Dean R. Koontz - Down In The Darkness

VIP免费

2024-12-24 0 0 121.79KB 19 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

DOWN IN THE DARKNESS

Dean R. Koontz, 1986

DARKNESS DWELLS WITHIN EVEN THE BEST OF US. IN THE WORST OF us, darkness not

only dwells but reigns.

Although occasionally providing darkness with a habitat, I have never provided it with a kingdom. That's

what I prefer to believe. I think of myself as a basically good man: a hard worker, a loving and faithful

husband, a stern but doting father.

If I use the cellar again, however, I will no longer be able to pretend that I can suppress my own

potential for evil. If I use the cellar again, I will exist in eternal moral eclipse and will never thereafter walk

in the light.

But the temptation is great.

* * *

I first discovered the cellar door two hours after we signed the final papers, delivered a cashier's check

to the escrow company to pay for the house, and received the keys. It was in the kitchen, in the corner

beyond the refrigerator: a raised-panel door, stained dark like all the others in the house, with a

burnished-brass lever-action handle instead of a conventional knob. I stared in disbelief, for I was certain

that the door had not been there before.

Initially, I thought I had found a pantry. When I opened it, I was startled to see steps leading down

through deepening shadows into pitch blackness. A windowless basement.

In Southern California, nearly all houses - virtually everything from the cheaper tract crackerboxes to

those in the multimillion-dollar range – are built on concrete slabs. They have no basements. For decades

this has been considered prudent design. The land is frequently sandy, with little bedrock near the

surface. In country subject to earthquakes and mudslides, a basement with concrete-block walls can be a

point of structural weakness into which all rooms above might collapse if the giants in the earth wake and

stretch.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Our new home was neither crackerbox nor mansion, but it had a cellar. The real-estate agent never

mentioned it. Until now, we had never noticed it.

Peering down the steps, I was at first curious - then uneasy. A wall switch was set just inside the

doorway. I clicked it up, down, up again. No light came on below.

Leaving the door open, I went looking for Carmen. She was in the master bathroom, hugging herself,

grinning, admiring the handmade emerald-green ceramic tiles and the Sherle Wagner sinks with their

gold-plated fixtures.

"Oh, Jess, isn't it beautiful? Isn't it grand? When I was a little girl, I never dreamed I'd live in a house like

this. My best hope was for one of those cute bungalows from the forties. But this is a palace, and I'm not

sure I know how to act like a queen."

"It's no palace," I said, putting an arm around her. "You've got to be a Rockefeller to afford a palace in

Orange County. Anyway, so what if it was a palace - you've always had the style and bearing of a

queen."

She stopped hugging herself and hugged me. "We've come a long way, haven't we?"

"And we're going even further, kid."

"I'm a little scared, you know?"

"Don't be silly."

"Jess, honey, I'm just a cook, a dishwasher, a pot scrubber, only one generation removed from a shack

on the outskirts of Mexico City. We worked hard for this, sure, and a lot of years ... but now that we're

here, it seems to have happened overnight."

"Trust me, kid - you could hold your own in any gathering of society ladies from Newport Beach. You

have natural-born class."

I thought: God, I love her. Seventeen years of marriage, and she is still a girl to me, still fresh and

surprising and sweet.

"Hey," I said, "almost forgot. You know we have a cellar?"

She blinked at me.

"It's true," I said.

Smiling, waiting for the punch line, she said, "Yeah? And what's down there? The royal vaults with all the

jewels? Maybe a dungeon?"

"Come see."

She followed me into the kitchen.

The door was gone.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Staring at the blank wall, I was for a moment icebound.

"Well?" she said. "What's the joke?"

I thawed enough to say, "No joke. There was ... a door."

She pointed to the image of a kitchen window that was etched on the blank wall by the sun streaming

through the glass. "You probably saw that. The square of sunlight coming through the window, falling on

the wall. It's more or less in the shape of a door."

"No. No ... there was ..." Shaking my head, I put one hand on the sun-warmed plaster and lightly traced

its contours, as if the seams of the door would be more apparent to the touch than to the eye.

Carmen frowned. "Jess, what's wrong?"

I looked at her and realized what she was thinking. This lovely house seemed too good to be true, and

she was superstitious enough to wonder if such a great blessing could be enjoyed for long without fate

throwing us a heavy weight of tragedy to balance the scales. An overworked husband, suffering from

stress - or perhaps afflicted by a small brain tumor - beginning to see things that were not there, talking

excitedly of nonexistent cellars ... That was just the sort of nasty turn of events with which fate too

frequently evened things out.

"You're right," I said. I forced a laugh but made it sound natural. "I saw the rectangle of light on the wall

and thought it was a door. Didn't even look close. Just came running for you. Now, has this new-house

business got me about as crazy as a monkey or what?"

She looked at me somberly, then matched my smile. "Crazy as a monkey. But then ... you always were."

"Is that so?"

"My monkey," she said.

I said, "Ook, ook," and scratched under one arm.

I was glad I had not told her that I'd opened the door. Or that I had seen the steps beyond.

* * *

The house in Laguna Beach had five large bedrooms, four baths, and a family room with a massive stone

fireplace. It also had what they call an "entertainer's kitchen," which didn't mean that either Siegfried and

Roy or Barbra Streisand performed there between Vegas engagements, but referred instead to the high

quality and number of appliances: double ovens, two microwaves, a warming oven for muffins and rolls, a

Jenn Air cooking center, two dishwashers, and a pair of Sub Zero refrigerators of sufficient size to serve

a restaurant. Lots of immense windows let in the warm California sun and framed views of the lush

landscaping - bougainvillea in shades of yellow and coral, red azaleas, impatiens, palms, two imposing

Indian laurels - and the rolling hills beyond. In the distance, the sun-dappled water of the Pacific

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

glimmered enticingly, like a great treasure of silver coins.

Though not a mansion, it was unquestionably a house that said, The Gonzalez family has done well, has

made a fine place for itself. My folks would have been very proud.

Maria and Ramon, my parents, were Mexican immigrants who had scratched out a new life in El Norte,

the promised land. They had given me, my brothers, and my sister everything that hard work and

sacrifice could provide, and we four had all earned university scholarships. Now, one of my brothers was

an attorney, the other a doctor, and my sister was chairperson of the Department of English at UCLA.

I had chosen a career in business. Carmen and I owned a restaurant, for which I provided the business

expertise, for which she provided the exquisite and authentic Mexican recipes, and where we both

worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week. As our three children reached adolescence, they took

jobs with us as waiters. It was a family affair, and every year we became more prosperous, but it was

never easy. America does not promise easy wealth, only opportunity. We seized the machine of

opportunity and lubricated it with oceans of perspiration, and by the time we bought the house in Laguna

Beach, we were able to pay cash. Jokingly, we gave the house a name: Casa Sudor - House of Sweat.

It was a huge home. And beautiful.

It had every amenity. Even a basement with a disappearing door.

The previous owner was one Mr. Nguyen Quang Phu. Our Realtor - a sturdy, garrulous, middle-aged

woman named Nancy Keefer - said Phu was a Vietnamese refugee, one of the courageous boat people

who had fled months after the fall of Saigon. He was one of the fortunate who had survived the storms,

the gunboats, and the pirates.

"He arrived in the U.S. with only three thousand dollars in gold coins and the will to make something of

himself," Nancy Keefer told us when we first toured the house. "A charming man and a fabulous success.

Really fabulous. He's pyramided that small bankroll into so many business interests, you wouldn't believe

it, all in fourteen years! Fabulous story. He's built a new house, fourteen thousand square feet on two

acres in North Tustin, it's just fabulous, really, it is, you should see it, you really should."

Carmen and I made an offer for Phu's old house, which was less than half the size of the one he had

recently built, but which was a dream home to us. We dickered a bit but finally agreed on terms, and the

closing was achieved in just ten days because we were paying cash, taking no mortgage.

The transfer of ownership was arranged without Nguyen Quang Phu and me coming face to face. This is

not an unusual situation. Unlike some states, California does not require a formal closing ceremony with

seller, buyer, and their attorneys gathered in one room.

Nevertheless, it was Nancy Keefer's policy to arrange a meeting between the buyer and seller at the

house, within a day or two of the close of escrow.

Although our new home was beautiful and in splendid repair, even the finest houses have quirks. Nancy

believed it was always a good idea for the seller to walk the buyer through the place to point out which

closet doors tended to slide off their tracks and which windows wept in a rainstorm. She arranged for

Phu to meet me at the house on Wednesday, May fourteenth.

Monday, May twelfth, was the day we closed the deal. And that was the afternoon when, strolling

through the empty house, I first saw the cellar door.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

DOWNINTHEDARKNESSDeanR.Koontz,1986 1 DARKNESSDWELLSWITHINEVENTHEBESTOFUS.INTHEWORSTOFus,darknessnotonlydwellsbutreigns.Althoughoccasionallyprovidingdarknesswithahabitat,Ihaveneverprovideditwithakingdom.That'swhatIprefertobelieve.Ithinkofmyselfasabasicallygoodman:ahardworker,alovingandfaithfulhusba...

展开>> 收起<<

Dean R. Koontz - Down In The Darkness.pdf

共19页,预览4页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Dean R. Koontz - Down In The Darkness

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: