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

Mariko Inamura to know her? She wondered if her hunger for companionship and love was much greater than she had ever realized until this disturbing moment.
    She blushed. “Enough of this soul baring. How’d you get me to do that? You aren’t a psychoanalyst, are you?”
    “Every private detective has to be a bit of a psychiatrist ... just like any popular bartender.”
    “Well, I don’t know what in the world got me started on that.”
    “I don’t mind listening.”
    “You’re sweet.”
    “I mean it.”
    “Maybe you don’t mind listening,” she said, “but I mind talking about it.”
    “Why?”
    “It’s private. And silly.”
    “Didn’t sound silly to me. It’s probably good for you to talk about it.”
    “Probably,” she admitted. “But it’s not like me to babble on about myself to a perfect stranger.”
    “Hey, I’m not a perfect stranger.”
    “Well, almost.”
    “Oh, I see,” he said. “I understand. You mean I’m perfect but not a stranger. I can live with that.”
    Joanna smiled. She wanted to touch him, but she didn’t. “Well, anyway, we’re here to show you the palace, not to have long boring Freudian discussions. There are a thousand things to see, and every one of them is more interesting than my psyche.”
    “You underestimate yourself.”
    Another group of chattering tourists rounded the corner and approached from behind Joanna. She turned toward them, using them as an excuse to avoid Alex’s eyes for the few seconds required to regain her composure, but what she saw made her gasp.
    A man with no right hand.
    Twenty feet away.
    Walking toward her.
    A. Man. With. No. Right. Hand.
    He was at the front of the group: a smiling, grandfatherly Korean gentleman with a softly creased face and iron-gray hair. He wore sharply pressed slacks, a white shirt, a blue tie, and a light blue sweater with the right sleeve rolled up a few inches. His arm was deformed at the wrist: There was nothing but a smooth, knobby, pinkish stub where the hand should have been.
    “Are you all right?” Alex asked, apparently sensing the sudden tension in her.
    She wasn’t able to speak.
    The one-handed man drew closer.
    Fifteen feet away now.
    She could smell antiseptics. Alcohol. Lysol. Lye soap.
    That was ridiculous. She couldn’t really smell antiseptics. Imagination. Nothing to fear. Nothing to fear in Nijo Castle.
    Lysol.
    Alcohol.
    No. Nothing to fear. The one-handed Korean was a stranger, a kindly little ojii-san who couldn’t possibly hurt anyone. She had to get a grip on herself.
    Lysol.
    Alcohol.
    “Joanna? What’s happening? What’s wrong?” Alex asked, touching her shoulder.
    The elderly Korean seemed to advance with the slow-motion single-mindedness of a monster in a horror film or in a nightmare. Joanna felt trapped in the unearthly, oppressive gravity of her dream, in that same syrupy flow of time.
    Her tongue was thick. A bad taste filled her mouth, the coppery flavor of blood, which was no doubt as imaginary as the miasma of antiseptics, although it was as sickening as if it had been real. Her throat was constricted. She felt as if she might begin to gag. She heard herself straining for air.
    Lysol.
    Alcohol.
    She blinked, and the flutter of her eyelids magically altered reality even further, so the Korean’s pinkish stump now ended in a mechanical hand. Incredibly, she could hear the compact servo-mechanisms purring with power, the oiled push-pull rods sliding in their tracks, and the gears click-click-clicking as the fingers opened from a clenched fist.
    No. That was imagination too.
    “Joanna?”
    When the Korean was less than three yards from her, he raised his twisted limb and pointed with the mechanical hand that wasn’t really there. Intellectually Joanna knew that he was interested only in the mural that she and Alex had been studying, but on a more primitive and affecting emotional level, she reacted with the certainty that he was pointing at her, reaching for her with