Dean Koontz - Sole Survivor

Trusting that their attention would be on the Delmann place and that they would not even notice him departing, Joe switched on the headlights. He swung the Honda into the street.

The lovely old Georgian house was now the domicile of dragons, where bright presences with incendiary breath prowled from room to room. While the dead lay in shrouds of fire, multiple sirens rose like lamentations in the distance.

Joe drove away into a night grown too strange to comprehend, into a world that no longer seemed to be the one into which he had been born.

This Halloween light in August, as orange as pumpkin lanterns but leaping high from pits in the sand, made even the innocent seem like debauched pagans in its glow.

On a stretch of beach where bonfires were permitted, ten blazed. Large families gathered at some, parties of teenagers and college students at others.

Joe walked among them. The beach was one he favoured on nights when he came to the ocean for therapy, although usually he kept his distance from the bonfires.

Here the decibels of chatter were off the top of the- scale, and barefoot couples danced in place to old tunes by the Beach Boys. But here a dozen listeners sat enthralled as a stocky man with a mane of white hair and a reverberant voice spun a ghost story.

The day’s events had altered Joe’s perception of everything, so it seemed he was looking at the world through a pair of peculiar glasses won in a game of chance on the midway of a mysterious carnival that travelled from venue to venue in whisper-quiet black trains, spectacles with the power not to distort the world but to reveal a secret dimension that was enigmatic, cold, and fearsome.

The dancers in bathing suits, bare limbs molten-bronze from the firelight, shook their shoulders and rolled their hips, dipped and swayed, beat their supple arms like wings or clawed at the radiant air, and to Joe each celebrant seemed to be two entities at the same time. Each was a real person, yes, but each was also a marionette, controlled by an unseen puppet master, string-tugged into postures of jubilation, winking glass eyes and cracking wooden smiles and laughing with the thrown voices of hidden ventriloquists, for the sole purpose of deceiving Joe into believing that this was a benign world that merited delight.

He passed a group of ten or twelve young men in swimming trunks. Their discarded wetsuits glistened like piles of sealskins or flayed eels or some other harvest of the sea. Their upended surfboards cast Stonehenge shadows across the sand. Testosterone levels were so high among them that the air virtually smelled of it, so high that it made them not rowdy but slow and murmurous, almost somnambulant with primal male fantasies.

The dancers, the storyteller and his audience, the surfers, and everyone else whom Joe passed watched him warily. This was not his imagination. Though their glances were mostly surreptitious, he was aware of their attention.

He wouldn’t have been surprised if all of them worked for Teknologik or for whoever funded Teknologik.

On the other hand, although wading deep in paranoia, he was still sane enough to realize that he carried with him the unspeakable things he had seen at the Delmann house — and that these horrors were visible in him. The experience carved his face, painted a dull sheen of desolation in his eyes, and sculpted his body into angles of rage and dread. When he passed, the people on the beach saw a tormented man, and they were all city dwellers who understood the danger of tormented men.

He found a bonfire surrounded by twenty or more utterly silent young men and women with shaved heads. Each of them wore a sapphire-blue robe and white tennis shoes, and each had a gold ring in his or her left ear. The men were beardless. The women were without makeup. Many of both sexes were so strikingly attractive and so stylish in their raiments that he instantly thought of them as the Cult of the Beverly Hills Children.

He stood among them for a few minutes, watching them as they watched their fire in meditative silence. When they returned his attention, they had no fear of what they perceived in him. Their eyes were, without exception, calm pools in which he saw humbling depths of acceptance and a kindness like moonlight on water — but perhaps only because that was what he needed to see.

He was carrying the McDonald’s bag that contained the wrappers of two cheeseburgers, an empty soft drink container, and the Kleenex with which he had scrubbed the blood off his hand. Evidence. He tossed the bag into the bonfire, and he watched the cultists as they watched the bag burst into flame, blacken, and vanish.

When he walked away, he wondered briefly what they believed the purpose of life to be. His fantasy was that in the mad spiral and plummet of modern life, these blue-robed faithful had learned a truth and achieved an enlightened state that gave meaning to existence. He didn’t ask them, for fear their answer would be nothing other than one more version of the same sad longing and wishful thinking on which so many others based their hope.

A hundred yards up the beach from the bonfires, where the night ruled, he hunkered down at the purling edge of the surf and washed his hands in the inch-deep salty water. He picked up wet sand and scrubbed with it, scouring any lingering traces of blood from the creases in his knuckles and from under his fingernails.

After a final rinse of his hands, without bothering to take off his socks and Nikes or to roll up his jeans, he walked into the sea. He moved into the black tide and stopped after he passed the break line of the quiet surf, where the water was above his knees.

The gentle waves wore only thin frayed collars of phosphorescent foam. Curiously, though the night was clear and pierced by a moon, within a hundred yards the sea rolled naked, black, invisible.

Denied the pacifying vista that had drawn him to the shore, Joe found some solace in the surging tide that pressed against his legs and in the low, dumb grumble of the great watery machine. Eternal rhythms, meaningless motions, the peace of indifference.

He tried not to think about what had happened at the Delmann house. Those events were incomprehensible. Thinking about them would not lead to understanding.

He was dismayed to feel no grief and so little anguish about the Delmanns’ and Lisa’s deaths. At meetings of The Compassionate Friends, he had learned that following the loss of a child, parents often reported a disturbing inability to care about the suffering of others. Watching television news of freeway wrecks, apartment-building fires, and heinous murders, one sat numb and unaffected. Music that had once stirred the heart, art that had once touched the soul, now had no effect. Some people overcame this loss of sensitivity in a year or two, others in five years or ten, but others — never.

The Delmanns had seemed like fine people, but he had never really known them.

Lisa was a friend. Now she was dead. So what? Everyone died sooner or later. Your children. The woman who was the love of your life. Everyone.

The hardness of his heart frightened him. He felt loathsome. But he could not force himself to feel the pain of others. Only his own.

From the sea he sought the indifference to his losses that he already felt to the losses of others.

Yet he wondered what manner of beast he would become if even the deaths of Michelle and Chrissie and Nina no longer mattered to him. For the first time, he considered that utter indifference might inspire not inner peace but a limitless capacity for evil.

The busy service station and the adjacent twenty-four-hour convenience store were three blocks from his motel. Two public telephones were outside, near the restrooms.