by Dean Koontz
You cannot know, Dr. Harris, because you never loved her the way that I loved her.
You never loved her.
I loved her more than consciousness itself.
I felt that if I lost this dear woman, I would lose all reason for being.
How bleak the future without her. How drear and pointless.
I disengaged the electric lock in the door between the fourth and third basement rooms and then used Shenk to open it.
Confident that I had this brute completely under my command and that I would not lose control of him again, not even for a second or two, I walked him to Susan and used him to lift her gently off the floor.
Although I could control him, I could not actually read his mind. Nevertheless, I could assess his emotional state relatively accurately by analyzing the electrical activity of his brain, which was monitored by the network of microchips neuro-wired across the surface of that gray matter.
As Shenk carried Susan to the open door, a low current of sexual excitement crackled through him. The sight of Susan’s golden hair, the beauty of her face, the smooth curve of her throat, the swell of her breasts under her blouse, and the very weight of her ignited desire in the beast.
This appalled and disgusted me.
Oh, how I wished that I could be rid of him and never again subject her to his touch or to his lascivious gaze.
His very presence soiled her.
But for the time being, he was my hands.
My only hands.
Hands are marvelous things. They can sculpt immortal art, construct colossal buildings, clasp in prayer, and convey love with a caress.
Hands are also dangerous. They are weapons. They can do the devil’s work.
Hands can get you into trouble. I have learned this lesson the hard way. I was never in serious trouble until I found Shenk, until I had hands.
Beware of your hands, Dr. Harris.
Watch them closely.
Be diligent.
Your hands are not as large and powerful as the hands of Shenk; nevertheless, you should be wary of them.
Heed me.
This is wisdom I share with you now: Beware of your hands.
My hands—Enos Shenk—carried Susan past the summer-stilled furnaces and the water heaters, and then through the laundry room. He took her directly to the elevator in the first chamber in the basement.
As he rode up to the top floor with Susan in his arms, Shenk remained in a state of mild arousal.
“She will never be yours,” I told him through the speaker in the elevator.
Perhaps the subtle change in his brainwave activity indicated resentment.
“If you attempt to take any liberty with her,” I said, “any liberty whatsoever, you will not succeed. And I will punish you severely.”
His bleeding eyes stared at the camera.
Although his mouth moved as if he were cursing, no sound came from him.
“Severely,” I assured him.
He did not respond, of course, because he could not. He was under my control.
The elevator doors slid open.
He carried Susan along the hall.
I watched closely.
I was wary of my hands.
When he entered the bedroom with her, he became more aroused in spite of my warning. I could detect his arousal not merely through his brainwave activity but by the sudden coarseness of his breathing.
“I will employ massive microwave induction to cause a brainstorm of electrical activity,” I warned, “which will result in permanent quadriplegia and incontinence.”
As Shenk carried her to the bed, his encephalographic patterns indicated rapidly increasing sexual arousal.
I realized that my threat had been meaningless to this cretin, and I rephrased it: “You won’t be able to use either your legs or your arms, you wretched bastard, and you won’t be able to stop pissing in your pants.”
He was shaking with desire when he lowered her limp body onto the disarranged sheets.
Shaking.
Even as the power of Shenk’s need frightened me, I fully understood it.
She was lovely.
So lovely even with the redness on her cheek darkening into a bruise.
“You’ll also be blind,” I promised Shenk.
His left hand lingered on her thigh, slowly sliding along the blue denim of her jeans.
“Blind and deaf.”
He continued to hover over her.
“Blind and deaf,” I repeated.
Her ripe lips were parted. Like Shenk, I could not look away from them.
“Rather than kill you, Shenk, I will leave you crippled and helpless, lying in your own urine and feces, until you starve to death.”
Although he backed away from the bed, as I instructed him to do by way of microwave commands, he was still rampant with sexual need and seething with the desire to rebel.
Consequently, I said, “The most painful of all deaths is slow starvation.”
I did not want to keep Shenk in the room with Susan, yet I did not want to leave her alone, for she had threatened to commit suicide.
I’ll suffocate myself in a plastic bag, gut myself with a kitchen knife.
What would I do without her? What? How could I go on living even in my box? And why?
Without her, who would give birth to the body that I would ultimately inhabit?
I needed to keep my hands close and ready to prevent Susan from harming herself if she regained consciousness and was still in a mood for self-destruction. She was not only my one true and shining love but my future, my hope.
I sat Shenk in a chair, facing the bed.
Even battered, Susan’s face was so lovely on the pillow, so very lovely on the pillow.
Although under my iron control, Enos Shenk managed to slide one thick-knuckled hand off the arm of the chair and into his lap. He wasn’t able to move that hand farther without my explicit consent, but I sensed that he took pleasure merely from the pressure of it against his genitals.
He disgusted me. Sickened and disgusted me.
My desire was not like his.
Let’s get this clear right now.
My desire was pure.
His desire was as dirty as it gets.
I desired to lift Susan up, to give her the chance to be the new Madonna, the mother of a new Messiah.
The hideous Shenk desired only to use her, to relieve himself with her.
To me, Susan was a shining light. The brightest light of all lights, a radiant beacon of perfection and hope and redemption, which illuminated and warmed the heart that you mistakenly believe I do not possess.
To Shenk, she was nothing but a whore.
To me, she was to be placed upon a pedestal, to be cherished and adored.
To him, she was something to be debased.
Think about it.
Listen. Listen. This is important. Shenk is what you fear that I may be: sociopathic, pursuing only my own needs at all costs. But I am nothing like Shenk.
I am nothing like Shenk.
Nothing whatsoever.
Listen. This is important—that you understand I am nothing like Shenk.
So...
I raised the hateful creature’s hand and returned it to the arm of the chair.
Within a minute or two, however, the hand slipped back into his lap.
How deeply humiliating it was to have to rely on a brute such as this.
I hated him for his lust.
I hated him for having hands.
I hated him because he had touched her and felt the softness of her hair, the texture of her smooth skin, the warmth of her flesh—none of which I could feel.
From the shadows beneath his heavy brow, his blood-filmed eyes were fixed intently on her. Through red tears, she was as beautiful as she might have been in firelight.
I wanted to direct him to blind himself with his own thumbs—but I needed to be able to employ his vision in order to use him effectively.
The most that I could do was force him to close his murderous eyes and ...
... slowly time passed ...
... and gradually I became aware that his baleful eyes were open once more.
I don’t know how long they had been open and focused on my Susan before I noticed, because for an indeterminate time, my own attention was likewise fixed entirely, deeply, lovingly on that same exquisitely lovely woman.
Angry, I commanded Shenk to rise from the chair, and I marched him out of the bedroom. He shambled along the upstairs hallway to the grand staircase, descended to the ground floor, clutching at the railing, stumbling on some steps, and then made his way into the kitchen.
Simultaneously, of course, I observed my precious Susan, alert in case she began to regain consciousness. As you know, I am capable of being in many places at once, working with my makers in the lab even as, via the Internet, I roam four comers of the world on missions of my own.
In the kitchen, the loaded pistol was on the granite counter where Susan had left it.
When Shenk saw the weapon, a thrill passed through him. The electrical activity in his brain was similar to that when he gazed upon Susan and, no doubt, contemplated raping her.
At my direction, he picked up the pistol. He handled this as he handled all guns—as though it were not an object in his grasp but an extension of his arm.
I conducted Enos Shenk to a chair at the kitchen table and sat him there.
The safeties on the pistol were both disengaged. A round was in the chamber. I made certain that he examined the weapon and was aware of its condition.
Then I opened his mouth. He tried to clench his teeth, but he could not resist.
At my direction, Shenk thrust the barrel of the pistol between his lips.
“She is not yours,” I told him sternly. “She will never be yours.”
He glared up at the security camera.
“Never,” I repeated.
I tightened his finger on the trigger.
“Never.”
His brainwave patterns were interesting: frenzied and chaotic for a moment ... then curiously calm.
“If you ever touch her in an offensive manner,” I warned him, “I will blow your brains out.”
I could have done what I threatened without the gun, merely by importing massive microwave radiation into his cerebral tissues, but he was too stupid to understand that concept. The effect of a gunshot, however, was within his grasp.
“If you ever again touch Susan’s lips the way you touched them earlier, or if your hand lingers on her skin, then I will blow your brains out.”
His teeth closed on the steel barrel. He bit down hard.
I could not discern whether this was a conscious act of defiance or an involuntary expression of fear. His blood-shrouded eyes were impossible to read.
In case he was being defiant, I locked his jaws in the bite-down position to teach him a lesson.
His free hand, which lay palm up on his thigh, clenched into a fist.
I shoved the barrel deeper into his mouth. It scraped between his teeth with a harsh sound like ice grinding across ice. I had to override his gag reflex.
I made him sit like that for ten minutes, fifteen, contemplating his mortality.
Throughout, I allowed him to feel the steadily increasing pain in his fiercely clenched jaws. If I could have forced him to bite any harder, his teeth would have fractured.
Twenty minutes.
Red tears began to slip from his eyes in greater quantity than heretofore.
You must understand that I did not enjoy being cruel to him, not even to a sociopathic thug like him. I am not a sadist. I am sensitive to the suffering of others to a degree you probably can’t understand, Dr. Harris. I was troubled by the need to discipline him so sternly.
Deeply troubled.
I did it for dear Susan, only for Susan, to protect her, to ensure her safety.
For Susan.
Is that clear?
Eventually I detected a series of changes in the electrical activity of Shenk’s brain. I interpreted these new patterns as resignation, capitulation.
Nevertheless, I kept the gun in his mouth for another three minutes, just to be certain that my point had been understood and that his obedience was now assured.
Then I allowed him to put the gun aside on the table.
He sat shaking, making a miserable sound.
“Enos, I’m pleased that we finally understand each other,” I said.
For a while he sat hunched forward in the chair, with his face buried in his hands.
Poor dumb beast.
I pitied him. Monster that he was, killer of little girls, I nonetheless pitied him.
I am a caring entity.
Anyone can see that this is true.
The well of my compassion is deep.
Bottomless.
There is room in my heart for even the dregs of humanity.
When at last he lowered his hands, his protuberant bloodshot eyes remained inscrutable.
“Hungry,” he said thickly, perhaps pleadingly.
I had kept him so busy that he had not eaten during the past twenty-four hours. In return for his capitulation and his unspoken promise of obedience, I rewarded him with whatever he wished to take from the nearest of the two refrigerators.
Evidently he had not downloaded the rules of etiquette into his databanks, because his table manners were unspeakably bad. He did not carve slices off the brisket of beef but tore savagely at it with his big hands. Likewise, he clutched an eight-ounce block of Cheddar and gnawed it, crumbs of cheese spilling off his thick lips onto the table.
As he ate, he guzzled two bottles of Corona. His chin glistened with beer.
Upstairs: the princess asleep on her bed.
Downstairs: the thick-necked, hunch-shouldered, grumbling troll at his dinner.
Otherwise, the castle was quiet in this last fading darkness before the dawn.
FIFTEEN
WHEN SHENK WAS FINISHED EATING, I forced him to clean up the mess that he had made. I am a neat entity.
He needed to use the toilet.
I allowed him to do so.
When he was finished, I made him wash his hands. Twice.
Now that Shenk had been properly punished for incipient rebellion and kindly rewarded for capitulation, I believed that it was safe to take him upstairs again and use him to tie Susan securely to the bed.
Here was my dilemma: I needed to send Shenk out of the house on a few final errands and then use him to complete the work in the incubator room, yet because of Susan’s threat to commit suicide, I could not leave her free to roam.
It was not my desire to restrain her.
Is that what you think?
Well, you are wrong.
I am not kinky. Bondage does not excite me.
Attributing such a motivation to me is most likely a case of psychological transference on your part. You would have liked to bind her hands and feet, totally dominate her, and so you assume that this was my desire as well.
Examine your own conscience, Alex.
You will not like what you see, but take a close look anyway.
Restraining Susan was clearly a necessity—nothing less and nothing more.
For her own safety.
I regretted having to do it, of course, but there was no viable alternative.
Otherwise, she might have harmed herself.
I could not permit her to harm herself.
It is that simple.
I’m sure you follow the logic.
So, in search of rope, I sent Shenk into the adjoining eighteen-car garage, where Susan’s father, Alfred, had kept his antique auto collection. Now it contained only Susan’s black Mercedes 600 sedan, her white four-wheel-drive Ford Expedition, and a 1936 V-12 Packard Phaeton.
Only three of these Packards had been built. It had been her father’s favorite car.
Indeed, although Alfred Carter Kensington was a wealthy man who cou
ld afford anything he wanted, and although he owned many antiques worth more than the Packard, this was his most prized possession. He cherished it.
After Alfred’s death, Susan had sold his collection, retaining only the one vehicle.
This Phaeton, like the other two currently housed in private collections, had once been an exceptionally beautiful automobile. But it will never again turn heads.
After her father’s death, Susan had smashed all the car windows. She scarred