By the Light of the Moon by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online

hundred acts of kindness; so if you were the type to brood, you would be more sensible if you dwelt on the remarkable goodwill with which most people treated others even in a society where the cultural elites routinely mocked virtue and celebrated brutality.
    In this case, his options were so severely limited that although he might be an unskilled brooder, he was able quickly to arrive at a plan of action. Leaning forward again, he brought the cutting edge of the blade to one of the loops of glossy black tape that fixed his left wrist to an arm of the chair. Much like a goose bobbing its head, much as Shep sometimes spent hours
imitating
a goose bobbing its head, Dylan sawed with the pocketknife. The bonds began to part, and once his left hand was freed, he transferred the knife from teeth to fingers.
    As Dylan quickly cut away the remaining restraints, the jigsaw junkie—now locking pieces in the picture at a frenetic pace that even methamphetamine could not have precipitated—altered his nonsense chant: “Deedle-doodle-diddle.”
    “I feel a pressure in my middle.”
    “Deedle-doodle-diddle.”
    “I think I have to piddle.”

Chapter Six
    J ILLY OPENED HER EYES AND SAW, BLEARILY, THE salesman and his identical twin bending over the bed on which she reclined.
    Although she knew that she ought to be afraid, she had no fear. She felt relaxed. She yawned.
    If the first brother was evil—and no doubt he was—then the second must be good, so she was not without a protector. In movies and often in books, moral character was distributed in exactly that ratio between identical siblings: one evil, one good.
    She’d never known twins in real life. If she ever met any, she would not be able to trust both. Your trust ensured that you would be bludgeoned to death, or worse, in Act 2 or in Chapter 12, or certainly by the end of the story.
    These two guys looked equally benign, but one of them slipped loose a rubber-tube tourniquet that had been knotted around Jilly’s arm, while the second appeared to be administering an injection. Neither of these interesting actions could fairly be called evil, but they were certainly unsettling.
    “Which of you is going to bludgeon me?” she asked, surprised to hear a slur in her voice, as though she had been drinking.
    As one, with matching expressions of surprise, the twin salesmen looked at her.
    “I should warn you,” she said, “I know karaoke.”
    Each of the twins kept his right hand on the plunger of the hypodermic syringe, but simultaneously each snatched up a white cotton handkerchief with his left hand. They were exquisitely choreographed.
    “Not karaoke,” she corrected herself. “Karate.” This was a lie, but she thought that she sounded convincing, even though her voice remained thick and strange. “I know karate.”
    The blurry brothers spoke in perfect harmony, their syllables precisely matched. “I want you to sleep a little more, young lady. Sleep, sleep.”
    As one, the wonderfully synchronized twins swept the white handkerchiefs through the air and dropped them on Jilly’s face with such panache that she expected the cloths to transform magically into doves before they quite touched her skin. Instead, the damp fabric, reeking with the pungent chemistry of forgetfulness, seemed to turn black, like crows, like ravens, and she was borne away on midnight wings, into darkness deep.
    Although she thought that she’d opened her eyes an instant after closing them, a couple minutes must have passed in that blink. The needle had been withdrawn from her arm. The twins no longer hovered over her.
    In fact, only one of the men was present, and she realized that the other had not actually existed, had been a trick of vision. He stood at the foot of the bed, returning the hypodermic syringe to the leather satchel, which she’d mistaken for a kit of salesman’s samples. She realized that it must be a medical bag.
    He droned on about his life’s work, but nothing he said