Книга - The Moonlit Mind: A Novella

The Moonlit Mind: A Novella
Dean Koontz


In this chilling original stand-alone novella, available exclusively as an eBook, Dean Koontz offers a taste of what’s to come in his novel, 77 Shadow Street, with a mesmerizing tale of a homeless boy at large in a city fraught with threats … both human and otherwise. Includes the first chapter of 77 Shadow Street.Twelve-year-old Crispin has lived on the streets since he was nine – with only his wits and his daring to sustain him, and only his silent dog, Harley, to call his friend. He is always on the move, never lingering in any one place long enough to risk being discovered.Still, there are certain places he returns to, like the hushed environs of St. Mary Salome Cemetery, a place where Crispin can feel at peace – safe, at least for a while, from the fearsome memories that plague him … and seep into his darkest nightmares.But not only his dreams are haunted. Crispin has seen ghosts in the dead of night, and sensed dimensions beyond reason in broad daylight.Alone, drifting, and scavenging to survive is no life for a boy. But the life Crispin has left behind, and is still running scared from, is an unspeakable alternative … that may yet catch up with him.There is more to Crispin’s world, and its darkest corners have yet to be encountered, in this eBook’s special bonus: a spine-tingling excerpt from Dean Koontz’s forthcoming novel, 77 Shadow Street.







Dean Koontz

The Moonlit Mind

A Tale of Suspense









Contents


Title Page (#u43b392b1-5b8c-5151-9f68-3a015d2d2e94)

Chapter 1 (#ulink_b8c98857-af4d-52f3-9e17-a238346a862e)

Chapter 2 (#ulink_d1eeeb0e-a813-54c1-9b86-ea8fd07f44fa)

Chapter 3 (#ulink_2138611a-25ca-59fd-96e3-b0e3f7228946)

Chapter 4 (#ulink_78ef939e-3f8d-5e6f-ac9d-55183a016098)

Chapter 5 (#ulink_3ea93330-284c-560a-b8fb-beb37498da2a)

Chapter 6 (#ulink_4f1e59c5-3846-52dd-b1ae-0803231d9adb)

Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)

Excerpt from 77 Shadow Street

1:The North Elevator (#litres_trial_promo)

2:The Basement Security Room (#litres_trial_promo)

3:The Basement Pool (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




1 (#ulink_703e3ada-54bb-501d-842f-506ac313eecf)


Crispin lives wild in the city, a feral boy of twelve, and he has no friend but Harley, though Harley never speaks.

Friendship does not depend on conversation. Sometimes the most important communication is not mouth to ear, but heart to heart.

Harley can’t speak because he is a dog. He understands many words, but he isn’t able to form them. He can bark, but he does not. Neither does he growl.

Silence is to Harley as music to a harp, flowing from him in glissando passages and arpeggios that are melodious to Crispin. The boy has heard too much in his few years. Quiet is a symphony to him, and the profound silence in any hushed place is a hymn.

This metropolis, like all others, is an empire of noise. The city rattles, bangs, and thumps. It buzzes and squeals, hisses and roars. Honks, clangs, tolls, jingles, clicks, clacks, creaks, knocks, pops, and rumbles.

Even in this storm of sound, however, quiet havens exist. Across the vast lawns of St. Mary Salome Cemetery, between tall pines and cedars like processions of robed monks, concentric circles of granite headstones lead inward to open-air mausoleum walls where the ashes of the dead are interred behind bronze plaques. The eight-foot-high, freestanding walls are arranged like spokes in a wheel. On any windless night, the massive evergreens of St. Mary Salome muffle the municipal voice, and the wheel of walls baffles it entirely.

At the hub where the spokes meet lies a wide circle of grass and at its center a great round slab of gray granite that serves as a bench. Here, Crispin sometimes sits in moonlight until the silence soothes his soul.

Then he and Harley move to the grass, where the boy prepares his bedroll. With no guilt to claw at his conscience, the dog sleeps the sleep of an innocent. The boy is not so fortunate.

Crispin suffers nightmares. They are based on memories.

Harley seems to dream of running free, toes spreading and paws trembling as he races across imagined meadows. He does not whimper but makes small thin sounds of delight.

Once, when the boy was ten, he woke well past midnight and saw the silvery shimmering form of a woman in a long dress or robe. She approached between two mausoleum walls, seeming not to walk but rather to glide like a skater on ice.

Crispin sat up, frightened because the woman had no substance. Moonlit objects behind her were visible through her.

She neither smiled nor threatened. Her expression was solemn.

She drifted to a stop about two yards from them, her bare feet a few inches above the grass. For a long moment, she gazed upon them.

Crispin felt that he should speak to her. But he could not.

Although the boy only half rose, Harley stood on all fours. Clearly, the dog saw the woman, too. His tail wagged.

When she moved past them, Crispin caught the scent of perfumed ointment. Harley sniffed with what seemed to be pleasure.

The woman evaporated as if she were a fog phantom encountering a warm current of air.

Crispin first thought she must be a ghost haunting these fields of graves. Later he wondered if he’d witnessed instead a visitation, the spirit of Saint Mary Salome, for whom the cemetery was named.

Over the past three years, since he was nine, the boy has lived in this city by his wits and by his daring. He has enjoyed little human companionship or charity.

He doesn’t spend every night in the cemetery. He sleeps in many places to avoid following a routine that might leave him vulnerable to discovery.

In places more ordinary than cemeteries, he and the dog often see extraordinary things. Not all their discoveries are supernatural. Most are as real as sunlight and starlight, and some of those things are more terrible than any ghost or goblin could be.

This city—perhaps any city—is a place of secrets and enigmas. Roaming alone with your dog in realms that others seldom visit, you will glimpse disturbing phenomena and strange presences that suggest the world has dimensions that reason alone cannot explain.

The boy is sometimes afraid, but never the dog.

Neither of them is ever lonely. They are family to each other, but more than family. They are each other’s salvation, each a lamp by which the other finds his way.

Harley was abandoned to the streets. No one but the boy loves this mixed-breed canine, which appears to be half golden retriever and half mystery mutt.

Crispin was not abandoned. He escaped.

And he is hunted.




2 (#ulink_4d0156c3-9ba9-54b3-9215-34731d345d51)


Three years earlier …

Crispin, only nine years old, is two days on the run, having fled a scene of intolerable horror on a night in late September. He has no one to whom he can turn. Those who should be trustworthy have already proven to be evil and to be intent on his destruction.

Of the eleven dollars in his possession when he escaped, he now has only four. He has spent the rest on food and drink purchased from vendors with street-corner carts.

The previous night, he slept in a nest of shrubbery in Statler Park, too exhausted to be fully wakened even by the occasional sirens of passing police cars or, near dawn, by the racket of sanitation workers emptying park trash cans into their truck.

On Monday he spends a couple of the daylight hours visiting the library. The stacks are a maze in which he can hide.

He is too much in the grip of fear and grief to be able to read. Now and then he pages through big glossy travel books, studying the photos, but he has no way of getting to those far, safe places. The children’s picture books that once amused him no longer seem at all funny.

For a while he walks along the banks of the river, watching a few fishermen. The water is gray under a blue sky, and the men seem gray, too, sad and listless. The fish are not biting.

Most of the day he wanders alleyways where he thinks he is less likely to encounter those who are surely looking for him. Behind a restaurant, a kitchen worker asks why he isn’t in school. No good lie occurs to him, and he runs from her.

The day is mild, as were the previous day and night, but suddenly it grows cool and then cooler in the late afternoon. He is wearing a short-sleeved shirt, and the gooseflesh on his bare arms may or may not be caused by the chilly air.

In a vacant lot between a drugstore and a marshal-arts dojo, a Goodwill Industries collection bin overflows with used clothing and other items. Rummaging among those donations, Crispin finds a gray wool sweater that fits him.

He takes also a dark-blue knitted toboggan cap. He pulls it low over his forehead, over the tops of his ears.

Perhaps a nine-year-old boy alone will only call attention to himself by such an effort at disguise. He suspects that the simple cap is, on him, flamboyant. He feels clownish. But he does not strip it off and toss it away.

He has walked so many alleys and serviceways, has darted across so many avenues into so many shadowed backstreets, that he has become not merely lost but also disoriented. The walls of buildings appear to tilt toward or away from him at precarious angles. The cobblestone pavement under his feet resembles large reptilian scales, as though he is walking on the armored back of a sleeping dragon.

The city, always large, seems to have become an entire world, as immense as it is hostile.

With the disorientation comes a quiet desperation that compels Crispin at times to run when he knows full well that no one is in immediate pursuit of him.

Shortly before dusk, in a wide alleyway that serves ancient brick warehouses with stained-concrete loading docks, he encounters the dog. Golden, it approaches along the east side of the passage, in a slant of light from the declining sun.

The dog stops before Crispin, gazing up at him, head cocked. In the last bright light of day, the animal’s eyes are as golden as its coat, pupils small and irises glowing.

The boy senses no threat. He holds out one hand, and the dog nuzzles it for a moment.

When the dog walks past, the boy hesitates but shuffles after him. Unlike his follower, the animal seems to know where he is going, and why.

Cracked concrete steps lead up to a loading dock. The big bay roll-downs are shut, but a man-size door proves to be unlocked and ever-so-slightly ajar.

The dog nudges the door open. With a swish of his white tail, he disappears inside.

Crossing the threshold into darkness, Crispin withdraws a small LED flashlight from a pocket of his jeans. The flash was once in his nightstand drawer. He took it when he fled his home in the first minutes after midnight.

As sharp as a stropped razor, the white beam cuts through the gloom, revealing a long-abandoned, windowless space large enough to serve as a hangar for jet airliners. High overhead are storage lofts and catwalks.

Everything is shrouded in gray dust. Rust as layered as pastry dough flakes and peels from metal surfaces.

Scattered across the concrete floor are rat bones and the shells of dead beetles. Old playing cards spotted with mold. Here a one-eyed jack, there a queen of hearts and a king of clubs, and there four sixes laid out side by side. Cigarette butts. Broken beer bottles.

The flashlight finds a spider crawling on a low-hanging loop of cable, projecting its enlarged shadow on a wall, where it creeps like a creature in one of those old movies about insects made enormous by atomic radiation.

Without need of the flashlight, the dog finds his way around the sprays of glass. In such an odorous place, most dogs would weave from smell to smell, their noses to the floor. But this one carries his head high, alert.

At the north end of the great room are three doors leading to three offices, each with a window looking out upon the warehouse. Two doors are closed, the other ajar.

Beyond the gap between the third door and the jamb, an amber light pulses.

Crispin halts, but the dog does not. After a hesitation, the boy follows the animal into the illumined chamber.

Between two groups of fat candles—three to his left, three to his right—a man in his late twenties sits with his back against a wall, his legs straight out in front of him.

His glassy blue eyes stare but do not see. His mouth hangs open, but he has used all the words that he was born to speak.

Beside one trio of candles lies a sooty spoon. Next to the spoon is a plastic packet from which spills a white powder. In his lap lies a hypodermic syringe emptied of its contents.

The right sleeve of his checkered shirt is rolled up past the crook of his elbow, where blood earlier trickled from a puncture. Evidently he had some difficulty finding the vein.

Crispin is not afraid in the presence of a dead man. He has recently witnessed much worse than this.

With a keen intention more human than canine, the dog goes to a backpack lying beyond the candles, takes one of its straps between his teeth, and drags it away from the corpse.

The boy supposes that the bag must contain dog treats. On his knees, searching the various compartments, however, he finds no evidence that the dead man ever provided for the animal.

A quick scan of the dust-covered floor and the few paw prints suggests that the dog has never been here before, that he was led here by scent, not by experience. Yet …

Among the greasy, mostly worthless possessions of the deceased, Crispin discovers two stuffsacks full of currency rolled into tight bundles and held together by rubber bands. There are wads of five-, ten-, and twenty-dollar bills.

The money is most likely stolen or otherwise dirty. But no one, not even the police, will be likely to discover from whom the dead man has swiped this fortune or by what illegal activity he might have earned it.

Taking money from the body of a homeless loner surely can’t be theft. The man has no need of it anymore.

Nevertheless, the boy hesitates.

After a while, he feels that he is being watched. He looks up, half expecting that the corpse’s gaze has shifted toward him.

Eyes bright with candlelight, the dog studies him, panting softly as if in expectation.

Crispin has nowhere to go. And if he thinks of somewhere to go, he currently has only four dollars to get there.

The dog seems not to have belonged to the dead man. Whatever his provenance, however, Crispin will need to feed him.

He returns the wads of cash to the stuffsacks and pulls tight the drawstring tops. The backpack is too big for him. He will take only the money.

At the threshold, Crispin glances back. Candlelight creates an illusion of life in dead eyes. With reflections of flame throbbing across the slack face, the drug addict seems to be a man of glass, a lamp aglow from within.

As they retrace their steps through the enormous warehouse, the dog halts to sniff one of the moldy playing cards lying on the floor. It is the six of diamonds.

When Crispin passed this way earlier, four sixes had lain at this spot, one in every suit.

He surveys the immense dark room, probing this way and that with the flashlight. No one appears. No voice threatens. He and the dog seem to be alone.

The LED beam, arcing across the littered floor, cannot locate the missing sixes.

Outside, in the alleyway, the western sky is crimson, but the twilight is overall purple. The very air seems violet.

In a pet shop on Monroe Avenue, he buys a collar and leash. From now on, the dog will wear the collar at all times, so that he will not appear to be a stray. Crispin will use the leash only on public streets, where there is a risk of attracting the attention of an animal-control officer.

He also buys a bag of carob biscuits, a metal-toothed grooming comb, and a collapsible water dish.

At a sporting-goods store, he ties the dog to a lamppost and leaves him long enough to go inside and buy a backpack of the size that kids need to carry books to and from school. He puts the stuffsacks of money and his pet-store purchases in the pack.

Their dinner is hot dogs from a street vendor. Coke for the boy, bottled water for the dog.

At a novelty store specializing in magic tricks and games of all kinds, Crispin window-shops for a minute or two. He decides to buy a deck of cards, though he’s not sure why.

As Crispin is tying the dog to a rack designed for securing bicycles against theft, the owner of the novelty store opens the door, causing a silvery ringing from an annunciating bell. He says, “Come, lad. Dogs are welcome here.”

The owner is elderly, with white hair and bushy white eyebrows. His eyes are green, and they sparkle like sequins. He wears six emerald rings on various fingers, all as green—but none as sparkly—as his eyes.

“What is your pooch’s name?” the old man asks.

“He doesn’t have one yet.”

“Never leave an animal unnamed for long,” the old man declares. “If it doesn’t have a name, it’s not protected.”

“Protected from what?”

“From any dark spirit that might decide to take up residence in it,” the old man replies. He smiles and winks, but something in his merry eyes suggests that he is not kidding. “We’re closing in fifteen minutes,” he adds. “Can I help you find something?”

A few minutes later, as Crispin pays for the deck of cards, a white-haired woman ascends from the basement and comes through an open door with a large but apparently not heavy box of merchandise. She has a smile as warm as that of the man, who is perhaps her husband.

When she sees the dog, she halts, cocks her head, and says, “Young fella, your furry friend here has an aura that a pious archbishop couldn’t match.”

Crispin has no idea what that means. But he thanks her shyly.

As the woman busies herself restocking a case of magic tricks, and as the many-ringed old man explains a three-dimensional puzzle to another customer, Crispin takes bold action that surprises him. With the dog, he goes to the open door and down the stairs to the basement, unnoticed by the proprietors of the shop.

Below lies a storeroom with rows of freestanding metal shelves crammed with merchandise. There is also a small lavatory with sink and toilet.

Boy and dog take shelter behind the last row of shelves. Here, they can’t be seen from the stairs.

Crispin doesn’t worry that the dog might bark and reveal their presence. He already knows that, in some mysterious way, he and this animal are in synch. He unclips the leash from the collar, coils it, and puts it aside.

After a while, the lights are switched off from the top of the stairs. The door closes up there. For a few minutes, footsteps echo overhead, but soon all is silent.

They wait in the dark until they can be certain the store is closed for the night. Eventually, they make their way back through the stockroom, along the metal shelves, to the foot of the stairs.

Crispin is blind, but perhaps the dog is not. The boy fumbles for the light switch at the bottom of the steps. The dog, standing on its hind feet, finds it first, and the overhead fixtures brighten.

On one shelf, Crispin discovers a stack of quilted blue moving blankets. With them, he makes a bed in a corner, on the floor.

While Crispin strips the rubber bands from the wads of cash and places the flattened bills in three stacks according to denomination, he feeds the dog some of the cookies that he bought at the pet shop.

Together they count their fortune. Crispin announces the total—“Six thousand, seven hundred, forty-five dollars”—and the dog seems to agree with his math. He rolls the money into tight bundles again and returns them to the stuffsacks.

They will not starve. With this much money, they will be able to hide out for a long time, moving every night to a new refuge.

Exhausted, the boy lies back in the pile of blankets. The dog curls up beside him, its head on his abdomen.

Crispin gently rubs behind the dog’s ears.

As sleep is descending upon him, the boy thinks of the dead drug addict, mouth yawning and teeth yellow in the candlelight. He shivers but surrenders to his weariness.

In the dream, Crispin’s younger brother lies on a long white-marble table. His hands and feet are shackled to steel rings. A hard green apple is crammed into his mouth, stretching his jaws painfully. The apple is held in place by an elastic strap that is tied securely at the back of the boy’s head. His teeth are sunk into the fruit, but he isn’t able to bite through it and spit out the pieces.

The raised dagger has a remarkable serpentine blade.

Like a shining liquid, light drizzles along the cutting edge.

The cords of muscle in Crispin’s brother’s neck are taut. The arteries swell and throb as his heart slams great tides of blood through his body.

The apple stifles his screams. He seems also to be choking on a flood of his own saliva.

Crispin wakes in a sweat, crying his brother’s name: “Harley!”

For a moment he doesn’t know where he is. But then he realizes that he is under the shop of magic and games.

You can undo what has been done and still save them.

Those words whisper through his mind, but they seem like nothing more than wishful thinking.

When the terror recedes, he knows that he has found the perfect name for the dog. It is a name that will protect the animal from any malevolent spirit that might wish to enter him.

“Harley,” Crispin repeats softly. He names the dog for his lost brother. “Harley.”

The dog gently but insistently licks his hand.




3 (#ulink_b80ec713-e176-5ecf-984b-2442c3937170)


All these years later …

The night is cool, the sky deep, the stars as sharp as stiletto points.

At twelve, Crispin is strong and tougher than any boy his age should have to be. His senses are sharp, as is his intuition, as if from his association with four-legged Harley, he has acquired some of the dog’s keen perceptions.

This October night, the streets are filled with goblins and witches, vampires and zombies, sexy Gypsy women and superheroes. Some hide behind masks that look like certain despised politicians, and others wear the faces of leering swine, red-eyed goats, and serpents with forked tongues.

These people are on their way to parties in seedy lounges, in modest workingmen’s clubs, and in the ballrooms of older hotels that are desperate to have a profitable night in this economy that has been a mean Halloween for more than three years.

In this lower-middle-class district, Crispin feels safe enough to wander the streets, scoping the scene, enjoying the costumes and the bustle and the decorations. Halloween is swiftly becoming one of the biggest holidays of the year.

The people whom he fears are not of this neighborhood. They are not likely to descend to these streets for any celebration. Their tastes are more expensive and more exotic than anything that can be provided here.

Three months have passed since his most recent encounter with them. They had almost caught him in an old elementary school slated for eventual demolition.

His mistake then was to spend too many nights in the same place. If he remains on the move, they have greater difficulty locating him.

Crispin doesn’t know why being stationary too long puts him at risk. It’s as if his scent becomes concentrated when he lingers in one place.

He knows the legend of the Wandering Jew who struck Christ on the day of the crucifixion and was then condemned to roam the world forever without rest. Some say this condemnation was in fact an act of grace because the devil can’t find and take a man whose remorse drives him to wander ceaselessly in search of absolution.

In addition to his good dog, Crispin’s constant companion is remorse. That he could not save his brother. That he could not save his little sister. That he was so long blind to the truth of their stepfather and to the treachery of their unloving mother.

Now he and Harley pass a two-story buff-brick building that houses the local VFW post. The structure seems to tremble and swell with the muffled backbeat of a band playing an old Beatles tune, as if such rock and roll can’t be constrained without risk of explosion.

A wave of laughter and chatter and louder music washes across the sidewalk when two men, fumbling packs of cigarettes from their pockets, push open the door and step outside for a smoke. One is dressed as a pirate. The other wears a tuxedo, a fake goatee, and a pair of horns.

They glance at Crispin. The devil thumbs flame from a butane lighter.

The boy looks away from them. He takes up the slack in the leash, and brings the dog to his side.

Fifty yards or so from the VFW post, he dares to look back, half expecting the men to be following him. They are where he last saw them, smoke pluming from their mouths as if their souls must be on fire.

At the end of the block is a nightclub called Narcissus. No smokers loiter outside. The windows are two-way mirrors, offering no view of the interior.

A tall man stands beside a taxi. He assists a woman from the vehicle.

His dark hair is slicked back. His cheeks are rouged, his lips bright red. His face is painted like that of a ventriloquist’s dummy, with prominent laugh lines from his nose to the corners of his mouth. The woman’s makeup matches the man’s.

Attached to their white clothes at key points are thick black strings that have been broken. They are not costumed as ventriloquists’ dummies but instead as marionettes freed from their puppet master.

The man says to Crispin, “What a handsome dog,” and the woman says, “Your sister tasted so sweet.”

The encounter is by chance, but you can be killed by chance as easily as by someone’s design.

The dog runs, the boy runs, the man snares the boy by his jacket, the leash jerks from the boy’s hand, and the boy falls …




4 (#ulink_9dc90e46-7447-5893-9a63-b97dc916225e)


Before Crispin went on the run …

He lives with his younger brother, Harley, and his little sister, Mirabell. They share a house with their mother, Clarette.

Each child has a different father because many men are drawn to their mother.

Clarette is so beautiful that one of her in-between boyfriends—in between the rich ones—tells Crispin, “Kid, your mom she’s like the magical princess in some fairy-tale cartoon movie, how she can charm kings and princes, even make animals and trees and flowers swoon and sing for her. But I never did see a cartoon princess as smokin’ hot as she is.”

At that time Crispin is seven years old. He understands the princes, animals, trees, and flowers part. Years will pass before he knows what “smokin’ hot” means.

Their mother is drawn to many men, not because their beauty matches hers but because of what they are able to do for her. She says that she has expensive tastes and that her “little bastards” are her ticket to the good life.

Each of their fathers is a man of great prominence for whom the existence of a little bastard would not only be an embarrassment but also a wrecking ball that might smash apart his marriage and lead to an expensive divorce.

In return for specifying on each birth certificate that the father is unknown, Clarette receives a one-time cash payment of considerable size and a smaller monthly stipend. The children live well, though not nearly as well as their mother, because she spends far more freely on herself than on them.

One night, she enjoys too much lemon vodka and cocaine. She insists that eight-year-old Crispin cuddle with her in an armchair.

He would rather be anywhere else but in her too-clingy arms and within range of her exotic breath. When she is in this condition, her embrace seems spidery, and for all her expressions of affection, he expects that something terrible will happen to him.

She tells him then that he ought to be grateful that she is so smart, so cunning, and so tough. Other women who make their living by giving birth to little bastards are likely sooner or later to have a well-planned accident or to become a victim of a supposedly random act of violence. Rich men do not like to be played for fools.

“But I’m too quick and bright and clever for them, Crispie. No one will take your mommy from you. I’ll always be here. Always and always.”

Time passes and change comes.…

The change is named Giles Gregorio. He makes the other rich men in Clarette’s life seem like paupers. His wealth is inherited and so immense as to be almost immeasurable.

Giles has palatial residences all over the world. In this city, he lives atop Shadow Hill, directly across the street from the fabled Pendleton. His mansion—called Theron Hall—is not as large as the Pendleton, but large enough: fifty-two rooms, eighteen baths, and a maze of hallways.

When Giles intends to be in town, twenty servants precede him by a week, readying the great house. Among them are one of his personal chefs, his junior butler, and his junior valet.

Two weeks after Clarette meets the multibillionaire, cuddling again with her oldest son, once more under the spell of lemon vodka, she speaks of a glorious future. “I’ve changed my business model, Crispie. No more little bastards. No more, no more. Mommy’s going to be richer than she ever dreamed of being.”

Just a week later, three weeks after Giles met Clarette, they are married in a private ceremony so exclusive that even her three children are not in attendance. In fact, watching arrivals from a high window, Crispin thinks that fewer than twenty people come to Theron Hall on the day and that more servants than guests must be witness to the wedding.

Crispin is nine then, Harley seven, Mirabell six.

He and his younger siblings are confined to a second-floor drawing room for the duration of the celebration, where they are showered with fabulous new toys, fed all their favorite foods, and watched over by Nanny Sayo, who is Japanese. Petite and pretty, with a soft, musical voice, Nanny Sayo is quick to laugh, but any test of her authority is met with the displeasure of a stern disciplinarian.

Following the wedding, all the many servants at Theron Hall are respectful of the children and even treat them with affection. But it seems to Crispin that when these people smile, the expression in their eyes does not match the curve of their lips.

Yet life is good. Oh, it is grand.

The children eat only what they like.

They go to bed only when they wish.

Each rises to his or her own clock.

They are schooled at home by a tutor, Mr. Mordred. He is deeply knowledgeable in all subjects. He is most entertaining and can make any topic interesting.

Mr. Mordred is a jolly man, not exactly fat but well-rounded, and sometimes he tells little Mirabell that she looks good enough to eat, which always makes her giggle.

Perhaps the best thing about Mr. Mordred is that he doesn’t press them hard on their lessons. He allows them to break frequently for play, in which he often leads them.

When they are mischievous, he sometimes encourages them. When they are in a lazy mood, Mr. Mordred says that any child who isn’t lazy must not be a child at all but instead a dwarf masquerading as one.

On his left temple, Mr. Mordred has a black birthmark shaped exactly like a horsefly. When any of the children puts a finger to this oddity, Mr. Mordred makes a buzzing sound.

Now and then he pretends to mistake this image of a fly for the real thing. He twitches as if annoyed and slaps at the imagined insect with the flat of his hand, which always makes the children burst into laughter.

If Crispin were burdened with such a birthmark, he would be self-conscious about it, even embarrassed. He admires Mr. Mordred for finding reason to be amused even by this disfigurement.

One day, three weeks after the wedding, Crispin and Harley and Mirabell spend a couple of hours sprawled on the library floor with bundles of new children’s picture books and lots of cool comic books that Giles has bought for them. When at last they become bored, Nanny Sayo retrieves the scattered reading material to stack it on a table.

At one point, Crispin turns and finds himself standing over the woman as she kneels to gather the discarded comics. He is looking down the scooped neck of her blouse, where he sees on the curve of one breast a birthmark identical to that on Mr. Mordred’s forehead.

As if she is aware of his attention, Nanny Sayo begins to raise her head. Crispin turns away, flustered, before their eyes can meet.

Although he is only nine, he is embarrassed to have been staring at her breasts, the sight of which has affected him in some new and disturbing way that he can’t define. His face burns. His heart knocks so loud he thinks Nanny Sayo must hear it.

Later, in bed, he wonders how Mr. Mordred and Nanny Sayo can have the same birthmark. Maybe it’s something contagious, like a head cold or the flu.

He feels sorry for Nanny Sayo, though at least her disfigurement is in a less visible place than Mr. Mordred’s.

That night he dreams of Nanny Sayo dancing naked in firelight. She has several horsefly birthmarks, not just one, and they are not fixed. They crawl across her skin.

Crispin wakes in the morning with a fever, plagued by nausea and aching muscles.

His mother says that he’s just caught a virus. Antibiotics won’t help him cast off a virus. He must remain in bed a day or two until it passes. She sees no need to call a doctor.

During the day, Crispin reads and takes short naps and reads again. The book is an adventure story set at sea and on various tropical islands.

Although the author has kept the tone light and has never put the young leads in any danger that they couldn’t handily escape, although no characters in the novel are named Crispin or Harley or Mirabell, near twilight he turns the last page and reads this line: And so the little bastards were slaughtered, Mirabell and then Harley and last of all young Crispin, slaughtered and left to rot, to be fed upon by rats and sharp-beaked birds.

In disbelief, Crispin reads the line again.

His heart races, and he cries out, but the cry largely dies in his throat. He drops the book, throws off the covers and erupts from bed. As he gets to his feet, dizziness overcomes him. He totters a few steps, collapses.

When he regains consciousness, he knows that little time has passed because the formerly pending twilight has just arrived. The sky beyond the windows is purple pressing toward a red horizon.

His dizziness has passed, but he feels weak.

He gets to his knees, claws the book from the bed, and dares to read the last page again. The words he saw before are gone. No mention is made of Mirabell, Harley, Crispin, slaughter, rats, or sharp-beaked birds.

With trembling hands, he closes the book and puts it on the nightstand.

Wondering if a delusion born of fever had put the words before him on the page, he returns to bed. He is more worried than afraid, but then more confused than worried, and finally exhausted.

A chill overtakes him. He pulls the covers up to his chin.

When Nanny Sayo rolls a service cart into his room with a bed tray that holds his dinner, Crispin first intends to tell her about the threatening words in the book. But he is embarrassed to have been so frightened by something that, in the end, proved to be entirely imaginary.

He doesn’t want Nanny Sayo to think he is, at nine years of age, still a big baby. He wants her to be proud of him.

His sick-boy dinner consists of lime Jell-O, buttered toast, hot chocolate, and chicken noodle soup. Anticipating that her patient might not have much appetite, that he might take his dinner in fits and starts, Nanny Sayo has put the chocolate and the soup in separate thermos bottles to ensure that they stay warm.

When Crispin expresses disinterest in the food, Nanny Sayo leaves the footed tray on the cart.

She perches on the edge of his bed and urges him to sit up. As Crispin leans against the headboard, Nanny Sayo takes his hand to time his pulse.

He likes watching her face as she stares solemnly at his wrist, counting his heartbeats.

“Just a little fast,” she says.

A curious disappointment overcomes him when she lets go of his wrist. He wishes she would continue to hold his hand, though he does not know why he has this desire.

He is consoled when she presses one hand to his forehead.

“Just a little fever,” she says, though it seems to him that her palm and slender fingers are hotter than his brow.

To his surprise, she undoes the first two buttons of his pajama top and places her delicate hand on his chest. She has already taken his pulse. He doesn’t understand why she would need to feel the thump of his heart, if that is indeed what she’s doing.

She moves her hand slowly back and forth. Slowly and smoothly. Smoothly.

He almost feels that she could make him well just by her touch.

Removing her hand from his chest, leaving the buttons undone, she says, “You’re a strong boy. You’ll be well soon. Just rest and eat all your dinner. You need to eat to get well.”

“All right,” he says.

She stares into his eyes. Her eyes are very dark.

She says, “Nanny knows best.”

In her eyes, he sees twin reflections of himself.

“Doesn’t Nanny know best?” she asks.

“I guess so. Sure.”

He sees the moon in her eyes. Then he realizes it is only a reflection of his bedside lamp.

“Trust Nanny,” she says, “and you’ll get well. Do you trust Nanny?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Eat your dinner before you go to sleep.”

“I will.”

“All your dinner.”

“Yes.”

Leaning forward, she kisses his brow.

She meets his eyes again. Her face is very close to his.

“Trust Nanny.”

On her breath is the scent of lemons as she kisses one corner of his mouth. Her lips are so soft against the corner of his mouth.

Nanny Sayo is almost to the door before Crispin realizes that she has risen from the edge of his bed.

Before stepping into the hallway, she looks back at him. And smiles.

Alone, watching TV but comprehending none of what he sees, Crispin eats the Jell-O. He eats the buttered toast and drinks the hot chocolate.

He isn’t delirious anymore, but he’s not himself, either. He feels … adrift, as though his bed is floating on a placid sea.

The chicken noodle soup will be too much. He will eat it later. Nanny Sayo has said that he must.

After returning the tray to the cart and after visiting the bathroom—he has one of his own—Crispin settles in bed once more.

He turns off the TV but not the bedside lamp. Night waits at the windows.

Tired, so tired, he closes his eyes.

In spite of having eaten the toast and drunk the hot chocolate, he can still vaguely taste her lemony kiss.

He dreams. He would not be surprised if he dreamed of Nanny Sayo, but he dreams instead of Mr. Mordred, their teacher.

Crispin, Harley, and Mirabell are sitting at a reading table in the library. Mr. Mordred strides back and forth in front of a row of bookshelves, holding forth on some subject, delighting them with his stories. In the dream, Mr. Mordred doesn’t have a horsefly birthmark on his left temple. His entire head is that of a giant horsefly.

Dream leads to dream, to dream, until he is awakened by a sound. A swishing-scraping noise.

The clock reads 12:01 A.M.

So weary that he can’t fully sit up, Crispin lifts his head from the pillow just far enough to survey the room for the source of the noise.

The bed tray stands on the cart, where he last put it. On the tray, the thermos of chicken soup wobbles around and around on its base, as if something inside is turning, spinning, impatient for Crispin to unscrew the cap and pour it out.

He must be delirious again.

Lowering his head to the pillow, closing his eyes, he thinks of her slender hand upon his chest, and soon he sleeps.

In the morning when he wakes, the cart is gone and the tray with it. He hopes that a maid removed it and that Nanny Sayo will not have to know that he failed to eat her soup.

He never wants to disappoint her.

Crispin loves his nanny.

In two days, he regains his health.

When he is well again, after showering, he stands naked in the bathroom, studying himself in a full-length mirror, searching for the detailed silhouette of a horsefly. He can’t find one.

For reasons he is unable to put into words, he believes that he has narrowly escaped something worse than a birthmark.

His embarrassment and worry do not last. Soon he lapses back into the relaxed and carefree rhythms of Theron Hall.

Crispin, Harley, and Mirabell eat only what they like. Chef Faunus and Cook Merripen cater to their every desire.

They go to bed only when they wish.

Each rises to his or her own clock.

Mr. Mordred entertains. Nanny Sayo attends the children’s needs.

The world beyond the great house has been fading from Crispin’s mind. Sometimes, passing a window, he is surprised to see the city, the Pendleton looming across the street.

Shortly before midnight on July 25, having been in bed less than two hours, Crispin swims up from a troubled sleep. Half awake, he sees two shadowy figures in his room, the place brightened only by the hallway light that seeps in through the door, which is ajar no more than two inches.

The visitors are talking softly to each other. One voice is that of Giles, whom the children now call Father. The other belongs to Jardena, Giles’s mother.

Jardena looks old enough to be her son’s great-grandmother. She keeps almost entirely to her suite of rooms on the third floor. She is withered, her face as drawn as a sun-dried apple, but her eyes as lustrous and purple as wet grapes. She’s seldom seen, almost always at a distance, at the farther junction of hallways, floating by in one of her long dark dresses.

Crispin hears little of what they say, though it seems that tomorrow is some kind of memorial or feast day. Before he slides away into sleep once more, the boy hears the names Saint Anne and Saint Joachim.

When he wakes in the morning, Crispin is not sure that the visitors to his room were real. More likely, they were part of his otherwise unremembered dream.

In the coming night, something happens to Mirabell.




5 (#ulink_dc21bbf3-4e55-514a-aa43-acd8e38592d2)


Halloween, three years and three months later …

The leash jerks from the boy’s hand, and he falls.

The previously gentle dog, never having growled, does not growl now, but bites. He nips at the ankle of the male marionette in the white suit, who cries out and lets go of Crispin’s jacket.

The boy sprints after the dog, away from the nightclub called Narcissus. They plunge into the street, dodging cars as brakes shriek and horns blare.

From the comparative safety of the next sidewalk, Crispin looks back across the street and sees the man on one knee, examining his bitten ankle. The woman in white is talking on a cell phone.

Crispin snatches up the dropped leash, and the dog sets off with purpose. He and Harley weave between the pedestrians, half of whom are costumed for Halloween, half not.

When the hunters are hot on the scent, some places are safer than others. Certain churches, not all, seem to foil these particular pursuers. Sanctuary can be found in that kind of church—whether Baptist or otherwise—in which, on Sundays, rollicking gospel songs are sung with gusto and booming piano. Churches in which Latin is sometimes spoken, candles are lit for the intention of the dead, incense is sometimes burned, and fonts of holy water stand at the entrances—those are also secure. Synagogues are good refuges, too.

Right now, he and Harley are a few dangerous blocks from any such a safe haven.

Reverend Eddie Nordlaw, who founded the Crusade for Happiness and who appears Sundays on his TV show, The Wide Eye of the Needle, preaches that God wants everyone to be rich. He operates from his megachurch, the Rapture Temple, on Joss Street, which is not far from here.

But Crispin has learned the hard way that the Rapture Temple offers no more protection against these enemies than does a shopping mall. Or a police station.

On the day of his mother’s wedding, when he watched from a high window, one of the honored guests whom he saw arriving was the chief of police.

Pedestrians admonish and curse Crispin as he pounds pell-mell after the bolting dog, holding fast to the leash and trying not to be jerked off his feet.

Water in motion can also screen Crispin from Giles Gregorio and everyone like him. A rushing stream, if it is wide enough, thwarts them. Even if the boy stands on the farther bank from them, in plain sight, they seem unable to see him and eventually give up the search.

In Statler Park, a man-made waterfall tumbles into a fake-rock pond. A narrow pathway allows you to walk behind the falls, where there is a grotto. In that sequestered hollow, you can look out toward the park, through the cascades. The hunters must know of that retreat; but Crispin has several times been safe there while they stalked him through the rest of the grounds.

Rushing torrents seem not only to deny them his scent but also to confuse their senses, as though the swish and burble of the water is not merely sound but also a language, as if Nature is speaking a dispensation to spare him from their homicidal fury.

He and the dog are at this moment far from Statler Park and no nearer any rushing stream. Their best hope is Memorial Plaza, two acres of granite cobblestones, raised planters full of flowers, and benches on which people sit to read the morning paper, to have a bite of lunch, to feed the pigeons, and even to contemplate the sacrifices made by soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines who have died to keep them free.

Harley knows the city as well as Crispin does. Soon cobblestones are underfoot. At this hour, the lamplit plaza is deserted because, for everyone except Crispin and his dog, such places are dangerous after dark in this part of town.

At the center of Memorial Plaza, on a granite plinth twelve feet in diameter, stand three larger-than-lifesize bronze figures: marines in battle gear, one of them wounded and leaning on another, the third carrying Old Glory as if defiantly announcing their location to an adversary they do not fear.

These days, the city is operating with such an enormous budget deficit that the plaza lamps and the spotlights on the statuary are extinguished at nine o’clock to save electricity. All is dark but for the lunar lamp.

The sounds of celebrations ring in from surrounding streets.

Harley springs onto the plinth, and Crispin scrambles after him. The slab of granite is carved to represent a stony outcrop, as if the bronze marines stand atop a battle-blasted hill. Among those sculpted rocks is a place where a boy and a dog can nestle.

They are less than half concealed. Even without the spotlights that used to wash the statues, the boy and the dog should be visible to anyone passing by, for the moon is full.

Yet Crispin is confident that they are safe. They are safe in the company of these bronze heroes.

The woman in white, black strings dangling, rushes into the plaza. Moonglow powders her marionette face, and her blood-red lips look black.

While the woman surveys her surroundings, the boy half believes that he can hear her doll eyes click-click-clicking as she blinks, as if she is in fact an animated puppet.

Her gaze passes over him from right to left, then slowly left to right.…

She doesn’t hesitate or come closer. She turns and moves away toward another part of the plaza.

Proximity to certain symbols and images can make boy and dog invisible to this woman’s kind, as surely as does swift-moving water. Statues honoring acts of courage and valor. Certain religious figures carved or cast life-size or larger. The immense mural of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on the front wall of the Russian-American Community Center. The huge cast medallion of America’s sixteenth president embedded above the main entrance of Lincoln Bank on Main Street.

A cross or a serviceman’s medal worn around the neck will not provide invisibility. The symbol needs to be of substantial size to be effective, as if the noble efforts and the determination of those who created and erected it are as important as the symbol or image itself.

The dog-bitten man in the white suit appears, limping. Soon there are five of them, though the others are not costumed, prowling the plaza and its immediate surroundings.

Although it is ancient, the silver moon looks newly minted.

On a nearby street, a drunken reveler howls like a werewolf.

The moon is without menace. It neither favors evil nor calls to those who do.

This is what Crispin believes at the age of twelve: By the light of the moon, truth can be seen as easily as by any other light. Year by year, he will refine that perception into a greater wisdom that will sustain him.

To see the truth, however, you must have an honest eye.

Across the plaza, the marionettes and their allies, who love lies, search for the boy and his dog, unaware that they are incapable of seeing that for which they seek.




6 (#ulink_8b5bfa87-c455-5b43-b0e1-191899d2e372)


July 26, three years and three months earlier …

Having been healed by the power of his nanny’s kiss or having been healed in spite of it, nine-year-old Crispin falls again into the cozy rhythms of Theron Hall. The world outside seems less real than the kingdom within these walls.

For some reason, Mirabell is excused from the day’s lessons. The three-year age difference between Crispin and his sister ensures that he is less interested in what she’s engaged upon than he would be if she were only a year younger or were his twin.

Besides, girls are girls, and boys are most like boys when girls aren’t around. Therefore, Mr. Mordred is even more interesting and entertaining when he is able to focus his attention on Crispin and Harley, with no need to tailor part of his lesson to a girl so small that her brothers sometimes call her Pip, short for pipsqueak.

Lessons begin at nine and are finished by noon. After lunch, Crispin and Harley intend to play together, but somehow they go their separate ways.

Most likely, Brother Harley is on a cat hunt. Recently, he has claimed to have seen three white cats slinking along hallways, across rooms, ascending or descending one staircase or another.

Nanny Sayo says there are no cats. Both the chief butler, Minos, and the head housekeeper, the formidable Mrs. Frigg, agree that no felines live in Theron Hall.

No cats are fed here and in this immaculate residence, no mice exist on which the cats might feed themselves. No disagreeable evidence of toileting cats has been found.

The more the staff dismisses the very idea of cats, the more that Harley is determined to prove they exist. He has become quite like a cat, creeping stealthily through the immense mansion, trying to sniff them out.

He claims to have nearly captured one on a couple of occasions. These elusive specimens are even faster than the average cat.

He says their coats are as pure-white as snow. Their eyes are purple but glow silver in the shadows.

Considering that Theron Hall offers over forty-four thousand square feet in its three floors and basement, Crispin figures that his brother might be engaged in a search for the phantom cats that will last weeks if not months before he tires of his fantasy.

At four o’clock on the afternoon of July 26, Crispin is in the miniature room. This magical chamber is on the third floor, across the main hallway from the suite in which the matriarch, Jardena, withers in reclusion.

The space measures fifty feet in length, thirty-five feet in width. Clearance from floor to ceiling is twenty-six feet.

In the center of this room stands a one-quarter scale model of Theron Hall. The word miniature seems inadequately descriptive, because each linear foot of the great house is reduced only to three inches in this representation. Whereas Theron Hall is 140 feet from end to end, the miniature is thirty-five feet. The real house is eighty feet wide, and the reduced version is twenty. The fifteen-foot-high likeness stands on a four-foot-high presentation table with solid sides rather than legs.





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