by Dean Koontz
Beyond a deep backyard, shingled to match the house and with windows flanked by white shutters, stands a small barn with a gambrel roof. Because the property is at the extreme southern end of town, it offers access to riding trails and the open hills; the original owner had stabled horses in the barn. Now the structure is a studio, where Toby Ramirez builds his life from glass.
Approaching through the fog, I saw the windows glowing. Toby often wakes long before dawn and comes out to the studio.
I propped the bike against the barn wall and went to the nearest window. Orson put his forepaws on the windowsill and stood beside me, peering inside.
When I pay a visit to watch Toby create, I usually don’t go into the studio. The fluorescent ceiling panels are far too bright. And because borosilicate glass is worked at temperatures exceeding twenty-two hundred degrees Fahrenheit, it emits significant amounts of intense light that can damage anyone’s eyes, not just mine. If Toby is between tasks, he may turn the lights off, and then we talk for a while.
Now, wearing a pair of goggles with didymium lenses, Toby was in his work chair at the glassblowing table, in front of the Fisher Multi-Flame burner. He had just finished forming a graceful pear-shaped vase with a long neck, which was still so hot that it was glowing gold and red; now he was annealing it.
When a piece of glassware is removed suddenly from a hot flame, it will usually cool too quickly, develop stresses—and crack. To preserve the item, it must be annealed—that is, cooled in careful stages.
The flame was fed by natural gas mixed with pure oxygen from a pressurized tank that was chained to the glassblowing table. During the annealing process, Toby would feather out the oxygen, gradually reducing the temperature, giving the glass molecules time to shift to more stable positions.
Because of the numerous dangers involved in glassblowing, some people in Moonlight Bay thought it was irresponsible of Manuel to allow his Down’s-afflicted son to practice this technically demanding art and craft. Fiery catastrophes were envisioned, predicted, and awaited with impatience in some quarters.
Initially, no one was more opposed to Toby’s dream than Manuel. For fifteen years, the barn had served as a studio for Carmelita’s older brother, Salvador, a first-rank glass artist. As a child, Toby had spent uncounted hours with his uncle Salvador, wearing goggles, watching the master at work, on rare occasion donning Kevlar mittens to transfer a vase or bowl to or from the annealing oven. While he’d appeared to many to be passing those hours in stupefaction, with a dull gaze and a witless smile, he had actually been learning without being directly taught. To cope, the intellectually disadvantaged often must have superhuman patience. Toby sat day after day, year after year, in his uncle’s studio, watching and slowly learning. When Salvador died two years ago, Toby—then only fourteen—asked his father if he might continue his uncle’s work. Manuel had not taken the request seriously, and he’d gently discouraged his son from dwelling on this impossible dream.
One morning before dawn, he found Toby in the studio. At the end of the worktable, standing on the fire-resistant Ceramfab top, was a family of simple blown-glass swans. Beside the swans stood a newly formed and annealed vase into which had been introduced a calculated mixture of compatible impurities that imparted to the glass mysterious midnight-blue swirls with a silvery glitter like stars. Manuel knew at once that this piece was equal to the finest vases that Salvador had ever produced; and Toby was at that very moment flame-annealing an equally striking piece of work.
The boy had absorbed the technical aspects of glass craft from his uncle, and in spite of his mild retardation, he obviously knew the proper procedures for avoiding injury. The magic of genetics was involved, too, for he possessed a striking talent that could not have been learned. He wasn’t merely a craftsman but an artist, and not merely an artist but perhaps an idiot savant to whom the inspiration of the artist and the techniques of the craftsman came with the ease of waves to the shore.
Gift shops in Moonlight Bay, Cambria, and as far north as Carmel sold all the glass Toby produced. In a few years, he might become self-supporting.
Sometimes, nature throws a bone to those she maims. Witness my own ability to compose sentences and paragraphs with some skill.
Now, in the studio, orange light flared and billowed from the large, bushy annealing flame. Toby took care to turn the pear-shaped vase so that it was bathed uniformly by the fire.
With a thick neck, rounded shoulders, and proportionately short arms and stocky legs, he might have been a storybook gnome before a watch fire deep in the earth. Brow sloped and heavy. Bridge of the nose flat. Ears set too low on a head slightly too small for his body. His soft features and the inner epicanthic folds of his eyes give him a perpetual dreamy expression.
Yet on his high work chair, turning the glass in the flame, adjusting the oxygen flow with intuitive precision, face shimmering with reflected light, eyes concealed behind didymium goggles, Toby did not in any way seem below average, did not in any way impress me as being diminished by his condition. To the contrary, observed in his element, in the act of creation, he appeared exalted.
Orson snorted with alarm. He dropped his forepaws from the window, turned away from the studio, and tightened into a wary crouch.
Turning as well, I saw a shadowy figure crossing the backyard, coming toward us. In spite of the darkness and fog, I recognized him at once because of the easy way that he carried himself. It was Manuel Ramirez: Toby’s dad, number two in the Moonlight Bay Police Department but now at least temporarily risen by succession to the top post, due to the fiery death of his boss.
I put both hands in my jacket pockets. I closed my right hand around the Glock.
Manuel and I were friends. I wouldn’t feel comfortable pointing a gun at him, and I certainly couldn’t shoot him. Unless he was not Manuel anymore. Unless, like Stevenson, he had become someone else.
He stopped eight or ten feet from us. In the annealing flame’s coruscating orange glow, which pierced the nearby window, I could see that Manuel was wearing his khaki uniform. His service pistol was holstered on his right hip. Although he stood with his thumbs hooked in his gun belt, he would be able to draw his weapon at least as quickly as I could pull the Glock from my jacket.
“Your shift over already?” I asked, although I knew it wasn’t.
Instead of answering me, he said, “I hope you’re not expecting beer, tamales, and Jackie Chan movies at this hour.”
“I just stopped by to say hello to Toby if he happened to be between jobs.”
Manuel’s face, too worn with care for his forty years, had a naturally friendly aspect. Even in this Halloween light, his smile was still engaging, reassuring. As far as I could see, the only luminosity in his eyes was the reflected light from the studio window. Of course, that reflection might mask the same transient flickers of animal eyeshine that I’d seen in Lewis Stevenson.
Orson was reassured enough to ease out of his crouch. But he remained wary.
Manuel exhibited none of Stevenson’s simmering rage or electric energy. As always, his voice was soft and almost musical. “You never did come around to the station after you called.”
I considered my answer and decided to go with the truth. “Yes, I did.”
“So when you phoned me, you were already close,” he guessed.
“Right around the corner. Who’s the bald guy with the earring?”
Manuel mulled over his answer and followed my lead with some truth of his own. “His name’s Carl Scorso.”
“But who is he?”
“A total dirtbag. How far are you going to carry this?”
“Nowhere.”
He was silent, disbelieving.
“It started out a crusade,” I admitted. “But I know when I’m beaten.”
“That sure would be a new Chris Snow.”
“Even if I could contact an outside authority or the media, I don’t understand the situation well enough to convince them of anything.”
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“And you have no proof.”
“Nothing substantive. Anyway, I don’t think I’d be allowed to make that contact. If I could get someone to come investigate, I don’t think I or any of my friends would be alive to greet them when they got here.”
Manuel didn’t reply, but his silence was all the answer I needed.
He might still be a baseball fan. He might still like country music, Abbott and Costello. He still understood as much as I did about limitations and still felt the hand of fate as I did. He might even still like me—but he was no longer my friend. If he wouldn’t be sufficiently treacherous to pull the trigger on me himself, he would watch as someone else did.
Sadness pooled in my heart, a greasy despondency that I’d never felt before, akin to nausea. “The entire police department has been co-opted, hasn’t it?”
His smile had faded. He looked tired.
When I saw weariness in him rather than anger, I knew that he was going to tell me more than he should. Riven by guilt, he would not be able to keep all his secrets.
I already suspected that I knew one of the revelations he would make about my mother. I was so loath to hear it that I almost walked away. Almost.
“Yes,” he said. “The entire department.”
“Even you.”
“Oh, mi amigo, especially me.”
“Are you infected by whatever bug came out of Wyvern?”
“‘Infection’ isn’t quite the word.”
“But close enough.”
“Everyone else in the department has it. But not me. Not that I know. Not yet.”
“So maybe they had no choice. You did.”
“I decided to cooperate because there might be a lot more good that comes from this than bad.”
“From the end of the world?”
“They’re working to undo what’s happened.”
“Working out there at Wyvern, underground somewhere?”
“There and other places, yeah. And if they find a way to combat it…then wonderful things could come from this.”
As he spoke, his gaze moved from me to the studio window.
“Toby,” I said.
Manuel’s eyes shifted to me again.
I said, “This thing, this plague, whatever it is—you’re hoping that if they can bring it under control, they’ll be able to use it to help Toby somehow.”
“You have a selfish interest here, too, Chris.”
From the barn roof, an owl asked its single question of identity five times in quick succession, as if suspicious of everyone in Moonlight Bay.
I took a deep breath and said, “That’s the only reason my mother would work on biological research for military purposes. The only reason. Because there was a very good chance that something would come of it that might cure my XP.”
“And something may still come of it.”
“It was a weapons project?”
“Don’t blame her, Chris. Only a weapons project would have tens of billions of dollars behind it. She’d never have had a chance to do this work for the right reasons. It was just too expensive.”
This was no doubt true. Nothing but a weapons project would have the bottomless resources needed to fund the complex research that my mother’s most profound concepts necessitated.
Wisteria Jane (Milbury) Snow was a theoretical geneticist. This means that she did the heavy thinking while other scientists did the heavy lifting. She didn’t spend much of her time in laboratories or even working in the virtual lab of a computer. Her lab was her mind, and it was extravagantly equipped. She theorized, and with guidance from her, others sought to prove her theories.
I have said that she was brilliant but perhaps not that she was extraordinarily brilliant. Which she was. She could have chosen any university affiliation in the world. They all sought her.
My father loved Ashdon, but he would have followed her where she wished to go. He would have thrived in any academic environment.
She restricted herself to Ashdon because of me. Most of the truly great universities are in either major or midsize cities, where I’d be no more limited by day than I am in Moonlight Bay, but where I’d have no hope of a rich life by night. Cities are bright even after sunset. And the few dark precincts of a city are not places where a young boy on a bicycle could safely go adventuring between dusk and dawn.
She made less of her life in order to make more of mine. She confined herself to a small town, willing to leave her full potential unrealized, to give me a chance at realizing mine.
Tests to determine genetic damage in a fetus were rudimentary when I was born. If the analytic tools had been sufficiently advanced for my XP to have been detected in the weeks following my conception, perhaps she would have chosen not to bring me into the world.
How I love the world in all its beauty and strangeness.
Because of me, however, the world will grow ever stranger in the years to come—and perhaps less beautiful.
If not for me, she would have refused to put her mind to work for the project at Wyvern, would never have led them on new roads of inquiry. And we would not have followed one of those roads to the precipice on which we now stand.
As Orson moved to make room for him, Manuel came to the window. He stared in at his son, and with his face more brightly lit, I could see not a wild light in his eyes but only overwhelming love.
“Enhancing the intelligence of animals,” I said. “How would that have military applications?”
“For one thing, what better spy than a dog as smart as a human being, sent behind enemy lines? An impenetrable disguise. And they don’t check dogs’ passports. What better scout on a battlefield?”
Maybe you engineer an exceptionally powerful dog that’s smart but also savagely vicious when it needs to be. You have a new kind of soldier: a biologically designed killing machine with the capacity for strategizing.
“I thought intelligence depended on brain size.”
He shrugged. “I’m just a cop.”
“Or on the number of folds in the brain surface.”
“Evidently they discovered different. Anyway,” Manuel said, “there was a previous success. Something called the Francis Project, several years ago. An amazingly smart golden retriever. The Wyvern operation was launched to capitalize on what they learned from that. And at Wyvern it wasn’t just about animal intelligence. It was about enhancing human intelligence, about lots of things, many things.”
In the studio, hands covered with Kevlar gloves, Toby placed the hot vase into a bucket half filled with vermiculite. This was the next stage of the annealing process.
Standing at Manuel’s side, I said, “Many things? What else?”
“They wanted to enhance human agility, speed, longevity—by finding ways not just to transfer genetic material from one person to another but from species to species.”
Species to species.
I heard myself say, “Oh, my God.”
Toby poured more of the granular vermiculite over the vase, until it was covered. Vermiculite is a superb insulator that allows the glass to continue cooling very slowly and at a constant rate.
I remembered something Roosevelt Frost had said: that the dogs, cats, and monkeys were not the only experimental subjects in the labs at Wyvern, that there was something worse.
“People,” I said numbly. “They experimented on people?”
“Soldiers court-martialed and found guilty of murder, condemned to life sentences in military prisons. They could rot there…or take part in the project and maybe win their freedom as a reward.”
“But experimenting on people…”
“I doubt your mother knew anything about that. They didn’t always share with her all the ways they applied her ideas.”
Toby must have heard our voices at the window, because he took off the insulated gloves and raised the big goggles from his eyes to squint at us. He waved.
“It all went wrong,” Manuel said. “I’m no scientist. Don’t ask me how. But i
t went wrong not just in one way. Many ways. It blew up in their faces. Suddenly things happened they weren’t expecting. Changes they didn’t contemplate. The experimental animals and the prisoners—their genetic makeup underwent changes that weren’t desired and couldn’t be controlled….”
I waited a moment, but he apparently wasn’t prepared to tell me more. I pressed him: “A monkey escaped. A rhesus. They found it in Angela Ferryman’s kitchen.”
The searching look that Manuel turned on me was so penetrating that I was sure he had seen into my heart, knew the contents of my every pocket, and had an accurate count of the number of bullets left in the Glock.
“They recaptured the rhesus,” he said, “but made the mistake of attributing its escape to human error. They didn’t realize it had been let go, released. They didn’t realize there were a few scientists in the project who were…becoming.”
“Becoming what?”
“Just…becoming. Something new. Changing.”
Toby switched off the natural gas. The Fisher burner swallowed its own flames.
“Changing how?” I asked Manuel.
“Whatever delivery system they developed to insert new genetic material in a research animal or prisoner…that system just took on a life of its own.”
Toby turned off all but one panel of fluorescents, so I could go inside for a visit.
Manuel said, “Genetic material from other species was being carried into the bodies of the project scientists without their being aware of it. Eventually, some of them began to have a lot in common with the animals.”
“Jesus.”
“Too much in common maybe. There was some kind of…episode. I don’t know the details. It was extremely violent. People died. And all the animals either escaped or were let out.”
“The troop.”
“About a dozen smart, vicious monkeys, yes. But also dogs and cats…and nine of the prisoners.”
