rose and started down into the trees, he followed. Eventually we came to a stream different from the one that I had walked earlier, a lively one that chortled over a stony course. I knelt at the water’s edge and drank directly from the flow until my thirst was slaked.
The wolf stopped to watch me. Only when I had finished and had gotten to my feet did he go to the water and lower his muzzle and drink upstream from me, as if he understood the health protocols of refreshment in the wilds.
We set out once more. Although the day was cooling and lacked sunshine to celebrate, birds sang us toward home. After a while, when I glanced back to see if I still had a companion, I discovered that a second wolf had joined the first. Their heads were high, and they wagged their tails, and their smiles in no way suggested that their intentions toward me were the same as those of the storybook wolf toward Red Riding Hood. I had no fear of them, and I continued on, and when next I looked back, they were three.
By the time we reached the tree line beyond which lay the yard around my mother’s house, the pack had grown to five. Now they loped past me and onto the grass. One of them executed a play bow before another, and the bow was reciprocated, and soon they were tumbling together and pretending to bite, chasing this way and that. One of them turned a hundred eighty degrees on one leg so that the chased became the chaser, and they displayed with every move a grace that enchanted me.
I had never seen anything like this before, and I felt that it was a performance for my benefit. I stood watching with delight and knew intuitively that I was not invited to participate. After a while they tired themselves and retreated to the edge of the forest and stood there staring at me, their eyes warm yellow in the dreariness of the day. I believed their play had a purpose greater than mere frolic, but I had no idea what it might mean.
Tongues lolling, flanks heaving, they turned away from me and faded into the trees, quite like the wolves of sleep might wither into the vaporous forest in a dream. I stood alone.
I intended to go directly to the weathered building that served as a garage and see what my mother had left there for me in a picnic hamper, but then I saw the flag—the dish towel—hung from the hook on a front porch post. My banishment had come to an end much sooner than I expected.
In spite of the terror of the day and my sorrow that the hiker had come to his death that I might live, elation swelled in me. My mother suffered from anxiety in my presence and sometimes became so despondent that even drink and drugs were slow to rescue her from depression. But in the end, however, I was her child, and she loved me in her way. If she could seldom bring herself to touch me and even more seldom look at me directly, she nonetheless made a place for me in her life.
To that point, my greatest fear had been that my mother might grow ill or die by accident, leaving me alone. Even a freak such as I could dread solitude in a world of wonder made for sharing. As I headed toward the small but beloved house, I would soon begin to learn that our greatest fears are seldom realized, because the world is a machine that produces endless surprises and mysteries layered on mysteries—and shocks that either temper or shatter the spirit. My life was not to be this house or this forest, but instead the wilderness that is any city and the world beneath the city, where we few, we hidden, live in secret.
BY DEAN KOONTZ
77 Shadow Street • What the Night Knows • Breathless • Relentless • Your Heart Belongs to Me • The Darkest Evening of the Year • The Good Guy • The Husband • Velocity • Life Expectancy • The Taking • The Face • By the Light of the Moon • One Door Away from Heaven • From the Corner of His Eye • False Memory • Seize the Night • Fear Nothing • Mr. Murder • Dragon Tears • Hideaway • Cold Fire • The Bad Place • Midnight • Lightning • Watchers • Strangers • Twilight Eyes • Darkfall • Phantoms • Whispers • The Mask • The Vision • The Face of Fear • Night Chills • Shattered • The Voice of the Night • The Servants of Twilight • The House of Thunder • The Key to Midnight • The Eyes of Darkness • Shadowfires • Winter Moon • The Door to December • Dark Rivers of the Heart • Icebound • Strange Highways • Intensity • Sole Survivor • Ticktock • The Funhouse • Demon Seed
Odd Thomas • Forever Odd • Brother Odd • Odd Hours • Odd Interlude • Odd Apocalypse • Deeply Odd
Prodigal Son • City of Night • Dead and Alive • Lost Souls • The Dead Town
A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog Named Trixie
About the Author
DEAN KOONTZ, the author of many #1
Correspondence for the author should be addressed to:
Dean Koontz
P.O. Box 9529
Newport Beach, California 92658
To Be Continued…
He lives in solitude beneath the city, an exile from society, which will destroy him if he is ever seen.
She dwells in seclusion, a fugitive from enemies who will do her harm if she is ever found.
But the bond between them runs deeper than the tragedies that have scarred their lives. Something more than chance—and nothing less than destiny—has brought them together in a world whose hour of reckoning is fast approaching.
In
Acclaim for Dean Koontz
“A rarity among bestselling writers, Koontz continues to pursue new ways of telling stories, never content
