Darkness Under the Sun by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online

speak, he would only scream in frustration and abhorrence, and so he got to his feet and stood there until theshaking stopped, until his heart quieted. Then he walked his bike across the grass to the cemetery lane and rode home.
    In another summer, on the one-year anniversary of the day that he had spent with Blackwood on the roof of the old department store, when Howie was one week short of his twelfth birthday, he received a letter postmarked from a town half a continent away. He was home alone when the postman delivered, and because he thought his grandma Alice, his mother’s mother, might send him a card with money for his upcoming birthday, he sorted through the mail as he walked from the curbside box to the house. He was surprised to see his name on a white business-size envelope, which bore no return address and was clearly not from his grandmother. It contained a single sheet of paper that enfolded a raven feather, which fluttered to the porch floor at Howie’s feet. The simple six-word message was in handwriting so neat that it almost looked as though a machine had produced it: I still remember your delicious sandwiches .
    He tore the letter into small pieces and buried it at the bottom of the trash in the kitchen waste can. He took the glossy feather into the backyard, flung it up into the breeze, and watched solemnly as it sailed away toward St. Anthony’s and the cemetery.
    Since the day at Ron Bleeker’s grave, ten months earlier, Howie understood what penance he must perform: For the rest of his life, he must never tell another lie, not so much as a little fib; he must neverengage in even the most innocent deception of any kind, for any reason, no matter how justifiable it might seem. A pledge of truth was his only armor against the horrifying consequences that surely would result from his having made his deal with Blackwood. If his mother or sister found the feather and the mysterious message about sandwiches, he would have been honor-bound to explain it, to tell them all about Blackwood—and thereby rob them of their peace of mind forever.

6
    THAT FOLLOWING OCTOBER 25, ALTON TURNER Blackwood made the news posthumously. Howie was in the kitchen, helping his mother by setting the table for dinner, when the story came on the small TV that stood on a counter. In a far city, Blackwood had over a few months murdered four entire families, raped the girls and the women, tortured and mutilated some, before he was killed by the last surviving member of the fourth family, a boy of fourteen named John Calvino, who shot the monster in the face. The news provided no photo of Blackwood because none existed, but there were pictures of the victims. All the young girls reminded Howie of Corrine, and all the mothers reminded him of his own. Flatware rattled in his hands as he laid down the forks, the spoons, the gleaming knives at three place settings on the dinette table.
    Blackwood had kept a journal in which he wrote of others he had killed throughout the years, all across America. Over the next day, Howie waited to hear Ron Bleeker’s name and then to be identified as an unwitting accomplice. But the killer’s journal didn’t include the names of the victims or the locations where they were murdered—not untilBlackwood began to slaughter entire families. He had felt that his numerous one-off homicides were in some way beneath him, and he believed that he had achieved greatness as a killer only when he began annihilating whole families. Howie was folding napkins to put on the table when, on the second evening that the story topped the news, he heard that Alton Turner Blackwood had been inspired to murder families by someone whom he described only as “a young boy who made good sandwiches.”
    Here were the consequences that Howie dreaded, and they were so terrible that during the next few weeks they gradually laid him as low as any disease might have done. He began to sleep most of the day and to lie in listless