The forest of lost souls, p.1
The Forest of Lost Souls, page 1
ALSO BY DEAN KOONTZ
The Bad Weather Friend · After Death · The House at the End of the World · The Big Dark Sky · Quicksilver · The Other Emily · Elsewhere · Devoted · Ashley Bell · The City · Innocence · 77 Shadow Street · What the Night Knows · Breathless · Relentless · Your Heart Belongs to Me · The Darkest Evening of the Year · The Good Guy · The Husband · Velocity · Life Expectancy · The Taking · The Face · By the Light of the Moon · One Door Away from Heaven · From the Corner of His Eye · False Memory · Seize the Night · Fear Nothing · Mr. Murder · Dragon Tears · Hideaway · Cold Fire · The Bad Place · Midnight · Lightning · Watchers · Strangers · Twilight Eyes · Darkfall · Phantoms · Whispers · The Mask · The Vision · The Face of Fear · Night Chills · Shattered · The Voice of the Night · The Servants of Twilight · The House of Thunder · The Key to Midnight · The Eyes of Darkness · Shadowfires · Winter Moon · The Door to December · Dark Rivers of the Heart · Icebound · Strange Highways · Intensity · Sole Survivor · Ticktock · The Funhouse · Demon Seed
JANE HAWK SERIES
The Silent Corner · The Whispering Room · The Crooked Staircase · The Forbidden Door · The Night Window
ODD THOMAS SERIES
Odd Thomas · Forever Odd · Brother Odd · Odd Hours · Odd Interlude · Odd Apocalypse · Deeply Odd · Saint Odd
FRANKENSTEIN SERIES
Prodigal Son · City of Night · Dead and Alive · Lost Souls · The Dead Town
MEMOIR
A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog Named Trixie
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2024 by The Koontz Living Trust
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781662500510 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781662517785 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 9781662500503 (digital)
Cover design by James Iacobelli
Interior illustrations by Edward Bettison
Cover images: © Mark Fearon / ArcAngel; © Northern Owl / Shutterstock
First edition
This book is for Jessica Tribble Wells, Gracie Doyle, and the entire lovely team at Thomas & Mercer, who have made this phase of my journey by far the most pleasant and inspiring since I first sat down at a keyboard so many years ago.
CONTENTS
START READING
ONE THE PAST IN THE PRESENT
1 HARBINGER
2 THE WATCHER IN THE WOODS
3 SHE
4 THE EARTH PROVIDES
5 GOODBYE AND HELLO
6 THE BOX
7 THE FIRST GRAVE
8 THE DANGER OF SEEING AND BEING
9 LYING IN THE DARK
10 NATURE’S BOUNTY
11 HE KNOWS NOT WHO SHE IS
12 DISTANT CRIES
13 LIFE PASSES LIKE A SHADOW
14 THE COMFORT OF THE MOON
15 A WHITE FEDORA
16 BLACKBERRIES
17 WOLVES
18 THE UNDERTAKER’S DAUGHTER
19 NEWS OF THE DEAD
20 THE BOX AND THE ATLAS
21 THE SUITOR
22 THE FORTUNETELLER
23 SNAPSHOT
24 THE BIRD ASSASSIN
25 BAR THE DOOR
26 THE YOUNG PSYCHOPATH AT HOME
27 THE BIRDS’ REVENGE
28 LOVE NOTE
29 WHAT SHE VALUES LEAST
30 THE SERPENT’S COURTSHIP
31 DOG COLLAR
32 THE VENERABLE BEAD
33 THE SECOND GRAVE
34 WHAT THE SEER SEES
35 SUBMISSION
36 THE THIRD GRAVE
37 MY HEART IS READY
38 WHAT HE VALUES LEAST
TWO THE HUNT
39 PREPARATIONS
40 THE RIGHT HAND OF EVIL
41 THE BOX
42 THE BATS TAKE FLIGHT
43 FACELESS MEN ARE COMING
44 MEN WHO CAST NO SHADOWS
45 SHE IS BOTH PREY AND HUNTRESS
46 PUZZLEMENT
47 A NIGHT WATCH OF WOLVES
48 ETERNAL FAWN
49 FIND HER, GRILL HER, KILL HER
50 THE RIGHT HAND OF EVIL HARD AT WORK
51 WHAT WAS AND WHAT CAN BE
52 THE DOG LOVER
53 THE HUNT BEGINS
54 A MAN IN NEED OF FIXING
55 IN THE COMPANY OF MONSTERS
56 BECOMING
57 BREAD UPON THE WATERS
58 STICKY WIDGETS
59 REMEMBERING MOTHER
60 THREE FOR BREAKFAST
61 HAVING BECOME
62 THE KILL COUNT THEORY
63 AZRAEL OR RHADAMANTHUS
64 WITHOUT A MOON OR WOLVES
THREE THE FUTURE IN THE PAST
65 WHAT THE DEAD CAN PROVIDE
66 A PHONE CALL
67 DOGS AND DRONES
68 THE MEN WHO EVAPORATED
69 COME NIGHTFALL
70 AMBROSIA
71 SLEEPLESS IN MONTECITO
72 TWO MOON, SUN SPIRIT
73 BOSCHVARK FOREVER
74 TO THE GRAND PLATEAU
75 WHISPER MODE
76 EVERYBODY DIES
77 THE BOX
78 SEEING
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
What starts out here [in the US] as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.
—Eric Hoffer, 1967
ONE
* * *
THE PAST IN THE PRESENT
1
* * *
HARBINGER
The white mountain lion, an albino female, is rarely seen in this county, though she seems to roam only here. The astonished few who have caught a glimpse of her remember the place, the day, the hour, and the circumstances as vividly and indelibly as they recall any event in their lives. Like others of her species that are of a more common coloration, she mostly sleeps by day and stalks the world in darkness. Whether she appears pale and fluid in a shadowy forest, striding through a meadow at dusk, prowling a ridgeline in little more than starlight, or crossing a highway at night, her eyes like yellow lanterns, she is beautiful and terrifying, a majestic three-hundred-pound predator that inspires awe and terror in the same instant, a kind of sacred love.
She has been seen in a moonlit cemetery, gliding like a spirit among the headstones. She has lazed on the steps of a church in the first radiance of the hidden sun before it rose above the mountains. She has been observed drinking at dusk from the water in the deep lakelet that formed in what was long ago a stone quarry. These sightings and certain others have led some to attribute to her a dire prognostic power. They claim she’s an omen of death because a groundskeeper died of a heart attack a day later in that cemetery, because the minister of the church perished in a rectory fire soon after the lion’s dawn visit, and because two children drowned in the quarry pool less than twenty-four hours after the big cat drank from it. Those who give credence to this superstition call her Azrael, after the angel of death. Of course, people die with regularity whether Azrael appears or not. Perhaps the only death she will truly foretell is her own, when her twenty years are behind her and she retreats to some place deep in the forest, there to lie on the couch of her own everlasting sleep.
2
* * *
THE WATCHER IN THE WOODS
For three days, a watcher takes up various positions among the trees. Because he moves only within purple shadows as the traveling sun elongates them, he apparently believes he can’t be seen. When he startles a flock of birds roosting overhead, he must assume their sudden, noisy eruption into flight means nothing to the woman whom he’s observing. Judging by the frequency with which his binoculars reflect sunlight and reveal his position, Vida decides that the watcher is not experienced at surveillance. When he indulges in marijuana, he seems to think she cannot smell it when she’s sitting on her porch, at a distance of perhaps forty yards. However, her senses have not been dulled by the riotous mélange of odors common to places that are said to be more civilized than this rustic realm.
Although city-born, she’s been gone from that place for twenty-three years. The metropolis is a memory so faded that it seems to have been no more than a dream.
She has long been of the land. She’s been formed by the truths of the wilderness, by the wonder and the myths that nature inspires, by hard experience, by love and loss, by the prophecy of a traveling seer in a white robe and yellow sneakers.
The watcher among the trees does not worry her. The forest is hers not just by day but also by night, when the moon is her lamp whether it has risen or not. She knows most of the paths, and when she does not know the way, the children of the forest will lead her where she needs to go, in safety. Sooner or later, the watcher will come to her with a confidence that he will learn is misplaced.
3
* * *
SHE
In Vida’s dr
Her five-room home is of native stone and timbers, with a slate roof. It was built seventy years earlier under the supervision of her uncle Ogden. The house stands in the foothills and backs up to the woods. The front porch faces a meadow fifty yards in diameter. Great mountains loom on three sides; on the fourth, the descending phalanxes of trees are little thinned by the valley where, at the moment, a still mist lies like a frozen river.
Throughout the residence, the floors are red-brown waxed concrete. Walls paneled in golden pine have been shellacked to a soft gloss. Although the bedroom is small, it is large enough. The eat-in kitchen is a generous space, likewise the bathroom and the library with its hundreds of books. Her workshop, where she cuts gemstones en cabochon and polishes them to perfection, is slightly larger than the room in which she sleeps.
The property lies remote, beyond the service of all public utilities. Propane provides gas for cooking and fuels a generator. A deep well issues a sparkling flow as pure as the headwaters of Eden.
Uncle Ogden didn’t want a phone. After he died at the age of eighty-five, ten years ago, Vida installed a satellite dish on the roof and, through it, obtained cell service. She hasn’t made more than ten calls a year since then, mostly to arrange appointments with a doctor and dentist in the nearest town, which is more than nineteen miles away.
Although homeschooled, she’s never used a computer other than the one in her phone. What she knows of social media appalls her. She has no need to stream anything. A turntable linked to quality speakers summons music from her uncle’s collection of vinyl records. Otherwise, her entertainment needs are provided by books and nature.
Should she wish to assess the current condition of the world beyond these woods, she has a radio. She rarely turns it on. Because she has lived her life in pleasant seclusion, she has never been subjected to the tide of misinformation and fearmongering that seems to be the news as the authorities shape it; therefore, she recognizes agitprop for what it is.
This Monday morning in May, as she prepares breakfast, she listens to Arthur Rubinstein’s recording, with the Guarneri Quartet, of the Brahms Quintet for Piano and Strings in F Minor, opus 34. As always, this music moves her, though not to tears as it did in her youth. She is now twenty-eight.
Somehow, the music evokes from the humble kitchen a grand sense of place. The morning light shimmering in polished pine cabinetry; the black-and-white two-inch ceramic tiles that checkerboard the countertops; the O’Keefe and Merritt six-burner three-oven stove from 1949; the Philco refrigerator of similar vintage: Everything speaks of dependability, of an age when proud manufacturers could not have conceived of a policy of planned obsolescence, when often the consumer was knowledgeable enough to repair most appliances. The kitchen is a timeless space in a world where time erodes all else.
Having learned much from her uncle, Vida has, since his death, replaced the compressor, condenser fan, and evaporator fan in the refrigerator, and has maintained all the systems on the property.
After eating breakfast and washing the dishes, she threads a supple leather holster onto her belt and inserts a can of bear spray in it. She has firearms but never carries them on her placer-mining expeditions.
Burdened with only a cooler that contains flexible cold packs and two bottles of water and a protein bar, she leaves by the front door and engages both deadbolts. The back door is likewise secured.
The metal casement windows feature pairs of twelve-inch panes with a sturdy center post. Even if the glass is broken out, neither pane is wide enough to admit anyone above the age of five.
There is a basement where she stores canned goods and freeze-dried food in vacuum drums. The lower realm has no window or exterior door; the only entrance is from inside the residence.
Behind and to the north of the house stands a smaller building of stone. It contains a backhoe, a riding lawn mower, a workbench, an extensive collection of tools, the generator, and racks of spare propane tanks.
Included is a stall for her midnight-blue 1950 Ford F-1 pickup. Thirty-two years ago, her uncle added rack-and-pinion steering and replaced the engine. The vehicle is a workhorse and a beauty.
The placer mine lies two miles from here, but no road leads to it. She walks there and back two or three times a month.
This is the first time she has left the house since the man in the forest has put her under surveillance. Whatever his intentions, he is unlikely to follow her, for to do so would be taking a greater risk of being exposed.
She enters the forest by a deer trail at the west end of the meadow and turns to look past the house, across the field to the forest in the east. The sun is behind him, so his binoculars don’t reveal his position, but she can almost feel him out there, perhaps much as an exorcist might feel the presence of a demon hiding bone-deep in the body of the possessed.
This is largely an evergreen wilderness, pines and firs, but it includes communities of deciduous trees that have begun to leaf out with the coming of spring. The undergrowth is mostly western sword ferns, snowy wood rush, maidenhair spleenwort, and ribbon grass.
A maze of deer trails winds through the rising foothills and ravines, offering novice hikers a false sense of direction while providing myriad paths to nowhere and a variety of deaths. Of the few nature lovers who venture into this primeval vastness, fewer still are unwise enough to do so without preparation and provisions.
Vida knows the terrain as well as she knows the rooms of her house. The beaten paths lie in sun-dappled shadow, but unique rock formations and a tree disfigured by a lightning strike, as well as other landmarks, allow her to proceed almost at a run, too fast for the unknown man to follow her even if he is of a mind to do so.
4
* * *
THE EARTH PROVIDES
Here where the trees relent, sun and shade contest throughout the day, and false Solomon’s seal flourishes knee-high. Early sprays of white flowers, like clustered kernels of freshly popped corn, are bursting through densely layered light-green leaves. Vida negotiates this barrier at the point where she’s always passed through before, tramping on only those plants that she crushed previously.
Beyond lies the six-foot-high bank that defined the river’s edge when, decades earlier, the watercourse had been wider in this section than it is now. She descends a weedy incline to a bare alluvial field that varies between eighteen and twenty-two feet in width and extends three hundred yards. Along the far flank of this gently sloped expanse of sediment, tangerine-scented sweet flag brandishes tall, swordlike leaves in the breeze, and the land steps down to a new riverbank beyond which cold, rushing currents speak in a double tongue of spirited splashing and sinister susurration.
Like her uncle before her, Vida works the alluvial field as a placer mine. Rain and wind ceaselessly smooth away evidence of this labor so that it is necessary to mark the point where she stopped on her most recent expedition. This she has done with a two-foot-long circus-tent spike that, at the end of the day, she always pounds into the soft soil near the slope of the new riverbank.
The spike also serves as a belaying pin to which is tethered a canvas bag that contains waist-high wading boots, a folded length of heavy-gauge plastic sheeting, a mattock, a spade, a spare spike, a mallet, a seining pan, and a pair of work gloves. The bag is buried under a few inches of soil, so that it won’t draw the attention of anyone passing this way. She retrieves it.
For ten years, since her uncle’s death, Vida has labored in this remote field alone, without encountering another soul. Chances are small that anyone will find and steal her humble tools. Given the hard work required to exploit the deposits here, it’s even less likely that anyone who discovers her at this task will want to stake a claim to part of the placer mine. However, because her uncle Ogden took precautions, so does Vida.
