Eyes of Darkness Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  TUESDAY, DECEMBER 30

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 31

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  THURSDAY, JANUARY 1

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  FRIDAY, JANUARY 2

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  AFTERWORD

  The acclaimed bestsellers by Dean Koontz

  THE EYES OF DARKNESS

  “Koontz puts his readers through the emotional wringer.” -The Associated Press

  THE KEY TO MIDNIGHT

  “An exceptional novelist ... top-notch.”

  —Lincoln Journal-Star

  MR. MURDER

  “A truly harrowing tale ... superb work by a master at the top of his form.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  THE FUNHOUSE

  “Koontz is a terrific what-if storyteller.” —People

  DRAGON TEARS

  “A razor-sharp, nonstop, suspenseful story ... a first-rate literary experience.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  SHADOWFIRES

  “His prose mesmerizes ... Koontz consistently hits the bull’s-eye.” —Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

  HIDEAWAY

  “Not just a thriller but a meditation on the nature of good and evil.” —Lexington Herald-Leader

  COLD FIRE

  “An extraordinary piece of fiction ... It will be a classic.” —UPI

  THE HOUSE OF THUNDER

  “Koontz is brilliant.” —Chicago Sun-Times

  THE VOICE OF THE NIGHT

  “A fearsome tour of an adolescent’s psyche. Terrifying, knee-knocking suspense.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  THE BAD PLACE

  “A new experience in breathless terror.” —UPI

  THE SERVANTS OF TWILIGHT

  “A great storyteller.” —New York Daily News

  MIDNIGHT

  “A triumph.” —The New York Times

  LIGHTNING

  “Brilliant ... a spine-tingling tale ... both challenging and entertaining.” —The Associated Press

  THE MASK

  “Koontz hones his fearful yarns to a gleaming edge.” —People

  WATCHERS

  “A breakthrough for Koontz ... his best ever.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  TWILIGHT EYES

  “A spine-chilling adventure ...will keep you turning pages to the very end.” —Rave Reviews

  STRANGERS

  “A unique spellbinder that captures the reader on the first page. Exciting, enjoyable, and an intensely satisfying read.” —Mary Higgins Clark

  PHANTOMS

  “First-rate suspense, scary, and stylish.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  WHISPERS

  “Pulls out all the stops ... an incredible, terrifying tale.” —Publishers Weekly

  NIGHT CHILLS

  “Will send chills down your back.”

  —The New York Times

  DARKFALL

  “A fast-paced tale ... one of the scariest chase scenes ever.” —The Houston Post

  SHATTERED

  “A chilling tale ... sleek as a bullet.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  THE VISION

  “Spine-tingling—it gives you an almost lethal shock.” —San Francisco Chronicle

  THE FACE OF FEAR

  “Real suspense ... tension upon tension.”

  —The New York Times

  Berkley titles by Dean Koontz

  THE EYES OF DARKNESS

  THE KEY TO MIDNIGHT

  MR. MURDER

  THE FUNHOUSE

  DRAGON TEARS

  SHADOWFIRES

  HIDEAWAY

  COLD FIRE

  THE HOUSE OF THUNDER

  THE VOICE OF THE NIGHT

  THE BAD PLACE

  THE SERVANTS OF TWILIGHT

  MIDNIGHT

  LIGHTNING

  THE MASK

  WATCHERS

  TWILIGHT EYES

  STRANGERS

  DEMON SEED

  PHANTOMS

  WHISPERS

  NIGHT CHILLS

  DARKFALL

  SHATTERED

  THE VISION

  THE FACE OF FEAR

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcom Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M4V 3B2, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr. Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196,

  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Originally published under the pseudonym Leigh Nichols.

  THE EYES OF DARKNESS

  A Berkley Book/ published by arrangement with Nkui, Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Pocket Books edition / February 1981

  Berkley edition / July 1996

  Copyright © 1981 by Leigh Nichols. Copyright © 1996 by Nkui, Inc.

  Author photo copyright © 1993 by Jerry Bauer.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form

  without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in

  violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 978-1-4406-1949-6

  BERKLEY®

  Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson St
reet, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  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

  1

  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 school-yardspast 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 b
een 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.