Read Online The Moonlit Mind (Novella): A Tale of Suspense by Dean Koontz - Free Book Online
Authors: Dean Koontz
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than she has ever thought before. She won’t know which is true for a long time to come.
She puts the coins and most of the money in a small suitcase and quickly packs jeans, sweaters. Because her all-white and dated outfit might call attention to her, she shrugs into a raincoat. Carrying the suitcase with her left hand, she has the fortitude to stoop and pick up the bloody scissors with her right, holding them ready in the event that the killer has been unwise enough to linger.
She leaves by the back door, crosses the deep rear yard, hurries alongside the garage and through a gate into an alleyway.
The moon that night is a crescent and appears to be as sharp as the Italian kitchen knife that her mother calls a mezzaluna.
Thirty minutes later, in a deserted bus-station bathroom, Daisy Jean Sims chops her long hair short. She changes into blue jeans, a sweater, a pair of running shoes.
She purchases hair dye and a few other items at an all-night supermarket. Before dawn, alone in a public restroom in Statler Park, she transforms blond to raven.
The slaughter at the Sims house is not discovered until two-fifteen that afternoon. Judging by his bloody handprints and a single shoe print, police believe the killer is a tall man with unusually large hands, physically formidable. Because his prints are found, as well, in Daisy’s room, and because the girl is missing, the assumption is made that she has been kidnapped.
Trusting that her shaggy black hair will, for the moment, serve as an adequate disguise, she visits the main city library both with the hope that its quiet will settle her nerves and with the intention to do some research.
First she reads about predictive clairvoyance, but those who have written on the subject generally treat it as mere fantasy or as a possibility that has validity only because it might be predicted by some more liberal interpretations of Jungian psychological theory, whatever the hell that might be. There’s a third group that writes with gosh-wow enthusiasm that seems to be a cheesy attempt to sell books to the gullible.
She knows that what she foresaw when she plunged the scissors into the killer was neither a fantasy nor a Jungian whatever. It was the most intense and truest experience of her life. If she lives as Daisy Jean Sims, she will be found, she will be killed, and people she loves will die with her.
After putting aside the books on clairvoyance, she researches names, the history and the meaning of them. Without being able to explain to herself
why
, she believes that she must choose her new name with care, that the right name will make her safe, that the wrong name will leave her vulnerable.
By the time the library closes, she decides to rename herself Amity Onawa. Amity, from the Latin
amicitia
, means “friendship.” Onawa, a North American Indian word, means “wide awake girl.”
In her new and terrible loneliness, the name Amity—friendship—speaks to what she hopes to give and receive. And after the hideous experiences of the night just passed, she seems to have come out of a lifelong half sleep; she is now as wide awake as any girl has ever been, wide awake to the fact that the world is more dangerous and far stranger than she had previously realized.
She is one month past her fourteenth birthday.
She has not yet wept for her parents or her brother. Those tears will not come for another three weeks, and then they will be a flood.
Now, more than two years later …
Amity, who also calls herself the Phantom of the Broderick, sits in a restaurant booth with Crispin, eating a tasty chicken sandwich and drinking a Coke. She is sixteen. He is twelve and counting down. At their age, four years is a chasm, but it’s bridgedby their shared awareness that the world is a more mysterious place than most people wish to acknowledge.
Amity asks, “You still sometimes hear a voice saying you can undo what was done, save them both?”
“Sometimes. Been hearing it since I
She puts the coins and most of the money in a small suitcase and quickly packs jeans, sweaters. Because her all-white and dated outfit might call attention to her, she shrugs into a raincoat. Carrying the suitcase with her left hand, she has the fortitude to stoop and pick up the bloody scissors with her right, holding them ready in the event that the killer has been unwise enough to linger.
She leaves by the back door, crosses the deep rear yard, hurries alongside the garage and through a gate into an alleyway.
The moon that night is a crescent and appears to be as sharp as the Italian kitchen knife that her mother calls a mezzaluna.
Thirty minutes later, in a deserted bus-station bathroom, Daisy Jean Sims chops her long hair short. She changes into blue jeans, a sweater, a pair of running shoes.
She purchases hair dye and a few other items at an all-night supermarket. Before dawn, alone in a public restroom in Statler Park, she transforms blond to raven.
The slaughter at the Sims house is not discovered until two-fifteen that afternoon. Judging by his bloody handprints and a single shoe print, police believe the killer is a tall man with unusually large hands, physically formidable. Because his prints are found, as well, in Daisy’s room, and because the girl is missing, the assumption is made that she has been kidnapped.
Trusting that her shaggy black hair will, for the moment, serve as an adequate disguise, she visits the main city library both with the hope that its quiet will settle her nerves and with the intention to do some research.
First she reads about predictive clairvoyance, but those who have written on the subject generally treat it as mere fantasy or as a possibility that has validity only because it might be predicted by some more liberal interpretations of Jungian psychological theory, whatever the hell that might be. There’s a third group that writes with gosh-wow enthusiasm that seems to be a cheesy attempt to sell books to the gullible.
She knows that what she foresaw when she plunged the scissors into the killer was neither a fantasy nor a Jungian whatever. It was the most intense and truest experience of her life. If she lives as Daisy Jean Sims, she will be found, she will be killed, and people she loves will die with her.
After putting aside the books on clairvoyance, she researches names, the history and the meaning of them. Without being able to explain to herself
why
, she believes that she must choose her new name with care, that the right name will make her safe, that the wrong name will leave her vulnerable.
By the time the library closes, she decides to rename herself Amity Onawa. Amity, from the Latin
amicitia
, means “friendship.” Onawa, a North American Indian word, means “wide awake girl.”
In her new and terrible loneliness, the name Amity—friendship—speaks to what she hopes to give and receive. And after the hideous experiences of the night just passed, she seems to have come out of a lifelong half sleep; she is now as wide awake as any girl has ever been, wide awake to the fact that the world is more dangerous and far stranger than she had previously realized.
She is one month past her fourteenth birthday.
She has not yet wept for her parents or her brother. Those tears will not come for another three weeks, and then they will be a flood.
Now, more than two years later …
Amity, who also calls herself the Phantom of the Broderick, sits in a restaurant booth with Crispin, eating a tasty chicken sandwich and drinking a Coke. She is sixteen. He is twelve and counting down. At their age, four years is a chasm, but it’s bridgedby their shared awareness that the world is a more mysterious place than most people wish to acknowledge.
Amity asks, “You still sometimes hear a voice saying you can undo what was done, save them both?”
“Sometimes. Been hearing it since I
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