Wilderness: A Short Work Tie-In to Innocence
Dean Koontz
Language: English
Pages: 0
ISBN: 1491500484
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
New York Times bestseller
With this darkly intriguing original short story, Dean Koontz sets the stage for his masterly novel of mystery, suspense, and strange wonder―Innocence.
“The world is a machine that produces endless surprises and mysteries layered on mysteries.”
Addison Goodheart is a mystery even to himself. He was born in an isolated home surrounded by a deep forest, never known to his father, kept secret from everyone but his mother, who barely accepts him. She is haunted by private demons and keeps many secrets―none of which she dreads more than the young son who adores her.
Only in the woods, among the wildlife, is Addison truly welcome. Only there can he be at peace. Until the day he first knows terror, the day when his life changes radically and forever.…
Wilderness is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. A Bantam Books eBook Original Copyright © 2013 by Dean Koontz All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New
York. BANTAM BOOKS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC. eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-7861-7 Cover design: Scott Biel Cover images: (forest) Travelpix Ltd/The Image Bank/Getty Images; (walker in hooded sweatshirt) Valeri Byrne/Flickr Open/Getty Images www.bantamdell.com v3.1 Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 By Dean Koontz About the Author 1 My mother claimed that in any mirror I
spent so much time roaming the forest that it was as much a home to me as the house. Nothing in nature’s greenwood feared me or was repelled merely by the sight of me. Because I had no memory of the midwife, I had never seen a human being other than my mother, and she had impressed upon me that such an encounter would almost surely result in my death. But what traveled on wings or four feet did not judge me. Furthermore, I possessed considerable strength for my age, and quickness, and at all
had used, she could see my face rather than her own, my face and my singular eyes, and she could not thereafter have the mirror in the house. She shattered it and swept up the pieces without daring to look at them, because she said that somehow every shard contained a full image of my face, not merely a portion of it. She could hardly tolerate the sight of me even occasionally, and she most often looked past me or at something else altogether when we were in conversation. Consequently, seeing my
than I did and all the firepower, anyone lacking my peculiar intuitive sense of direction might become lost here forever. When I reached the first turn of the trail without hearing another shot, I assumed that he must be racing after me. I didn’t look back but made an even greater effort. Deer traveled by the way of least resistance, and because their sense of time measured life in four seasons rather than in minutes and hours, they lived without urgency. The hoof-beaten trails were therefore