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

newspaper when he opened it to read, stuck to the bottom of his shoe along with a bit of tramped-on chewing gum, under the driver’s-side windshield wiper when he returned to the car from a trip to the mall, once inexplicably in his jacket pocket when he reached for coins to feed a vending machine.… Each time, although he came to expect this curious apparition, the sight of the feather sent a frisson of terror through him, a shiver that was almost convulsive, though it never lasted more than a few minutes.
    Howie grew up, shaved off what hair he had because shaved heads were now stylish, became a Realtor, and eventually opened his own successful brokerage even though he was scrupulous about revealing every property’s flaws to every potential buyer. Medicine advanced, but not in any way that would allow a minimization of his scars; but he had settled into his looks and did not brood about them. He sold a starter house to a pretty woman named Felicity Callaway, and when she got her license as a Realtor, she marketed properties through his brokerage. They had worked together almost a year when, much to his surprise, she said, “What the hell does a girl have to do to get asked on a date by you? Or isn’t there any interest?” Months later, when she accepted his proposal of marriage, she said, “You’re the most honest man I’ve ever known. I’ve never heard you tell a lie, not one, I feel so safe with you.”
    Still the raven’s feather came each year, and Howie wondered somewhat more about it when he and Felicity had children. But he figured that if he worried excessively about the feather and what it implied, he might be inviting something into his life that he would regret. Someone once said that if you painted the devil on the walls often enough, you got the devil on the stairs, his footsteps approaching.

7
    ON AN AUTUMN EVENING, WHEN HOWIE WAS thirty-two and the father of three beautiful children, as he sat in his favorite armchair, reading a novel, he felt a sudden relief, as if a burden had been lifted from him that he hadn’t known he was carrying. The curious sensation, not related to any apparent cause, was so extraordinary that he had to put his book aside and get at once to his feet. For a moment, because his life had been going so well for so long and because he knew how abruptly good fortune could pivot to bad, he imagined that this new buoyancy of spirit was instead light-headedness, the first—and only benign—symptom in a series that would grow rapidly worse until something catastrophic, like a stroke or a heart attack, felled him. But he was not pessimistic by nature, and as the sense of relief persisted, he went looking for Felicity. He found her in the kitchen, and he kissed her more than once. He discovered the kids—Mia, Leo, and Josh—watching TV instead of doing their homework, but he did not scold them.
    In his study, he sat at his desk, staring at the phone, certain there was someone with whom he must speak, though he could not think who that might be.One of the desk drawers contained hanging files that held copies of various insurance policies, among other things. Howie didn’t at first realize why he opened the drawer—and then he knew. The final file contained a sealed envelope. He slit it open and removed a five-dollar bill and a pair of ones, the seven bucks that he had kept from Blackwood’s thirty, for the sandwiches. All these years, he had felt that this money could buy him only bad luck, and he had even been reluctant to give it away for fear that it came with a curse that he would be passing to someone else. He didn’t know why the money should suddenly be clean, but he felt that it was, and he decided to drop it in the poor box at church.
    The following day, one of the lead stories on the television news concerned several bizarre murders in a distant city, culminating in an attack on the home of a homicide detective named John Calvino, the same person who, twenty years