The Moonlit Mind (Novella): A Tale of Suspense by Dean Koontz

is hers.
    This
side of the hostess station, in the open doorway, stands the Phantom of Broderick’s.

8
     
    July 26, memorial day for Saints Anne and Joachim, memorial
night
, three years and four months earlier …
    Nine-year-old Crispin in his sister’s empty closet is pierced by a sharp fear, not fear for himself—not yet—but for Mirabell.
    Crispin, help me!
    He doesn’t hear the voice again, but he remembers it clearly.
    Something is terribly wrong, and it can’t be put right by one of Mr. Mordred’s jokes or by a kiss from Nanny Sayo.
    At the thought of Nanny, the intense flavor of lemon candy fills his mouth. An impossible flood of saliva forces him to swallow once, twice, three times, and still a string of spittle escapes, drools down his chin. He wipes it away with a sleeve of his pajamas.
    They have lived in Theron Hall for six weeks, and suddenly those days seem to have passed mostly in a haze. Looking back, he has only a vague sense of what happened on which day, as if time has no fixed meaning in this house.
    They have gone to bed and risen according to their desires. They have eaten only what they wish. Every toy they’ve wanted—and many they never requested—have been provided for them. They have been entertained rather than schooled, and their tutor with the horsefly birthmark has indulged them at every turn, always excusing and even encouraging their laziness. They have never left the house. In their three separate rooms, they are gradually being isolated, one from the other, as they already have been isolated from the outside world.
    None of that is how things ought to be. Crispin sees now that the past six weeks have been like a dream through which they havebeen drawn as though responding to invisible strings attached to all their limbs.
    Crispin, help me!
    The sense of being in a dream only intensifies as Crispin finds himself at the door to Clarette and Giles’s bedroom suite without realizing that he has left Mirabell’s room.
    His mother and his new father have made it clear that they value their privacy and that their quarters are strictly off-limits. Until now, Crispin has never tried their door. He assumes that it must be locked, but it is not.
    Stained-glass and blown-glass lamps pour out honeyed light so rich that he can almost taste it, and the velvet shadows remind him of a place he cannot name or quite remember, a place that somehow came before everything he’s ever known.
    Of all the grand spaces in Theron Hall, this is the grandest of them all. The dazzling and intricate pattern in the colorful Persian carpet seems to pull gently at his bare feet with every step that he takes, as though it might draw him down into it, into not just the threads that constitute it, but into it and also
through
it, as if it might be a secret gate to another world more real than this one. The draperies are so soft and hang in such elegant folds, the colors are so appealing, the fringe and tassels are so plush, that no vista he might see through the windows behind them could compete. Here is the furniture of some greater royalty than mere kings, and an ornate mirror of such compelling depth that when Crispin stares past his reflection, the room appears too vast to be contained within Theron Hall, dwindling to infinity.
    He is overwhelmed by opulence, on the verge of vertigo, when once more he focuses on the velvet shadows in the corners, whichremind him of some place he can’t remember, a place that came before everything he’s ever known. But this time some alien voice inside his head, with words he’s never heard before yet understands, reveals to him that the perfection of these shadows are the darkness of his mother’s womb, from which he was born. If he wishes to step into a corner and allow these shadows to fold around him, if he will wait here for his mother, upon her return she will take him back into herself, and he will know again the peace of being part of her and eventually of being