The Key to Midnight

van in which they'd been brought unconscious from the hotel. Their luggage was still in the back.
        Exactly half an hour after Peterson left, they drove away from Rotenhausen's clinic. The windshield wipers thumped metronomically, as if counting cadence for the dead; snow caked on the blades and turned to ice.
        'We can't drive through these mountains tonight,' Joanna said. 'The roads won't be passable. Where will we go?'
        'To the depot,' he said. 'Maybe there's another train out.'
        To where?'
        'Anywhere.'
        'Whose life will we live?'
        'Our own,' he said without hesitation. 'No disguises. No running. In our own ways, we've been running for a long, long time. Neither of us can do that any more.'
        'I know. I just meant - your life in Chicago or mine in Kyoto?'
        'Kyoto,' he said. 'You can't be asked to start over yet again. And there's nothing for me in Chicago if you're not there. Besides, I really do like big-band music. It's not a taste they programmed into me. And on a winter night, I like the way that snow falls like powdered starlight on the Gion. I like the pure notes of temple bells and oiled-paper lanterns that make shadows dance in a breeze.'
        Within the hour, they were sitting in a nearly empty passenger car, holding hands, as the last train out clattered toward midnight and then, finally, beyond.

----

    AFTERWORD
        
         The Key to Midnight was the first novel that I wrote under the pen name Leigh Nichols, which I now no longer use. The other Nichols novels included Shadowfires, The Servants of Twilight, and The House of Thunder, which have previously been put under my real name, and one other that will be reissued in paperback in 1996.
        Like all my pen names, Leigh met a tragic end. (Please see the Afterword to The Funhouse for the story of the death of 'Owen West,' who also wrote The Mask.) I used to tell people that while taking a tour for research purposes, Leigh had been killed in an explosion at a jalapeno-processing plant. Later, I insisted that Leigh died in a catastrophic rickshaw pile-up in Hong Kong. The truth, of course, is uglier. After drinking too much champagne one evening on a Caribbean cruise ship, Leigh Nichols was decapitated in a freak limbo accident.
        This first Nichols book was meant to be my stab at an action-suspense-romance novel with a background of international intrigue, because I like to read stories of that kind when they are well done. Before giving Berkley Books the go-ahead to reprint Key, I reread it. Although many readers who discovered this novel through the years wrote to say that they enjoyed it, I decided that I hadn't succeeded with the original version as well as I'd thought at the time. Furthermore, it needed to be updated to reflect world events since its initial publication.
        I am my own worst critic and a full-blown obsessive-compulsive, which is a bad combination in a line of work that requires me to meet deadlines. I swore that I would only lightly revise Key, but as is often the case, I was lying to myself. After all these years, one might think that I would no longer trust myself, but I continue to be a sucker for my own lies. I have this wide-eyed, puppy-dog look that I give myself in the mirror, when I'm lying, and I'm always fooled by it. I could sell myself the Brooklyn Bridge. In fact, I have. And I've no idea what I did with the money that I swindled from myself. I hope I had fun with it. Anyway, by the time I'd finished revising The Key to Midnight, I'd cut 30,000 words from it, added about 5,000 new words, and reworked it nearly line by line.
        Nevertheless, I resisted the demonic urge to write an entirely new version of the story - even though the satan-ically induced desire to do so was so strong that at one point my head was spinning around 360 degrees on my shoulders. In spite of all these changes, Key is still largely the novel that it was on first publication. The plot and the characters have not been changed materially, and I have not altered the style in which it was written, but I believe and hope that the story is much more smoothly told and more fun to read than it was in its previous incarnation.
        None of my other books is in the genre or the style of The Key to Midnight, but lurking in these pages is the Dean Koontz you know. I can't repress a love of twist-and-turn storytelling, and a certain characteristic