Читать книгу Dean Koontz 2-Book Thriller Collection: Innocence, The City - Dean Koontz, Dean Koontz - Страница 35

FROM GWYNETH’S APARTMENT, I CAME HOME TO my three windowless rooms in no mood to sleep. I should have slept. This was my time for sleeping. But I couldn’t lie down and stay down. It just didn’t feel right. Lying in my hammock and closing my eyes, I felt as if sleep would be a kind of incarceration. I was too alive to sleep, more alive than I had felt since I had been a young boy living by day—and some nights—in the wild woods, determined not to bother my troubled mother in the little house on the mountain.

Sitting in Father’s armchair, I attempted to escape into fiction, but that didn’t work, either. Three different books failed to gather me into their stories. I couldn’t focus on the meaning of the sentences, and sometimes the words looked foreign to me, as if they were written with those symbols on the windowsill in Gwyneth’s bedroom.

I didn’t think it was love that made me restless, although in some way I did already love her. I knew what love felt like, for I had loved Father and, less powerfully, my mother. Love is absorbing, related to affection but stronger, full of appreciation for—and delight in—the other person, marked by a desire always to please and benefit her or him, always to smooth the loved one’s way through the roughness of the days and to do everything possible to make her or him feel profoundly valued. All of that I had experienced before, and this was all those things but also a new and poignant yearning of my soul toward some excellence that this girl embodied, not just physical beauty, in fact not physical beauty at all, but something more precious that she epitomized, although I couldn’t name it.

I also thought of the man into whom the Fog had forced itself, and I knew that I should do something to bring him to the attention of the authorities. Perhaps he had never committed the crimes that he watched with such twisted pleasure on the TV, but by acquiring those DVDs and viewing them, he encouraged those who had committed those crimes and perhaps worse. What he wished to watch was what he wished to do, and if he watched enough of it, he might one day grant himself his wish and ruin some child’s life.

In time, exhaustion overcame me, and though I was loath to lie down, I fell asleep in my armchair, asleep and into dreams. I don’t remember what other dreams might have preceded the bad one, but in time I found myself in the open-air mall into which I had wandered on my first night in the city.

In this reimagined confrontation, I appeared twenty-six, not a boy any longer, although the hobo looked exactly as he had been in life, flinging aside his burning hat and fleeing into the night. Pursuing him were not two delinquents but a pair of marionettes as large as men, one of them the puppet from the toy shop and the other a representation of Ryan Telford, the curator from the library and the murderer of Gwyneth’s father. Their joints were crudely hinged and, though freed from the puppeteer’s strings, they didn’t walk but instead approached in a grotesque dance. They were nonetheless quick and not easily escaped, and both carried butane torches. When they cornered me, they spoke, their wooden jaws clacking. Ryan Telford reported what I had glimpsed in the newspaper earlier, “Plague in China,” and the nameless marionette with the painted face and the scarlet-striated black eyes said, “War in the Middle East,” in a low voice thick with menace. Instead of thrusting their swords of fire at me, they knocked me aside and to the bricks, both screaming wordlessly in rage, clattering past me in pursuit of someone else. When I scrambled to my feet and turned to discover the object of their hatred, it proved to be Gwyneth. She was already gripped in the teeth of fire, and when I rushed toward her, desperate to save her and to take the biting flames unto myself, I woke in a sweat and got up from the armchair.

I had slept away the latter part of the morning, through lunch, into the afternoon. My watch read 2:55.

More than four hours remained before I would see Gwyneth again, but in the first minutes after waking, I felt that the dream must be premonitory, a warning that she was in danger now.

I had no phone to call her. I had never before needed a phone. Nor did I have a number at which she could be reached.

Pacing restlessly, trying to quell the shakes with which the nightmare had left me, I knew that going to her right now involved intolerable risk. Sundown didn’t come for about another two hours. I had never gone aboveground into the teeming streets in daylight.

During the twelve years that I had been blessed with Father’s companionship, he schooled me continuously and well in matters of secrecy and survival. We of the hidden are so hated that we can’t afford a single mistake, and most potentially fatal errors are made when you think that some new circumstance requires a relaxation of the rules of conduct that have thus far kept you safe.

As little use as I might be to Gwyneth in a moment of crisis, I would be of no use at all if I were dead.

Gradually Father’s training and wisdom trumped the panic induced by the dream.

After pouring peach-flavored tea into a mug and heating it in the microwave, I soaked in the old claw-foot tub in the bathroom and drank the tea. I counseled myself to be patient. I assured myself that, in spite of her social phobia, the girl had more street smarts than I could ever hope to acquire. She knew how to protect herself. Besides, the trusts established by her wealthy father would insulate her from much that was wrong with the world.

By the time I toweled dry and dressed, I regretted missing lunch. I prepared a sandwich and another mug of tea.

When I was nearly finished with the meal, I realized something that seemed peculiar at first blush and that seemed more strange the longer that I thought about it. Gwyneth’s large diamonds of black makeup and her highly unusual eyes at the center of those dramatic shapes were uncannily like those of the toy-store marionette, yet I had not mentioned the puppet to her. Neither had I allowed myself to wonder much about those curious similarities.

Minutes later, as I washed my plate and mug in the bathroom, at my one sink, still thinking about the marionette, I was reminded of something that had happened that long-ago October night, after the windows shattered and the two young hoodlums fled with their butane torches.