The Key to Midnight by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page B

unmistakably malevolent purpose.
    “Joanna.”
    It was Alex speaking her name, but she could almost believe that it had been the Korean.
    From the deepest reaches of memory came a frightening sound: a gravelly, jagged, icy voice seething with hatred and bitterness. A familiar voice, synonymous with pain and terror. She wanted to scream. Although the man in her nightmare, the faceless bastard with steel fingers, had never spoken to her in sleep, she knew this was his voice. With a jolt, she realized that while she had never heard him speak in the nightmare, she had heard him when she was awake, a long time ago... somehow, somewhere. The words he spoke to her now were not imagined or dredged up from her worst dreams, but recollected. The voice was a cold, dark effervescence bubbling up from a long-forgotten place and time: “ Once more the needle, my lovely little lady. Once more the needle. ” It grew louder, reverberating in her mind, a voice to which the rest of the world was deaf—“ Once more the needle, once more the needle, once more the needle ”—booming with firecracker repetitiveness, until she thought her head would explode.
    The Korean stopped two feet from her.
    Lysol.
    Alcohol.
     
Once more the needle, my lovely little lady ...
    Joanna ran. She cried out like a wounded animal and turned away from the startled Korean, pushed at Alex without fully realizing who he was, pushed so hard that she almost knocked him down, and darted past him, her heels tapping noisily on the hardwood floor. She hurried into the next chamber, trying to scream but unable to find her voice, ran without looking back, convinced that the Korean was pursuing her, ran past the dazzling seventeenth-century artworks of the master Kano Tan’yu and his students, fled between strikingly beautiful wood sculptures, and all the while she struggled to draw a breath, but the air was like a thick dust that clogged her lungs. She ran past richly carved transoms, past intricate scenes painted on sliding doors, footsteps echoing off the coffered ceilings, ran past a surprised guard who called to her, dashed through an exit into cool November air, started across the big courtyard, heard a familiar voice calling her name, not the cold voice of the man with the steel hand, so she finally stopped, stunned, in the center of the Nijo garden, shaking, shaking.

10
    Alex led her to a garden bench and sat beside her in the brisk autumn breeze. Her eyes were unnaturally wide, and her face was as pale and fragile as bridal lace. He held her hand. Her fingers were cold and chalky white, and she squeezed his hand so hard that her manicured nails bit into his skin.
    “Should I get you to a doctor?”
    “No. It’s over. I’ll be all right. I just... I need to sit here for a while.”
    She still appeared to be ill, but a trace of color slowly began to return to her cheeks.
    “What happened, Joanna?”
    Her lower lip quivered like a suspended bead of water about to surrender to the insistent pull of gravity. Bright tears glistened in the corners of her eyes.
    “Hey. Hey now,” he said softly.
    “Alex, I’m so sorry.”
    “About what?”
    “I made such a fool of myself.”
    “Nonsense.”
    “Embarrassed you,” she said.
    “Not a chance.”
    Her eyes brimmed with tears.
    “It’s okay,” he told her.
    “I was just... scared.”
    “Of what?”
    “The Korean.”
    “What Korean?”
    “The man with one hand.”
    “Was he Korean? Do you know him?”
    “Never saw him before.”
    “Then what? Did he say something?”
    She shook her head. “No. He... he reminded me of something awful... and I panicked.” Her hand tightened on his.
    “Reminded you of what?”
    She was silent, biting her lower lip.
    He said, “It might help to talk about it.”
    For a long moment she gazed up into the lowering sky, as if reading enigmatic messages into the patterns of the swift-moving clouds. Finally she told him about the nightmare.
    “You have it every night?”