Koontz, Dean - A Darkness In My Soul

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A Darkness in my Soul
by Dean R. Koontz
Version 1.0
A #bw release
ONE
Divinity Destroyed...
I
For a long while, I wondered if Dragonfly was still in
the heavens and whether the Spheres of Plague still floated
in airlessness, blind eyes watchful. I wondered whether
men still looked to the stars with trepidation and whether
the skies yet bore the cancerous seed of mankind. There
was no way for me to find out, for I lived in Hell during
those days, where news of the living gained precious little
circulation.
I was a digger into minds, a head-tripper. I esped. I
found secrets, knew lies, and reported all these things for
a price. I esped. Some questions were never meant to be
answered; some parts of a man's mind were never intended
for scrutiny. Yet our curiosity is, at the same time, our
greatest virtue and our most serious weakness. I had
within my mind the power to satisfy any curiosity which
tickled me. I esped; I found; I knew. And then there was
a darkness in my soul, darkness unmatched by the depths
of space that lay lightless between the galaxies, an ebony
ache without parallel.
It started with a nerve-jangling ring of the telephone, a
mundane enough beginning.
I put down the book I was reading and lifted the
receiver and said, impatiently perhaps, "Hello?"
"Simeon?" the distant voice asked. He pronounced it
correctly—Sim-ee-on.
It was Harry Kelly, sounding bedraggled and bewildered,
two things he never was. I recognized his voice
because it had been—in years past—the only sound of
sanity and understanding in a world of wildly gabbling
self-seekers and power-mongers. I esped out and saw him
standing in a room that was strange to me, nervously
drumming his fingers on the top of a simulated oak desk.
The desk was studded with a complex panel of controls,
three telephones, and three-dimensional television screens
for monitoring interoffice activity—the work space of
someone of more than a little importance.
"What is it, Harry?"
"Sim, I have another job for you. If you want it, that is.
You don't have to take it if you're already wrapped up in
something private."
He had long ago given up his legal practice to act as my
1
agent, and he could be counted on for at least one call a
week like this. Yet there was a hollow anxiety in his tone
which made me uncomfortable. I could have touched
deeper into his mind, stirred through the pudding of his
thoughts and discovered the trouble. But he was the one
person in the world I would not esp for purely personal
reasons. He had earned his sanctity, and he would never
have to worry about losing it.
"Why so nervous? What kind of job?"
"Plenty of money," he said. "Look, Sim, I know how
much you hate these tawdry little government contracts. If
you take this job, you're not going to need money for a
long while. You won't have to go around snooping
through a hundred government heads a week."
"Say no more," I said. Harry knew my habit of living
beyond my means. If he thought there was enough in this
to keep me living fat for some time to come, the buyer
had just purchased his merchandise. All of us have our
price. Mine just came a little steeper than most.
"I'm at the Artificial Creation complex. We'll expect
you in—say twenty minutes."
"I'm on my way." I dropped the phone into its cradle
and tried to pretend I was enthusiastic. But my stomach
belied my true feelings as it stung my chest with acidic,
roiling spasms. In the back of my mind, The Fear rose
and hung over me, watching with dinner-plate eyes,
breathing fire through black nostrils. The Artificial
Creation building: the womb, my womb, the first tides of
my life....
I almost crawled back into bed and almost said the hell
with it. The AC complex was the last place on Earth I
wanted to go, especially at night, when everything would
seem more sinister, when memories would play in brighter
colors. Two things kept me from the sheets: I truly did
not enjoy the loyalty checks I ran on government employees
to keep me in spending money, for I was not only
required to report traitors, but to delineate the abnormal
(as the government defined that) private practices and
beliefs of those I scanned, violating privacy in the most
insidious of fashions; secondly, I had just promised Harry
I would be there, and I couldn't find a single instance when
that mad Irishman had ever let me down.
I cursed the womb which had made me, beseeching the
gods to melt its plastic walls and short-circuit those miles
and miles of delicate copper wires.
I pulled on street clothes over pajamas, stepped into
overshoes and a heavy coat with fur lining, one of the
popular Nordic models. Without Harry Kelly, I would
most likely have been in prison at that moment—or in a
preventive detention apartment with federal plainclothes
2
guards standing watch at the doors and windows. Which is
only a more civilized way of saying the same thing: prison.
When the staff of Artificial Creation discovered my wild
talents in my childhood, the FBI attempted to "impound"
me so that I might be used as a "national resource" under
federal control for "the betterment of our great country and
the establishment of a tighter American defense perimeter."
It had been Harry Kelly who had cut through all that fancy
language to call it what it was—illegal and immoral imprisonment
of a free citizen. He fought the legal battle all
the way to nine old men in nine old chairs, where the case
was won. I was nine when we did that—twelve long years
ago.
It was snowing outside. The harsh lines of shrubbery,
trees, and curbs had been softened by three inches of
white. I had to scrape the windscreen of the hovercar,
which amused me and helped settle my nerves a bit. One
would imagine that, in 2004 A.D., Science could have
dreamed up something to make ice scrapers obsolete.
At the first red light, there was a gray police howler
overturned on the sidewalk, like a beached whale. Its
stubby nose had smashed through the display window of a
small clothing store, and the dome light was still swiveling.
A thin trail of exhaust fumes rose from the bent tailpipe,
curled upwards into the cold air. There were more than
twenty uniformed coppers positioned around the intersection,
though there seemed to be no present danger. The
snow was tramped and scuffed, as if there had been a
major conflagration, though the antagonists had disappeared.
I was motioned through by a stern-faced bull in a
fur-collared fatigue jacket, and I obeyed. None of them
looked in the mood to satisfy the curiosity of a passing
motorist, or even to let me pause long enough to scan their
minds and find the answer without their knowledge.
I arrived at the AC building and floated the car in for a
Marine attendant to park. As I slid out and he slid in, I
asked, "Know anything about the howler on Seventh?
Turned on its side and driven halfway into a store. Lot of
coppers."
He was a huge man with a blocky head and flat
features that looked almost painted on. When he wrinkled
his face in disgust, it looked as if someone had put an
eggbeater on his nose and whirled everything together.
"Peace criers," he said.
I couldn't see why he should bother lying to me, so I
didn't go through the bother of using my esp, which
requires some expenditure of energy. "I thought they were
finished," I said.
"So did everyone else," he said. Quite obviously, he
hated the peace criers, as did most men in uniform. "The
Congressional investigating committee proved the voluntary
army was still a good idea. We don't run the country
3
like those creeps say. Brother, I can sure tell you we
don't!" Then he slammed the door and took the car away
to park it while I punched for the elevator, stepped
through its open maw, and went up.
I made faces at the cameras which watched me, and
repeated two dirty limericks on the way to the lobby.
When the lift stopped and the doors opened, a second
Marine greeted me, requested that I hold my fingertips to
an identiplate to verify his visual check. I complied, was
approved, and followed him to another elevator in the
long bank. Again: up.
Too many floors to count later, we stepped into a
cream-walled corridor, paced almost to the end of it, and
went through a chocolate door that slid aside at the
officer's vocal command. Inside, there was a room of
alabaster walls with hex signs painted every five feet in
brilliant reds and oranges. There was a small and ugly
child sitting in a black leather chair, and four men standing
behind him, staring at me as if I were expected to say
something of monumental importance.
I didn't say anything at all.
The child looked up, his eyes and lips all but hidden by
the wrinkles of a century of life, by gray and gravelike
flesh. I tried to readjust my judgment, tried to visualize
him as a grandfather. But it was not so. He was a child.
There was the glint of babyhood close behind that ruined
countenance. His voice crackled like papyrus unrolled for
the first time in millennia, and he gripped the chair as the
words came, and he squinted his already squinted eyes,
and he said, "You're the one." It was an accusation.
"You're the one they sent for."
For the first time in many years, I was afraid. I was not
certain what terrified me, but it was a deep and relentless
uneasiness, far more threatening than The Fear which rose
in me most nights when I considered my origins and the
pocket of the plastic womb from which I came.
"You," the child said again.
"Who is he?" I asked the assembled military men.
No one spoke immediately. As if they wanted to be sure
the freak in the chair was finished.
He wasn't.
"I don't like you," he said. "You're going to be sorry
you came here. I'm going to see to that."
II
"That's the situation," Harry said, leaning back in his
4
chair for the first time since he had taken me aside to
explain the job. He was still nervous. His clear blue eyes
were having trouble staying with mine, and he sought
specks on the walls and scars on the furniture to draw his
attention.
The child-ancient's eyes, on the other hand, never left
me. They squinted like burning coals sparking beneath
rotted vegetation. I could feel the hatred smoldering
there, hatred not just for me (though there was surely
that), but for everyone, everything. There was no particle
of his world which did not draw the freak's contempt and
loathing. He, more so than I, was an outcast of the
wombs. Once again, the doctors who made their living
here and the congressmen who had supported the project
since its inception could gloat: "Artificial Creation is a
Benefit to the Nation." It had produced me. More than
eighteen years later, it had come up with this warped
super-genius who was no more than three years old but
who appeared to be a relic. Two successes in a quarter of
a century of operation.
For the government, that's a winner.
"I don't know if I can do it," I said at last.
"Why not?" asked the uniformed hulk the others called
General Morsfagen. He was a chiseled granite man with
exaggerated shoulders and a chest too large for anything
but tailored shirts. Wasp-waisted, with the small feet of a
boxer. Hands to bend iron bars in circus acts.
"I don't know what to expect. He has a different sort of
mind. Sure, I've esped army staff, the people who work
here at AC, FBI agents, the whole mess. And I've unerringly
turned over the traitors and potential security risks.
But this just doesn't scan like that."
"You don't have to do any sorting," Morsfagen
snapped, his thin lips making like a turtle bill. "I thought
this had been made clear. He can formulate theories in
areas as useful as physics and chemistry to others as
useless as theology. But each time we drag the damn thing
out of him, he leaves out some vital piece of it. We've
threatened the little freak. We've tried bribing him. The
trouble is, he has no fear or ambition." He had almost
said "tortured" for "threatened" but was a good enough
self-censor to change words without a pause. "You simply
go into his head and make sure he doesn't hold anything
back."
"How much did you say?" I asked.
"A hundred thousand poscreds an hour."
It pained him to say that.
"Double that," I said. For many men, the single hun-
5
dred thou was more than a year's salary in these time of
inflation.
"What? Absurd!"
He was breathing heavily, but the other generals didn't
even flinch. I esped each of them and discovered that,
among other things, the child had given them an almost
completed design for a faster-than-light engine which would
make star travel possible. For the rest of that theory alone,
a million an hour was not ridiculous. I got my two hundred
big ones with an option to demand more if the work
proved more demanding than I anticipated.
"Without your shyster, you'd be working for room and
board," Morsfagen said.
He had an ugly face.
"Without your brass medals, you'd be a street-gang
punk," I replied, smiling the famous Simeon Kelly smile.
He wanted to hit me.
His fists made flesh balls, and the knuckles nearly
pierced the skin—they protruded so harshly.
I laughed at him.
He couldn't risk it. He needed me too much.
The freak kid laughed too, doubling over in his chair
and slapping his flabby hands against his knees. It was the
most hideous laugh I had ever heard in my life. It spoke
of madness.
III
The lights had been dimmed. The machines had been
moved in and now stood watch, solemnly recording all
that transpired.
"The hex signs which you see on the walls are all part
of the pre-drug hypnosis which has just been completed.
After he's placed in a state of trance, we administer 250
cc's of Cinnamide, directly into his jugular." The whitesmocked
director of the medical team spoke with crisp,
pleasant directness, but as though he were discussing the
maintenance of one of his machines.
The child sat across from me. His eyes were dead, the
scintillating sparkle of intelligence gone from them, and
not replaced by any corresponding quality. Just gone. I
was less horrified by his face and no longer bothered by
the dry, decaying look of it. Still, my guts felt cold and my
chest ached with an indefinable pressure, as if something
were trying to burst free of me.
6
"What's his name?" I asked Morsfagen.
"He hasn't any."
"No?"
"No. We have his code name, as always. We don't need
more."
I looked back at the freak. And within my soul (some
churches deny me one; but then churches have been
denying people a lot of things for a lot of reasons, and the
world still turns), I knew that in all the far reaches of the
galaxy, to the ends of the larger universe, in the billions of
inhabited worlds that might be out there, no name existed
for the child. Simply: Child. With a capital.
A team of doctors administered the drug.
"Within the next five minutes," Morsfagen said. He had
both big hands fisted on the arms of his chair. It wasn't
anger now, merely a reaction to the air of tension that
overhung the room.
I nodded, looked at Harry who had demanded to be
there for this initial session. He was still nervous over the
confrontation of the monsters. I tried not to mirror his
unease. I turned back to Child and prepared myself for
the assault upon his mental sanctity.
Stepping easily over the threshold, I fell through the
blackness of his mind, flailing . . .
... and woke up to white faces with blurred black holes
where the eyes should have been.
They mumbled things in their alien language, and they
prodded me with cold instruments.
When my vision cleared, I could see it was a strange
triumvirate: Harry, Morsfagen, and some unnamed physician
who was taking my pulse and clucking his tongue
against his cheek like someone had told him doctors were
supposed to do when they couldn't think of anything
intelligent to say.
"You all right, Sim?" Harry asked.
Morsfagen pushed my lawyer/agent/father-figure out of
the way and thrust his bony face down at mine. I could see
hairs crinkling out of his flared nostrils. There were flecks
of spittle on his lips, as if he had been doing a lot of shouting
in rage. The dark blue of his close-shaved whiskers
seemed like needles waiting to thrust out of his tight pores.
"What happened? What's wrong? You don't get paid without
results."
"I wasn't prepared for what I found," I said. "Simple as
7
that. No need for hysterics."
"But you were yelling and screaming," Harry protested,
insinuating himself between the general and myself.
"Not to worry."
"What did you find that you didn't expect?" Morsfagen
asked. He was skeptical. I could have cared more, but not
less.
"He hasn't any conscious mind. It's a vast pit, and I fell
into it expecting solid ground. Evidently, all his thoughts,
or a great many of them, come from what we would
consider the subconscious."
Morsfagen stood away. "Then you can't reach him?"
"I didn't say that. Now that I know what's there and
what isn't, I'll be all right."
I struggled to a sitting position, reached out and stopped
the room from swaying. The hex signs settled onto the
walls where they belonged, and the light fixtures even
stopped whirling in erratic circles from wall to wall. I
looked at my watch with the picture of Elliot Gould on
the face, calculated the time, assumed a properly bland
expression, and said. "That'll be roughly a hundred thousand
poscreds. Put it on my earnings sheet, why don't
you?"
He sputtered. He fumed. He roared. He glowered. He
quoted the Government Rates for Employees. He quoted
the Employer's Rights Act of 1986, paragraph two,
subparagraph three. He fumed a bit more.
I watched, looking unshaken.
He pranced. He danced. He raved. He ranted. He
demanded to know what I had done to earn any pay whatsoever.
I didn't answer him. He finished ranting. Started
fuming again. In the end, he put it down in the book and
vouchered the payment before pounding on a table in utter
frustration and then leaving the room with a warning to be
on time the following day.
"Don't push your luck," Harry advised me later.
"Not my luck, but my weight," I said.
"He doesn't take to a subordinate position. He's a
bastard."
"I know. That's why I needle him."
"When did the masochism arise?"
"Not masochism—my well-known God-syndrome. I was
just passing one of my famous judgments."
8
"Look," he said, "you can quit."
"We both need the money. Especially me."
"Maybe there are other things more important than
money."
Someone pushed us aside as equipment was trundled
out of the hex-painted room.
"More important than money?"
"I've heard it said..."
"Not in this world. You've heard wrong. Nothing's
more important when the creditors come. Nothing's more
important when the choice is to live with cockroaches or
in splendor."
"Sometimes, I think you're too cynical," he said, giving
me one of those fatherly looks, something I inherited
along with his last name.
"What else?" I asked, buttoning my greatcoat.
"It's all because of what they tried to do to you. You
should forget that. Get out more. Meet people."
"I have. I don't like them."
"There's an old Irish legend which says——"
"Old Irish legends all say the same thing. Look, Harry,
aside from you, everyone tries to use me. They want me
to spy on their wives to see if they have been laying with
someone else. Or they want me to find hubby's mistress.
Or I get invited to their cocktail parties so that I can
perform parlor tricks for a batch of drunks. The world
made me cynical, Harry. And it keeps me that way. So, if
we're both wise, we'll just sit back and get rich off my
cynicism. Maybe if a psychiatrist made me happy-go-lucky
and at peace with myself, my talent would disappear."
Before he could reply, I left. When I closed the door
behind me, they were wheeling Child down the corridor.
His empty eyes stared fixedly at the softly colored ceiling.
Outside, the snow was still falling. Fairy gowns. Crystal
tears. Sugar from a celestial cake. I tried to come up with
all the pretty metaphors I could, maybe to prove I'm not
so cynical after all.
I slid into the hovercar, tipped the Marine as he slid
out the other side. I drove into the street, taking the small
curb too fast. White clouds whooshed up behind me and
obscured the AC building and everything else I put behind
me.
9
The book lay at my side, the dust jacket face down
because it had her picture on it. I didn't want to see
amber hair and smooth lips imitating a bow. It was a
picture that disgusted me. And intrigued me. I couldn't
understand the latter, so I pretended to more of the
former than I felt.
I turned on the radio and listened to the dull voice of the
newscaster casting his tidbits on the airwave waters with a
voice uniformly pleasant whether the topic was a cure for
cancer or the death of hundreds in a plane crash. "Peking
announced late today that it had developed a weapon
equal to the Spheres of Plague launched yesterday by the
Western Alliance ..." (Pa-changa, changa, sissss, sisss
pa-changa, the Latin music of another station added in
unconscious sardonic wit) "... According to Asian sources,
the Chinese weapon is a series of platforms . . ." (Sa-baba,
sa-baba, po-po-pachanga) ". . . above Earth's atmosphere,
capable of launching rockets containing a virulent mutant
strain of leprosy which can be distributed across seventeenmile-
wide swaths of territory ..." (Hemorrhoids really can
be dealt with in less than an hour at the Painless Clinic on
the West Side, another station assured me, though it faded
out before it would tell me how much less than an hour and
just how painless.) ". .. Members of the New Maoism said
today that they had assurances from . . ."
I turned it off.
No news is good news. Or, as the general populace of
that glorious year was wont to say: All news is bad news.
It seemed like that. The threat of war was so heavy on the
world that Atlas must certainly have had a terrible backache.
The 1980s and 1990s, with their general climate of
peace and good will made these last fourteen years of
tense brinksmanship all the more agonizing by comparison.
That was why the young peace criers were so militant.
They had never really known the years of peace, and
they lived with the conviction that those in power had
always been men of guns and destruction. Perhaps, if they
had been old enough to have experienced peace before the
cold war, their fiery idealism might have been metamorphosed
into despair, as with the rest of us. I was very
young in the last of the pre-war years, but I had been
reading since before I was two and spoke four languages
by the age of four. I was aware even then. It makes the
present chaos more maddening.
Besides the threat of plague, there was the super-nuclear
accident in Arizona which had claimed thirty-seven thousand
lives, a number too large to carry emotion with it.
And there were the Anderson Spoors which had riddled
half a state with disease before the Bio-Chem Warfare
people had been able to check their own stray experiment.
And, of course, there were the twisted things the AC labs
produced (their failures), which were sent away to rot in
unlighted rooms under the glossy heading of "perpetual
10
professional care." Anyway, I turned the radio off.
And thought about Child.
And knew I should never have taken the job.
And knew that I wouldn't quit
IV
At home, in the warmth of the den, with my books and
my paintings to protect me, I took the dust jacket off the
book so I wouldn't accidentally see her face, and I began
reading Lily. It was a mystery novel, and a mystery of a
novel. The prose was not spectacular, actually intended
for the average reader seeking a few hours of escape.
Still, I was fascinated. Through the chapters, between the
lines of marching black words, a face seen at a party weeks
before kept drifting through my mind. A face which I had
been fighting to forget. . ..
Amber hair, long and straight.
"See that woman? Over there? That's Marcus Aurelius.
Writes those semi-pornographic books, like Lily and
Bodies in Darkness, those."
Her face was sculpted, smooth planes and milky flesh.
Her eyes were green, wider than eyes should be, though
not the eyes of a mutant.
Her body was graceful, provocatively in vogue.
Her...
I ignored what he was saying about her, all the foul
things he suggested, and studied amber hair, cat's eyes,
fast fingers touching that hair, clasping a glass of gin,
jabbing the air for emphasis in conversation....
When I was finished with the book, I went and made
myself some Scotch and water. I am not a good bartender.
I drank it and pretended I was about sleepy enough for
bed. I stood on the patio, which is slung over the side of
the small mountain which I own, and I watched the snow.
I got cold and went inside. Undressing, I went to bed,
nestled down in the covers, and thought about ice floes
and blizzards and piling drifts, letting myself find sleep.
I said, "Damn!" and got up and got more Scotch and
went to the phone, where I should have gone as soon as I
finished the last page of the novel.
I could not understand the logic of what I was doing,
but there are times when the physical overrides the cerebral,
no matter what the proponents of civilized society
11
might say about it.
Punching out the numbers for directory assistance, I
asked for Marcus Aurelius' number. The operator refused
to give me her real name and number, but I esped out and
saw it as she looked at the directory in front of her:
MARCUS AURELIUS Or MELINDA THAUSER; 22-223-296787/
UNLISTED.
So I said sorry and hung up and dialed the number I
had just stolen.
"Hello?"
It was a competent, businesslike voice. Yet there was a
sultriness in it that could not be ignored.
"Miss Thauser?"
"Yes?"
I told her my name and said she would probably know
it and then sounded pleased when she did. It was all as if
someone were possessing me, directing my tongue against
the will of the screaming particle of me that demanded I
hang up, run away, hide.
"I've followed your exploits," she said. "In the papers."
"I've read your books."
She waited.
"I think it's time I had my biography done," I said.
"I've been approached before, but I've always been against
it. Maybe like the primitive tribesmen who feel a photograph
locks their soul away inside it. But with you, maybe
it would be different. I like your work."
There was a bit more said, and it ended with me and
with this: "Fine. Then I'll expect you here for dinner
tomorrow night at seven."
I had suggested escorting her to dinner somewhere, but
she had said that was not necessary. I insisted. She had
said that restaurants were too noisy to discuss business. In
the course of the floundering planning, I had mentioned
my cook. And now she was coming here.
I went out and swallowed half a glass of Scotch on the
rocks (as a change from the Scotch and water), which
solved the problems I had just acquired upon hanging the
phone on its hook: a dry mouth and a bad case of the
chills.
It was stupid. Why be so afraid of meeting a woman? I
had met quite famous and sophisticated ladies, wives of
12
men of state and some of them statesmen themselves.
Yes, I told myself. But they were different. They were not
young and beautiful. That was where the core of my terror
lay, though that seemed just as unfathomable as anything
else.
At two in the morning, unable to sleep, I got heavily
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