Darkness Under the Sun by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page A

distraction when not sleeping. He had no appetite, and sometimes when his mother insisted that he eat, Howie vomited soon after. By mid-November, he had lost five pounds, and although he had no fever, the doctors began to suspect an exotic virus of some kind. Depression was the only virus afflicting him, depression like murky waters into which he sank and sank and seemed sure to drown. Days passed without him being much aware of them, so numbed by sadness that he half heard voices as if through muffling fathoms. He saw little more than shadow and light, as a dying boy might see the world with his back pressed in the mud of a pond and his lungs full of water. His sadness was so deep that even in his all but constant sleep, he experienced neither good dreams nor bad ones, and thus escaped Blackwood, who would haveraged through his nightmares if catatonic sorrow had not spared him from them.
    The next time he knew what day it was, he had lost more than two weeks, and it was the second of December, a Sunday, though he didn’t at first know the date when his mother’s weeping began to call him back from the darkness. Through slitted and crusted eyes, he found himself in a hospital, his right arm connected to an intravenous drip. He could tell that he had lost more weight. He felt like a creature of straw and paper. He heard some man say “dehydration from the vomiting and the night sweats. But also willful dehydration, not something you see often.” When Howie tried to raise his left arm, he didn’t possess enough strength to move it off the bed.
    His mother’s weeping was a wrenching sound, the wretched sobbing of a woman beyond all consolation, and it so pained him to hear her that he couldn’t retreat into darkness again but felt compelled to comfort her. As his thoughts clarified, he heard her say, with such terrible anguish, “Howie saved my life, he saved me from despair by the way he coped with his burns.” The man’s voice seemed to belong to a doctor. Howie didn’t care about the man, what he said. He wanted to hear more from his mother, and in a while he did: “I bought a gun. To kill my husband. For what he’d done, the fire. But by the time they set bail and he found a way to post it, I saw Howie wasn’t just going to live, he was going to thrive. I had to control my rage for Howie’ssake. Day after day, year after year, he’s been my hero, such courage for a little guy like him. He has such strength, and he’s always been the source of mine.”
    Howie had never thought of himself as his mother’s hero, not anyone’s hero. He was just a bad-luck boy, someone a father couldn’t love, Scarface, Eight-Fingered Freak, Butt-Ugly Dugley, determined to live only because he was afraid to die. In a voice as dry as burnt toast, he said, “Mom,” and had to say it twice again before she heard him and came to his bedside. Her eyes were bloodshot, her nose rubbed red by Kleenex, her pale cheeks glistening with tears, but she was as pretty as ever. Howie had always been proud of how pretty his mom was. He sometimes wondered if any pretty girl would ever like him, but he didn’t waste much time wondering about it because his mother and his sister were pretty enough to last him a lifetime, just knowing they liked him. Now, as his mother leaned close, he said, “I’m all right now,” and he was.
    The following summer, a week short of his thirteenth birthday, on the second anniversary of the episode with Blackwood, Howie woke in the morning to the sound of wind whistling in the eaves. When he looked at his bedroom window, a single black feather, about four inches in length, with a gray quill, danced against the glass. He watched it for more than ten minutes before at last the warm June wind carried it away.
    Year after year, on that day, although Blackwoodwas dead and gone, a night-black raven’s feather came to Howie by one means or another: spiraling out of a tree to brush across his face, sliding out of a