Nightlife

“If thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”
—Nietzsche

“Abyss: The primeval chaos. The bottomless pit; hell. An unfathomable or immeasurable depth or void.”

—The American Heritage Dictionary

You’re holding in your hands one of the first in a new line of books of dark fiction, called Abyss. Abyss is horror unlike anything you’ve ever read before. It’s not about haunted houses or evil children or ancient Indian burial grounds. We’ve all read those books, and we all know their plots by heart.

Abyss is for the seeker of truth, no matter how disturbing or twisted it may be. It’s about people, and the darkness we all carry within us. Abyss is the new horror from the dark frontier. And in that place, where we come face-to-face with terror, what we find is ourselves. The darkness illuminates us, revealing our flaws, our secret fears, our desires and ambitions, longing to break free. And we never see ourselves or our world the same way again.

“HIS VOICE IS STRAIGHTFORWARD AND DOWN-TO-EARTH, HIS STORIES ARE ABOUT REAL PEOPLE, HIS WRITING IS HONEST ... HIS MANY READERS CAN EXPECT TO HEAR MUCH MORE FROM HIM IN THE FUTURE.”

—The Horror Show
magazine

“YOU’LL BE PLENTY ABSORBED . . . Hodge once again plays by the rules—but with a frightening catch. His characters breathe and his prose is chilling and crisp.”

—West Coast Review of Books

“FINE DEGREES OF NUANCE AND SHADING . . . Hodge’s knack is in invoking sympathy for his characters. He draws on a talented mix of humor and suspense to entertain. It makes for compelling style. His writing races ahead . . . carrying the reader along.”

—Deathrealm
magazine

“HODGE KEEPS THE READER’S INTEREST. ... He writes well, he is adept at both atmosphere and action, and his sense of story is good.”

—Fangoria

“NEVER PREDICTABLE, NEVER BORING, AND NOT AT ALL EASY TO PUT DOWN . . . a fresh style that makes for a very enjoyable and often surprising reading.”

—New Blood
magazine

“A VERY TALENTED WRITER. His scenes blaze with energy and life, and his characters are very real.”

—Robert R. McCammon, author of
Swan Song
and
Stinger

“A roller coaster of a plot. Brian Hodge just keeps getting better with every new novel he produces.
Nightlife
is his best yet, and that’s saying something.”

—William Relling, Jr. author,
The Infinite Man

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Published by Dell Publishing a division of

Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

666 Fifth Avenue

New York, New York 10103

Copyright © 1991 by Brian Hodge

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.

The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

ISBN: 0-440-20754-1

Printed in the United States of America

Published simultaneously in Canada;

March 1991

10 987654321

OPM

For Clark Perry,

my Siamese twin

joined at the id;

and

for Dolly Nickel,

who showed me stars

and gave me ladders

Yes, it’s time to hack down a few extra trees to provide a well-deserved page of written applause to deserving souls.

Thanks go to Jeff Hamilton, R.N. C.E.N., Brad Strickland, and Randy Smith, for providing useful information on, respectively, the effects of hallucinogens, the effects of poisons, and every piranha’s Achilles heel. Topics that make life more interesting, to be sure. Also, thanks to my editor, Jeanne Cavelos, for the usual faith and advice and new, improved suggestions.

Thanks to Karla Sanner and Kristin Leister of the Orlando Convention Bureau for pulling a few strings (You’re still missed up north, Karla. Especially happy hours on Thursdays!), and to Glenda Gilmore’s office at Busch Gardens, for the freebies.

And extraspecial thanks to Clark, Donna, Mike, Tim, Laura, and everybody else who makes Tampa what it is: dangerous for normal people to visit.

The jungle grew shadows, and the shadows grew eyes.

Across the Western Hemisphere, dawn was coming simultaneously to tens of thousands of locations. Millions of souls arising for their days, stumbling sleepily for radios and coffee and morning editions—oblivious to anything going on in the world not covered by Bryant Gumbel and the rest of the mass-media pack.

Equally oblivious to the denizens of high-tech civilization were those who rose with the dawn in the equatorial jungles of southern Venezuela. They were the Yanomamö. They were the Fierce People.

Angus Finnegan watched as the brown-skinned warriors crept near to the low stockade wall surrounding the village of Iyakei-teri. The raiding party, numbering just over twenty, moved like predatory cats, jaguars silently stalking prey. They carried bows made of palm wood, so hard it deflected nails, that were as long as the Yanomamö were tall. The arrows alone were six feet long, built for interchangeable tips. This morning war tips were in place—bamboo lanceolate coated with sticky brown curare.

Angus made a curious sight among the raiding party. Better than a full head taller than the tribe’s tallest man, he stood a hulking six foot five. His long, unkempt hair and beard had gone white several years before, giving him a look of some Old Testament prophet sun-blasted toward madness in an unforgiving desert. He wore dirty khakis instead of robes, but the allusion wasn’t far off. And at sixty years old, he looked to have the power of a man twenty years younger.

Kneeling beside a thicket of brush and ferns, Angus scanned through the gloom toward the village. Weak shafts of sunlight cut through at a slant, and the air was alive with the calls of birds. Macaws, parrots, others. Beneath the constant canopy of trees, the jungle was never very bright, and during the chill of dawn, visibility was murky at best.