by Dean Koontz
I had oranges and tea for breakfast, which helped my headache.
Outside, the city crews had finished cleaning up the snow. The streets were bare, but the buildings and trees were smothered with whiteness. Fences became delicate laceworks. Trees and shrubs were conglomerations of icicles welded together by a frost-fingered artist. A bitter wind swept over everything, stirring the snow, whipping it against the neat houses, the sides of hovercars, and up my nose.
It was as if Nature, via the snowstorm, had tried to reclaim what had once been hers but was now lost to her forever.
Clouds, heavy and gray, betrayed the advent of yet another storm. A low flock of birds streaked north, some kind of geese or other. Their calls were long and cold.
I passed by the broken store window where the howler had lain on its side the night before. It had been removed.
There were no police around.
I passed by a church which had burned sometime after I had returned from the AC complex. Its black skeleton seemed leeringly evil.
At AC, the hex signs were on the walls, the lights were dimmed, the machines stood sentinel, and Child was tranced.
"You're late," Morsfagen said. His fists were drawn tightly together. I wondered if he had opened his hands at all since he had stalked out of the room last night.
"You don't have to pay me for the first five minutes," I said. I smiled the famous smile.
It didn't cheer him up much.
I slid into the chair opposite Child and looked him over. I don't know what I expected to have changed.
Perhaps it seemed too much to believe that he could go to bed at night and get up in the morning, still in that same condition. It was as if some healing process had to be underway. But, if anything, he looked more wrinkled and decaying than before.
Harry was there. He had worked a third of the Times crossword, in ink as he always does, so he must have been there for some while. Like an old woman coming early to mass. "You sure?" he asked me.
"Quite," I said. And I was immediately sorry for having cut him so short. It was the atmosphere of the place, so damned military. And it was Morsfagen. Like Herodtrying to destroy the Child. I was the assassin sent out. And whether my knife was an intellectual or a physical one made no difference, really.
I was on edge for another reason; there was a certain dinner guest this evening...
This time I parachuted through the emptiness of his consciousness, no flailing, ready for the drop that awaited me... ... Labyrinth...
The walls were hung with cobwebs, and the floor was strewn with dirt and bones. The walls were multi-fluted, polished here, rugged here, but a uniform gray everywhere. Far down there, somewhere in the nova-like center of the mind was the Id. It gave out the same, nearly unbearable whine that all Ids do. And somewhere above, in the blackness and the perfect quietude, was the area where the conscious mind should have been. It was clear that the mind of a super-genius was strangely unhuman.
Most minds think in disconnected pictures, flittering arrays of scenes and snatches of the past, but Child's mind created an entire world of its own, a realism within his mind, an analogue that I could explore like the actual terrain of some lost land.
There was a clacking of hooves, and from the source of light at the end of the tunnel came the outline in smoke, then the form in flesh of a Minotaur, nut-brown skin and all textures of black hair, eyes gleaming, steam caught in the large ovals of the nostrils.
"Get out!"
I mean no harm.
"Get out, Simeon."
There was a blue field of sparks crackling above his head, and psychic energies shot thin sporadic flames from his nostrils, the steam to hang there afterwards.
"Leave a monster his only privacy!"
I too am a monster.
"Look at your face, Monster. It is not wrinkled like a dried fig; it is not old beyond its years with seeing; it is not caked with the dust of unlived centuries. You pass for human in your world. You pass. At least, you pass."
Child, listen to me. I amHe charged and grasped at me with hoof-hands. I fashioned a sword from my own fields of thought and smashed him broadside on the head.
The sound rang in the stone corridors.
My arm reverberated with the force of the blow.
And he was gone, a vapor in the darkness, a phantom.
Holding the green glow of the weapon, I advanced slowly down the twisting halls toward the inner part of him, where his theories would bubble, where thoughts would run in molten rivers. I came out, finally, on an earthen shelf above a yawning pit. Far below, eternities away, drifting and glowing, was a circular mass, and the heat it threw into my face was great.
From here had come the Minotaur. From here came everything.
I reached out and grasped for anything, a subcurrent, a cracked image, the shell of a daydream, and I caught a Hate River ebbing and flowing.
HATE, HATE, HATE HATEHATEHATEHATE-HA-TE-HATEHATE
HATE... Somewhere in the middle of it, a two-headed thing swam, cutting the foul waters with a viciously spined neck. I caught the "T" in HATE and traced it along the currents, searching. T leads ToThumb and a suckling mouTh... and The sucking mouTh suddenly To a brown nipple and a moTher's breasT... and again The T dominaTed... and I allowed The river To carry me ineviTably on Toward Theorem...
Theory Through Tees... Through Thousand Times Tedious Tiring... Ten Times one Times Two To SubOughT-seven in drepshler Tubes now being used...
The flood was too fast. I could see the theory, but I could not divert it fast enough toward the ocean in the distance where a waterspout whirled (taking the thoughts to the little bit of conscious mind he possessed). The thoughts that were now being spoken in dust whispers in a room far away-the thoughts being recorded by serious men with serious faces who listened, no doubt, quite seriously.
Then the drug must have finally taken hold of him, or I would have been swallowed alive by a mind construct and destroyed in his cauldron of insanity. The two-headed beast had swum near without drawing my notice. It caught my eye, now, as it moved swiftly, its mouth gaping, a giant cave that drooled...
I lifted my sword as it raised its huge head above me to strike. Then there was a sudden, jerky slip like an old movie reel that has been spliced, and everything went into slow motion. It was like an underwater ballet. At that rate, it would have taken an hour for the beast's jaws to reach me and snap me up, and I slew him as his red eyes glistened and as a strange THRIDDLE THRIDDLE came out of his throat. Or hers.
Turning back toward the river, I directed thoughts toward the slow-moving waterspout until so much time had passed that I thought I had better get out before I lost my own character identity.
I turned away from the screaming Id pit.
I walked back the gray tunnel.
Cobwebs brushed my face.
But there were stairs leading upward this time...
VI
There were candles in her green eyes, reflections of those on the table. The same flickering amber glinted from her hair, made the smooth flesh of her one bared shoulder glow with health. Her sequined, well-cut, Oriental something-or-other was dazzling.
"I'd want nothing held back," she said over the remains of two Cornish game hens of that special diminutive and fleshy mutant strain. Bones and gravy contrasted with her loveliness.
"Nothing," I assured her for the hundredth time.
We sipped the wine, but I felt giddy without it, and her flesh did not need any more glow than it had.
"All your feelings toward Artificial Creation, toward the FBI, and all the others who have used you."
"That could be a blunt book."
"Backing down?"
"Just making an observation."
"Anything watered down would be a flop. Believe me, sensationalism sells a book."
I remembered some passages from Bodies in Darkness and smiled and drank my wine and felt my face grow red.
The tape changed. The colored lights playing on t
he walls to either side ceased. Then a recording of Scheherazade came on, and the walls took on color again, spattered with orange, showered over with yellow, bursting with crimson along the baseboard.
She took her wine to the Plexiglas view deck that bubbled out from the east wall of the living room. She stood on the transparent floor of it, as if suspended above the side of the pine-covered mountainside. My mountain thrusts downward into a jumble of shattered rocks, falls off from there into the sea. White waves crashed against the stones below, and a dim echo of the ocean's agony reached us.
I walked after her, forcing myself to be calm, and stood next to her.
The moon was high and full and scarred. My guest was quite beautiful, flushed with its light, but she did not seem altogether real. A woman out of Poe or modeling herself after one.
"I keep thinking of Dragonfly," she said, her eyes up there where it might be.
Toward the horizon a cloud drifted, gray against the purity of the sky. The storm had failed to materialize.
"Why do people enjoy ugliness so much?" she asked. It was such an abrupt change of pace that I was not able to cope with it. I shuffled my feet and smacked my lips at the wine I still held, and tried to think why people did that. She went on without me. "There's all this beauty, and they try to make it ugly. They like ugly movies, ugly books, ugly news."
By then, I was functioning. "Perhaps, in reading about the worst parts of life, the terrible parts of reality seem more tame by contrast, more easily lived with."
Her lips puckered, as if of their own volition, two separate strips of flesh, entities not a part of her body.
"Truthfully now," she said, "what do you think of my books? You say you've read them."
I was thrown off balance. I had known a couple other writers, and I had never known exactly where criticism should stop and praise begin, exactly how much negative vibration they could take about their work. The last thing I wanted to do was insult or enrage this woman. "Well ..."
"Truthfully," she said, signaling me that maybe she was tougher than the other artists I knew.
"You mean... the ugliness in them?"
"Yes. Exactly." She turned back to the ocean. "I tried writing beautiful books about sex. I gave that up. It's the ugliness that sells." She shrugged her shoulders. Amber hair danced. "One must eat, mustn't one?" Another shrug.
Another amber jitterbug.
I was overly aware of the tightness of her bodice.
With the soft light on her face, the vista of the pines and ocean framing her refined beauty with their own rugged majesty, I wanted to grasp her, to draw her to me, hold her, kiss her. At the same moment I felt myself gripped by that desire, I experienced a counter-emotion, a disgust and a deep fear. It was connected to The Fear, to the wombs, to the first moments of my conscious life when I first knew what I was-and what I wasn't.
I brought a hand to that bare shoulder, felt her flesh, resilient and warm, scintillating beneath my fingers.
I took my hand away, breathless and confused.
Turning from her, I began to pace the room, holding my wine glass so tightly that it must surely soon snap in my fingers. I examined the original oil paintings on the walls, as if I were looking for something, though I could not guess what. They had hung here so long that I knew their every detail. There was nothing new in them, not for me.
What did I fear? What about her terrified me so much that I could not bring myself to complete the advance I had made, to draw fingers downwards from her shoulder, to touch the thinly sheathed roundness of her breasts? Was it only what the computerized psychiatrist in the den told me it was-? Was it only that I feared making too many contacts in the world and then discovering that I did not belong? It seemed to me that it ran deeper than that, though I could not find any other motivations that made as much sense.
She had turned away from the window, and she looked at me curiously. I suppose I looked like a caged animal, prowling that room, sniffing the brilliant canvases for solace and finding no solace.
I turned and looked at her. But when I tried to speak, there was nothing to say. I thought, perhaps, in some way I could never understand, she realized the nature of my problem more completely than I did.
She crossed the room, her body doing wonderful things to the clinging black fabric of her dress, and placed a soft hand upon my lips. "It's getting late," she said.
She took her hand away.
"When do we start?" I asked.
"Tomorrow. And we tape all the interviews."
"Tomorrow, then," I said.
"Tomorrow, then."
And she was gone in a whirlwind of efficiency that left me standing with my drink in my hand and my "goodbye" in my mouth like a lump of used lard.
I went to bed to dream... ... and I woke up needing comfort, a strange comfort that I could find but one place:
IT IS FOUR O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING, the metal headshrinker said as it swallowed me and thrust its ethereal fingers into the pudding of my brain.
I know.
RELAX AND TALK.
What should I say? Tell me what it is that I could-that I should say to you.
START WITH A DREAM IF YOU'VE HAD ONE.
I always have one.
THEN START.
There are storm clouds in the sky: dark, thick, mysterious. There is no place where the sun shows. Below all this piling grayness, beneath the scudding harbingers of rain, there is a hill, a large and rounded hill formed by Nature into a grotesque, gnarled lump, a blemish upon the face of the earth. There are people... people,..
GO ON. The same old urging-go on, go on, go on...
There are people... and there is a cross... a wooden cross...
FOCUS ON THE CROSS. WHAT DO YOU SEE THERE?
Me.
YES?
Nailed. Blood. Much blood. White, festered wounds dribbling rusty blood around the edges of little holes, neat little holes like the cavities left when you rip the buttons from the faces of rag dolls... Rusty blood there...
WHO IS IN THE CROWD?
Harry. I see Harry there. He's weeping.
WHY IS HE WEEPING?
For me.
WHO ELSE?
I'm thirsty.
WHO ELSE?
I'm thirsty. Very thirsty.
THEY WILL GIVE YOU WATER SOON. THEY
WILL SLAKE YOUR THIRST. NOW WHO ELSE IS
IN THE CROWD?
Morsfagen is casting dice for my cloak. And over there, beyond him, is a pregnant woman who is...
GO ON, PLEASE
.
Please this time?
GO ON.
I look at her belly... and... there... is Child. He is weeping too. But he is not weeping for the same reason that Harry is. He isn't weeping for me. It's because he wants up there where I am. He wants out of that woman's womb and up on the cross, nailed and bleeding and thirsty and dying. He wants it so bad that he writhes inside her in fury, wanting out...
DO YOU KNOW WHY HE WANTS OUT?
For the same reason I am happy to be there.
YOU ENJOY BEING ON THE CROSS?
Yes.
WHY?
WHY?
I don't know.
DO YOU SEE ANYONE ELSE IN THE CROWD?
No! Oh, no! Oh, my God, my God, my God!
WHAT IS IT? WHAT IS THE MATTER?
No! You'll spoil it/me! I can't! Don't you see my station, my purpose, my nature? It must be my purpose! I haven't got another one, there isn't another one, this must be it! Get away from me! No!
WHAT IS IT? WHO DO YOU SEE?
Melinda. Floating, naked. Floating toward the cross. No!
Stay away! You'll spoil my purpose!
STOP IT.
Help! Help me! Don't let her touch me! Forgod'ssakeshe'snaked... naked... nakednakednakednaked!
STOP DREAMING! WAKE! LISTEN TO ME; HOLD
YOURSELF TOGETHER AND LISTEN TO ME.
IQUIET. COMPOSE YOURSELF. I WILL INTERPRET YOUR DREAM. THOUGH I MUST SA
Y THAT
THIS THROWS A NEW LIGHT ON YOUR PSYCHE.
DO YOU SEE WHY YOU ARE THE ONE ON THE
CROSS? NO NEED FOR AN ANSWER, PURELY
RHETORICAL. YOU SEE YOURSELF AS CHRISTWHAT A NEW DEVELOPMENT!-MORE PRECISELY, AS THE INCARNATION OF CHRIST AS REPRESENTED BY THE SECOND COMING. THERE
ARE PARALLELS, OF COURSE, BETWEEN YOUR
CONDITION AND THE STORY OF THE CHRIST.
YOU COULD SAY THAT YOUR OWN BIRTH WAS A
VIRGIN BIRTH, FOR EXAMPLE. YOU WERE NOT
CONCEIVED BY FLESH IN FLESH AND THE SPILLING OF SEED, BUT BY THE GENETIC ENGINEERS
AND THE COMPLEX CYBERNETIC ARTIFICIAL
WOMBS. AND THERE ARE YOUR SUPER-HUMAN
POWERS. PERHAPS THEY ARE NOT AS ALL-ENCOMPASSING AS THOSE OF THE CHRIST MYTH,
BUT THEY ARE SUFFICIENTLY STRONG TO NURTURE YOUR DELUSIONS.
YOU WERE NOT ABLE TO SEE A PURPOSE TO
YOUR LIFE, SO YOU CHOSE TO CAST YOURSELF
IN THE ROLE OF A SAVIOUR. IT SERVES A DOUBLE PURPOSE: FIRST, IT REINFORCES ALL YOUR
CHRISTIAN MORES, ALL THE THINGS THEY
THOUGHT YOU SHOULD BELIEVE AS YOU WERE
RAISED (THOUGH THEY WERE AS INTERESTED
IN SUPPLYING YOU WITH MORES THAT WOULD