Innocence

by Dean Koontz

  I wondered what it would be like to sit in such a theater, with the auditorium in quiet shadows and the whole wide world for a while shrunken to a stage evocatively lighted, to sit without fear among hundreds of people and to see a story told, to laugh with them, to share their suspense, and in the most human moment of the play, to cry with them.

  Again, I thought of the comatose child, reclining in the bed, like a princess in a play, a princess bewitched, with many years to wait and grow before she would be old enough to be awakened and betrothed by a prince’s kiss. And as in a fairy tale, the kiss would also heal the bone of battered temple, so that when the flaxen hair was drawn back, there would no longer be a grievous indentation in her skull.

  Perhaps it was inevitable that such a thought would bring to mind Father’s battered face and the spray of blood like a nimbus on the snow around his sainted head.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Something’s wrong.”

  “No. I’m all right.”

  I suspected she still believed that my face was only scarred from burns. I was reluctant to tell her there had been others like me—Father and his father—and that there might be more in the world, we of the hidden. She no doubt thought my father had been like her own, a man of normal appearance who had walked in daylight as well as night, who had gone wherever he wished, whenever he chose. I hoped that she would continue believing just that for a while yet. These tender hours of friendship might come to an end when at last she understood that the thing about us that terrified people wasn’t anything as mundane as fire-chewed flesh or any of the ordinary deformities of the human face that have medical definitions, that we were so horrific, even she, with all her tolerance and sympathy, might recoil in fear and disgust.

  “I’m all right,” I repeated, keeping my head turned away from her. “I’m just hungry.”

  “We’re almost there. We’ll have dinner soon.”

  “Good. That will be nice.”

  I knew that I had done a fateful thing when I had sought her out in her hiding place in the library. If I were to die in this snow as Father had died in the white night six years earlier, my actions would have summoned this storm and my rebellion against loneliness would have been the death of me.

  38

  “PLEASE STOP RIGHT THERE.”

  Spotlighted, Father and I stood on a sidewalk that had become a theater, two actors in a cast of four, the remaining players soon to enter left. The street scene was so minutely detailed, the snow such a masterly effect so exquisitely executed, that I could not deny this stage was in fact the world. Nevertheless, for half a minute, I stood paralyzed by denial, insistent that this must be a theater of dreams from which I would awaken at any moment.

  We had contingency plans for various situations that might arise when we were aboveground, and the worst of these was an encounter with the police. Since we never committed crimes, they had no reason to detain us, but on the other hand, they were legitimate authorities to whom everyone should respond properly if approached. In our case, a proper response would be the death of us.

  Our tactic in such a confrontation was no different from that of men in ancient times surprised by a pride of lions: run. But we had the misfortune to be stopped on Cathedral Hill, in a block that offered few routes of escape. Behind us stood the Museum of Natural History, which occupied an entire block, allowing no alleyway, and which was closed and locked at that hour. Across the street, also a full block on every side, was the Ruthaford Center for the Performing Arts, dark and secured. Our only options were to continue north on Cathedral Avenue or retreat south.

  In such a situation, which we had never faced before but which we had discussed, our intention was to wait until the officers were out of their vehicle and approaching, so that when we ran, we might gain a few seconds of advantage while they returned to the patrol car. We dared not let them get too close, however, or they might pursue on foot. The plan was to run in opposite directions, dividing their attention. Because they had no reason to suspect us of a crime, they would react according to the police department’s official rules of engagement, which allowed pursuit but did not allow them to shoot us in the back.

  “Go south,” Father advised me, as the doors of the winterized SUV opened and the officers stepped down to the street.

  They were tall and solid men, made to appear even bigger by their dark-blue, insulated winter uniforms. The short quilted jackets ended in elastic hems just above their gun belts, pistols ready in swivel holsters on their right hips.

  Father said to them, in the friendliest of voices, “We’re too old for snowball fights, but it’s such an exhilarating night.”

  “You live around here?” one of them asked.

  “Yes, sir. We do indeed.”

  In this situation the word indeed was code between us, and it meant run.

  As I turned south, from the corner of my eye, I saw Father slip in the snow on his second step, stagger, slide, and fall.

  We of the hidden may be mutants, but whatever we are, we don’t have superpowers like mutants have in movies. We are more human than we’re perceived to be, subject to the laws of physics, to gravity, to the consequences of our decisions. The frivolity of a snowball fight in the middle of the street invited notice, and inviting notice was, for us, like pulling the pin from a hand grenade.

  The shock of Father falling blew out of my mind all of our contingency planning, and I turned toward him in fear for his life, my own peril for a moment forgotten.

  As far as the policemen were concerned, the attempt to flee was as damning as flight itself. They drew their guns, one aimed at me, the other covering him, and they said the things that they say in these situations, issued commands. I dared not move, and Father got to his feet as they demanded that he do, arms spread, hands far from any pocket in which he might have a weapon.

  He possessed no gun, but that didn’t matter. What followed was now ordained, as certain as that all rivers run downhill.

  Before he could be told what to do next, before we both might be handcuffed and both surely dead, Father said, “Officer, you need to see who I am. I’m going to take off my hood and ski mask.” He was warned not to make any sudden moves, and he said, “Sir, I have no moves to make.”

  As he untied the drawstrings of his hood, I said, “No.” My chest was so tightly banded with horrified anticipation, the breath so heavy in my lungs, that I couldn’t speak even that small word twice, but only pray it silently: No, no, no, no.

  He pulled back the hood, drew off the mask.

  After a sharp inhalation of shock, the two men were frozen for a moment at the sight of him. At first but only at first, their wrenched countenances were those of helpless children cornered by a thing that stalked them in their worst dreams, a thing that in the lands of sleep never quite possessed features but that now had a face more terrifying than their worst imaginings.

  Father looked at me and said, “Endure.”

  As if in reaction to the catalyst of that word, the policemen’s expressions of childlike terror morphed into disgust, although the terror remained evident in eyes and trembling jaws, and then morphed into hatred, although the terror and disgust could still be seen, so that their faces were grotesque and tormented, galleries of wretched emotions.

  The officer to whom Father had spoken shot him twice, and the reports were muffled in the snow-blanketed night, echoing briefly back and forth between the museum and the concert hall, across the deserted top of Cathedral Hill. They were not at all like gunfire but like the thud of fists on a door, sounds like those that wake you and then do not repeat, leaving you uncertain if they were real or of the dream from which you’ve risen.

  Father fell onto his back in soft snow that plumed up and then sparkled down across his black raincoat. He labored for breath, and his twitching hands fanned through the snow at his sides, like birds with broken wings.

  In that moment and for a while, I ce
ased to exist as far as the two policemen were concerned. Their universe was Father’s face and Father’s dying eyes, and though surely they could see that he was mortally wounded and no threat, they went after him not with guns, but with truncheons, clubbing him furiously where he lay unresisting. Such is the power of our appearance that, once they have killed one of us, their violence escalates, as if they feel that we are yet alive in death and must be killed twice.

  I was no longer the small boy whom Father saved from burning. Twenty years old, a grown man, I nevertheless could not help him. I could not help him.

  Knowing how the sight of his face and eyes would consume their attention, he offered his life for mine, and when he said “Endure,” he meant many things, the first of which was run. I could not help him, but neither could I run and leave him there, with no one to stand witness to the last of his ordeal.

  I retreated along the sidewalk to the vehicles parked at the curb, slipped between two of them, dropped to the ground, and belly-crawled under an SUV. I moved forward until, from beneath the front bumper but still cloaked in shadow, I could watch them try to break their truncheons on his bones.

  I did not weep, because weeping would reveal me, and I owed him my survival, for which he had paid everything. From my low point of view, I couldn’t see their faces—and was glad that I couldn’t. The viciousness of their assault on a man now dead or dying, the bitter curses and the wordless exclamations of hatred and fear were so savage that the sight of their faces might turn me to stone.

  When they were done, they stood for a moment, silent but for their ragged breathing. Then they began to ask each other What the hell, what was it, what is it, what the shit? One of them vomited. The other made a sound like sobbing, and although there might have been remorse in it, there were other and worse miseries.

  Lying under the SUV, I prayed they wouldn’t read my footprints in the snow and drag me into the open.

  When they realized that I was gone, their reactions were of two kinds, revealed in rapid-fire conversation. They were afraid that I was another like the one they killed and that if two existed, perhaps there might be others of us even now gathering around one corner or another. And they were overcome by a recognition that they had lost control. Regardless of what we might be, they hadn’t proceeded in anything resembling a professional manner, which troubled them with guilt and the fear of punishment.

  Because my father had told me of his father’s death, I wasn’t surprised when their first impulse was to climb aboard their patrol SUV and get out of there. As the clink of chain-wrapped tires and the engine noise receded, I crawled into the open. When the officers’ fear and confusion abated, when doubt set in and guilt grew greater, they would come back. Before they returned or anyone else came along, I had an awful job to do.

  39

  GOING ON NINE O’CLOCK OF AN ORDINARY NIGHT, the city would be in its third act of the day, the streets and restaurants and places of entertainment crowded with millions of people living out their stories. This evening, the storm was a counterweight to the allure of things culinary, musical, theatrical, and otherwise enticing, and most people had flown home as if pulled off the stage by fly lines.

  Gwyneth pointed out to me that even on those blocks where vehicles were usually lined up, their drivers buying drugs, the NO PARKING signs were being obeyed. Also gone were the usual frontline salesmen, young expendables hoping to avoid jail long enough to be promoted off the streets, some of whom did business in Rollerblades, the better to skate around a corner and away at the first sign of a cop, or at least to get out of sight long enough to dump incriminating merchandise down a street drain before being pursued and arrested.

  Gone, too, from their customary corners, were the prostitutes, who could not look sufficiently erotic to attract johns when they were attired in Gore-Tex storm suits and parkas.

  Already, in only the second hour of its reign, the blizzard had decreed at least a temporary interdiction against the more public expressions of vice.

  I thought of the Fog that entered into the man in the apartment two floors below Gwyneth’s, and I wondered how many in this world were hosts to those creatures. Judging by the fact that I saw many more Clears than Fogs, I thought that the latter numbered many fewer than the former. I also didn’t think that Clears could enter into anyone. Most people indulged in their vices and clung to their virtues based on their responses to temptation and conflict, not because some Other within them drove their behavior. My guess was that when you descended to a certain depth of depravity, the Fogs could smell you as a hound, catching a murderer’s spoor, could track the criminal through forest, field, and moor.

  Having seen Ryan Telford in fevered pursuit of Gwyneth in the library and having made an effort to clean up the wreckage that he left behind in her apartment, I suspected that a Fog had climbed aboard him years earlier and was delighted to be traveling in his company.

  Through sheeting snow, we cruised a block of a cross street that once had been lined with five- and six-story apartment buildings, a few of which still served that residential purpose. Others had been converted to low-rent offices for a series of fledgling or declining businesses, reminding me of the buildings in which private detectives had their offices in noir novels, and the ground floors were occupied by gin joints, tattoo parlors, and specialty shops dealing in narrow lines of merchandise like vinyl records, psychedelic-era memorabilia, and taxidermy.

  At a narrow brown-brick five-story, where the street level had been converted into a garage, Gwyneth said, “Here we are.”

  With a remote control, she disarmed the alarm system and put up the segmented rolling door. As soon as the back end of the Land Rover cleared the threshold, she lowered the big door again, watching in the rearview and side mirrors until it clunked into place, perhaps concerned that someone might slip in behind us.

  When I got out of the vehicle, powdery snow slid off the door onto the concrete. The garage was cold, dimly lighted by an automatic ceiling lamp. The only smell was the faint astringency of lingering exhaust fumes.

  Gwyneth indicated stairs behind a locked steel door, though she used the elevator, which could be summoned not by a call button, but only by a key.

  On the floor of the elevator car, just past the tracks in which the doors rolled, were the words in an unknown alphabet that she had printed on other thresholds. I had asked about them before, and she had avoided an answer. I didn’t ask about them again.

  As the car rose from the garage on what I thought must be a hydraulic ram, I faced the floor, to avoid being revealed by the fluorescent lights behind the ceiling grid.

  She said, “Not even Teague Hanlon knows about this place. Daddy set up a trust in the Cayman Islands to buy it. The trust pays the taxes and utilities. It’s my emergency bolt-hole.”

  “In case of what?”

  “In case of anything. Right now, in case of Ryan Telford. If he found one of my other eight apartments, he’ll find them all, because all of those are linked through the domestic trust that owns them.”

  “Your father set all this up by the time you were thirteen?”

  “I think he had a premonition or something, I mean that he wouldn’t live long. Though he didn’t expect to be murdered—either by honey or otherwise.”

  We were going to the fifth floor at the top of the building.

  I asked, “What’s on floors two, three, and four?”

  “Nothing. You might not have noticed, but the windows on the first four floors have been bricked shut. This is now designated a warehouse, but nothing’s stored on those levels.”

  The elevator opened, revealing a vestibule. The formidable steel door between that small space and the rest of the apartment could be unlocked only by entering a four-digit code and the star sign into a keypad.

  I said, “Such heavy security.”

  “I’m embarrassed to tell you, but Daddy called me a priceless treasure. This is my vault.”

  In the living room, she sw
itched on a lamp and then went to set out candles, in the light of which I would be more comfortable. The room was nearly as minimally furnished as the one in the apartment where we had eaten scrambled eggs and brioche, except that this one contained a grand piano.

  At the wall of windows, I discovered three Clears on the roofs of the two buildings across the street, a woman and two men, glowing softly. The falling snow, all of it vaguely luminous as it reflected the ambient light of the city, was brighter in their vicinity, but it appeared to pass through them, and it wove no lace mantillas in their hair. One of the men gazed into the sky, and the other two peered down into the street along which we had recently arrived.

  The heavens offered nothing but the sea of snow. In the street, on the farther sidewalk, a man bent into the wind, two lengths of his long scarf trailing behind him as if he were a walking weather vane. Also trailing behind him on a leash was a German shepherd, judging by its deep chest, straight back, and sloping hindquarters.

  As they passed out of shadow and under a lamppost, the shepherd raised its bowed head and turned its face out of the wind-driven snow to look up as if suddenly aware of me at the window high above, its eyes radiant in the lamplight. I didn’t step back from the glass. The Fogs may take tenancy in bad people and sleep dreaming in certain objects, but I have reason to trust dogs.

  In the living room behind me, Gwyneth finished strategically placing candles in ruby-glass cups and turned off the lamp.

  She said, “I’ve put a glass of pinot grigio on a coaster on the piano. You do drink wine?”

  Turning away from the window, I said, “Father and I would from time to time have a glass or even two.”

  “I want to hear all about your father.”

  Not ready to open that door yet, I said, “And I want to hear all about you.”

  “There’s not that much to me.”

  The most that I could clearly see of her in the lambent ruby glow of isolated votives was her right hand as it gripped a wineglass, in the bowl of which glimmered the reflection of a nearby flame.