77 Shadow Street by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page A

but he had never been tested. One thing Winny had learned from books was that you had to be tested in life to discover who you were and what you were capable of doing. Hopeless sissy, noble warrior, maniac—he could be anything, and he wouldn’t know until he was tested.
    One thing he could never be was Santa Claus. Nobody could be Santa Claus. Santa Claus wasn’t real like the FedEx guy. This was a recent discovery of Winny’s. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. At first, he was sad, he felt like Santa had died, but the sad thing didn’t last very long. A person who never existed couldn’t die, you couldn’t grieve for him. Mostly Winny felt like an idiot for having believed the whole stupid Santa thing as long as he had.
    So now he couldn’t honestly say his dad came around as seldom as Santa Claus because in truth Santa Claus never came, but sometimes his dad did. Of course, he hadn’t seen his dad in a long time, so maybe it would turn out that his dad never existed, either. Winny got a phone call now and then, but that could be a fake-out, the guy on the other end could be anyone. If his dad came for a Christmas visit, he would bring Winny what he always brought: a musical instrument or two, a stack of CDs, not just his own but also CDs by other singers, and a signed publicity photo if he had a new one. Every time Farrel Barnett got a new publicity photo, he made sure that Winny received one. Even though Santa Claus didn’t exist, he brought better presents than Winny’s dad, who was most likely real, though you never could tell.
    Winny had almost decided which of the three books to read when the floor and walls shuddered. The lamp on the table beside his chair had a pull chain, and it swung back and forth, clinking against the base. At the windows, draperies swished a little, as if stirred by a draft, but there was no draft. In the open shelf of his bookcase headboard, Dragon World action figures vibrated against the wood. They jiggled around as if they were coming to life. They were jiggling a lot. But of course they were even deader than old Grace Lyman.
    Winny sat through the shaking, the bright blasts of lightning at the windows, and the booming thunder. He wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t going to wet his pants or anything. But he wasn’t calm and collected, either. He was in-between somewhere. He didn’t know the word for how he felt. The past couple of days, things were kind of strange in the Pendleton. Things were weird. But weird didn’t always have to be scary. Sometimes weird was really interesting. Last Christmas, his dad gave him a gold-plated saxophone, which was just about as big as Winny. That was more than a little weird, but it wasn’t either interesting or scary, just weird in a stupid kind of way.
    He had kept secret the weird and interesting thing that happened to him twice in the past two days. Although he wanted to share his strange experiences with his mom, he suspected that she would feel she had to tell his dad. For all the right reasons, she was always trying to keep old Farrel Barnett involved in his son’s life. For sure, his dad would overreact, and the next thing Winny knew, he would be seeing a shrink twice a week, and there would be some kind of custody battle, and he would be in danger of Nashville or Los Angeles.
    As the shaking came to an end, Winny glanced at the TV. It was dark and silent. Although the acrylic screen wasn’t polished enough to reflect him as he sat in the armchair, it didn’t appear flat but instead seemed to have forbidding depths, like a cloudy pool of water in the shade of a forest. The glow of his reading lamp, floating on the screen, seemed to be the pale distorted face of someone drowned and drifting just below the surface.

    Twyla hurried from her study to Winny’s room at the farther end of the big apartment, which contained over thirty-five hundred square feet of living space in eight rooms, three baths, and a kitchen—one of the two