Dean Koontz - The Servants of Twilight

In desperation, he got up and went into the kitchen, to the sink, and turned on the cold water. He put the stopper in the drain. He got ice cubes from the refrigerator and added them to the growing pool. When the sink was almost full, he turned the spigot off and lowered his head into the freezing water, forced himself to stay there, holding his breath, face submerged, skin stinging, until he finally had to come up, gasping for air. He was shivering, and his teeth were chattering, but he still felt the violence building in him, so he put his head under again, waiting until his lungs were bursting, came up sputtering and spitting, and now he was frigid, quaking uncontrollably, but still the urge to do violence swelled unchecked.

Satan was here now. Must be. Satan was here and dredging up the old feelings, pushing Kyle's face in them, tempting him, trying to get him to toss away his last chance at salvation.

I won't!

He stormed through the apartment, trying to detect exactly where Satan was. He looked in closets, opened cabinets, pulled aside the draperies to check behind them. He didn't actually expect to see Satan, but he was sure he would at least sense the devil's presence somewhere, invisible though the demon might be. But there was nothing to be found.

Which only meant the devil was clever at concealing himself.

When he finally gave up searching for Satan, he was in the bathroom, and he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror: eyes wild, nostrils dilated, jaw muscles popping, lips bloodless and skinned back over his crooked yellow teeth. He thought of the Phantom of the Opera. He thought of Frankenstein's monster and a hundred other tortured, unhuman faces from a hundred other films he had seen on "Chiller Theater."

The world hated him, and he hated the world, all of them, the ones who laughed, who pointed, the women who found him repulsive, all the No.

God. Please. Don't let me think about these things. Get my mind off this subject. Help me. Please.

He couldn't look away from his Boris Karloff-Lon ChaneyRhondo Hatten face, which filled the age-spotted mirror.

He never missed those old horror movies when they were on TV. Many nights he sat alone in front of his black-and-white set, riveted by the ghastly images, and when each picture ended, he went into the bathroom, to this very mirror, and looked at himself and told himself that he wasn't that ugly, wasn't that frightening, not as bad as the creatures that crept out of primeval swamps or came from beyond the stars or escaped from mad scientists' laboratories. By comparison, he was almost ordinary.

At worst, pathetic. But he could never believe himself. The mirror didn't lie. The mirror showed him a face made for nightmares.

He smiled at himself in the mirror, tried to look amiable. The result was awful. The smile was a leer.

No woman would ever have him unless he paid, and even some whores turned him down. Bitches. All of them. Rotten, stinking, heartless bitches.

He wanted to make one of them hurt.

He wanted to bring his pain to one of them, hammer his pain into some woman and leave it in her, so that for a short while, at least, there would be no pain in him.

No. That was bad thinking. Evil thinking.

Remember Mother Grace.

Remember the Twilight and salvation and life everlasting.

But he wanted. He needed.

He found himself at the door of his apartment without being able to recall how he'd gotten there. He had the door half open.

He was on his way out to find a prostitute. Or someone to beat up. Or both.

No!

He slammed the door, locked it, put his back to it, and looked frantically around his living room.

He had to act quickly to save himself.

He was losing his battle against temptation. He was whimpering now, shuddering and mewling. He knew that in a second or two he would open the door again, and this time he would leave, go hunting…

In panic, he rushed to a small bookshelf, pulled out one of the inspirational volumes from his collection of a hundred such titles, tore out a fistful of pages and threw them onto the floor, tore out more pages, and more, until only the covers of the book remained, and then he ripped those apart, too. It felt good to mutilate something. He was gasping and shuddering like a horse in distress, and he seized another book, tore it to pieces, pitched the fragments behind him, grabbed another book, demolished it, then another, another.

When he regained his senses, he was on the floor, weeping softly. Twenty ruined books, thousands of ripped pages, were heaped around him. He sat up, pulled out his handkerchief, wiped his eyes. Got to his knees, stood. He wasn't shaking any more. The NEED was gone.

Satan had lost.

Kyle had not surrendered to temptation, and now he knew why God wanted men like him to fight the battle of the Twilight.

If God built His army strictly of men who had never sinned, how could He know that they would be able to resist the devil's entreaties? But by choosing men like me, Kyle thought, men with no resistance to sin, by giving us a second chance at salvation, by making us prove ourselves, God has acquired an army of tempered soldiers.

He looked up at the ceiling but didn't see it. Instead he saw the sky beyond, saw into the heart of the universe. He said, "I'm worthy. I've climbed out of the sewer of sin, and I've proved I'll never sink back down. If what You want is for me to handle the boy for You, I'm worthy now. Give me the boy. Let me have the boy. Let me."

He felt the NEED surging in him again, the desire to choke and rend and crush, but this time it was a purer emotion, the clean white holy desire to be God's gladiator.

It occurred to him that God was asking him to do the very thing he most wanted to avoid. He didn't want to kill again. He didn't want to harm people any more. He was finally gaining a small measure of respect for himself, finally saw the dim but real possibility that he might one day live in peace with the rest of the world-and now God wanted him to kill, wanted him to use his rage against selected targets.

Why? he asked in sudden, silent misery. Why do I have to be the one? I used to thrive on the NEED, but now it scares me, and it should scare me. Why must I be used this way; why not in some other way?

That was what Mother Grace called "wrong-thought," and he tried to wipe it out of his mind. You never challenged God like that. You just accepted what He wanted. God was mysterious. Sometimes He was harsh, and you couldn't understand why He demanded so much of you. Like why He wanted you to kill. or why He'd made you a freak in the first place when He could just as easily have made you handsome.

No. That was more wrong-thought.

Kyle cleaned up the ravaged books. He poured a glass of milk.

He sat down by his telephone. He waited for Grace to call and say that it was time for him to be the hammer of God.

In Ventura, they abandoned the yellow Cadillac. They searched along another residential street until Charlie found a dark blue Ford LTD whose owner had been unwise enough to leave the keys in the ignition. He drove the LTD only two miles before stopping again, in a poorly lit parking lot behind a movie theater, where he removed the license plates and tossed them in the trunk. He took the plates off a Toyota parked nearby and put those on the LTD.