The Book of Counted Sorrows by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page A

leashes, smoking a slim cigarette in a six-inch carved-ivory holder, with a monocle over his left eye - and with an incredibly witty wisecrack always on his lips, as was expected from every icon in that glittering era. In our own time, of course, icons are expected only to be surly, grunt out half-articulate sentences, scratch their crotches, and whine about their inadequacies and addictions on boring talk shows hosted by butt-kissing celebritymongers.
                       During the first year that he owned Counted Sorrows, overwhelmed by the demands of being an icon, with little time to read, Clete Reet sampled only a few of the verses in the book. In 1942, however, he became obsessed with the volume. He read it more than a hundred times, cover to cover, backwards, forwards, upside down, with monocle and without, abed and afoot, tipsy and sober, to his dogs with a keen eye for their reactions, at a distance of twenty feet with the assistance of high-quality binoculars - and finally at a distance of only sixteen feet but still with binoculars, this time bending forward from the waist, looking backward between his legs.
                       Two months after Ed Thomas met his end in a delicate dance of death with 30,000 pounds of rolling doom, on the fateful night of December 10, 1942, while having dinner at the Brown Derby, Clete Reet - dining with the suave William Powell and the delightful Myrna Loy, with dancer extraordinaire Fred Astaire and the incomparable Ginger Rogers - suddenly sat bolt upright in his chair and swallowed his tongue, whereafter he swallowed his teeth, his lips, his chin, his nose, the remainder of his face and skull, his neck complete with wing collar and black tuxedo tie, his shoulders, both arms, then his torso, his hips, his legs, and his feet, shoes and all, until nothing remained of him but a toothless red pulsing orifice. This toothless red pulsing orifice hungrily sucked in three poppy-seed dinner rolls, a champagne flute filled with Dom Perignon, Ginger Rogers' exquisite pearl necklace, one of William Powell's cufflinks, and a hapless busboy before at last imploding on itself and vanishing with a rude noise that would have embarrassed the stylish and impeccably well-mannered Mr. Reet if he had still been alive to hear it.
                       Clete Reet's last will and testament bequeathed his estate to his sister, one "Miss Scuttlesby," of Ennui Plains, Kansas. This third female Scuttlesby with no first name might seem significant, but I am assured by our Mrs. Scuttlesby (whose assurances have the fearsome conviction and the blistering heat of a long burst of hard radiation from a malfunctioning nuclear-power plant) that Reet's sister was no relation of hers. I also do not believe that Reet's sister was related to Langford Crispin's clothespin-on-the-nose housekeeper, the other Mrs. Scuttlesby, because the nine private detectives that I sent to the once bustling town of Ennui Plains, in search of leads, discovered nothing along those lines before they all perished, one by one, in a series of tornadoes. No, the appearance in this story of the three Scuttlesby women without Christian names is just one of those amazing coincidences that litter our lives, but which I, as a novelist, could never use in a work of fiction, lest I be criticized for perpetrating a plot full of improbabilities.
                       By the way, I say "once bustling," as regards Ennui Plains, because the town no longer exists. Shortly after Clete Reet's will was probated and after the full sum of the inheritance was settled upon his beloved sister, something catastrophic happened to this picturesque prairie hamlet. I say "something catastrophic," because I have insufficient information to be more specific. On the morning that Miss Scuttlesby was to leave on vacation, Ennui Plains ceased to exist. No smallest splinter or stone of the community was ever