Last Light (Novella)

by Dean Koontz

  “Pretty Makani, being so brave. You didn’t read as deep as you thought. For eleven years, I had only the power to see their problems with a touch. But five years ago, another trick sprouted from the first. Don’t know why or how. Don’t need to know. I can’t become invisible, none of that hokey H. G. Wells crap. But when I want people around me—in a room, on a street, in a park—to leave me alone, all I gotta do is think my disinterest at them. Then they become disinterested in me. It started on a beach. Two skanks were coming toward me, a pair of sevens on a scale of ten, neither of them up to my standards. Would’ve been tedious, getting rid of them without a scene. I thought, Just leave me alone, little bitches, and damn if they didn’t stop fifteen feet away, confused, looking around like they didn’t remember where the hell they’d been going, like they didn’t even see me anymore, and just wandered away. I’m totally good at it now.”

  He wanted her to react.

  When she didn’t, when she met his stare in silence, he said, “They don’t see me or hear me—except when I want them to. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say they see and hear but don’t compute what they see and hear. As if I’ve hacked their brains and edited the flow of sensory data. I can edit you out of their awareness, too, Makani, even lovely you, or anyone who’s with me. Would you like a demonstration?”

  He had nothing to gain by lying. “I believe you.” She already grasped the greater threat that he now posed and was trying to anticipate what he might do next.

  He gave her the demonstration that she didn’t need. Raising his voice, he said angrily, “You lied to me, you bitch, you’ve done nothing but lie to me!” As he spoke, he snatched up his half-empty glass and threw the remaining beer in her face.

  Less because of the beer than because she thought he would throw the glass after it, Makani startled, flinched—then surveyed the restaurant. No one seemed to have heard Rainer’s outburst or to have seen what he had done. Conversations continued uninterrupted. Waiters glided through the room, carrying trays of drinks and food, as overhead the sharks hung unmoving in their hunting postures.

  “They’re not like you and me,” said Rainer Sparks. “We’re deep, and they are not. We know, and they don’t. They’re pawns, and we’re power. We could have been so much to each other. Tragic that you find me so despicable.”

  He wanted to see her shrink from him in fear, perhaps even bolt for the door, but she would not give him the satisfaction of her terror. She had ridden twelve-foot behemoths in Waikiki. She’d night-surfed quaking monoliths at Pipeline, a crazy-girl adventure with a storm coming and thunder at her back. She’d been in Newport Beach when a hurricane, tearing up the Mexican coast, had pushed ahead of it monster waves that perhaps ten percent of the surfers in the world would dare. She rode them and survived the Wedge. Maybe Rainer would kill her, maybe she had no hope, but she would never cower or beg for her life.

  She picked up her napkin and blotted her face. Finished, she folded it neatly and returned it to the table before she said, “So will you kill me here and now?”

  Whatever reaction Rainer expected, this was not it. He cocked his head, and his thick golden hair fell over one eyebrow. His grin was quizzical. “Do you have a death wish?”

  “Sometimes I’ve wondered about that. When beaches have been closed ’cause there were great whites in the water, I’ve paddled out anyway, if there was even just barely decent wave action. I’ve surfed in thunderstorms when the sky was full of fire and the sea danced with its reflections, on lonely stretches of coast where no one would have been there to help if I’d been struck by lightning. But, no, it’s not a death wish. I figured that out a few years ago.”

  “You did, huh?” He assumed that he was being played, but he was not sure of her game. “If it’s not a death wish, what is it?”

  “Confidence. I belong here. I have this gift—this power, as you call it—for a reason. There’s a purpose I’m meant to fulfill before anything too bad will happen to me.”

  He smirked, an expression that transformed him from a handsome man into a snarky adolescent. “What purpose would that be—building the coolest hot rod ever?”

  “Maybe. But I’m pretty sure it’s way bigger than that.” She took a sip of beer. “Fact is, sometimes I think there’s someone important I’m meant to save. Like, maybe I’ll touch her and see her problem or her darkest secret, and I’ll know right away what to do. I’ll save her life or maybe turn her away from a destructive path, and she’ll go on to make a huge difference in the world.”

  His soft laugh revealed less amusement than contempt. “You’re gonna save the world, are you?”

  “No. Just maybe one person more important than me. You haven’t answered my question. Are you going to kill me here and now?”

  “I’d love to. Except for the security cameras. I can’t work my mojo on them. Don’t know where the digital video is stored. And even if it’s on a recorder somewhere here, they probably back it up in the cloud. So it’ll be another time and place. Besides, half the fun is in the chase. And I want to pin you down and spread those pretty legs before I cut your throat.”

  Makani wagged one finger at him, as if to say he was being a naughty boy. “Won’t happen. Instead, you’ll rot in Hell, and I’ll sing a little song of celebration over your grave.”

  “You are refreshing. A spunky little thing. What next—gonna pretend you can go to the cops?”

  “I could prove my gift just by touching them, reading them.”

  “Then what kind of a life would you have? You’d be a freak. The mind reader who knows things nobody wants known. They might not stone you to death, but in time they’d be lining up to shoot you in the head. Face it—you’re more alone than any girl has ever been.”

  She shrugged. “Anyway, I don’t need police. Don’t need anyone. Hasn’t it occurred to you? My first power might have sprouted another, just like yours did.”

  “I would have seen it when I read you.”

  “I didn’t see yours. Maybe you didn’t see mine.”

  He studied her, looking for a tic or tremor that would reveal her bluff.

  “Best be careful,” Makani said. “I’ve got the islands and the Irish in me. It’s a dangerous combination. Let me go my way, and I’ll let you go yours. The world’s big enough for two of us.”

  Reaching across the table, he said, “Take my hand.”

  She threw half a glass of beer in his face.

  Startled, he gasped, inhaling some of the brew, and coughed explosively.

  At nearby tables, diners turned to look. Rainer’s spell over them had been broken.

  When he saw them staring, he got control of his coughing and wiped a hand over his dripping face. Everyone who’d been interested in him looked puzzled, frowned, turned their attention elsewhere, and seemed to lose interest in the lovers’ spat or whatever it had been.

  As soon as she’d thrown the beer, Makani had slid out of the booth. She stood looking down at Rainer Sparks. “I won’t warn you again,” she said, and she walked out of the restaurant, under the torsional forms of the dead sharks swimming the air overhead.

  6

  On the Die

  Outside of Sharkin’, where Rainer Sparks couldn’t see her, Makani broke into a run toward the pier and the parking lot that served it. Perhaps because of the dark nature of the encounter with Sparks, she expected night when she pushed through the door, but sunshine still ruled. At least an hour of the summer day remained before the sunset might brush the palette of a Maxfield Parrish painting across the western sky.

  She had no second power, as she had claimed, no sprout that grew from the branch of her initial psychic gift. Maybe he believed that she, too, had another more formidable talent. Maybe he didn’t. In either case, he would not relent. Rainer Sparks was a narcissist, a megalomaniac who would abide no limits to his dominion, tolerate no one who denied him.

  She didn’t start shaking until she was behind the wheel of her ’54 Chevy, the ring of keys jingling
as she fumbled to get the right one into the ignition. She kept glancing toward the restaurant, sure that she would see him striding toward her, but for whatever reason, he chose to allow her a chance to escape.

  Half the fun is in the chase.

  He might even take time for dinner. He had no need to hurry. The only thing that could possibly defeat him was his perfect arrogance.

  Leaving the parking lot, she turned left on Balboa Boulevard, heading toward the mainland and Pacific Coast Highway, three miles away. Traffic clotted the peninsula’s main artery, and though the jam-ups would inhibit Sparks as much as they did her, she expected to discover the white Mercedes SUV in the rearview mirror, weaving effortlessly among the swarm of jostling vehicles by virtue of some third power that the sonofabitch had not yet revealed.

  When first her gift had come upon her almost a decade earlier, she had been frightened. In time, fear twined with consternation and dismay, as she began to understand how completely her life had been changed forever. She might have surrendered to enduring dread and depression if, without quite realizing it, she had not dealt with the fear of her psychic talent by testing—and strengthening—her courage in a long series of half-mad challenges to the sea and all the dangers that it offered. Already at sixteen, she had long been a bold surfer. So she became a reckless one. Surfing where beaches were closed due to a temporary abundance of large sharks spotted by shore-patrol choppers, straddling her board, feet dangling in the water, as she waited for the next set to roll toward her and offer her a ride, watching nervously for a dorsal fin and for a menacing shadow in the water, aware of the insane risk but intent on taking it, each wipeout an invitation to be dined upon. When others fled storms, she ran to them and launched her board into the raging sea, struggling out against the turbulence, hoping to find a few rideable liquid mountains among the mushy waves blown over by strong onshore winds, fearless of rip currents, tossed in churning white-water soup, spitting out foamy swash, struggling for breath, at risk of being caught inside a breaking wave and held down until she drowned, but at least without concern about sharks, because those predators had fled the storm-racked coast for deep-water calm.

  After all these years, the sea inspired in Makani little fear but much respect. Considering Rainer Sparks’s ability to enshroud himself and his potential victim in a kind of invisibility, where he could do as he wished without fear of witnesses, and considering as well his enthusiasm—his thirst—for violent murder, only a fool would not be terrified of him.

  Still no white Mercedes GL550 in the traffic behind her.

  At the end of the peninsula, she crossed Coast Highway and drove as fast as she dared into Newport Heights, where she lived.

  Her residence phone was unlisted; the street name and number were not in the phone directory. But her home address could be found with little effort. Sparks was many things, but he wasn’t stupid; within an hour, he would know where she lived.

  She had to pack what she needed and get out fast.

  When a wave is waning, it’s said to be “on the die.” In this case, Sparks was the wave, and he was not on the die, but swelling higher by the moment. On the die was also lingo for someone who was heading for a wipeout. Makani had given Sparks the slip; and in all other circumstances, she had long been confident of her ability to fend for herself. But now she felt intuitively that she was on the die, and she could not shake the feeling.

  7

  Round One

  Her house was a modest Craftsman-style bungalow in the sunny highlands above Newport Harbor, shaded by queen palms and skirted with ferns. The land had more value than the structure, though the lot offered no view of anything except the larger houses on the farther side of the street. Hers was a cozy home, with a deep front porch, and Makani hoped that she wouldn’t have to leave it forever.

  She parked in the driveway rather than in the garage, took the porch steps two at a time, keyed open the front door, and slammed it behind her. She stripped off her long-sleeve wrap and T-shirt and sports bra and boardshorts, discarding them as she hurried through the front rooms to the master bedroom at the back of the house.

  Naked, she felt two things: vulnerable and the need for a shower to wash off the sea salt, though the first ruled out the second. She donned fresh underwear, jeans, a bra, a clean T-shirt.

  After fetching an overnight bag from the walk-in closet and filling it with a change of clothes and a pre-packed travel kit of toiletries, she went into the kitchen. She kept twenty thousand dollars in a secret stash in the cabinet to the left of the refrigerator.

  Although confident and practiced at concealing her difference from other people, Makani had never been able to free herself of a measure of paranoia. Rainer Sparks had been right when he suggested that anyone with the ability to read minds, even to a limited extent, would be feared and hated if her power were revealed. A public stoning would not be in the cards these days. But depending on who discovered that she could read them by a touch, a bullet to the head or a razor-sharp stiletto across the throat was not an unlikely fate. Therefore, she kept the getaway money in a metal lockbox in the kitchen.

  She removed cook pots of various sizes, set them aside, lifted an inch-thick slab of Melamine that served as the false floor of the cabinet, and extracted the foot-square three-inch-deep box that contained stacks of twenty- and hundred-dollar bills tightly wrapped in plastic.

  In the bedroom again, she transferred the cash to the overnight bag, wishing that her simmering paranoia had also induced her to buy a firearm. She didn’t like guns. She had never struck another human being in anger, and although she was not a pacifist, she had always found it difficult to imagine committing an act of significant violence. Until now. She didn’t like guns, yeah, okay, but she also didn’t like dentists’ drills, either, and yet she got her cavities filled when they were discovered. Now she thought that she’d been stupid when she’d considered guns evil. Revolvers, dental drills, pistols, hammers—they were tools, nothing more than tools, and evil was a word applicable only to people and their worst actions.

  Rainer Sparks had promised to rape her and kill her. She had read enough of him, through one touch, to be certain that between the sexual assault and the murder, he would enjoy torturing her in ways that she, in her naïveté, could not imagine.

  He was evil.

  And she had no defense against him.

  Makani latched the suitcase and stood staring at the bedside telephone, trying to think of someone she knew who was likely to have a firearm. She couldn’t bring a single name to mind. On the other hand, maybe everyone she knew was armed as if for imminent war. Maybe she’d wrongly assumed that the people she liked all shared her aversion to guns.

  She longed for the sea, for the dependability of its rhythms, for the honesty of water in motion, which could be read reliably, for depths that concealed nothing worse than sharks. Oceans were the antithesis of the sea of humanity. Oceans killed, but without anger or intent. For all the poets who wrote of the soul of the ocean, the waters could not envy, neither could they hate. Oceans did not revel in their power, and the storms that afflicted them always passed, as the storms of the human heart never quite did. At night, in the dark of the moon and the faintness of stars, the rolling waters did not dream of blood.

  Although she had changed clothes, she suddenly realized that the faint smell of spilled beer clung to her skin and hair. No time to wash even her face, and certainly not her hair.

  After setting the suitcase beside the front door, Makani hurried into the kitchen. She pulled open the knife drawer and considered the array of blades. No item of culinary cutlery would serve her as well as a dagger or a switchblade, but it would be better than nothing.

  Rainer Sparks allowed her to be aware of him only when he thrust the handheld Taser against her neck and triggered it.

  She fell.

  Knees, elbows, and one side of her head rapped the mahogany floor, which seemed to distort and thrum beneath her, as if it were the s
tretched-tight membrane of a trampoline, though she did not rebound from the hardwood.

  Pain was the least of it. The electric current traveled every byway of her peripheral nervous system, wreaking havoc with the messaging of both sensory and motor nerves. As she twitched and shuddered, a few words stuttered from her, although she didn’t intentionally speak and could not understand what she had said.

  Sparks’s voice, however, was clear and coherent when, standing over her, he said, “Stupid bitch.”

  Makani knew what was happening to her, fully understood the peril, bitterly railed at herself for not realizing that he could blind and deafen even her to his presence, just as he had done with all the “common” people in the restaurant. She and Sparks were alike in their great difference from others, but that didn’t mean she was immune to his spell-casting.

  He bent down, his face a grinning moon—the beery odor was his—and this time the stun gun delivered the charge through her right arm.

  She felt as if she were falling again. But she was already on the floor and couldn’t tumble through it.

  Gagging, gasping, she spasmed like some beached fish, as if she did not belong—could not survive—in this realm of air. Her flesh felt stiff, her bones like jelly.

  How strange that she could think with reasonable clarity, even while her brain confused her nervous system’s natural signals with the jigging static injected by the Taser and continued to be unable to control her body. Her condition seemed to argue that the mind was within the brain but in some fundamental way not subject to it, which was an odd bit of philosophy to have flashed upon her under the circumstances.

  Rainer Sparks had pulled a chair away from the kitchen table and had turned it to face Makani. He sat down.

  As the effects of the Tasering diminished, she lay prostrate, with her head turned to her right, watching him as a beaten dog might watch its abuser, with fear and smoldering resentment.