Children of the Storm Dean R. Koontz

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He touched his knife which was still in his pocket, and he ran after them, joyous, half the island
behind him and half ahead, the perfectly isolated place for what he had in mind.
TWENTY-NINE
Two hours earlier, not long after dawn, Kenneth Blenwell had spent half an hour fastening down the
shutters on Hawk House, not long be-fore Henry Dalton and Leroy Mills had performed the same chore
at the other end of the island, in Seawatch. He had worn a heavy canvas rain slicker with a hood that
closed tight around his face by means of a drawstring that tied beneath his chin, and he had still felt damp
and chilled to the bone before the job was a quarter finished, his own body heat trapped under the
slicker and turn-ing cold the perspiration that filmed his skin.
Standing outside, facing a window, swinging the heavy wooden, tin-backed shutter panels into place
and working the rust-stuck bolts through their loops, he had felt as if a couple of hundred malicious
children, with slingshots and a supply of ripe grapes, were using his back as a target. From previous,
similar experiences, he knew that the quickest way to get this routine finished, the eas-iest way to endure
the punishment of the wind and the rain, was to let his mind wander and forget what he was doing . . . He
would move from win-dow to window like some sort of robot, an autom-aton who need only fall into a
familiar work pat-tern and did not need to think, letting his mind dwell on other matters; then before he
realized it, he would have rounded the house and closed down all the windows. Therefore, he began to
consider the mess over at Seawatch, Saine, the Dougherty family, everyone who was involved with the
strange threats against the Dougherty children . . .
He wandered through these mental images much like a man strolling leisurely through a mu-seum,
considering each of the many characters who was involved in this real-life drama, turning them around in
his mind, but rather quickly reject-ing them and choosing, for a longer consideration, Miss Sonya Carter .
. .
He was a young man, some said a handsome young man, and he was wealthy and educated with a
degree in literature and he had seen a great deal of the world, from England to Japan, from Chile to
Sweden. He had, according to popu-lar modern mythology, all of the qualities for a great romantic, a
ladies' man . . . Yet, until he had seen the Carter girl, he had never pictured himself as a romantic, and
certainly not as he had been continually imagining since as a family man. He tended to be cynical,
wary of people professing friendship, and felt it unlikely that he would ever experience a close,
love-relationship with anyone but his grandparents, with whom he shared a special closeness originally
born of mu-tual dependency but now gone far beyond that.
Then he had seen Sonya Carter.
When he first glimpsed the Lady Jane moving slowly across the mouth of the cove, he had been
surveying the horizon for large cruise ships, an idle hobby that he sometimes spent hours at. He realized
that Peterson was not alone and, still con-vinced that Peterson was the most likely suspect in the recent
Dougherty family incidents, trained his glasses there to see who might be with him. Even at that distance,
seen only through a pair of field glasses, she had mesmerized him. Not by her looks, so much (though she
was quite lovely), but by her smile, her attitude . . .
In prep school, when he was a teenager, the other kids had begun to call him The Raven, be-cause
they said that he matched the gloomy per-sonality of that bird in Poe's famous narrative poem of the
same name. He had endured his nick-name without comment, though he had naturally not much
appreciated it.
He was not gloomy at all, he felt, but merely being realistic. The world was not, as most of his
frivolous classmates seemed to think it was, the proverbial oyster. Certainly, many things in life were
pleasurable, and he enjoyed himself when-ever he could. But you had to be on the lookout for the bad,
for the upsets and the disappoint-ments. Most of these prep school kids had lived all their lives, to date,
in wealthy homes where doting parents had supplied them everything they wanted and twice everything
that they needed. Until they were on their own, until they risked emotional in-volvement with the world,
they could not realize that it contained things you had to be wary of. He realized it, because he had his
mother's history of madness haunting him, and he was plagued by the memory of that awful day when the
news of her suicide had come and his grandparents, though they knew she was insane, had grieved so
deeply, so terribly at her loss.
In college, too, he had been known as a pessi-mist, an image he at first attempted to void himself of
but later embraced because, if they all believed it, he could be let alone, friendless. He enjoyed his
privacy more than the average student his age, and he convinced himself that he also enjoyed being
without any companions at all.
These days, he liked to think, he was in a much lighter mood, far less likely to become despondent
over events. He had developed a sense of humor that pleased his grandfather immensely and, though it [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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