The Eyes of Darkness by Dean Koontz

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 7th, 2022 in Stories

began to rattle violently against the wall, and then both flew off their mountings and clattered to the floor behind the beige, brushed-corduroy sofa.

This was the sound she had heard when she’d been in the kitchen—this clatter. “What the hell?”

The remaining two photographs abruptly flung themselves off the wall. One dropped behind the sofa, and the other tumbled onto it.

Vivienne blinked in amazement, unable to understand what she had seen. An earthquake? But she hadn’t felt the house move; the windows hadn’t rattled. Any tremor too mild to be felt would also be too mild to tear the photographs from the wall.

She went to the sofa and picked up the photo that had dropped onto the cushions. She knew it well. She had dusted it many times. It was a portrait of Danny Evans, as were the other five that usually hung around it. In this one, he was ten or eleven years old, a sweet brown-haired boy with dark eyes and a lovely smile.

Vivienne wondered if there had been a nuclear test; maybe that was what had shaken things up. The Nevada Nuclear Test Site, where underground detonations were conducted several times a year, was less than a hundred miles north of Las Vegas. Whenever the military exploded a high-yield weapon, the tall hotels swayed in Vegas, and every house in town shuddered a little.

But, no, she was stuck in the past: The Cold War was over, and nuclear tests hadn’t been conducted out in the desert for a long time. Besides, the house hadn’t shuddered just a minute ago; only the photos had been affected.

Puzzled, frowning thoughtfully, Vivienne put down the knife, pulled one end of the sofa away from the wall, and collected the framed eight-by-tens that were on the floor behind it. There were five photographs in addition to the one that had dropped onto the sofa; two were responsible for the noises that had drawn her into the living room, and the other three were those that she had seen popping off the picture hooks. She put them back where they belonged, then slid the sofa into place.

A burst of high-pitched electronic noise blared through the house: Aiii-eee. . . aiii-eee. . . aiii-eee. . .

Vivienne gasped, turned. She was still alone. Her first thought was: Burglar alarm.

But the Evans house didn’t have an alarm system.

Vivienne winced as the shrill electronic squeal grew louder, a piercing oscillation. The nearby windows and the thick glass top of the coffee table were vibrating. She felt a sympathetic resonance in her teeth and bones.

She wasn’t able to identify the source of the sound. It seemed to be coming from every comer of the house.

“What in the blue devil is going on here?”

She didn’t bother picking up the knife, because she was sure the problem wasn’t an intruder. It was something else, something weird.

She crossed the room to the hallway that served the bedrooms, bathrooms, and den. She snapped on the light. The noise was louder in the corridor than it had been in the living room. The nerve-fraying sound bounced off the walls of the narrow passage, echoing and re-echoing.

Vivienne looked both ways, then moved to the right, toward the closed door at the end of the hall. Toward Danny’s old room. .

The air was cooler in the hallway than it was in the rest of the house. At first Vivienne thought that she was imagining the change in temperature, but the closer she drew to the end of the corridor, the colder it got. By the time she reached the closed door, her skin was goose-pimpled, and her teeth were chattering.

Step by step, her curiosity gave way to fear. Something was very wrong here. An ominous pressure seemed to compress the air around her.

Aiii-eee . . . aiii-eee . . .

The wisest thing she could do would be to turn back, walk away from the door and out of the house. But she wasn’t completely in control of herself; she felt a bit like a sleepwalker. In spite of her anxiety, a power she could sense—but which she could not define—drew her inexorably to Danny’s room.

Aiii-eee . . . aiii-eee . . . aiii-eee . . .

Vivienne reached for the doorknob but stopped before touching it, unable to believe what she was seeing. She blinked rapidly, closed her eyes, opened them again, but still the doorknob appeared to be sheathed in a thin, irregular jacket of ice.

She finally touched it. Ice. Her skin almost stuck to the knob. She pulled her hand away and examined her damp fingers. Moisture had condensed on the metal and then had frozen.

But how was that possible? How in the name of God could there be ice here, in a well-heated house and on a night when the outside temperature was at least twenty degrees above the freezing point?

The electronic squeal began to warble faster, but it was no quieter, no less bone-penetrating than it had been.

Stop, Vivienne told herself. Get away from here. Get out as fast as you can.

But she ignored her own advice. She pulled her blouse out of her slacks and used the tail to protect her hand from

the icy metal doorknob. The knob turned, but the door wouldn’t open. The intense cold had caused the wood to contract and warp. She put her shoulder against it, pushed gently, then harder, and finally the door swung inward.