Phantoms Part 58

He smiled. "Don't worry. I'm not flaking out on you. I'm not going to start sending money to those charlatan preachers on TV, asking them to pray for Timmy. h.e.l.l, I'm not even going to start attending church. Sunday's the only day I can sleep in! What I'm talking about isn't your standard, garden variety religion..."

"Yes, but it wasn't really the Devil," she said.

"Wasn't it?"

"It was a prehistoric creature that-"

"Couldn't it be both?"

"What're we getting into here?"

"A philosophical discussion."

"On our honeymoon?"

"I married you partly for your mind."

Later, in bed, just before sleep took them, he said, "Well, all I know is that the shape-changer made me realize there's a lot more mystery in this world than I once thought. I just won't rule anything out. And looking back on it, considering what we survived in Snowfield, considering how Tal had just strapped on his gun when Jeeter walked in, considering how the spotted fever screwed up Kale's aim... well, it seems to me like we were meant to survive."

They slept, woke toward dawn, made love, slept again.

In the morning, she said, "I know one thing for sure."

"What's that?"

"We were meant to be married."

"Definitely."

"No matter what, fate would've run us headlong into each other sooner or later."

That afternoon, as they strolled along the beach, Jenny thought the waves sounded like huge, rumbling wheels. The sound called to mind an old saying about the mill wheels of Heaven grinding slowly. The rumble of the waves enforced that image, and in her mind she could see immense stone mill wheels turning against each other.

She said, "You think it has a meaning, then? A purpose?"

He didn't have to ask what she meant. "Yes. Everything, every twist and turn of life. A meaning, a purpose."

The sea foamed on the sand.

Jenny listened to the mill wheels and wondered what mysteries and miracles, what horrors and joys were being ground out at this very moment, to be served up in times to come.

A Note to the Reader.

Like all the characters in this novel, Timothy Flyte is a fictional person, but many of the ma.s.s disappearances to which he refers are not merely figments of the author's imagination. They really happened. The disappearance of the Roanoke Island colony, the mysteriously deserted Eskimo village of Anjikuni, the vanished Mayan populations, the unexplained loss of thousands of Spanish soldiers in 1711, the equally mystifying loss of the Chinese battalions in 1939, and certain other cases mentioned in Phantoms are actually well-doc.u.mented, historical events.

Likewise, there is a real Dr. Ananda Chakrabarty. In Phantoms, the details of his development of the first patented microorganism are drawn from public record. Dr. Chakrabarty's bacterium was, as stated in the book, too fragile to survive outside of the laboratory. Biosan-4. the trade name of a supposedly hardier strain of Chakrabarty's bug, is a fictional device.

And of course the ancient enemy is a product of the author's imagination. But what if ...

NEW AFTERWORD.

BY.

DEAN KOONTZ.

AFTERWORD.

We all make mistakes. Maybe you've been at a tony dinner party, where you've eaten your entire salad before realizing you've used the wrong fork. Faux pas. Maybe you've been a worker in a nuclear power plant, where you've pushed the wrong b.u.t.ton, contaminating dozens of fellow workers with plutonium. Oops. In a drunken haze, high on cheap red wine spiked with Listerine, perhaps you have mistaken the neighbor's golden retriever for an attractive blonde and eloped with it to a wedding chapel in Vegas, only to be told by the minister-who is dressed in a sequined jumpsuit and pomaded like Elvis-that the state of Nevada will not permit you to marry a canine without the written consent of its trainer plus a six-figure line of credit in a major casino. Woof. Perhaps you have tried to kill a spider with a nail gun, only to spike your foot to the floor. Ouch. It is possible, I suppose, that on a cold, rainy day in Manhattan, you have stepped out of an open window on the thirty-sixth floor of a high-rise, thinking you were pa.s.sing through a door into a stairwell, that you plummeted like a wingless ox toward the street below, that you were spared death only because you fell onto a fruit vendor's cart of mush melons, that you then stepped out of the cart into the path of a bus, were knocked aside like a mere rag doll, rolled in a tangle of broken limbs into an open manhole, fell into a storm drain, were swept by surging torrents from one end of the city to the other, and were flushed into the sea, where in your desperation you mistook a shark for a marker buoy, resulting in the loss of two pinkie fingers, an ear, and half a kneecap. Get insurance. Maybe, in an argument with a h.e.l.l's Angel, you've used the words "kissy-lipped girly man." Maybe you've eaten live fire ants. Maybe you've left a waffle iron plugged in, on the floor beside your bed, and then awakened in the middle of the night and mistook it for a slipper. Maybe, in spite of the printed warning, you tore the manufacturer's tag off a sofa cushion; and now you are serving twenty years in a federal prison, making crocheted license-plate cozies for three cents an hour. Maybe one of you reading this has made all these mistakes, in which case you are not merely exhibiting the fundamental human tendency to err: You are as dumb as a sump pump.

Writing Phantoms was one of the ten biggest mistakes of my life, ranking directly above that incident with the angry porcupine and the clown, about which I intend to say nothing more. Phantoms has been published in thirty-one languages and has been in print continuously for fifteen years, as I write this. Worldwide, it has sold almost six million copies in all editions. It has been well reviewed, and more than a few critics have called it a modern cla.s.sic of its genre. Readers write to me by the hundreds every year, even this long after first publication, to tell me how much they like Phantoms. I enjoyed writing the book, and when I had to reread it to create a screenplay for the film version, I found it to be just the thrill ride that I had originally hoped to produce. Yet it is this novel, more than any other that earned for me the label of "horror writer," which I never wanted, never embraced, and have ever since sought to shed.

As I have written in another of these afterwords, I enjoy reading horror novels, have considerable respect for the form, and admire the finest writers who have worked in the genre. I believe, however, that 95 percent of my work is anything but horror. I am a suspense writer. I am a novelist. I write love stories now and then, sometimes humorous fiction, sometimes tales of adventure, sometimes all those things between the covers of a single volume. But Phantoms fixed me with a spooky-guy label as surely as if it had been st.i.tched to my forehead by a highly skilled and diligent member of the United Garment Workers Union-making a far better wage than that poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d crocheting license-plate cozies.

So why did I write it?

In 1981, after Whispers had become a bestseller in paperback, I wanted to follow it with an equally strange novel of psychological suspense, an edgy and chilling tale in which the only monsters were the human kind. My publisher believed the other book had succeeded because readers had thought-solely because of packaging-that Whispers was a horror novel. Horror was then a hot genre. Prior to Whispers, I had never earned a great deal of money from a book, and the Whispers royalties then due were slowly, slowly, slowly moving through a long pipeline. Meanwhile, I needed to pay the bills, and my agent and publisher made it clear that I could not get a substantial advance for another book like Whispers, only for a horror novel. I was also told that a horror novel would be backed with major advertising, but that a mere suspense novel would not get much support. If I wanted to build upon the success of Whispers, I had no choice but to write a highly promotable horror novel. Against my better judgment, I wrote Phantoms.

I thought I would cleverly evade their horror-or-starve ultimatum by making Phantoms something of a tour de force, rolling virtually all the monsters of the genre into one beast, and also by providing a credible, scientific explanation for the creature's existence. Instead of fearless vampire hunters armed with wooden stakes, instead of werewolf trackers packing revolvers loaded with silver bullets, my protagonists would save themselves by using logic and reason to determine the nature of their mysterious enemy and to find a way to defeat it. Phantoms would be a horror story, yes, but it would also be science fiction, an adventure tale, a wild mystery story, and an exploration of the nature and source of myth.

When I delivered the book, there was little enthusiasm for it. Only five thousand hardcovers were printed and, prior to publication, I was told by most people in my professional life that this was too much of a horror story and, therefore, could be of no interest to the broader audience that had made Whispers a paperback bestseller. I was flummoxed. I felt I had delivered precisely what had been asked of me, only to be crushed like that h.e.l.l's Angel crushed the guy who called him a "kissy-lipped girly man." The reviews began to come in, and they were largely excellent, although this praise did not result in a bigger first printing or any promotion, which led to festivals of self-pity and wild storms of depression in the Koontz household. Fortunately, enthusiasm for my work remained strong at the paperback house, and one year after the hardcover bombed, Phantoms followed Whispers onto the paperback bestseller list, ensuring that my career would not lose momentum. Thereafter, it sold and sold and sold; and as I write this, it is nearing its sixtieth printing in paperback in the United States.

Do I like Phantoms? Yes. Do I wish I'd never written it? Yes. Am I happy to have written it? Yes. Am I a little schizo on this issue? Yes. Although as a matter of career planning, Phantoms was a major strategic blunder, the writing of it brought me considerable pleasure, and readers' outspoken delight in the book has provided a gratification that has sustained me through some bad days.

The lesson, I suppose, is that beneficial developments can flow even from a mistake. If you work in a nuclear power plant, however, triple check yourself before you push that b.u.t.ton.

Berkley t.i.tles 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.