Breathless. Dean Koontz

memory replayed like a film loop. Again, again. And again. Each time, the experience returned to Grady with greater force. He didn’t merely recall the shimmering incandescence but saw it as he had never relived a previous memory: in three dimensions, with the true color and the poignant detail of the event itself, hypersensitive to every nuance.

      He seemed to be transported to the deer trail, to the pregnant moment. Charcoal and gray, untethered shadow, Merlin strode toward the meadow as Grady hesitated behind him. Overhead: the canopy of evergreen boughs, more feathery than needled, green-dark and still and fragrant. Ahead: pine trunks and limbs almost black against the backdrop of twinkling and glistering coppery light, the compelling and coruscating light, the significant light, the light.

      The memory relented, the past moment in the woods released him to the present moment in the kitchen, and he found himself standing at the table, having knocked over the chair as he’d gotten to his feet. He had experienced not merely a memory but something else for which he had no name, a re-immersion in a past event, all five senses fully engaged.

      And it was as though, earlier in the day, during the actual occurrence, he was blinded to the intense character of the light, and was able to perceive the momentous quality of it only when he experienced it through recollection, from the safety of this later hour.

      His scalp crawled, cold sweat slicked the nape of his neck, and he heard his heart knocking.

      Grady’s eyes were sufficiently dark-adapted that he could see Merlin a few feet away, alert and regarding him with interest.

      Beyond the window, beyond the shadowed porch, the burning moon seemed to have dusted the yard and the trees with its phosphorescent ashes. The night lay as still as if it were airless.

      Then something moved in the moonlight: quick, lithe, on all fours, white. Two of them.

       Chapter Sixteen

      The most expensive of the hotel-casino’s five restaurants had a large holding bar that featured a black-marble floor with small diamond-shaped inlays of gold onyx. The walls were clad in the same marble but without the diamonds. A highly dimensional black-marble ceiling glowed with panels of backlit translucent gold onyx at the bottom of each coffer. Instead of a mirror behind the black-marble bar, huge panels of backlit onyx were inlaid with the silhouettes of Art Deco wolves perpetually leaping.

      If Dracula had moonlighted as an interior designer, he might have created a room like this.

      Sitting at the bar, Lamar Woolsey ordered his only alcoholic beverage of the evening: a bottle of Elephant Beer, a Danish import.

      Some people at the cocktail tables were waiting to be told by the maître d’ that their dinner tables were ready, but those at the bar had not come for dinner. They were mostly men, but whether men or women, they fled the casino for a respite from self-destruction.

      Their moods ranged between forced gaiety and somber reflection, but the impression they all made on Lamar was of desperation.

      They had come to the games of chance with hope. Emily Dickinson, the poet, had written that “Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul …” But if your hope was hope for the wrong thing, it could be a sharp-beaked hawk that ravaged the soul and the heart.