Dean Koontz - Innocence

I said, “You fed us all these years.”

“The food wasn’t mine. It was all donated.”

“You clothed us.”

“With secondhand garments also donated.”

“You kept our secret.”

“The least expected of a priest who hears confessions.”

“You never raised a hand against Father.”

“I saw his face only a few times.”

“But never harmed him.”

“I was able to meet his eyes only once.”

“And didn’t harm him.”

“I should have made myself meet them again and again.”

“But after each encounter with him, you fell into despair.”

“I suffered periodic depression before I ever knew about you and the man you called Father.”

“Yes, but the very thought of us made those depressions blacker. You said so yourself in your note to me, and we gave you nightmares, yet still you sustained us.”

Standing with his face in his hands, he spoke in Latin, not to me, but perhaps in prayer. I listened, and though I didn’t understand the words, his great distress was evident.

I rose from the armchair, took a couple of steps toward Father Hanlon, but halted, for it was not given to me, in my difference, to be able to comfort people. In fact, quite the opposite. As on the night when Father had been brutally murdered while I lay watching from under an SUV, I felt inadequate, useless, and I was ashamed of my helplessness.

The Latin words crumbled in his mouth, falling from his lips in broken syllables, and he faltered in the prayer, taking deep shuddery breaths and expelling them with tortured sounds that might have been half sobs of grief and half expressions of disgust.

Given my twenty-six years of experience, I could only imagine that my presence was the cause of such powerful, unchecked emotions. I said, “I’ll go. I never should have come here. Foolish. I’ve been foolish. And reckless.”

“No. Wait. Let me pull myself together. Give me a chance.”

He had given us so much that I owed him anything he asked.

When he regained control of himself, he went to the door through which we had arrived and seemed to check the locks to be certain that he had secured them. He stood listening to the storm, his back to me, and at last he said, “It’s an east wind, like the one that parted the sea.” That thought led him to another, and he quoted: “‘They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.’”

Although there was much I wanted to say, I knew that I should not. His mind and heart were out of alignment, and only he could bring them into harmony.

He said, “The North Koreans, what’s left of them, announced a short while ago that birds don’t contract the disease, but they do carry it. There’s no quarantine that can prevent birds from flying.”

They made movies and wrote books about planet-killing asteroids, stories that evoked a frisson of horror in audiences and readers. But in the end, no million-ton mass from outer space was necessary to put an end to civilization. The murder of one man could be committed with something as small as a few drops of nectar from the oleander plant instilled in honey, and all of humankind could be murdered most efficiently by something even smaller, a mere microbe of malevolent invention.

Still turned to the door, the priest said, “Your father didn’t know what he was, but there was no reason that he should. Do you know what you are, Addison?”

“A monstrosity,” I said. “A miscreation, freak, abomination.”

THE WIND RATTLED THE BASEMENT DOOR THAT Father Hanlon faced, and as if he knew my thoughts, he said, “It may seem to be the wind that tests the door, but on this night of all nights, it’s more likely to be something far worse than wind. These aren’t the times of which Saint John the Evangelist wrote in Revelations. Armageddon would be an hour of horror and of glory, but there is no glory in what’s coming, no final judgment, no new Earth, only bitter tragedy on an unthinkable scale. This is the work of men and women in all their perversity and transgression, the love of power in the service of mass death. On such a night, the darkest spirits are likely to be drawn from their usual pursuits, taking to the streets in gleeful celebration.”

The delicious aroma of coffee gave way to the stench of burning marionettes. Remembering Gwyneth’s words to me as we left the yellow-brick house with the girl, I said, “That’s how the marionettes smelled in the archbishop’s fireplace. But the stink is deception. Nothing’s out there.”

“Don’t be so sure,” he cautioned, and pointed to the doorknob, which worked violently back and forth, not as the wind could ever have moved it. “Whatever wants in, it will bring with it doubt. Did you know that the artist Paladine’s last will and testament required that a marionette be included in his casket?”

“There were only six, and Gwyneth found them all.”

“This one wasn’t like the six. Paladine carved and painted this one in his own image, and they say it looked uncannily like him. His mother was his sole living relative and heir. A woman with unhealthy interests and strange beliefs that perhaps she had inculcated in her son. She had him buried precisely as his will directed, in a little-known cemetery that attracts people who wish to be laid to rest in ground that isn’t hallowed, that has never been blessed by anyone of any faith.”

The foul odor had grown stronger, and although the door stopped rattling and the knob stopped turning, I said, “Deception.”

“You must learn what you are, Addison, so that you won’t doubt anymore and won’t any longer be vulnerable.” He turned his back to the door but still didn’t look at me. He stared down at his hands, which he turned palms up. “Doubt is poison. It leads to a loss of faith in yourself, and in all that’s good and true.”

The storm wind struck great blows at the house, and although the rectory was a sturdy structure of long-standing brick, it creaked overhead.

Father Hanlon lowered his hands and took two steps toward me, but he didn’t attempt to make eye contact. “You’re not a monster, miscreation, freak, or abomination. You’ve seen yourself in mirrors, I assume.”

“Yes.”

“Often?”

“Yes.”

“And what did you see?”

“I don’t know. Nothing. I’m blind to it, I guess.”

He pressed me: “What is the deformity that makes you an object of such instant hatred and rage?”

“Father and I spent many hours in speculation and conjecture, but in the end there’s no way for us to know. It’s something in our faces, especially in our eyes, even in our hands, that others see in the first instant they look at us, but it’s something we can’t ever see. Lots of people recoil from spiders, don’t they? But if spiders had the capacity for complex thought, they wouldn’t have a clue why they were so often loathed, because to one another, spiders look appealing.”

“You’ve come close to the truth,” the priest said. “But you are not to be compared to spiders.” He came to me, stood before me, but didn’t look up. He took one of my gloved hands in both of his hands. “The man you called Father told me about your arrival in the world. Your biological father was shiftless, irresponsible, perhaps even a criminal, and he was never known to you. Your mother was a damaged woman but not entirely lost. You were born of man and woman, as are we all, but with one crucial difference. You were born with that difference perhaps because the world was moving toward a time when such as you would be needed.”

“What difference?” I asked, breathless in expectation of the answer. I knew that a difference shaped my life and made of me an outcast, though I didn’t know the nature of it. In this mysterious world, I was the central mystery of my life.