The Voice of the Night by Dean Koontz Page B

houses up here? This must be valuable land.”
    Without looking away from the window, Roy said, “The entire Kingman fortune, including the land, went to the state.”
    “Why?”
    “There weren’t any living relatives on either side of the family, nobody to inherit.”
    “What’s the state going to do with the place?”
    “In twenty years they’ve managed to do absolutely zilch, nothing at all, big zero,” Roy said. “For a while there was talk of selling the land and the house at public auction. Then they said they were going to make a pocket park out of it. You still hear the park rumor every once in a while, but nothing ever gets done. Now will you please shut up for a minute? I think my eyes are finally beginning to adjust. I have to concentrate on this.”
    “Why? What’s so important in there?”
    “I’m trying to see the mantel.”
    “You’ve been here before,” Colin said. “You’ve already seen it.”
    “I’m trying to pretend it’s that night. The night Kingman went berserk. I’m trying to imagine what it must have been like. The sound of the ax... I can almost hear it... whooooosh-chunk, whooooosh-chunk ... and maybe a couple of short screams... his footsteps coming down the stairs... heavy footsteps ... the blood... all that blood ...”
    Roy’s voice gradually trailed away as if he had mesmerized himself.
    Colin walked to the far end of the porch. The boards squeaked underfoot. He leaned against the shaky railing and craned his neck so that he could look around the side of the house. He could see only the overgrown garden in shades of gray and black and moonlight-silver: knee-high grass; shaggy hedges; orange and lemon trees pulled to the ground by the weight of their own untrimmed boughs; sprawling rose bushes, some with pale flowers, white or yellow, that looked like puffs of smoke in the darkness; and a hundred other plants that were woven into a single, tangled entity by the loom of the night.
    He had the feeling something was watching him from the depths of the garden. Something less than human.
    Don’t be childish, he thought. There’s nothing out there. This isn’t a horror movie. This is life.
    He tried to stand his ground, but the possibility that he was being observed became a certainty, at least in his own mind. He knew that if he stood there much longer, he would surely be seized by a creature with huge claws and dragged into the dense shrubbery, there to be gnawed upon at the beast’s leisure. He turned away from the garden and went back to Roy.
    “You ready to go?” Colin asked.
    “I can see the whole room.”
    “In the dark?”
    “I can see a lot of it.”
    “Yeah?”
    “I can see the mantel.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Where he lined up the heads.”
    As if he were drawn by a magnet stronger than his will, Colin stepped up beside Roy and bent forward and peered into the Kingman house. It was extremely dark in there, but he could see a bit more than he had seen a while ago: strange shapes, perhaps piles of broken furniture and other rubble; shadows that seemed to be moving but, of course, were not; and the white-marble mantel above the enormous fireplace, the sacrificial altar upon which Robert Kingman had offered up his family.
    Suddenly Colin felt that this was a place he must get away from at once, a place he must stay away from forever. He knew it instinctively, on a deep animal level; and as if he were an animal, the hairs rose on the back of his neck, and he hissed softly, involuntarily, through bared teeth.
    Roy said, “Whooooosh-chunk !”

11

    Midnight.
    They cycled down Hawk Drive to Broadway and followed Broadway until it ended at Palisades Lane. They stopped at the head of the wooden steps that led down to the public beach. On the other side of the narrow street, elegant old Spanish houses faced the sea. The night was still. There was no traffic. The only sound was the steady pounding of the surf fifty feet below them. From here they would go separate ways: