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

made any sense to Jilly, perhaps because he was an incoherent psychopath or perhaps because the fumes of nepenthe, still burning in her nose and sinuses, rendered her incapable of understanding him.
    When she tried to rise from the bed, she experienced a wave of vertigo that washed her back down onto the pillows. She clutched the mattress with both hands, as a shipwrecked sailor might cling to a raft of flotsam in a turbulent sea.
    This sensation of tilting and spinning at last stirred up the fear that she knew she ought to feel but that until now had been an inactive sediment at the bottom of her mind. As her breathing grew shallow, quick, and frantic, her racing heart churned currents of anxiety through her blood, and fear threatened to darken into terror, panic.
    She had never been interested in controlling others, but she’d always insisted on being the master of her own fate. She might make mistakes,
did
make mistakes—lots, lots—but if her life was destined to be screwed up, then she’d damn well do the job herself. Control had been taken from her, seized by force, maintained with chemicals, with drugs, for reasons that she could not understand even though she strained to remain focused on her tormentor’s line of self-justifying patter.
    With the surge of fear came anger. In spite of her karaoke-karate threat and her Southwest Amazon image, Jilly wasn’t by nature a butt-kicking warrioress. Humor and charm were her weapons of choice. But here she saw an ample backside in which she emphatically wanted to bury a boot. As the salesman-maniac-doctor-whatever walked to the desk, to pick up his cola and three bags of peanuts, Jilly tried once more to rise in righteous rage.
    Again, her box-spring raft tossed in the flamboyant sea of bad motel decor. A second attack of vertigo, worse than the first, spun a whirlpool of nausea through her, and instead of executing the butt-booting assault that she’d envisioned, she groaned. “I’m gonna puke.”
    Retrieving his Coke and peanuts, picking up his medical bag, the stranger said, “You’d better resist the urge. The effects of the anesthesia linger. You could lose consciousness again, and if you pass out
while
regurgitating, you’ll wind up like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, choking to death on your own vomit.”
    Oh, lovely. She’d simply gone out to buy some root beer. Such an innocent undertaking. Not ordinarily a high-risk task. She had fully understood the need to compensate for the root-beer indulgence with a dry-toast breakfast, but she hadn’t gone to the vending machines with any expectation whatsoever that by doing so she would put herself at risk of choking to death on her own upchuck. Had she known, she would have stayed in her room and drunk tap water; after all, what was good enough for Fred was good enough for her.
    “Lie still,” the crackpot urged, not with any element of command in his voice but with what sounded like concern for her. “Lie still, and the nausea and the vertigo will fade in two or three minutes. I don’t want you to choke to death, that would be stupid, but I can’t risk hanging around here, playing nursemaid. And remember, if they get their hands on me and discover what I’ve done, they’ll come looking for anyone I’ve injected, and they’ll kill you.”
    Remember? Kill?
They?
    She had no memory whatsoever of any such previous warning, so she assumed that it must have been part of what he’d been talking about when her brain haze, now gradually clearing, had been as thick as London fog.
    From the door, he looked back at her. “The police won’t be able to keep you safe from these people who’re coming. There’s no one to turn to.”
    On the rolling bed, in this tilting room, she could not help but think about the chicken sandwich, slathered with chipotle mayonnaise, and the greasy French fries she’d eaten. She tried to concentrate on her assailant, desperate to devastate him with words in place of the boot that