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Strange Highways

Strange Highways

Titel: Strange Highways Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Dean Koontz
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of the hearth. Tommy sat in an armchair, put his crutches nearby, propped his castbound leg on a footstool, and opened his adventure novel. Meg programmed the compact-disc player with some easy-listening music and settled into her own chair with a new novel by Mary Higgins Clark.
     The wind sounded cold and sharp, but the living room was cozy. In half an hour Meg was involved in the novel when, in a lull between songs, she heard a hard snap! from the kitchen.
     Doofus lifted his head.
     Tommy's eyes met Meg's.
     Then a second sound: Snap!
     "Two," the boy said. "We caught two at the same time!"
     Meg put her book aside and armed herself with an iron poker from the fireplace in case the prey needed to be struck to finish them off. She hated this part of rat catching.
     She went to the kitchen, switched on the lights, and looked first in the cabinet beneath the sink. In the dish, the poisoned food was almost gone. The beef was gone from the big trap too; the steel bar had been sprung, but no rat had been caught.
     Nevertheless, the trap wasn't empty. Caught under the bar was a six-inch-long stick of wood, as if it had been used to spring the trap so the bait could be taken safely.
     No. That was ridiculous.
     Meg took the trap from the cupboard to have a closer look. The stick was stained dark on one side, natural on the other: a strip of plywood. Like the plywood backing in all the cabinets, through which the rat had chewed to get at the Saltines.
     A shiver shook her, but she remained reluctant to consider the frightening possibility that had given rise to her tremors.
     In the cupboard by the refrigerator, the poisoned bait had been taken from the other dish. The second trap had been sprung too. With another stick of plywood. The bait had been stolen.
     What rat was smart enough ... ?
     She rose from her knees and eased open the middle doors of the cabinet. The canned goods, the packages of Jell-O, the boxes of raisins, and the boxes of cereal looked undisturbed at first.
     Then she noticed the brown, pea-size pellet on the shelf in front of an open box of All-Bran: a piece of warfarin bait. But she had not put any bait on the shelf with the cereal; all of it had been in the dish below or under the kitchen sink. So a rat had carried a piece of it onto the higher shelf.
     If she hadn't been alerted by the pellet, she might not have noticed the scratch marks and small punctures on the package of All-Bran. She stared at the box for a long time before she took it off the shelf and carried it to the sink.
     She put the poker on the counter and, with trembling hands, opened the cereal box. She poured some into the sink. Mixed in with the All-Bran were scores of poison pellets. She emptied the entire box into the sink. All the missing bait from both plastic dishes had been transferred to the cereal.
     Her heart was racing, pounding so hard that she could feel the throb of her own pulse in her temples.
      What the hell is going on here?
     Something screeched behind her. A strange, angry sound.
     She turned and saw the rat. A hideous white rat.
     It was on the shelf where the All-Bran had been, standing on its, hind quarters. The shelf was fifteen inches high, and the rat was not entirely erect because it was about eighteen inches long, six inches longer than an average rat, exclusive of its tail. But its size wasn't what iced her blood. The scary thing was its head: twice the size of an ordinary rat's head, as big as a baseball, out of proportion to its body - and oddly shaped, bulging toward the top of the skull, eyes and nose and mouth squeezed in the lower half.
     It stared at her and made clawing motions with its upraised forepaws. It bared its teeth and hissed - actually hissed as though it were a cat - then shrieked again, and there was such hostility in its shrill cry and in its demeanor that she snatched up the fireplace poker again.
     Though its eyes were beady and red like any rat's, there was a difference about them that she could not immediately identify. The way it stared at her so boldly was intimidating. She looked at its enlarged skull - the bigger the skull, the bigger the brain - and suddenly realized that its scarlet eyes revealed an unthinkably high, unratlike degree of intelligence.
     It shrieked again,

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