The Eyes of Darkness

the plateau, around the burning wreckage of the helicopter, Danny said, "They were bad people. It's all right, Mom. They were real bad people."
    To everything there is a season, Tina reminded herself. A time to kill and a time to heal.
    She held Danny close, and she stared into his dark eyes, and she wasn't able to comfort herself with those words from the Bible. Danny's eyes held too much pain, too much knowledge. He was still her sweet boy—yet he was changed. She thought about the future. She wondered what lay ahead for them.
     

AFTERWORD 
     
     
    The Eyes of Darkness is one of five novels that I wrote under the pen name "Leigh Nichols," which I no longer use. Although it was the second of the five, it is the fifth and final in the series to be reissued in paperback under my real name. The previous four were The Servants of Twilight, Shadowfires, The House of Thunder, and The Key to Midnight. Demand from my readers made it possible for these books to be republished, and I'm grateful to all of you for your interest.
    As you know if you have read the afterwords in The Funhouse and The Key to Midnight, I like to amuse myself by revealing the tragic deaths of the various pen names I used early in my career. Somewhat to my embarrassment, I must admit that I've not always been truthful with you in these matters. Previously, I told you that Leigh Nichols drank too much champagne one evening on a Caribbean cruise ship and was decapitated in a freak limbo accident. I was touched by your sympathy cards and accounts of the memorial services you held, but now that Berkley Books has brought you this fifth and final of the Nichols novels, I must confess that I was lying in order not to have to reveal Nichols's true—and more disturbing—fate. One bleak and wintry night Leigh Nichols was abducted by extraterrestrials, taken on a tour of our solar system, introduced to the alien Nest Queen, and forced to undergo a series of horrifying surgeries. Though eventually returned to Earth, the author was too traumatized to continue a career as a novelist—but finally built a new life as the current dictator of Iraq.
    The Eyes of Darkness was one of my early attempts to write a cross-genre novel mixing action, suspense, romance, and a touch of the paranormal. While it doesn't have the intensity, depth of characterization, complexity of theme, or pace of later novels such as Watchers and Mr. Murder, and while it doesn't go for your throat as fearsomely as a book like Intensity, readers who have found it under the Nichols name in used-book stores have expressed favorable opinions of it. I suppose they like it because the device of the lost child—and the dedicated mother who will do anything to find out what has happened to her little boy—strikes a primal chord in all of us.
    As I revised the book for this new edition, I resisted the urge to transform the story entirely into a novel of the type that I would write today. I updated cultural and political references, polished away a few of the more egregious stylistic inadequacies, and trimmed excess wordage here and there. I enjoyed revisiting Eyes, which remains a basically simple tale that relies largely on plot and on the strangeness of the premise to engage the reader. I hope you were engaged, and that you have enjoyed taking this five-book voyage through the career of Leigh Nichols. If you're ever in Iraq, the surgically altered author will probably be happy to sign copies of these books for you—or will denounce you as an infidel and have you thrown into a prison cell as vile as any sewer. Inquire at your own risk.