Dean Koontz - (1984)

by The Servants Of Twilight(Lit)

  "When evil appears to us, when we see it at work in this troubled, troubled world, we can't merely fall to our knees and beg God to deliver us from it. Evil and vile temptation are a test of our faith and virtue, a challenge that we must face every day of our lives, in order to prove ourselves worthy of salvation and ascendance into Heaven. We cannot expect God to remove the yoke from us, for it is a yoke that we put upon ourselves in the first place. It is our sacred responsibility to confront evil and triumph over it, on our own, with those resources that Almighty God has given us. That is how we earna place at His right hand, in the company of angels."

  At last the old woman turned away from Joey and faced Christine, and her eyes were more disturbing than ever. She continued her harangue:

  "And you reveal your own ignorance and your damning lack of faith when you attribute cancer and death and other afflictions to our Lord, God of Heaven and earth. It was not He who brought evil to the earth and afflicted mankind with ten thousand scourges. It was Satan, the abominable serpent, and it was Eve, in the blessed garden of peace, who brought the knowledge of sin and death and despair to the thousand generations that followed. We brought evil upon ourselves, and now that the ultimate evil walks the earth in this child's body, it is our responsibility to deal with it ourselves. It is the test of tests, and the hope of all mankind rests with our ability to meet it!"

  The old woman's fury had left Christine speechless, devoid of hope.

  Spivey turned to Joey again and said, "I smell your putrescent heart. I feel your radiant evil. It's a coldness that cuts right into my bones and vibrates there. Oh, I know you, all right. I know you. I I

  Fighting off panic that threatened to leave her as emotionally and mentally incapacitated as she was physically helpless, Christine wracked her mind for a plan, an idea. She was willing to try anything, no matter how pointless it seemed, anything, but she could think of nothing.

  She saw that, in spite of his condition, Charlie had pulled himself into a sitting position. Weak as he was, overwhelmed by pain, any movement must have been an ordeal for him. He wouldn't have pulled himself up without reason-would he?

  Maybe he had thought of the course of action which continued to elude Christine. That's what she wanted to believe. That's what she hoped with all her heart.

  Spivey reversed her grip on the knife, held the handle toward the ugly giant ." It's time, Kyle. The boy's appearance is deceptive. He looks small and weak, but he'll be strong, he'll resist, and although I am Chosen, I'm not physically strong, not any more. It's up to you."

  An odd expression took possession of Kyle's face. Christine expected a look of triumph, eagerness, maniacal hatred, but instead he appeared . . . not worried, not confused, but a little of both . . . and hesitant.

  Spivey said, "Kyle, it's time for you to be the hammer of God ."

  Christine shuddered. She scrambled across the floor toward the giant, so frightened that she could ignore the pain in her leg .

  She grabbed for the hem of his parka, hoping to unbalance him, topple him, and get the gun away from him, a hopeless plan considering his size and strength, but she didn't even have a chance to try it because he swung the butt of his rifle at her, just as he'd swung it at the dog. It slammed into her shoulder, knocking her back, onto her side, and all the air was driven from her lungs. She gasped for breath and put one hand to her damaged shoulder and began to cry.

  With tremendous effort, nearly blacking out from the pain, Charlie sat up because he thought he might see the situation differently from a new position and might, finally, spot a solution they had overlooked. However, he still could not think of anything that would save them.

  Kyle took the knife from Grace and gave her the rifle.

  The old woman stepped out of the giant's way.

  Kyle turned the knife over and over in his hand, staring at it with a slightly baffled expression. The blade glinted in the goblin light of the fire.

  Charlie tried to pull himself up the five-foot-high face of the ledge that formed the hearth, with the notion of grabbing a buming log and throwing it. From the corner of her eye, Spivey saw him struggling with the dead weight of his own shattered body, and she pointed the rifle at him. She might as well have saved herself the trouble; he didn't have sufficient strength to reach the fire, anyway.

  Kyle Barlowe looked at the knife in his hand, then at the boy, and he wasn't sure which scared him more.

  He had used knives before. He'd cut people before, even killed them. It had been easy, and he had vented some of the rage that periodically built in him like a head of steam in a boiler. But he was not the same man that he had been then. He could control his emotions now. He understood himself at last. The old Kyle had hated everyone he met, whether he knew them or not, because inevitably they rejected him. But the new Kyle realized that his hatred did more harm to him than to anyone else. In fact, he now knew that he had not always been rejected because of his ugliness, but often because of his surliness and anger .

  Grace had given him purpose and acceptance, and in time he had discovered affection, and after affection had come the first indications of an ability to love and be loved. And now, if he used the knife, if he killed the boy, he might be launching himself on an inevitable slide back down to the depths from which he'd climbed. He feared the knife.

  But he was afraid of the boy, too. He knew Grace had psychic power, for he had seen her do things that no ordinary person

  could have done. Therefore, she must be right when she said the boy was the Antichrist. If he failed to kill the demonic child, he would be failing God, Grace, and all mankind.

  But wasn't he being asked to throw away his soul in order to gain salvation? Kill in order to be blessed? Did that make sense?

  "Please don't hurt my little boy. Please," Christine Scavello said.

  Kyle looked down at her, and his quandary deepened. She didn't look like the dark Madonna, with the power of Satan behind her. She was hurt, scared, begging for mercy. He had hurt her, and he felt a pang of guilt at the injury he'd caused.

  Sensing that something was wrong, Mother Grace said, "Kyle?"

  lbrning to the boy, Kyle drew his knife hand back, so he would have all the power of his muscles behind the first blow .

  If he took the last few steps in a crouch, swung the knife in low, rammed the blade into the boy's guts, it would all be over in a few seconds.

  The child was still crying, and his bright blue eyes were transfixed by the point of the knife in Kyle's hand. His face was twisted into a wretched mask of terror, and sweat had broken out all over his pasty skin. His small body was slightly bent as if in anticipation of the pain to come.

  " Strike him!" Mother Grace urged.

  Questions raced through Kyles mind. How can God be merciful and still make me bear the burden of my monstrous face?

  What kind of god would let me be saved from a meaningless life of violence and pain and hatred-just to force me to kill again?

  If God rules the world, why does He allow so much suffering and pain and misery? And how could it be any worse if Satan ruled?

  "The devil is putting doubt in your mind!" Grace said .

  "That's where it's coming from, Kyle. Not from within you!

  From the devil!"

  "No," he told her ." You taught me to always think about doing the right thing, to care about doing the right thing, and now I'm going to take a minute here, just a minute to think!"

  "Don't think, just do!" she said ." Or get out of my way and

  let me use this gun. How can you fail me now? After all I've done, how can you fail?"

  She was right. He owed her everything. He would still be peddling dope, living in the gutter, consumed by hatred, if not for her. If he failed her now, where was his honor, his gratitude?

  In failing her, wouldn't he be sliding back into his old life almost as surely as if he used the knife as she demanded?

  "Please," Christine Scavello said ." Oh, God, please don't hurt my
baby."

  "Send him back to Hell forever!" Grace shouted.

  Kyle felt as if he were being torn apart. He had been making moral judgments and value decisions for only a few years, not long enough for it to be an unconscious habit, not long enough to deal easily with a dilemma like this. He realized that tears were spilling down his cheeks.

  The boy's gaze rose from the point of the blade.

  Kyle met the child's eyes and was jolted by them.

  "Kill him!" Grace said.

  Kyle was shaking violently.

  The boy was shaking, too.

  Their gazes had not merely locked but . . . fused . . . so it seemed to Kyle that he could see not only through his own eyes but through the eyes of the boy, as well. It was an almost magical empathy, as if he were both himself and the child, both assailant and victim. He felt large and dangerous . . . yet small and helpless at the same time. He was suddenly dizzy and increasingly confused. His vision swam out of focus for a moment .

  Then he saw-or imagined that he saw-himself looming over the child, literally saw himself from the boy's point of view, as if he were Joey Scavello. It was a stunning moment of insight, strange and disorienting, almost a clairvoyant experience. Looking up at himself from the boy's eyes, he was shocked by his appearance, by the savagery in his own face, by the madness of this attack. A chill swept up his spine, and he could not get his breath. This unflattering vision of himself was the psychic equivalent of a blow to the head with a ball-peen hammer, psychologically concussive. He blinked, and the moment of insight passed, and he was just himself again, though with a terrible

  headache and a lingering dizziness. Finally, he knew what he must do.

  To Christine's surprise, the giant turned away from Joey and threw the knife into the flames beyond Charlie. Sparks and embers flew up like a swarm of fireflies.

  "No!" Grace Spivey shouted.

  "I'm through killing," the big man said, tears pouring copiously down his cheeks, softening the hard and dangerous look of him much as rain on a windowpane blurs and softens the view beyond.

  "No," Spivey repeated.

  "It's wrong," he said ." Even if I'm doing it for you . . . it's wrong ."

  "The devil put this thought in your mind," the old woman warned.

  "No, Mother Grace. You put it there."

  "The devil!" she insisted frantically ." The devil put it there!"

  The giant hesitated, blotting his face with his big hands.

  Christine held her breath and watched the confrontation with both hope and dread. If this Frankensteinian creature actually turned against his master, he might be a formidable ally, but at the moment he did not seem sufficiently stable to deliver them from their crisis. Though he had thrown the knife away, he appeared confused, in a mental and emotional turmoil, and even slightly unsteady on his feet. When he put his hands to his head and squinted through his tears, he seemed in pain, almost as if he had been blackjacked. He might, at any moment, turn on Joey and kill him, after all.

  "The devil put this doubt in your mind," Grace Spivey insisted, advancing on the giant, shouting at him ." The devil, the devil, the devil!"

  He took his tear-wet hands from his face and blinked at the old woman ." If it was the devil, then he's not all bad. Not all bad if he wants me never to kill again." He staggered toward the passageway that led out of the caves, stopped just his side of it, and leaned wearily against the wall, as if he needed a moment to recover from some exhausting task.

  "Then I'll do it," Spivey said furiously. She had been clutching the semiautomatic rifle by its shoulder strap. Now she took it in both hands ." You're my Judas, Kyle Barlows. Judas. You've failed me. But God won't fail me. And I won't fail God the way you have, no, not me, not the Chosen, not me!"

  Christine looked at Joey. He still stood in the corner, with his back against the stone, his arms raised now, his small pale palms flattened and turned outward, as if warding off the bullets that Grace Spivey would fire at him. His eyes were huge and frightened and fixed on the old woman as though she had hypnotized him. Christine wanted to shout at him to run, but it was pointless because Spivey was in his way and would surely stop him. Besides, where could he go? Outside, in the subzero air, where he would quickly succumb to exposure? Deeper in the caves, where Spivey would easily follow and soon find him? He was trapped, small and defenseless, with nowhere to hide.

  Christine looked at Charlie, who was weeping with frustration at his own inability to help, and she tried to launch herself up at Grace Spivey, but she was defeated by her wounded leg and damaged shoulder, and finally, in desperation, she looked back at Kyle and said, "Don't let her do it! For God's sake, don't let her hurt him!"

  The giant only blinked stupidly at Christine. He seemed shellshocked, in no condition to wrest the rifle out of Spivey's hands.

  "Please, please, stop her," Christine begged him.

  "You shut up!" Grace warned, taking one threatening step toward Christine. Then, to Joey, she said, "And don't you try using those eyes on me. It won't work with me. You can't get at me that way, not any way, not me. I can resist."

  The old woman was having some difficulty figuring how to fire the gun, and when she finally got a round off, it went high, smashed into the wall above Joey's head, almost striking the ceiling, the explosive report crashing back and forth in that confined area, one deafening echo laminated atop another. The thunderous noise and the recoil surprised Spivey, jolting her frail body. She stumbled backwards two steps, fired again without meaning to, and that second bullet &d strike the ceiling and ricocheted around the room.

  Joey was screaming .

  Christine was shouting, looking for something to throw, a

  weapon no matter how crude, but she could find nothing. The pain in her wounded leg was like a bolt fastening her to the stone, and she could only beat her hand on the floor in frustration.

  The old woman moved in on Joey, holding the rifle awkwardly though with evident determination to finish the job this time .

  But something was wrong. She was either out of ammunition or the gun had jammed, for she began to struggle with the weapon angrily.

  As the echoes of the second shot faded, a mysterious sound arose from deeper in the mountain, adding to the confusion, rising up from other caverns, a strange and frightening racket that Christine could almost but not quite identify.

  The gun had janimed. Spivey managed to eject an expended cartridge that had been wedged in the chamber. The brass cylinder popped into the air, reflecting the firelight, and hit the floor with a faint clink and ping.

  Wicka-wicka-wicka-wicka: The strange, leathery, flapping sound drew nearer, approaching from deeper in the mountain .

  The cool air vibrated with it.

  Spivey half turned away from Joey to look at the entrance to the adjoining cave, through which she and the giant had entered a few minutes ago ." No!" she said, and she seemed to know what was coming.

  And in that instant Christine knew, too.

  Bats.

  A thunderous, flapping, whirling tornado of bats.

  An instant later they swarmed out of the adjoining caverns and into this room, a hundred of them, two hundred, more, rising to the vaulted ceiling, screeching, industriously working their leathery wings, darting back and forth, a seething multitude of frenziedly whirling shadows at the upper reaches of the firelight.

  The old woman stared at them. She was speaking, but her words were lost in the drumlike roar of the swarm.

  As one, the bats stopped shrieking. Only the rustlingfluttering-hissing of wings sounded now. Their silence was so unnatural that it seemed worse than their screams.

  No, Christine thought. Oh, no!

  In the pall of this frightening assemblage, Spivey's maniacal

  self-confidence shattered. She fired two rounds at the nightmare flock, a senseless and, in fact, dangerous assault.

  Whether provoked by the gunfire or otherwise motivated, the bats swooped down as if they were a si
ngle creature, a cloud of tiny black killing machines, all claws and teeth, and fell upon Grace Spivey. They slashed at her insulated ski suit, got tangled in her hair, sank their claws into her and hung on. She staggered across the cavern, flailing her arms and whirling about, as if performing a macabre dance, or as if she thought she could take flight with them. Squealing, gagging, retching, she collided with one wall, rebounded from it, and still the beasts clung to her, darted, nipped.

  Kyle Barlowe took two tentative steps toward her, halted, looking not so much afraid as bewildered.

  Christine did not want to look, but she could not he lp it. She was transfixed by the horrible battle.

  Spivey appeared to be wearing a garment composed of hundreds of flapping black rags. Her face vanished entirely beneath that tattered cloth. But for the flutter and scrape and tick of their wings, the bats maintained their eerie silence, though they moved even more frantically now, with malign intent. They tore her to pieces.

  At last the bats were still.

  Spivey was motionless, too.

  For perhaps a minute, the bats were a living, black funeral shroud covering the body, quivering slightly like wind-rustled cloth. By the second, their unnatural silence grew more remarkable and unnerving. They did not quite look, behave, or seem like ordinary bats. Besides the astonishing timeliness of their appearance and the purposefulness of their attack, they had a quality-an air-that was indefinably strange. Christine saw some of the small, dark, evil heads lift up, turn left and right and left again, crimson eyes blinking, and it seemed as if they

  were awaiting an order from the leader of their flock. Then, as if the order came in a voice only they could hear, they rose as one, in a sudden fluttering cloud, and flew back into other cavems.

  Kyle Barlowe and Charlie were silent, stunned.

  Christine would not look at the dead woman.

  And she could not look away from her son. He was aliveunbelievably, amazingly, miraculously alive. After all the terror and pain they had been through, after death had seemed inevitable, she had difficulty believing this last-minute reprieve was real. Irrationally, she felt that if she looked away from Joey, even for a moment, he would be dead when she looked back again, and their extraordinary salvation would prove to be a delusion, a dream.