A Darkness in My Soul

by Dean R. Koontz

  V

  In the large apartment complexes such as the one in which Melinda maintained her home, there is every convenience of modern living that one could wish for-all under a single roof. There are supermarkets and there are special "ethnic" food centers; there are clothing stores and beauty salons, bookstores and theaters, garages for hovercars and banks for money, bars for drinking and restaurants for nights out of the kitchen, office supply stores and car shops, electricians and plumbers and carpenters, legal prostitutes and drugbars for the purchase of approved chemical stimulants.

  To connect all these facilities and to make them all accessible in minutes from every reach of the three-blocksquare structure (and when you consider that with eighty floors and nine square blocks per floor, there are 720 square blocks, you can easily envision how distant some points of the complex can be from others), there is a maze of express elevators, slow elevators, descending and ascending escalators, horizontal pedways with belts moving at a variety of speeds, and stairs-though very few of the last. Near any of the main shopping plazas within the structure, one needs only to stand close to any wall to hear the thrumming arteries of transportation moving ceaselessly, efficiently, like blood behind the plastic and the plaster.

  It is possible to live in one such complex without ever finding the need to leave for wider spaces. If the urge to divorce oneself from civilization and its mad pace becomes too urgent, there are the underground parks with false sunlight and real trees and four floors of convoluted paths and bubbling, fresh brooks. There are butterflies and small animals and birds. If one happens to be a sports aficionado, there are arenas where various games are played out weekly. Some housewives who seek no career beyond that of running their home may be married in the complex church, return from a honeymoon, and perhaps live the next ten years in eighty floors, each nine square blocks. Husbands who work at stores within the complex and not at professions that take them into other parts of the city, may spend an equal length of time without ever seeing the real sky and the real world except through their windows-which usually exhibit other apartment complexes built nearby.

  And no one seems to mind.

  In fact, this sort of existence is advertised as a blessing, as something all of us should desire.

  For instance:

  Crime, the realtors point out, is all but nonexistent within the confines of the apartment area. All corridors are monitored by a full-time staff of police from central scanning depots within the structure. Anyone bent on illegal activity against the residents would find that it is utterly impossible to get into the complex without a plastic identicard full of computer nodes which activate the automatically locked doors. And only residents are carefully screened guests may have the use of such cards. Since everyone with a card has his fingerprints, retinal pattern, blood type, odor index, hair type, and encephalographic readouts on file with the structure's police bureau, it is difficult, if not impossible, to commit a crime from within and escape detection and retribution. Compared to the outside world, with its juvenile gangs, organized rackets, and political dissidents, such a style of crime-free living is quietly attractive.

  Pollution, the same realtors say, is a serious problem outside the complexes. Man never really seriously stopped fouling his air and his water until the early 1980s. Then, some of the European and Asian countries had still not seen the light. Pollution had not totally ceased until the mid 1990s, after the complexes were being built. Outside, the air had still not been purified. The death rate for lung cancer, beyond the complex walls, among those unfortunate enough not to have seen the wisdom of such compact mini-cities, was three times that for complex dwellers. The same for all respiratory diseases. The realtors could go on and on. And they often did. The complexes had elaborate filtration systems, and this selling point was never overlooked.

  Inflation, the salesmen will tell you, is far less noticeable in a complex apartment, for the companies who own the mammoth structures also do the buying from the smaller stores within. A company owning a hundred complexes, buying for a thousand grocery stores and hundreds of thousands of citizens can obtain lower wholesale rates and pass the savings on to the residents.

  A community sense of togetherness, the realtors insist, has all but died in the regular life style, in the cities and the suburbs. There, they say with great sincerity, there is a dog-eat-dog, every-man-for-himself attitude. In the great complexes, this is not so. There is a camaraderie, a sense of group achievement, a community pride and identity that makes life more like it used to be: "Back When." No man need be an island, but a part of a great continent.

  Trumpets. Drums. End of the ad.

  Why don't I live in one, then? Why build a house by the sea, set in its own isolation of pine trees? Well, there are lots of reasons.

  For instance:

  Crime, it seems to me, is nothing more than a necessary evil, an offshoot of freedom and liberty. When you give a man a list of rights, things that he should expect to be able to do according to his standing as a member in the human community, you are providing the unscrupulous man with a list to stretch to his own ends. You are giving the clever man something to look over in search of loopholes. And, in the end, you have criminals making the free-enterprise system work for them, their way, as they understand it. So you arrest them and you punish them, but you learn to live with them. Unless you would prefer restricting those liberties everyone enjoys. You could shorten the list of rights or do away with it altogether, thus giving the unscrupulous ones less to stretch, less things to find loopholes in. Everyone suffers, of course, when the list is destroyed. And the cleverest and most intelligent of the unscrupulous manage to end up at the top of the pile anyway-or maybe they were the ones who eliminated the list of rights to begin with, in order to cut down on competition from amateurish punks. They call themselves "city government" and steal legally. And with their surveillance of the corridors, their bugging of elevators and escalators and pedways and stairs, their files on every resident, which grow thicker with data each year, the apartment complexes do not foster liberty, but slowly absorb it from their residents.

  Pollution? Well, maybe I'll die of lung cancer sooner than a complex dweller. But I can breathe the smell of the sea, the smell of wet earth after a rain, the ozone produced by lightning. My air has not been so filtered and cleaned as to become flat and unexciting.

  Inflation? Perhaps things are cheaper in the complexes, and perhaps that's because the companies really want to give their residents a fair shake in every way possible. But there is something frightening, to me at least, about depending on one conglomerate entity for your food, your drink, your entertainment, your clothing, your necessities, and your luxuries. I stopped being dependent on Harry, my father image, by the time I was halfway through adolescence. I don't yearn to be fathered or mothered to death by some team of accountants and cost-projecting computers.

  A community sense of togetherness, they say, makes life much more fun in the giant apartment structures. But I don't want to have to be friends with anyone merely because I happen to live near them. I don't enjoy the high school rah-rah, go-team unison of small minds or the brittle-fingered canasta desperation of old people seeking companionship in their last days. Besides, last night, I saw an example of that community togetherness which banded the "innocent" citizens of that complex.across the street into a spying, ruthless creature which could report neighbors to the police to have them slaughtered. Community togetherness can lead to a consensus outlook that seeks and destroys any dissident element, no matter how small and really harmless.

  Thanks but no thanks.

  I'll take my sea.

  And my pine trees.

  And even my damned polluted air.

  Her apartment was as it had been. It did not look as if it had even been searched-a strange fact if they truly had thought her involved with revolutionary elements. I got some food in a plaza supermarket and returned to her place, fixed myself a solid meal, and ate until my shr
iveled stomach was somewhat back to normal size.

  After that, I turned on the television and was instantly glad I had taken so many precautions getting here. I had driven to the airport, abandoned my hovercar, and had brought my luggage back here on a bus. If I had not been so quick and careful, I might now be jailed, for I was a television star it seemed, my face a portrait on the wideangle tube.

  On the news, they showed coppers at my house, looking busy as they attended complex machinery. They found signs of traitorous activities-signs which they had planted since my escape. They had uncovered a "secret room" and such nefarious things as a photo-printer and stacks of antiAlliance, anti-military booklets I was alleged to have written with-they pointed out-the aid of Melinda Thauser, who had already been taken into custody. There were even weapons caches and a small bomb assembly bench. I was wanted on a warrant for sedition. Very neat indeed.

  But there was another warrant as well.

  The second one was for murder.

  They exhibited, in ludicrous detail, the demolished howler at the foot of the cliff, the charred corpses of the men who had been riding in the back of it. They had fished the detached cab from the sea, and the drivers were laid side by side, horribly mutilated by the broken windscreen and the crumpled roof of their vehicle. According to the news, I had run the howler off the narrow cliff road. I had charged it directly, and when it was obvious I was going to hit them, the drivers of the mammoth rig had swerved off the road to avoid killing me. Quite gallant of them.

  I waited for the reporter to say how I had managed to make my escape with still another cop car ahead of me, but he talked around it without letting the home audience in on the way I had dived over the cliff myself.

  KELLY KILLER, COPS SAY! That was the headline the papers would carry, surely. Those boys always went for alliteration.

  I spent most of the evening working over a plan in my head. Just remaining on the loose did not seem enough, any longer, not while Melinda was in the women's quarters of the Tombs, down there in dark, cold stones without me.

  Somewhere around nine in the evening, my thinking was interrupted by the whine of sirens and the sinister rattle of gunfire.

  I stood, listening intently, wondering if they were now surrounding the building, now getting wise to my sudden disappearance. But they would hardly be firing out in the streets. And there would be no need for sirens. Indeed, sirens would warn me, and such a building as this provided a great many hiding places.

  Turning to the broad picture window, I looked down into the street eight floors below. Three howlers curbed in front of the building across the street, and uniformed coppers poured out of them like insects from a broken hive. From the fourth floor of that building, a number of men opened fire with small arms, pitifully insufficient against such organized and deadly police.

  What followed was a bloody, desperate battle which carried no reason nor purpose to it, so far as I could see.

  Obviously, the people on the fourth floor were considered enemies of the state, for there was also an army car down there, with what appeared to be high brass directing the operation. But why tear gas was not used, why bullets were chosen instead, I could not understand.

  I watched, terrified and fascinated.

  In the end, as those on the fourth floor surrendered, tossing guns and ammunition down to the street, the most chilling scene of all occurred. Searchlights now illuminated the rooms beyond the shattered fourth-floor windows, showed the men and women there, dejected and defeated.

  Almost simultaneously, the inside doors to the building's corridors burst open, and uniformed coppers stepped into the rooms. They carried what appeared to be machine pistols, and they used them expertly, slaughtering the thirty or so human beings who had already surrendered. A tall, willowy blonde twirled gracefully and fell across the windowsill. Her long fingers scrabbled at the wooden frame, while her mouth went slack and her face contorted hideously with the knowledge of impending death. Another eruption of gunfire behind her sent her lunging through the window, tearing her arms on projections of broken glass. She tumbled sixty feet to the street, turning lazily, her waist-long yellow hair sprayed around her like a halo

  At last I turned away from the window.

  What I had just seen was a sample of that "community camaraderie" the real estate agents spoke of. The neighbors of those dead men and women had turned them in, surely, in righteous indignation that a cell of revolutionaries should exist in their building.

  The consensus had killed them as surely as the bullets.

  The consensus, I would have to soon learn, was a living, breathing creature that could attack in vicious rage.

  And the molders of the consensus had Melinda in a cell where they could get to her at any moment.

  VI

  At a quarter to three in the morning, after a short nap and a quick snack of cheese and crackers, I dressed and slipped both loaded pistols into the pockets of the heavy coat I was wearing. Through a series of pedways, escalators, and elevators, I reached the ground level of the west wall of the apartment complex and went outside. For a moment, I savored the cool air, then turned right and walked briskly toward the center of the city. I held my chin high and made my step firm but not rushed. I tried to look as little like a fugitive as possible. In ten minutes, I passed a dozen other pedestrians without getting a second glance from any of them, and I thought the ruse was working.

  Twenty-five minutes from her apartment complex, the squat, round surface portion of the Tombs hove into sight.

  This was the administrative wing, containing offices and files. Light burned in some of the long, narrow window slits. Below this modest and attractive nubbins, bored for dozens of levels into the earth, were the cells and the interrogation chambers. The place had been designed, originally, as a modern progressive prison. But slowly, through the years since the cold war had been renewed, it was converted into something quite less than progressive by those reactionaries who branded change as part of any enemy plot, labeled disagreement as subversion. The ideal of rehabilitation was abandoned by those who thought punishment was better than converting to usefulness. Frustration and boredom and rage were the companions of those locked within these walls.

  And Melinda was there now.

  There were three howlers parked along the curb, all of them empty and locked. At the four corners of the intersection, there were piles of snow which had not yet been removed. Streetlights threw long shadows against the circular structure. There was no other person in sight, and the scene was almost like still-life painting into which I had walked through some unknown magic.

  I had both guns shoved into my overcoat pockets, though I prayed to an insane and unheeding God that I would not have to use them. Indeed, I didn't think I could use them if the occasion arose. But, clutched in my hands, they gave me a sense of determination, as the dying Catholic must feel when his fingers grip his crucifix and he doesn't feel so bad about meeting the end.

  Stepping from the curb, I crossed the icy street toward the main entrance of the building.

  The doors opened and two coppers came out, walked to the last of the three howlers, and got in.

  I kept moving. Up on the other curb, across the sidewalk, up the long flight of gray steps, my heart pounding and my mouth dry. I pushed through the double doors into the well-lighted lobby of the place, took it all in as I walked across it, went down the main corridor to the elevator, which I took down to the cell levels. The doors opened on a guard sitting at a desk, and I received my first challenge.

  "Yeah?" he asked, looking up from the magazine of undressed girls and overdressed fiction.

  I probed out, struck into the center of his mind, fishing through the currents of thoughts there, seeking the fragments of scenery from his past and from the future he imagined for himself. I had not done this thing since I had been a child in the AC complex and they had made me do it in experiments. It was distasteful and painful, to me as well as to my victim. But I f
ound the worst of his thoughts, the deepest id dreams which would horrify him and which would make him cringe with shame. The one I chose was of him and his eleven-year-old sister-a whip and a chain and all the horrors of sexual perversion those symbols represented. And I pushed them up into his conscious mind with such force that they became reality for him, so that he lost sight of me for only a split second and fell back, reeling, under the force of the ugliness which had welled up from the center of him.

  Then I got out of there.

  He was bent over the desk, clutching the corner of it, gagging, shaking his head, moaning to dispel the vision which he refused to believe could be his. I stepped forward, producing a pistol from my pocket, and struck him across the side of the head. He went down, hard, and stayed there. I wrestled him behind the desk, took off his jacket, ripped the arms loose, tied his ankles and wrists. I stuffed his handkerchief in his mouth, rolled the bulk of the jacket up, and tied the handkerchief in place.

  And then I took his keys and opened the prisoner file, found her cell number. It was eight floors further down.

  Committed to this insanity now, I used another of his keys to open the restricted elevator which led to the lower levels. I went down.

  When the elevator doors opened again, there was another guard waiting, though this one was more alert than the first. He looked at me and saw that I had not come with an escort, even though I was obviously not a regular traveler in these halls. He unsnapped his holster with a clean, swift move, slipped fingers over the butt of his gun with the reactions of a trained fighter.

  I pried open his mind and found his id.

  I wallowed in it.

  I dredged up a vision of his own basic blood lust, a gruesome, mad match that even he would never have known existed inside him. It involved his unvoiced, unrealized, unknown desire to-as an adolescent boy-rise up in the middle of the night and slaughter both his parents in their bed. There were spraying blood, harsh and strangled screams, terrified faces of two gentle people, the boy's hands wielding an ax whose blade gleamed wickedly in the thin light which streamed through the bedroom window from the iron street lamp beyond