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Narrated by J. Charles
Dean KoontzUnabridged — 15 hours, 30 minutes
Narrated by J. Charles
Dean KoontzUnabridged — 15 hours, 30 minutes
In picturesque Moonlight Cove, California, inexplicable deaths occur and spine-tingling terror descends to this 'edge of paradise.' Growing numbers of residents harbor a secret so dark it is sure to cost even more lives.
Tessa Lockland comes to town to probe her sister's seemingly unprompted suicide. Independent and clever, she meets up with Sam Booker, an undercover FBI agent sent to Moonlight Cove to discover the truth behind the mysterious deaths. They meet Harry Talbot, a wheelchair-bound veteran, who has seen things from his window that he was not meant to see. Together they begin to understand the depth of evil in Moonlight Cove. Chrissie Foster, a resourceful eleven-year-old, running from her parents who have suddenly changed and in whom darkness dwells, joins them. Together they make a stand against darkness and terror.
``Despite some paper-thin characterizations and a predilection for the maudlin, Koontz's sense of pace and the dramatic are sure,'' observed PW. A horror story with science fiction underpinnings, this concerns an insane inventor whose bizarre experiment turns the sleepy California town of Moonlight Cove into a charnel house. (Nov.)
Four people are the last hope of Moonlight Cove, because one by one the rest of the citizens are changinginto boogymen, werewolves, mythical creatures, or something entirely new. They are the New People, willing victims of a seductive experiment in chemically induced evolution. They can transform their bodies at will and eliminate unproductive emotions, like grief and compassion. In fact, the only instinct left to the New People is self-preservation, and their only emotion is fear. And they want the rest of humanity to join them. Popular author Koontz ( Watchers , Lighting ) has again delivered a gripping horror thriller with well-drawn characters and plenty of suspense. Literary Guild selection. A.M.B. Amantia, Population Crisis Committee Lib., Washington, D.C.
A triumph.”—The New York Times
“Blood-chilling...The eerie mood of this creepy, crawly novel is vividly etched…gripping.”—Los Angeles Times
“A monster hit...In his own masterful way, Koontz slowly unveils the escalating horror...breathtaking.”—Dallas Morning News
“Fresh and exciting. Well-drawn, likable characters. Required reading for all thriller fans.”—Boston Herald
“Koontz is a prose stylist whose lyricism heightens malevolence and tension.”—Seattle Times
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
In this morality tale for our time, Dean Koontz tells a story of mindlessness run amok. Sam Booker, undercover FBI agent, comes to peaceful Moonlight Cove, California, to investigate a sudden increase in the “accidental” death rate. A messianic genius has effected chemically induced changes in the DNA of the townsfolk. The absence of human emotions frees the locals from thought and responsibility, but burdens them with murderous, uncontrollable altered states. Narrator J. Charles’s high energy keeps things from becoming a gratuitous bloodbath. Although Charles plays against the gloom and doom, infusing humor whenever possible, Koontz spends too much time defining terminology, interrupting rather than advancing the excitement. It is Charles’s performance that keeps this ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU clone from bogging down. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine
| BN ID: | 2940169530216 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Brilliance Audio |
| Publication date: | 05/16/2017 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
chapter one
Janice Capshaw liked to run at night.
Nearly every evening between ten and eleven o'clock, Janice put on her gray sweats with the reflective blue stripes across the back and chest, tucked her hair under a headband, laced up her New Balance shoes, and ran six miles. She was thirty-five but could have passed for twenty-five, and she attributed her glow of youth to her twenty-year-long commitment to running.
Sunday night, September 21, she left her house at ten o'clock and ran four blocks north to Ocean Avenue, the main street through Moonlight Cove, where she turned left and headed downhill toward the public beach. The shops were closed and dark. Aside from the faded-brass glow of the sodium-vapor streetlamps, the only lights were in some apartments above the stores, at Knight's Bridge Tavern, and at Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Church, which was open twenty-four hours a day. No cars were on the street, and not another person was in sight. Moonlight Cove always had been a quiet little town, shunning the tourist trade that other coastal communities so avidly pursued. Janice liked the slow, measured pace of life there, though sometimes lately the town seemed not merely sleepy but dead.
As she ran down the sloping main street, through pools of amber light, through layered night shadows cast by wind-sculpted cypresses and pines, she saw no movement other than her own-and the sluggish, serpentine advance of the thin fog through the windless air. The only sounds were the soft slap-slap of her rubber-soled running shoes on the sidewalk and her labored breathing. From all available evidence, she might have been the last person on earth, engaged upon a solitary post-Armageddon marathon.
She disliked getting up at dawn to run before work, and in the summer it was more pleasant to put in her six miles when the heat of the day had passed, though neither an abhorrence of early hours nor the heat was the real reason for her nocturnal preference; she ran on the same schedule in the winter. She exercised at that hour simply because she liked the night.
Even as a child, she had preferred night to day, had enjoyed sitting out in the yard after sunset, under the star-speckled sky, listening to frogs and crickets. Darkness soothed. It softened the sharp edges of the world, toned down the too-harsh colors. With the coming of twilight, the sky seemed to recede; the universe expanded. The night was bigger than the day, and in its realm, life seemed to have more possibilities.
Now she reached the Ocean Avenue loop at the foot of the hill, sprinted across the parking area and onto the beach. Above the thin fog, the sky held only scattered clouds, and the full moon's silver-yellow radiance penetrated the mist, providing sufficient illumination for her to see where she was going. Some nights the fog was too thick and the sky too overcast to permit running on the shore. But now the white foam of the incoming breakers surged out of the black sea in ghostly phosphorescent ranks, and the wide crescent of sand gleamed palely between the lapping tide and the coastal hills, and the mist itself was softly aglow with reflections of the autumn moonlight.
As she ran across the beach to the firmer, damp sand at the water's edge and turned south, intending to run a mile out to the point of the cove, Janice felt wonderfully alive.
Richard-her late husband, who had succumbed to cancer three years ago-had said that her circadian rhythms were so post-midnight focused that she was more than just a night person. "You'd probably love being a vampire, living between sunset and dawn," he'd said, and she'd said, "I vant to suck your blood." God, she had loved him. Initially she worried that the life of a Lutheran minister's wife would be boring, but it never was, not for a moment. Three years after his death, she still missed him every day-and even more at night. He had been-
Suddenly, as she was passing a pair of forty-foot twisted cypresses that had grown in the middle of the beach, halfway between the hills and the waterline, Janice was sure that she was not alone in the night and fog. She saw no movement, and she was unaware of any sound other than her own footsteps, raspy breathing, and thudding heartbeat; only instinct told her that she had company.
She was not alarmed at first, for she thought another runner was sharing the beach. A few local fitness fanatics occasionally ran at night, not by choice, as was the case with her, but of necessity. Two or three times a month she encountered them along her route.
But when she stopped and turned and looked back the way she had come, she saw only a deserted expanse of moonlit sand, a curved ribbon of luminously foaming surf, and the dim but familiar shapes of rock formations and scattered trees that thrust up here and there along the strand. The only sound was the low rumble of the breakers.
Figuring that her instinct was unreliable and that she was alone, she headed south again, along the beach, quickly finding her rhythm. She went only fifty yards, however, before she saw movement from the corner of her eye, thirty feet to her left: a swift shape, cloaked by night and mist, darting from behind a sandbound cypress to a weather-polished rock formation, where it slipped out of sight again.
Janice halted and, squinting toward the rock, wondered what she had glimpsed. It had seemed larger than a dog, perhaps as big as a man, but having seen it only peripherally, she had absorbed no details. The formation-twenty feet long, as low as four feet in some places and as high as ten feet in others-had been shaped by wind and rain until it resembled a mound of half-melted wax, more than large enough to conceal whatever she had seen.
"Someone there?" she asked.
She expected no answer and got none.
She was uneasy but not afraid. If she had seen something more than a trick of fog and moonlight, it surely had been an animal-and not a dog because a dog would have come straight to her and would not have been so secretive. As there were no natural predators along the coast worthy of her fear, she was curious rather than frightened.
Standing still, sheathed in a film of sweat, she began to feel the chill in the air. To maintain high body heat, she ran in place, watching the rocks, expecting to see an animal break from that cover and sprint either north or south along the beach.
Some people in the area kept horses, and the Fosters even ran a breeding and boarding facility near the sea about two and a half miles from there, beyond the northern flank of the cove. Perhaps one of their charges had gotten loose. The thing she'd seen from the corner of her eye had not been as big as a horse, though it might have been a pony. On the other hand, wouldn't she have heard a pony's thudding hoofbeats even in the soft sand? Of course, if it was one of the Fosters' horses-or someone else's-she ought to attempt to recover it or at least let them know where it could be found.
At last, when nothing moved, she ran to the rocks and circled them. Against the base of the formation and within the clefts in the stone were a few velvet-smooth shadows, but for the most part all was revealed in the milky, shimmering lunar glow, and no animal was concealed there.
She never gave serious thought to the possibility that she had seen someone other than another runner or an animal, that she was in real danger. Aside from an occasional act of vandalism or burglary-which was always the work of one of a handful of disaffected teenagers-and traffic accidents, local police had little to occupy them. Crimes against a person-rape, assault, murder-were rare in a town as small and tightly knit as Moonlight Cove; it was almost as if, in this pocket of the coast, they were living in a different and more benign age from that in which the rest of California dwelt.
Rounding the formation and returning to the firmer sand near the roiling surf, Janice decided that she had been snookered by moonlight and mist, two adept deceivers. The movement had been imaginary; she was alone on the shore.
She noted that the fog was rapidly thickening, but she continued along the crescent beach toward the cove's southern point. She was certain that she would get there and be able to return to the foot of Ocean Avenue before visibility declined too drastically.
A breeze sprang up from the sea and churned the incoming fog, which seemed to solidify from a gauzy vapor into a white sludge, as if it were milk being transformed into butter. By the time Janice reached the southern end of the dwindling strand, the breeze was stiffening and the surf was more agitated as well, casting up sheets of spray as each wave hit the piled rocks of the man-made breakwater that had been added to the natural point of the cove.
Someone stood on that twenty-foot-high wall of boulders, looking down at her. Janice glanced up just as a cloak of mist shifted and as moonlight silhouetted him.
Now fear seized her.
Though the stranger was directly in front of her, she could not see his face in the gloom. He seemed tall, well over six feet, though that could have been a trick of perspective.
Other than his outline, only his eyes were visible, and they were what ignited her fear. They were a softly radiant amber like the eyes of an animal revealed in headlight beams.
For a moment, peering directly up at him, she was transfixed by his gaze. Backlit by the moon, looming above her, standing tall and motionless upon ramparts of rock, with sea spray exploding to the right of him, he might have been a carved stone idol with luminous jewel eyes, erected by some demon-worshiping cult in a dark age long passed. Janice wanted to turn and run, but she could not move, was rooted to the sand, in the grip of that paralytic terror she had previously felt only in nightmares.
She wondered if she were awake. Perhaps her late-night run was indeed part of a nightmare, and perhaps she was actually asleep in bed, safe beneath warm blankets.
Then the man made a queer low growl, partly a snarl of anger but also a hiss, partly a hot and urgent cry of need but also cold, cold.
And he moved.
He dropped to all fours and began to descend the high breakwater, not as an ordinary man would climb down those jumbled rocks but with catlike swiftness and grace. In seconds he would be upon her.
Janice broke her paralysis, turned back on her own tracks, and ran toward the entrance to the public beach-a full mile away. Houses with lighted windows stood atop the steep-walled bluff that overlooked the cove, and some of them had steps leading down to the beach, but she was not confident of finding those stairs in the darkness. She did not waste any energy on a scream, for she doubted anyone would hear her. Besides, if screaming slowed her down, even only slightly, she might be overtaken and silenced before anyone from town could respond to her cries.
Her twenty-year commitment to running had never been more important than it was now; the issue was no longer good health but, she sensed, her very survival. She tucked her arms close to her sides, lowered her head, and sprinted, going for speed rather than endurance, because she felt that she only needed to get to the lower block of Ocean Avenue to be safe. She did not believe the man-or whatever the hell he was-would continue to pursue her into that lamplit and populated street.
High-altitude, striated clouds rushed across a portion of the lunar face. The moonlight dimmed, brightened, dimmed, and brightened in an irregular rhythm, pulsing through the rapidly clotting fog in such a way as to create a host of phantoms that repeatedly startled her and appeared to be keeping pace with her on all sides. The eerie, palpitant light contributed to the dreamlike quality of the chase, and she was half convinced that she was really in bed, fast asleep, but she did not halt or look over her shoulder because, dream or not, the man with the amber eyes was still behind her.
She had covered half the strand between the point of the cove and Ocean Avenue, her confidence growing with each step, when she realized that two of the phantoms in the fog were not phantoms after all. One was about twenty feet to her right and ran erect like a man; the other was on her left, less than fifteen feet away, splashing through the edge of the foam-laced sea, loping on all fours, the size of a man but certainly not a man, for no man could be so fleet and graceful in the posture of a dog. She had only a general impression of their shape and size, and she could not see their faces or any details of them other than their oddly luminous eyes.
Somehow she knew that neither of these pursuers was the man whom she had seen on the breakwater. He was behind her, either running erect or loping on all fours. She was nearly encircled.
Janice made no attempt to imagine who or what they might be. Analysis of this weird experience would have to wait for later; now she simply accepted the existence of the impossible, for as the widow of a preacher and a deeply spiritual woman, she had the flexibility to bend with the unknown and unearthly when confronted by it.
Powered by the fear that had formerly paralyzed her, she picked up her pace. But so did her pursuers.
She heard a peculiar whimpering and only slowly realized that she was listening to her own tortured voice.
Evidently excited by her terror, the phantom forms around her began to keen. Their voices rose and fell, fluctuating between a shrill, protracted bleat and a guttural gnarl. Worst of all, punctuating those ululant cries were bursts of words, too, spoken raspily, urgently: "Get the bitch, get the bitch, get the bitch . . ."
What in God's name were they? Not men, surely, yet they could stand like men and speak like men, so what else could they be but men?
Janice felt her heart swelling in her breast, pounding hard.
"Get the bitch . . ."
