Dean Koontz - Intensity

Chyna liked to daydream about him sometimes: She imagined that her mother had lied about this, as about so many things, and that her dad was alive. He would be a lot like Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, a big man with gentle eyes, soft-spoken, kind, quietly humorous, with a keen sense of justice, certain of who he was and of what he believed. He would be a man who was admired and respected by other people but who thought himself no more special than anyone else. He would love her.

If she had known his name, either first or last, she would have spoken it now, aloud. The mere sound of her father’s name would have comforted her.

She was crying. Through the many hours since she had come under Vess’s thrall, she had felt tears welling more than once, and she had repressed them. But she couldn’t dam this hot flood. She despised herself for crying — but only briefly. These bitter tears were a welcome admission that there was no hope for her. They washed her free of hope, and that was what she wanted now, because hope led only to disappointment and pain. All her troubled life, since at least her eighth birthday, she had refused to weep freely, really let loose with tears. Being tough and dry-eyed was the only way to get respect from those people who, on seeing the smallest weakness in another, got a fearful muddy light in their eyes and closed in like jackals around a gazelle with a broken leg. But withholding tears wouldn’t fend off the jackal who had promised to be back after midnight, and a lifetime of grief and hurt burst from her. Great wet sobs shook Chyna so hard that her chest began to ache worse than her neck or her sprained finger. Her throat soon felt hot and raw. She sagged in her clinking chains, in her imprisoning chair, face clenched and streaming and hot, stomach clenched and cold, the taste of salt in her mouth, gasping, groaning in despair, choking on the smothering awareness of her terrible solitude. She shuddered uncontrollably, and her hands spasmed into frail fists but then opened and grasped at the air around her head as if her anguish were a cowl that might be torn off and cast aside. Profoundly alone, unloved and lost, she spiraled down into a mental mirror maze without even her father’s name for comfort.

After a while, an engine roared. She heard the brassy toot of a horn: two short blasts and then two more.

Chyna lifted her head, looked through the nearby window, and saw the headlights of a car leaving the barn. Her vision was blurred by tears. She couldn’t see the car itself as it sped past the house in the gray dusk, but it must be driven by Vess, of course. Then it was gone.

The jaunty toot of the horn mocked her, but that mockery wasn’t enough to rekindle her anger.

She stared out at the gloaming and didn’t care that it might be the last twilight she ever saw. She cared only that she had spent too much of her twenty-six years alone, with no one at her side to share the sunsets, the starry skies, the turbulent beauty of storm clouds. She wished that she had reached out to people more, instead of retreating inward, wished that she had not made her heart into a sheltering closet. Now, when nothing mattered any more, when the insight couldn’t do her any damn good at all, she realized that there was less hope of survival alone than with others. She’d been acutely aware that terror, betrayal, and cruelty had a human face, but she had not sufficiently appreciated that courage, kindness, and love had a human face as well. Hope wasn’t a cottage industry; it was neither a product that she could manufacture like needlepoint samplers nor a substance she could secrete, in her cautious solitude, like a maple tree producing the essence of syrup. Hope was to be found in other people, by reaching out, by taking risks, by opening her fortress heart.

This insight seemed so obvious, the simplest of wisdom, yet she had not been able to arrive at it until in extremis.

And the chance had long ago passed to act upon it. She would die as she had lived — alone. This further realization might have wrung greater rivers of tears from her but, instead, drove her into a bleaker place than she’d been before, an interior garden of stone and ashes.

Then, as she was still gazing out the window, she saw something moving in the last of the dusk. Though it was blurred by her tears, she could see that it was too large to be a Doberman.

But if Vess had gone, how could it be a man?

Chyna blotted her eyes on the sleeve of her sweater, and she blinked until the mysterious shape resolved out of tears and twilight shadows. It was an elk. A female, without antlers.

It ambled across the backyard, from the forested foothills to the west, pausing twice to tear up a mouthful of the succulent grass. As Chyna knew from her months on the ranch in Mendocino County many years ago, these animals were highly sociable and always traveled in herds, but this one seemed to be alone.

The Dobermans should have been after this intruder, barking and snarling and excited by the prospect of blood. Surely the dogs would be able to smell it even from the farthest corners of the property. Yet no Dobermans were in sight.

Likewise, the elk should have caught the scent of the dogs and galloped at once for safety, wild-eyed and snorting. Nature had made its kind prey to mountain lions and wolves and packs of coyotes; as dinner-on-the-hoof to so many predators, elk were always watchful and cautious.

But this specimen seemed utterly unconcerned that dogs were in the immediate neighborhood. Except for the two brief pauses to graze on the lush grass, it came directly to the back porch, with no sign of skittishness.

Although Chyna was not a wildlife expert, this seemed to her to be a coastal elk, the same type she had encountered in the grove of redwoods. Its coat was gray-brown, and it had the familiar white and black markings on the body and face.

Yet she was sure that this place was too far from the sea to be a suitable home for coastal elk or to provide the ideal vegetation for their diet. When she’d gotten out of the motor home, she’d had an impression of mountains all around. Now the rain had stopped and the mist had lifted; in the west, where the dregs of daylight swiftly drained away, the black silhouettes of high peaks pressed against tattered clouds and electric-purple sky. With a mountain range of such formidable size between here and the Pacific Ocean, coastal elk could not have found their way so far inland, for they were basically a lowland breed partial to plains and gentle hills. This must be a different type of elk — although with coloration strikingly similar to that of the animals she had seen the previous night.

The imposing creature stood outside the wooden balustrade of the shallow porch, no more than eight feet away, staring directly at the window. At Chyna.

She found it difficult to believe that the elk could see her. With the lights off, the kitchen was currently darker than the dusk in which the animal stood. From its perspective, the interior of the house should have been unrelievedly black.

Yet she couldn’t deny that its eyes met hers. Large dark eyes, shining softly.

She remembered Vess’s sudden return to the kitchen this morning. He’d been inexplicably tense, ceaselessly turning the screwdriver in his hand, an odd light in his eyes. And he’d been full of questions about the elk in the redwood grove.

Chyna didn’t know why the elk mattered to Vess any more than she could imagine why this one stood here, now, unchallenged by the dogs, studying her intently through the window. She didn’t puzzle long over this mystery. She was in a mood to accept, to experience, to admit that understanding was not always achievable.

As the deep-purple sky turned to indigo and then to India ink, the eyes of the elk grew gradually more luminous. They were not red like the eyes of some animals at night, but golden.