The Eyes of Darkness by Dean Koontz

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 7th, 2022 in Stories

“When was this?”

“He left just a couple minutes before you came in.” “How long was he here?”

“Fifteen, twenty minutes.”

“It took him that long to check out the furnace?” “He wanted to be thorough. He said—”

“Were you with him the whole time?” “No. I was cleaning out Danny’s room.” “Where’s your furnace?”

“In the garage.” “Show me.”

“What about the suitcases?” “There may not be time,” he said.

He was pale. Fine beads of sweat had popped out along his hairline. She felt the blood drain from her face.

She said, “My God, you don’t think—” “The furnace!”

“This way.”

Still carrying the magazine, she rushed through the house, past the kitchen, into the laundry room. A door stood at the far end of this narrow, rectangular work area. As she reached for the knob, she smelled the gas in the garage.

“Don’t open that door!” Elliot warned.

She snatched her hand off the knob as if she had almost picked up a tarantula.

“The latch might cause a spark,” Elliot said. “Let’s get the hell out. The front door. Come on. Fast!”

They hurried back the way they had come.

Tina passed a leafy green plant, a four-foot-high schef-flera that she had owned since it was only one-fourth as tall as it was now, and she had the insane urge to stop and risk getting caught in the coming explosion just long enough to pick up the plant and take it with her. But an image of crimson eyes, yellow skin—the leering face of death— flashed through her mind, and she kept moving.

She tightened her grip on the horror-comics magazine in her left hand. It was important that she not lose it.

In the foyer, Elliot jerked open the front door, pushed her through ahead of him, and they both plunged into the golden late-afternoon sunshine.

“Into the street!” Elliot urged.

A blood-freezing image rose at the back of her mind: the house torn apart by a colossal blast, shrapnel of wood and glass and metal whistling toward her, hundreds of sharp fragments piercing her from head to foot.

The flagstone walk that led across her front lawn seemed to be one of those treadmill pathways in a dream, stretching out farther in front of her the harder that she ran, but at last she reached the end of it and dashed into the street. Elliot’s Mercedes was parked at the far curb, and she was six or eight feet from the car when the sudden outward- sweeping shock of the explosion shoved her forward. She stumbled and fell into the side of the sports car, banging her knee painfully.

Twisting around in terror, she called Elliot’s name. He was safe, close behind her, knocked off balance by the force of the shock wave, staggering forward, but unhurt.

The garage had gone up first, the big door ripping from its hinges and splintering into the driveway, the roof dissolving in a confetti-shower of shake shingles and flaming debris. But even as Tina looked from Elliot to the fire, before all of the shingles had fallen back to earth, a second explosion slammed through the house, and a billowing cloud of flame roared from one end of the structure to the other, bursting those few windows that had miraculously survived the first blast.

Tina watched, stunned, as flames leaped from a window of the house and ignited dry palm fronds on a nearby tree.

Elliot pushed her away from the Mercedes so he could open the door on the passenger side. “Get in. Quick!”

“But my house is on fire!” “You can’t save it now.”

“We have to wait for the fire company.”

“The longer we stand here, the better targets we make.”

He grabbed her arm, swung her away from the burning house, the sight of which affected her as much as if it had been a hypnotist’s slowly swinging pocket watch.

“For God’s sake, Tina, get in the car, and let’s go before the shooting starts.”

Frightened, dazed by the incredible speed at which her world had begun to disintegrate, she did as he said.

When she was in the car, he shut her door, ran to the driver’s side, and climbed in behind the steering wheel.

“Are you all right?” he asked. She nodded dumbly.

“At least we’re still alive,” he said.

He put the pistol on his lap, the muzzle facing toward his door, away from Tina. The keys were in the ignition. He started the car. His hands were shaking.

Tina looked out the side window, watching in disbelief as the flames spread from the shattered garage roof to the main roof of the house, long tongues of lambent fire, licking, licking, hungry, bloodred in the last orange light of the afternoon.