appeared to be unmoved by his mother's death. This couldn't be the case, for ten years later he had brought them back in time to bear witness; in his older incarnation, he'd come to this scene with palpable dread, repeating Shep is brave .

Features slack, no tremor at the mouth, without tears, the boy turned from his mother's body. He walked to the nearest corner, where he stood staring at the meeting of the walls.

Overwhelmed by traumatic experience, he reduced his world to a narrow space, where he felt safer. Likewise, he dealt with grief.

Flexing his latex-sheathed hands, Proctor went to the boy and stood over him, watching.

Rocking slowly back and forth, young Shepherd began to murmur a rhythmic series of words that Jilly could not quite hear.

Dylan still knelt at his mother's side, his head bowed as though in prayer. He wasn't ready to leave her yet.

Satisfied that corner-focused Shepherd would serve diligently as the warden of his own imprisonment, Proctor walked out of the living room, crossed the entrance hall, and opened the door to another room.

If they weren't going to fold out of here immediately, then it made sense to follow Proctor and learn what he was doing.

With an affectionate squeeze, she released Shep. 'Let's see what the bastard is up to. Will you come with me, sweetie?'

Leaving Shep alone wasn't an option. Still scared and grieving, he needed companionship. Besides, though Jilly doubted that he would fold out of here without her and Dylan, she dared not chance it.

'Will you come with me, Shepherd?'

'Rat, Mole, Mr. Toad.'

'What does that mean, Shep? What do you want?'

'Rat, Mole, Mr. Toad. Rat, Mole, Mr. Toad.'

By the third time he recited this mantra, he had synchronized his words to those of ten-year-old Shepherd in the corner, and the resonance between them revealed the words that the younger Shep was murmuring as he rocked. 'Rat, Mole, Mr. Toad.'

Jilly didn't know the meaning of this, and she didn't have the time to get involved in one of those long, circuitous conversations with Shepherd. 'Rat, Mole, Mr. Toad. We'll talk about that later, sweetie. Right now, just come with me. Come along with me.'

Somewhat to her surprise, without hesitation, Shep followed her out of the living room.

As they entered the study, Proctor used the computer keyboard to smash the monitor. He shoved the entire machine off the desk, onto the floor. He exhibited no glee, even winced at the mess he'd made.

Drawer by drawer, he quickly searched for diskettes. He found a few, stacked them aside. He tossed the other contents of the drawers on the floor, scattering them widely, evidently hoping to create the impression that the person or persons responsible for the death of Dylan's mother had been ordinary thieves and vandals.

File cabinets in the bottom of the study closet contained only paper records. He dismissed these at once.

Atop the file cabinets were double-wide diskette-storage boxes: three of them, each capable of holding perhaps a hundred diskettes.

Proctor snatched diskettes out of the boxes, tossing them aside in handfuls without reading labels. In the third box, he found four diskettes different from the others, in canary-yellow paper sleeves.

'Bingo,' Proctor said, bringing these four to the desk.

Holding Shep's hand, Jilly moved close to Proctor, expecting him to cry out as if he'd seen a ghost. His breath smelled of peanuts.

The yellow sleeve of each diskette blazed with the word WARNING! printed in red. The rest of the printing was in black: legalistic prose stating that these diskettes contained private files protected by lawyer-client privilege, that criminal and civil prosecution would be undertaken against anyone in wrongful possession of same, and that anyone not in the employment of the below-referenced law firm would automatically be in wrongful possession.

Proctor slid one diskette out of its sleeve to read the label. Satisfied, he tucked all four into an inner jacket pocket.

Now that he had what he'd come for, Proctor played vandal once more, pulling books off the study shelves and slinging them across the room. With flapping pages, the volumes flew through Jilly and Shepherd, dropping like dead birds to the floor.

***

When the computer crashed off the study desk, Dylan remembered the mess in which parts of the house had been found that February night long ago. Thus far he had remained at his mother's side with the irrational hope that even though he had been unable to save her from the bullet, he would somehow spare her from the indignity yet to come. The racket in the study forced him to accept that in this matter, he was indeed as helpless as his brother.

His mother was gone, ten years gone, and all that had followed her death remained immutable. His concern now must be for the living.

He didn't care to watch Proctor engaged in set-dressing. He knew what the ultimate look of the scene would be.

Instead, he went to the corner where ten-year-old Shep rocked back and forth, murmuring. 'Rat, Mole, Mr. Toad.'

This was not what Dylan might have expected to hear his brother chanting, but it did not mystify him.

After the complete works of Dr. Seuss and others, the first story for older children that their mother read to Shep was Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows . Shep had so adored the tale of Rat, Mole, Toad, Badger, and the other colorful characters of the Wild Wood that he had insisted she read it to him again and again during the year that followed. By the time he was ten, he'd read it at least twenty times on his own.

He wanted the company of Rat, Mole, and Mr. Toad, the story of friendship and hope, the dream of life in warm and secure burrows, in deep lamplit warrens, in sheltered glades, wanted the reassurance that after fearful adventures, after chaos, there would be always the circle of friends, the firelit hearth, quiet evenings when the world shrank to the size of a family and when no heart beat in a stranger.

Dylan couldn't give him that. In fact, if such a life could be lived in this world, the likelihood was that it could be enjoyed only by characters in books.

In the downstairs hall, the mirror by the front door shattered. If memory served, it had been broken with the vase that had stood on the small entry table.

From the living-room doorway, Jilly called to Dylan, 'He's going upstairs!'

'Let him go. I know what he does. Sacks the master bedroom and steals Mom's jewelry… I guess to make it look like a robbery. Her purse is up there. He empties it, takes the money from her wallet.'

Jilly and Shepherd joined him, gathering behind the long-ago Shepherd in the long-ago corner.

This was not where Shep had been found on the night of February 12, 1992. Dylan wanted to remain in this time until he knew if Shep had been spared bearing witness to what was yet to come.

From upstairs echoed the hard crashes of drawers being pulled out of the bureau and thrown against the walls.

'Rat, Mole, Mr. Toad,' said the younger Shepherd, and the older Shep, armoring himself against a scary world and perhaps speaking also to his ten-year-old self, said, 'Shep is brave, Shep is brave.'

After a minute, the noises of destruction ceased upstairs. Proctor had probably found the purse. Or he was loading his pockets with her jewelry, none of which had great value.

Head bowed in his posture of eternal supplication, the younger Shep moved out of the corner and shuffled to the dining-room door, and the older Shep closely followed him. Like processional monks, they were, in a brotherhood of the genteel estranged.

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