Twilight Eyes [011 5.0] By Dean R. Koontz Synopsis: There really are goblins in the world, hideous, loathsome creatures bent on the slow, painful destruction of mankind. THEY'RE OUT THERE Waiting. Watching. Unseen by normal eyes, but all too visible to Slim MacKenzie, a young man blessed-or cursed-by TwilightEyes... THEY'RE OUT THERE Lurking in the darkest shadows of an eerie, moonlit carnival. Feeding their twisted needs with human suffering. And fiendishly plotting the downfall of the human race... THEY'RE OUT THERE But don't scream. They'll hear you... Berkley Books by Dean Koontz THE BAD PLACE COLD FIRE DARKFALL THE FACE OF FEAR THE HOUSE OF THUNDER LIGHTNING THE MASK MIDNIGHT NIGHT CHILLS PHANTOMS THE SERVANTS OF TWILIGHT SHATTERED STRANGERS TWILIGHT EYES THE VISION THE VOICE OF THE NIGHT WATCHERS WHISPERS BERKLEY BOOKS, NEW YORK If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher.has received any payment for this "stripped book." A slightly different version of Part One of TWILIGHT EYES was published in a special illustrated hardcover edition for collectors by The Land of Enchantment in November 1985. This is the first publication of the complete story. TWILIGHT EYES A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author PRINTING HISTORY Berkley edition / September 1987 All rights reserved. Copyright @ 1985, 1987 by Nkui, Inc. Back cover photo copyright @ Jerry Bauer. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016. ISBN: 0-425-10065-0 This book is dedicated to Tim and Serena Powers and Jim and Viki Blaylock because they are fellow toilers in the vineyards and because it seems fining that such a strange story should be dedicated to strange peopk. A BERKLEY BOOK @ TM 757,375 Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016. The name "BERKLEY" and the "B" logo are trademarks belonging to Berkley Publishing Corporation. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 20 19 18 17 16 15 I had thought some of nature's journeymen had made men and not made them well, for they imitated humanity so abominably. -Shakespeare Hope is the pillar that holds up the world. Hope is the dream of a waking man. -Pliny the Elder I am on the side of the unregenerate to affirm the worth of life as an end in itself. -Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. PART ONE TWILIGHT EYES . . . the still sad music of humanity ... -William Wordsworth Humanity ain't always what's pretty. Some of the worst killers are pretty. Humanity ain't always what sounds nice and falls smooth on the ear, 'cause any pitchman can charm a snake, but some pitchmen ain't too humane. A person shows humanity when he's there you need him, when be takes you in, when he has a genuine kind word, when he makes you feel not alone, when he makes your fight his fight. That's what humanity is, if you want to know. And-if we had a little more of it in this world, maybe we could get ourselves out of the handbasket we're in ... or at least stop carrying that handbasket straight to Hell, the way we have been for so long. -an anonymous carnival pitchman.1 The Carnival That was the year they murdered our president in Dallas. It was the end of innocence, the end of a certain way of thinking and being, and some were despondent and said it was the death of hope, as well. But though falling autumn leaves may reveal skeletal branches, spring reclothes the wood; a beloved grandmother dies, but as compensation for the loss, her grandchild enters the world strong and curious; when one day ends, the next begins, for in this infinite universe there is no final conclusion to anything, definitely not to hope. From the ashes of the old age, another age is born, and birth is hope. The year that followed the assassination would bring us the Beatles, new directions in modern art that would alter the way we viewed our environment, and the beginning of a refreshing distrust of government. If it also contained the germinating seeds of war, this should only serve to teach us that-like hope-terror and pain and despair are constant companions in this life, a lesson that is never without value. I came to the carnival in the sixth month of my seventeenth year, in the darkest hours of the night, on a Thursday in August, more than three months before that death in Dallas. During the following week, what happened to me would change my life as profoundly as assassination could transform the future of a nation, though upon my anval the shuttered
3 and deserted midway seemed an unlikely place for destiny to be waiting. At four o'clock in the morning, the county fairgrounds had been closed for almost four hours. The carnies had shut down the Ferris wheel, Dive Bomber, Tilt-a-Whirl, and other rides. "They had closed up their hanky-panks, grab-joints, pitch-anddunks, pokerino parlors, had turned off the lights and killed the music and folded up the gaudy glamour. With the departure of the marks, the carnies had gone to their travel trailers, which were parked in a large meadow south of the midway. Now the tattooed man, the midgets, dwarves, hustlers, the women from the girly shows, the pitchmen, the bottle-pitch and ring-toss operators, the man who made cotton candy for a living, the woman who dipped apples in caramel sauce, the bearded lady, the three-eyed man, and all the others were asleep or fighting insomnia or making love as if they were ordinary citizens-which, in this world, they were. A three-quarter moon, sliding down one side of the sky, was still high enough to shed a pale wintry glow that seemed anachronistic in the hot, humid, graveyard hours of an August night in Pennsylvania. As I strolled through the lot, getting a feel for the place, I noticed how strangely white my own hands looked in that frosty luminescence, like the hands of a dead man or ghost. That was when I first perceived the lurking presence of Death among the rides and hanky-panks, and sensed dimly that the carnival would be the site of murder and much blood. Overhead, lines of plastic pennants hung limp in the muggy air; they were bright triangles when touched by sunshine or splashed in the dazzling glow of ten thousand carnival lights but were bled of color now, so they seemed like scores of sleeping bats suspended above the sawdust-carpeted concourse. As I passed by the silent carousel a frozen stampede was halted in.mid-gallop-black stallions, white mares, pintos, palominos, mustangs-charging forward without proceeding, as if the river of time had parted around them. Like a thin spray of metallic paint, traces of moonlight adhered to the brass poles that transfixed the horses, but in that eerie radiance the brass was silver and cold. I had jumped the high fence that ringed the county fairgrounds, for the gates had been closed when I arrived. Now I felt vaguely guilty, a thief in search of booty, which was odd, for I was no thief and harbored no criminal intentions toward anyone in the carnival. I was a murderer, wanted by the police in Oregon, but I felt no guilt about the blood I had spilled out there at the other end of the continent. I killed my Uncle Denton with an ax because I wasn't strong enough to finish him with my bare hands. Neither remorse nor guilt pursued me, for Uncle Denton had been one of them. The police, however, did pursue me, and I couldn't be sure that even three thousand miles of flight had won me any safety. I no longer used my real name, Carl Stanfeuss. At first I had called myself Dan Jones, then Joe Dann, then Harry Murphy. Now I was Slim MacKenzie, and I figured I would stay Slim for a while; I liked the sound of it. Slim MacKenzie. It was the kind of name a guy might have if he were John Wayne's best buddy in one of the Duke's Westerns. I had let my hair grow longer, though it was still brown. There was not much else I could do to alter my appearance, other than stay free long enough for time to make a different man of me. What I hoped to get from the carnival was sanctuary, anonymity, a place to sleep, three square meals a day, and pocket money, all of which I intended to earn. In spite of being a murderer, I was the least dangerous desperado ever to ride out of the West. Nevertheless, I felt like a thief that first night, and I expected someone to raise an alarm, to come running at me through the maze of rides, hamburger stands, and cotton candy kiosks. A couple of sec
urity guards must have been cruising the fairgrounds, but when I made my entrance they were nowhere in sight. Listening for the sound of their car, I continued my nocturnal tour of the famous midway of the Sombra Brothers Carnival, the second largest road show in the country. At last I stopped by the giant Ferris wheel, to which darkness brought a chilling transformation: In the glow of the moon, at this dead hour, it did not resemble a machine, especially not a machine designed for amusement, but gave the impression of being the skeleton of a huge prehistoric beast. The girders and beams and cross-supports might not have been wood and metal but bony accretions of calcium and other minerals, the last remains of a decomposed leviathan washed up on the lonely beach of an ancient sea. Standing in the complex pattern of moon-shadows cast by that imagined paleolithic fossil, I peered up at the black two-seat baskets all hanging motionless, and I knew this wheel would play a role in a pivotal event in my life. I did not know how or why or when, but I knew without doubt that something momentous and terrible would happen here. I knew. Reliable premonitions are part of my gift. Not the most important part. Not the most useful, startling, or frightening part, either. I possess other special talents that I use but do not understand. They are talents that have shaped my life but which I cannot control or employ at will. I have Twilight Eyes. Looking up at the Ferris wheel, I did not actually see details of the dreadful event that lay in the future, but I was drenched in a wave of morbid sensations, flooding impressions of terror, pain, and death. I.swayed and nearly fell to my knees. I could not breathe, and my heart hammered wildly, and my testicles drew tight, and for an instant I felt as if lightning had struck me. Then the squall passed, and the last of the psychic energies sluiced through me, and there remained nothing but the low, barely detectable vibrations that could have been sensed only by someone like me, ominous vibrations emanating from the wheel, as if it were radiating scattered particles of the death-energy stored within it, much the way a storm sky charges the day with uneasy expectation even before the first bolt of lightning or clap of thunder. I could breathe again. My heart slowed. The hot, thick August night had raised a greasy film of perspiration on my face long before I had entered the midway, but now sweat poured from me. I pulled up the T-shirt I was wearing and blotted my face. Partly in the hope that I could somehow clarify those foggy, clairvoyant perceptions of danger and see exactly what violence lay ahead, and partly because I was determined not to be intimidated by the aura of evil that clung to the big machine, I shrugged off the backpack I had been carrying, unrolled my sleeping bag, and made ready to pass the last hours of the night right there in the faint patchwork of purple-black shadows and ash-gray moonlight, with the wheel looming over me. The air was so heavy and warm that I used the sleeping bag only as a mattress. I lay on my back, staring up at the towering amusement ride, then at the stars visible beyond the curve of it and between its beams. Although I tried, I sensed nothing more of the future, but I did see a humbling plenitude of stars and thought about the immensity of space and felt lonelier than ever. Less than a quarter of an hour passed before I grew drowsy, and just as my eyes were about to flutter shut, I heard movement on the abandoned midway, not far from me. It was a crisp, crackling sound, as of someone stepping on discarded candy wrappers. I raised up and listened. The crackling stopped, but it was followed by the thump of heavy footsteps on hard-packed earth. A moment later a gloom-shrouded figure moved out from beside a tent that housed one of the kootch shows, hurried across the concourse, slipped into the darkness on the far side of the Ferris wheel, no more than twenty feet away from me, reappeared in the moonlight by the Caterpillar. It was a man, quite big-unless the shadows, like voluminous cloaks, gave him a deceptively large appearance. He hurried away, unaware of me. I had only a glimpse of him, saw nothing of his face, but I shot to my feet, shaking, suddenly cold in spite of the August heat, for what little I had seen of him was enough to generate a current of fear that sizzled the length of my spine. It was one of them. I withdrew the knife hidden in my boot. As I turned the blade in my hand, lambent moonbeams licked along the cutting edge. I hesitated. I told myself to pack up and leave, get out, seek shelter elsewhere. Oh, but I was weary of running and needed a place to call home. Weary and disoriented by too many highways, too many towns, too many strangers, too-many changes. During the past few months I had worked in half a dozen gillys and ragbags, the bottom of the carnival business, and I had heard how much better the life was when you were hooked up with an organization like E. James Strates, the Vivona Brothers, Royal American, or the Sombra Brothers Shows. And now that I had walked this midway in the dark, soaking up both physical and psychic impressions, I wanted to stay. In spite of the bad aura around.the Ferris wheel, in spite of the premonition that murder would be done and blood spilled in the days to come, the Sombra outfit gave off other, better emanations, and I sensed I could find happiness here too. I wanted to stay more than I had ever wanted anything else. I needed a home and friends. I was only seventeen. But if I were to stay, he must die. I didn't think I could live in the carnival knowing that one of them nested in it too. I held the knife at my side. I went after him, past the Caterpillar, around the back of the Tilt-a-Whirl, stepping over thick power cables, trying to t avoid putting a foot down on any litter that would reveal my presence to him as it had revealed him to me. We moved toward the dark, quiet center of the carnival.
2 The Goblin He was up to no good, but his kind always are. He scurried through the archipelago of night, rushing across the islands of moonlight, much preferring the deep pools of darkness and hesitating there only when he needed to reconnoiter, dodging from one bit of cover to the next, repeatedly glancing behind but never glimpsing or sensing me. I followed noiselessly through the center of the midway, not on either of the parallel concourses but through the rides and past the backs of game stands and refreshment shacks, past the Whip, between the Tip Top and the Whirlwind, observing him from concealment provided by now dormant gasoline-powered generators, trucks, and other equipment scattered the length of the grounds. His destination proved to be the open-air Dodgem Car pavilion, where he paused for one last look around, then climbed the two steps, unhitched the gate, and stepped under the electrical-grid ceiling, moving among the small cars that were parked wherever their last paying drivers had left them, from one end of the wooden floor to the other. Perhaps I could have hidden in the nearby shadows, there to observe him for a while, until I had some idea of his intentions. Perhaps that would have been the wisest course, for I knew less of the enemy in those days than I know now and might have benefited by even the most trivial addition to my meager store of knowledge. However, my hatred of the goblins-which was the only name that I could think to give them-was exceeded only by my fear, and I worried that delaying the confrontation would erode my courage. With perfect stealth, which was not one of my special gifts but, rather, a consequence of being seventeen and lithe and in excellent physical condition, I approached the Dodgem Car pavilion and followed the goblin inside. The two-seat cars were small, only slightly higher than my knees. A pole rose from the rear of each car to the ceiling grid, from which power was drawn down to allow the driver to collide violently with the other maniacally piloted vehicles. When the marks crowded the midway, the area around the Dodgem Cars was usually one of the noisiest places in the carnival, the air rent with screams and cries of attack, but now it was as preternaturally silent as the petrified stampede of the carousel horses. Because the cars were low and offered virtually no concealment, and because the raised floor was wood with a crawlspace underneath that encouraged every footstep to echo in the still night air, an undetected advance was not.easy. My enemy unwittingly assisted me by concentrating intently upon whatever task had brought him out into the moon-ruled carnival, most of his caution having been expended on the journey here. He was on his knees at the rear of a car halfway across the long rectangular pavilion, his head bowed over the focus of a flashlight beam. As I edged closer, the amber back splash of the light confirmed that
he was indeed a large specimen, with a thick neck and broad shoulders. His wide back was visibly well muscled under the tightly stretched material of his yellow and brown-checkered shirt. In addition to the flashlight, he had brought a cloth tool pouch, which he had unrolled and placed on the floor beside him. The tools nestled in an array of pockets and glinted as errant rays from the flashlight found them and bounced off their smoothly machined surfaces. He worked quickly, with only a little noise, but the soft scrape and tick and squeak of metal against metal was sufficient to mask my steady advance. I intended to steal within six feet of him, then launch myself on him and ram my blade into his neck, seek and sever the jugular, before he realized that he was not alone. However, in spite of the noises he made and in spite of my cat-soft approach, when I was still twelve or fifteen feet from him, he suddenly became aware that he was being watched, and he half turned from his mysterious task, looking back and up at me, astonished, owl-eyed. From the Eveready pocket flash, which he had propped on the fat rubber bumper of the car, light streamed across his face, diminishing in intensity from chin to hairline, distorting his features, creating queer shadows above his prominent cheekbones, and making his bright eyes seem fantastically sunken. Without the grotesque effect of the light, he still would have had a hard, cruel look, thanks to a bony forehead, eyebrows grown together over a wide nose, a prognathous jaw, and a thin slash of a mouth that, because of the overly generous features that surrounded it, seemed even more a slit than it really was. Because I held the knife at my side, shielded from him by the position of my body, he still did not realize the degree of his danger. With a boldness born of the smug superiority that is characteristic of all the goblins I have ever encountered, he tried to bluff me. "Here, what's this?" he asked gruffly. "What're you doing here? Are you with the show? Never seen you around. What're you up to?" Looking down at him, heart pounding, sick with terror, I could see what others could not. I saw the goblin within, beyond his masquerade. And this is the most difficult thing of all to explain, this ability to perceive the beast within, for it is not as if my psychic sight peels back the human countenance and reveals the lurking horror underneath, nor is it that I can discard the illusion of humanity and obtain an unobstructed view of the malignant illusionist who thinks he deceives me. Instead I see both at once, the human and the monstrous, the former superimposed upon the latter. Maybe I can best explain by way of an analogy drawn from the art of pottery. At a gallery in Carmel, California, I once saw a vase with a gloriously transparent red glaze, luminescent as air at the open door of some mighty furnace; it gave the impression of fantastic depth, magical three-dimensional realms and vast realities, within the flat surface of the clay. I see something much like that when I look at a goblin. The human form is solid and real in its own way, but through the glaze I see the other reality within. There in the Dodgem Car pavilion I saw through the midnight mechanic's.human glaze to the demonic masquerader within. "Well, speak up," the goblin said impatiently, not even bothering to rise from his knees. He had no fear of ordinary human beings, for in his experience they could not harm him. He did not know that I was not ordinary. "Are you part of the show? Do the Sombra Brothers employ you? Or are you just a stupid, nosy kid poking into other people's business?" The creature within the human hulk was both porcine and canine, with thick, dark, mottled skin the shade and character of aged brass. Its skull was shaped like that of a German shepherd, the mouth filled with wickedly pointed teeth and hooked fangs that seemed neither canine nor porcine but reptilian. The snout more closely resembled that of pig than dog, with quivering, fleshy nostrils. It had the beady, red, malevolent eyes of a mean hog, around which the pebbled amber skin shaded darker until it was the green of beetie's wings. When it spoke, I saw a coiled tongue unfold part way inside its mouth. Its five-fingered hands were humanlike, although with an extra joint in each, and the knuckles were larger, bonier. Worse, it had claws, black and gnarled, pointed and well honed. The body was like that of a dog that had evolved to such an extent that nature meant for it to stand upright in imitation of a man, and for the most part there was an appearance of grace in its form, except in its shoulders and knotted arms, which seemed to contain too much malformed bone to allow fluid movement. A second or two passed in silence, a silence occasioned by my fear and by a distaste for the bloody task confronting me. My hesitancy probably seemed like guilty confusion, for he started to bluster at me some more and was surprised when, instead of running away or making a flimsy excuse, I flung myself upon him. "Monster. Demon. I know what you are," I said through clenched teeth as I rammed the knife deep. I struck at his neck, at the throbbing artery, missed. Instead the blade plunged into the top of his shoulder, slipping through muscle and cartilage, between bones. He grunted with pain but did not howl or scream. My declaration stunned him. He wanted interruption no more than I did. I tore the knife out of him as he fell back against the Dodgem Car, and taking advantage of his momentary shock, I stabbed again. If he had been an ordinary man, he would have been lost, defeated as much by the temporary paralysis of terror and surprise as by the ferocity of my attack. However, he was a goblin, and although he was encumbered by his disguise of human flesh and bone, he was not limited to human reaction. With inhumanly quick reflexes he brought up one beefy arm to shield himself and hunched his shoulders and drew his head in as if he were a turtle, the net effect of which was to deflect my second blow. The blade sliced lightly across his arm and skipped over the top of his skull, gouging his scalp but doing no serious damage. Even as my knife ripped up a small patch of skin and hair, he was shifting from a defensive to an offensive posture, and I knew I was in trouble. I was atop him, shoving him against the car, and I tried driving a knee into his crotch to give myself time to wield the knife again, but he blocked the knee and grabbed a handful of my T-shirt. I knew that his other hand was coming for my eyes, so I threw myself backward, pushing off him with one foot on his chest. My T-shirt tore from collar to hem, but I was free, tumbling across the floor, between two cars..In the great genetic lottery that is God's idea of efficient management, I had won not only my psychic gifts but also a natural athletic ability, and I had always been quick and agile. If I had not been thus blessed, I would never have survived my first fight with a goblin (my Uncle Denton), let alone that nightmare battle among the Dodgem Cars. Our struggles had dislodged the Eveready propped on the rubber bumper, which fell to the floor and went out, leaving us to war in shadows, able to see each other only by the indirect, milky radiance of the waning moon. Even as I tumbled away and came to my feet in a crouch, he was launching up from the car, rushing toward me, his face a black blank except for a pale disc of cataractic light shimmering in one eye. As he descended on me, I swung the knife up from the floor in a skyward arc, but he jerked back. As the blade swept by a quarter of an inch from the tip of his nose, he seized the wrist of my knife hand. With his greater size came superior strength, and he was able to hold my right arm rigidly above my head. He pulled back his right arm and drove his fist into my throat, a terrible blow that would have crushed my windpipe if it had landed squarely. But I lowered my head and twisted away from him, taking the impact half in the throat and half in the neck. Nevertheless, the punch was devastating. I gagged, couldn't draw breath. Behind my watering eyes I saw a rising darkness much deeper than the night around us. Desperate, with an adrenaline-stoked strength born of panic, I saw his fist drawing back to take another whack at me, and I abruptly stopped struggling. Instead I embraced him, clung to him, so he would not be able to put power behind his punches, and in frustrating his counterattack I found both my breath and hope. We stumbled several steps across the floor, turning, dipping, breathing hard, his left hand still locked around my right wrist, our two arms raised. We must have looked like a bizarre pair of clumsy apache dancers performing without benefit of music. When we drew close to the scalloped wooden railing that ringed the pavilion, where the ash-silver moonlight was brightest, I saw through my adversary's human glaze with unusua
l and startling clarity, not because of the moon but because my psychic power seemed to surge for a moment. His counterfeit features faded until they were like the barely visible lines and planes of a crystal mask. Beyond the now perfectly transparent costume, the hellish details and nauseating textures of the dog-pig thing were more vivid and real than I had ever perceived before-or wished to perceive. Its long tongue, as forked as that of a serpent, pebbled and wart-covered, oily and dark, flickered out of its ragged-toothed mouth. Between its upper lip and its snout there was a band of what at first appeared to be crusted mucus but was evidently an agglomeration of scaly moles, small cysts, and bristling warts. The thick-rimmed nostrils were dilated, quivering. The mottled flesh of the face looked unhealthy-worse, putrescent. And the eyes. The eyes. Red, with fractured black irises like broken glass, they fixed on mine, and for a moment, as we struggled there by the pavilion railing, I seemed to fall away within those eyes, as if they were bottomless wells filled with fire. I was aware of hatred so intense that it almost scared me, but the eyes gave a view of more than mere loathing and rage. They also revealed an evil far more ancient than the human race and as pure as a gas flame, so malignant that it could have withered a.man the way the gaze of the Medusa turned the most courageous warriors to stone. Yet, worse than the evil was the palpable sense of madness, an insanity beyond human comprehension or description, though not beyond human apprehension. For those eyes somehow conveyed to me the knowledge that the creature's hatred of humankind was not just one facet of its sickness but was at the very core of its madness, and that all the perverse invention and fevered plotting of its insane mind was directed solely toward the suffering and destruction of as many men, women, and children as it was able to touch. I was sickened and repelled by what I saw in those eyes and by this intimate physical contact with the creature, but I dared not break my embrace of it, for that would have been the death of me. Therefore I clung even tighter, closer, and we bumped against the railing, then staggered a few steps away from it. He had made a vise of his left hand and was determinedly grinding the bones in my right wrist, trying to reduce them to splinters and calcium dust-or at least force me to release the knife. The pain was excruciating, but I held on to the weapon, and with more than a small measure of revulsion I bit his face, his cheek, then found his ear and bit it off. He gasped but did not shriek, indicating a desire for privacy even greater than mine and a stoic resolve that I could never hope to match. However, though he stifled a cry as I spat out his ruined ear, he was not so inured to pain and fear that he could continue the battle without flinching. He faltered, reeled backward, smashed into a roof post, brought one hand to his bleeding cheek, then to his head in a frantic search for the ear that was no longer attached. He was still holding my right arm above my head, but he was not as powerful as he had been, and I twisted free of him. That might have been the moment to thrust the knife into his guts, but restricted circulation numbed my hand, and I could barely maintain a grip on the weapon. An attack would have been foolhardy; my senseless fingers might have dropped the knife at the crucial moment. Gagging on the taste of blood, resisting the urge to vomit, I backed rapidly away from him, transferring the weapon to my left hand, working my right hand vigorously, opening and closing it, with the hope of exercising the numbness out of those fingers. That hand began to tingle, and I knew it would be back to normal in a few minutes. Of course, he didn't willingly give me the minutes I required. With a fury so bright that it should have lit the night, he charged toward me, forcing me to dodge between two of the miniature cars and vault over another. We circled the pavilion for a while, our roles somewhat reversed from what they had been when I'd first crept in through the gate. Now he was the cat-one-eared but undeterred, and I the mouse with one numb paw. And although I scurried about with a quickness and limberness and cunning born of a renewed and acute sense of mortality, he did what cats always do with mice: He inevitably closed the gap in spite of all my maneuvers and stratagems. The slow pursuit was eerily quiet, marked only by the thump of footfalls on the hollow floor, the bone-dry scrape of shoes on wood, the creak-rattle of the Dodgem Cars as we occasionally put a hand out to steady ourselves in the process of slipping over or around them, and heavy breathing. No words of anger, no threats, no pleas for mercy or reason, no cries for help. Neither of us would give the other the satisfaction of a whimper of pain. Gradually circulation returned to my right hand, and although my tortured wrist was swollen and throbbing, I thought I had recovered.sufficiently to employ a skill that I had learned from a man named Nerves MacPhearson in another, less fancy carnival where I had passed a few weeks in Michigan, earlier in the summer, after fleeing the police in Oregon. Nerves MacPhearson, sage and mentor and much-missed, was a knife-thrower extraordinaire. Wishing Nerves was with me now, I slipped the knife-which had a weighted handle and overall balance designed for throwing-from left hand to right. I hadn't thrown it at the goblin when he'd been kneeling at the Dodgem Car, for his position had not allowed a clear and mortal hit. And I hadn't thrown it the first time that I had broken free of him because, in truth, I didn't trust my skill. Nerves had taught me a lot about the theory and practice of knife-throwing. And even after saying good-bye to him and moving on from the show in which we had traveled together for a while, I continued to study the weapon, expending hundreds of additional hours refining my skill. However, I was most definitely not good enough to throw the knife at the goblin as a first resort. Considering my enemy's advantages of size and strength, if I only slightly wounded him or missed altogether, I would be virtually defenseless. Now, however, having tangled with him in hand-to-hand combat, I knew that I was no match for him and that a well-calculated toss of the knife was my only chance of survival. He didn't seem to notice that in transferring the knife to my left hand, I had gripped it by the blade instead of the handle, and when I turned and ran into a long stretch of pavilion where there were no obstructing cars, he assumed that fear had gotten the better of me and that I was running from the fight. He came after me, heedless of his own safety now, triumphant. When I heard his heavy footfalls on the boards behind me, I stopped, whirled, judged position-angle-velocity in a wink, and let the blade fly. Ivanhoe himself, letting loose with his best-placed arrow, could have done no better than I did with my tumbling knife. It tumbled exactly the right number of times and struck at precisely the right whirling moment, taking him in the throat and burying itself to the hilt. The point must have been sticking out the back of his neck, for the blade was six inches long. He came to an abrupt, swaying halt, and his mouth popped open. The light where he stood was meager but sufficient to show the surprise in both the human eyes and in the firey demon eyes beyond. A single jet of blood, like a gush of ebony oil in the gloom, spouted from his mouth, and he made croaking noises. He drew breath with a futile hiss and rattle. He looked astonished. He put his hands to the knife. He fell to his knees. But he did not die. With what appeared to be monumental effort, the goblin began to shuck out of its human shell. More accurately, nothing was sloughed off; rather, the human form began to lose definition. Facial features melted together, and the body began to change as well. The transformation from one state to the other seemed agonizing, exhausting. As the creature dropped forward on its hands and knees, the human masquerade kept reasserting itself, and that horrid pig-snout appeared, receded, and reappeared several times. Likewise, the skull flowed into a canine shape, held for a moment, began to revert to human proportions, then reasserted itself with new vigor, sprouting murderous teeth..I backed away, reached the railing, and paused there, prepared to vault across and onto the midway if the goblin should magically acquire new strength and immunity from the knife wound merely by virtue of its hideous metamorphosis. Perhaps, in its goblin form, it was capable of healing itself in a way it could not while trapped in the human condition. That seemed unlikely, fantastic-though no more fantastic than the very fact of its existence. At last, having devolved almost completely, working its huge jaws and gnashing its tee
th, clothes hanging absurdly on its altered frame, claws having punched out through the leather of its shoes, it dragged itself across the pavilion floor in my direction. Its malformed shoulders, arms, and hips, all burdened with strange excrescences of useless bone, worked laboriously, although I had the feeling that they would have driven the beast forward with inexplicable grace and speed if it had not been wounded and weakened. Unfiltered by the costume of humanity, its eyes were now not simply red but luminous as well; they did not shine with refracted light like the eyes of a cat but poured forth a bloody radiance that shimmered in the air before them and laid a red swath on the otherwise dark floor. For a moment I was certain that the metamorphosis did, in fact, renew the enemy, and I am sure that is why it changed. In its human form it was trapped and rapidly dying, but in its goblin identity it could call upon an alien strength that might not save it but might, at least, give it enough additional resources to pursue and kill me as a last defiant act. Because we were alone here, because there was no one else to see what it became, it risked this revelation. I had witnessed such a thing once before in similar circumstances, with another goblin, in a small town south of Milwaukee. It was no less terrifying the second time. The creature swelled with a new vitality. It seized the handle of the knife in one clawed hand, tore the blade out of its throat, and threw it aside. Slavering, drooling blood, but grinning like a fiend risen from the Pit, it scuttled toward me on all fours. I leapt up onto the railing and was about to go over when I heard a car approaching along the wide concourse that passed beside the pavilion. I figured it must be the long-anticipated security guards making their rounds. Hissing, thumping its short, thick tail against the floorboards, the beast had nearly reached the railing. It glared up at me, eyes lit with murderous intention. The engine of the approaching car grew louder, but I did not rush to the security men for help. I knew the goblin would not obligingly maintain its true form for their inspection; instead it would reclothe itself in its disguise, and I would be leading the guards to what would appear to be a dead or dying man, my victim. Therefore, as the headlights became visible but before the car pulled into view, I leapt off the railing, back into the pavilion, jumping over the beast, which reared up and tried to grab me but missed. I landed on both feet, skidded to my hands and knees, rolled, came onto hands and knees again, and crawled most of the way across the pavilion before turning and looking back. The twin ruby gleams of the goblin's hot gaze were fixed on me. The shattered throat, broken windpipe, and spurting arteries had weakened it, and it was reduced to slithering on its belly. It came slowly like a tropical lizard suffering from cold-thickened blood, closing the gap between us with evident agony but equal determination. It was twenty feet away..Beyond the goblin, beyond the pavilion, the headlights of the oncoming car grew brighter still; then the Ford sedan itself appeared, cruising slowly, engine purring, tires making an oddly soft sound in the sawdust and litter. The lights fell on the concourse, not on the Dodgem Car structure, but one of the security men in the sedan was operating a spotlight, which he now swept along the side of the pavilion. I pressed flat to the floor. The goblin was fifteen feet away from me and inching nearer. The waist-high railing that encircled the Dodgem Car field of battle was so heavy and solid that the spaces between the thick and closely set ba lusters were narrower than the balusters themselves. That design was fortunate; although the spotlight flickered through the gaps, there was no place where the guards could get a good look into the pavilion, certainly not as long as they continued to move. The dying goblin flopped forward with another spasmodic flexing of its powerful legs, heaving into a patch of moonglow, where I could see blood oozing from its piggish snout and dripping from its mouth. Twelve feet away. It snapped its jaws and shuddered and heaved again, its head moving out of the light, into shadow. Ten feet. I slid backward, staying flat on my belly, eager to get farther from this living gargoyle-but I froze after moving only a couple of feet, for the cruising security car had come to a full stop on the concourse, directly beside the Dodgem Car attraction. I told myself that it must be part of the guards' routine to stop every so often along their patrol route, that they had not halted in response to anything they had seen in the pavilion, and I prayed fervently that such would prove to be the case. Nevertheless, on a night as warm and sticky as this one, they would be riding with their windows open, and once stopped, they were more likely to hear any sound that I or the goblin made. With that in mind I ceased retreating from my enemy, skinned myself to the floor, and silently cursed this nasty bit of luck. With a grunt and a lurch and a hard-drawn breath, the wounded beast dragged itself closer to me, reclosing the gap I had begun to widen, once more only ten feet away. Its vermilion eyes were not as clear or bright as they had been, muddy now, their strange depths clouded, as mysterious and foreboding as the lanterns of a distant ghost ship seen at night on a dark and fogbound sea. From the car the guards played the spotlight over the shuttered hanky-panks on the far side of the concourse, then slowly moved it around until it was stabbing brightly at the flank of the pavilion, spearing between the wide supports of the balustrade. Though it was unlikely they would spot either me or the goblin past the screen of balusters and among the score of miniature cars, it was not unlikely that, above the noise of the Ford's idling engine, they might hear the monster's wheezing inhalations or the thump of its tail upon the hollow floor. I nearly shrieked out loud: Die, damn you! It heaved itself forward more energetically than before, covering a full five feet, and thudded down on its belly with little more than one yard separating us. The spotlight stopped moving. The security men had heard something. A dazzling lance of light cut between two balusters, its point embedding in the pavilion floor eight or ten feet to my left. In the beam's narrow revelatory width the wood planks-the grain, nicks, scrapes, gouges, and stains-were, at least from my deck-level point of view, preternaturally revealed in the most amazing and intricate.detail. A tiny up-thrusting splinter seemed like a towering tree-as if the spotlight not only illuminated but also magnified what it touched. With a soft sputter, the goblin's breath passed out of its ruined throat-and no new breath was drawn in. To my great relief the glow faded from its hateful eyes: blazing fire subsiding to flickering flame, flame to hot coals, hot coals to dull embers. The beam of the spotlight moved in this direction, paused again, no more than six feet from the dying goblin. And now the creature underwent another remarkable transformation, like a movie werewolf's final reaction to a silver bullet, relinquishing its phantasmic form and once more dressing itself in the comparatively mundane face and limbs and skin of a human being. Its last energies were committed to maintaining the secrecy of its race's presence in the midst of ordinary men. The gargoyle was gone. A dead man lay in the gloom before me. A dead man whom I had killed. I could no longer see the goblin within. The transparent human glaze was not a glaze any more but a convincing paint job, beyond which there seemed no mysteries whatsoever. On the concourse the Ford eased forward a bit, stopped again, and the guards' spotlight slid across a few more balusters, then found another gap through which to pry. It probed the floor of the pavilion and touched the heel of one of the dead man's shoes. I held my breath. I could see the dust on that portion of his shoe, the pattern of wear along the rubber edge, and a tiny bit of paper stuck to the place where the heel joined the sole. Of course, I was considerably closer than the guard in the Ford, who was probably squinting along the track of his light, but if I could see so much, so clearly, surely he could see a little, enough to damn me. Two or three seconds ticked by. Two or three more. The light glided to another gap. This time it was to my right, several itches beyond the other foot of the corpse. A shiver of relief passed through me, and I took a breath-but held it unreleased when the light moved back a few balusters, seeking its previous point of interest. Panicked, I slid forward as silently as possible, seized the corpse by the arms, and jerked it toward me, though only a couple of inches, not far enough to cause a lot of noise. Again the beam bored through the railing toward the
heel of the dead man's shoe. I had acted quickly enough, however. The heel was now just one safe inch beyond the spotlight's inquisitive reach. My heart ticked far faster than a clock, two beats to every second, for the events of the past quarter of an hour had wound me far too tight. After eight beats, four seconds, the light moved away, and the Ford drove off slowly along the concourse, toward the back end of the lot, and I was safe. No, not safe. Safer. I still had to dispose of the corpse and clean up the blood before daylight made things more difficult for me and before morning brought the carnies back onto their midway. When I stood up, a pinwheel of pain whirled in each knee, for when I had jumped off the balustrade and over the crawling goblin, I had stumbled and fallen to my hands and knees with little of that grace about which I was boasting earlier. The palms of my hands were mildly abraded as well, but neither that discomfort nor the other-nor the pain in my right wrist where the.goblin had squeezed so hard, nor the ache in my neck and throat where I had been punched-could be allowed to hinder me. Staring down at the night-clad remains of my enemy, trying to arrive at the easiest plan for moving his heavy corpse, I suddenly remembered my backpack and sleeping bag, which I had left by the Ferris wheel. They were small objects, half in shadow and half in vague pearly moonlight, not likely to be noticed by the patrol. On the other hand, the carnival's security men had made their circuit of this midway so many times that they knew exactly what they should see at any given place along the route, and it was easy to imagine their eyes floating past the backpack, past the sleeping bag-only to return abruptly, the way the spotlight beam had returned unexpectedly to probe toward the corpse again. If they saw my gear, if they found proof that some drifter had come over the fence during the night and had bedded down on the midway, they would swiftly return to the Dodgem Cars pavilion to double-check it. And find the blood. And the body. Jesus. I had to get to the Ferris wheel before they did. I hurried to the railing, vaulted over it, and ran back through the dark heart of the midway, legs pumping and arms cutting the thick moist air away from me and hair flying wildly, as if there were a demon behind me, which there was, though it was dead.
Dean Koontz - (1985) Page 1