Dean Koontz - (1985)

by Twilight Eyes(Lit)

  16 A Total Eclipse of the Heart Rya was sitting in an armchair in the living room of the Airstream, still dressed in the tan slacks and emerald-green blouse she had been wearing when I had last seen her on the midway. She held a glass of Scotch in one hand, and when I got a look at her face, I stopped three or four words into the deception that I had formulated on the way home. Something was terribly wrong; it was visible in her eyes, in the tremor that softened her mouth, in the sooty rings that had appeared around her eyes, and in the paleness that aged her. "What is it?" I asked. She motioned me to the chair that faced hers, and when I indicated the stains on my jeans-not too bad now that I saw them in the light-she said it did not matter and again directed me to the armchair, this time with a note of impatience. I sat, suddenly aware of the earth and blood on my hands, realizing that my face very likely had a smear or two of blood on it. Yet she seemed neither shocked nor curious about my appearance, uninterested in my whereabouts during the past three hours, which must be an indication of the seriousness of the news that she had for me. As I perched on the edge of the chair, she took a long pull on her Scotch. The glass rattled against her teeth. She shuddered and said, "When I was eleven, I killed Abner Kady, and they took me away from my mother. I already told you that. They put me in a state-run orphanage. I told you that too. But what I didn't tell you was that . . . when I went to the orphanage . . . that was where I first saw them." I stared at her, uncomprehending. "Them," she said. "They ran the place. They were in charge. The.director, the assistant director, the head nurse, the doctor who didn't live in but was on twenty-four-hour call, the counselor, the majority of the teachers, almost t he entire staff were their kind, and I was the only kid who could see them." Stunned, I started to get up. With a gesture she indicated that I should remain where I was. She said, "There's more." "You see them too! But this is incredible!" "Not so incredible," she said. "The carnival is the best home in the world for social outcasts, and who is more of an outcast than those of us who see . . . the others?" "Goblins," I said. "I call them goblins." "I know. But isn't it logical that our kind would drift into the carnival . . . or into insane asylums . . . more than anywhere else?" "Joel Tuck," I said. She blinked in surprise. "He sees them too?" "Yes. And I suspect he knows you see the goblins." " But he's never told me." "Because he says he detects a darkness in you, and he's a most careful man." She finished her Scotch and then stared at the ice cubes in her glass for a long moment, bleaker than I had ever seen her. When I started to get up again, she said, "No. Stay there. Don't come to me, Slim. I don't want you trying to comfort me. I don't want to be held. Not now. I've got to finish this. "All right. Go on." She said, "I had never seen the . . . the-goblins up in the Virginia hills. Weren't many people around, and we never went far from home, never saw any outsiders, so I wasn't likely to encounter them. When I saw them in the orphanage for the first time, I was terrified, but I sensed I would be eliminated . . . if I let them know I could see through their charade. With careful questioning and a lot of hinting, I soon learned that none of the other kids were aware of the beasts inside our keepers." She raised the Scotch, remembered that she had finished the whiskey, and held the glass in her lap with both hands to keep them from shaking. "Can you understand what it was like to be helpless children at the mercy of those creatures? Oh, they didn't cause us too much physical injury, because a lot of dead or badly battered children would have brought an investigation. But the code of discipline allowed a lot of leeway for vigorous spankings and a wide variety of punishments. They were masters at psychological torture, as well, and they kept us in a constant state of fear and despair. They seemed to feed on our distress, on the psychic energy produced by our anguish." I felt as if spicules of ice had formed in my blood. I longed to hold her, stroke her hair, and assure her that they would never get their filthy hands on her again, but I sensed that she was not finished yet and would not appreciate an interruption. She was almost whispering now. "But there was a worse fate than having to stay at the orphanage. Adoption. You see, I soon became aware that the couples who showed up to interview kids for adoption sometimes were both goblins, and no child was ever given to a family in which at least one of the parents wasn't . . . of that kind. You get my drift? You see? You know what was happening to those kids who were adopted? In the privacy of their new families, beyond the eye of the state, which might have seen blatant wrongdoing in the orphanage, in the 'sanctity' of the family where bad secrets are more easily kept, they were.tortured, used as toys for the gratification of goblins that had taken custody of them. So while it was Hell in the orphanage, it was worse to be sent home with a couple of them." The ice spread from my blood into my bones, where it seemed as if my marrow had frozen solid. "I avoided adoption by playing stupid, by pretending to have such a low IQ that torturing me would be no more fun than torturing a dumb animal. They want response, you see. That's what thrills them. And I don't mean just your physical response to the pain they inflict. That's pretty much secondary. What they want is your anguish, your fear, and it's hard to engender a satisfyingly complex terror in a dumb animal. So I avoided adoption, and when I was old enough and tough enough to be fairly sure of making it on my own, I ran away to the carnival." "When you were fourteen." "Yes." "Old enough and tough enough," I said with grim irony. "After eleven years of Abner Kady and three years under the thumb of the goblins," she said, "I was as tough as you can get." If her endurance, perseverance, strength, and courage had been awesome before, this new information provided a glimpse of bravery almost too great to be comprehended. I had found myself a special woman, all right, a woman whose determination to survive gave rise to reverent wonder. I slumped back in my chair, suddenly hammered limp by the horror that I had just heard. My mouth was dry and bitter, and my stomach was sour, and there was a great hollowness in me. I said, "Goddamnit, what are they? Where do they come from? Why. Do they haunt the human race?" "I know," she said. For a moment I did not fully grasp the meaning of those two words. Then, when I saw that she literally meant that she knew the answers to my three questions, I came forward on my chair, breathless, electrified. "How do you know? How did you find out?" She stared down at her hands, unspeaking. "Rya?" "They're our creation," she said. Startled, I said, "How can that possibly be true?" "Well, you see . . . mankind has been on this world far longer than current wisdom has it. There was a civilization many thousands of years before ours . . . before written history, and it was even more advanced than ours." "What do you mean? A lost civilization?" She nodded. "Lost . . . destroyed. War and the threat of war was as much a problem for the people of that earlier civilization as it is for us now. Those nations developed nuclear weapons and reached a stalemate not unlike the one we're approaching now. But that standoff didn't lead to an uneasy truce or to peace by necessity. Hell, no. No. Instead, stalemated, they searched for other means of waging warfare." A part of me wondered how she could know these things, but I did not for a moment doubt the truth of what she said, for with my sixth sense-and perhaps with a wisp of racial memory buried deep in my subconscious-I perceived an ominous reality to what some listeners might have thought was only a crazy fantasy or fairy tale. I could not bear to interrupt her to ask again for the source of her information. For one thing, she did not seem ready to tell me. And for another thing, I was spellbound, compelled to attend the seafarer's story, and.she seemed equally obsessed with the need to tell it. No child at bedtime has ever been more captivated by any wondrous fable, nor has any condemned man listened with more dread to the judge's reading of his sentence than I felt as I listened to Rya Raines that night. "In time," she continued, "they developed the ability to . . . to tamper with the genetic structure of animals and plants. Not just tamper but edit, splice one gene to another, excise characteristics or add them at will." "That's science fiction." "To us, yes. To them it was a reality. That breakthrough vastly improved people's lives by insuring better crops . . . and a more stable food supply . . . and by creating a host of "new medicines. But it als
o had great potential for evil "And that potential didn't go unexplored for long," I said, not with clairvoyant insight but with a cynical surety that human nature had been no different-or better-tens of thousands of years ago than it was in our own age. Rya said, "The first goblin was bred purely for military purposes, the ultimate warrior for a slave army." Picturing the grotesque demonkind, I said, "But what specific animal did they alter to come up with this . . . this thing?" "I don't know exactly, but I think it's not an altered version of anything so much as . . . an entirely new species on the face of the earth, a man-made race with intelligence equal to ours. As I understand it, the goblin is a being with two genetic patterns for every detail of physical appearance-one pattern essentially human and one not-plus a vital linking gene that bears the metamorphic talent, so that the creature has the ability to choose between its two identities at will, to be-to all outward appearances, at least-a human being, or a goblin, whichever the moment seems to demand." "But it's not really a human being even when it looks like one of us," I said. Then, thinking of Abner Kady, it occurred to me that even some genuine human beings are not human beings. Rya said, "No. Even when it can pass the most rigorous medical examination of its tissues, it's always a goblin. That's its base reality, regardless of the physical mode it chooses at any particular time. After all, its inhuman viewpoint, its thinking, its methods of reasoning are all alien to a degree beyond our comprehension. It Was designed to be able to enter a foreign country, mingle with people, pass for human . . . then, when most appropriate, revert to its frightening reality. For instance, say that five thousand goblins were infiltrated into enemy territory. They could engage in terrorist attacks, launched at random, disrupting commerce and society, creating an atmosphere of paranoia. I could imagine the chaos. Neighbor would suspect neighbor. No one would trust anyone but members of his immediate family. Society as we know it could not exist in such an atmosphere of paranoid suspicion. In time the beleaguered nation would be ground into subservience. "Or the five thousand could all be programmed to strike at the same time," Rya said, "erupting in a single murderous rampage that would claim two hundred thousand lives in one night. A thing of claws and fangs, a carefully engineered fighting machine with a heart-stopping appearance, the goblin's purpose was not merely to kill but also to demoralize. As I considered the effectiveness of an army of goblin terrorists, I was temporarily speechless. .My muscles were tense, knotted, and I could not relax them. My throat was tight. My chest ached. As I listened, a fist of fear clutched my guts and squeezed. But it was not merely the history of the goblins that affected me. Something else. An unfocused prescience. Something coming. . . . Something bad. I had the feeling that when I had at last heard all the details of the goblins' origins, I would then find myself in the midst of a horror that was currently beyond my imagination. Still sitting in her armchair, shoulders slumped, head low, eyes downcast, Rya said, "This warrior . . . goblin was specifically designed to be incapable of pity, guilt, shame, love, mercy, and most other human emotions, though it could imitate them well enough when it wished to pass as a man or woman. It had no compunctions about committing acts of extreme violence. In fact . . . if I've understood the information I've accumulated over the years . . . if I've properly interpreted the things I've seen . . . the goblin was even engineered to experience pleasure, when it killed. Hell, its only three emotions were a limited capacity for fear (which was included by the geneticists and psychogeneticists as a survival mechanism), hatred, and blood lust. So . . . condemned to that limited range of experience, the beast naturally tried to milk the most out of each emotion it'd been permitted." No human killer in either their civilization or ours, in all the thousands of years of lost or recorded history, possibly could have exhibited obsessive, compulsive, psychopathic, homicidal behavior even one-hundredth as intense as that of these laboratory soldiers. No religious fanatic, guaranteed a place in heaven for taking up a gun in God's name, ever slaughtered with such zeal. My muddy, bloody hands were so tightly curled into fists that my fingernails pressed painfully into my palms, yet I could not relax them. It was as if I were a determined penitent, seeking absolution through the endurance of pain. But absolution for whom? Whose sins did I feel it was necessary to atone for? I said, "But, Jesus, the creation of this warrior . . . it was . . . it was madness! A thing like that never could be controlled!" "Apparently they thought it could," she said. "As I understand it, each goblin that went out of those labs had a control mechanism implanted in its brain, which was intended to deliver temporarily crippling jolts of pain and trigger the creature's fear. Through this device a disobedient warrior could be punished in any corner of the world, regardless of where it hid," "But something went wrong," I said. "Something always goes wrong," she said. Again I asked, "How do you know these things?" "Give me time. In time I'll explain everything." "I'll insist on it." Her voice was bleak and gray, and it became grayer by the moment as she spoke of other safeguards that had been built into the goblins to prevent rebellion and unwanted bloodshed. Of course, they were created sterile. They could not breed; only the labs could produce more of them. And each goblin underwent intense conditioning that directed its hatred and murderous urges toward a narrowly defined ethnic or racial group, so it could be targeted on a very specific enemy, without fear that it might recklessly kill its master's allies.."Then what went wrong?" I asked." "I need more Scotch," she said. She got up and went into the kitchen. "Pour me some," I said. I ached all over, and my hands burned and itched because I had not yet extracted all the splinters from them. The Scotch would have an anesthetizing effect. But it could not anesthetize me against the feeling of impending danger. That presentiment was growing stronger, and I knew it would persist regardless of the quantities of liquor that I consumed. I glanced at the door. I had not locked it when I had come in. No one locks his doors in Gibtown, Florida, or in Gibtown-on-Wheels, because carnies never-or seldom ever-steal from one another. I got up, went to the door, thumbed in the lock button on the knob, and slid the bolt latch in place. I should have felt better then. I did not. Rya came back from the kitchen and handed me a glass of Scotch on the rocks. I resisted the urge to touch her because I sensed that she still did not want me close. Not until she had told me everything. I returned to my chair, sat down, and gulped half the Scotch in one swallow. She continued, but a replenishment of her whiskey did not improve the bleak tone of her voice. I sensed that her state of mind was induced not only by the horrible tale she had to tell but also by some personal turmoil. Whatever else was eating at her, I could not get a clear perception of it. Proceeding with the story, she told me that the secret knowledge of the goblins' creation soon spread, as knowledge always will, and half a dozen countries quickly had their own laboratory-made soldiers, similar to the first goblins but with modifications, refined and improved. They grew the creatures in vats, by the thousands, and the impact of this brand of warfare proved to be almost as terrible as a full-scale nuclear exchange. "Remember," Rya said, "the goblins were supposedly an alternative to nuclear combat, a much less destructive means of attaining world domination." "Some alternative!" "Well, if the nation that originated them could've maintained exclusivity of its technology, it would have conquered the world in a few years, without resort to atomic weapons. However, when everyone had goblin soldiers, when the terror was answered with counter terror, all sides quickly realized that mutual destruction was as certain through the surrogate soldiers as through nuclear holocaust. So they reached an agreement to recall and destroy their goblin armies." "But someone reneged," I said. "I don't think so," she said. "I may be wrong about this, I may have misunderstood . . . but I think some of the soldiers successfully refused to be recalled. "Jesus." "For reasons never discovered, or at least for reasons I don't grasp, some of the goblins had undergone fundamental changes once out of the laboratory." Having been a science buff through most of my childhood and adolescence, I had a thought or two about the subject. I said,."Perhaps they changed because their chains of arti
ficial chromosomes and edited genes were too fragilely constructed." She shrugged. "Anyway, it appears that one result of this mutation was the development of an ego, a sense of independence." "Which is a damned dangerous thing in a biologically engineered psychopathic killer," I said with a shiver. "An attempt was made to bring them to heel by activating the pain-producing devices implanted in their brains. Some gave themselves up. Others were found writhing and squealing in an unexplainable agony that effectively unmasked them. But some apparently mutated in still another way-either developed an incredible tolerance for pain . . . or learned to like it, even thrive on it." I could imagine how things had progressed from that point. I said, "In their perfect human disguises, with intelligence equal to ours, driven by only hatred and fear and blood lust, they couldn't ever be found . . . except maybe by subjecting every man and woman in the world to a brain scan in search of the goblins' defused control mechanisms. But there'd be a thousand dodges the creatures could use to avoid going under the scanners. Some would probably produce counterfeit clearance cards attesting to brain scans they'd never undergone. Others would simply flee to wilderness areas and hide out, running forays into towns and villages only when they needed to steal supplies . . . or when the lust to kill became an intolerable pressure in them. In the end most would escape detection. Right? Is that how it was?" "I don't know. I think so. Something like that. And at some point after the . . . the worldwide brain-scan program was under way . . . the authorities discovered that some of the rebel goblins had undergone one other fundamental mutation-" "They were no longer sterile." Rya blinked. "How did you know?" I told her about the pregnant goblin in Yontsdown. She said, "if I've not misunderstood, most remained sterile, but a lot became fertile. The legend is-" "What legend?" I asked, finding it increasingly difficult to contain my curiosity. "Where did you hear these things? What legends are you talking about?" Ignoring the question, still not ready to divulge her sources, she said, "According to the legends, a woman was caught in the brain-scan program, and when revealed as a goblin, she was goaded into transforming into her true shape. When they shot her, as she died, she ejected a litter of squirming goblin babies. In death she reverted to the human form, as she had been genetically programed to do (for the purpose of foiling autopsies and pathologists). And when her offspring were executed, they metamorphosed into human babies during their death throes' " "And then mankind knew it had lost the war with the goblins. " Rya nodded. They had lost the war because goblin children, formed in the alien womb instead of in the laboratory, had no control mechanisms to show up on brain scans; there was no method whatsoever by which their disguises could be penetrated. From that point on, man shared the earth with a species that was his intellectual equal and that had no purpose but to destroy him and all his works. Rya finished her Scotch. I badly wanted a second drink, but I was afraid to get it, for in my current state of mind a second would surely lead to a third, a third to.a fourth, and I would not stop until I passed out drunk. I could not afford to indulge myself, for the dark premonition of pending disaster hung over me more oppressively than ever, the psychic equivalent of a massive blac k formation of churning thunderheads settling down over a summer day. I looked at the door. Still locked. I looked at the windows. They were open. But they were jalousies, and no goblin could force its way through one of them without considerable effort. "So," Rya said softly, "we weren't happy with the earth God gave us. Evidently we had heard about Hell in that lost age, and we found the concept interesting. We found it so interesting, so appealing, that we brought forth demons of our own design and re-created Hell on earth." if there was a God, I could almost understand (as never before) why He would visit pain and suffering upon us. Looking down in disgust at our use of the world and the life He gave us, He might very well say, "All right, you ungrateful wretches, all right! You like to screw up everything? You like to hurt one another? You like it so much, you make your own devils and turn them loose on yourselves? All right! So be it! Stand back and let the Master please you! Watch my smoke, little ones. Here! Take these gifts. Let there be brain cancer and polio and multiple sclerosis! Let there be earthquakes and tidal waves! Let there be bad glands! You like? Hmmm?" I said, "Somehow the goblins destroyed that earlier civilization, wiped it off the face of the earth." She nodded. "It took time. A couple of decades. But according to legend . . . eventually a few of their kind, passing as human, rose into the upper social strata and finally attained sufficiently high political office that they were in a position to wage a nuclear war." Which, according to the mysterious and unspecified "legends" that she quoted, they had done. They did not care that most of them would be wiped out along with our kind; their entire reason for existing was to harry and destroy us, and if the ultimate fulfillment of their purpose led to their own swift demise, they were nevertheless powerless to change their destiny. The missiles flew. Cities were vaporized. No missile was withheld, no bomber restricted from taking flight. So many thousands of enormously powerful nuclear devices were detonated that something happened in the earth's crust, or perhaps there was a change in the magnetic field and a subsequent shifting of the poles, but for some reason fault lines responded worldwide, shifted, and produced quakes of unimaginable magnitude. Thousand-mile stretches of low-lying land collapsed into the seas, and tidal waves washed halfway across continents, and volcanoes erupted everywhere. That holocaust, the subsequent ice age, and thousands of years of time had ground away every trace of the civilization that had once lit the many continents as brightly as our carnival lit the midway every night. More goblins than humans survived, for they were hardier, born fighters. The few surviving human beings returned to caves, reverted to savagery, and with the passing of many cruel seasons their heritage was forgotten. Although the goblins did not forget and never would, we forgot the goblins, along with everything else, and in ages to come, our rare encounters with them in their demon form were the source for many superstitions-and countless cheap horror films-involving.shapechanging, supernatural entities. "Now, we've climbed up out of the muck again," Rya said dismally, "and we've rebuilt civilization, and we've begun to acquire the means to destroy the world again-" "-and the goblins will one day push the Button if they get the chance," I finished for her. "I believe they will," she said. "It is true that they're less capable fighters than they were in the previous civilization . . . more easily beaten in hand-to-hand combat . . . more easily deceived. They've changed, evolved somewhat, due to the passage of so much time and because of all that nuclear fallout. The radiation sterilized many, stole the fertility that the original mutations had given them, which is why they haven't completely overrun the earth and outnumbered us. And there's been a . . . a slight mitigation of their mania for destruction. As I understand it, many of them abhor the thought of another nuclear war . . . at least on a worldwide scale. You see, they're long-lived; some of them are as much as fifteen hundred years old, so they aren't that many generations removed from the previous holocaust. Their stories of the world's end, passed down by their ancestors, are still fresh and immediate to them. But though most of them might be satisfied with the current arrangement, stalking and killing us as if we were nothing more than animals in their private game preserve, there are a few . . . a few who long to induce human agony on a nuclear scale again . . . who believe it's their destiny to wipe us from the face of the earth forever. In ten years or twenty or forty, one of those is sure to get its chance, don't you think?" The near certainty of the Armageddon she had described was shocking and depressing beyond words, but still I feared a more immediate death. My precognitive awareness of imminent danger had become a constant, unpleasant pressure inside my skull, though I could not tell where the trouble would come from or what form it would take. I was faintly nauseous with apprehension. Chilled. Slick with sweat. Shivering. She went into the kitchen for another Scotch. I stood up. Went to a window. Looked out. Saw nothing. I returned to the armchair. Sat on the edge of it. Wanted to scream. Something was coming. . . . When she ret
urned with her drink and slumped in her chair again, still withdrawn from me, still grim-faced, I said, "How did you learn about them? You've got to tell me. Are you able to read their minds or what?" "Yes." "Really?" "A little." "I can't get anything from them except . . . a rage, a hatred. "I see . . . into them a little," Rya said. "Not their exact thoughts. But when I probe at them, I get images . . . visions. I think a lot of what I see is more . . . racial memory . . . things that some of them are not entirely aware of on a conscious level. But to be honest, it's more than that." "What? More-how? And what about these legends you spoke of?" Instead of answering me, she said, "I know what you were doing out there tonight." "Huh? What're you talking about? How can you know?" "I know." "But-" "And it's futile, Slim." "It is?" "They can't be beaten."."I beat my Uncle Denton. I killed him before he could bring any more misery to my family. Joel and I stopped six of them tonight, and if we hadn't, they would have rigged the Ferris wheel to collapse. We saved the lives of who knows how many marks." "And what does it matter?" she asked. A new note entered her voice, an earnestness, a dark enthusiasm. "Other goblins will just kill other marks. You can't save the world. You're risking your life, your happiness, your sanity-and at most you're involved in a delaying action. You're not going to win the war. In the long run our demons have to beat us. It's inevitable. It is our destiny, one we planned for ourselves a long, long time ago." I could not see what she was driving at. "What alternative do we have? If we don't fight, don't protect ourselves, our lives have no meaning. You and I could be snuffed out at any moment, at their whim!" She put aside her Scotch and slid to the edge of her seat. "There is another way." "What are you talking about?" Her beautiful eyes fixed on mine, and her gaze was hot. "Slim, most people aren't worth spit." I blinked. She said, "Most people are liars, cheats, adulterers, thieves, bigots, you name it. They use and abuse one another with as much eagerness as the goblins abuse us. They aren't worth saving." "No, no, no," I said. "Not most of them. A lot of people aren't worth spit, true, but not most of them, Rya." "In my experience," she said, "hardly any of them are better than the goblins." "Your experience wasn't typical, for God's sake. The Abner Kadys and Maralee Sweens of this world are definitely a minority faction. I can see why you would feel differently, but you never met my dad or mom, my sisters, my grandma. There's more decency in the world than cruelty. Maybe I wouldn't have said so a week ago, or even yesterday, but now that I hear you talking like this, now that I hear you saying it's all pointless, I don't have any doubt there's more good than evil in people. Because . . . because . . . well, there has to be." "Listen," she said, her eyes still fixed on mine, a beseeching blue, a pleading blue, a fierce and almost painful blue, all we can hope for is a little happiness with a small circle of friends, with a couple people we love-and the rest of the world be damned. Please, please, Slim, think about this! It's amazing that we found each other. It's a miracle. I never thought I would have anything like what we've found together. We're so compatible . . . so alike . . . that there's even an overlapping of certain brain waves when we sleep, . . . a psychic sharing when we make love and when we sleep which is why the sex is so damned good for us and why we even share the same dreams! We were meant for each other, and the most important thing, the most important thing in the world is that we be together all our lives." "Yes," I said. "I know. I feel it too." "So you've got to give up your crusade. Stop trying to save the world. Stop taking these insane risks. Let the goblins do what they have to do, and we'll just live our own lives in peace. "But that's the whole point! We can't live in peace. Ignoring them won't save us. Sooner or later they'll come sniffing around, eager to feel our hurt, drink our pain-" Slim, wait, wait, listen." She was agitated now, bristling with nervous energy. She popped up from her chair and went to the window, took a deep breath of the in-flowing air,.turned to me again, and said, "You agree that what we have to gether has to come first, above all else, at all costs. So what if . . . what if I could show you a way to coexist with the goblins, a way for you to give up your crusade and not have to worry that they'd ever come after you or me?" "How?" She hesitated. "Rya?" "It's the only way, Slim." "What?" "It's the only sane way to deal with them." "Will you, for Christ's sake, tell me?" She frowned, looked away from me, started to speak, hesitated again, said, "Shit!" and suddenly threw her Scotch glass across the room at the wall. Ice cubes flew out of it, shattered as they hit pieces of furniture or bounced on the carpet, and the glass exploded against the wall. Startled, I leapt up, then stood there stupidly as she waved me back and returned to her own chair. She sat. She took a deep breath. She said, "I want you to hear me out, just listen and don't interrupt, don't stop me until I'm done, and try to understand. I've found a way to coexist with them, to make them leave me alone. See, in the orphanage and later, I realized there was no way to win with them. "They have all the advantages. I ran away, but there're goblins everywhere, not just in the orphanage, and you can't really run away from them no matter where you go. It's pointless. So I took a risk, a calculated risk, and I approached them, told them that I could see "You what!" "Don't interrupt!" she said sharply. "This is . . . this is hard . . . going to be damned hard . . . and I just want to get through it, so shut up and let me talk. I told one of the goblins about my psychic ability, which is, you know, a mutation of our own, a consequence of that nuclear war, because according to the goblins there weren't people with any kind of psychic abilitie@lairvoyance, telekenesis, none of that-in the previous civilization. There aren't many now, but there were none then. I guess . . . in a twisted sort of way . . . since the goblins started that war, brought those bombs and ill that radiation down on us ... well, you could say they sort of created gifted people like you and me. In an awful sort of way we owe our special talents to them. Anyway, I told them that I could see through their human form to . . . I don't know . . . to the goblin potential within them-" "You've talked to them, and they've told you their . . . legends! That's how you know about them?" "Not entirely. They haven't told me much. But all they have to do is tell me a little, and I quickly have a vision of the rest. It's like . . . if they open the door a crack, I can push it all the way and see even the stuff they're trying to hide from me. But that's not important right now, and I wish to God you wouldn't interrupt. What's important is that I made it clear to them that I didn't care about them, didn't care what they did, who they hurt, as long as they didn't hurt me. And we reached an . . . accommodation - " Astonished, I collapsed back into my chair, and in spite of her admonition about interrupting her, I said, "An accommodation? Just like that? But why would they want to reach an accommodation with you? Why not just kill you? No matter what you told them, even if they believed you would.keep their secret, you still represented a threat to them. I don't understand. They had nothing to gain by reaching this . . . this accommodation." Her pendulum mood had swung again, back toward darkness and quiet despair. She sagged in her chair. When she spoke, her voice was barely audible. "They did have something to gain. There was something I could offer them. You see, I have another psychic ability that you either don't have . . . or don't have in the same degree that I do. What I've got is . . . the ability to detect extrasensory perception in other people, especially when they can see the goblins. I can detect their power regardless of how hard they might try to conceal it. I don't always know instantly upon meeting them. Sometimes it takes awhile. It's a slowly growing awareness. But I can perceive hidden psychic gifts in others pretty much the way I can see the goblins in their disguises. Until tonight I thought this insight was ... well, infallible ... but now you tell me Joel Tuck sees the goblins, and I never suspected him. Still, I think I'm nearly always quick to perceive these things. I knew there was something special about you, right from the start, though you turned out to be . . . more special, much more special, in more ways than I realized at first." She whispered now: "I want to hold on to you. I never thought I would find someone . . . someone I needed . . . loved. But you came, and now I want to hold on to you, but the only way I
can do that is if you make the same accommodation with them that I've made." I had turned to stone. Immobile as rock, I, sat in the armchair, listening to my granite heart thump, a hard and cold and heavy sound, a mournful and hollow sound, each beat like a mallet striking a block of marble. My love, my need for her, my longing were all still in my petrified heart but inaccessible, just as beautiful sculptures are potentialities in any crude block of stone but remain inaccessible and unrealized to the man who lacks artistic talent and who has no skill with the chisel. I did not want to believe what she had said, and I could not bear to think about what came next, yet I was compelled to listen, to know the worst. As tears came to her eyes, she said, "When I encounter someone who can see the goblins, I . . . I report it. I warn one of their kind about the seer. You see, they don't want open warfare, like there was last time. They prefer their secrecy. They don't want us organizing against them, even though it would be hopeless, anyway. So I point out people who know about them, who might kill them or spread the word. And the goblins . . . they just ... they eliminate the threat. In return they guarantee my safety from their kind. Immunity. They leave me alone. That's all I've ever wanted, Slim. To be left alone. And if you make the same arrangement with them, then they'll leave both of us alone . . . and we can be . . . we can stay . . . together . . . happy-" "Happy?" I did not speak the word so much as expel it. "Happy? You think we can be happy, knowing that we survive by . . . by betraying others?" "The goblins would get some of them, anyway." With great effort I moved my cold stone hands to my face and hid in the cave of fingers, as if I could retreat from these hideous revelations. But that was a childish fantasy. The ugly truth stayed with me. "Jesus." 'We could have a life," she said, weeping openly now because she sensed my horror and the impossibility of my ever reaching the dreadful.accommodation that she had negotiated for herself. "Together..... a life . . . the way it's been this past week ... even better... much better . . . us against the world, safe, perfectly safe. And the goblins don't just guarantee my safety in return for the information I give them. They guarantee my success too. I'm very valuable to them, see. Because, like I said, a lot of people who see the goblins either wind up in an asylum or a carnival. So . . . so I'm in a perfect position to . . . well, to turn up more than a few seers like you and me. So the goblins also help me out, help me get along. Like . . . they planned an accident at the Dodgem Cars-" "And I stopped it from happening," I said coldly. She was surprised. "Oh. Yes. I should have figured you did. But, see . . . the idea was, once there'd been an accident, the injured mark would probably sue Hal Dorsey, the man who owns the Dodgem, and then he would be in financial trouble, what with the legal fees and everything, and I would be able to buy him out at a good price, take on a new concession at a cost that was attractive. Oh, shit. Please. Please listen to me. I see what you're thinking. I sound so . . . so cold." In fact, though the tears flowed from her, and though I had never seen anyone more miserable than she was at that moment, she did indeed seem cold, bitterly cold. "But, Slim, you've got to understand about Hal Dorsey . He's a bastard, he really is, a mean son of a bitch, and nobody likes him 'cause he's a user, a user and an abuser, so I'll be damned if I'll feel sorry about ruining him." Although I did not want to look at her, I looked. Although I did not want to speak to her, I spoke. "What's the difference between the torture that the goblins initiate and the torture you suggest to them?" "I told you, Hal Dorsey is a-" Raising my voice, I said, "What's the difference between the behavior of a man like Abner Kady and the way you betray your own kind?" She was sobbing now. "I only wanted to be . . . safe. For once in my life-just once-I wanted to be safe." I loved her and hated her, pitied and despised her. I wanted her to share my life, wanted it as intensely as ever, but I knew that I could not sell my conscience or my birthright for her. When I thought of what she had told me about Abner Kady and her dull-witted mother, when I considered the horror of her childhood, when I realized the extent of her legitimate complaints against the human race and how little she owed to society, I could understand how she could have decided to collaborate with the goblins. I could understand, almost forgive, but I could not agree that it had been right. At that awful moment in feelings for her were so complex, such a tangled mess of tightly knotted emotions, that I experienced an uncharacteristic suicidal longing, so vivid and sweet that it made me cry, and I knew it must be like the death wish that haunted her every day of her life. I could see why she had spoken of nuclear war with such enthusiasm and poetry when we had been together on the Ferris wheel on Sunday night. With the burden of dark knowledge that she carried, total annihilation of the Abner Kadys and the goblins and the whole dirty mess of human civilization must, at times, strike her as a wonderfully freeing, cleansing possibility. I said, "You made a deal with the devil." "If they're devils, then we're gods, because we created them, " she said. "That's sophistry," I said. "And this is no goddamned debate." She.said nothing. She just drew herself into a ball and wept uncontrollably. I wanted to get up, unlock the door, burst out into the clean night air, and run, just run and run, forever. But my soul seemed to have turned to stone, in sympathy with the petrification of my flesh, and that added weight made it impossible for me to rise up from the chair. After perhaps a minute during which neither of us could think of anything to say, I finally broke the silence. "Where the hell do we go from here?" "You won't make the . . . accommodation," she said. I did not even bother answering that question. "So . . . I've lost you," she said. I was crying, too. She had lost me, but I had lost her. Finally I said, "For the sake of others like me . . . others to come . . . I should break your neck right now. But . . . God help me . . . I can't. Can't. Can't do it. So . . . I'll pack my things and go. Another carnival. Another start. We'll . . . forget." "No," she said. "It's too late for that." With the back of my hand I wiped some of the tears out of my eyes. "Too late?" "You've done too much killing here. The killing, and your special relationship with me, has drawn attention." I did not merely feel someone walking on my grave; I sensed someone dancing on it, stomping on it. For all the warmth I felt, it seemed more like a night in February than August. She said, "Your only hope was to see things my way, to make the same arrangements with them that I have." "You're actually . . . going to turn me in?" "I didn't want to tell them about you . . . not after I got to know you." "Then don't." "You don't understand yet." She shuddered. "The day I met you, before I realized what you would mean to me, I . dropped a hint to one of them . . . suggested that I was on the trail of another seer. So he's waiting for a report. "Who? Which one of them?" "The one who's in charge here . . . in Yontsdown." "In charge among the goblins, you mean?" He's especially alert, even for one of them. He saw something special was happening between you and me, and he sensed that you were someone extraordinary, the one I had hinted about. So he demanded that I confirm it. I didn't want to. I tried to lie. But he's not stupid. He's not easily deceived. He kept pressing me. 'Tell me about him,' he said. 'Tell me about him or things will change between us. You'll no longer have our immunity." Slim, can't you see? I had . . . no choice." I heard movement behind me. I turned my head. From the narrow hall that led to the back of the trailer, Chief Lisle Kelsko entered the living room.