Dean Koontz - (1985)

by Twilight Eyes(Lit)

  " It Is Always Lightest just Before the Dark Tuesday morning, the sky was without sun, and the storm was without lightning, and the rain was without wind. It fell straight down as if in exhaustion, a great burden of rain, fell by the pound and by the hundredweight, fell by the ton, crushing the grass, sighing wearily over the roofs of the trailers, fell upon the sloped roofs of tents and slid languidly to the ground and slept there in puddles, dripped from the Ferris wheel, plopped from the Dive Bomber. Again the show call was canceled. The start of the Yontsdown County Fair was postponed another twenty-four hours. Rya did not regret the previous night's revelations as much as I had expected she would. At breakfast she smiled more quickly than the Rya whom I had come to know during the past week, and she was so given to little shows of affection that she would have forever damaged her reputation as a hard-nosed bitch if there had been anyone around to see. Later, when we paid visits to a couple of other carnies, to see how they were passing the time, she was more like the Rya they knew: cool, detached. However, even if she had been as changed in thur company as she was when alone with me, I am not sure they would have noticed. A pall lay over Gibtown-on-Wheels, a drab and suffocating blanket of despondency woven partly from the monotony of the rain, partly from the loss of income that came with bad weather, but mostly from the fact that Jelly Jordan was only one day dead. The tragedy of his death was still very much with them. After stopping at the Lorus's trailer, at the Frazellis', and at the Cutshanks', we finally decided to spend the day together, just the two of us, and then on the way back to Rya's Airstream we made a more important -decision. She stopped suddenly and gripped my umbrella arm with her rain-chilled hands. "Slim!" she said, with a shine in her eyes not quite like anything I'd seen before. So I said, "What?" She said, "Let's go to the trailer where you've been assigned a bed-and let's pack your things and move them to my place." So I said, "You aren't serious," praying to God that she was. And she said, "Don't tell me you don't want to." I said, "All right, I won't tell you that." Frowning, she said, "Hey, you know, this isn't your boss talking." I said, "I didn't think it was." And she said, "This is your girl talking." I said, "I just want to be sure you've thought about this." She said, "I have." I said, "It looked like a spur-of-the-moment thought to me." She said, "That's the way I tried to make it look, dummy. I didn't want you to think I was a calculating woman." I said, "I just want to be sure you aren't doing something rash." -She said, " Rya Raines never does anything rash." So I said, "I guess that's true, huh?" And it was as easy as that. Fifteen.minutes later, we were living together. We spent the afternoon making cookies in the tiny kitchen of her Airstream, four dozen peanut butter and six dozen chocolate chip, and it was one of the best days of my life. The mouth-watering aromas, the ceremonial licking of the spoon as each batch was finished, the joking, the teasing, the shared labor-it all brought to mind similar afternoons in the kitchen of the Stanfeuss house in Oregon, with my sisters and my mother. But this was even better. I had enjoyed but never fully appreciated such afternoons in Oregon, for I had been too young to realize that I was living through golden hours, too young to see that all things end. Because I no longer labored under the childhood delusions of stasis and immortality, and because I had begun to think that I would never again be able to sample the simple pleasures of an ordinary domestic life, those hours in the kitchen with Rya had a poignancy so sharp, it was a sweet aching in my chest. We made dinner together, too, and after dinner we listened to the radio: WBZ in Boston, KDKA in Pittsburgh, Dick Biondi making a fool of himself out there in Chicago. They played the songs of the time-"He's So Fine," by the Chiffons; "Surfin' USA," by the Beach Boys; "Rhythm of the Rain," by the Cascades; "Up on the Roof," by the Drifters; "Blowin' in the Wind," by Peter, Paul, and Mary; and "Puff (the Magic Dragon)," by the same; "Limbo Rock" and "Sugar Shack," "Rock Around the Clock," and "My Boyfriend's Back"; tunes by Leslie Gorr, the Four Seasons, Bobby Darin, the Chantays, Ray Charles, Little Eva, Dion, Chubby Checker, the Shirelles, Roy Orbison, Sam Cooke, Bobby Lewis, and Elvis, always Elvis-and if you do not think that was a good year for music, then you sure as hell weren't there. did not make love that night, our first as live-in mates, but it could not have been better if we had. Nothing could have improved that evening. We had never been closer, not even when melded flesh to flesh. Although she revealed no more of her secrets, and although I pretended that I was nothing other than a simple drifter gratified and amazed to have found a home and someone to love, we nevertheless felt comfortable with each other, possibly because we harbored secrets in our minds but not in our hearts. At eleven o'clock the rain stopped. It suddenly faded from a roar to a patter, from a patter to a scattered plop-thump of fat drops, which was the way it had begun two days ago, then ceased altogether, leaving the night silent and steaming. Standing at the bedroom window, looking out at the misty darkness, I felt as if the storm had not only cleansed the world but had washed something out of me as well; however, it was actually Rya Raines who had washed through me, and what she had scrubbed away was my loneliness. Among alabaster slabs in a hillside city of the dead, I seized her and swung her around to face me, and her eyes were wild with fear, and I was filled with pain and regret, but her throat was exposed and I went for it in spite of my regret, felt the soft tissue against my bared teeth I pitched myself headlong out of sleep before the taste of her blood was in my mouth. I found myself sitting up in bed, hiding my face behind my hands, as if she might awaken and somehow, even in the darkness, be able to read my face and know what violence I had been about to perpetrate upon her in my dream. Then, to my surprise, I sensed someone standing in the gloom beside the bed. With a gasp, still under the influence of the miasma of conflicting terrors from the nightmare, I flung my hands away from my face and thrust them out defensively in front of me, drew back against.the headboard. "Slim?" It was Rya. She was standing beside the bed, looking down at me, though in this lap of blackness I could be no more visible to her than he was to me. She had been watching while I pursued her dream analogue through cemeterial landscapes, just as I had watched her last night. "Oh, Rya, it's you," I said thickly, releasing the painfully held breath in my chest, my heart stuttering. "What was wrong?" she asked. "Dream." "But what kind of dream?" "Bad." "Your goblins?" "No." "Was it . . . my graveyard?" I said nothing. She sat on the edge of the bed. She said, "Was it?" "Yes. How did you know?" "From things you said in your sleep." I looked at the radiant dial of the clock. Three-thirty. "And was I there in your dream?" she asked. "Yes." She made a sound that I could not interpret. I said, "I was chasing-" "No!" she said quickly. "Don't tell me. It doesn't matter. I don't want to hear any more. It doesn't matter. It really doesn't. " But it seemed clear that she knew it did matter, that she understood this shared nightmare better than I did, and that she knew precisely what such a strange thing meant. Or, with veils of sleep still clinging to me and with torn rags of dreams muffling my thoughts and perceptions, perhaps in her state of mind and saw a mystery there was none. She might be reluctant to discuss the situation merely because it frightened her-not because she grasped and dreaded the meaning of it. When I began to speak again, she hushed me and came into my arms. She had never been more passionate, never more silken or more supple or more sweetly practiced in the elicitation of my response, but I thought I detected a new and disturbing quality to her lovemaking, a quiet desperation, as if she were not only seeking pleasure and closeness in the act but was pursuing forgetfulness, sanctuary from some dark knowledge that she could not bear, oblivion. Wednesday morning the clouds blew away on a wind, and blue sky flew in with crows and robins and ravens and bluebirds, and the earth still steamed as if mighty machinery labored in a heat of friction just beneath the thin crust of the planet, and on the midway the sawdust and wood shavings were drying out in the blazing August sun. Carnies were out in force, looking for storm damage, polishing chrome and brass, snugging down loosened tent flaps, and talking about money weather," which this surely was. An hour before the show call I located Joel Tuc
k be hind the tent that housed Shockville. He was wearing woodsman's boots with work pants tucked into the tops of them, and a red plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up on his massive arms. He was pounding the tent pegs deeper into the moist earth, and although he was swinging a hammer instead of an ax, he looked like a mutant Paul Bunyon. "I have to talk to you," I said.."I hear you've got new accommodations," he said, putting down the long-handled sledgehammer. I blinked. "It got around that fast?" "What do you have to talk to me about?" he asked, not with blatant hostility but with a coolness he had never exhibited before. "The Dodgem Car pavilion, for one thing." "What about it?" "I know that you saw what happened there." "I don't follow you." "You followed me well enough that night." His broken, unreadable expression made his face look like a ceramic mask that had been shattered, then glued back together by a drunkard on a binge. When he did not speak, I said, "You buried him under the floor of your tent." "Who?" "The goblin." "Goblin?" "That's what I call them, goblins, though you might use another word. The dictionary says a goblin is 'an imaginary being, a demon in some mythologies, grotesque, malevolent to man." That's good enough for me. You call them whatever the hell you want. But I know you see them." "Do I, then? Goblins?" "I want you to understand three things. One, I hate them, and I'll kill them whenever I have a chance-and when I think I can get away with it. Two, they murdered Jelly Jordan because he stumbled across them while they were trying to sabotage the Ferris wheel. Three, they won't give up; they'll be back to finish the job on the wheel, and if we don't stop them, something terrible is going to happen here later in the week." "Is that right?" "You know it is. You left the pass to the Ferris wheel in my bedroom." "I did?" "For Christ's sake den's no man to be so cautious of me!" I said impatiently. "We've both got the power. We should be allies!" He raised one eye, and the orange eye above it had to squint to make room for the look of astonishment in the lower orbs. I said, "Of all the fortune-tellers and palm readers and psychics that I've known in other carnivals, you're the first person I've ever met who actually has some ESP." "I do?" "And you're the only one I've ever known who sees the goblins the way I do." "Do I?" "You must." "Must I?" "God, you can be infuriating." 'Can I?" "I've been thinking about it. I know you saw what happened at the Dodgem Car pavilion and took care of the body-" "Body?" "-and then tried to warn me about the Ferris wheel in case I didn't sense the trouble coming. You had some doubts when Jelly was found dead. You wondered if maybe I was just a psychopath, because you knew Jelly wasn't a goblin. But you didn't accuse me; you decided to wait and watch. That's why I've come to you. To clear things up between us. To get it out in the open. So you'll know for sure that I see them,.that I hate them, and then we can work together to stop them. We've got to prevent them from doing whatever they have planned at the Ferris wheel. I've been over there this morning, getting a feel for the emanations pouring from it, and I'm sure nothing's going to happen today. But tomorrow or Friday . He just stared at me. "Damn it," I said, " why do you insist on being so goddamned enigmatic?" "I'm not being enigmatic," he said. "You are." "No, I'm just being dumbfounded." "Huh?" "dumbfounded. Because, Carl Slim, this is the most amazing conversation I've ever had in my life, and I haven't understood a thing you've said." I sensed that he was in emotional turmoil, and perhaps a large part of that turmoil was confusion, but I just could not believe that he was completely baffled by what I had told him. I stared at him. He stared at me I said, "Infuriating." He said, "Oh, I get it." "What?" "This is some sort of joke." "Jesus." "Some elaborate joke." " If you didn't want me to know you were here, if You didn't want me to know I wasn't alone, then why did you help me dispose of the body?" "Well, I guess, partly because it's a hobby." what am you talking about?" "Disposing of bodies," he said. "It's a hobby. Some people collect postage stamps, and some people build model airplanes, and I dispose of bodies whenever I find them." I shook my head in dismay. "And partly," he said, "it's because I'm such a neat person. I just can't stand litter, and there's no litter worse than a decomposing body. Especially a goblin body. So whenever I find one, I clean up the mess and-" "It isn't a joke!" I said, patience lost. He blinked all three eyes. "Well, it's either a joke or you're a deeply disturbed young man, Carl Slim. So far I've liked you, liked you too much to want to believe you're crazy, so if it's all right with you, I'll just figure it's a joke." I turned from him and stalked away, to the corner of the tent and around it, out to the concourse. What the hell was his game? The storm had wrung the worst of the humidity out of the air, and the muggy August heat did not return with the blue sky. The day was warm and dry, with the sweet, clean tang of the mountains that surrounded the fairgrounds, and when the gates opened at noon, the marks came in numbers we had not expected to see until the weekend. The carnival, a fantastic loom, used exotic sights and smells and sounds to weave a dazzling fabric that entranced the marks, a familiar and supremely comfortable fabric that we carnies drew around ourselves with joy and relief after two days of rain, after the death of our patch. The threads of sound included calliope music, "The Stripper" by David Rose blasting out of speakers at one of the kootch shows, the roar of the daredevil's motorcycle on the "wooden wall of death," the whistle-shriek-roar of the rides, the swish of compressed air that whirled the metal baskets of the Tip Top, diesels running full blast,.the ten-in-one talker pitching the tip, laughing men and women, shouting and giggling children, and pitchmen everywhere saying, "Tell ya what I'm gonna do!" Filaments of scents, threads of odors, were worked through the shuttle, plated on the loom: cook-house grease, hot popcorn, hot unshelled peanuts, diesel fuel, sawdust, cotton candy, molten caramel from the fragrantly steaming vats in the candy-apple stands. Sounds and smells were the texture of the carnival cloth, but the sights were the dyes that gave it brilliant color: the unpainted, burnished steel of the Dive Bomber's egg-shaped capsules, upon which sunlight seemed to melt and spread in shimmering silver films of mercury; the whirling red baskets of the Tip Top; the sparkling sequins and shimmering beads and glimmering spangles on the costumes of the girlie show performers who paraded on the baily platforms with, only tantalizing promises of the charms to be revealed within the tents; the red, blue, orange, yellow, white, and green pennants flapping in the breeze like the wings of a thousand tethered parrots; the giant, laughing face of the fun-house clown, nose still yellow; the pumping-spinning brass of the carousel poles. This magic carnival coat was a rainbow garment with many mysterious pockets, of flamboyant cut and design; when you put it on, you slipped your arms through a sense of immortality, as well, and the cares of the real world faded. Unlike the marks and many of the other carnies, I could not escape all of my worries in the razzle-dazzle of the show, for I kept waiting for the first goblins to appear on the concourse. But the afternoon melted into evening, and the evening gave way to night, and none of the demonkind appeared. I was neither relieved nor pleased by their absence. Yontsdown was a nest, a breeding ground, and there should have been more of them on the midway than usual. I knew why they had stayed away. They were waiting for the real fun later in the week. Tonight, no tragedy was scheduled, no pageant of blood and death, so they were waiting until tomorrow or the day after. Then they would appear by the score, by the hundred, eager for a ringside seat at the Ferris wheel. If they had their way, the wheel would probably experience "mechanical failure" that would cause it either to topple or to collapse, and it was when this event was imminent that they would come for a day at the fair. That night, after the marks were gone, the midway lights were extinguished except for the bulbs on the merry-goround, where the carnies gathered to pay their last respects to Jelly Jordan. Hundreds of us encircled the ride; those in the front rows were limned by amber and red light that, under the circumstances, was reminiscent of the candle-glow and stained glass luminosity in a cathedral, while those who were farther back in this makeshift open-air nave either stood in reverent shadows or mourning darkness. Some stood on nearby fides, and some had climbed onto the tops of trucks parked along the center of the midway. All were silen
t, as they had been Monday morning, when the body had first been found. The urn containing Jelly's ashes was placed on one of the benches, with mermaids standing an honor guard on both sides and with a cortege of proudly posed horses both in front of and behind the bier. Arturo Sombra started the engine that put the carousel in motion, though he did not switch on the calliope. While the carousel went around in silence, Cash Dooley read selected paragraphs from "Piper at the Gates of Dawn," a chapter from Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, which was what Jelly had requested in his will. Then the merry-go-round motor was stilled..The horses glided slowly to a full stop. The lights were turned off. We went home, and so did Jelly Jordan. Rya went instantly to sleep, but I could not. I lay awake, wondering about Joel Tuck, worrying about the Ferris wheel and the vision of Rya's bloodied face, concerned about the schemes in which the goblins might even now be engaged. As the night dragged on, I cursed my Twilight Eyes. There are moments when I wish I'd been born without psychic powers, especially without the ability to see the goblins. Sometimes nothing seems sweeter than the perfect ignorance with which other people mingle with the demonkind. Maybe it is better not to know that the beasts are among us. Better than to see . . . then feel helpless, haunted, and outnumbered. Ignorance would, at least, be good medicine for insomnia. Except, of course, if I could not see goblins, I would already be dead, a victim of my Uncle Denton's sadistic games. Uncle Denton. The time has come to talk of treachery, of a goblin masquerading as human in the midst of my own family, wearing a disguise so perfect that not even the sharp blade of an ax was able to carve away the false persona and reveal the monster within. My father's sister, Aunt Paula, had first married Charlie Forster, and together they had brought a son, Kerry, into the world, the same year and month that my folks had delivered me. But Charlie died of cancer, a sort of goblin of his own that had devoured him from within, and he was laid in the ground when both Kerry and I were three years old. Aunt Paula remained single for ten years, raising Kerry on her own. But then Denton Harkenfield had come into her life, and she had decided not to. live all her days as a widow. Denton was a stranger to the valley, not even an Oregonian, hailing from Oklahoma (or so he said), but everyone accepted him with remarkable alacrity, considering that third-generation valley people were often called "new folks" by the majority who could trace their roots back to the settlement of the Northwest. Denton was handsome, soft-spoken, polite, modest, quick to laugh, a born storyteller with an apparently limitless fund of amusing anecdotes and interesting experiences. He was a man of simple tastes, with no pretensions. Though he seemed to have money, he did not flaunt it or act as if money made him any better than the next Joe. Everyone liked him. Everyone but me. As a child, I'd not been able to see the goblins clearly, though I knew they were different from other people. Occasionally-although not often in rural Oregon-I encountered someone who had a strange fuzziness about him, a dark-smoky-curling shape within, and I sensed that I must tread carefully around him, although I did not understand why. However, as puberty began to change my hormonal balance and metabolism, I began to see the goblins more clearly, as vaguely defined demons at first, then in all their malevolent detail. By the time Denton Harkenfield came in from Oklahoma-or Hell-I was just beginning to be able to discern that the smoky spirit within these people was not merely a mysterious new form of psychic energy but an actual being, a demon or alien puppet master or creature unknown. In the months that Denton courted my Aunt Paula, my ability to perceive the hidden goblin improved steadily until, by the week of the wedding, I was in a panic at the thought of her marrying such a beast. Yet.there seemed to be nothing that I could do to prevent it. Everyone else thought Paula was an exceedingly fortunate woman to have found a man as universally well liked and admired as Denton Harkenfield. Even Kerry, my favorite cousin and best friend, would listen to no word spoken against his new father-to-be, who had won him over even before Paula's heart had been captured, and -who had promised to adopt him. My family knew that I was clairvoyant, and my premonitions and psychic insights were taken seriously. Once, when Mom had to fly back to Indiana to attend the funeral of her sister, I received distressing emanations from her airline ticket and was convinced that her plane would crash. I made such a fuss that she canceled at the last minute and booked a different flight. In fact, the first plane did not crash, but there was a small fire aboard in midair; many passengers were overcome by smoke, and three were asphixiated before the pilot managed to land. I cannot say for sure that my mother would have been a fourth victim if she had been aboard, but when I touched her ticket, I felt not paper but the cold, hard brass of a coffin handle. However, I had never told anyone about seeing smoky, curling shapes in some people. For one thing, I did not know what I was seeing or what it meant. And I had sensed from the start that I would be in terrible danger if one of those people with the darkness inside was to discover that I was aware of his difference. It was my secret. By the week of Aunt Paula's wedding, when I finally could see every sickening detail of the porcine-canine goblin in Mr. Denton Harkenfield, I could not just suddenly start babbling about monsters masquerading as human beings; it would not be credible. You see, though the accuracy and validity of my occasional clairvoyant visions had been established, there were many who did not view my unusual talents as a blessing. My powers, though seldom mentioned or employed, marked me as "strange," and there were those in our valley who believed that seers were invariably mentally unstable. More than a few people had told my parents that I should be watched closely for signs of delusional behavior or incipient autism, and although my parents had no patience with such talk, I was sure they sometimes worried that my gift might eventually prove to be a curse. The link between psychic ability and mental instability is such a strong part of folklore that even my grandmother, who believed my Twilight Eyes were an unmixed and joyous blessing, worried that I would somehow lose control of the power, that it would turn in upon me and lead me to destruction. Therefore I was afraid that if I began ranting about goblins hidden inside human forms, I would reinforce the fears of those who were sure I would one day wind up in a padded room. Indeed I had doubts about my own sanity. I knew the folklore, and I had overheard some of the warnings my parents had been given, and when I began to see the goblins, I wondered if my mind had begun to fail me. Furthermore, while I feared the goblin in Denton Harkenfield and sensed the intense hatred that motivated the creature, I had no concrete evidence that it intended to harm Aunt Paula, Kerry, or anyone else. Denton Harkenfield's behavior had been exemplary. And, finally, I hesitated to sound the alarm because if I was disbelieved-as would inevitably be the case-I would have done nothing but alert Uncle Denton to the danger that I posed to his kind. If I was not hallucinating, if he was a deadly beast, the last thing I wanted to do was call attention to myself, put myself in a position where I stood alone and defenseless, to be murdered at his leisure. The wedding was held, and Denton adopted Kerry, and for months Paula.and Kerry were happier than anyone had ever seen them. The goblin remained in Denton, but I began to wonder if it was in essence an evil creature or merely . . . different from us. While the Harkenfield family prospered, an unusual amount of tragedy and disaster was visited upon many of their neighbors in that Siskiyou valley, but it took me a long time to realize that Uncle Denton was the source of this uncanny run of bad luck. The Whitborn family, half a mile from us, a mile from the Harkenfield place, were burned out of their home when their oil furnace exploded; of the six Whitborn children, three perished in the fire. A few months later, out on Goshawkan Lane, all but one of the five members of the Jenerette family died of carbon monoxide poisoning when a vent on their furnace became inexplicably clogged, filling the house with deadly fumes in the middle of the night. And Rebecca Norfron, the thirteen-year-old daughter of Miles and Hannah Norfron, disappeared while on a walk with her little dog, Hoppy; she turned up a week later, over at the county seat, twenty miles away, in an abandoned house; not only had she been killed but also tortured, and at lengt
h. Hoppy was never found. Then trouble moved closer to home. My grandmother fell down the cellar stairs at her place, broke her neck, and lay undiscovered for almost a day. I did not go into Grandma's house after her death, which probably delayed my discovery that Denton Harkenfield was the source of many of the valleys' miseries; if I had stood at the top of those cellar steps, had gone to the bottom to kneel at the spot where they had found Grandma's body, I would have sensed Uncle Denton's contribution to her demise, and perhaps I could have stopped him before he caused more pain. At Grandmother Stanfeuss's funeral, with her body three days dead and its invisible robes of psychic energy therefore somewhat depleted, I was nonetheless so afflicted with clairvoyant perceptions of unspecific violence that I collapsed and had to be taken home. They thought it was grief that brought me down, but it was the shocking knowledge that somehow Grandma had been murdered and had died in terror. But I did not know who had killed her, and I did not even have a shred of evidence to suggest that murder had been done, and I was only fourteen, an age when no one listens to you, and I was already considered strange, so I kept my mouth shut. I knew Uncle Denton was something more-or less-than human, but I did not immediately suspect him of murder. I was still confused about him because Aunt Paula and Kerry loved him so much and because he was nice to me, always making jokes with me and showing what seemed to be a genuine interest in my achievements at school and on the junior varsity wrestling team. He and Aunt Paula gave me wonderful Christmas presents, and on my bi rthday he gave me several novels by Robert Heinlein and A. E. van Vogt plus a crisp new five-dollar bill. I had seen him do nothing but good, and although I sensed that he virtually seethed with hatred, I wondered whether I was imagining the rage and loathing that I perceived within him. If an ordinary human being had been committing wholesale slaughter, a psychic residue of that villainy would have clung to him, and I would have detected it sooner or later, but goblins radiate nothing but hatred, and because I perceived no specific guilt in Uncle Denton's aura, I did not suspect that he was my grandmother's killer. I did notice that when anyone died, Denton spent more time visiting at the funeral parlor than did any other friend or member of the family. He was always solicitous, sympathetic, providing the most convenient.shoulder to cry on, running errands for the bereaved, helping in any way he could, and he usually paid frequent visits to survivors after their loved ones had been buried, just to see how they were getting along and to inquire if there was any favor he could perform. He was widely lauded for his empathy, humanity, and charity, but he modestly turned aside such praise. This only confused me the more. It was especially confusing when I could see the goblin within him, which invariably grinned most wickedly on those occasions of grief and even seemed to take sustenance from the misery of the mourners. Which was the true Uncle Denton: the gloating beast within or the good neighbor and concerned friend? I still had not arrived at an answer to that question when eight months later my father was crushed to death beneath his John Deere tractor. He had been using the tractor to pull up large stones in the new field that he was preparing for cultivation, a twenty-acre parcel hidden from our house and barn by an intruding arm of the forest that reached down from the Siskiyous. My sisters found him when they went to see why he had not come to the house at dinnertime, and I did not find out about it until I came home from a wrestling match at school a couple of hours later. ("Oh, Carl," my sister Jenny had said to me, hugging me tight, "his poor face, his poor face, all black and dead, his poor face!") By then Aunt Paula and Uncle Denton were at our place, and he was the rock to which my mother and sisters clung. He tried to comfort me as well, and he seemed sincere in both his grief and his offer of sympathy, but I could see the goblin leering within and fixing me with hot, red eyes. Although I half believed that the hidden demon was a figure of my imagination or even proof of my growing madness, I nevertheless withdrew from Denton and avoided him as much as I could. At first the county sheriff was suspicious of the death, for there seemed to be wounds on my father that could not be explained by the toppling of the tractor. But as no one had a motive for murdering my dad, and as there was no other evidence whatsoever to point toward foul play, the sheriff eventually arrived at the conclusion that Dad had not been killed immediately when the tractor fell over on him, that he had struggled for some time, and that his other injuries resulted from those struggles. At the funeral I fell down in a swoon, as I had done at the services for my grandmother the previous year, and for the same reason: A punishing wave of psychic energy, a formless surging tide of violence smashed over me, and I knew that my father had been murdered, too, but I did not know why or by whom. Two months later I finally found the courage to go to the field where Dad had had his accident. There I moved inexorably toward the very spot where he had perished, drawn by occult forces, and when I knelt on the earth that had received his blood, I had a vision of Uncle Denton striking him along the side of the head with a length of pipe, knocking him unconscious, then rolling the tractor on top of him. My father had regained consciousness and had lived five minutes, straining against the weight of the tractor, while Denton Harkenfield had stood over him, watching, enjoying. The horror of it overwhelmed me, and I passed out, waking some minutes later with a bad headache and hands squeezed tightly around, clumps of moist earth. I spent the next couple of months in secret detective work. My grandmother's house was sold soon after her death, but I returned there when the new owners were away, and I let myself in through a basement window that I knew had no latch. When I stood at the foot and then at the head of the cellar steps, I received vague but unmistakable psychic impressions that convinced me Denton had pushed her and then.had come down the steps and had snapped her neck when the fall had not done the job as planned. I began to think about the unusually long run of misfortune that people in our valley had experienced for the past couple of years. I visited the rubble-strewn site of the fire-blasted Whitborn place where three children had succumbed to flames, and while the people who had purchased the old Jenerette house were away, I let myself into their place and laid my hands upon the furnace that had spewed killing fumes, and in both instances I received strong clairvoyant impressions of Denton Harkenfield's involvement. When Mom went into the county seat one Saturday to do some shopping, I rode along with her, and while she visited several stores I went to the abandoned house where Rebecca Norfron's tortured and mutilated corpse had been discovered. There, too, the stain of Denton Harkenfield was visible to the psychic eye. For all of that, I had no evidence whatsoever. My tale of goblins would be no more believable now than when I had first recognized Denton Harkenfield for what he was, more than two years before. If I publicly accused him without having the means to insure his arrest, I would certainly be the next "accident" victim in the valley. I had to have proof, and I hoped to obtain it by anticipating him with a precognitive flash of his next crime. If I knew where he would strike, I could be there to interrupt him in some dramatic fashion, after which his intended victim-spared only by my intervention-would testify against him, and he would be put in prison. I dreaded such a confrontation, afraid that I would botch it and wind up dead alongside the victim I had meant to save, but I could see no hope in any other course of action. I began spending more time around Uncle Denton, though his dual identity was terrifying and repellent, for I thought that I was more likely to receive the precognitive flash in his company than away from him. But to my surprise a year passed without developments of the sort I was hoping for. I did sense violence building in him on a number of occasions, but I received no visions of slaughter to come, and each time that his rage and hatred seemed to have reached an unusually fierce strength, each time that it seemed he must strike out to relieve the pressure in him, he would go away on some piece of business or on a short vacation with Aunt Paula, and he would always return in a more stable condition, the hatred and rage still in him but temporarily weakened. I suspected that he was causing suffering wherever he went, wary of spreading an inordinant amount of misery too close to h
ome. I could not obtain a clairvoyant vision of these crimes while in his company because, until he arrived at wherever he was going and looked over the opportunities for destruction, he did not know, himself, where he would land a blow. Then, after our valley had known a year of peace, I began to sense that Denton intended to bring the war back to the original battleground. Worse, I perceived that he intended to kill Kerry, my cousin, his own adopted son, to whom he had given his name. If the goblin in him fed on human anguish, which I was beginning to suspect, it would enjoy-a feast of surpassing richness in the aftermath of Keny's death. Aunt Paula, having lost a husband years before and being deeply attached to her son, would be destroyed by the loss of Kerry and the goblin would be with her not just in funeral parlors but twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, drinking of her agony and despair. As the goblin's hatred became more bitter day by day, as portents of impending violence grew increasingly obvious to my sixth sense, I became frantic, for I could not perceive the place, time, or method of the murder to come..The night before it happened, late last April, I awoke from a nightmare in which Kerry had been dying in the Siskiyou forests, under towering spruce and pine. In the dream he was wandering in circles, lost, dying of exposure, and I kept running after him with a blanket and a thermos of hot chocolate, but for some reason he did not see or hear me, and in spite of his weakness he managed to keep ahead of me, until I awoke not in a state of sheer terror but in frustration. I could not use my sixth sense to wring any more details from the ether, but in the morning I went to the Harkenfield place to alert Kerry to the danger. I was not sure how to lead into the subject and present my information convincingly, but I knew I must warn him immediately. On the way I must have considered and rejected a hundred approaches. However, when I got there, no one was home. I waited around for a couple of hours, and finally I headed back to our place, figuring I would return later, toward suppertime. I never saw Kerry again@alive. Late that afternoon the word reached us that Uncle Denton and Aunt Paula were worried about Kerry. That morning, after Aunt Paula had driven in to the county seat to tend to various matters, Kerry had told Denton that he was going into the mountains, into the woods back of their place, to do a little off-season small-game hunting, and he had said he would ret urn by two o'clock at the latest. At least that was what Denton claimed. By five o'clock there was still no sign of Kerry. I expected the worst because it just was not like my cousin to hunt off-season. I did not believe that he had told Denton any such thing or that he had gone up into the Siskiyous by himself. Denton had lured him there on one pretext or another and then had . . . disposed of him. Search parties combed the foothills most of that night, 'without success. At first light they went out in greater force with a pack of bloodhounds and with me. I had never before used my clairvoyance in a search of that kind. Because I could not control the power, I did not think I would be able to sense anything of value, and I did not even tell them that I intended to bring my special abilities to bear. To my surprise, in two hours, ahead of the hounds, I experienced a sense of psychic flashes and found the corpse at the head of a deep and narrow draw, at the foot of a rocky slope. Kerry was so badly battered that it was difficult to believe he had sustained all his injuries in the fall down the side of the ravine. Under other circumstances the county coroner might have found more than sufficient evidence to warrant a determination of death at the hands of another, but the corpse was in no condition to support the subtle analyses of forensic pathology, especially as practiced by a simple country physician. During the night, animals-raccoons, perhaps, or foxes, or wood rats, or weasels-had gotten at the body. Something had eaten the eyes, and something had burrowed into Kerry's guts; his face was slashed, and the tips of some fingers were nibbled off. A few days later I went after Uncle Denton with an ax. I remember how fiercely he fought, and I remember my agonizing doubts. But I swung the ax in spite of my reservations, driven by an instinctive awareness of how quickly and gleefully he would destroy me if I showed the slightest weakness or hesitation. What I remember most clearly is how that weapon felt in my hands as I used it on him: It felt like justice. I do not remember returning from the Harkenfield place to our house. One moment I was standing over Denton's corpse, then suddenly I was in the shadow of the brewer's spruce at the Stanfeuss farmhouse, cleaning the bloody blade of the ax on an old rag. Coming out of my trance, I.dropped the ax and the rag and slowly became aware that the fields would soon need tilling, that the foothills would soon be green and beautifully dressed in the raiments of spring, that the Siskiyous looked more majestic than usual, and that the sky was a piercingly clear and aching shade of blue, except toward the west, where dark and ominous thunderheads were rapidly moving in. Standing there in the sunlight, with sage cloud shadows racing toward me, I knew, without resort to my clairvoyant powers, that I was probably looking upon that treasured landscape for the last time. The incoming clouds were an omen of the stormy and sunless future I had hewn for myself when I had gone after Denton Harkenfield with that well-sharpened blade. And now, four months and thousands of miles from those events, lying next to Rya Raines in the darkness of her bedroom, listening to her even breathing as she slept, I was compelled to ride the memory train all the way to the end of the line before I could get off. With uncontrollable shudders and a thin, cold sweat, I relived the- last hour at home in Oregon: the hurried packing of my knapsack, my mother's frightened questions, my refusal to tell her what trouble I had gotten myself into, the mixture of love and fear in the eyes of my sisters, the way they longed to embrace and soothe me but drew back at the sight of the blood on my hands and clothes. I knew there was no sense telling them about the goblins; even if they believed me, there was nothing they could do, and I did not want to burden them with my crusade against the demonkind, for already I had begun to suspect that inevitably it would become just that, a crusade. So I had walked away, hours before Denton Harkenfield's body would be found, and later I had sent my mother and sisters a letter with vague assertions of Denton's involvement in the deaths of my father and Kerry. The last stop on the memory train is in some ways the worst: Mom, Jenny, and Sarah, standing on the front porch, watching me walk away, all of them weeping, confused, frightened, afraid for me, afraid of me, left on their own in a world grown cold and bleak. End of the line. Thank God. Exhausted but curiously cleansed by the journey, I turned onto my side, facing Rya, and fell into a deep sleep that was, for the first time in days, utterly dreamless. In the morning, over breakfast, feeling guilty about all the secrets I was keeping from her and looking for a way to lead into a warning about the unknown threat she faced, I told Rya about my Twilight Eyes. I did not mention my ability to see the goblins but spoke only of my other psychic talents, specifically of my clairvoyant ability to sense oncoming danger. I told her of my mother's airline ticket that had felt not like paper but like the brass handle of a coffin, and I recounted other less dramatic instances of accurate premonition. that was enough for openers; if I had piled on stories of goblins hiding in human disguises, it would have been too rich a confection to inspire belief. To my surprise and gratification she had far less difficulty accepting what I told her than I had anticipated. At first her hands kept returning to her coffee mug and she sipped nervously at that brew, as if, by its heat and slight bitterness, it was a touchstone with which she could repeatedly test herself to determine if she were dreaming or awake. But before long she became enthralled by my stories, and it was soon evident that she believed. "I knew there was something special about you," she said. "Didn't I say so just the other night? That wasn't just mushy love talk, you know. I meant that I really did sense something special . ... something unique and unusual in you. And I was right! " She had scores of questions, and I answered them as best I could, while avoiding any mention of the goblins or of Denton Harkenfield's murderous spree in Oregon, lest her belief collapse. In her reaction to my revelations, I sensed both wonder and what I thought was a dark dread, though that second emotion was less clear than the first. She
openly expressed the wonder, but she tried to hide her dismay from me, and she managed to conceal it with such success that, in spite of my psychic perceptions, I was not sure that I was not imagining it. At last I reached across the table, took her hands in mine, and said, "I have a reason for telling you about all this." "What?" "But first, I've got to know whether you really want to. "Want to what?" "Live," I said quietly. "Last week . . . you talked about the ocean down in Florida, about swimming out and out until your arms turned to lead . . . " With too little conviction she said, "That was just talk." "And four nights ago, when we climbed the Ferris wheel, you almost seemed to want the lightning to catch you there on the girders." She turned her eyes away from mine, looked down at the yellow smears of egg yolk and the toast crumbs on her plate, said nothing. With love that must have been as evident in my voice as Luke Bendingo's stutter was evident in his, I said, "Rya, there is a certain . . . strangeness in you." Well," she said without looking up. "Since you told me about Abner Kady and your mother, I've begun to understand why darkness falls over you at times. But understanding doesn't make me worry any less about it." "There's no need for you to worry," she said softly. "Look in my eyes and tell me." She took a long time in lifting her gaze from the remnants of her breakfast, but she met my eyes forthrightly when she said, "I have these . . . spells . . . these depressions . . . and sometimes it seems that going on is just too difficult. But I'll never give in to those moods entirely. Oh, I'll never . . . do away with myself. You don't have to worry about that. I'll always pull myself out of those funks and go on because I've got two damned good reasons not to give up. If I gave up, Abner Kady would win, wouldn't he? And I can't ever allow that. I've got to go on, build up my little empire, and make something of myself, because every day that I go on and every success I have is a triumph over him, isn't it?" "Yes. And what's your other reason?" "You," she said. I had hoped that would be her answer. She said, "Since you've come into my life I've got a second reason to go on." I lifted her hands, kissed them. Although she appeared relatively calm-if teary-on the surface, she was in an emotional turmoil of which I could make little sense. I said, "All right. We've got something together that's worth living for, and the worst thing that could happen now is that we'd somehow lose each other. So . . . I don't want to scare you . . . but I have had a..... a sort of premonition . . . that worries me." "Concerning me?" she said. "Yes." Her lovely face darkened. "Is it..... really bad?"."No, no," I lied. "It's just that..... I vaguely sense some trouble heading your way, so I want you to be careful when I'm not with you. Don't take any chances or risks-" "What sort of chances? What kind of risks?" "Oh, I don't know," I said. "Don't climb up high anywhere, certainly not up the Ferris wheel again, until I've sensed that the crisis is past. Don't drive too fast. Be careful. Be alert. It's probably nothing. I'm probably being a nervous nellie because you're so valuable to me. But it won't hurt you to be more alert for a few days, until I have a clearer premonition or until I sense that the danger is past. Okay?" "O kay." I did not tell her about the gruesome vision in which she had been covered in blood, for I did not want to terrify her. That would not accomplish anything and might even contribute to the danger she faced, for exhausted by prolonged and constant terror, she would not think instinctively or well when the crisis finally came. I wanted her to be cautious, not constantly afraid, and when we walked up to the midway a short white later and parted with a kiss, I felt that she was in approximately that desired state of mind. The August sun rained golden light upon the carnival, and birds sailed in a serene blue sky. As I prepared the high striker for business my spirits rose steadily, until it seemed that I could take flight and join the birds above if I so desired. Rya had revealed her secret shame and the horror of her Appalachian childhood, and I had told her the secret of my Twilight Eyes, and in this sharing of long-guarded confidences, we had created an important bond; neither of us was alone any more. I was confident that she would eventually reveal her other secret, the story of the orphanage, and when she had done that, I might test her trust in me with hints about the goblins. I strongly suspected that, given more time with me, she would one day be able to accept my goblin tales as the truth, even though she did not have the ability to see the creatures and confirm my testimony. Certainly there were still problems ahead: the enigmatic Joel Tuck; the goblins' scheme involving the Ferris wheel, which might or might not be the same danger that hung over Rya; and our very presence in Yontsdown, with its abundant demonkind in positions of power from which they could cause us unguessable misery. Nevertheless, for the first time I was confident that I would triumph, that I would be able to avert the disaster at the Ferris wheel, that I would be able to save Rya, and that my life was, at last, on an upward track. It is always lightest just before the dark.