Last Light (Novella) by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page A

Sometimes it took a while.
    The blinking dot stopped in Laguna Beach.
    The GPS system provided an address.
    He finished his dinner.
    He gathered up the clothes that she had stripped off as she had gone from front door to bedroom, when she’d first come home.
    The garments smelled of her. He liked the feel of them.
    He put them under the pillow on her bed.
    To refresh himself for what lay ahead, he needed some sleep.
    After undressing, he slipped naked into her bed.
    He never had trouble falling asleep. Insomnia was caused by anxiety. He had no anxiety. Nothing worried him. He led a perfect, beautiful life.
    He slept between Makani’s sheets. With the intoxicating smell of her.
    He dreamed that she was under him. He saw her in ecstasy. And then he saw her torn and broken, which was
his
ecstasy.

10
You Don’t Find Life by Fleeing from It
    In the pricey coastal towns of Southern California, if the house was near the beach and the real-estate ads referred to it as a cottage, you needed to put ironic quotation marks around the word—“cottage”—for it would cost upward of a couple million dollars and be a cottage only by imitation of that style. The one that Pogo was house-sitting encompassed more than 3,500 square feet, large enough to contain five real cottages within its walls. But it had gingerbread millwork and beadboard wainscoting and selected-mahogany floors and enough quaint details to fill a coffee-table book with photographs to engender seething envy in those who cherished the style.
    In the big eat-in kitchen, an old and tattered trade-paperback edition of Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road
lay on the table beside a mug of coffee.
    Bob was on his back, on the floor, with a dog toy, a floppy blue bunny rabbit with squeakers in each foot. He held it between his front paws, chewing on one of its ears, breathing rapidly and squirming with delight. If he had raced to the kitchen to fetch the rabbit and bring it to Makani as a gift, he had become enthralled with it and had forgotten his original intention.
    “You spoiled him with a new toy,” she said.
    “I want him to love his uncle Pogo.”
    He brought her a mug of coffee, black, as she liked it, and she settled in a chair across the table from him.
    When Pogo sat down to his own coffee and pushed aside the book, Makani said, “The thing is, I’m a witch or something.”
    “I’ll get you a new broom for your birthday.”
    “I said ‘or something.’ I’m not into pointy black hats and cauldrons and cats. But there’s this witchy thing I can do.”
    “You sure can,” he said.
    She reached out to him. “Hold my hand.”
    He did as she asked.
    “This is embarrassing,” she said.
    “What—is hand-holding risque in Hawaii?”
    “In my experience, anyway, this is as close as you’ve ever come to having a secret, something you’d be reluctant to express. You’re thinking that…I’m lovely but somehow damaged, and you wish you could fix me.”
    His eyes widened slightly, but he said, “I am not.”
    “Yes, you are. It makes you sad, but you think I’m broken. And in a way, I am.”
    “If you say so, but I don’t see broken.”
    “I can’t read continuously. What I get, when I get anything at all, are flashes.” She let go of him and reached out with her other hand. “Try this one.”
    “Maybe we can levitate the table later,” he said, as he took her left hand in his right.
    Giving voice to his unspoken judgment of her, Makani said, “You’re spooked by what I’m doing, but you think I’m just expressing what I’ve long believed you feel about me. You think I’m pretending to see fragments of your thoughts, so I have an excuse to discuss our relationship this bluntly.”
    He did not look away from her. He was the most direct, least evasive person she had ever known. But he let go of her hand, and in his electric-blue eyes she saw what she could no longer perceive by touch: He had begun to believe that, at least to some limited extent, she