Last Light (Novella)

by Dean Koontz

  After a long drink of ice-cold beer, while Rainer scanned the familiar menu, Makani said, “What do you do when you’re not watching girls on the beach?”

  “I’ve been known to paddle out and take some waves myself.”

  “I didn’t see you on the ride today.”

  “You wouldn’t have, not as into it as you were.”

  “I was into it,” she admitted.

  “I suspect you’re always into it. I’ve never seen such concentration.” He put the menu aside. “So where’d you first learn to surf?”

  “Oahu. I was born there.”

  “Hamakuapoko?” he asked, naming a popular and sometimes difficult surfing location on Oahu.

  “I learned some there. Here, there, and everywhere on the island, from when I was seven and only bodyboarding.”

  “Nuumehalani?” he asked, and then he translated, perhaps to impress her with the fact that he knew more than just the name. “ ‘The heavenly site where you are alone.’ It means alone with the gods, no matter how many people might be there.”

  “Sure. Went there so often, I maybe could have staked a claim to part of the beach.”

  Something like delight enlivened his face. While he tipped his beer to his lips and drank, Makani waited to hear what amused him.

  He licked the foam off his lips and put down the glass and said, “I saw you there once.”

  “I don’t think so. I haven’t been in Oahu in more than five years.”

  “This was ten years ago. I was a month short of my twenty-first birthday, in the islands on business, wanted to catch some waves. A weekday in October. You were with three girls, a couple of boys. You were wearing a yellow bikini.”

  “Must be a million girls with yellow bikinis.”

  “You were riding a Mayhem by Lost Boards,” he said.

  Surprised, she said, “I loved that board. I broke it two months later when I bailed out on a big set.”

  “Couldn’t be two girls in the world who looked like you, with those eyes, and riding a Mayhem.”

  “You recognized me right away, out there today?”

  “At first sight.”

  “Get real.”

  “It’s true.”

  She was flattered, but also embarrassed. “I don’t remember you.”

  “Why would you? You were with your crew, having a great time.”

  That October, ten years earlier, the unwanted gift of psychic insight had not yet been given to her. She had been normal. Free.

  “I admired you from a distance,” he said. “Almost approached you to say ’sup, or something just as stupid. Then I realized you must be the same age as the other kids, fifteen or sixteen. And I was almost twenty-one. Wouldn’t have been right.”

  Makani didn’t blush easily, but she blushed now.

  “That day,” Rainer said, “you were so radical, so live, the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.”

  Flattery had always embarrassed her. Virtually from the cradle, her mother had taught her that humility was a virtue as important as honesty, just as she had been taught by her mother, Grandma Kolokea. Now Makani could respond to Rainer’s admiration only with gentle sarcasm: “What—were you blind until that day?”

  “Well, I’m not blind now,” he said, compounding the flattery and her embarrassment.

  To gain time to catch her breath, she said, “You were in Oahu on business that day? What business are you in?”

  “I’m a facilitator,” he said, and sipped his beer, as if that one word should say it all.

  “Facilitator? What do you facilitate?”

  “Negotiations, transactions, financial arrangements.”

  “Sounds important. You were doing all that when you were just twenty?”

  He shrugged. “I like people. I’ve always had this ability to, you know, bring them together when all they want is to be arguing with each other. I can’t stand people fighting, always looking for a reason to be at each other’s throats.” A solemnity overcame him. An underlying pallor seemed to leach some of the glow out of his tan. He looked down at the table. “When I was a little kid, I saw enough of that. My old man, my mom. Too much drinking, so much anger. I couldn’t do a thing about…the brutality.” He looked up with repressed tears in his eyes. “We get only one life. We shouldn’t waste a day of it in anger.”

  Because Makani knew too well the darker corners of the human heart, she sympathized with his childhood trauma and hoped that things might develop between them in such a way that she could be a comfort to him.

  “You facilitate between businesses?” she asked. “In the surfing world?”

  “Yeah, exactly. I did what every surf mongrel dreams of doing—found a way to make a living out of living the waves.”

  She didn’t know the rules of poker, didn’t know how to read another player’s tells, but suddenly something about his smile or maybe a certain glint in his eyes, or the faintest hint of arrogance in the slight lifting of his chin, suggested to her that he might be lying about his work.

  She must be wrong. He was such a big strong man, yet he didn’t use his size to intimidate. There he sat in his surfing-penguins shirt, like an overgrown boy, as sweet as anything. Her suspicion no doubt resulted from the uncounted times that her paranormal talent had revealed to her someone’s well-concealed deceit.

  If she allowed unalloyed cynicism to settle in her heart, she would never trust anyone again. She’d have no hope of friendship, and certainly no chance of ever sharing her life with a man. The possibility of a life alone already gave her sleepless nights; the certainty of it would bring a depression that not even the consoling sea, with all its power and beauty, could relieve.

  Pushing aside his half-finished beer, folding his hands on the table, leaning forward, Rainer said, “This is all a little awkward for me. I mean, I’ve thought about you for ten years, and never for a minute imagined I’d ever see you again. But here you are.”

  “For real, now—you can’t have been thinking of me for ten years,” she said, though she wanted to believe that what he’d said was more true than not.

  “Not every minute, ’course not. More often than you’d believe. When the waves were big and glassy and offshore and pumping, when it was a perfect day, then you kind of walked out of the back of my mind, as vivid as when I first saw you, as if you had to be there for it to really be a perfect day. Is it too much to believe that a man could see a woman across a crowded room or on the beach and be so drawn to her that he feels everything is about to change? But then, for whatever reason, he never has the chance to meet her, and so he’s haunted by that lost opportunity, by her, for years after? Do you think that sort of thing only happens in novels?”

  Makani smiled knowingly, pushed her beer aside, folded her hands on the table, leaned forward as he had done, and took refuge in defensive sarcasm. “Haunted? Rainer, you seem to be a dear man, you really do. But what will you tell me next—that you’ve saved yourself for me all these years, that you’ve been as celibate as a monk? A guy who looks like you, a babe magnet?”

  He regarded her with grave seriousness, met her eyes and did not look away. “Not at all. There have been women. I’ve been fond of all those girls, loved one. But never loved one enough. Never had that…electrifying moment, though I’ve hoped for it. I’ll promise you this—take me seriously, give me a chance, more dates than just this one, and I won’t pressure you to be intimate, not once, never. If that happens, it’ll be when you want it to. Whether it takes a year, longer, I don’t care. Your company, companionship, the sight of you—that’ll be enough for me until it’s not enough for you.”

  He had rendered her speechless. Any guy she’d ever known would have delivered that pitch in such a way that insincerity would have dripped from every word. But from Rainer, it sounded as genuine as an innocent child’s pledge of fealty to a friend. When she found her voice, she said, “I’m not used to conversations like this, moving this fast. I’m not sure about the territory.”
/>   “Makani, do you believe in hopena?”

  “Destiny?” She thought of the unsought and burdensome gift that fate—or something in its guise—had bestowed upon her. “Have to say, I’ve had reason to wonder about it.”

  “Have you?”

  “Who hasn’t? Sometimes, it seems, things happen for no reason. You know? An effect without a cause. Crazy things.”

  His right hand unfolded from his left. He reached across the table to her.

  The moment had come. Skin to skin. All the dangers of a touch.

  If she didn’t take his hand, he’d be stung by her rejection.

  The possibility of a relationship was at stake.

  Perhaps she had lied to herself. Perhaps she preferred to be alone. Her hesitation suggested as much.

  No. She hadn’t been conceived in passion—and in the surf—only for a life of loneliness.

  He would be either what he appeared to be or in some way a lesser man. She had nothing to lose. Except hope. Again.

  She took his hand, and knew him for the monster that he was.

  4

  Taking the Drop

  When a surfer came over the top of a wave, using its velocity to remain ahead of the curl, he was “taking the drop,” and ahead lay either a sweet ride or a wipeout, depending largely on his skill and on the steepness of the curved face of the wave, between its crest and trough. If the drop went wrong, rider and board could go into free fall down the face and either wipe out or recover just well enough to claim a tie with the ocean.

  In a sense, Makani was taking the drop when she accepted Rainer’s hand, and the wave down which she plummeted in free fall was storm-dark and menacing and strange. In the few dreadful seconds that followed the touch, surging out of the darkness at the man’s core and into her mind were faces of women and men, of children, mouths open in silent screams, eyes wide with terror, plus treasured and well-remembered patterns of blood in the gallery of his memory, because blood was art to him, blood his passion, blood his money, too, and in his mind the images of spilling blood were confused with thick gouts of hundred-dollar bills gushing from the wounds of his victims, murder for money, murder for pleasure, murder for murder’s sake. She saw herself, too, an object of intense desire, imagined in multiple poses, naked and vulnerable and chillingly submissive. During this deluge of shocking images, she sensed as well that he was in some way like her, that by touch he discovered his victims and learned why he would profit by the killing of them.

  The contact was far more intense than any she had previously experienced, as if she had grasped a cable through which surged a powerful current, so that she couldn’t easily let go. When she snatched her hand from his, the disconnection stung, produced a snapping-sizzling sound that arced within her head, by some route other than her ears.

  His look of astonishment no doubt matched hers. But with a swiftness that suggested the mental reflexes of a perfect predator, his face was subtly reworked by cunning; and in his eyes—gray with green striations—the warmth of an enchanted would-be lover had given way to icy calculation.

  He said, “I didn’t know there were others like me.”

  She wasn’t like him in any way but one. She suffered with the psychic curse that was to this man a treasured gift. He had shaped himself into a nihilistic beast who believed all other lives were his to exploit, a creature with no morals and no limits.

  Almost too late, Makani realized that he might not have seen into her as deeply as she had seen into him, that he might know nothing more of her than that she possessed a power similar to his. If she expressed loathing or fear, if she called him an abomination, he would at once be her enemy, and the calculation in his eyes would become venomous intent. If perhaps he thought she reveled in her wild talent, as he did, that she shared his contempt for ordinary humanity, she could buy time to think of some way to deal with—or escape—him.

  He leaned back in the booth. “That’s why you rocked me so hard when I first saw you, aside from your obvious charms.”

  Surveying the other customers, the busy waiters, Makani said, “Be careful what you say,” as if he and she were conspirators and never could be adversaries.

  “Don’t worry about them,” he said. “I never have. Never will.”

  “Be careful just the same,” she insisted, and she drained the last of her beer. Then she said what seemed to be something she would have said if indeed she had been a cold-blooded specimen like him. “No point in spooking the sheep. I need another round.”

  No sooner had Makani spoken than their waitress appeared as if she had been commanded to attend them, and Rainer ordered two more bottles of Corona with fresh frosted glasses.

  “When did the power first come to you?” he asked.

  “I was sixteen. Two months after you saw me on the beach. How old were you when it happened?”

  “Fourteen. Does anyone know?”

  “Who would believe? Why would I tell? Have you told?”

  “Hell, no. It’s like being an adult in a world of helpless children, except that if you pretend to be a child like them, you totally rule the playground.”

  She glanced at nearby diners and said, “Quieter, okay? Maybe they’re children by comparison, but children can be as mean as snakes, and they way outnumber us.”

  Adopting a stage whisper that probably carried as far as his normal voice, Rainer said, “I’ll be as discreet as a confessor.”

  She glared at him. “I’m serious.”

  “I know. It’s real cute.” Leaning forward, dropping the stage whisper, but speaking no more discreetly than before, he said, “What exactly does your touch bring you?”

  She dared not say that she saw the wickedness in people, their darker and darkest secrets. Because she had read him so completely in mere seconds, she claimed that her gift was what she knew his to be. She spoke softly as she lied. “I see whatever their biggest problem is at the moment, what worries and frustrates them.”

  “With that, you could make yourself everyone’s best friend.”

  She smiled. “They think I’m way sensitive and caring.”

  “You look the sensitive and caring type.”

  “Screw them,” she said.

  “You have a huge advantage in any relationship—especially if in fact you don’t give a shit about them. Sweet, isn’t it?”

  “Sweet,” she agreed. She felt increasingly confident that he didn’t know how profoundly she had read him, and that he had not read her as deeply as he’d been read.

  The waitress returned with two cold beers and frosted glasses. “Ready to order dinner yet?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” Makani said. “Give us ten minutes.”

  “Oh, sure, take your time.”

  “And you?” Makani asked Rainer when the waitress had gone. “What comes to you with a touch?”

  “Same as you. Their biggest problem, the thing obsessing them. Maybe she has a filthy-rich husband she despises, she needs him gone forever. Or maybe it’s the rich husband, he has this much younger wife who was a mistake, and she pumped out a baby he never wanted, and a divorce will cost too much. I’m their problem solver.” As he tipped his bottle and poured beer into the glass, he said, “What’s my biggest problem, Makani? What did you see when you took my hand?”

  She told part of the truth now that it served her to do so. “You’re unique. You have no problem. At least I didn’t see anything that’s troubling or frustrating you.”

  “And you saw that I have the power.”

  “Felt it, knew it, more than saw it. Almost like an electrical shock. It would’ve knocked me down if I’d been standing. Like you, I always thought there was…only me.”

  “Neither of us should ever have a problem, a frustration,” he said. “With the power, I’m king of the world. You’re a queen among billions of clueless commoners.” He leaned forward, regarding her with desire that earlier she had welcomed and that now sickened her. “Before you took my hand, before we touched, I asked
if you believed in destiny. You said sometimes you wonder. Well, now you know. That we should meet, that we should want each other even before we knew we were alike…that’s the very definition of destiny.”

  She would have to kill him. She was shaken by the realization. Sickened. But she would not bed him, could not abide him. Seduction was quickening toward consummation. If her previous interest in him did not gain heat, even as his was going from embers to full flame, he would suspect that she was deceiving him. She didn’t have a gun. He was bigger than she was, stronger. When they were alone, while he still thought their kingdoms would combine, she would need a knife and a moment when he turned his back.

  Makani was surprised that she could conjure a lascivious smile. “What will it be like, us two, all your power in all of mine?”

  “We’ll shake the walls,” he said. “But one thing worries me. I have no problem, but you do. And your problem, as I saw it, is that you hate the power you’ve been given.”

  “But I don’t,” she lied.

  “But you do.” Sadness was not in his nature, so he had to craft a sad smile. “With the touch, I read you no less than you read me. I know what I saw. And I know what you saw. So many murders. And so many more to come—starting with you.”

  5

  More Alone Than Any Girl Has Ever Been

  Having announced his intention to kill her in a conversational tone of voice, Rainer Sparks said, “Oh, should I have whispered such an incriminating threat? Have I endangered myself? Well, actually, no, I haven’t. Do you know why?”

  She would not show fear. She said, “I’m sure you’ll tell me,” and took a sip of her beer.