Dean Koontz - Innocence

Much of that I learned from Father Hanlon as we sat together in the rectory basement, with the house creaking around us and the storm rattling the door, if indeed it was the storm and not a bestial hand, though Gwyneth shared some of her story with me later.

I still had questions, not the least of which was, What next?

This might not be the last winter of the world, but by all the evidence, it was likely to be the last winter to which the people of this city or any other would stand witness. The contagion out of Asia, spread by man and bird, might have a hundred-percent mortality rate among the infected. However, if we were what we now believed ourselves to be, we were not heir to the ills of this fallen world.

I said, “If Gwyneth and I—and the child—aren’t destined to die from what those madmen have unleashed, what’s our future and how do we ensure it?”

If Father Hanlon knew the answer, he had no time to tell me, for just then Gwyneth returned with the girl.

DRESSED NOW IN SWEATER AND JEANS AND SNEAKERS, with a coat draped over one arm, the nameless six-year-old girl came down the basement stairs, fully alert and smiling. No evidence remained that she had been comatose for years. Her sweet smile seemed to shame the storm, or whatever wanted to be let into the house, because the door stopped rattling and the rectory ceased its creaking.

Following the child, Gwyneth appeared, dressed as before but with all the Goth makeup washed off. She did not glow as the Clears glowed, but I will tell you that she glowed anyway, for no other word quite conveys the wattage of her beauty, skin as clear as rainwater, eyes reflecting summer heavens here in the winter of the world, not luminous, no, this girl of flesh and blood, but radiant nonetheless. The serpent ring was gone from her nose, the red bead missing from the corner of her mouth, and her lips were no longer black, but the red-pink of certain roses.

Of the child, Gwyneth said, “Her name is Moriah,” and I asked, “How do you know?” and the child said, “I told her.” Of Moriah, I inquired, “Do you remember what happened to you?” and she responded, “No, I don’t remember anything of the past,” and I said, “Then I wonder how you remember your name.” She said, “I didn’t remember. It was spoken to me just when I woke, a whisper in my mind, Moriah .”

Father Hanlon closed his eyes, as if the sight of three such as us would undo him, although his voice didn’t tremble when he said, “Addison, Gwyneth, and Moriah.”

Gwyneth came to me, stood before me, and considered my shadowed face within my hood.

“Social phobia,” I said.

“Not a lie. People did terrify me, their potential. My social phobia wasn’t a mental affliction, but a choice.”

Throughout much of her eighteen years and much of my twenty-six, we had known the world more through our books than through direct contact. We should not have been surprised that of those many hundreds of volumes, we had for the most part read the same books, which we began to discover there in the rectory basement.

When she untied the drawstrings under my chin, she touched my face, and a new light entered my heart. Her voice soft and loving, she began to recite a poem by Poe, one of the last he had written. “‘Gaily bedight, A gallant knight, In sunshine and in shadow—’”

I continued: “‘Had journeyed long, Singing a song, In search of Eldorado.’”

When the drawstrings were untied, I put a hand to the hood, to keep it in place, suddenly fearful of letting her see me in full light. I found it difficult to believe that I was what Father Hanlon said that I was, easier by far to believe that I was a hideous thing that a stabbed man, dying by the roadside, hated and feared more than he hated and feared dying.

She skipped from the first stanza of “Eldorado” to the fourth and last. “‘ “Over the Mountains Of the Moon, Down the Valley of the Shadow, Ride, boldly ride,” The shade replied,—“If you seek for Eldorado!” ’”

I lowered my hand from the hood, and she pushed it back from my head. “In every way,” she said, “you are so beautiful, and you will be beautiful forever.”

Overcome by wonder, I kissed the corner of her mouth, where the bead had been, and the nose from which the serpent ring had hung, and her eyes that no longer needed to be concealed from a hostile world, and her brow, behind which she lived and hoped and dreamed and knew God, and loved me.

AS ALWAYS SEEMED TO BE THE CASE, BY THE TIME I began to imagine the shape of the immediate future, Gwyneth already knew what came next, what came after what came next, and what came after that , as well. Regarding foresight and wise planning, she was her father’s daughter. Before picking me up in the Land Rover, by the pond in Riverside Commons, more than eight hours earlier, she had by phone set the appointment in the Egyptian Theater, had arranged for her guardian to expect us, with the child, in the darkest hour of the night, and had suggested that he might be required, perhaps with unseemly haste, to perform a duty of his office before daybreak.

I was honored that she should want my proposal, joyous when it was accepted, and somewhat dizzied when Gwyneth took from around her neck a delicate gold chain on which hung a ring fashioned from a nail. Either the nail must have been very old and worn or the point had been rounded with a file. The shank was bent into a smooth and perfect circle, and the head, which resembled in shape the setting for a diamond, was engraved with a tiny lazy eight, the symbol for infinity. The artist, Simon, made it for her because he believed she had freed him from the self-crucifixion of his addiction. In an accompanying note, he wrote that one day she would meet a man who would so love her that, if his sacrifice would spare her from death, he would straighten the nail and drive it through his own heart.

“Simon was as melodramatic as he was talented,” she said, “but he was also right.”

Father Hanlon had only begun to explain the necessary simplicity with which we must proceed when from the house above us came the hard crash and then the brittle ringing fall of shattered glass, as if not one window but three or four had exploded simultaneously.

Not even Gwyneth, with all her foresight, had anticipated such a frontal assault in the penultimate moment.

Regarding the basement ceiling with apprehension, Father Hanlon said, “The stairhead door locks from the kitchen, but not from this side.”

I snatched up a chrome-and-red-vinyl chair, which might once have been part of a dinette set, and hurried to the stairs. On the landing at the top, I was relieved to discover that the door opened toward me rather than into the kitchen. I tipped the chair onto its back legs and jammed the header under the knob, bracing the door shut.

By the time I returned to the basement, heavy footsteps sounded in the rooms above. They blundered first in one direction and then in another, as though the intruder must be drunk or confused.

“Who is it?” Moriah asked. “What does he want?”

I didn’t know, couldn’t guess, but judging by Gwyneth’s grim expression, she had at least a firm suspicion.

Among the old furniture stored in the basement was a prie-dieu that had previously been in the sacristy of St. Sebastian’s but had been moved when it was replaced with a new one. The padded kneeling bench was wide enough for two. Father Hanlon stood on the other side of it, his face averted but his voice steady and full.

In the house overhead, something crashed over with thunderous impact, perhaps a breakfront or a tall chest of drawers, and dust sifted down upon us from the basement ceiling.