Читать книгу Dean Koontz 2-Book Thriller Collection: Innocence, The City - Dean Koontz, Dean Koontz - Страница 38

THREE YEARS WITH FATHER, ELEVEN YEARS OLD, learning every day that the city was a kind of forest through which our kind could move as secretly as foxes through ferny woods …

At two o’clock one morning, with the key that Father had been given by the man who feared him, yet did not hate him—of whom, more later—he let us into the food bank operated by St. Sebastian’s Church. When the facility was closed, its windows were covered by roll-down burglary-proof shutters made of interlocking steel slats, which allowed us to turn on a few lights for easier shopping, with little risk of arousing the suspicion of any police patrol that might pass by.

The building served two functions, food bank and thrift shop, and an interior archway connected the former with the latter. Father had been given permission to clothe himself—and now me—from the secondhand garments in the thrift-shop stock. Before selecting canned and packaged foods, we meant to find new pants and sweaters for me, because I was a fast-growing boy.

The thrift shop offered more than clothing: some used furniture, shelves of well-read books, other shelves of CDs and DVDs, used toys, and costume jewelry. Dishes. Decorative items.

That night I discovered a music box that enchanted me. It was made of wood, intricately painted and lacquered, but what charmed me in particular were four tiny dancers on the top. Three inches tall, beautifully carved and painted, with exquisite details, they included a princess wearing a long gown and tiara, and a prince in formalwear and crown. In spite of its fine craftsmanship, the piece was comical, because the prince and the princess did not embrace each other but instead took two fanciful characters as their dancing partners. The prince had his right arm around a goggle-eyed frog, and with his left hand he held the webbed right hand of that grinning amphibian, as if about to waltz. The pretty princess stood in a similar pose, but she was in the embrace of a creature who had the head, chest, and arms of a man but the legs, hooves, ears, and horns of a goat; he looked especially silly because he wore a cocked wreath of green leaves on his head.

After I wound the box with its key and pushed the switch, the two unlikely couples began to dance to the music, turning around in circles as they also moved along figure-eight tracks. I laughed, but Father watched without even a smile, solemn as he seldom was.

“She dances with the Greek god Pan,” he said, “and the prince with something worse.”

“They’re funny.”

“Not to me.”

“You don’t think they’re funny?”

“That’s not a waltz,” Father said.

“It’s not?”

“They changed it into a waltz.”

“What was it before?”

The dancers went around, around.

Father said, “They changed it to mock it.”

Inside the box, the pegs on the turning cylinder plucked the tuned-steel teeth on the song plate. In spite of being mechanical, the music had at first struck me as sparkling, effervescent. Now it had an undeniably disturbing quality, the steel teeth biting off the notes as if music were a violent and hateful art. As the tempo increased, the royal couple and their partners turned more rapidly, until they seemed not to be dancing anymore but whirling about in a mad frenzy.

Father switched off the music and the four figurines. He plucked out the small steel key that wound the mechanism, and put it in a pocket of his pants.

I said, “Are you taking that? Why?”

“So it can’t be played.”

“But, sir, then it can’t be sold.”

“All the better.”

“But isn’t that like stealing?”

“I’ll give the key to our friend.”

“What friend?”

“The one who lets us come here.”

“Is he our friend?”

“No. But he’s not our enemy.”

“Why will you give him the key?”

“So he can decide about the music box.”

“Decide what?”

“What to do with it.”

“The store needs money. Won’t he decide to sell it?”

“I hope not,” Father said.

“What do you hope he’ll do with the box?”

“Smash it. Come on, let’s find you those pants and sweaters.”

We chose a pair of dark khakis, blue jeans, and a couple of sweaters for me. Father rolled them and stuffed them in a gunnysack that he had brought for that purpose.

In the food bank, following his instructions, after he filled my backpack with light packages of dry pasta and crackers, and after I had filled his with canned goods and blocks of cheese, he said, “You want to know about the music box.”

“I just wonder why smash it.”

“You know those things we both see that others don’t.”

“You mean the Fogs and the Clears.”

“Call them whatever. I told you don’t look at them directly if you feel they’re looking at you.”

“I remember.”

“And I told you it isn’t wise to spend a lot of time thinking about them.”

“But you didn’t say why it isn’t wise.”

“You’ve got to figure that out in your own good time. What you need to know right now is that the Fogs, as you call them, sometimes hide in things like that box.”

“They hide in music boxes?”

“Not just music boxes,” Father said. “In all kinds of man-made things, in anything they want.”

“Only man-made?”

“I think only. Maybe it has to do with who made the thing, the character of the person. If the object was made by someone consumed by anger or envy, or lust, or whatever, then the Fog feels drawn to that thing, feels comfortable inside it.”

“Why do they hide in things?” I asked.

“Well, I don’t know that hide is the right word. They go into things like that maybe to dream. To sort of hibernate. I don’t know. They’re dreaming away for weeks, months, years, decades, but time doesn’t mean anything to them, so it doesn’t matter.”

“One of them is dreaming in the music box?”

“Dreaming and waiting. Yes, I feel it. One day you’ll learn to feel it, too.”

“What is it waiting for?”

“Someone to see the box and take it home, to take the Fog home.”

“What happens when someone takes it home?”

“Ruination,” Father said. “Now we’ve talked too much about this already. If it’s dreaming, talking too much about it can wake it up.”

We went into the night again, where the man-made city bustled and slept, laughed and wept, danced and dreamed, and waited.

When we were safely below the streets, walking in the path of countless floods long past and floods to come, whispery echoes of our voices spiraling along the curved concrete, I told him about the marionette that, three years earlier, had disappeared from the shop window. He said that this was the very thing he meant when he told me about the music box, and I said but no one took the puppet home, and he said maybe one of the delinquents with butane torches scooped it up as they ran away or maybe, since it had legs, the marionette went somewhere on its own. He said we shouldn’t talk any more about it, that if it had been sleeping three years somewhere in the city, we didn’t want to talk it awake.