77 Shadow Street (with bonus novella The Moonlit Mind) (Pendleton) by Koontz Dean

Author:Koontz, Dean [Koontz, Dean]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780345532367
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

Julian Sanchez

Crossing into the dining room, Julian knew at once that it, too, must be unfurnished. For one thing, the area carpet was missing, and for another, his footsteps on the limestone floor resonated off the walls differently from how they would have sounded in a furnished space.

The voices he’d heard a moment earlier were silent now. He stood listening. In the same way that he could discern the positions of the furnishings around him by what was a kind of psychic radar, he could also to a pretty reliable degree intuit the presence of others. Even a person who stood at ease still produced telltale sounds—shifting weight from foot to foot, breathing shallowly, licking lips, sucking a bit of food from between teeth, the rustle of clothes, the tick of a wristwatch—but except for the small noises that he himself made, this room sounded deserted.

Julian had not been blind since birth. He’d lost his vision at the age of eleven, when retinoblastoma required the removal of both his eyes. Consequently, he had more than a decade of visual memories stored away, which allowed him to construct mental images and whole scenes—including colors—from clues to his environment provided by his other four senses. When he cruised his apartment, his mind’s eye saw every room in vivid detail even though he’d never actually seen any corner of the place.

The inexplicable change that had recently occurred, however, left him unable to visualize his new surroundings. The perception of vacancy, the dirt and debris, the rankness of mold and mildew and other unidentifiable malodors so fundamentally altered these rooms that he was almost as unable to picture them as would have been a man blind from birth and without visual memories.

When Julian stepped warily into his living room, the muttering voices rose once more. They were speaking in a foreign language that he couldn’t identify. Previously they had an urgency, as if they were delivering a warning. Now they remained urgent but began to sound quarrelsome. Julian imagined a dozen people, perhaps more, and their voices issued from all sides, as though he must be encircled by some conclave that had come there specifically to study him, analyze him. Judge him.

“Who’s there?” he asked. “Who are you? What do you want?”

At the same time that the voices seemed to press close to him, they lacked the clarity of intimate speech, and he could imagine as easily that these were utterances carried to him from other rooms, through an intervening wall or door.

Moving to where he thought the center of the living room should be, finding no furniture in his way, Julian spoke louder than before: “Where are you? What do you want?”

In his first year or two of blindness, he had felt vulnerable and had worried unduly about the many things that might happen to him because of his disability. But you couldn’t spend your life expecting a calamitous fall or an assault at any moment; fear soon exhausts itself. After forty years

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