by Dean Koontz
Kelsko was in his early fifties, about five-nine, stocky, forty pounds overweight. He wore a khaki uniform but carried no revolver. Under brush-cut hair the shade of gunmetal, he had a square, hard, rough-looking face. His bushy eyebrows met over eyes bracketed by thick bone, and his mouth was a mean slash.
The goblin within Kelsko was no visual treat, either. I have never seen one of the beasts that was less than hideous, although some are slightly less hideous than others. Some have eyes not quite so fierce. Some have teeth less sharp than others. Some have faces a degree less predatory than their miscreant brethren. (To me this slight variety in the appearances of the goblins seemed to prove they were real and not just phantoms of a diseased mind; for if I had been imagining them, if they were only figments of a madman’s primal fear, they would all look alike. Would they not?) The demonic creature in Kelsko had red eyes that not only burned with hatred but were the very molten essence of hatred, more penetrating than those of any goblin I had encountered prior to this. The beetle-green skin around its eyes was webbed with cracks and thickened with what might have been scar tissue. The obscene fleshiness of its quivering pig-snout was made even more repellent by the addition of wattled skin around its nostrils, pale wrinkled lobes that fluttered (and glistened wetly) when it drew or expelled breath and that might have been the result of extreme age. Indeed the psychic emanations pouring forth from this monster gave an impression of incredibly ancient evil, an evil of such antiquity that by comparison it made the pyramids seem modern; it was a poisonous stew of malevolent emotions and wicked intentions, cooked at high heat for ages, until any possibility of a charitable or innocent thought had been boiled away long ago.
Jelly played the role of the ingratiating patch with enthusiasm and enormous skill, and Lisle Kelsko pretended to be nothing more than a hopelessly hard-nosed, hard-assed, narrow-minded, amoral, authoritarian, coal-country cop. Jelly was convincing, but the thing that impersonated Kelsko deserved an Oscar. At times its performance was so perfect that even to my eyes its human glaze became opaque, the goblin fading until it was just an amorphous shadow within the human flesh, forcing me to strain to bring it back into focus.
From my point of view, our situation became even more intolerable when, a minute after we entered Kelsko’s office, a uniformed officer came in behind us and closed the door. He, too, was a goblin. This man-shell was about thirty, tall, lean, with thick brown hair combed straight back from a good-looking, Italian face. The goblin at the core was frightening but noticeably less repulsive than the beast in Kelsko.
When the door closed behind us with a thump, I jumped. From his chair, out of which he had not deigned to rise upon our entry and from which he dispensed only steely-eyed glares and flat unfriendly responses to Jelly’s friendly patter, Chief Lisle Kelsko flicked a glance at me. My expression must have been odd, for Luke Bendingo gave me an odd one of his own, then winked to indicate everything was copacetic. When the young cop went to a corner and stood with his arms crossed on his chest, where I could see him, I relaxed a bit, though not much.
I had never before been in a room with two goblins at the same time, let alone two goblins posing as cops and one carrying a loaded sidearm. I wanted to lunge at them; I wanted to pound their hateful faces; I wanted to run; I wanted to pull the knife from my boot and plant it in Kelsko’s throat; I wanted to scream; I wanted to puke; I wanted to grab the young cop’s revolver and blow his head off, pump a few shots into Kelsko’s chest as well. But all I could do was stand there beside Luke, keep the fear out of my eyes and off my face, and strive to appear intimidating.
The meeting lasted less than ten minutes and was not a fraction as bad as Jelly had led me to believe it would be. Kelsko did not taunt or humiliate or challenge us as much as I had been told he would. He was not as demanding, sarcastic, rude, foulmouthed, quarrelsome, or threatening as the Kelsko in Jelly’s colorful stories. He was icy, yes, arrogant, yes, and filled with unconcealed loathing for us. No doubt about that. He was supercharged with violence, like a high-tension power line, and if we cut through his insulation, either by insulting him or talking back or giving the slightest indication that we thought ourselves superior to him, he would deliver a mega-volt assault that we would never forget. But we remained docile and subservient and eager to please, and he restrained himself. Jelly put the envelope of money on the desk and passed along booklets of free tickets, all the while telling jokes and inquiring after the chief’s family, and in short order we did what we had come to do, and we were dismissed.
We returned to the third-floor corridor, went to the rear stairs again, climbed to the fourth floor, which was deserted now that the lunch hour was well begun, and went from one dreary hall to another to another, until we had reached the wing where the mayor had his office. As we walked, our footsteps clicking on the dark vinyl tiles, Jelly looked increasingly worried.
At one point, relieved to be out of the goblins’ company and remembering what Jelly had told me in the car, I said, “Well, that wasn’t so bad.”
“Yeah. That’s what worries me,” Jelly said.
“Me t-t-too,” Luke said.
I said, “What do you mean?”
“It was too damned easy,” Jelly said. “Ain’t never been a time since I knew him that Kelsko was that cooperative. Something’s wrong.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“I wish I knew,” Jelly said.
“S-s-something’s up.”
“Something,” Jelly agreed.
The mayor’s office was not as plain as that of the chief of police. The elegant desk was mahogany, and the other pieces of tasteful and expensive furniture—in the English style of a first-rate men’s club, upholstered in hunter’s-green leather—stood on plush gold carpeting. The walls were festooned with civic awards and photographs of His Honor involved in all manner of charitable activities.
Albert Spectorsky, elected occupant of the office, was a tall, florid man, conservatively dressed in a blue suit and white shirt and blue tie, with features formed by indulgence. A fondness for rich food was visible in the moon-round shape of his face and in the plentitude of chins below his ripe mouth. A taste for fine whiskey was evident in the broken blood vessels that gave his cheeks and bulbous nose a ruddy glow. And there was, in everything about him, an undefinable but unmistakable air of promiscuity, sexual perversion, and whore-chasing lust. What made him electable was a marvelously warm laugh, an appealing manner, and an ability to concentrate so intently and sympathetically on what you were saying that he could make you feel as if you were the most important person in the world, at least as far as he was concerned. He was a joke-teller, a back-slapper, a hail-fellow-well-met. And it was a sham. Because what he really was, beneath it all, was a goblin.
Mayor Spectorsky did not ignore Luke and me, the way Kelsko had done. He even offered us his hand.
I shook it.
I touched him, and somehow I maintained control of myself, which was not easy, because touching him was worse than touching any of the four goblins that I had killed over the past four months. Touching him was the way I would imagine it would be if you came face-to-face with Satan and were required to shake his hand; like an outpouring of bile, evil surged from him, gushing into me at the point of contact made by our clasped hands, contaminating me, sickening me; a lightning bolt of unrelenting hatred and a fierce rage exploded from him as well, blasted through me, and kicked my pulse rate to at least a hundred and fifty.
“Glad to see ya,” he said, smiling broadly. “Glad to see ya. We always look forward to the coming of the carnival!”
This goblin’s performance was every bit the equal of Chief Lisle Kelsko’s superb portrayal of humankind, and like Kelsko, this one was an especially repellent example of its species, snaggletoothed and withered and wart-covered and pockmarked and nearly left pustulant by the passage of uncountable years. Its radiant crimson eyes seemed to have taken their color from oceans of human blood that it alone had caused to be sp
illed, and from uncharted depths of red-hot human agony that it alone had inflicted upon our abused race.
Jelly and Luke felt a little better after our meeting with Mayor Spectorsky because he was, they said, the same as always.
But I felt worse.
Jelly had been right when he had said that they were up to something.
A deep, thawless chill had reached into every part of me. Ice hardened in my bones.
Something was wrong.
Very wrong.
God help us.
The Yontsdown County Courthouse was across the street from the city municipal building. In the offices adjacent to the courtroom, various county officials conducted their business. In one of these suites of rooms, the president of the county council, Mary Vanaletto, was waiting for us.
She was a goblin too.
Jelly treated her differently from the way he had treated Kelsko and Spectorsky, not because he sensed that she was a goblin or anything more—or less—than human, but because she was a woman, and attractive as well. She appeared to be about forty, a slim brunette with big eyes and a sensuous mouth, and when Jelly poured on the charm, she reacted so well—blushing, flirting, giggling, eating up the compliments he paid her—that he began to get sincere about it. He clearly thought he was making one hell of an impression on her, but I could see that she was putting on a performance far superior to his. Within the clever human disguise the goblin—not nearly as ancient and decadent as Kelsko and Spectorsky—desired nothing more intensely than to kill Jelly, kill all of us. As far as I could tell, that was what every goblin wanted—the pleasure of slaughtering human beings, one after the other, though not in an unrelieved frenzy, not in one long bloodbath; they wanted to parcel out the slaughter, kill us one at a time so they could savor the blood and misery. Mary Vanaletto had that same sadistic need, and as I watched Jelly hold her hand and pat her shoulder and generally make nice with her, I required all my self-restraint to keep from tearing him away from her and yelling, “Run!”
There was something else about Mary Vanaletto, a factor other than her true goblin nature, that made my skin break out in gooseflesh. It was something I had never encountered before and, even in my bleakest nightmares, had not imagined. Through the transparent human glaze I saw not one goblin but four: a full-size creature of the sort to which I was accustomed and three small beasts with closed eyes and half-formed features. The three seemed to exist within the large goblin that was pretending to be Mary Vanaletto—specifically, within its abdomen—and they were curled motionlessly in recognizably fetal positions. This frightful, gruesome, abominable monstrosity was pregnant.
It had never occurred to me that the goblins could breed. The very fact of their existence was enough to deal with. The prospect of generations of goblins yet unborn, destined to ride herd on us human cattle, was unthinkable. Instead I thought of them as risen from Hell or descended from another world, their numbers on earth limited to whatever they had begun with; in my mind they were all most mysterious and immaculate (though sinister) conceptions.
Not anymore.
As Jelly teased and entertained Mary Vanaletto, as Luke grinningly followed their witticisms from his perch on the chair beside mine, I rebelled at the sickening mental image of a dog-mouthed goblin ramming its vilely deformed penis into the cold and mutant vagina of a red-eyed and pigsnouted bitch, both of them panting and slobbering and grunting, wart-covered tongues lolling, their grotesque bodies convulsed in ecstasy. But as soon as I managed to push that unbearable image out of my mind, a worse picture came to me: newborn goblins, small, the color of grubs, smooth and shiny and moist, mad red eyes glimmering, with sharp little claws and pointed teeth not yet grown into wicked fangs, three of them, slithering and pushing and squirming out of their mother’s stinking womb.
No.
Oh, Jesus, please, no, if I did not put such a thought out of my mind at once, I would reach for the knife in my boot and destroy this Yontsdown County councilwoman in full view of Jelly and Luke, and then none of us would leave this town alive.
Somehow I endured.
Somehow I got away from that office with my sanity intact and my knife still in my boot.
On our way out of the county building, we passed through the echo-filled foyer, with its marble floor and huge mullioned windows and arched ceiling, off which the main courtroom opened. On impulse I stepped to the massive, brass-handled oak doors, opened one of them a crack, and peered inside. The current case had reached the stage of concluding arguments, so they had not yet recessed for lunch. The judge was a goblin. The prosecuting attorney was a goblin. The two uniformed guards and the court stenographer were fully human, but three members of the jury were goblins.
Jelly said, “What’re you doing, Slim?”
Further shaken by what I had seen in the courtroom, I let the door ease shut, and I rejoined Jelly and Luke. “Nothing. Just curious.”
Outside, at the corner, we recrossed the street, and I studied the other pedestrians and the drivers of the vehicles halted by the traffic light. Out of about forty people on that dingy thoroughfare, I saw two goblins, which was twenty times the usual ratio.
We were finished making payoffs, so we headed past the municipal building to the parking lot behind it. When we were twenty feet from the yellow Cadillac, I said, “Just a minute. I got to take a look at something.” I turned and strode back the way we had come.
Jelly called after me. “Where you going?”
“Just a minute,” I said, breaking into a run.
Heart hammering, lungs expanding and contracting with all the flexibility of cast iron, I went past the side of the municipal building, around to the front, up a set of granite steps, through glass doors, into a lobby less grand than the one at the courthouse. Various agencies of the city government had their public offices on the first floor, and police headquarters was to the left. I pushed through a set of walnut-framed, frosted-glass doors, into an antechamber encircled by a wooden railing.
The on-duty desk sergeant worked on a platform two feet higher than the rest of the floor. He was a goblin.
A ballpoint pen in one hand, he raised his eyes from a file on which he had been working, looked down at me, and said, “Can I help you?”
Beyond him was a large open area that held a dozen desks, a score of tall filing cabinets, a photocopier, and other office equipment. A teletype chattered in one corner. Of the eight clerical workers, three were goblins. Of the four men who worked apart from the clerks and appeared to be plainclothes detectives, two were goblins. Three uniformed officers were present at the moment, and all were goblins.
In Yontsdown the goblins not only walked among the ordinary citizens, preying upon them at random. Here, the war between our species was well organized—at least on the goblins’ side. Here, the subversive masqueraders made the laws and enforced them, and pity the poor bastard who was guilty of even the slightest infraction.
“What was it you wanted?” the desk sergeant asked.
“Uh . . . I’m looking for the City Department of Health.”
“Across the hall,” he said impatiently.
“Yeah,” I said, pretending befuddlement. “This must be the police station.”
“It’s sure no ballet school,” he said.
I left, conscious of his crimson eyes burning into my back, and I returned to the yellow Cadillac, where Jelly Jordan and Luke Bendingo were waiting, curious and unaware.
“What’re you up to? Jelly asked.
“Wanted to have a closer look at the front entrance to this building here.”
“Why?”
“I’m a nut about architecture.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah.”
“Since when?”
“Since I was a kid.”
“You’re still a kid.”
“And you’re not, but you’re a nut about toys, which is a whole lot stranger than being a nut about architecture.”
He stared at me a momen
t, then smiled and shrugged. “Guess you’re right. But toys are more fun.”
As we got in the car I said, “Oh, I don’t know. Architecture can be fascinating. And this town’s full of terrific examples of Gothic and medieval style.”
“Medieval?” Jelly said as Luke started the engine. “You mean like the Dark Ages?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you’re right about that. This burg is straight from the Dark Ages, sure enough.”
On our way out of town, we approached the burned-out elementary school again, where seven children had died the past April. The first time we had passed the building, I had received precognitive vibrations of more tragedy to come. Now, as I stared at the blasted windows and soot-smeared walls, and as we drew relentlessly nearer, a wave of clairvoyant impressions flowed off those fire-scorched bricks and swept toward me. To my sixth sense it was a wave every bit as real as an onrushing wall of water, with a weight and force to be reckoned with, a churning mass of possibilities and probabilities and unthinkable tragedies. Such an extraordinary amount of human suffering and anguish was associated with this structure that it was not merely wrapped in an ominous aura but was afloat in a sea of death-energy. The wave was coming with freight-train speed and power, like one of those giant combers rushing toward the beach in every film you have ever seen of Hawaii, but black and ominous, unlike anything I had encountered before, and I was suddenly terrified of it. There was a fine spray of psychic energy flung out in advance of the wave itself, and as these invisible droplets spattered across my receptive mind I “heard” children screaming in pain and terror . . . fire roaring and hissing and making a snick-snap-gabble-crackle sound like sadistic laughter . . . alarm bells clanging . . . a wall collapsing with a thunderous crash . . . shouting . . . distant sirens. . . . I “saw” unspeakable horrors: an apocalyptic conflagration . . . a teacher with her hair aflame . . . children stumbling blindly through smothering smoke . . . other children desperately and futilely taking refuge beneath schoolroom desks as smoldering slabs of the ceiling slammed down on them. . . . Some of what I was hearing and seeing was from the fire that had already been, the April pyre, but some images were from a fire not yet lit, sights and sounds of a nightmare that lay in the future, and in both cases I perceived that the school’s abrupt combustion was neither accidental nor caused by human error nor attributable to machine failure, but was the work of goblins. I was beginning to feel the children’s pain, the searing heat, and beginning to experience their terror. The psychic wave bore down on me, towering higher . . . higher, growing darker, a black tsunami so powerful that it surely would crush me, so cold that it would leech all the warmth of life from my flesh. I closed my eyes and refused to look at the half-ruined school as we drew nearer it, and I tried desperately to build the mental equivalent of a lead shield around my sixth sense, to shut out the unwanted clairvoyant radiations that, instead of water, composed the oncoming destructive wave. To turn my mind away from the school, I thought of my mother and sisters, thought of Oregon, the Siskiyous . . . thought of Rya Raines’s exquisitely sculpted face and sun-spangled hair. Memories and fantasies of Rya were what effectively armored me against the onslaught of the psychic tsunami, which now hit me, battered me, and washed through me without breaking me to pieces or carrying me away.
I waited half a minute, until I felt nothing paranormal whatsoever, then opened my eyes. The school was behind us. We were approaching the old iron bridge, which looked as if it were constructed from fossilized black bones.
Because Jelly was in the backseat again, and because Luke was paying strict attention to his driving (possibly fearing the slightest infraction of the Yontsdown traffic laws would bring one of Kelsko’s men down on us with particular fury), neither of them noticed the peculiar seizure that, for a minute, had rendered me as speechless and helplessly rigid as any afflicted, unmedicated epileptic. I was grateful that there was no need to make up an explanation, for I did not trust myself to speak without betraying my turmoil.
I was overwhelmed with pity for the human inhabitants of this godforsaken place. With one school fire already seared into the city’s history, with a much worse blaze to come, I was quite sure of what I would discover if I went to the nearest firehouse: goblins. I thought of the headline we had seen in the local paper—BOTULISM KILLS FOUR AT CHURCH PICNIC—and I knew what I would find if I paid a visit to the priest at the rectory: a demonic beast in a backward collar, dispensing blessings and sympathy—just as it must have dispensed the deadly bacterial toxins in the potato salad and baked-bean casserole—while leering gleefully within its remarkable disguise. What a crowd of goblins must have gathered in front of the elementary school that day, the moment the alarm went off, to watch the erupting catastrophe with counterfeit horror, ostentatiously grieving while surreptitiously feeding on the human agony the way we would go to McDonald’s for lunch, each child’s scream like a bite of a juicy Big Mac, each radiant flash of pain like a crisp French fry. Dressed as city officials, professing shock and a shattering sense of loss, they would have lurked at the city morgue, hungrily observing the fathers who reluctantly came to identify the grisly, charred remains of their beloved offspring. Posing as grief-stricken friends and neighbors, they would have gone to the homes of bereaved parents, offering moral support and comfort, but secretly sucking up the sweet psychic pudding of anguish and misery, just as, months later, they were now hovering about the families of those who had been poisoned at the church picnic. Regardless of the respect and admiration—or lack of it—in which the deceased was held, no funeral in Yontsdown would ever be lightly attended. There was a snake pit full of goblins here, and they would slither off to feed wherever a banquet of suffering was laid out for them. And if fate did not produce enough victims to suit their taste, they would do a little cooking of their own—torch a school, orchestrate a major traffic accident, carefully plan a deadly industrial mishap at the steel mill or down at the rail yards . . .
The most frightening aspect of what I had discovered in Yontsdown was not merely the startling concentration of goblins, but their heretofore unseen desire and ability to organize themselves and take control of human institutions. Until this moment I had seen the goblins as roving predators, insinuating themselves throughout society, and more or less choosing their victims at random and on the spur of the moment. But they had plucked up the reins of power in Yontsdown and, with terrifying purposefulness, had transformed the entire town and surrounding county into a private game preserve.
And they were breeding here in the Pennsylvania mountains, in this coal-country backwater where the rest of the world seldom cast a glance.
Breeding.
Jesus.
I wondered how many other nests of these vampires existed in other dark corners of the world. And vampires they were, in their own way, for I sensed that they drew their primary nourishment not from the blood itself but from the radiant auras of pain, anguish, and fear that were produced by human beings in desperate trouble. A meaningless distinction. To cattle destined for the butcher’s block, it does not matter which portions of their anatomy are most