Dragon Tears by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page A

silently:
shit, shit, shit.
    She came out of the northern eaves and crept across the open space at the east end, moving toward Harry. She peered warily into the mouths of other aisles between rows of boxes and mannequins.
    Harry started toward her, squinting into the gloomy aisles on his side. The garret was so wide, so packed withgoods, that it was a maze. And it harbored a monster to rival any in mythology.
    From elsewhere in the high room came the now-familiar voice:
“All Shook Up, I Feel So Bad, Steamroller Blues!”
    Harry squeezed his eyes shut. He wanted to be somewhere else. Maybe in the kingdom of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” with its twelve gorgeous young heirs to the throne, subterranean castles of light, trees with leaves of gold, others with leaves of diamonds, enchanted ballrooms filled with beautiful music…. Yeah, that would be all right. It was one of the Grimm Brothers’ gentler tales. Nobody in it got eaten alive or hacked to death by a troll.
    “Surrender!”
    It was Connie’s voice this time.
    Harry opened his eyes and frowned at her. He was afraid she would give away their position. True, he had not been able to pinpoint the perp by listening to him; sounds bounced around the attic in strange ways, which was a protection for them as well as for the madman. Nevertheless, silence was wiser.
    The perp shouted again:
“A Mess of Blues, Heartbreak Hotel!”
    “Surrender!” Connie repeated.
    “Go Away Little Girl!”
    Connie grimaced. “That wasn’t Elvis, you peabrain! That was Steve Lawrence. Surrender.”
    “Stay Away.”
    “Surrender.”
    Harry blinked sweat out of his eyes and studied Connie with incomprehension. He had never felt less in control of a situation. Something was going down between her and the lunatic, but Harry didn’t have a clue as to what it was.
    “I Don’t Care If the Sun Don’t Shine.”
    “Surrender.”
    Suddenly Harry remembered that “Surrender” was the title of a Presley classic.
    “Stay Away.”
    He thought that might be another Presley song.
    Connie slipped into one of the aisles, out of Harry’s sight, as she called out: “It’s Now or Never.”
    “What’d I Say?”
    Moving away into the maze, Connie answered the perp with two Presley titles: “Surrender. I Beg of You.”
    “I Feel So Bad.”
    After a hesitation, Connie responded: “Tell Me Why.”
    “Don’t Ask Me Why.”
    A dialogue had been established. In Presley song titles. Like some bizarre television quiz-show contest with no prizes for correct answers but plenty of peril for wrong ones.
    In a crouch, Harry eased into a different aisle from the one that Connie had taken. A spider’s web wrapped his face. He pulled it off and crept deeper into the mannequin-guarded shadows.
    Connie resorted to a previously used title: “Surrender.”
    “Stay Away.”
    “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”
    After a hesitation, the perp admitted:
“Lonely Man.”
    Harry still couldn’t get a fix on the voice. Sweat was really pouring off him now, wispy remnants of the spider web clung to his hair and tickled his brow, his mouth tasted like the bottom of a pestle in Frankenstein’s laboratory, and he felt as if he’d stepped out of reality into some drug addict’s dark hallucinations.
    “Let Yourself Go,” Connie advised.
    “I Feel So Bad,”
the perp repeated.
    Harry knew he shouldn’t be so disoriented by the peculiar twists this pursuit kept taking. These were the 1990s, after all, an age of unreason if ever there had been one, when the bizarre was so common as to establish a new definition of normality. Like the holdup men who had recently taken to threatening convenience-store clerks not with guns but with syringes full of AIDS-tainted blood.
    Connie called to the perp, “Let Me Be Your TeddyBear,” which seemed, to Harry, an odd turn in the song-title conversation.
    But the perp came right back at her in a voice full of yearning and suspicion:
“You Don’t Know Me.”
    Connie needed