by Dean Koontz
understood the information I’ve accumulated over the years . . . if I’ve properly interpreted the things I’ve seen . . . the goblin was even engineered to experience pleasure when it killed. Hell, its only three emotions were a limited capacity for fear (which was included by the geneticists and psychogeneticists as a survival mechanism), hatred, and blood lust. So . . . condemned to that limited range of experience, the beast naturally tried to milk the most out of each emotion it’d been permitted.”
No human killer in either their civilization or ours, in all the thousands of years of lost or recorded history, possibly could have exhibited obsessive, compulsive, psychopathic, homicidal behavior even one-hundredth as intense as that of these laboratory soldiers. No religious fanatic, guaranteed a place in Heaven for taking up a gun in God’s name, ever slaughtered with such zeal.
My muddy, bloody hands were so tightly curled into fists that my fingernails pressed painfully into my palms, yet I could not relax them. It was as if I were a determined penitent, seeking absolution through the endurance of pain. But absolution for whom? Whose sins did I feel it was necessary to atone for?
I said, “But, Jesus, the creation of this warrior . . . it was . . . it was madness! A thing like that never could be controlled!”
“Apparently they thought it could,” she said. “As I understand it, each goblin that went out of those labs had a control mechanism implanted in its brain, which was intended to deliver temporarily crippling jolts of pain and trigger the creature’s fear. Through this device a disobedient warrior could be punished in any corner of the world, regardless of where it hid.”
“But something went wrong,” I said.
“Something always goes wrong,” she said.
Again I asked, “How do you know these things?”
“Give me time. In time I’ll explain everything.”
“I’ll insist on it.”
Her voice was bleak and gray, and it became grayer by the moment as she spoke of other safeguards that had been built into the goblins to prevent rebellion and unwanted bloodshed. Of course, they were created sterile. They could not breed; only the labs could produce more of them. And each goblin underwent intense conditioning that directed its hatred and murderous urges toward a narrowly defined ethnic or racial group, so it could be targeted on a very specific enemy, without fear that it might recklessly kill its master’s allies.
“Then what went wrong?” I asked.
“I need more Scotch,” she said.
She got up and went into the kitchen.
“Pour me some,” I said.
I ached all over, and my hands burned and itched because I had not yet extracted all the splinters from them. The Scotch would have an anesthetizing effect.
But it could not anesthetize me against the feeling of impending danger. That presentiment was growing stronger, and I knew it would persist regardless of the quantities of liquor that I consumed.
I glanced at the door.
I had not locked it when I had come in. No one locks his doors in Gibtown, Florida, or in Gibtown-on-Wheels, because carnies never—or seldom ever—steal from one another.
I got up, went to the door, thumbed in the lock button on the knob, and slid the bolt latch in place.
I should have felt better then. I did not.
Rya came back from the kitchen and handed me a glass of Scotch on the rocks.
I resisted the urge to touch her because I sensed that she still did not want me close. Not until she had told me everything.
I returned to my chair, sat down, and gulped half the Scotch in one swallow.
She continued, but a replenishment of her whiskey did not improve the bleak tone of her voice. I sensed that her state of mind was induced not only by the horrible tale she had to tell but also by some personal turmoil. Whatever else was eating at her, I could not get a clear perception of it.
Proceeding with the story, she told me that the secret knowledge of the goblins’ creation soon spread, as knowledge always will, and half a dozen countries quickly had their own laboratory-made soldiers, similar to the first goblins but with modifications, refined and improved. They grew the creatures in vats, by the thousands, and the impact of this brand of warfare proved to be almost as terrible as a full-scale nuclear exchange.
“Remember,” Rya said, “the goblins were supposedly an alternative to nuclear combat, a much less destructive means of attaining world domination.”
“Some alternative!”
“Well, if the nation that originated them could’ve maintained exclusivity of its technology, it would have conquered the world in a few years, without resort to atomic weapons. However, when everyone had goblin soldiers, when the terror was answered with counterterror, all sides quickly realized that mutual destruction was as certain through the surrogate soldiers as through nuclear holocaust. So they reached an agreement to recall and destroy their goblin armies.”
“But someone reneged,” I said.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I may be wrong about this, I may have misunderstood . . . but I think some of the soldiers successfully refused to be recalled.”
“Jesus.”
“For reasons never discovered, or at least for reasons I don’t grasp, some of the goblins had undergone fundamental changes once out of the laboratory.”
Having been a science buff through most of my childhood and adolescence, I had a thought or two about the subject. I said, “Perhaps they changed because their chains of artificial chromosomes and edited genes were too fragilely constructed.”
She shrugged. “Anyway, it appears that one result of this mutation was the development of an ego, a sense of independence.”
“Which is a damned dangerous thing in a biologically engineered psychopathic killer,” I said with a shiver.
“An attempt was made to bring them to heel by activating the pain-producing devices implanted in their brains. Some gave themselves up. Others were found writhing and squealing in an unexplainable agony that effectively unmasked them. But some apparently mutated in still another way—either developed an incredible tolerance for pain . . . or learned to like it, even thrive on it.”
I could imagine how things had progressed from that point. I said, “In their perfect human disguises, with intelligence equal to ours, driven by only hatred and fear and blood lust, they couldn’t ever be found . . . except maybe by subjecting every man and woman in the world to a brain scan in search of the goblins’ defused control mechanisms. But there’d be a thousand dodges the creatures could use to avoid going under the scanners. Some would probably produce counterfeit clearance cards attesting to brain scans they’d never undergone. Others would simply flee to wilderness areas and hide out, running forays into towns and villages only when they needed to steal supplies . . . or when the lust to kill became an intolerable pressure in them. In the end most would escape detection. Right? Is that how it was?”
“I don’t know. I think so. Something like that. And at some point after the . . . the worldwide brain-scan program was under way . . . the authorities discovered that some of the rebel goblins had undergone one other fundamental mutation—”
“They were no longer sterile.”
Rya blinked. “How did you know?”
I told her about the pregnant goblin in Yontsdown.
She said, “If I’ve not misunderstood, most remained sterile, but a lot became fertile. The legend is—”
“What legend?” I asked, finding it increasingly difficult to contain my curiosity. “Where did you hear these things? What legends are you talking about?”
Ignoring the question, still not ready to divulge her sources, she said, “According to the legends, a woman was caught in the brain-scan program, and when revealed as a goblin, she was goaded into transforming into her true shape. When they shot her, as she died, she ejected a litter of squirming goblin babies. In death she reverted to the human form, as she had been genetically programed to do (for the purpose of foilin
g autopsies and pathologists). And when her offspring were executed, they metamorphosed into human babies during their death throes.”
“And then mankind knew it had lost the war with the goblins.”
Rya nodded.
They had lost the war because goblin children, formed in the alien womb instead of in the laboratory, had no control mechanisms to show up on brain scans; there was no method whatsoever by which their disguises could be penetrated. From that point on, man shared the earth with a species that was his intellectual equal and that had no purpose but to destroy him and all his works.
Rya finished her Scotch.
I badly wanted a second drink, but I was afraid to get it, for in my current state of mind a second would surely lead to a third, a third to a fourth, and I would not stop until I passed out drunk. I could not afford to indulge myself, for the dark premonition of pending disaster hung over me more oppressively than ever, the psychic equivalent of a massive black formation of churning thunderheads settling down over a summer day.
I looked at the door.
Still locked.
I looked at the windows.
They were open.
But they were jalousies, and no goblin could force its way through one of them without considerable effort.
“So,” Rya said softly, “we weren’t happy with the earth God gave us. Evidently we had heard about Hell in that lost age, and we found the concept interesting. We found it so interesting, so appealing, that we brought forth demons of our own design and re-created Hell on earth.”
If there was a God, I could almost understand (as never before) why He would visit pain and suffering upon us. Looking down in disgust at our use of the world and the life He gave us, He might very well say, “All right, you ungrateful wretches, all right! You like to screw up everything? You like to hurt one another? You like it so much, you make your own devils and turn them loose on yourselves? All right! So be it! Stand back and let the Master please you! Watch my smoke, little ones. Here! Take these gifts. Let there be brain cancer and polio and multiple sclerosis! Let there be earthquakes and tidal waves! Let there be—bad glands! You like? Hmmm?”
I said, “Somehow the goblins destroyed that earlier civilization, wiped it off the face of the earth.”
She nodded. “It took time. A couple of decades. But according to legend . . . eventually a few of their kind, passing as human, rose into the upper social strata and finally attained sufficiently high political office that they were in a position to wage a nuclear war.”
Which, according to the mysterious and unspecified “legends” that she quoted, they had done. They did not care that most of them would be wiped out along with our kind; their entire reason for existing was to harry and destroy us, and if the ultimate fulfillment of their purpose led to their own swift demise, they were nevertheless powerless to change their destiny. The missiles flew. Cities were vaporized. No missile was withheld, no bomber restricted from taking flight. So many thousands of enormously powerful nuclear devices were detonated that something happened in the earth’s crust, or perhaps there was a change in the magnetic field and a subsequent shifting of the poles, but for some reason fault lines responded worldwide, shifted, and produced quakes of unimaginable magnitude. Thousand-mile stretches of low-lying land collapsed into the seas, and tidal waves washed halfway across continents, and volcanoes erupted everywhere. That holocaust, the subsequent ice age, and thousands of years of time had ground away every trace of the civilization that had once lit the many continents as brightly as our carnival lit the midway every night. More goblins than humans survived, for they were hardier, born fighters. The few surviving human beings returned to caves, reverted to savagery, and with the passing of many cruel seasons their heritage was forgotten. Although the goblins did not forget and never would, we forgot the goblins, along with everything else, and in ages to come, our rare encounters with them in their demon form were the source for many superstitions—and countless cheap horror films—involving shape-changing, supernatural entities.
“Now, we’ve climbed up out of the muck again,” Rya said dismally, “and we’ve rebuilt civilization, and we’ve begun to acquire the means to destroy the world again—”
“—and the goblins will one day push the Button if they get the chance,” I finished for her.
“I believe they will,” she said. “It is true that they’re less capable fighters than they were in the previous civilization . . . more easily beaten in hand-to-hand combat . . . more easily deceived. They’ve changed, evolved somewhat, due to the passage of so much time and because of all that nuclear fallout. The radiation sterilized many, stole the fertility that the original mutations had given them, which is why they haven’t completely overrun the earth and outnumbered us. And there’s been a . . . a slight mitigation of their mania for destruction. As I understand it, many of them abhor the thought of another nuclear war . . . at least on a worldwide scale. You see, they’re long-lived; some of them are as much as fifteen hundred years old, so they aren’t that many generations removed from the previous holocaust. Their stories of the world’s end, passed down by their ancestors, are still fresh and immediate to them. But though most of them might be satisfied with the current arrangement, stalking and killing us as if we were nothing more than animals in their private game preserve, there are a few . . . a few who long to induce human agony on a nuclear scale again . . . who believe it’s their destiny to wipe us from the face of the earth forever. In ten years or twenty or forty, one of those is sure to get its chance, don’t you think?”
The near certainty of the Armageddon she had described was shocking and depressing beyond words, but still I feared a more immediate death. My precognitive awareness of imminent danger had become a constant, unpleasant pressure inside my skull, though I could not tell where the trouble would come from or what form it would take.
I was faintly nauseous with apprehension.
Chilled. Slick with sweat. Shivering.
She went into the kitchen for another Scotch.
I stood up. Went to a window. Looked out. Saw nothing. I returned to the armchair. Sat on the edge of it. Wanted to scream.
Something was coming. . . .
When she returned with her drink and slumped in her chair again, still withdrawn from me, still grim-faced, I said, “How did you learn about them? You’ve got to tell me. Are you able to read their minds or what?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“A little.”
“I can’t get anything from them except . . . a rage, a hatred.”
“I see . . . into them a little,” Rya said. “Not their exact thoughts. But when I probe at them, I get images . . . visions. I think a lot of what I see is more . . . racial memory . . . things that some of them are not entirely aware of on a conscious level. But to be honest, it’s more than that.”
“What? More—how? And what about these legends you spoke of?”
Instead of answering me, she said, “I know what you were doing out there tonight.”
“Huh? What’re you talking about? How can you know?”
“I know.”
“But—”
“And it’s futile, Slim.”
“It is?”
“They can’t be beaten.”
“I beat my Uncle Denton. I killed him before he could bring any more misery to my family. Joel and I stopped six of them tonight, and if we hadn’t, they would have rigged the Ferris wheel to collapse. We saved the lives of who knows how many marks.”
“And what does it matter?” she asked. A new note entered her voice, an earnestness, a dark enthusiasm. “Other goblins will just kill other marks. You can’t save the world. You’re risking your life, your happiness, your sanity—and at most you’re involved in a delaying action. You’re not going to win the war. In the long run our demons have to beat us. It’s inevitable. It is our destiny, one we planned for ourselves a long, long time ago.”
I could not see
what she was driving at. “What alternative do we have? If we don’t fight, don’t protect ourselves, our lives have no meaning. You and I could be snuffed out at any moment, at their whim!”
She put aside her Scotch and slid to the edge of her seat. “There is another way.”
“What are you talking about?”
Her beautiful eyes fixed on mine, and her gaze was hot. “Slim, most people aren’t worth spit.”
I blinked.
She said, “Most people are liars, cheats, adulterers, thieves, bigots, you name it. They use and abuse one another with as much eagerness as the goblins abuse us. They aren’t worth saving.”
“No, no, no,” I said. “Not most of them. A lot of people aren’t worth spit, true, but not most of them, Rya.”
“In my experience,” she said, “hardly any of them are better than the goblins.”
“Your experience wasn’t typical, for God’s sake. The Abner Kadys and Maralee Sweens of this world are definitely a minority faction. I can see why you would feel differently, but you never met my dad or mom, my sisters, my grandma. There’s more decency in the world than cruelty. Maybe I wouldn’t have said so a week ago, or even yesterday, but now that I hear you talking like this, now that I hear you saying it’s all pointless, I don’t have any doubt there’s more good than evil in people. Because . . . because . . . well, there has to be.”
“Listen,” she said, her eyes still fixed on mine, a beseeching blue, a pleading blue, a fierce and almost painful blue, “all we can hope for is a little happiness with a small circle of friends, with a couple people we love—and the rest of the world be damned. Please, please, Slim, think about this! It’s amazing that we found each other. It’s a miracle. I never thought I would have anything like what we’ve found together. We’re so compatible . . . so alike . . . that there’s even an overlapping of certain brain waves when we sleep . . . a psychic sharing when we make love and when we sleep which is why the sex is so damned good for us and why we even share the same dreams! We were meant for each other, and the most important thing, the most important thing in the world is that we be together all our lives.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know. I feel it too.”
“So you’ve got to give up your crusade. Stop trying to save the world. Stop taking these insane risks. Let the goblins do what they have to do, and we’ll just live our own lives in peace.”
“But that’s the whole point! We can’t live in peace. Ignoring them won’t save us. Sooner or later they’ll come sniffing around, eager to feel our hurt, drink our pain—”
“Slim, wait, wait, listen.” She was agitated now, bristling with nervous energy. She popped up from her chair and went to the window, took a deep breath of the in-flowing air, turned to me again, and said, “You agree that what we have together has to come first, above all else, at all costs. So what if . . . what if I could show you a way to coexist with the goblins, a way for you to give up your crusade and not have to worry that they’d ever come after you or me?”
“How?”
She hesitated.
“Rya?”
“It’s the only way, Slim.”
“What?”
“It’s the only sane way to deal with them.”
“Will you, for Christ’s sake, tell me?”
She frowned, looked away from me, started to speak, hesitated again, said, “Shit!” and suddenly threw her Scotch glass across the room at the wall. Ice cubes flew out of it, shattered as they hit pieces of furniture or bounced on the carpet, and the glass exploded against the wall.
Startled, I leapt up, then stood there stupidly as she waved me back and returned to her own chair.
She sat.
She took a deep breath.
She said, “I want you to hear me out, just listen and don’t interrupt, don’t stop me until I’m done, and try to understand. I’ve found a way to coexist with them, to make them leave me alone. See, in the orphanage and later, I realized there was no way to win with them. They have all the advantages. I ran away, but there’re goblins everywhere, not just in the orphanage, and you can’t really run away from them no matter where you go. It’s pointless. So I took a risk, a calculated risk, and I approached them, told them that I could see—”
“You what!”
“Don’t interrupt!” she said sharply. “This is . . . this is hard . . . going to be damned hard . . . and I just want to get through it, so shut up and let me talk. I told one of the goblins about my psychic ability, which is, you know, a mutation of our own, a consequence of that nuclear war, because according to the goblins there weren’t people with any kind of psychic abilities—clairvoyance, telekenesis, none of that—in the previous civilization. There aren’t many now, but there were none then. I guess . . . in a twisted sort of way . . . since the goblins started that war, brought those bombs and all that radiation down on us . . . well, you could say they sort of created gifted people like you and me. In an awful sort of way we owe our special talents to them. Anyway, I told them that I could see through their human form to . . . I don’t know . . . to the goblin potential within them—”
“You’ve talked to them, and they’ve told you their . . . legends! That’s how you know about them?”
“Not entirely. They haven’t told me much. But all they have to do is tell me a little, and I quickly have a vision of the rest. It’s like . . . if they open the door a crack, I can push it all the way and see even the stuff they’re trying to hide from me. But that’s not important right now, and I wish to God you wouldn’t interrupt. What’s important is that I made it clear to them that I
