copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman
Synopsis
Mystic Mansion: A Sequel to Saturday’s Child
Crystal Fall and her friends discover that the horrors of Nazi Germany didn't end with Adolph Hitler. An ancient artifact, which he believed empowered him and his Third Reich, has been discovered, and its awesome power has been unleashed in a mysterious mystic mansion. Can Crystal Fall and her friends save the world. . . again. . . even if, as Fran Newell believes, God is not on their side? For readers who have graduated from R. L. Stine but aren't quite ready for Stephen King, this novel and its prequel, Saturday's Child, are perfect reads!
Sample
Prologue
The blonde-haired woman sat hunched against the concrete wall of the underground bunker.
The bunker was one of many in the two-story complex fifty feet below the Chancellery Building. She had the run of the complex, but she preferred to be wherever her soul mate led. At the moment, he was here, planning the army’s defenses.
Now thirty-three years old, she was considered a handsome woman. Only ten years ago, she had been strikingly beautiful, but the last decade had been expensive. It had cost her not only her beauty, but also her youthful lust for life and, very nearly, her sanity.
Now, as she sat in the dank subterranean shelter, she studied her life’s companion, the odd-looking man with the odd-looking mustache who sat hunkered over a table, surrounded by Army officers and staring at maps.
How different life had seemed when, at twenty, she’d met him at Heinrich Hoffman’s photographic studio! He’d struck her, even then, as somewhat odd-looking. She’d mentioned to her sister Isle that he wore a “funny mustache and carried a big felt hat.” At the same time, though, she’d been struck with the air of authority that virtually radiated from him. Even then, he had carried himself with an arrogant pride. He had seemed a man of destiny.
When he’d asked her to become his domestic partner, she’d left Heinrich’s employ. Over the years, she’d gone from living in an apartment in Munich to a villa in the same city, and her lover had provided her a chauffeur-driven Mercedes. Life for the former photographer’s assistant was good. Her perception, it appeared, had been correct. Her paramour seemed to be a man destined for greatness, indeed.
Nevertheless, during the next decade, although her material existence continually improved, her emotional and spiritual health declined. She read cheap novels, watched romantic films, and alternated between exercise and brooding inactivity. Her appearance became increasingly a concern to her, and she assured and reassured her mate that she would stand by him, even unto death.
To her, he would confide his most intimate fears and concerns. One was that he would lose the source of his power, the Spear of Destiny, as he called it.
As a youth, long before he had come to power, he’d stood in the Hofburg Treasure House, where the holy relic was on display, staring intently at the wondrous weapon—the spear that the Roman soldier Longinus had used to pierce the side of the crucified Christ.
According to the lore associated with this spear, it was imbued with Jesus Christ’s passion. It was steeped in the very agony and ecstasy that Christ had experienced while hanging on the cross. Consequently, the spear was said to equip its possessor with enormous power to do good or evil.
Now, it was 1945, and their enemies had surrounded them, forcing them to retreat to this last refuge.
Leaving the conference at the table, he came to her. “It is still not too late,” he said, passionately. “You can save yourself, my darling. I have yet within my hands the power to secure your life, your future. I have ordered you to go. Now, I beg you.”
“Have you accepted your advisors’ counsel that you should flee to the mountains around Berchtesgaden?” she asked.
Without hesitation, he replied, “My place is here.”
“As is mine,” she declared.
“No, you must save yourself!”
Eva Braun smiled at his thoughtfulness, at his love. “It is better that ten thousand die,” she replied, “than that you be lost to Germany!”
She had said this when she’d heard that millions of Jews were being tortured and exterminated and that millions more were scheduled for such a fate. It was necessary, he had explained to her, to feed the demons with which he was in allegiance. They thrived on misery and human suffering. Under his regime, the demons had fattened and had rewarded him accordingly. His rise to power had been meteoric.
He averted his gaze, not wishing for her to see the emotion that her words had engendered within him. Her fierce devotion was moving.
“Then you will not go?”
She shook her head. “My place is at your side.”
“This is no game,” he told her bluntly. “This is the end. We will die.”
“Then,” she said defiantly, holding his gaze with hers, “we will die together.”
He kissed her hand before returning to his generals.
Eva thought of the sacrifices that he had made in leading his country to its glorious destiny as the Third Reich.
The First Reich had lasted for well over two hundred years, from 700 to 936, from the time of the Merovingian kings to the time that the Vikings threatened to tear the empire apart. The First Reich had blossomed under Charlemagne, who had also possessed the Spear of Destiny. It was not until long after his death that the First Reich was divided into the five duchies of Franconia, Swabia, Bavaria, Saxony, and Lorraine and a long period of weak kings ruined the glory that had been the First Reich.
By 1860, Germany had been divided into the German Confederation of thirty-nine states. The Second Reich began when Kaiser Wilheim I was crowned. Thereafter, through warfare and political machinations, a succession of leaders established the Weimar Republic at the end of World War I, and the Second Reich came to its end.
Some time between or during the first empires, the Spear of Destiny passed into the hands of the Hapsburg family, who displayed it in a kind of museum, the Hofburg Treasure House, in Vienna, along with their other regalia.
In 1933, the German Reichstag burned down, and the communists were blamed, giving the Nazis the opportunity to capitalize on the German people’s fears and limit their rights under the Weimar Constitution. Wondrously, Hitler then secured the authority to enact laws without parliamentary action, and the beginnings of his rise to power began as the Nazi Party became the only legal political organization in the state and the rights of other groups were methodically repressed through the Gestapo’s brutal tactics. Now, Hitler was able to pursue his dream of a Master Race exercising world dominance.
Behind the scenes at every turn, Hitler had wielded the Spear of Destiny. Always, the miraculous weapon had inspired visions in which Hitler had seen his dreams unfold. Even as a youth, he’d visited the Hofburg Treasure House to see the wonderful artifact, standing for hours before the ancient weapon, spellbound by it.
As soon as he’d risen to power, Hitler had taken the spear as his own, and it had both guided and empowered him ever since.
Now, however, something was wrong.
The enchantments were failing.
Hitler himself had lost faith in his glorious dream of the worldwide rule a pure Master Race.
Eva Braun shook her head in disbelief. Despite Der Führer’s words, she could not believe that the end had come. She could not believe that they would die.
How could their dream end this way?
The Spear of Destiny assured her paramour’s success, had it not? For years, the spear had led him to victory after victory until his dominion over the entire world seemed inevitable.
Nevertheless, the Russian army had done the unthinkable, forcing them to retreat to this subterranean bunker.
She looked at the spear, which Hitler had set against the wall near his seat at the head of the table. Its point glowed blood-red, as bright and glorious as ever.
They would not be defeated—not now, not ever!
Had not the Reich created an elite force of commandos, the Werewolves, to disrupt the enemy? No less a personage than Goebbels had vouchsafed the sanctity of the
Werewolves’ mission, asserting in his radio messages that “Satan has taken command."
He had sworn, further, that “"We Werewolves consider it our supreme duty to kill, to kill, and to kill, employing every cunning and wile in the darkness of the night, crawling, groping through towns and villages, like wolves, noiselessly, mysteriously” to wreck vengeance on the Reich’s would-be conquerors.”
The bunker shook. The bare light bulb in the suspended fixture swung madly back and forth as a thick cloud of earth and concrete dust billowed within the close confines of the chamber that, Eva believed now, for the first time, might actually become their tomb.
“My Führer, you have received a telegram,” an aide announced, presenting the message to Hitler.
Hitler slit open the sealed communiqué and read the text:
My Führer!
In view of your decision to remain in the fortress of Berlin, do you agree that I take over at once the total leadership of the Reich, with full freedom of action at home and abroad as your deputy, in accordance with your decree of June 29, 1941? If no reply is received by 10 o'clock tonight, I shall take it for granted that you have lost your freedom of action, and shall consider the conditions of your decree as fulfilled, and shall act for the best interests of our country and our people. You know what I feel for you in this gravest hour of my life. Words fail me to express myself. May God protect you, and speed you quickly here in spite of all.
Your loyal
Hermann Göring
Hitler flung the telegram aside, color rising through his neck and reddening his face. His countenance was transformed. Where moments before had appeared the features of a man, there was now something indubitably demonic about the twisted visage. He pounded the table with his fist, glaring at the officers surrounding him.
“This is treason!” he cried. “This outrage will not be brooked!”
The officers looked fearfully at one another or averted their gaze altogether, glancing at the tabletop or the floor.
Eva also averted her gaze.
She hated to see him like this, during one of what she had come to regard as his “fits.” Lately, it seemed, he was having more and more of these fits.
During such moments, he was transformed, and the inner, hidden beast within came to
the fore in all its savagery.
He turned to his top aide. “Borrman, send a reply at once! I want Göring to understand that I regard his message as an act of treason for which he deserves no less than death. However, in deference to his previous long-term loyalty and service to the Reich, I will spare his life, provided that he resign immediately.”
Martin Bormann nodded. “It will be done, Führer.”
As the aide started to turn, Hitler stopped him. “I want him arrested at once! See to it that the S S receive the order.”
“Yes, my Führer.”
Another artillery shell struck near the Chancellery Garden. The bunker filled with
a thick, choking dust.
The point of the spear seemed just as bright and luminous, Eva thought.
They could weather the Russians’ assault.
Their elite Werewolves would prevail.
The Spear of Destiny, after all, was still in the hands of the Reich.
She consoled herself with the thought that the spearhead still shone as brightly as ever.
Didn’t it?
Then why, she wondered, had Hitler earlier allowed all but essential personnel to leave the bunker complex?
A few days later, Eva and her beloved took time to marry.
“I wish that I could be a proper bride for you,” she apologized.
Hitler held her face in his hands. “I wish that I could have given you the world.”
The officiating officer awaited Der Führer’s command. There was little time to waste on pleasantries. More and more of the Russian’s artillery had been striking closer and closer to the Chancellery.
Without taking his eyes off his bride, Hitler gave the official permission to begin, and he and Eva were wed. In death, if not in life, they would be married, at least.
“I regret that we cannot have a proper honeymoon,” the groom said.
“My entire life with you has been a honeymoon.” She replied.
“I am sorry, my darling, but I must return my attention to—“
“There is no need to apologize,” she said, shushing him.
Yesterday, he had sent for Luftwaffe General Ritter von Greim, who had arrived through a barrage of Russian ground fire, landing his plane in the street near the bunker complex. In the process, the general’s foot had been injured, but he was here, now, and that was all that mattered for, today, Hitler would name Greim as Göring's successor, and the general would become the field marshal in command of the Luftwaffe.
Yesterday, Hitler had performed a more unpleasant duty. Word had reached him that S S Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler had resorted to treason as well, attempting to negotiate with the accursed Allies. Himmler had even offered to surrender some of the Reich’s western armies to the American general, Eisenhower!
Hitler’s rage had frightened even Eva. He’d ordered Himmler’s immediate arrest and, to make an example of what would befall such traitors, he’d had S S Lt. Gen. Hermann Fegelein, Himmler’s personal assistant in the bunker, taken to the Chancellery Garden and summarily executed. When she’d heard that her brother-in-law had been shot on Hitler’s command, Eva supported her paramour, repeating what had become almost a mantra. “It is better that ten thousand die,” she had sworn, “than that he be lost to Germany!” It was, perhaps, this expression of her uttermost devotion to him that had persuaded Hitler to marry her.
Hitler, however, had not been the same since the disastrous defections of Göring and Himmler. The latter’s treason affected Hitler more than anything in his late career. Himmler had been a trusted confidant from the beginning. “Faithful Heinrich,” Hitler had dubbed him. Next to Eva, there was no one in whom Hitler trusted as much. He had allowed himself to put his faith in this one man above all others, and Himmler had sought to betray that trust in the end, when he perceived his own life to be endangered. Hitler had meant nothing to the coward! The Reich had meant nothing. Only the worthless life of Heinrich Himmler had counted in the end.
It was Himmler’s betrayal that made Hitler understand that, Spear of Destiny or no Spear of Destiny, the Reich would fall and he would die.
All that remained within his power was to determine the manner of his death. It was unthinkable to allow his enemies to execute him.
If die he must, it would be by his own hand.
“Bring me Blondi,” he ordered.
“Yes, Führer,” Borrman replied, fetching Hitler’s favorite dog. Hitler commanded that Blondi be administered a lethal dose of poison. When the animal died a few minutes later, Hitler and the others in the bunker knew that the toxin was effective, and he handed capsules to each of his female secretaries. “I wish that I had better parting gifts,” he said. “At least these will allow you to die with dignity, rather than at the hands of our accursed enemies.”
By now, it was common knowledge that the Russians were only blocks away from the Chancellery. Their artillery fire had begun to score direct hits.
To her horror, Eva had seen that, at last, the bright spearhead was dimmer—much dimmer than it had been even days before.
Along with her groom, she had come to accept the inevitability of the loss of the war and the failure of the Reich. She did not wish to live in this world any longer if her husband could not rule it absolutely. She was prepared to die. Taking her husband’s hand, she walked with him through the gloomy bunker, into their private chamber, having bid farewell to Bormann, Goebbels, Generals Krebs and Burgdorf, and the other staff.
Soon afterward, those outside the couple’s chamber heard a gunshot.
Bormann and Goebbels entered their room.
Hitler’s body lay sprawled upon the couch. He had shot himself in the right temple. Blood ran from the wound, streaking his cheek with its crimson stain.
His bride was also dead, but she had died from having swallowed the same poison that had killed Blondi.
Outside, Russian artillery rounds continued to rain down upon the Chancellery Garden.
Bormann and Goebbels ordered the bodies of Hitler and Eva carried to the Garden, saying “Douse them with gasoline.”
Nazi soldiers poured the fuel on their bodies, and the corpses were ignited. The fire raged, dancing furiously. The roasting corpses blackened in the blazing inferno. The air filled with the sickening stench of burning flesh.
Bormann and Goebbels presented stiff-armed Nazi salutes.
From time to time, the soldiers poured more gasoline onto the fire. The blackened bodies crackled and sizzled in the flames.
“I think they’re done,” one of the officers observed dryly.
The soldiers removed the blackened corpses, wrapped them in a tarpaulin, and buried them in a shallow grave.
The Third Reich had fallen to the combined might of the Allied forces.
In the subterranean bunker, the Spear of Destiny rested against the wall. Its head no longer glowed. It had the dull, lackluster appearance of flint.
Fran Newell tossed and turned.
A full moon was high in the star-studded heavens, peering through the tangle of twisted limbs that the mimosa tree outside her bedroom window stretched into the sky.
Fran’s heart beat fast, and she panted for breath. Her arms flailed.
Shadows shifted in her bedroom as the night breeze gently lifted and tossed the mimosa branches. The soft fragrance of the pink powder-puff blossoms wafted through Fran’s open window.
Fran opened her mouth to scream—but, then, she saw him—the white-robed figure stood before her. A dazzling white light emanated from within him; he was its source.
Fran slunk backward, frightened.
She heard his voice. It was gentle, peaceful, full of love. Fear not.
What frightened Fran even more was that she hadn’t seen his lips move. The light
was so bright that she could not see his face clearly; it was like a sun—so brilliant that it hurt her eyes to look at it directly. Somehow, she knew that his lips hadn’t moved—yet he’d spoken to her; she’d heard his voice.
“W-who are you?” she stammered.
I am Alpha and Omega, he said, the Beginning and the End.
Wasn’t that a verse from the Bible? Fran thought. Wasn’t that something that Jesus was supposed to have said? What would Jesus want with an atheist like me?
Your time has not yet come, the voice informed her. You shall live to serve me. Your eyes shall be opened, and you shall see.
Fran frowned. What was that supposed to mean? She wondered. There was nothing wrong with her vision. I see just fine, she thought.
You shall see visions; you shall prophecy in my name.
Okay, Fran thought, this is all too weird. I’m going to wake up now!
Abruptly, the dazzling figure was gone, and Fran felt an enormous pain in her head.
She heard another voice. We have a pulse!
Fran gasped, sitting upright in her bed, the disheveled counterpane in tangled mounds. The moonlight shone through her window. Her teddy bear lay beside her, and she clutched it to her chest. “It was a dream” she told the plush animal, “just a dream.”
It was a dream inspired by a reality, though. Unknown to her best friends, Crystal Fall, Dee Dee Dawkins, and David Lewis, Fran hadn’t merely suffered a concussion during their battle with Dr. Trask and his hypnotized servants in their bid to take control of Edgar Allan Poe High School and its students’ minds. When Randy Sheffield had shoved her headfirst into that bank of lockers, Fran had sustained injuries that had actually killed her—if only for a few moments. At first, she’d attributed her strange dream about the brilliant figure in white to a “near-death experience,” but research showed that, whatever had happened to her, she hadn’t had such an experience, even if she had been clinically dead.
No, her research showed that, other than seeing a shining figure in white, she’d experienced few of the common characteristics associated with a near-death experience. Fran had felt no calmness (she’d been frightened). She had heard no buzzing sound, and she had felt no tingling sensation. There’d been no awareness before the dream that her soul had separated from her body (Fran believed, in fact, that there was no soul). She’d fallen through no dark tunnel. She’d felt no ecstasy. She hadn’t met bewildered spirits. She hadn’t seen a beautiful garden.
She hadn’t watched a filmstrip of her life that highlighted missed opportunities to lend others a hand. She’d met no deceased friends or family members. There’d been no sightings of celestial cities of light.
Yes, she had encountered a Being of Light and, yes, she had been sent back to this world with a mission—but, to her mind, two out of more than a dozen possible characteristics did not constitute a near death experience.
It had been only a dream, induced by the powerful sedatives she’d been administered in the emergency room.
It had been just a dream.
Then, the emergency room team had revived her.
Thereafter, she’d lain in the hospital for a week, recovering.
Except that she hadn’t recovered—at least, not completely.
The dream or vision or whatever she’d had while she’d been clinically dead continued to haunt her.
There was no God.
Jesus had been only a great teacher and a superior moral leader. Certainly, if there were no God, Jesus couldn’t have been the Son of God. That was just a myth.
So how did she explain the figure that had said, I am Alpha and Omega?
Obviously, it had been a hallucination, the effect of chemicals in her brain, or misfiring synapses, or something. There was no reason to think that it was actually Jesus Christ who’d appeared to her in another realm somewhere beyond this world.
Ockcam’s razor, she reminded herself, was the sensible position to take with regard to such a dubious hypothesis as her being visited by God in the flesh: “Never needlessly multiply hypotheses.” The simplest explanation was to be preferred.
There was no need to bring in the supernatural to explain something for which natural causes could account.
Sure, she’d been dead—for a few minutes—and she’d seen a brilliant, shining man in a white robe that had quoted the Bible, but it had been her own mind creating the imagery and the words, just as her mind created dreams during sleep.
Again, Fran frowned. Why should I, an atheist, dream about Jesus Christ? The question was unsettling, and Fran shivered. Perhaps, she thought, she wasn’t as immune to superstition as she’d supposed. Maybe part of her—a deep part beyond logic and emotion—believed despite her disbelief. What was it that Blaise Pascal had said? “The heart has reasons that reason does not know?”
Even if hallucination could explain the figure in white, what about the other visions—those that she’d had while she’d been wide awake—those that had been of future events—those that had come to pass?
She had tried to repress the memory of these visions, had tried to deny them, but she couldn’t.
The little boy who’d fallen from the tree house in his back yard—he had fallen, just as she’d foreseen. It had been in the newspaper. Wasn’t she responsible for his injuries, his paralysis? After all, she had known—or had seen, at least—and she had done nothing to report the impending catastrophe. Now, the boy had lost the use of his legs forever.
A week later, she’d had a vision of the hornets’ nest in the woods near Eureka Creek—and of the girl taking a shortcut home being stung by the hornets—stung and stung and stung. How many times had the newspaper article said? “Over a hundred.” Luckily, the girl had lived but, again, couldn’t Fran have prevented the calamity? Hadn’t the shining, white-robed figure told her as much?
Your eyes shall be opened, and you shall see.
Fran’s denial had resulted in a boy being paralyzed and a girl being stung nearly to death.
That was absurd!
There was no God.
She was sure of it.
God couldn’t exist—not in a world of suffering and pain, not if God was, as Crystal Fall had assured her, omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent. How could a loving God countenance starving babies and famine and pestilence and railroad accidents and tornadoes and disease and insanity and paralyzed boys and hornets stinging girls and teenage girls dying because they’d been shoved by a brainwashed, hypnotized zombie into a bank of high school lockers? If God existed, he’d have to be a sadist, not a loving God.
On the other hand, what if there is a God? she asked herself.
What if Job had been right in his answer? What if, despite evil, pain, and suffering, God is good and all-powerful and has reasons for allowing bad things to happen to good people? To a cat, it may seem evil that its master won’t let it out, but its owner may know that this apparent evil could save the pet from being squashed to death beneath a car’s tires or from being torn apart by a pack of wild dogs. Maybe God, being all-knowing, knows a thing or two that people don’t. Maybe people should trust him, as Job had argued, saying, “The just shall live by faith.”
Fran thought of the latest vision she’d had. The vision had involved Crystal’s discovery of a dead body in the park they called “The Swamp.”
What if that happened, too?
“It won’t,” she told her teddy bear. “There is no God.”
She recalled her visions of the paralyzed boy and the bee-stung girl.
Coincidence, Fran decided.
The high, full moon seemed to grin at her from its vantage point among the stars.
Strangely enough, UFO’s and extraterrestrial creatures, often called aliens, have a history. In fiction (mostly science fiction, but some horror fiction as well), aliens have made appearances, usually as the enemy of humanity (but sometimes as its friend and would-be guru) as early as the seventeenth century. The idea that the moon might be inhabited was introduced in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) when an angel implies that the lunar satellite may be inhabited by lunatics similar to Adam and Eve, and Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle made a case for alien civilizations in his Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686). Aliens appear in H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898) as villains who meet their match in their encounter with Earth’s lowly bacteria. The recent discovery of rather large quantities of water on Mars makes the idea of life’s reality or possibility on other planets more feasible to many scientists than it seemed before this discovery.
Like Wells and other nineteenth-century novelists, many contemporary writers have featured aliens as characters in their novels. Stephen King (Dreamcatcher, The Tommyknockers) and Dean Koontz (The Taking) are examples. However, Hollywood loves aliens even more than novelists, and many films, both of the science fiction and the horror variety, have featured extraterrestrials.
This post is concerned not so much with the appearance of extraterrestrials in science fiction and horror stories but with the means by which such creatures seek to accomplish their goals or missions.
Form is limited by what nature exhibits. Therefore, as one might suspect, most aliens are either bipedal or humanoid in form, if not function, because it is difficult to imagine a creature that is otherwise, unless a writer takes (as some have done) one of our four-legged animal friends, one of our six-legged insect friends, or one of our eight-legged arachnid friends as his or her model. A few writers have looked to supernatural entities for their inspiration. Star Trek: The Next Generation’s allasomorph, in its true form, for instance, resembles nothing so much as it does a ghost. Although no such inspiration has been confirmed, it seems that George Lucas’ muse for his many extraterrestrial creatures could have been the demons with which Hieronymus Bosch populated the canvases of his Garden of Earthly Delights triptych.
One of the more interesting aliens is The Blob, a gelatinous mass similar to an ameba that has been magnified several millions of times. Although a giant jelly-like mass may seem silly, it seems less so if one imagines what it would be like to be engulfed by such a blob. One would no doubt twist and thrash about, kicking (if not screaming), panicked and terrified, as he or she began to suffocate within the gelatinous mass. If mere suffocation is not enough to frighten and annoy the victim, one is not to worry: the creature also digests its prey, dissolving him or her into a nutritious protein stew. Meanwhile, the terrified face of the struggling victim is visible through the blob’s membranous, gelatinous form.
King’s Dreamcatcher aliens resemble legless red weasels. Spawned by the ingestion of an infectious mold called a byrus, the aliens, known as byrum, incubate within their hosts’ abdomens and exit through their rectums. The byrum is linked telepathically with the byrus, with which the alien creatures maintain a symbiotic relationship that is hazardous to human health. King said that his aliens symbolize cancer, which is the title that he’d originally given his work in progress before deciding upon Dreamcatchers instead.
The aliens of King’s Tommyknockers are more human in their appearance, although with a bit of crab and dog thrown in, for good measure. Unusually tall, they have claws instead of feet and canine countenances. Gray of skin, they are milky-eyed and have apparently foregone sex and gender in favor of sexless androgyny. They have also given up spoken and written language, it seems, preferring to communicate telepathically. (In King’s novels, the ability to use telepathy is one of the necessary attributes, it seems, for aliens.) In other ways, however, the aliens are severely limited, if not actually mentally handicapped. Unable to reproduce sexually, the aliens resort to transforming humans into semblances of themselves in an apparent attempt (King is never too clear on this point) at colonizing the Earth. Many critics see these aliens as representing the effects of substance abuse, from which King was allegedly suffering at the time that he wrote this novel.
Koontz’s aliens are so much like spaceships that the human characters mistake the extraterrestrials for such. (In fact, though, the creatures aren’t aliens at all, as it turns out; they’re fallen angels, led by Satan). When they pass overhead, one feels as if he or she is mentally radiated, as it were, and known, completely and instantly. To facilitate their conquest of the Earth, an advance team of the extraterrestrials is undertaking a reverse-terraforming of the planet to create an atmosphere that is hazardous to humans but agreeable to the extraterrestrials. It is only toward the end of the novel that the protagonist learns that the aliens are actually an army of demons who have come to destroy the planet. In this novel, Koontz inverts the old idea that the demons of myth and legend were inspired by aliens who visited the Earth in days long past, making the belief in aliens a consequence of the actual existence of demons. This plot ploy allows Koontz’s novel an unusual theological significance that King matches in his own demon-haunted novel Desperation.
Form is one of the limits that nature imposes upon writers who want to write about alien creatures, for people, writers included, are limited by nature as to what they can know and, consequently, about what they can write. Nature, although varied, is finite, and, sooner or later, minerals, plants, insects, and animals are going to run out of characteristics and abilities that can be imposed, in more or less disguised fashion, upon supposedly extraterrestrial creatures. This is a given.
Therefore, writers are well advised, if they want their monster to be an alien, to take a leaf from King and Koontz and give them a non-human (and possibly an inhuman) means of carrying out their (more or less human) motives for visiting Earth to begin with and for whatever mission or endeavor they undertake after they get here. Despite some problems with his plots, King’s Dreamcatcher and Tommyknockers do impart more-or-less alien means of accomplishing his extraterrestrials’ more-or-less human purposes, although he uses a biological concept (symbiosis), a paranormal cliché (telepathy), and a centuries-old political purpose (colonization) to do so: his aliens are here to invade the Earth (Dreamcatcher) and to colonize our planet (The Tommyknockers); the way they go about doing so--spreading a disease in which they are symbiots and transforming humans into themselves with a gas--are more-or- less alien methods. Koontz’s motive for his aliens’ presence is even more intriguing: they are merely wearing disguises; the aliens are actually demons who wear their extraterrestrial appearances as fleshly costumes. Affecting a disguise isn’t all that unusual, especially for humans, but the means by which the demons in his novel accomplish their purpose--taking upon themselves an extraterrestrial likeness--is beyond the scope of anything that human beings can accomplish--at least this side of hell.
If a writer can’t get past the restrictions of form in creating aliens, he or she should at least try to imagine a way to bypass function, giving his or her aliens a non-human method by which to accomplish their purposes. As in so many other matters relating to horror fiction, King and Koontz have shown the way by which writers can do so.
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