The Eyes of Darkness by Dean Koontz

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 7th, 2022 in Prophecy, Stories

THURSDAY,

JANUARY 1

TINA STAYED THE NIGHT WITH ELLIOT, AND HE realized that he had forgotten how pleasant it could be to share his bed with someone for whom he truly cared. He’d had other women in this bed during the past two years, and a few had stayed the night, but not one of those other lovers had made him feel content merely by the fact of her presence, as Tina did. With her, sex was a delightful bonus, a lagniappe, but it wasn’t the main reason he wanted her beside him. She was an excellent lover—silken, smooth, and uninhibited in the pursuit of her own pleasure—but she was also vulnerable and kind. The vague, shadowy shape of her under the covers, in the darkness, was a talisman to ward off loneliness.

Eventually he fell asleep, but at four o’clock in the morning, he was awakened by cries of distress.

She sat straight up, the sheets knotted in her fists, catapulted out of a nightmare. She was quaking, gasping about a man dressed all in black, the monstrous figure from her dream. Elliot switched on the bedside lamp to prove to her that they were alone in the room.

She had told him about the dreams, but he hadn’t realized, until now, how terrible they were. The exhumation of Danny’s body would be good for her, regardless of the horror that she might have to confront when the coffin lid was raised. If seeing the remains would put an end to these bloodcurdling nightmares, she would gain an advantage from the grim experience.

He switched off the bedside lamp and persuaded her to lie down again. He held her until she stopped shuddering.

To his surprise, her fear rapidly changed to desire. They fell easily into the pace and rhythm that had earlier best pleased them. Afterward, they slipped into sleep again.

• • •

Over breakfast he asked her to go with him to the afternoon party at which he was going to corner Judge Kennebeck to ask about the exhumation. But Tina wanted to go back to her place and clean out Danny’s room. She felt up to the challenge now, and she intended to finish the task before she lost her nerve again.

“We’ll see each other tonight, won’t we?” he asked. “Yes.”

“I’ll cook for you again.”

She smiled lasciviously. “In what sense do you mean that?” She rose out of her chair, leaned across the table, kissed him.

The smell of her, the vibrant blue of her eyes, the feel of her supple skin as he put a hand to her face—those things generated waves of affection and longing within him.

He walked her to her Honda in the driveway and leaned in the window after she was behind the wheel, delaying her for another fifteen minutes while he planned, to her satisfaction, every dish of this evening’s dinner.

When at last she drove away, he watched her car until it turned the corner and disappeared, and when she was gone he knew why he had not wanted to let her go. He’d been trying to postpone her departure because he was afraid that he would never see her again after she drove off.

He had no rational reason to entertain such dark thoughts. Certainly, the unknown person who was harassing Tina might have violent intentions. But Tina herself didn’t think there was any serious danger, and Elliot tended to agree with her. The malicious tormentor wanted her to suffer mental anguish and spiritual pain; but he didn’t want her to die, because that would spoil his fun.

The fear Elliot felt at her departure was purely superstitious. He was convinced that, with her arrival on the scene, he had been granted too much happiness, too fast, too soon, too easily. He had an awful suspicion that fate was setting him up for another hard fall. He was afraid Tina Evans would be taken away from him just as Nancy had been.

Unsuccessfully trying to shrug off the grim premonition, he went into the house.

He spent an hour and a half in his library, paging through legal casebooks, boning up on precedents for the exhumation of a body that, as the court had put it, “was to be disinterred in the absence of a pressing legal need, solely for humane reasons, in consideration of certain survivors of the deceased.” Elliot didn’t think Harold Kennebeck would give him any trouble, and he didn’t expect the judge to request a list of precedents for something as relatively simple and harmless as reopening Danny’s grave, but he intended to be well prepared. In Army Intelligence, Kennebeck had been a fair but always demanding superior officer.

At one o’clock Elliot drove his silver Mercedes S600 sports coupe to the New Year’s Day party on Sunrise Mountain. The sky was cerulean blue and clear, and he wished he had time to take the Cessna up for a few hours. This was perfect weather for flying, one of those crystalline days when being above the earth would make him feel clean and free.

On Sunday, when the exhumation was out of the way, maybe he would fly Tina to Arizona or to Los Angeles for the day.

On Sunrise Mountain most of the big, expensive houses featured natural landscaping— which meant rocks, colored stones, and artfully arranged cacti instead of grass, shrubs, and trees—in acknowledgment that man’s grip on this portion of the desert was new and perhaps tenuous. At night the view of Las Vegas from the mountainside was undeniably spectacular, but Elliot couldn’t understand what other reasons anyone could possibly have for choosing to live here rather than in the city’s older, greener neighborhoods. On hot summer days these barren, sandy slopes seemed godforsaken, and they would not be made lush and green for another ten years at least. On the brown hills, the huge houses