by Dean Koontz
We followed a footpath across lawns, past the pond where, in warmer seasons and in a full moon, half-sleeping koi sometimes rose into view. They were thick from eating bread cast to them by daytime visitors, too spoiled to take night insects off the surface.
As if she knew my mind, the girl said, “By now they will have netted the koi and moved them inside for the winter.”
At home in my hammock, when I slept, those fish sometimes swam into sight, mottled and pale, fins wimpling in the gentle currents, smoky presences. On the mirrored water of those dreams, I saw my face reflected darkly. The koi shimmering under my reflection had a place where they belonged in this world. Waking from such a dream, I was always filled with longing, yearning for a home in the light, a garden flowering and fruiting as it ought to be.
Now, at the Kellogg Parkway entrance to the Commons, as we stood under a towering pine, Gwyneth pointed to a house across the street. “That’s one of the places where I live. Come in for coffee.”
Having no friends, I had no experience of such invitations, and I stood speechless for a moment before I could say, “I better not. The night’s nearly gone.”
She said, “There’s almost another hour and a half of darkness.”
“I have to go to the food bank, get supplies before they open.”
“What food bank?”
“St. Sebastian’s.”
“Come up, have breakfast. Go to the food bank tomorrow night.”
“But I’ll be seen going in your place. Too dangerous.”
She said, “No doorman. Nobody’s coming or going at this hour. Quick up the stairs.”
I shook my head. “I shouldn’t. I can’t.”
She pointed to a narrow walkway between her house and the one next door. “Go through there to the alley. At the back, there’s a fire escape.”
“No. I really can’t.”
“You will. Come on.” She ran into the street in the wake of a passing limousine with tinted windows as black as its paint job.
Before other traffic might appear, I sprinted after her. She raced up the front stairs of the house as I followed the passageway that led to the alley.
The fire escape switchbacked up the building, looking as though it ought to ring loudly beneath my feet like the bars of a xylophone struck exuberantly, but my ascent was quieter than pianissimo. A window framed soft light at the second-floor apartment, and the draperies were only half closed. As far as I could see, the room beyond was deserted. I turned onto the next flight of iron treads.
At the fourth floor, Gwyneth had opened the window for me; but she was not waiting. At the farther end of the dark room, beyond an open door, a cut-crystal ceiling fixture brightened a hallway wall with prismatic patterns.
Switching on my flashlight, I noticed words printed in black letters on the white windowsill, but before I could consider them, Gwyneth appeared beyond the open door and said, “Addison. Come to the kitchen.”
By the time I climbed through the window and slid it shut behind me, the girl was gone. I stood in a generously proportioned room as sparsely furnished as a nun’s cell: narrow bed, single nightstand, lamp, digital clock. The place smelled fresh, and I could relate to the minimalism.
Across the hallway lay an equally large room, containing only a desk, an office chair, a computer, a scanner, and two printers.
A lamp turned low illuminated a living room that must have been twice as large as my three underground rooms combined, but the place felt like home because of the books. There was, however, only one armchair, as if her father, while alive, had never lived here.
Beyond an archway lay a dining area with a table and chairs, open to a large kitchen in which she worked by candlelight. Even those discreet flames in ruby-glass holders were bright enough to risk my revelation.
Although we seemed to have much in common, I suddenly grew wary and felt that I should leave quietly.
Although her back was to me, she said, “There you are. Scrambled eggs and toasted brioche with raisin butter will be quick. Okay?”
“I should go.”
“You won’t. You’re never rude. Pull out a chair. Sit down.”
In spite of the one narrow bed, in spite of the single armchair in the living room, I said, “You aren’t alone here, are you?”
Breaking an egg into a bowl, attended by her shadow and the shadows of candle flames that quivered on the walls, she said, “There is one who comes and goes infrequently, but I won’t speak of that. It’s nothing that will put you at risk.”
I stood beside the table, unsure what to do.
Her back remained toward me, yet she seemed to know that I had not pulled out a chair. She held another egg, hesitating to break it.
“Everything now depends on mutual trust, Addison Goodheart. Sit down or go. There can be no third choice.”
20
EIGHTEEN YEARS EARLIER, DURING MY SECOND WEEK in the city, on the night I saw a Clear in hospital blues walking the high ledge …
Later, at home in our deep redoubt, after the groceries were put away, Father brewed a pot of orange-flavored herbal tea, and I sliced a pound cake with coconut icing, and we sat at our small table, It and Son of It, speaking of this and that, until he finished his cake and put down his fork, whereupon he brought up the subject that he felt was more important than our small talk: Fogs and Clears.
He never called them that. He had no names for them, and if he had a theory about what they might be, he wasn’t inclined to discuss it. But he had an opinion about what we should do when we encountered them.
His instinct, like mine, told him that the Fogs were nothing but bad news, though of exactly what kind he wasn’t prepared to say. Even the word evil, he said, was not sufficient to describe them. Best to avoid the Fogs. Certainly never approach one, but on the other hand, maybe it was also wise never to run from them, just as running from an angry dog might invite attack. Feigning indifference to the Fogs had worked for Father and for his father, and he strongly advised me to respond to them always and without fail as he did.
Leaning over the table, lowering his voice, as though even this far beneath the city, all but entombed by a mountain of concrete, he might be overheard, he said, “As to the others, the ones you call the Clears. They aren’t evil like the Fogs, but in their own way, they’re more terrible. Pretend indifference to them, as well. Try never to meet their eyes, and if you do find yourself in close quarters with one of them and eye-to-eye, turn away at once.”
Perplexed by his warning, I said, “But they don’t seem terrible to me.”
“Because you’re so young.”
“They seem wonderful to me.”
“Do you believe I would deceive you?”
“No, Father. I know you never would.”
“When you’re older, you’ll understand.”
He would say no more. He cut another slice of cake.
21
BY THE LIGHT OF A SINGLE CANDLE SET NEAR Gwyneth’s plate and far from mine, we ate a simple but delicious pre-dawn breakfast of scrambled eggs and brioche with raisin butter. I had never tasted coffee as good as hers.
After six years of solitude, sharing a meal and conversation with someone was a pleasure. More than a pleasure, her hospitality and companionship were also affecting to a surprising extent, so that at times I was overcome by emotion so intense, I couldn’t have spoken without revealing how profoundly I was moved.
With my encouragement, she did most of the talking. In but half an hour, the quality of her voice—clear, steady, gentle in spite of her profession of toughness—charmed me no less than the grace with which she moved and the determination that she seemed to bring to every task she undertook.
She was, she said, a recluse from a young age, but she did not suffer from agoraphobia, a fear of open spaces, of the world beyond her rooms. She loved the world and exploring it, though she did so largely under limited circumstances. When the hour grew late and few people were afoot, she ventured out. When the w
eather turned so bad that no one spent a minute longer outdoors than absolutely necessary, she prowled the streets with enthusiasm. The previous year, a storm of historic power shook the city with such elemental ferocity that its broadest avenues were all but deserted for two days, and in the tempest, she spent hours abroad, as if she were the goddess of lightning, thunder, rain, and wind, undaunted by Nature’s fury, in fact thrilled by it, soaked, blown nearly off her feet, fully alive.
People were what repelled her. Psychologists called it social phobia. She was able to be around people only briefly and could not tolerate crowds at all. She would touch no one and would not allow herself to be touched. She had a phone but rarely answered it. She shopped almost exclusively on the Internet. Groceries were left on her doorstep, where she could collect them when the delivery boy had gone. She loved people, she said, especially those in books, which was largely how she knew them, but she declined to associate with those who were not fictional.
I interrupted then to say, “Sometimes I think there may be more truth in fiction than in real life. Or at least truth condensed so that it’s more easily understood. But what do I know of real people or the world, considering my strange existence?”
She said, “Perhaps you have always known everything important but will need a lifetime to discover what you know.”
Although I wanted her to explain what she meant, my greater desire was to hear more about her past before the coming dawn drove me underground. I encouraged her to continue.
Her wealthy, widowed father, sympathetic to her condition and suspicious of psychologists, chose to indulge her rather than force her to seek treatment. As a child, Gwyneth had been a prodigy, self-educated and emotionally mature far beyond her years. She lived alone on the top floor of her father’s midtown mansion, behind a locked door to which only he was allowed a key. Food and other items were left outside her door, and when her quarters periodically required housekeeping, she retreated to a room that only she cleaned, to wait until the staff had gone. She did her own laundry, made her own bed. For a long time, except for people on the street, whom she watched from her fourth-floor windows, she saw no one but her father.
Shortly before her thirteenth birthday, she had chanced upon a magazine article about Goth style, and the photographs had fascinated her. She studied them for days. On the Internet, she sought other examples of Goth girls in all their freaky majesty. Eventually she began to think that if she became a Gwyneth different from the one whom she had always been, a Gwyneth who denied the world all power over her and challenged it with her very appearance, she might be able to walk in the open with a degree of freedom. Denied sun, her skin was already as pale as lily petals. Spiked and pomaded hair, heavy black mascara, other makeup, facial jewelry, sunglasses, and faux tattoos on the backs of her hands were more than a costume; they were also a kind of courage. She discovered that too extreme a Goth look drew attention that she didn’t want, but soon she found the happy medium. Thereafter she could live beyond her fourth-floor rooms, although she didn’t go out often, wouldn’t enter a crowd, preferred quiet streets, and was most comfortable in the night or in the foulest weather.
Her father, as forward-looking as he was indulgent, had prepared for his daughter’s future, so that she would be able to thrive after he passed away, a prudent step considering that he died before her fourteenth birthday. Assuming that Gwyneth would be no less a recluse at eighty than she was as an adolescent, assuming that the confidence and freedom she got from her Goth disguise or from any different look she might later adopt would always be limited, he created a web of trusts to ensure her lifetime support. But the trusts were also designed to allow her to draw upon them and benefit from them in numerous ways with the barest minimum of interaction with trustees, in fact with only one man, Teague Hanlon, her father’s closest friend and the only confidant that he fully trusted. After her father’s murder, Hanlon had been her legal guardian until she turned eighteen; he would be the primary trustee of the interlocking trusts until his death or hers, whichever came first.
Among the things that the trusts provided were eight comfortable though not extravagant apartments located in different but appealing parts of the city, including the one in which we sat now together at breakfast. This choice of residences allowed her a change of scenery, a not inconsiderable boon if her reluctance to go out resulted in day after day during which her experience of the city was restricted to the view from her windows. In addition, her father supposed that because of her natural elegance and her elfin beauty—which she denied possessing—she might attract the unwanted attentions of a dangerous man, whereupon an apartment could be easily abandoned for immediate relocation to another ready haven. Likewise, a fire or other disaster would not leave her homeless for so much as one hour, an important consideration if her social phobia rendered her more terrified of human contact and more reclusive as the years went by. She also kept moving from residence to residence as a means of discouraging well-meaning neighbors from making any attempt to be neighborly.
She rose from the table to fetch the pot from the coffeemaker.
The night was in retreat from the city, first light less than half an hour from possession of its streets.
I declined another cup.
Nevertheless, she poured one for me.
Returning to her chair, she said, “Before you go, we have to settle a few questions.”
“Questions?”
“Will we meet again?”
“Do you want to?”
“Very much,” she said.
Those two words were not just music, they were an entire song.
“Then we will,” I said. “But what about your … social phobia?”
“So far you haven’t triggered it.”
“Why is that?”
She sipped her coffee. The silver-snake ring, as delicate as the nose that it ornamented, glimmered when the candle flame fluttered, and seemed to circle round and round through the pierced nare from which it hung.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe next time, I’ll turn away from you and run, and want to be alone forever.”
She stared directly at me, but I was too far from the candle for her to see anything more than a hooded figure with gloved hands, and nothing more visible within the hood than there would have been if I were Death himself.
She said, “Come by this evening at seven o’clock. We’ll have dinner. And you’ll tell me more about yourself.”
“I never go out until after midnight. Too dangerous.”
Following a silence, Gwyneth said, “Do you have hope?”
“If I didn’t, I would long ago have died by my own hand.”
“Belief and trust, twined together, can meet any danger. Do you fear death, Addison?”
“Not my own death. Not the way people fear their death in books. I sometimes worried that my father would die. And when he did, the loss was worse than I imagined. The pain.”
She said, “I want to hear all about your father and your life, at dinner.”
My heart felt enlarged, not swollen with grief as it had been after Father died, but with complex emotions, swollen but not heavy, buoyant. I reminded myself that the heart is deceitful above all things, though I was sure it did not deceive me now.
I pushed my chair back from the table and got to my feet. “Leave the window open. At that hour, I’ll have to be very quick, out of the storm drain and up the fire escape.”
Rising from her chair, she said, “The rules don’t change.”
“The same rules,” I agreed. “You don’t look, and I don’t touch.”
She smiled and quoted me: “ ‘We hold each other hostage to our eccentricities.’ ”
After following me through the apartment to the dark bedroom, she remained in the open doorway to the softly lighted hall as I switched on my flashlight, dimmed it with fingers across the lens, and went to the window.
I turned to look at her and quoted something that she had said earlier.
“ ‘There is one who comes and goes infrequently, but I won’t speak of that.’ ” When she said nothing, I asked, “Will you speak of that at dinner?”
“Perhaps. But as I said before, it’s nothing that’ll put you at risk. Not in any way.”
When I raised the window, the beam of my light reminded me of the words hand-printed on the windowsill with a felt-tip marker, which I had half seen when I first entered. If they were words and not just symbols, they were in a foreign language, and in fact they somewhat resembled letters of the Greek alphabet, with which college sororities and fraternities named themselves.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Remember the sun. Go, Addison. Go, while you still have the night.”
Switching off the flashlight, I slipped out of the room, onto the fire escape, where the air was cool, and all around the city seemed to be rising from its dreams, the millions of its cells waking one by one.
As I descended the iron steps, I heard the window sliding shut behind me and the latch being engaged.
Suddenly I was sure that I would never see her again, and the thought was so piercing, so sharp with intuition, that I froze on the iron, there above the alleyway.
22
AFTER A MOMENT, I FOUND MY HOPE AGAIN AND continued down the fire escape. At the second-floor apartment, light still glowed at the window, and the draperies remained partly open. But this time movement in the room caught my attention in passing.
I would not have stopped, would not have moved closer to the glass, if I had glimpsed only the man. But in the room with him was one of the Fogs.
The man appeared to be in his thirties, as ordinary as anyone, with a pleasant face and hair damp from a recent shower. He wore a sapphire-blue silk robe and stood barefoot before an entertainment center, sorting through a small stack of DVDs.
The Fog traveled that living room, swimming through the air from wall to wall, from ceiling to floor and up again, like an eel lazily exploring an aquarium with which it had long ago grown bored. White from end to end, lacking eyes and mouth, in fact without any features whatsoever, it should have seemed no more threatening than a blind worm. But it inspired such repugnance that a sour mash of coffee and brioche rose in the back of my throat, and though I had to swallow hard to force down that acidic mass, I could not look away from the thing, wondering what its intentions might be, for I had never before seen one in such an intimate setting.