Hideaway

by Dean Koontz Narrated by Michael Hanson, Carol Cowan

Overview

He was clinically dead after the accident-but was miraculously revived. Now Hatch Harrison and his wife approach each day with a new appreciation for life.

But something has come back with Hatch from the other side. A terrible presence that links his mind to a psychotic's, so that a force of murderous rage courses through him.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

After a near-fatal car accident, a Californian must deal with the deranged killer with whom he now shares visions. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club selections in cloth. (Dec.)

School Library Journal

YA-- Koontz's latest thriller sits at the intersection of the weird and the ordinary. Once again, he explores a ``what if'' scenario in a most satisfying fashion. In this case, a near-death survivor accidentally carries a piggy-backing evil spirit through an open door from the afterlife. Hatch Harrison, the typical good-guy hero, is revived by a brilliant team of doctors more than an hour after drowning. Strange visions and half-waking dreams soon convince him that his recovery is not at all normal. His fears are soon magnified when people who have annoyed him are murdered, and he knows that he is somehow responsible. Paralleling the story of Hatch's recovery is the unfolding revelation of a young man so evil that ordinary people cannot imagine his existence. As he skulks about selecting victims to murder and mutilate, a bizarre bond develops between the two men. Gory incidents tumble one after another as the two men become locked in first a psychic and then a physical battle between good and evil. The violent climax is symbolically set in an abandoned amusement park where at last the true duel identity of the murderer is revealed. Once again, evil is resoundingly defeated, but as any Koontz fan knows, the victory is only temporary.--Carolyn E. Gecan, Thomas Jefferson Sci-Tech, Fairfax County, VA

Kirkus Reviews

Koontz's novels crest bestseller lists not only for their heart-pounding horrors but also for their celebration of righteousness and redemption. Here, the author of Cold Fire, etc., offers his most overtly religious tale yet—a fiercely exciting battle between two men who have returned from the dead. The California-set conflict is as simple as good vs. evil. In a roaringly suspenseful opening, antique-dealer Hatch Harrison, the soul of sweetness, drowns during a car accident that nearly kills his wife Lindsey as well, and is surgically "reanimated" after a record 80 minutes dead. Meanwhile, a life-hating young man known only by his self-adopted demonic name of Vassago stalks the subbasement of a nearby abandoned amusement park, admiring the rotting bodies of those he's sacrificed to Satan in hopes of being allowed to return to hell—which he apparently visited during his own brush with death. Upon awakening, Hatch's first words are "Something's out there"—for he now suffers a psychic link with Vassago, who, days later, reaps a new "trophy" as Hatch helplessly flashes on the savage killing. And at the same time, Vassago flashes on Hatch's world, including Lindsey and spunky, crippled Regina, the orphan the Harrisons have just adopted in their new embrace of life after years of mourning a son lost to cancer. Deciding that vibrant Regina would make the perfect final offering to Satan, Vassago—revealed through tense and brutal flashback as the homicidally deranged son of the surgeon who saved Hatch—cuts a bloody path to the Harrisons' door, kidnapping Regina off to his underground lair. In a slam-bang finale, amidst charnel- house horrors, the Harrisons take onVassago with a gun, a crucifix, and a little angelic help. A grandly melodramatic morality play that will have Koontz's fans—both here and in heaven—cheering. (Literary Guild Dual Selection for March)

From the Publisher

A chiller capable of leaving emotional bruises on readers.”—Associated Press

“Koontz leaps beyond the bounds of the usual supernatural thriller. Hideaway is a novel of ideas.”—Lexington Herald-Leader

“This is not just a chilling novel; it’s an igloo in mid-winter with the air-conditioning on. Taut…gripping...the ending is dead-solid perfect.”—The Raleigh News & Observer

“A taut serial-killer thriller and surprising occult fantasy. Chillingly convincing. It does exactly what it sets out to do and does it well.”—Locus

More Praise for Dean Koontz

“Dean Koontz is a prose stylist whose lyricism heightens malevolence and tension. [He creates] characters of unusual richness and depth.”—The Seattle Times

“Tumbling, hallucinogenic prose....‘Serious’ writers...might do well to examine his technique.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Lyrical writing and compelling characters...Koontz stands alone.”—Associated Press

“In every industry there exist ‘artists’ that are not only unforgettable, but know their craft better than the rest. Dean Koontz...is among these artisans.”—Suspense Magazine

“[Koontz] has always had near-Dickensian powers of description, and an ability to yank us from one page to the next that few novelists can match.”—Los Angeles Times

“Perhaps more than any other author, Koontz writes fiction perfectly suited to the mood of America...novels that acknowledge the reality and tenacity of evil but also the power of good...[and that] entertain vastly as they uplift.”—Publishers Weekly

JULY 92 - AudioFile

Dean Koontz presents a cast of characters strangely entwined in a fascinating plot which ultimately brings the forces of good and evil face-to-face in an abandoned fun house. Michael Hanson and Carol Cowan, more storytellers than readers, are perfectly suited to Koontz's style. Both presenters use excellent phrasing, pace and pitch. Hanson's resonant tone oozes with evil as he narrates the story of Vassago, the Prince of Darkness. Cowan is at her best as 10-year-old Regina whose conversations with God are full of brisk, lively dialogue. The audio quality is excellent, and the presentation attractively packaged. T.J.M. Winner of AUDIOFILE Earphones Award ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172667046
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	07/20/2005
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1

 

An entire world hummed and bustled beyond the dark ramparts of the mountains, yet to Lindsey Harrison the night seemed empty, as hollow as the vacant chambers of a cold, dead heart. Shivering, she slumped deeper in the passenger seat of the Honda.

 

Serried ranks of ancient evergreens receded up the slopes that flanked the highway, parting occasionally to accommodate sparse stands of winter-stripped maples and birches that poked at the sky with jagged black branches. However, that vast forest and the formidable rock formations to which it clung did not reduce the emptiness of the bitter March night. As the Honda descended the winding blacktop, the trees and stony outcroppings seemed to float past as if they were only dream images without real substance.

 

Harried by fierce wind, fine dry snow slanted through the headlight beams. But the storm could not fill the void, either.

 

The emptiness that Lindsey perceived was internal, not external. The night was brimming, as ever, with the chaos of creation. Her own soul was the only hollow thing.

 

She glanced at Hatch. He was leaning forward, hunched slightly over the steering wheel, peering ahead with an expression which might be flat and inscrutable to anyone else but which, after twelve years of marriage, Lindsey could easily read. An excellent driver, Hatch was not daunted by poor road conditions. His thoughts, like hers, were no doubt on the long weekend they had just spent at Big Bear Lake.

 

Yet again they had tried to recapture the easiness with each other that they had once known. And again they had failed.

 

The chains of the past still bound them.

 

The death of a five-year-old son had incalculable emotional weight. It pressed on the mind, quickly deflating every moment of buoyancy, crushing each new blossom of joy. Jimmy had been dead for more than four and a half years, nearly as long as he had lived, yet his death weighed as heavily on them now as on the day they had lost him, like some colossal moon looming in a low orbit overhead.

 

Squinting through the smeared windshield, past snow-caked wiper blades that stuttered across the glass, Hatch sighed softly. He glanced at Lindsey and smiled. It was a pale smile, just a ghost of the real thing, barren of amusement, tired and melancholy. He seemed about to say something, changed his mind, and returned his attention to the highway.

 

The three lanes of blacktop-one descending, two ascending-were disappearing under a shifting shroud of snow. The road slipped to the bottom of the slope and entered a short straightaway leading into a wide, blind curve. In spite of that flat stretch of pavement, they were not out of the San Bernardino Mountains yet. The state route eventually would turn steeply downward once more.

 

As they followed the curve, the land changed around them: The slope to their right angled upward more sharply than before, while on the far side of the road, a black ravine yawned. White metal guardrails marked that precipice, but they were barely visible in the sheeting snow.

 

A second or two before they came out of the curve, Lindsey had a premonition of danger. She said, "Hatch . . ."

 

Perhaps Hatch sensed trouble, too, for even as Lindsey spoke, he gently applied the brakes, cutting their speed slightly.

 

A downgrade straightaway lay beyond the bend, and a beer distributor's large truck was halted at an angle across two lanes, just fifty or sixty feet in front of them.

 

Lindsey tried to say, oh God, but her voice was locked within her.

 

While making a delivery to one of the area ski resorts, the trucker evidently had been surprised by the blizzard, which had set in only a short while ago but half a day ahead of the forecasters' predictions. Without benefit of snow chains, the big truck tires churned ineffectively on the icy pavement as the driver struggled desperately to bring his rig around and get it moving again.

 

Cursing under his breath but otherwise as controlled as ever, Hatch eased his foot down on the brake pedal. He dared not jam it to the floor and risk sending the Honda into a deadly spin.

 

In response to the glare of the car headlights, the trucker looked through his side window. Across the rapidly closing gap of night and snow, Lindsey saw nothing of the man's face but a pallid oval and twin charry holes where the eyes should have been, a ghostly countenance, as if some malign spirit was at the wheel of that vehicle. Or Death himself.

 

Hatch was heading for the outermost of the two ascending lanes, the only part of the highway not blocked.

 

Lindsey wondered if other traffic was coming uphill, hidden from them by the truck. Even at reduced speed, if they collided head-on, they would not survive.

 

In spite of Hatch's best efforts, the Honda began to slide. The tail end came around to the left, and Lindsey found herself swinging away from the stranded truck. The smooth, greasy, out-of-control motion was like the transition between scenes in a bad dream. Her stomach twisted with nausea, and although she was restrained by a safety harness, she instinctively pressed her right hand against the door and her left against the dashboard, bracing herself.

 

"Hang on," Hatch said, turning the wheel where the car wanted to go, which was his only hope of regaining control.

 

But the slide became a sickening spin, and the Honda rotated three hundred and sixty degrees, as if it were a carousel without calliope: around . . . around . . . until the truck began to come into view again. For an instant, as they glided downhill, still turning, Lindsey was certain the car would slip safely past the other vehicle. She could see beyond the big rig now, and the road below was free of traffic.

 

Then the front bumper on Hatch's side caught the back of the truck. Tortured metal shrieked.

 

The Honda shuddered and seemed to explode away from the point of collision, slamming backward into the guardrail. Lindsey's teeth clacked together hard enough to ignite sparks of pain in her jaws, all the way into her temples, and the hand braced against the dashboard bent painfully at the wrist. Simultaneously, the strap of the shoulder harness, which stretched diagonally across her chest from right shoulder to left hip, abruptly cinched so tight that her breath burst from her.

 

The car rebounded from the guardrail, not with sufficient momentum to reconnect with the truck but with so much torque that it pivoted three hundred and sixty degrees again. As they spun-glided past the truck, Hatch fought for control, but the steering wheel jerked erratically back and forth, tearing through his hands so violently that he cried out as his palms were abraded.

 

Suddenly the moderate gradient appeared precipitously steep, like the water-greased spillway of an amusement-park flume ride. Lindsey would have screamed if she could have drawn breath. But although the safety strap had loosened, a diagonal line of pain still cut across her chest, making it impossible to inhale. Then she was rattled by a vision of the Honda skating in a long glissade to the next bend in the road, crashing through the guardrail, tumbling out into the void-and the image was so horrifying that it was like a blow, knocking breath back into her.

 

As the Honda came out of the second rotation, the entire driver's side slammed into the guardrail, and they slid thirty or forty feet without losing contact. To the accompaniment of a grinding-screeching-scraping of metal against metal, showers of yellow sparks plumed up, mingling with the falling snow, like swarms of summer fireflies that had flown through a time warp into the wrong season.

 

The car shuddered to a halt, canted up slightly at the front left corner, evidently hooked on a guard post. For an instant the resultant silence was so deep that Lindsey was half stunned by it; she shattered it with an explosive exhalation.

 

She had never before experienced such an overwhelming sense of relief.

 

Then the car moved again.

 

It began to tilt to the left. The guardrail was giving way, perhaps weakened by corrosion or by the erosion of the highway shoulder beneath it.

 

"Out!" Hatch shouted, frantically fumbling with the release on his safety harness.

 

Lindsey didn't even have time to pop loose of her own harness or grab the door handle before the railing cracked apart and the Honda slipped into the ravine. Even as it was happening, she couldn't believe it. The brain acknowledged the approach of death, while the heart stubbornly insisted on immortality. In almost five years she had not adjusted to Jimmy's death, so she was not easily going to accept the imminence of her own demise.

 

In a jangle of detached posts and railings, the Honda slid sideways along the ice-crusted slope, then flipped over as the embankment grew steeper. Gasping for breath, heart pounding, wrenched painfully from side to side in her harness, Lindsey hoped for a tree, a rock outcropping, anything that would halt their fall, but the embankment seemed clear. She was not sure how often the car rolled-maybe only twice-because up and down and left and right lost all meaning. Her head banged into the ceiling almost hard enough to knock her out. She didn't know if she'd been thrown upward or if the roof had caved in to meet her, so she tried to slump in her seat, afraid the roof might crumple further on the next roll and crush her skull. The headlights slashed at the night, and from the wounds spouted torrents of snow. Then the windshield burst, showering her with minutely fragmented safety glass, and abruptly she was plunged into total darkness. Apparently the headlights blinked off, and the dashboard lights, reflected in Hatch's sweat-slicked face. The car rolled onto its roof again and stayed there. In that inverted posture it sledded farther into the seemingly bottomless ravine, with the thunderous noise of a thousand tons of coal pouring down a steel chute.

 

The gloom was utterly tenebrous, seamless, as if she and Hatch were not outdoors but in some windowless funhouse, rocketing down a roller-coaster track. Even the snow, which usually had a natural phosphorescence, was suddenly invisible. Cold flakes stung her face as the freezing wind drove them through the empty windshield frame, but she could not see them even as they frosted her lashes. Struggling to quell a rising panic, she wondered if she had been blinded by the imploding glass.

 

Blindness.

 

That was her special fear. She was an artist. Her talent took inspiration from what her eyes observed, and her wonderfully dexterous hands rendered inspiration into art with the critical judgment of those eyes to guide them. What did a blind painter paint? What could she hope to create if suddenly deprived of the sense that she relied upon the most?

 

Just as she started to scream, the car hit bottom and rolled back onto its wheels, landing upright with less impact than she had anticipated. It came to a halt almost gently, as if on an immense pillow.

 

"Hatch?" Her voice was hoarse.

 

After the cacophonous roar of their plunge down the ravine wall, she felt half deaf, not sure if the preternatural silence around her was real or only perceived.

 

"Hatch?"

 

She looked to her left, where he ought to have been, but she could not see him-or anything else.

 

She was blind.

 

"Oh, God, no. Please."

 

She was dizzy, too. The car seemed to be turning, wallowing like an airborne kite dipping and rising in the thermal currents of a summer sky.

 

"Hatch!"

 

No response.

 

Her lightheadedness increased. The car rocked and wallowed worse than ever. Lindsey was afraid she would faint. If Hatch was injured, he might bleed to death while she was unconscious and unable to help him.

 

She reached out blindly and found him crumpled in the driver's seat. His head was bent toward her, resting against his own shoulder. She touched his face, and he did not move. Something warm and sticky covered his right cheek and temple. Blood. From a head injury. With trembling fingers, she touched his mouth and sobbed with relief when she felt the hot exhalation of his breath between his slightly parted lips.

 

He was unconscious, not dead.

 

Fumbling in frustration with the release mechanism on her safety harness, Lindsey heard new sounds that she could not identify. A soft slapping. Hungry licking. An eerie, liquid chuckling. For a moment she froze, straining to identify the source of those unnerving noises.

 

Without warning the Honda tipped forward, admitting a cascade of icy water through the broken windshield onto Lindsey's lap. She gasped in surprise as the arctic bath chilled her to the marrow, and realized she was not lightheaded after all. The car was moving. It was afloat. They had landed in a lake or river. Probably a river. The placid surface of a lake would not have been so active.

 

The shock of the cold water briefly paralyzed her and made her wince with pain, but when she opened her eyes, she could see again. The Honda's headlights were, indeed, extinguished, but the dials and gauges in the dashboard still glowed. She must have been suffering from hysterical blindness rather than genuine physical damage.

 

She couldn't see much, but there was not much to see at the bottom of the night-draped ravine. Splinters of dimly glimmering glass rimmed the broken-out windshield. Outside, the oily water was revealed only by a sinuous, silvery phosphorescence that highlighted its purling surface and imparted a dark obsidian sparkle to the jewels of ice that floated in tangled necklaces atop it. The riverbanks would have been lost in absolute blackness but for the ghostly raiments of snow that cloaked the otherwise naked rocks, earth, and brush. The Honda appeared to be motoring through the river: Water poured halfway up its hood before parting in a "V" and streaming away to either side as it might from the prow of a ship, lapping at the sills of the side windows. They were being swept downstream, where eventually the currents were certain to turn more turbulent, bringing them to rapids or rocks or worse. At a glance, Lindsey grasped the extremity of their situation, but she was still so relieved by the remission of her blindness that she was grateful for the sight of anything, even of trouble this serious.

 

Shivering, she freed herself from the entangling straps of the safety harness and touched Hatch again. His face was ghastly in the queer backsplash of the instrument lights: sunken eyes, waxen skin, colorless lips, blood oozing-but, thank God, not spurting-from the gash on the right side of his head. She shook him gently, then a little harder, calling his name.

 

They wouldn't be able to get out of the car easily, if at all, while it was being borne down the river-especially as it now began to move faster. But at least they had to be prepared to scramble out if it came up against a rock or caught for a moment against one of the banks. The opportunity to escape might be short-lived.

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