Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
part one - SHATTERING THE PAST
chapter one
chapter two
chapter three
chapter four
chapter five
chapter six
chapter seven
part two - GUARDIAN
chapter eight
chapter nine
chapter ten
chapter eleven
AFTERWORD BY DEAN KOONTZ
“A winner. Give this one a straight 10 right across the board.”
—The San Francisco Examiner
“Watchers gives new meaning to the word terror . . . Koontz’s most original novel yet.” —Erie Times-News
“Watchers is an absorbing, intelligent, and altogether touching book.”
—West Coast Review of Books
“If you like suspense, grab Dean Koontz’s Watchers . . . It is utterly chilling.”
—Essex Journal
“Koontz weaves a tight plot, full of twists and complications, as he builds up the suspense to the inevitable violent confrontation.”
—The Oakland Press
“Keeps the reader on the edge of his seat. Keen-edged, insightful . . . thought-provoking.” —Asbury Park Press
“A spine-tingling thriller . . . Readers who are seeking a riveting page-turner should look no further, because Watchers offers an engrossing read with an unusually satisfying conclusion.” —Chattanooga Times Free Press
“An entertaining and exciting book that hooks you early and keeps you turning the pages . . . suspense builds and builds . . . totally enthralling.”
—The Orange County Register
“Mind-boggling suspense . . . This sensational book will have you gnashing your teeth at the villains and wiping away your tears as your affection grows for the other characters . . . Watchers never lags for an instant . . . Koontz has learned to cross the barrier between horror and literature and his books have become things of beauty.” —Ocala Star-Banner
“One of the most exciting terror tales of the season . . . marvelously effective . . . as well controlled as it is well written . . . Koontz has our vote as the best now working in his field.” —Anniston Star
“Relentless suspense and mounting tension . . . The climax is a stunner.”
—Cape Cod 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
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
WATCHERS
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.
Copyright © 1987 by Nkui, Inc.
“Afterword” copyright © 2003 by Dean Koontz.
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.
BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
The “B” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
PRINTING HISTORY
eISBN : 978-1-4406-3929-6
This book is dedicated to Lennart Sane who is not only the best at what he does but who is also a nice guy. And to Elisabeth Sane who is as charming as her husband.
part one
SHATTERING THE PAST
The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.
—H. G. Wells
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
—C. G. Jung
chapter one
1
On his thirty-sixth birthday, May 18, Travis Cornell rose at five o’clock in the morning. He dressed in sturdy hiking boots, jeans, and a long-sleeved, blue-plaid cotton shirt. He drove his pickup south from his home in Santa Barbara all the way to rural Santiago Canyon on the eastern edge of Orange County, south of Los Angeles. He took only a package of Oreo cookies, a large canteen full of orange-flavored Kool-Aid, and a fully loaded Smith & Wesson .38 Chief’s Special.
During the two-and-a-half-hour trip, he never switched on the radio. He never hummed, whistled, or sang to himself as men alone frequently do. For part of the drive, the Pacific lay on his right. The morning sea was broodingly dark toward the horizon, as hard and cold as slate, but nearer shore it was brightly spangled with early light the colors of pennies and rose petals. Travis did not once glance appreciatively at the sun-sequined water.
He was a lean, sinewy man with deep-set eyes the same dark brown as his hair. His face was narrow, with a patrician nose, high cheekbones, and a slightly pointed chin. It was an ascetic face that would have suited a monk in some holy order that still believed in self-flagellation, in the purification of the soul through suffering. God knows, he’d had his share of suffering. But it could be a pleasant face, too, warm and open. His smile had once charmed women, though not recently. He had not smiled in a long time.
The Oreos, the canteen, and the revolver were in a small green nylon backpack with black nylon straps, which lay on the seat beside him. Occasionally, he glanced at the pack, and it seemed as if he could see straight through the fabric to the loaded Chief’s Special.
From Santiago Canyon Road in Orange County, he turned onto a much narrower route, then onto a tire-eating dirt lane. At a few minutes past eight-thirty, he parked the red pickup in a lay-by, under the immense bristly boughs of a big-cone spruce.
He slipped the harness of the small backpack over his shoulders and set out into the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains. From his boyhood, he knew every slope, vale, narrow defile, and ridge. His father had owned a stone cabin in upper Holy Jim Canyon, perhaps the most remote of all the inhabited canyons, and Travis had spent weeks exploring the wild land for miles around.
He loved these untamed canyons. When he was a boy, black bears had roamed the woods; they were gone now. Mule deer could still be found, though not in the great numbers he had seen two decades ago. At least the beautiful folds and thrusts of land, the profuse and varied brush, and the trees were still as they had been: for long stretches he walked beneath a canopy of California live oaks and sycamores.
Now and then he passed a lone cabin or a cluster of them. A few canyon dwellers were half-hearted survivalists who believed the end of civilization was approaching, but who did not have the heart to move to a place even more forbidding. Most were ordinary people who were fed up with the hurly-burly of modern life and thrived in spite of having no plumbing or electricity.
Though the canyons seemed remote, they would soon be overwhelmed by encroaching suburbs. Within a hundred-mile radius, nearly ten million people lived in the interconnecting communities of Orange and Los Angeles counties, and growth was not abating.
But now crystalline, revelatory light fell on the untamed land with almost as much substance as rain, and all was clean and wild.
On the treeless spine of a ridge, where the low grass that had grown during the short rainy season had already turned dry and brown, Travis sat upon a broad table of rock and took off his backpack.
A five-foot rattlesnake was sunning on another flat rock fifty feet away. It raised its mean wedge-shaped head and studied him.
As a boy, he had killed scores of rattlers in these hills. He withdrew the gun from the backpack and rose from the rock. He took a couple of steps toward the snake.
The rattler rose farther off the ground and stared intensely.
Travis took another step, another, and assumed a shooter’s stance, with both hands on the gun.
The rattler began to coil. Soon it would realize that it could not strike at such a distance, and would attempt to retreat.
Although Travis was certain his shot was clear and easy, he was surprised to discover that he could not squeeze the trigger. He had come to these foothills not merely to attempt to recall a time when he had been glad to be alive, but also to kill snakes if he saw any. Lately, alternately depressed and angered by the loneliness and sheer pointlessness of his life, he had been wound as tight as a crossbow spring. He needed to release that tension through violent action, and the killing of a few snakes—no loss to anyone—seemed the perfect prescription for his distress. However, as he stared at this rattler, he realized that its existence was less pointless than his own: it filled an ecological niche, and it probably took more pleasure in life than he had in a long time. He began to shake, and the gun kept straying from the target, and he could not find the will to fire. He was not a worthy executioner, so he lowered the gun and returned to the rock where he had left his backpack.
The snake was evidently in a peaceable mood, for its head lowered sinuously to the stone once more, and it lay still.
After a while, Travis tore open the package of Oreos, which had been his favorite treat when he was young. He had not eaten one in fifteen years. They were almost as good as he remembered them. He drank Kool-Aid from the canteen, but it wasn’t as satisfying as the cookies. To his adult palate, the stuff was far too sweet.
The innocence, enthusiasms, joys, and voracities of youth can be recalled but perhaps never fully regained, he thought.
Leaving the rattlesnake in communion with the sun, shouldering his backpack once more, he went down the southern slope of the ridge into the shadows of the trees at the head of the canyon, where the air was freshened by the fragrant spring growth of the evergreens. On the west-sloping floor of the canyon, in deep gloom, he turned west and followed a deer trail.
A few minutes later, passing between a pair of large California sycamores that bent together to form an archway, he came to a place where sunlight poured into a break in the forest. At the far side of the clearing, the deer trail led into another section of woods in which spruces, laurels, and sycamores grew closer together than elsewhere. Ahead, the land dropped steeply as the canyon sought bottom. When he stood at the edge of the sun-fall with the toes of his boots in shadow, looking down that sloped path, he could see only fifteen yards before a surprisingly seamless darkness fell across the trail.
As Travis was about to step out of the sun and continue, a dog burst from the dry brush on his right and ran straight to him, panting and chuffing. It was a golden retriever, pure of breed by the look of it. A male. He figured it was little more than a year old, for though it had attained the better part of its full growth, it retained some of the sprightliness of a puppy. Its thick coat was damp, dirty, tangled, snarled, full of burrs and broken bits of weeds and leaves. It stopped in front of him, sat, cocked its head, and looked up at him with an undeniably friendly expression.
Filthy as it was, the animal was nonetheless appealing. Travis stooped, patted its head, and scratched behind its ears.
He half-expected an owner, gasping and perhaps angry at this runaway, to follow the retriever out of the brush. Nobody came. When he thought to check for a collar and license, he found none.
“Surely you’re not a wild dog—are you, boy?”
The retriever chuffed.
“No, too friendly for a wild one. Not lost, are you?”
It nuzzled his hand.
He noticed that, in addition to its dirty and tangled coat, it had dried blood on its right ear. Fresher blood was visible on its front paws, as if it had been running so long and so hard over rugged terrain that the pads of its feet had begun to crack.
“Looks like you’ve had a difficult journey, boy.”
The dog whined softly, as if agreeing with what Travis had said.
He continued to stroke its back and scratch its ears, but after a minute or two he realized he was seeking something from the dog that it could not provide: meaning, purpose, relief from despair.
“On your way now.” He gave the retriever a light slap on its side, rose, and stretched.
The dog remained in front of him.
He stepped past it, heading for the narrow path that descended into darkness.
The dog bolted around him and blocked the deer trail.
“Move along, boy.”
The retriever bared its teeth and growled low in its throat.
Travis frowned. “Move along. That’s a good dog.”
When he tried to step past it, the retriever snarled. It snapped at his legs.
Travis danced back two steps. “Hey, what’s gotten into you?”
The dog stopped growling and just panted.
He advanced again, but the dog lunged at him more ferociously than before, still not barking but growling even deeper and snapping repeatedly at his legs, driving him backward across the clearing. He took eight or ten clumsy steps on a slippery carpet of dead spruce and pine needles, stumbled over his own feet, and fell on his butt.
The moment Travis was down, the dog turned away from him. It padded across the clearing to the brink of the sloping path and peered into the gloom below. Its floppy ears had pricked up as much as a retriever’s ears can.
“Damn dog,” Travis said.
It ignored him.
“What the hell’s the matter with you, mutt?”
Standing in the forest’s shadow, it continued to stare down the deer trail, into the blackness at the bottom of the wooded canyon slope. Its tail was down, almost tucked between its legs.
Travis gathered half a dozen small sto...
