A Darkness in My Soul

by Dean R. Koontz

  "Perhaps," Morsfagen said.

  I looked around at the others to see whether they understood the cruelty in that tease. None of them seemed to pay any attention. Perhaps part of their jobs included paying no attention to such things.

  "What is this-perhaps?" I asked.

  Child's voice box made the words seem sinister when they were actually spoken in fear.

  "Perhaps," he said, his face impassive, "it would be better for all of us if no one outside of this room ever discovered that you have regained sanity and are ready to return to your own body. It would be less trouble to get you doing work for us. We would not have to pay you anything. All in all, perhaps it would be a wise idea."

  The nurse paid no attention. But her pleasant face mirrored her tacit agreement with Morsfagen.

  The doctor took my pulse, listened at my chest with a stethoscope, checked my eyes and ears, ignoring what transpired around him.

  The guard, by the door, had Morsfagen's impassive look.

  I was alone.

  Except for Child's intellect, which had expanded my own. There was a cunning about me now that I had not possessed before. Morsfagen would think he knew me: fast on the cutting remarks, but low on cleverness. But that had changed, and I was now every bit as devious as he.

  "One problem," I said.

  "What's that?"

  "I've told you that it took me this full month to shake loose of my own madness and to free myself from Child's insanity. I nearly lost my mind again trying to find a way through his subconscious landscape. You scanning all this so far?" He indicated that he was by saying nothing.

  "Now, if I'm trapped in this frame, welded so closely to his mind, I'm going to succumb to his insanity again-and this time it will be permanent. I couldn't stand the ordeal of recovery again." In that whispered, deathlike rattle of Child's, the words took on even more sincerity than I had tried to give them.

  Morsfagen looked doubtful. It was almost as if he could sense the change in me, sense the expanded awareness and cunning. But he could not take the chance that I was not telling him the truth, and he knew that I had won. He was going to have to console himself with the fact that at least he now had me in full mind for future use; if he tried to play for full stakes and keep me locked in Child's body, he might very well wind up with nothing. And military careers are not built on blunders.

  "Bring him along," he ordered the doctor. "We'll let him have his body back." He smiled at me, but it was not a pleasant smile. "But you'd better cooperate, Kelly. It's time of war now, and that rules out your brand of frivolity."

  "I understand perfectly," I said, not without a touch of sarcasm.

  "I'm sure you do."

  And he left the room.

  Minutes later, they wheeled me into the corridor to keep my rendezvous with my own coma-ridden flesh

  All the while, I gloried in the thought that I was swiftly getting the upper hand and that before they realized what had happened, I would be in my former position of dominance. There were two minds' worth of energy within me, plus the complex intellect of Child now amplifying my own. They were mere men, I told myself, and they stood no chance at all.

  I did not realize that I was making the same mistake that I had made twice before. In the old days, I had convinced myself that I was a god of sorts, the Second Coming, and my life had been disastrous because of that fantasy. In Child's subconscious, I had eagerly sought to be transformed into the mythic images of Tibetan wolves, into something transcending humanity, and that might have cost me my mind and my eventual recovery. And now, as I was wheeled down the corridor, I again looked at myself as more than a man, as a minor god soon to prove his power. Because I had never allowed myself to associate with "mere men," I did not understand them, or myself. And my latest delusions of grandeur were bound to lead to ultimate disaster

  And did.

  II

  My legs were cramped, and even a slight bit of movement made my shoulders ache, for the staff had not been exercising my body with the proper degree of enthusiasm during the month it had been vacant. I felt weak, and my stomach was a hard knot. Having been fed intravenously for some four weeks, the stomach had shrunk and felt like a clenched fist in there, squeezing my guts. Otherwise: fine. And since it was such a delight to be housed in my own flesh once again, I was willing to overlook the little aches and pains of readjustment to life. I didn't complain, and I tried not even to grimace.

  Morsfagen seemed disappointed by that.

  They wheeled Child's carcass out of the room. It would continue to live, though it would never exhibit intelligence again. It was a husk, nothing more. I still had not told them, for I was still not free of the AC complex and out of their immediate reach. Morsfagen would not take kindly to such a trick, and I didn't want to be around whenever he discovered it.

  I showered, washed away the weeks of sickbed smell.

  The hot water seemed to loosen my cramped muscles, and dressing was only half the ordeal I had expected. When I slipped into my jacket and checked my reflection in the mirror, Morsfagen said, "Your shyster is waiting downstairs."

  I held back the witty reply designed to demolish him, for I knew that was exactly what he wanted. He was searching for some reason to slap me down, either with his fists or with a preventive detention arrest. Why we had hit it off so miserably from the start, and why our hatred for each other was now twice what it had been, I didn't know. True, we were altogether different types, but the antagonism we felt for each other was deeper and more unremitting than a mere clash of personalities.

  "Thank you," I said, leaving him with nothing to attack. I walked to the door, opened it, and was halfway into the corridor before he replied.

  "You're welcome."

  I turned and looked at him and saw that he was smiling, that same cold smile of hatred which I had grown used to by then. He had said "you're welcome," but not with any seriousness-which meant that he understood me and knew that I understood him too.

  "We'll contact you day after tomorrow," he said.

  "There's a lot of work to do. But, after what you've been through, you deserve a little rest."

  "Thank you," I said.

  "You're welcome."

  Again. And grinning this time too

  I closed the door and walked down the hall to the bank of elevators with a dark-haired, blue-eyed, six-foot-fourinch guard as company. We didn't say much of anything to each other on our way downstairs, not so much out of any particular dislike for each other as out of a sheer lack of anything to say, like a nuclear physicist and an uneducated carpenter at the same cocktail party, neither exactly superior, but both separated by a mammoth communications gap.

  Down

  Harry was in the lobby, tearing his hat apart, and when the elevator doors opened, he gave the thing a particularly vicious mangling with his big hands and started toward us.

  He was smiling the first genuine, friendly, uncomplicated smile I had seen since I had awakened in Child's body. He hugged me, living up to the image of the father figure, and he had tears in his eyes which he could not manage to conceal.

  I was not concealing my own tears at all. I dearly loved this clumsy, pudgy, sloppily dressed Irishman, though most of my life had been spent in playing down that love. Maybe it was because I had learned early to hate and despise as self-protection. When Harry separated me from that world inside the AC complex and showed me what actual love was, I never lost my suspicion. And it is easier to act less involved so that if you're hurt later, the anguish doesn't show so much and give your adversary satisfaction. Now unchecked, evidence of that love flowed.

  We hurried across the lobby to the second elevator bank and went down to the underground garage, where the attendant brought Harry's hovercar, accepted a tip, and stepped back as we drove out of that great, sparkling building. In the street, we both sighed, as if some weight had been lifted from us, and we began to talk for the first time, out of the range of those microphones which infest any go
vernment building.

  "You'll tell me about it now," he said, his eyes flicking from the shifting layers of new snow on the street to where I sat against the far door. "They wouldn't let me up to see you but once a week, you know."

  "You'd only have been looking at flesh and blood," I said. "All this time, I've been inside of Child, locked down there in his mind."

  "As I figured," he said. "But those"-he jerked his thumb behind us, twisting his face up to look disgusted" those pretty boys in their uniforms, I just don't trust."

  "They didn't exercise my body properly. And they didn't take any precautions against stomach shrinkage.

  Otherwise, I'm fine."

  He snorted. "So tell me,"

  "You first. I've spent a month in that place, and I don't have the foggiest notion what has happened out here.

  When I went in, war had all but been declared. The Chinese and the Japanese had crossed the Soviet border, maybe nuked a town "

  He looked grim, stared at the street unfolding before us for a long time before he said anything. It was dark, and the crisp blue arc lights sent fantastic shadows wriggling between the heavy fall of snowflakes. The streets seemed almost empty of traffic.

  "War was declared two days later," he said.

  "And we won?"

  "Partly."

  I looked around at the streets, all undamaged, all occupied by our own troops, our own police. Indeed, I saw now that the amount of occupation of our territory spelled some sort of trouble. Every other street corner contained coppers parked in squad-carrying howlers, surveying the dark boulevard. They watched us go by with quick, dark glances, though they offered no pursuit.

  "Partly?" I asked.

  As we flitted across the city, he summed up the developments of the month-long war:

  The Chinese had indeed nuked Zavitaya, for there was nothing there any longer but powdered stone, splintered wood, and the ruins of a very few outlying structures. Of the moderately large population, there were six hundred survivors.

  Belogorsk was taken, its laboratories seized and impressed into the service of the People's Army of China-a euphemism for the military strong-arm of the Peking dictatorship and its Japanese allies. Within a day, hover-trucks had taxied Chinese troops into Svobodnyy and Shimanovsk, thereby effectively isolating one small sector of the Soviet Union.

  In this time, the Western Alliance had been making preparations and issuing stern warnings to the Chinese, who had ignored them imperiously, sparing no effort to make it apparent that they considered the West with scorn. The United Nations was petitioned by every Western Alliance nation, and the world organization replied by trade sanctions against China. These too were laughed off. The land of the dragon was feeling its muscle for the first time in many centuries, and its egotism threatened to carry it to the brink of world destruction and beyond. Yet the Alliance held off, well aware that the electronic shield envisioned by Child and later torn from Ms mind by my own extrasensory powers was reaching midpoint in its hasty construction. There was no sense, the strategists agreed, in helping to escalate a mini-war into a major conflagration until our side was immune to attack behind its shield generators and victory was assured the West.

  Two weeks after the start of the war, the Chinese were still consolidating territorial gains, moving more troops into the captured Russian territory. All the while, they pointed to their Dragonfly and made lightly veiled threats.

  They made false promises that this was all the land they Wanted. And they followed such worthless assurances with warnings that they could easily survive a nuclear-bacteriological war, for their population was so much greater than ours that it could not help but outlast us.

  The Alliance, furious, bided time.

  Then, unexpectedly, Japanese forces had landed on Formosa, coming in from the sea with destroyers and landing craft. While the guns and the forces were aimed at China, the back door was entered and the house secured by the enemy. The Alliance forces quartered on that strategic airbase were systematically slaughtered. Both the Chinese and the Japanese denied having anything to do with it.

  But reconnaissance planes reported Japanese ships, sans the rising sun, harbored in the islands.

  The following day, with even the peace criers united behind the government, the crash force working to erect electronic shields over all the strategic areas of the Western Alliance, the last of the invisible shells of stretched molecules in place and the generators backed with a second set to prevent disaster, the Alliance declared war on China and Japan.

  We struck out with nuclear stockpiles at the major industrial centers of both enemy nations. In hours, billions in property and hundreds of thousands of lives were wiped out in gushes of mile-high flame. The enemy was prepared for this, and it retaliated with its own nuclear weaponry.

  But the shields worked, the Alliance cities remained intact. Again and again, the People's Army rained missiles upon points in Russia, Europe, and North America. Not one of them did damage. Since all sides had long ago, for obvious strategic reasons concerned with occupying captured territory, gone to the construction of "clean" bombs, even the spill radiation did not kill people living in the countryside beyond the shelter of the unseen domes of molecules which had been stretched to stunningly large dimensions, their surface tension curiously increased and not decreased by that expansion.

  In desperation, plague drops were made on the cities of the Alliance, but even these did not penetrate. In the countryside, people died, but even many of these were saved by immunization teams from the cities. Property damage, at this point, was zero.

  The Chinese nuked the small, unprotected towns in a final spasm of fury, but they had little firepower left.

  The Japanese had already surrendered in order to protect what little unmolested lands the home islands still contained.

  The Chinese command center was discovered at last, destroyed with a vengeance, and the war brought to and end. Or so everyone thought

  "Thought?" I asked.

  "We have ambitious men for our military leaders,"

  Harry explained. His tone was none too pleasant.

  "Go on."

  "We made a mistake with the voluntary, reformed military service laws," he said.

  "How so?"

  "Try to envision these men, Sim. They're well-paid professionals. There hasn't been a draft within the Alliance for twenty-four years. They enlist because they like to be a part of a protective Big Brother sort of organization — and because combat and planning for combat excites them. We turned ourselves over to those who enjoy war, and we gave them the machines to wage it. Now, with all this hardware and all this education in the ways of dealing death, they had had to sit through fourteen years of cold war where guns were never fired. And before that, there were two decades of total peace, where nations hardly even exchanged angry words. They've never had the chance to prove themselves, and since they are basically the sort of men who need to prove themselves for their own benefit, they've been driven up the wall by brinksmanship and peace."

  I felt ill, without exactly understanding why. The night seemed darker and colder, and I had a sudden and furious need for Melinda, for the touch of her and the warmth, the seeking together and the final closeness. It was such an intense desire that I grew dizzy with it.

  "So?" I managed to ask.

  "So, they didn't want to stop. They were moving, living their dreams, and loving it. They were on the edge of the thing they'd all fantasized about-conquering the world.

  They could incorporate every nation into the Alliance, and then it would be over. All the plans and subplans, plots and counterplots and counter-counterplots came together in a marvelous mosaic, and they just couldn't resist. China was occupied, but the artillery was turned, next, on South America."

  "They're neutral!"

  "Mostly," he agreed. "But the Alliance generals were bothered by South America's autonomy, especially sines Brazil had been making that space effort of theirs pay or! with the m
ineral ships from Titan. The continent fell in slightly less than a week-yesterday, to be exact. They were either badly prepared militarily, or had oriented their armies toward the exploration of space. They've come under the banner of the Alliance-angrily, reluctantly, but under it."

  "And all the countries already in the Alliance-they all went along with this?"

  "Not all. But in Russia, the military had taken control of the government years before. France and Italy knuckled under to the popular sentiment of their people, of the common man. Spain is a military nation to start with-no problem there."

  "But Britain and the U.S. wouldn't stand for it!" It sounded false.

  "Britain did refuse, said she wouldn't supply her own men for the Alliance endeavor. But she gave tacit approval by continuing trade and diplomatic relationships with all her allies. She's too small to really buck them, and she could only maintain her military's integrity, nothing more.

  Canada did the same, though Quebec declared independence and won it-or at least had the last time I heardand joined the militant ranks of the other Alliance nations. As for us, the U.S., we were in it from the moment the Soviet generals made the suggestion. The peace criers were right all along: a volunteer army can become a secondary government and can threaten the elected one if the time is ripe. The coup came two mornings after the Soviet proposal when it became obvious that the elected government was not going to agree to a world-wide campaign. We are now ruled by a police-army coalition, by a council of eighteen generals and admirals, and the warmeantime-goes on."

  "Who now?"

  "Australia," he said. "She has become self-sufficient, which the Alliance military advisors never have appreciated. Sydney was obliterated this afternoon and an ultimatum was delivered to the Australian government shortly thereafter."

  Neither of us spoke for a while.

  The snow continued to fall, faster than ever.

  "Dictatorship then?" I asked.

  "They won't call it that."

  "Nazism?"

  "It's a mistake to apply the terms of other eras. The same sense of chauvinism is there, and a roiling muck of nationalistic fantasies. You can bet the Alliance factions will break down in a monumental squabble once this war is over. The Russians against us, a real Armageddon. They have the taste of blood, and the old hates have been resurrected on all sides."