Twilight Eyes

Table of Contents

 

 

 

“Koontz barely lets the reader come up for air between terrors.”

 

“Koontz’s skill at edge-of-the-seat writing has improved with each book. He can scare our socks off.”

 

“Koontz’s imagination is not only as big as the Ritz, it is also as wild as an unbroken stallion.”
—

 

“Koontz puts his readers through the emotional wringer.”

 

“His prose mesmerizes . . . Koontz consistently hits the bull’s-eye.”

 

“First-class entertainment.”

 

“An exceptional novelist . . . top notch.”

 

“Koontz is an expert at creating believable characters.”

 

“One of our finest and most versatile suspense writers.”

 

“Koontz does it so well!”

 

“Koontz’s prose is as smooth as a knife through butter and his storytelling ability never wavers.”

 

“Koontz’s gift is that he makes his monsters seem ‘realer,’ and he makes the characters who fight [them] as normal as anyone you’d meet on a street.”

THE EYES OF DARKNESS
THE KEY TO MIDNIGHT
MR. MURDER
THE FUNHOUSE
DRAGON TEARS
SHADOWFIRES
HIDEAWAY
COLD FIRE
THE HOUSE OF THUNDER
THE VOICE OF THE NIGHT
THE BAD PLACE
THE SERVANTS OF TWILIGHT
MIDNIGHT
LIGHTNING
THE MASK
WATCHERS
TWILIGHT EYES
STRANGERS
DEMON SEED
PHANTOMS
WHISPERS
NIGHT CHILLS
DARKFALL
SHATTERED
THE VISION
THE FACE OF FEAR

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196,

South Africa

 

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s

imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business

establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over

and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Copyright © 1985, 1987 by Nkui, Inc.

“Afterword” copyright © 2007 by Dean Koontz.

 

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without

permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the

author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

PRINTING HISTORY

First Berkley mass-market edition / September 1987

Berkley afterword edition / December 2007

Berkley trade paperback edition / November 2010

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Koontz, Dean, 1945-

Twilight eyes / Dean Koontz.—Berkley trade paperback ed.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-48419-7

1. Psychic ability—Fiction. 2. Carnivals—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3561.O55T9 2010

813’.54—dc22 2010032945

 

 

This book is dedicated to
Tim and Serena Powers
and
Jim and Viki Blaylock
because they are
fellow toilers
in the vineyards
and because
it seemed fitting
that such a strange story
should be dedicated to
strange people.

That was the year they murdered our president in Dallas. It was the end of innocence, the end of a certain way of thinking and being, and some were despondent and said it was the death of hope, as well. But though falling autumn leaves may reveal skeletal branches, spring reclothes the wood; a beloved grandmother dies, but as compensation for the loss, her grandchild enters the world strong and curious; when one day ends, the next begins, for in this infinite universe there is no final conclusion to anything, definitely not to hope. From the ashes of the old age, another age is born, and birth
is
hope. The year that followed the assassination would bring us the Beatles, new directions in modern art that would alter the way we viewed our environment, and the beginning of a refreshing distrust of government. If it also contained the germinating seeds of war, this should only serve to teach us that—like hope—terror and pain and despair are constant companions in this life, a lesson that is never without value.

I came to the carnival in the sixth month of my seventeenth year, in the darkest hours of the night, on a Thursday in August, more than three months before that death in Dallas. During the following week, what happened to me would change my life as profoundly as assassination could transform the future of a nation, though upon my arrival the shuttered and deserted midway seemed an unlikely place for destiny to be waiting.

At four o’clock in the morning, the county fairgrounds had been closed for almost four hours. The carnies had shut down the Ferris wheel, Dive Bomber, Tilt-a-Whirl, and other rides. They had closed up their hanky-panks, grab-joints, pitch-and-dunks, pokerino parlors, had turned off the lights and killed the music and folded up the gaudy glamour. With the departure of the marks, the carnies had gone to their travel trailers, which were parked in a large meadow south of the midway. Now the tattooed man, the midgets, dwarves, hustlers, the women from the girly shows, the pitchmen, the bottle-pitch and ring-toss operators, the man who made cotton candy for a living, the woman who dipped apples in caramel sauce, the bearded lady, the three-eyed man, and all the others were asleep or fighting insomnia or making love as if they were ordinary citizens—which, in this world, they were.

A three-quarter moon, sliding down one side of the sky, was still high enough to shed a pale wintry glow that seemed anachronistic in the hot, humid, graveyard hours of an August night in Pennsylvania. As I strolled through the lot, getting a feel for the place, I noticed how strangely white my own hands looked in that frosty luminescence, like the hands of a dead man or ghost. That was when I first perceived the lurking presence of Death among the rides and hanky-panks, and sensed dimly that the carnival would be the site of murder and much blood.

Overhead, lines of plastic pennants hung limp in the muggy air; they were bright triangles when touched by sunshine or splashed in the dazzling glow of ten thousand carnival lights but were bled of color now, so they seemed like scores of sleeping bats suspended above the sawdust-carpeted concourse. As I passed by the silent carousel a frozen stampede was halted in mid-gallop—black stallions, white mares, pintos, palominos, mustangs—charging forward without proceeding, as if the river of time had parted around them. Like a thin spray of metallic paint, traces of moonlight adhered to the brass poles that transfixed the horses, but in that eerie radiance the brass was silver and cold.

I had jumped the high fence that ringed the county fairgrounds, for the gates had been closed when I arrived. Now I felt vaguely guilty, a thief in search of booty, which was odd, for I was no thief and harbored no criminal intentions toward anyone in the carnival.

I
was
a murderer, wanted by the police in Oregon, but I felt no guilt about the blood I had spilled out there at the other end of the continent. I killed my Uncle Denton with an ax because I wasn’t strong enough to finish him with my bare hands. Neither remorse nor guilt pursued me, for Uncle Denton had been one of
them
.

The police, however,
did
pursue me, and I couldn’t be sure that even three thousand miles of flight had won me any safety. I no longer used my real name, Carl Stanfeuss. At first I had called myself Dan Jones, then Joe Dann, then Harry Murphy. Now I was Slim MacKenzie, and I figured I would stay Slim for a while; I liked the sound of it. Slim MacKenzie. It was the kind of name a guy might have if he were John Wayne’s best buddy in one of the Duke’s Westerns. I had let my hair grow longer, though it was still brown. There was not much else I could do to alter my appearance, other than stay free long enough for time to make a different man of me.