A Darkness in My Soul

by Dean Koontz

  A Darkness in my Soul

  by

  Dean R. Koontz

  * * *

  ONE

  Divinity Destroyed...

  I

  For a long while, I wondered if Dragonfly was still in the heavens and whether the Spheres of Plague still floated in airlessness, blind eyes watchful. I wondered whether men still looked to the stars with trepidation and whether the skies yet bore the cancerous seed of mankind. There was no way for me to find out, for I lived in Hell during those days, where news of the living gained precious little circulation.

  I was a digger into minds, a head-tripper. I esped. I found secrets, knew lies, and reported all these things for a price. I esped. Some questions were never meant to be answered; some parts of a man's mind were never intended for scrutiny. Yet our curiosity is, at the same time, our greatest virtue and our most serious weakness. I had within my mind the power to satisfy any curiosity which tickled me. I esped; I found; I knew. And then there was a darkness in my soul, darkness unmatched by the depths of space that lay lightless between the galaxies, an ebony ache without parallel.

  It started with a nerve-jangling ring of the telephone, a mundane enough beginning.

  I put down the book I was reading and lifted the receiver and said, impatiently perhaps, "Hello?"

  "Simeon?" the distant voice asked. He pronounced it correctly-Sim-ee-on.

  It was Harry Kelly, sounding bedraggled and bewildered, two things he never was. I recognized his voice because it had been-in years past-the only sound of sanity and understanding in a world of wildly gabbling self-seekers and power-mongers. I esped out and saw him standing in a room that was strange to me, nervously drumming his fingers on the top of a simulated oak desk.

  The desk was studded with a complex panel of controls, three telephones, and three-dimensional television screens for monitoring interoffice activity-the work space of someone of more than a little importance.

  "What is it, Harry?"

  "Sim, I have another job for you. If you want it, that is.

  You don't have to take it if you're already wrapped up in something private."

  He had long ago given up his legal practice to act as my agent, and he could be counted on for at least one call a week like this. Yet there was a hollow anxiety in his tone which made me uncomfortable. I could have touched deeper into his mind, stirred through the pudding of his thoughts and discovered the trouble. But he was the one person in the world I would not esp for purely personal reasons. He had earned his sanctity, and he would never have to worry about losing it.

  "Why so nervous? What kind of job?"

  "Plenty of money," he said. "Look, Sim, I know how much you hate these tawdry little government contracts. If you take this job, you're not going to need money for a long while. You won't have to go around snooping through a hundred government heads a week."

  "Say no more," I said. Harry knew my habit of living beyond my means. If he thought there was enough in this to keep me living fat for some time to come, the buyer had just purchased his merchandise. All of us have our price. Mine just came a little steeper than most.

  "I'm at the Artificial Creation complex. We'll expect you in-say twenty minutes."

  "I'm on my way." I dropped the phone into its cradle and tried to pretend I was enthusiastic. But my stomach belied my true feelings as it stung my chest with acidic, roiling spasms. In the back of my mind, The Fear rose and hung over me, watching with dinner-plate eyes, breathing fire through black nostrils. The Artificial Creation building: the womb, my womb, the first tides of my life...

  I almost crawled back into bed and almost said the hell with it. The AC complex was the last place on Earth I wanted to go, especially at night, when everything would seem more sinister, when memories would play in brighter colors. Two things kept me from the sheets: I truly did not enjoy the loyalty checks I ran on government employees to keep me in spending money, for I was not only required to report traitors, but to delineate the abnormal (as the government defined that) private practices and beliefs of those I scanned, violating privacy in the most insidious of fashions; secondly, I had just promised Harry I would be there, and I couldn't find a single instance when that mad Irishman had ever let me down.

  I cursed the womb which had made me, beseeching the gods to melt its plastic walls and short-circuit those miles and miles of delicate copper wires.

  I pulled on street clothes over pajamas, stepped into overshoes and a heavy coat with fur lining, one of the popular Nordic models. Without Harry Kelly, I would most likely have been in prison at that moment-or in a preventive detention apartment with federal plainclothes guards standing watch at the doors and windows. Which is only a more civilized way of saying the same thing: prison.

  When the staff of Artificial Creation discovered my wild talents in my childhood, the FBI attempted to "impound" me so that I might be used as a "national resource" under federal control for "the betterment of our great country and the establishment of a tighter American defense perimeter."

  It had been Harry Kelly who had cut through all that fancy language to call it what it was-illegal and immoral imprisonment of a free citizen. He fought the legal battle all the way to nine old men in nine old chairs, where the case was won. I was nine when we did that-twelve long years ago.

  It was snowing outside. The harsh lines of shrubbery, trees, and curbs had been softened by three inches of white. I had to scrape the windscreen of the hovercar, which amused me and helped settle my nerves a bit. One would imagine that, in 2004 A.D., Science could have dreamed up something to make ice scrapers obsolete.

  At the first red light, there was a gray police howler overturned on the sidewalk, like a beached whale. Its stubby nose had smashed through the display window of a small clothing store, and the dome light was still swiveling.

  A thin trail of exhaust fumes rose from the bent tailpipe, curled upwards into the cold air. There were more than twenty uniformed coppers positioned around the intersection, though there seemed to be no present danger. The snow was tramped and scuffed, as if there had been a major conflagration, though the antagonists had disappeared. I was motioned through by a stern-faced bull in a fur-collared fatigue jacket, and I obeyed. None of them looked in the mood to satisfy the curiosity of a passing motorist, or even to let me pause long enough to scan their minds and find the answer without their knowledge.

  I arrived at the AC building and floated the car in for a Marine attendant to park. As I slid out and he slid in, I asked, "Know anything about the howler on Seventh?

  Turned on its side and driven halfway into a store. Lot of coppers."

  He was a huge man with a blocky head and flat features that looked almost painted on. When he wrinkled his face in disgust, it looked as if someone had put an eggbeater on his nose and whirled everything together.

  "Peace criers," he said.

  I couldn't see why he should bother lying to me, so I didn't go through the bother of using my esp, which requires some expenditure of energy. "I thought they were finished," I said.

  "So did everyone else," he said. Quite obviously, he hated the peace criers, as did most men in uniform. "The Congressional investigating committee proved the voluntary army was still a good idea. We don't run the country like those creeps say. Brother, I can sure tell you we don't!" Then he slammed the door and took the car away to park it while I punched for the elevator, stepped through its open maw, and went up.

  I made faces at the cameras which watched me, and repeated two dirty limericks on the way to the lobby.

  When the lift stopped and the doors opened, a second Marine greeted me, requested that I hold my fingertips to an identiplate to verify his visual check. I complied, was approved, and fo
llowed him to another elevator in the long bank. Again: up.

  Too many floors to count later, we stepped into a cream-walled corridor, paced almost to the end of it, and went through a chocolate door that slid aside at the officer's vocal command. Inside, there was a room of alabaster walls with hex signs painted every five feet in brilliant reds and oranges. There was a small and ugly child sitting in a black leather chair, and four men standing behind him, staring at me as if I were expected to say something of monumental importance.

  I didn't say anything at all.

  The child looked up, his eyes and lips all but hidden by the wrinkles of a century of life, by gray and gravelike flesh. I tried to readjust my judgment, tried to visualize him as a grandfather. But it was not so. He was a child.

  There was the glint of babyhood close behind that ruined countenance. His voice crackled like papyrus unrolled for the first time in millennia, and he gripped the chair as the words came, and he squinted his already squinted eyes, and he said, "You're the one." It was an accusation.

  "You're the one they sent for."

  For the first time in many years, I was afraid. I was not certain what terrified me, but it was a deep and relentless uneasiness, far more threatening than The Fear which rose in me most nights when I considered my origins and the pocket of the plastic womb from which I came.

  "You," the child said again.

  "Who is he?" I asked the assembled military men.

  No one spoke immediately. As if they wanted to be sure the freak in the chair was finished.

  He wasn't.

  "I don't like you," he said. "You're going to be sorry you came here. I'm going to see to that."

  II

  "That's the situation," Harry said, leaning back in his chair for the first time since he had taken me aside to explain the job. He was still nervous. His clear blue eyes were having trouble staying with mine, and he sought specks on the walls and scars on the furniture to draw his attention.

  The child-ancient's eyes, on the other hand, never left me. They squinted like burning coals sparking beneath rotted vegetation. I could feel the hatred smoldering there, hatred not just for me (though there was surely that), but for everyone, everything. There was no particle of his world which did not draw the freak's contempt and loathing. He, more so than I, was an outcast of the wombs. Once again, the doctors who made their living here and the congressmen who had supported the project since its inception could gloat: "Artificial Creation is a Benefit to the Nation." It had produced me. More than eighteen years later, it had come up with this warped super-genius who was no more than three years old but who appeared to be a relic. Two successes in a quarter of a century of operation.

  For the government, that's a winner.

  "I don't know if I can do it," I said at last.

  "Why not?" asked the uniformed hulk the others called General Morsfagen. He was a chiseled granite man with exaggerated shoulders and a chest too large for anything but tailored shirts. Wasp-waisted, with the small feet of a boxer. Hands to bend iron bars in circus acts.

  "I don't know what to expect. He has a different sort of mind. Sure, I've esped army staff, the people who work here at AC, FBI agents, the whole mess. And I've unerringly turned over the traitors and potential security risks.

  But this just doesn't scan like that."

  "You don't have to do any sorting," Morsfagen snapped, his thin lips making like a turtle bill. "I thought this had been made clear. He can formulate theories in areas as useful as physics and chemistry to others as useless as theology. But each time we drag the damn thing out of him, he leaves out some vital piece of it. We've threatened the little freak. We've tried bribing him. The trouble is, he has no fear or ambition." He had almost said "tortured" for "threatened" but was a good enough self-censor to change words without a pause. "You simply go into his head and make sure he doesn't hold anything back."

  "How much did you say?" I asked.

  "A hundred thousand poscreds an hour."

  It pained him to say that.

  "Double that," I said. For many men, the single hundred thou was more than a year's salary in these time of inflation.

  "What? Absurd!"

  He was breathing heavily, but the other generals didn't even flinch. I esped each of them and discovered that, among other things, the child had given them an almost completed design for a faster-than-light engine which would make star travel possible. For the rest of that theory alone, a million an hour was not ridiculous. I got my two hundred big ones with an option to demand more if the work proved more demanding than I anticipated.

  "Without your shyster, you'd be working for room and board," Morsfagen said.

  He had an ugly face.

  "Without your brass medals, you'd be a street-gang punk," I replied, smiling the famous Simeon Kelly smile.

  He wanted to hit me.

  His fists made flesh balls, and the knuckles nearly pierced the skin-they protruded so harshly.

  I laughed at him.

  He couldn't risk it. He needed me too much.

  The freak kid laughed too, doubling over in his chair and slapping his flabby hands against his knees. It was the most hideous laugh I had ever heard in my life. It spoke of madness.

  III

  The lights had been dimmed. The machines had been moved in and now stood watch, solemnly recording all that transpired.

  "The hex signs which you see on the walls are all part of the pre-drug hypnosis which has just been completed.

  After he's placed in a state of trance, we administer 250 cc's of Cinnamide, directly into his jugular." The whitesmocked director of the medical team spoke with crisp, pleasant directness, but as though he were discussing the maintenance of one of his machines.

  The child sat across from me. His eyes were dead, the scintillating sparkle of intelligence gone from them, and not replaced by any corresponding quality. Just gone. I was less horrified by his face and no longer bothered by the dry, decaying look of it. Still, my guts felt cold and my chest ached with an indefinable pressure, as if something were trying to burst free of me.

  "What's his name?" I asked Morsfagen.

  "He hasn't any."

  "No?"

  "No. We have his code name, as always. We don't need more."

  I looked back at the freak. And within my soul (some churches deny me one; but then churches have been denying people a lot of things for a lot of reasons, and the world still turns), I knew that in all the far reaches of the galaxy, to the ends of the larger universe, in the billions of inhabited worlds that might be out there, no name existed for the child. Simply: Child. With a capital.

  A team of doctors administered the drug.

  "Within the next five minutes," Morsfagen said. He had both big hands fisted on the arms of his chair. It wasn't anger now, merely a reaction to the air of tension that overhung the room.

  I nodded, looked at Harry who had demanded to be there for this initial session. He was still nervous over the confrontation of the monsters. I tried not to mirror his unease. I turned back to Child and prepared myself for the assault upon his mental sanctity.

  Stepping easily over the threshold, I fell through the blackness of his mind, flailing... ... and woke up to white faces with blurred black holes where the eyes should have been.

  They mumbled things in their alien language, and they prodded me with cold instruments.

  When my vision cleared, I could see it was a strange triumvirate: Harry, Morsfagen, and some unnamed physician who was taking my pulse and clucking his tongue against his cheek like someone had told him doctors were supposed to do when they couldn't think of anything intelligent to say.

  "You all right, Sim?" Harry asked.

  Morsfagen pushed my lawyer/agent/father-figure out of the way and thrust his bony face down at mine. I could see hairs crinkling out of his flared nostrils. There were flecks of spittle on his lips, as if he had been doing a lot of shouting in rage. The dark blue of his close-shaved whiskers s
eemed like needles waiting to thrust out of his tight pores.

  "What happened? What's wrong? You don't get paid without results."

  "I wasn't prepared for what I found," I said. "Simple as that. No need for hysterics."

  "But you were yelling and screaming," Harry protested, insinuating himself between the general and myself.

  "Not to worry."

  "What did you find that you didn't expect?" Morsfagen asked. He was skeptical. I could have cared more, but not less.

  "He hasn't any conscious mind. It's a vast pit, and I fell into it expecting solid ground. Evidently, all his thoughts, or a great many of them, come from what we would consider the subconscious."

  Morsfagen stood away. "Then you can't reach him?"

  "I didn't say that. Now that I know what's there and what isn't, I'll be all right."

  I struggled to a sitting position, reached out and stopped the room from swaying. The hex signs settled onto the walls where they belonged, and the light fixtures even stopped whirling in erratic circles from wall to wall. I looked at my watch with the picture of Elliot Gould on the face, calculated the time, assumed a properly bland expression, and said. "That'll be roughly a hundred thousand poscreds. Put it on my earnings sheet, why don't you?"

  He sputtered. He fumed. He roared. He glowered. He quoted the Government Rates for Employees. He quoted the Employer's Rights Act of 1986, paragraph two, subparagraph three. He fumed a bit more.

  I watched, looking unshaken.

  He pranced. He danced. He raved. He ranted. He demanded to know what I had done to earn any pay whatsoever. I didn't answer him. He finished ranting. Started fuming again. In the end, he put it down in the book and vouchered the payment before pounding on a table in utter frustration and then leaving the room with a warning to be on time the following day.

  "Don't push your luck," Harry advised me later.