Dean Koontz: Innocence

Alert to the risk of being discovered, I sought the source of the draft, walking into it, to the south end of the stacks, where I hesitated to move into the open. The book-return station stood to the left, the main desk to the right, and between them a wide swath of glistening dark-caramel marble led to the circular grand foyer with its domed ceiling. At the farther end of the foyer, one of the four main doors, an ornately decorated slab of bronze, stood open to the night.

From out of sight, elsewhere in the stacks, came the sounds of someone running. As I shrank back into my aisle and the threadbare weave of shadows that dressed it, the angry man appeared, angling from the east, past the book-return desk. His attention was so focused on the foyer and the open door that he might not have seen me if I had been spotlighted on a pedestal.

The incident, still unfolding, excited me for reasons that I could not define, and I found myself behaving recklessly, as I had never done before. Certain that the man would exit through the open door and descend the two long flights of exterior stairs to see if he could spot the fugitive girl, I boldly followed him, so that he needed only to glance back to discover me.

Indeed, he rushed through the open door, and I arrived at its threshold in time to see him dashing across the landing and down the lower flight to the public sidewalk, where he looked left and right, searching for his silver-shoed quarry. The broad street had recently been half washed by a street-cleaning truck, which explained why the smell was less fresh than it would have been if rain had done the job, and the susurration arose from the light post-midnight traffic passing over the wet pavement.

As the man stepped off the curb, the better to see farther along the avenue, I realized that the alarm had not gone off when the girl had escaped. And then I noticed that the heavy door, which featured an automatic closer, was held open by the long L-shaped drop bolt that she must have extracted from the hole in the floor where it would have been inserted. She hadn’t taken the time to swivel the bolt into its retainer, and now the end of it was caught in a void in the granite of the upper landing of the exterior steps, propping open the door.

The likelihood of the bolt finding that—apparently single—void in the otherwise smooth stone seemed small. I suspected that she had wedged it there to make sure the door remained open wide to admit a draft that would be noticed.

As the frustrated man in the street began to turn back toward the library, I retreated before I might be seen. I raced across the foyer with the intention of returning to the labyrinth of books.

At the sight of the girl in black, I faltered. She hurried through the half-light in the reading area that lay past the stacks, heading toward an interior door at the distant northeast corner of the immense room.

She had faked her escape, which meant she must know a secret haven in the building where she felt safe. And it meant more than that, though I couldn’t quite imagine what.

I heard the man cursing loudly even before he reached the top of the exterior steps. I didn’t have enough time to reach the stacks across what seemed to be an acre of marble. The moment he arrived at the open door, he’d see me. I darted to the left and vaulted the wraparound counter at the main desk, which was not simply a desk but instead a spacious librarian station appointed with exquisite mahogany moldings, at which patrons could be served from four sides. I crouched below the counter, hopeful that I had not been spotted.

I listened as the bronze door boomed shut, as the primary deadbolts were engaged, and as the drop bolt rang softly as it was seated in the bronze-rimmed hole in the floor. His footsteps seemed to approach my hiding place directly, but then he walked past, so close that I could smell his spicy cologne. In passing, he snarled “bitch” and worse, alternating vicious epithets, as if in fact he hated her enough to kill her. He faded into silence. A door closed in the distance.

After a while, the lights went off.

I got to my feet but didn’t leave the shelter of the main desk.

The thirty-foot-tall windows in the south wall began above ten feet of bookshelves and arched to a keystone within ten feet of the deeply coffered ceiling. One of the charms of the city is its night glow, which is never less than romantic, sometimes magical. On this occasion in December, the metropolis shone into the library not with an eerie milkiness, as earlier, but with a convincing imitation of snow light, like a Christmas moon reflecting from a landscape cloaked by a recent blizzard. The EXIT signs above the doors were as red as clusters of holly berries, though I marveled at myself for thinking such a thing and wondered what had possessed me that I should be so light of spirit only minutes after cowering in fear.

Of course, it was the girl. Her gracefulness, her fleetness, her balletic sprint, and the sheer mystery of her presence in the library inspired in me the pleasant expectation that I might be witness to—if not a party to—an exciting adventure.

Although my life was by any standard unconventional, it wasn’t full of sparkling encounters and dazzling exploits. I hid by day, reading, listening to music through the earphones of my CD player, thinking, wondering, and from time to time sleeping. By night I skulked through the city, seeking the essentials for survival, as well as a few moments of beauty in places like this, where great culture and fine art came together in sublime architecture. But considering the all-consuming hatred and fury that I inspired on sight, if I sought to participate in an adventure, I would be as unwise as a hemophiliac juggling hatchets.

Books had shown me, however, that all people everywhere wanted their lives to have purpose and meaning. This longing was universal. Even I, in my terrible difference, wanted nothing less than purpose and meaning.

Intuition told me that this girl might be different from other people in her attitude toward me, that she might be at least as tolerant as my mother had been, that she might be a touchstone by which I could test my value as a person without suffering torture and a violent death. I suspected that she might need help and that I, in spite of my limitations, might be of service to her.

I expected no relationship, only a memorable encounter in which I might contribute something that would make a vital difference in her life. Father often said that we are here to learn and give. But how could one give while in hiding, six years alone?

A few minutes after the lights went out, a recorded voice issued from speakers throughout the building: “Perimeter is armed.”

The angry man must be leaving by the rear entrance, which opened onto an alleyway. An alarm keypad was positioned by that door.

In a building as elaborate as this one, motion detectors tended to report too many false alarms, and therefore they weren’t employed. Because of the paper-preserving climate-control system, the windows were fixed, and their bronze stiles and muntins would not be easily penetrated by thieves. Besides, the current criminal class was even dumber than those in centuries gone by, unaware that books had value. And the vandals who might once have enjoyed hiding in here to deface and destroy after hours were, these days, able to get away with such bold in-the-open mayhem that tearing books apart or even urinating in them was boring compared to the assaults on civilization that could be made elsewhere, anywhere. By comparison, the doors were easily alarmed, the perimeter secured; and within the walls, I was free to roam.

I switched on my flashlight and left the librarian station by its gate.

During the eighteen years that I’d been visiting, the grandeur of this building, for hours at a time, had been mine alone, as if I were the king of books and this my palace. In spite of my familiarity with its every nook, I never tired of the place, but now it offered something new. Why was she here? Why hadn’t she fled when she had the chance? Who was her enraged pursuer? I hadn’t found the library so exciting since the first few times that I had come here with Father.