by Dean Koontz
didn’t care about them, didn’t care what they did, who they hurt, as long as they didn’t hurt me. And we reached an . . . accommodation.”
Astonished, I collapsed back into my chair, and in spite of her admonition about interrupting her, I said, “An accommodation? Just like that? But why would they want to reach an accommodation with you? Why not just kill you? No matter what you told them, even if they believed you would keep their secret, you still represented a threat to them. I don’t understand. They had nothing to gain by reaching this . . . this accommodation.”
Her pendulum mood had swung again, back toward darkness and quiet despair. She sagged in her chair. When she spoke, her voice was barely audible. “They did have something to gain. There was something I could offer them. You see, I have another psychic ability that you either don’t have . . . or don’t have in the same degree that I do. What I’ve got is . . . the ability to detect extrasensory perception in other people, especially when they can see the goblins. I can detect their power regardless of how hard they might try to conceal it. I don’t always know instantly upon meeting them. Sometimes it takes a while. It’s a slowly growing awareness. But I can perceive hidden psychic gifts in others pretty much the way I can see the goblins in their disguises. Until tonight I thought this insight was . . . well, infallible . . . but now you tell me Joel Tuck sees the goblins, and I never suspected him. Still, I think I’m nearly always quick to perceive these things. I knew there was something special about you, right from the start, though you turned out to be . . . more special, much more special, in more ways than I realized at first.” She whispered now: “I want to hold on to you. I never thought I would find someone . . . someone I needed . . . loved. But you came, and now I want to hold on to you, but the only way I can do that is if you make the same accommodation with them that I’ve made.”
I had turned to stone. Immobile as rock, I sat in the armchair, listening to my granite heart thump, a hard and cold and heavy sound, a mournful and hollow sound, each beat like a mallet striking a block of marble. My love, my need for her, my longing were all still in my petrified heart but inaccessible, just as beautiful sculptures are potentialities in any crude block of stone but remain inaccessible and unrealized to the man who lacks artistic talent and who has no skill with the chisel. I did not want to believe what she had said, and I could not bear to think about what came next, yet I was compelled to listen, to know the worst.
As tears came to her eyes, she said, “When I encounter someone who can see the goblins, I . . . I report it. I warn one of their kind about the seer. You see, they don’t want open warfare, like there was last time. They prefer their secrecy. They don’t want us organizing against them, even though it would be hopeless, anyway. So I point out people who know about them, who might kill them or spread the word. And the goblins . . . they just . . . they eliminate the threat. In return they guarantee my safety from their kind. Immunity. They leave me alone. That’s all I’ve ever wanted, Slim. To be left alone. And if you make the same arrangement with them, then they’ll leave both of us alone . . . and we can be . . . we can stay . . . together . . . happy—”
“Happy?” I did not speak the word so much as expel it. “Happy? You think we can be happy, knowing that we survive by . . . by betraying others?”
“The goblins would get some of them, anyway.”
With great effort I moved my cold stone hands to my face and hid in the cave of fingers, as if I could retreat from these hideous revelations. But that was a childish fantasy. The ugly truth stayed with me. “Jesus.”
“We could have a life,” she said, weeping openly now because she sensed my horror and the impossibility of my ever reaching the dreadful accommodation that she had negotiated for herself. “Together . . . a life . . . the way it’s been this past week . . . even better . . . much better . . . us against the world, safe, perfectly safe. And the goblins don’t just guarantee my safety in return for the information I give them. They guarantee my success too. I’m very valuable to them, see. Because, like I said, a lot of people who see the goblins either wind up in an asylum or a carnival. So . . . so I’m in a perfect position to . . . well, to turn up more than a few seers like you and me. So the goblins also help me out, help me get along. Like . . . they planned an accident at the Dodgem Cars—”
“And I stopped it from happening,” I said coldly.
She was surprised. “Oh. Yes. I should have figured you did. But, see . . . the idea was, once there’d been an accident, the injured mark would probably sue Hal Dorsey, the man who owns the Dodgem, and then he would be in financial trouble, what with the legal fees and everything, and I would be able to buy him out at a good price, take on a new concession at a cost that was attractive. Oh, shit. Please. Please listen to me. I see what you’re thinking. I sound so . . . so cold.” In fact, though the tears flowed from her, and though I had never seen anyone more miserable than she was at that moment, she did indeed seem cold, bitterly cold. “But, Slim, you’ve got to understand about Hal Dorsey. He’s a bastard, he really is, a mean son of a bitch, and nobody likes him ’cause he’s a user, a user and an abuser, so I’ll be damned if I’ll feel sorry about ruining him.”
Although I did not want to look at her, I looked. Although I did not want to speak to her, I spoke. “What’s the difference between the torture that the goblins initiate and the torture you suggest to them?”
“I told you, Hal Dorsey is a—”
Raising my voice, I said, “What’s the difference between the behavior of a man like Abner Kady and the way you betray your own kind?”
She was sobbing now. “I only wanted to be . . . safe. For once in my life—just once—I wanted to be safe.”
I loved her and hated her, pitied and despised her. I wanted her to share my life, wanted it as intensely as ever, but I knew that I could not sell my conscience or my birthright for her. When I thought of what she had told me about Abner Kady and her dull-witted mother, when I considered the horror of her childhood, when I realized the extent of her legitimate complaints against the human race and how little she owed to society, I could understand how she could have decided to collaborate with the goblins. I could understand, almost forgive, but I could not agree that it had been right. At that awful moment my feelings for her were so complex, such a tangled mess of tightly knotted emotions, that I experienced an uncharacteristic suicidal longing, so vivid and sweet that it made me cry, and I knew it must be like the death wish that haunted her every day of her life. I could see why she had spoken of nuclear war with such enthusiasm and poetry when we had been together on the Ferris wheel on Sunday night. With the burden of dark knowledge that she carried, total annihilation of the Abner Kadys and the goblins and the whole dirty mess of human civilization must, at times, strike her as a wonderfully freeing, cleansing possibility.
I said, “You made a deal with the devil.”
“If they’re devils, then we’re gods, because we created them,” she said.
“That’s sophistry,” I said. “And this is no goddamned debate.”
She said nothing. She just drew herself into a ball and wept uncontrollably.
I wanted to get up, unlock the door, burst out into the clean night air, and run, just run and run, forever. But my soul seemed to have turned to stone, in sympathy with the petrification of my flesh, and that added weight made it impossible for me to rise up from the chair.
After perhaps a minute during which neither of us could think of anything to say, I finally broke the silence. “Where the hell do we go from here?”
“You won’t make the . . . accommodation,” she said.
I did not even bother answering that question.
“So . . . I’ve lost you,” she said.
I was crying, too. She had lost me, but I had lost her.
Finally I said, “For the sake of others like me . . . others to come . . . I should break your neck right now. But . . . God help me . . . I can’t. Can’t. Can’t do it. So . .
. I’ll pack my things and go. Another carnival. Another start. We’ll . . . forget.”
“No,” she said. “It’s too late for that.”
With the back of my hand I wiped some of the tears out of my eyes. “Too late?”
“You’ve done too much killing here. The killing, and your special relationship with me, has drawn attention.”
I did not merely feel someone walking on my grave; I sensed someone dancing on it, stomping on it. For all the warmth I felt, it seemed more like a night in February than August.
She said, “Your only hope was to see things my way, to make the same arrangements with them that I have.”
“You’re actually . . . going to turn me in?”
“I didn’t want to tell them about you . . . not after I got to know you.”
“Then don’t.”
“You don’t understand yet.” She shuddered. “The day I met you, before I realized what you would mean to me, I . . . dropped a hint to one of them . . . suggested that I was on the trail of another seer. So he’s waiting for a report.”
“Who? Which one of them?”
“The one who’s in charge here . . . in Yontsdown.”
“In charge among the goblins, you mean?”
“He’s especially alert, even for one of them. He saw something special was happening between you and me, and he sensed that you were someone extraordinary, the one I had hinted about. So he demanded that I confirm it. I didn’t want to. I tried to lie. But he’s not stupid. He’s not easily deceived. He kept pressing me. ‘Tell me about him,’ he said. Tell me about him or things will change between us. You’ll no longer have our immunity.’ Slim, can’t you see? I . . . had . . . no choice.”
I heard movement behind me.
I turned my head.
From the narrow hall that led to the back of the trailer, Chief Lisle Kelsko entered the living room.
chapter seventeen
THE NIGHTMARE FULFILLED
Kelsko’s Smith & Wesson .45 revolver was in his hand, but he was not actually pointing it at me because, given the advantages of surprise and police authority, he did not think he would need to fire the gun. He was holding it at his side, the muzzle aimed at the floor, but he would be able to swing it up and fire at the least sign of trouble.
From beneath the square, hard, rough-looking human face, the goblin leered at me. Under the bushy eyebrows of its human disguise, I saw the molten demon eyes encircled by cracked, thickened skin. Beyond the mean slash of the man’s mouth, there was the goblin’s mouth with its wickedly sharp teeth and hooked fangs. On first seeing the Kelsko goblin in its office in Yontsdown, I had been impressed by how much more malevolent and fierce it looked than many others of its kind—and how much uglier. Its cracked and wrinkled flesh, wattled skin, callused lips, blisters, warts, and array of scars seemed to indicate great age. Rya had said some of them lived to be fifteen hundred, even older, and it was not difficult to believe that the thing calling itself Lisle Kelsko was that ancient. It had probably lived thirty or forty human lives, moving from identity to identity, killing thousands of us as the centuries passed, directly or indirectly torturing tens of thousands more, and all those lives and all those years had brought it here, tonight, to finish me.
“Slim MacKenzie,” it said, maintaining its human identity with no purpose but sarcasm, “I am placing you under arrest as part of the investigation into several recent homicides—”
I was not going to let them put me in their squad car and drive me to some very private torture chamber. Instant death, here and now, was far more appealing than submission, so before the creature had finished its little speech, I reached into my boot and put my hand on my knife. I was sitting, my back to the goblin, twisted around to look at it, so the beast could not see either my boot or my hand. For some reason—and now I suppose I knew the reason—I had never told Rya about the knife, and she did not realize what I was doing until I drew the weapon from the sheath and, in one fluid movement, stood and turned and threw it.
I was so fast that Kelsko did not have an opportunity to raise the gun and pull off a shot at me, though the creature did fire one round into the floor as it fell backward with the blade protruding from its throat. In that small room the blast sounded like God shouting.
Rya screamed, not in warning so much as in shock, but the Kelsko demon was dead even as the sound escaped her.
As Kelsko hit the floor, while the crash of gunfire was still echoing in the trailer, I scrambled to the beast, twisted the knife to finish the job, pulled it out of the gushing flesh, stood, and turned just in time to see that Rya had unlocked the door and that a Yontsdown deputy was coming inside. It was the same officer who had stood in the corner of Kelsko’s office when Jelly, Luke, and I had gone there to deliver the payoffs; like the chief, this cop was also a goblin. It was coming off the top step, just this side of the doorway, and I saw its eyes flick to Kelsko’s body, saw it electrified by a sudden awareness of mortal danger, but by that time I had reversed the knife in my right hand and had a thrower’s grip on it. I tossed the blade and split the demon’s Adam’s apple with it, and in the same instant the beast squeezed the trigger of its Smith & Wesson, but its aim was wide and the bullet destroyed a lamp to the left of me. The goblin fell backward, through the open door, off the steps, into the night.
Rya’s face was a definition of terror. She thought I was going to kill her next.
She plunged out of the trailer and ran for her life.
For a moment I stood there, gasping, unable to move, overwhelmed. It was not the killing that had stunned me; I had killed before—often. It was not the close call that made my legs feel weak and numb; I had been through plenty of tight scrapes prior to this. What nailed me there, immovable, was the shock of how utterly things had changed between me and her, the shock of what I had lost and might never find again; it seemed as if love was nothing more than a cross on which she had crucified me.
Then my paralysis broke.
I stumbled to the door.
Down the metal steps.
Around the dead deputy.
I saw several carnies who had come out in response to the gunfire. One of them was Joel Tuck.
Rya was perhaps a hundred feet away, running down the “street” between the rows of trailers, heading toward the back of the meadow. As she passed through pools of darkness that alternated with streams of light from the trailer windows and doorways, the stroboscopic effect made her seem unreal, as if she were a spectral figure fleeing through a dreamscape.
I did not want to go after her.
If I caught up with her, I might have to kill her.
I did not want to kill her.
I should just leave. Go. Never look back. Forget.
I went after her.
As in a nightmare, we ran without seeming to go anywhere, with infinite rows of travel trailers bracketing us, ran for what seemed like ten minutes, twenty, on and on, but I knew that Gibtown-on-Wheels was not that big, knew that my sense of time was distorted by hysteria, and actually it must have been less than a minute before we broke out of the trailers into open field. High grass slashed at my legs, and frogs leapt out of my way, and a few fireflies snapped against my face. I ran as fast as I could, then faster, stretching my legs, going for the longest possible strides, though I was suffering terribly from the beating I had taken earlier. She had the speed of terror, but I inevitably closed the gap between us, and by the time she reached the edge of the woods, I was only forty feet behind her.
She never looked back.
She knew I was there.
Although dawn was near, the night was very dark, and in the forest it was darker still. Yet in spite of being nearly blind beneath that canopy of pine needles and leafy boughs, neither of us slowed down much. As brimming with adrenaline as we were, we seemed to be demanding and receiving more from our psychic abilities than we had ever gotten before, for we intuitively found the easiest way through the woods, going from one narrow de
er trail to another, pressing through barriers of underbrush at their weakest points, leaping from a table of limestone to a fallen log, across a little brook, along another deer trail, as if we were nocturnal creatures born for the night chase, and although I continued to gain on her, I was still more than twenty feet behind her when we came out of the forest at the top of a long hill and started down—
—into a graveyard.
I skidded, stopped myself against a tall monument, and stared down in horror at the cemetery below. It was big, though it did not go on forever, as in the dream that Rya had passed to me. Hundreds upon hundreds of rectangles, squares, and spires of granite and marble thrust up from the shelving hillside, and most of them were visible to one degree or another because, at the bottom, there was a street lined with mercury-vapor arc lamps, which thoroughly illuminated the lower portion of the graveyard and created a bright backdrop against which the stones on the higher slopes were silhouetted. There was no snow, as there had been in the dream, but the mercury-vapor globes produced a whitish light with a vague trace of blue in which the graveyard grass appeared to be frosted. The tombstones seemed to be wearing jackets of ice, and the breeze stirred the trees sufficiently to shake loose a lot of seeds that were equipped with fuzzy, white membranes for easy dispersal by the wind, and those seeds whirled through the air and settled to the ground as if they were snowflakes, so the effect was startlingly similar to the wintry location in the nightmare.
Rya had not stopped. She was widening the gap between us once more, following a twisting path down among the headstones.
I wondered if she had known the graveyard was here or whether it was as much a shock to her as it was to me. She had been to the Yontsdown County Fairgrounds in previous years, so she might have taken a walk to the end of the meadow, might have gone through the forest and to the top of this hill. But if she had known the cemetery was here, why had she run this way? Why hadn’t she gone in another direction and made at least that small effort to thwart the destiny that we both had seen in the dream?
I knew the answer to that one: She did not want to die . . . and yet she did.
She was afraid to let me catch her.
Yet she wanted me to catch her.
I did not know what would happen when I put my hands on her. But I knew that I could not merely turn back, and I could not stand there in the boneyard until I had ossified into a monument like all the others. I followed her.
She had not glanced back at me on the meadow or in the woods, but now she turned to see if I was still coming, ran on, turned again, then ran on but with less speed. On the last slope I realized that she was keening as she ran, an awful wail of grief and anguish, and then I closed the gap altogether, halted her, turned her toward me.
She was sobbing, and when her eyes met mine, there was a hunted-rabbit look in them. For a second or two she searched my gaze, then slumped against me, and for an instant I thought she had seen something she needed to see in my eyes, but actually she had seen exactly the opposite, something that terrified her even more. She had leaned against me not as a lover seeking compassion but as a desperate enemy, clenching me in order to insure that the deadly thrust was as well placed as possible. I felt no pain at first, just a spreading warmth, and when I looked down and saw the knife that she had driven into me, I was momentarily certain that this was not reality, after all, just one more nightmare.
My own blade. She had taken it from the throat of the dead deputy. I gripped the hand that held the knife and prevented her from twisting it in me, nor could she withdraw it and stab again. It had entered me about three inches to the left of my navel, which was better than if it had been centered, where it would have pierced my stomach and colon and brought certain death. It was still bad, Jesus, no pain yet, but the spreading warmth was becoming a biting heat. She struggled to wrench the knife free of me, and I struggled just as hard to keep us rigidly locked, and my racing mind saw only one solution. As in the dream, I bent my head, brought my mouth to her throat—
—and could not do it.
I could not savage her with my teeth as if I were a wild animal, could not tear open her jugular, could not bear even the thought of her blood spurting into my mouth. She was not a goblin. She was a human being. One of my own kind. One of our poor, sick, sorry, and much put-upon race. She had known suffering, and she had triumphed over it, and if she had made mistakes, even monstrous mistakes, she had had her reasons. If I could not condone, I could at least understand, and in understanding there is forgiveness, and in forgiveness there is hope.
One proof of true humanity is the inability to kill your own kind in cold blood. Surely. For if that is not proof, then there is no such thing as true humanity, and we are all goblins in essence.
I raised my head.
I released her hand, the one that held the knife.
She pulled the blade out of me.
I stood, arms at my sides, defenseless.
She drew back her arm.
I closed my eyes.
A second passed, another, three.
I opened my eyes.
She dropped the knife.
Proof.
chapter eighteen
FIRST EPILOGUE
We got out of Yontsdown, but only because everyone took extreme risks to protect Rya and me. Many of the other carnies did not know why two cops had been killed at her trailer, but they did not have to know or really want to know. Joel Tuck made up some story, and while no one believed it for a minute, everyone was satisfied. They closed ranks around us with admirable comradeship, blissfully unaware that they were up against an enemy more formidable than just the straight world and the Yontsdown Police Department.
Joel loaded the body of the Kelsko thing and its deputy into the patrol car, drove it to a quiet place, beheaded both corpses, and buried the heads. Then he took the squad car (with both decapitated bodies) back into Yontsdown and, just after daybreak, parked it in an alley behind a warehouse. Luke Bendingo picked him up and brought him back to the carnival, unaware of how the dead cops had been mutilated.
The other goblins in Yontsdown might believe that Kelsko had been murdered by a psycho before ever setting out for the carnival. But even if they did suspect us, they could prove nothing.
I hid in the trailer belonging to Gloria Neames, the fat lady, who was as kind as anyone I have ever known. She, too, had certain psychic powers. She could levitate small objects if she concentrated on them, and she could locate lost objects with a divining rod. She could not see the goblins, but she knew that
