The Eyes of Darkness Read online

  The Eyes of Darkness

  Dean R. Koontz

  A masterwork of suspense from the #1 New York Times bestselling author.

  Tina Evans can think of no better time for a fresh start. It's been a year of unbelievable heartache since her son Danny's death. Now the Vegas show that she directed is about to premiere, so she vows to put her grief behind her.

  Only there is a message for Tina, scrawled on the chalkboard in Danny's room. Two words that will send Tina on a terrifying journey… NOT DEAD.

  Dean R. Koontz

  The Eyes of Darkness

  Praise for Dean Koontz and his masterworks of suspense

  “Koontz barely lets the reader come up for air between terrors.”

  — The Washington Post

  “Koontz’s skill at edge-of-the-seat writing has improved with each book. He can scare our socks off.”

  — Boston Herald

  “Koontz’s imagination is not only as big as the Ritz, it is also as wild as an unbroken stallion.”

  — Los Angeles Times

  “His prose mesmerizes… Koontz consistently hits the bull’s-eye.”

  — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

  “First-class entertainment.”

  — The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “An exceptional novelist… top-notch.”

  — Lincoln Journal Star

  “Koontz is an expert at creating believable characters.”

  — The Detroit News and Free Press

  “One of our finest and most versatile suspense writers.”

  — The Macon Telegraph & News

  “Koontz does it so well!”

  — Baton Rouge Morning Advocate

  “Koontz’s prose is as smooth as a knife through butter and his storytelling ability never wavers.”

  — Calgary Sun

  “Koontz’s gift is that he makes his monsters seem ‘realer,’ and he makes the characters who fight [them] as normal as anyone you’d meet on a street.”

  — Orlando Sentinel

  Dedication

  This better version is for Gerda, with love.

  After five years of work, now that I’m nearly finished improving these early novels first published under pen names, I intend to start improving myself.

  Considering all that needs to be done, this new project will henceforth be known as the hundred-year plan.

  TUESDAY DECEMBER 30

  Chapter One

  At six minutes past midnight, Tuesday morning, on the way home from a late rehearsal of her new stage show, Tina Evans saw her son, Danny, in a stranger’s car. But Danny had been dead more than a year.

  Two blocks from her house, intending to buy a quart of milk and a loaf of whole-wheat bread, Tina stopped at a twenty-four-hour market and parked in the dry yellow drizzle of a sodium-vapor light, beside a gleaming, cream-colored Chevrolet station wagon. The boy was in the front passenger seat of the wagon, waiting for someone in the store. Tina could see only the side of his face, but she gasped in painful recognition.

  Danny.

  The boy was about twelve, Danny’s age. He had thick dark hair like Danny’s, a nose that resembled Danny’s, and a rather delicate jawline like Danny’s too.

  She whispered her son’s name, as if she would frighten off this beloved apparition if she spoke any louder.

  Unaware that she was staring at him, the boy put one hand to his mouth and bit gently on his bent thumb knuckle, which Danny had begun to do a year or so before he died. Without success, Tina had tried to break him of that bad habit.

  Now, as she watched this boy, his resemblance to Danny seemed to be more than mere coincidence. Suddenly Tina’s mouth went dry and sour, and her heart thudded. She still had not adjusted to the loss of her only child, because she’d never wanted — or tried — to adjust to it. Seizing on this boy’s resemblance to her Danny, she was too easily able to fantasize that there had been no loss in the first place.

  Maybe… maybe this boy actually was Danny. Why not? The more that she considered it, the less crazy it seemed. After all, she’d never seen Danny’s corpse. The police and the morticians had advised her that Danny was so badly torn up, so horribly mangled, that she was better off not looking at him. Sickened, grief-stricken, she had taken their advice, and Danny’s funeral had been a closed-coffin service. But perhaps they’d been mistaken when they identified the body. Maybe Danny hadn’t been killed in the accident, after all. Maybe he’d only suffered a mild head injury, just severe enough to give him… amnesia. Yes. Amnesia. Perhaps he had wandered away from the wrecked bus and had been found miles from the scene of the accident, without identification, unable to tell anyone who he was or where he came from. That was possible, wasn’t it? She had seen similar stories in the movies. Sure. Amnesia. And if that were the case, then he might have ended up in a foster home, in a new life. And now here he was sitting in the cream-colored Chevrolet wagon, brought to her by fate and by—

  The boy became conscious of her gaze and turned toward her. She held her breath as his face came slowly around. As they stared at each other through two windows and through the strange sulphurous light, she had the feeling that they were making contact across an immense gulf of space and time and destiny. But then, inevitably, her fantasy burst, for he wasn’t Danny.

  Pulling her gaze away from his, she studied her hands, which were gripping the steering wheel so fiercely that they ached.

  “Damn.”

  She was angry with herself. She thought of herself as a tough, competent, levelheaded woman who was able to deal with anything life threw at her, and she was disturbed by her continuing inability to accept Danny’s death.

  After the initial shock, after the funeral, she had begun to cope with the trauma. Gradually, day by day, week by week, she had put Danny behind her, with sorrow, with guilt, with tears and much bitterness, but also with firmness and determination. She had taken several steps up in her career during the past year, and she had relied on hard work as a sort of morphine, using it to dull her pain until the wound fully healed.

  But then, a few weeks ago, she had begun to slip back into the dreadful condition in which she’d wallowed immediately after she’d received news of the accident. Her denial was as resolute as it was irrational. Again, she was possessed by the haunting feeling that her child was alive. Time should have put even more distance between her and the anguish, but instead the passing days were bringing her around full circle in her grief. This boy in the station wagon was not the first that she had imagined was Danny; in recent weeks, she had seen her lost son in other cars, in schoolyards past which she had been driving, on public streets, in a movie theater.

  Also, she’d recently been plagued by a repeating dream in which Danny was alive. Each time, for a few hours after she woke, she could not face reality. She half convinced herself that the dream was a premonition of Danny’s eventual return to her, that somehow he had survived and would be coming back into her arms one day soon.

  This was a warm and wonderful fantasy, but she could not sustain it for long. Though she always resisted the grim truth, it gradually exerted itself every time, and she was repeatedly brought down hard, forced to accept that the dream was not a premonition. Nevertheless, she knew that when she had the dream again, she would find new hope in it as she had so many times before.

  And that was not good.

  Sick, she berated herself.

  She glanced at the station wagon and saw that the boy was still staring at her. She glared at her tightly clenched hands again and found the strength to break her grip on the steering wheel.

  Grief could drive a person crazy. She’d heard that said, and she believed it. But she wasn’t going to allow such a thing to happen to her. She
would be sufficiently tough on herself to stay in touch with reality — as unpleasant as reality might be. She couldn’t allow herself to hope.

  She had loved Danny with all her heart, but he was gone. Torn and crushed in a bus accident with fourteen other little boys, just one victim of a larger tragedy. Battered beyond recognition. Dead.

  Cold.

  Decaying.

  In a coffin.

  Under the ground.

  Forever.

  Her lower lip trembled. She wanted to cry, needed to cry, but she didn’t.

  The boy in the Chevy had lost interest in her. He was staring at the front of the grocery store again, waiting.

  Tina got out of her Honda. The night was pleasantly cool and desert-dry. She took a deep breath and went into the market, where the air was so cold that it pierced her bones, and where the harsh fluorescent lighting was too bright and too bleak to encourage fantasies.

  She bought a quart of nonfat milk and a loaf of whole-wheat bread that was cut thin for dieters, so each serving contained only half the calories of an ordinary slice of bread. She wasn’t a dancer anymore; now she worked behind the curtain, in the production end of the show, but she still felt physically and psychologically best when she weighed no more than she had weighed when she’d been a performer.

  Five minutes later she was home. Hers was a modest ranch house in a quiet neighborhood. The olive trees and lacy melaleucas stirred lazily in a faint Mojave breeze.

  In the kitchen, she toasted two pieces of bread. She spread a thin skin of peanut butter on them, poured a glass of nonfat milk, and sat at the table.

  Peanut-butter toast had been one of Danny’s favorite foods, even when he was a toddler and was especially picky about what he would eat. When he was very young, he had called it “neenut putter.”

  Closing her eyes now, chewing the toast, Tina could still see him — three years old, peanut butter smeared all over his lips and chin — as he grinned and said, More neenut putter toast, please.

  She opened her eyes with a start because her mental image of him was too vivid, less like a memory than like a vision. Right now she didn’t want to remember so clearly.

  But it was too late. Her heart knotted in her chest, and her lower lip began to quiver again, and she put her head down on the table. She wept.

  * * *

  That night Tina dreamed that Danny was alive again. Somehow. Somewhere. Alive. And he needed her.

  In the dream, Danny was standing at the edge of a bottomless gorge, and Tina was on the far side, opposite him, looking across the immense gulf. Danny was calling her name. He was lonely and afraid. She was miserable because she couldn’t think of a way to reach him. Meanwhile, the sky grew darker by the second; massive storm clouds, like the clenched fists of celestial giants, squeezed the last light out of the day. Danny’s cries and her response became increasingly shrill and desperate, for they knew that they must reach each other before nightfall or be lost forever; in the oncoming night, something waited for Danny, something fearsome that would seize him if he was alone after dark. Suddenly the sky was shattered by lightning, then by a hard clap of thunder, and the night imploded into a deeper darkness, into infinite and perfect blackness.

  Tina Evans sat straight up in bed, certain that she had heard a noise in the house. It hadn’t been merely the thunder from the dream. The sound she’d heard had come as she was waking, a real noise, not an imagined one.

  She listened intently, prepared to throw off the covers and slip out of bed. Silence reigned.

  Gradually doubt crept over her. She had been jumpy lately. This wasn’t the first night she’d been wrongly convinced that an intruder was prowling the house. On four or five occasions during the past two weeks, she had taken the pistol from the nightstand and searched the place, room by room, but she hadn’t found anyone. Recently she’d been under a lot of pressure, both personally and professionally. Maybe what she’d heard tonight had been the thunder from the dream.

  She remained on guard for a few minutes, but the night was so peaceful that at last she had to admit she was alone. As her heartbeat slowed, she eased back onto her pillow.

  At times like this she wished that she and Michael were still together. She closed her eyes and imagined herself lying beside him, reaching for him in the dark, touching, touching, moving against him, into the shelter of his arms. He would comfort and reassure her, and in time she would sleep again.

  Of course, if she and Michael were in bed right this minute, it wouldn’t be like that at all. They wouldn’t make love. They would argue. He’d resist her affection, turn her away by picking a fight. He would begin the battle over a triviality and goad her until the bickering escalated into marital warfare. That was how it had been during the last months of their life together. He had been seething with hostility, always seeking an excuse to vent his anger on her.

  Because Tina had loved Michael to the end, she’d been hurt and saddened by the dissolution of their relationship. Admittedly, she had also been relieved when it was finally over.

  She had lost her child and her husband in the same year, the man first, and then the boy, the son to the grave and the husband to the winds of change. During the twelve years of their marriage, Tina had become a different and more complex person than she’d been on their wedding day, but Michael hadn’t changed at all — and didn’t like the woman that she had become. They began as lovers, sharing every detail of their daily lives — triumphs and failures, joys and frustrations — but by the time the divorce was final, they were strangers. Although Michael was still living in town, less than a mile from her, he was, in some respects, as far away and as unreachable as Danny.

  She sighed with resignation and opened her eyes.

  She wasn’t sleepy now, but she knew she had to get more rest. She would need to be fresh and alert in the morning.

  Tomorrow was one of the most important days of her life: December 30. In other years that date had meant nothing special. But for better or worse, this December 30 was the hinge upon which her entire future would swing.

  For fifteen years, ever since she turned eighteen, two years before she married Michael, Tina Evans had lived and worked in Las Vegas. She began her career as a dancer — not a showgirl but an actual dancer — in the Lido de Paris, a gigantic stage show at the Stardust Hotel. The Lido was one of those incredibly lavish productions that could be seen nowhere in the world but Vegas, for it was only in Las Vegas that a multimillion-dollar show could be staged year after year with little concern for profit; such vast sums were spent on the elaborate sets and costumes, and on the enormous cast and crew, that the hotel was usually happy if the production merely broke even from ticket and drink sales. After all, as fantastic as it was, the show was only a come-on, a draw, with the sole purpose of putting a few thousand people into the hotel every night. Going to and from the showroom, the crowd had to pass all the craps tables and blackjack tables and roulette wheels and glittering ranks of slot machines, and that was where the profit was made. Tina enjoyed dancing in the Lido, and she stayed there for two and a half years, until she learned that she was pregnant. She took time off to carry and give birth to Danny, then to spend uninterrupted days with him during his first few months of life. When Danny was six months old, Tina went into training to get back in shape, and after three arduous months of exercise, she won a place in the chorus line of a new Vegas spectacle. She managed to be both a fine dancer and a good mother, although that was not always easy; she loved Danny, and she enjoyed her work and she thrived on double duty.

  Five years ago, however, on her twenty-eighth birthday, she began to realize that she had, if she was lucky, ten years left as a show dancer, and she decided to establish herself in the business in another capacity, to avoid being washed up at thirty-eight. She landed a position as choreographer for a two-bit lounge revue, a dismally cheap imitation of the multimillion-dollar Lido, and eventually she took over the costumer’s job as well. From that she moved up through
a series of similar positions in larger lounges, then in small showrooms that seated four or five hundred in second-rate hotels with limited show budgets. In time she directed a revue, then directed and produced another. She was steadily becoming a respected name in the closely knit Vegas entertainment world, and she believed that she was on the verge of great success.

  Almost a year ago, shortly after Danny had died, Tina had been offered a directing and co-producing job on a huge ten-million-dollar extravaganza to be staged in the two-thousand-seat main showroom of the Golden Pyramid, one of the largest and plushest hotels on the Strip. At first it had seemed terribly wrong that such a wonderful opportunity should come her way before she’d even had time to mourn her boy, as if the Fates were so shallow and insensitive as to think that they could balance the scales and offset Danny’s death merely by presenting her with a chance at her dream job. Although she was bitter and depressed, although — or maybe because — she felt utterly empty and useless, she took the job.

  The new show was titled Magyck! because the variety acts between the big dance numbers were all magicians and because the production numbers themselves featured elaborate special effects and were built around supernatural themes. The tricky spelling of the title was not Tina’s idea, but most of the rest of the program was her creation, and she remained pleased with what she had wrought. Exhausted too. This year had passed in a blur of twelve- and fourteen-hour days, with no vacations and rarely a weekend off.

  Nevertheless, even as preoccupied with Magyck! as she was, she had adjusted to Danny’s death only with great difficulty. A month ago, for the first time, she’d thought that at last she had begun to overcome her grief. She was able to think about the boy without crying, to visit his grave without being overcome by grief. All things considered, she felt reasonably good, even cheerful to a degree. She would never forget him, that sweet child who had been such a large part of her, but she would no longer have to live her life around the gaping hole that he had left in it. The wound was achingly tender but healed.