Odd Interlude Part Three by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page B

it insatiable.
    The bedroom reeks worse than the cellar in which I locked the other servant thing. Piled in far corners are cascades of bones from all manner of animals, and the floor around the bed is littered with fresh and spoiled meat, upon both of which this Hiskott seems content to dine. The butchered beef and pork and veal, the prepared chickens and plastic trays of fish fillets were obviously provided through the family’s restaurant, although nothing seems to have been cooked, as what is still not consumed is raw.
    Among this disgusting buffet are also the carcasses of animals, some partly eaten: a coyote stiff and sneering, rabbits as limp as rag piles, ground squirrels, rats. Perhaps in the night, especially when the moon is waning and no one at the distant motor court is likely to glimpse a fleet nightmarish figure in the rolling meadows, the thing I killed in the library or this one here, or the one in the cellar, goes hunting for its master. I wonder that there haven’t been more feasts of human flesh than only Maxy—but perhaps there have been. No one could know what hobo or coastal hiker, or what itinerant homeless person camping for the night on the beach, might have been overcome, paralyzed with venom or by a brain spiking, and dragged secretly to this chamber not to serve but to
be
served.
    Upon catching sight of me, as I stand trembling on the threshold of this abattoir, Hiskott lifts his huge head, which must be at least three times the size of any man’s head, yet is recognizably human. He opens his wide greedy mouth of ragged teeth in what appears to be a silent scream but is instead a call. The call is psychic, a command—
Feed me
—and I feel it pulling at me as a riptide pulls a swimmer under, into drowning depths.
    Hiskott’s confidence is palpable, the kind of self-assurance that is a vicious courage, arrogance born of absolute power and of endless abuses never punished. I discover that I have movedoff the threshold, into the room. After two or three steps, I halt as a great rustling noise arises and quickly swells louder behind me, and I am suddenly afraid that the servant in the cellar has gotten free and rises now at my back, to fold me in its cape.

TWENTY-SIX
     
    Before I can look over my shoulder to glimpse my fate, the source of the loud rustling noise becomes manifest as hundreds of moths swarm into the bedroom from the hallway, seething past me, buffeting the back of my neck, my face, questing at the corners of my mouth, at my nostrils, dusting my eyelashes with their powdery substance, fluttering through my hair and away, a surging river of soft wings.
    In this house, one horror breeds another, and the swarm flies straight into Hiskott’s silent scream, down into his long throat, so tender that he has no need to shred them with his teeth. Still they come, hundreds more—the house is a moth farm, their grazing among the mildewed books perhaps encouraged—and I hunch my neck to prevent them from crawling under my collar. They feed the beast on the bed, and although their numbers would seem great enough to choke it, a peristaltic pulsing in the sinuous coils suggests that the insects are easily accommodated, crushed and pushed along into the winding catacombs of the serpent’s stomach.
    This vile spectacle so stuns me that, as the last of the swarm answers the call, I break free of Hiskott’s psychic grip, and raise the pistol. The servant thing springs toward me, horn extruding from its brow. I cut it down with the last four rounds in the magazine and throw the gun aside.
    Hiskott seems unfazed that I have dispatched two of his three defenders. Having swallowed all that came to him, he preens the moth powder from his lips, from his six hands, watching me as he licks and licks. Were his tongue forked and thin, like that of a snake, it would be much less repulsive than the large, long, but human tongue that instead journeys through his many supple fingers and cleans his upturned