Dean Koontz - By the Light of the Moon

Dylan approached her. 'What's wrong?'

'I'm not sure.'

She glanced at the clock, the grinning pig.

She knew the porcine smile hadn't changed in the least. The lips were fixed in their expression under the ceramic glaze. The smile remained as benign as she'd first seen it less than half an hour ago, ten years in the past. Nevertheless, a malevolent energy seethed off the pig, off the clock.

'Jilly?'

In fact not just the pig but the entire kitchen seemed to be alive with an evil presence, as though a dark spirit had come upon them and, unable to manifest itself in the traditional ectoplasmic apparition, took residence in the furnishings and in the surfaces of the room itself. Every edge of every counter appeared to gleam with a lacerating sharpness.

Shepherd opened the refrigerator door again, and peering into it, he said, 'Cold. We're all cold.'

The black glass oven doors watched, watched like hooded eyes.

Dark bottles in a wine rack seemed to have Molotov potential.

Flesh crawled, fine hairs quivered, a chill settled on the nape of her neck when she imagined the steel teeth gnashing silently in the throat of the garbage disposal.

No. Absurd. No spirit possessed the room. She didn't need an exorcist.

Her sense of alarm – actually a presentiment of death, she realized – was so powerful and growing so rapidly that she desperately needed to discover a cause for it. She superstitiously projected her fear onto inanimate objects – pig clock, oven doors, garbage-disposal blades – when the real threat lay elsewhere.

'We're all cold,' said Shep at the open refrigerator.

This time, Jilly heard those three words differently from the way she had heard them before. She remembered Shepherd's talent for reeling off synonyms, and now she realized that they might have the same meaning as We're all dead . Cold as a corpse. Cold as the grave. Cold and dead.

'Let's get out of here now, fast,' she urged.

Dylan said, 'I've got to get the money in the lockbox.'

'Forget the money. We'll die trying to get the money.'

'That's what you see?'

'That's what I know .'

'Okay, all right.'

'Let's fold, let's go, hurry! '

'We're all cold ,' said Shep.

Tick-tock, pig clock. Gleaming little eyes squinting out of folds of pink fat. That knowing leer.

Forget the damn clock. The pig clock isn't a threat. Focus.

Dylan returned to his brother, closed the refrigerator door for the third time, and drew Shep toward Jilly. 'We've got to go, buddy.'

'Where's all the ice?' Shep asked, deeper into this obsession than Jilly had seen him in any other. 'Where's all the ice?'

'What ice?' Dylan asked.

This clairvoyance, this foreshadowing talent was still new to Jilly, as frightening as it was new, as unwanted as it was new, and she had not been channeling it properly.

'Where's all the ice?' Shepherd persisted.

'We don't need ice,' Dylan told him. 'Buddy, you're starting to scare me here. Don't freeze up on me.'

'Where's all the ice?'

'Shep, be with me now. Listen to me, hear me, stay with me.'

By struggling to identify the cause of her alarm, letting her suspicion hop from object to object, place to place, she had not been allowing the alarm to direct the compass needle of her intuition. She needed to relax, to trust this strange precognition and let it show her precisely what to fear.

'Where's all the ice?'

'Forget about the ice. We don't need ice, buddy. We need to get out of here, all right?'

'Nothing but ice.'

Inevitably, Jilly's attention was drawn toward the windows, and the deep backyard beyond the windows. The green grass, the garage, the golden meadow behind the garage.

'Nothing but ice.'

Dylan said, 'He's fixated on this ice thing.'

'Get him off it.'

'Nothing but ice,' said Shepherd. 'Where's all the ice?'

'You know Shep by now. There's no getting him off it until he wants to get off. The thing keeps… ricocheting around in his head. And this seems worse than usual.'

'Sweetie,' she said, her gaze riveted on the windows, 'we have to fold. We can get you some ice after we fold.'

'Where's all the ice?'

Dylan put a hand under his brother's tucked chin, raised his head. 'Shep, this is crucial now. You understand crucial? I know you do, buddy. It's crucial that we fold out of here.'

'Where's all the ice?'

Glancing at Shepherd, she saw that he refused to relate to his brother. Behind his closed lids, his eyes moved ceaselessly.

When Jilly returned her attention to the backyard, a man knelt on one knee at the northwest corner of the garage. He sheltered in shadows. She almost didn't spot him, but she was sure he hadn't been there a moment ago.

Another man ran in a crouch from the cover of the meadow to the south west corner of the garage.

'They're here,' she told Dylan.

Neither of these men wore desert-resort pastels, but they were of a type with the faux golfers in Arizona. They were big, they were purposeful, and they weren't going door to door to preach salvation through Jesus.

'Where's all the ice?'

As far as Jilly was concerned, the scariest thing about them was the headset that each man wore. Not just earpieces but also extension arms that placed penny-size microphones at their mouths. This high degree of coordination argued that the assault force had to be larger than two men, and further suggested that these weren't just your ordinary knee-breaking, contract-kill thugs, but thugs with a keen sense of organization.

'Where's all the ice?'

The second man had covered the ground between meadow and garage. He crouched at the southwest corner, half concealed by a shrub.

She expected them to come well armed, so their guns were only the second scariest thing about them. Big weapons. Sort of futuristic looking. Probably what were called assault rifles. She didn't know much about firearms, didn't need to know much to be a comedian, even in front of the most unruly audience, but she figured that these guns were capable of firing a gazillion rounds before they needed to be reloaded.

'Where's all the ice?'

She and Dylan had to buy time until Shepherd could be persuaded that the way to get cake and ice would be to fold the three of them someplace that offered both.

'Get away from the windows,' Jilly warned, retreating from those that faced the backyard. 'Windows are… windows are death.'

'Every room has windows,' Dylan worried. 'Lots of windows.'

'Basement?'

'Isn't one. California. Slab construction.'

Shep asked, 'Where's all the ice?'

Jilly said, 'They know we're here.'

'How could they know? We didn't come in from outside.'

'Maybe a listening device, planted in the house earlier,' she suggested. 'Or they spotted us with binoculars through the windows.'

'They sent Vonetta home,' he realized.

'Let's hope that's all they did to her.'

'Where's all the ice?'

The thought of harm having come to his housekeeper cast an ashen pallor over Dylan's face as the recognition of his own mortal danger had not. 'But we only folded out of Holbrook half an hour ago.'

'So?'

'We must have surprised the hell out of the guy in the motel room, the one who saw us go.'

'He probably needed clean underwear,' she agreed.

'So how could they have even figured out what folding was in just half an hour, let alone alerted people here in California?'

'These guys didn't come here on an alert sent out half an hour ago. They staked out this house when they didn't know where we were, before the Arizona goons confirmed we were in Holbrook, hours before they went into the motel after us.'