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Authors: Dean Koontz

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The Vision

BOOK: The Vision
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DON’T CLOSE YOUR EYES

He’s watching you. He knows what you’re doing. He knows what you’re thinking. He’s coming after you.

DON’T CLOSE YOUR EYES

He has a knife. The steel blade gleams. Whenever you close your eyes, you can see it—the tip of his knife, pointing at your chest.

DON’T CLOSE YOUR EYES

He’s closing them for you.

THE VISION

“The tension never lets up . . . a nail-biting, hair-raising finale!”


Florida Times-Union

The acclaimed bestsellers

THE EYES OF DARKNESS

“Koontz puts his readers through the emotional wringer!”

—The Associated Press

THE KEY TO MIDNIGHT

“A master storyteller . . . always riveting.”

—The San Diego Union-Tribune

MR. MURDER

“A truly harrowing tale . . . superb work by a master at the top of his form.”

—The Washington Post Book World

THE FUNHOUSE

“Koontz is a terrific what-if storyteller.”

—People

DRAGON TEARS

“A razor-sharp, nonstop, suspenseful story . . . a first-rate literary experience.”


The San Diego Union-Tribune

SHADOWFIRES

“His prose mesmerizes . . . Koontz consistently hits the bull’s-eye.”

—Arkansas Democrat

HIDEAWAY

“Not just a thriller but a meditation on the nature of good and evil.”

—Lexington Herald-Leader

COLD FIRE

“An extraordinary piece of fiction . . . It will be a classic.”

—UPI

THE HOUSE OF THUNDER

“Koontz is brilliant.”

—Chicago Sun-Times

THE VOICE OF THE NIGHT

“A fearsome tour of an adolescent’s psyche. Terrifying, knee-knocking suspense.”

—Chicago Sun-Times

THE BAD PLACE

“A new experience in breathless terror.”

—UPI

THE SERVANTS OF TWILIGHT

“A great storyteller.”

—New York Daily News

MIDNIGHT

“A triumph.”

—The New York Times

LIGHTNING

“Brilliant . . . a spine-tingling tale . . . both challenging and entertaining.”

—The Associated Press

THE MASK

“Koontz hones his fearful yarns to a gleaming edge.”

—People

WATCHERS

“A breakthrough for Koontz . . . his best ever.”

—Kirkus Reviews

TWILIGHT EYES

“A spine-chilling adventure . . . will keep you turning pages to the very end.”

—Rave Reviews

STRANGERS

“A unique spellbinder that captures the reader on the first page. Exciting, enjoyable, and an intensely satisfying read.”

—Mary Higgins Clark

DEMON SEED

“One of our finest and most versatile suspense writers.”

—The Macon Telegraph & News

PHANTOMS

“First-rate suspense, scary and stylish.”

—Los Angeles Times

WHISPERS

“Pulls out all the stops . . . an incredible, terrifying tale.”

—Publishers Weekly

NIGHT CHILLS

“Will send chills down your back.”

—The New York Times

DARKFALL

“A fast-paced tale . . . one of the scariest chase scenes ever.”

—The Houston Post

SHATTERED

“A chilling tale . . . sleek as a bullet.”

—Publishers Weekly

THE VISION

“Spine-tingling—it gives you an almost lethal shock.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

THE FACE OF FEAR

“Real suspense . . . tension upon tension.”

—The New York Times

Berkley titles by Dean Koontz

THE EYES OF DARKNESS

THE KEY TO MIDNIGHT

MR. MURDER

THE FUNHOUSE

DRAGON TEARS

SHADOWFIRES

HIDEAWAY

COLD FIRE

THE HOUSE OF THUNDER

THE VOICE OF THE NIGHT

THE BAD PLACE

THE SERVANTS OF TWILIGHT

MIDNIGHT

LIGHTNING

THE MASK

WATCHERS

TWILIGHT EYES

STRANGERS

DEMON SEED

PHANTOMS

WHISPERS

NIGHT CHILLS

DARKFALL

SHATTERED

THE VISION

THE FACE OF FEAR

DEAN KOONTZ

The Vision

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

THE VISION

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

PUBLISHING HISTORY

G. P. Putnam’s Sons hardcover edition / November 1977

Berkley mass-market edition / March 1986

Berkley premium edition / August 2012

Copyright © 1977 by Dean Koontz.

“Afterword” by Dean Koontz copyright © 2012 by Dean Koontz.

Cover photos: “Condensation” copyright © Anthony Bradshaw/Photographer’s Choice/Getty Images; “Woman” copyright © WIN-Initiative/Getty Images. Cover design by Marc J. Cohen.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

ISBN: 978-1-4406-2096-6

BERKLEY
®

Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

BERKLEY
®
is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

This book is for
Claire M. Smith

with love
and gratitude

Monday, December 21

1

“Gloves of blood.”

The woman raised her hands and stared at them, stared
through
them.

Her voice was soft but tense. “Blood on his hands.” Her own hands were clean and pale.

Her husband leaned forward from the backseat of the patrol car. “Mary?”

She didn’t respond.

“Mary, can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Whose blood do you see?”

“I’m not sure.”

“The victim’s blood?”

“No. In fact . . . it’s his own.”

“The killer’s?”

“Yes.”

“He has his own blood on his hands?”

“That’s right,” she said.

“He’s hurt himself?”

“But not badly.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

“Try to get inside of him.”

“I am already.”

“Get deeper.”

“I’m not a mind reader.”

“I know that, darling. But you’re the next best thing.”

The perspiration on Mary Bergen’s face was like the ceramic glaze on the plaster countenance of an altar saint. Her smooth skin gleamed in the green light from the instrument panel. Her dark eyes also shone, but they were unfocused, blank.

Suddenly she leaned forward and shuddered.

In the driver’s seat Chief of Police Harley Barnes shifted uneasily. He flexed his big hands on the steering wheel.

“He’s sucking the wound,” she said. “Sucking his own blood.”

After thirty years of police work, Barnes didn’t expect to be surprised or frightened. Now, in a single evening, he had been surprised more than once and had felt his heartbeat accelerate with fear.

The tree-shrouded streets were as familiar to him as the contours of his own face. However, tonight, cloaked in a rainstorm, they seemed menacing. The tires hissed on the slick pavement. The windshield wipers thumped, an eerie metronome.

The woman beside Barnes was distraught, but her appearance was less disturbing than the changes she had wrought inside the patrol car. The humid air became clearer when she entered her trance. He was certain he was not imagining that. The ordinary sounds of the storm and the car were overlaid with the soft humming of ghost frequencies. He sensed an indescribable power radiating from her. He was a practical man, not at all superstitious. But he could not deny what he felt so strongly.

She bent as far toward the dashboard as her seat belt would allow. She hugged herself and groaned as if she were having labor pains.

Max Bergen reached out from the rear seat, touched her.

She murmured and relaxed slightly.

His hand looked enormous on her slender shoulder. He was tall, angular, hard-muscled, hard-faced, forty years old, ten years older than his wife. His eyes were his most arresting feature; they were gray, cold, humorless.

Chief Barnes had never seen him smile. Clearly, Bergen harbored powerful and complex feelings for Mary, but he gave no indication that he felt anything but contempt for the rest of the world.

The woman said, “Turn at the next corner.”

Barnes braked gently. “Left or right?”

“Right,” she said.

Well-kept, thirty-year-old stucco houses and bungalows, most of them California-Spanish in style, lay on both sides of the street. Yellow lights glowed vaguely behind drapes that had been drawn against the chill of the damp December night. The road was much darker than the one they had left. Sodium vapor lamps stood only at the corners, and purple-black, rain-pooled shadows filled the long blocks between them.

After he made the turn, Barnes drove no faster than ten miles an hour. From the woman’s attitude, he gathered that the chase would end nearby.

Mary sat up straight. Her voice was louder and clearer than it had been since she began to use her strange talent, her clairvoyance. “I get an impression . . . of a . . . a fence. Yes . . . I see it now . . . he’s cut his hand . . . on a fence.”

Max stroked her hair. “And it’s not a serious wound?”

“No . . . just a cut . . . his thumb . . . deep . . . but not disabling.” She raised one thin hand, forgot what she meant to do with it, let it flutter back into her lap.

“But if he’s bleeding from a deep cut, won’t he give up tonight?” Max asked.

“No,” she said.

“You’re sure?”

“He’ll go on.”

“The bastard’s killed five women so far,” Barnes said. “Some of them fought like hell, scratched him and cut him and even tore out his hair. He doesn’t give up easily.”

Ignoring the policeman, Max soothed his wife, caressed her face with one hand and prompted her with another question. “What kind of fence do you see?”

“Chain-link,” she said. “Sharp and unfinished at the top.”

“Is it high?”

“Five feet.”

“What does it surround?”

“A yard.”

“Storage yard?”

“No. Behind a house.”

“Can you see the house?”

“Yes.”

“What’s it like?”

“It’s a two-story.”

“Stucco?”

“Yes.”

“What about the roof?”

“Spanish tile.”

“Any unique features?”

“I can’t quite see . . .”

“A veranda?”

“No.”

“A courtyard maybe?”

“No. But I see . . . a winding tile walkway.”

“Front or back?”

“Out front of the house.”

“Any trees?”

“Matched magnolias . . . on either side of the walk.”

“Anything else?”

“A few small palms . . . farther back.”

Harley Barnes squinted through the rain-dappled windshield. He was searching for a pair of magnolias.

Initially he had been skeptical. In fact, he’d been certain the Bergens were frauds. He played his role in the charade because the
mayor
was a believer. The mayor brought them to town and insisted the police cooperate with them.

Barnes had read about psychic detectives, of course, and most especially about that famous Dutch clairvoyant, Peter Hurkos. But using ESP to track down a psychopathic killer, to catch him in the act? He didn’t put much faith in that.

Or do I? he wondered. This woman was so lovely, charming, earnest, so convincing that perhaps she’d made a believer of him. If she hasn’t, he thought, why am I looking for magnolia trees?

She made a sound like an animal caught in a saw-toothed trap for a long time. Not a screech of agony, but a nearly inaudible mewl.

When an animal made that noise, it meant, “This still hurts, but I’m resigned to it now.”

Many years ago, as a boy in Minnesota, Barnes had hunted and trapped. It was that same pitiful, stifled moan of the wounded prey that caused him to give up his sport.

Until tonight, he had never heard precisely the same sound issue from a human being. Apparently, as she used her talent to zero in on the killer, she suffered from contact with his deranged mind.

Barnes shivered.

“Mary,” her husband said. “What’s the matter?”

“I see him . . . at the back door of the house. His hand on the door . . . and blood . . . his blood on a white door frame. He’s talking to himself.”

“What’s he saying?”

“I don’t . . . ”

“Mary?”

“He’s saying filthy things about the woman.”

“The woman in the house—the one he’s after tonight?”

“Yes.”

“He knows her?”

“No. She’s a stranger . . . random target. But he’s been . . . watching her . . . watching her for several days . . . knows her habits and routines.”

With those last few words she slumped against the door. She took several deep breaths. She was forced to relax periodically to regroup her energies if she were to maintain the psychic thread. For some clairvoyants, Barnes knew, the visions came without strain, virtually without effort; but apparently not for this one.

Phantom voices whispered and crackled, came and went in staccato bursts on the police radio.

The wind carried fine sheets of rain across the roadway.

The wettest rainy season in years, Barnes thought. Twenty years ago it would have seemed normal. But California had steadily become a drought state. This much rain was unnatural now. Like everything else that’s happening tonight, he thought.

Waiting for Mary to speak, he slowed to less than five miles an hour.

Matched magnolia trees flanking a winding tile walk
 . . .

He found it taxing to see what lay in the headlights directly in front of him, and extremely difficult to discern the landscaping on either side. They might already have passed the magnolias.

Brief as it was, Mary Bergen’s hesitation elicited Dan Goldman’s first words in more than an hour. “We haven’t much time left, Mrs. Bergen.”

Goldman was a reliable young officer, the chief’s most trusted subordinate. He was sitting beside Max Bergen, behind Barnes, his eyes fixed on the woman.

Goldman believed in psychic powers. He was impressionable. And as Barnes could see in the rearview mirror, the events of the evening had left a haunted look on his broad, plain face.

“We don’t have much time,” Goldman said again. “If this madman’s already at the woman’s back door—”

Abruptly, Mary turned to him. Her voice was freighted with concern. “Don’t get out of this car tonight—not until the man is caught.”

“What do you mean?” Goldman asked.

“If you try to help capture him, you’ll be hurt.”

“He’ll kill me?”

She shuddered convulsively. New beads of sweat popped out at her hairline.

Barnes felt perspiration trickle down his face, too.

She said to Goldman, “He’ll stab you . . . with the same knife he’s used on all the women . . . hurt you badly . . . but not kill you.” Closing her eyes, speaking between clenched teeth, she said, “
Stay in the car!

“Harley?” Goldman asked worriedly.

“It’ll be all right,” Barnes assured him.

“You’d better listen to her,” Max told Goldman. “Don’t leave the car.”

“If I need you,” Barnes told Goldman, “you’ll come with me. No one will be hurt.” He was concerned that the woman was undermining his authority. He glanced at her. “We need a number for the house you’ve described, a street address.”

“Don’t press,” her husband said sharply. With everyone but Mary he had a voice like two rough steel bars scraped against each other. “It won’t do any good whatsoever to press her. It’ll only interfere.”

“It’s okay, Max,” she said.

“But I’ve told them before,” he said.

She faced front once more. “I see . . . the rear door of the house. It’s open.”

“Where’s the man, the killer?” Max asked.

“He’s standing in a dark room . . . small . . . the laundry room . . . that’s what it is . . . the laundry room behind the kitchen.”

“What’s he doing?”

“He’s opening another door . . . to the kitchen . . . no one in there . . . a dim light on over the gas range . . . a few dirty dishes on the table . . . he’s standing . . . just standing there and listening . . . left hand in a fist to stop the thumb from bleeding . . . listening . . . Benny Goodman music on a stereo in the living room . . .” Touching Barnes’s arm, a new and urgent tone in her voice, she said, “Just two blocks from here. On the right. The second house . . . no, the third from the corner.”

“You’re positive?”

“For God’s sake,
hurry!

Am I about to make a fool of myself? Barnes wondered. If I take her seriously and she’s wrong, I’ll be the punch line of bad jokes for the rest of my career.

Nevertheless, he switched on the siren and tramped the accelerator to the floor. The tires spun on the pavement. With a squeal of rubber, the car surged forward.

Breathlessly she said, “I still see . . . he’s crossing the kitchen . . . moving slowly . . . ”

If she’s faking all this, Barnes thought, she’s a hell of a good actress.

The Ford raced along the poorly lit street. Rain snapped against the windshield. They swept through a four-way stop, then toward another.

“Listening . . . listening between steps . . . cautious . . . nervous . . . taking the knife out of his overcoat pocket . . . smiling at the sharp edge of the blade . . . such a big knife . . . ”

In the block she had specified they fishtailed to a stop at the curb in front of the third house on the right: a pair of matched magnolias, a winding walk, a two-story stucco with lights on downstairs.

“Goddamn,” Goldman said, more reverently than not. “It fits her description perfectly.”

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