Dean Koontz - From the Corner of His Eye

“Once out of the coma and stabilized for a few weeks, I was transferred to a hospital in Portland, where I had to undergo eleven surgeries."

He either detected their well-concealed surprise or assumed they would be curious as to why, in spite of extensive surgery, he still wore this Boris Karloff face.

“The doctors,” he continued, “needed to repair damage to the left frontal sinus, the sphenoidal sinus, and the sinus cavernous, which had all been partially crushed by that pewter candlestick. Frontal, malar, ethmoid, maxillary, sphenoid, and palatine bones had to be rebuilt to properly contain my right eye, because it sort of ... well, it dangled. That was just for starters, and there was considerable essential dental work, as well. I elected not to have any cosmetic surgery."

He paused, giving them a chance to ask the obvious question-and then smiled at their reticence.

“I was never Cary Grant, to begin with,” said Vanadium, still ceaselessly rolling the quarter across his fingers, “so I had no big emotional investment in my appearance. Cosmetic surgery would have added another year of recuperation time, probably much longer, and I was anxious to get after Cain. Seemed to me this mug of mine might be just the thing to scare him into an incriminating mistake, even a confession."

Kathleen expected this would prove to be true. She herself was not frightened by Thomas Vanadium's appearance; but then she had been prepared for it before she first saw him. And she wasn't a murderer, fearful of retribution, to whom this particular face would seem like Judgment personified.

“Besides, I still live by my vows as much as possible, though I've had the longest continuing dispensation on record.” A smile on that cracked countenance could be touching, but an ironic look now worked less well; it gave Kathleen a chill. “Vanity is a sin I've more easily been able to avoid than some others."

Between his surgeries and for many months thereafter, Vanadium had devoted his energies to speech therapy, physical rehabilitation, and the concoction of periodic torments for Enoch Cain, which Simon Magusson was able to implement, every few months, through Nolly and Kathleen. The idea wasn't to bring Cain to justice by torturing his conscience, since he'd allowed his conscience to atrophy a long time ago, but to keep him unsettled and thereby magnify the impact of his first face-to-face encounter with the resurrected Vanadium.

“I got to admit,” Nolly said, “I'm surprised these little pranks have rattled him so deeply."

“He's a hollow man,” Vanadium said. “He believes in nothing. Hollow men are vulnerable to anyone who offers them something that might fill the void and make them feel less empty. So-"

The coin stopped turning across his knuckles and, as though with volition of its own, it slipped into the tight curve of his curled forefinger. With a snap of his thumb, he flipped the quarter into the air.

"—I'm offering him cheap and easy mysticism-"

The instant he flipped the coin, he opened both hands-palms up, fingers spread-with a distracting flourish.

"—a relentless pursuing spirit, a vengeful ghost-"

Vanadium dusted his hands together.

"-I'm offering him fear-"

As though Amelia Earhart, the long-lost aviatrix, had reached out of her twilight zone and snared the two bits, no tumbling coin glinted in the air above the desk.

"-sweet fear,” Vanadium concluded.

Frowning, Nolly said, “What-it's up your sleeve?"

“No, it's in your shirt pocket,” Vanadium replied.

Startled, Nolly checked his shirt pocket and withdrew a quarter. “It's not the same one."

Vanadium raised his eyebrows.

“You must've slipped this one in my pocket when you first came in here,” Nolly deduced.

“Then where's the coin I just tossed?"

“Fear?” Kathleen asked, more interested in Vanadium's words than in his prestidigitation. “You said you're offering fear to Cain ... as if that was something he would want."

“In a way, he does,” Vanadium said. “When you're as hollow as Enoch Cain, the emptiness aches. He's desperate to fill it, but he doesn't have the patience or the commitment to fill it with anything worthwhile. Love, charity, faith, wisdom-those virtues and others are hard won, with commitment and patience, and we acquire them one spoonful at a time. Cain wants to be filled quickly. He wants the emptiness inside poured full, in quick great gushes, and right now. “

“Seems like lots of people want that these days,” said Nolly.

“Seems like,” Vanadium agreed. “So a man like Cain obsesses on one thing after another-sex, money, food, power, drugs, alcohol, anything that seems to give meaning to his days, but that requires no real self-discovery or self-sacrifice. Briefly, he feels complete. However, there's no substance to what he's filled himself with, so it soon evaporates, and then he's empty again."

“And you're saying fear can fill his emptiness as well as sex or booze?” Kathleen wondered.

“Better. Fear doesn't require him even to seduce a woman or to buy a bottle of whiskey. He just needs to open himself to it, and he will be filled like a glass under a faucet. As difficult as this may be to comprehend, Cain would choose to be neck-deep in a bottomless pool of terror, desperately trying to stay afloat, rather than to suffer that unrelieved hollowness. Fear can give shape and meaning to his life, and I intend not merely to fill him with fear but to drown him in it."

Considering his battered and stitched face, considering also his tragic and colorful history, Vanadium spoke with remarkably little drama. His voice was calm, nearly flat, rising and falling so little that he almost talked in a monotone.

Yet Kathleen has been as totally riveted by his every word as ever she had been by Laurence Olivier's great performances in Rebecca and Wuthering Heights. In Vanadium's quiet and in his restraint, she heard conviction and truth, but she detected something more. Only gradually did she realize that it might be this: the subtle resonance arising from a good man whose soul, containing not one empty chamber, was filled with those spoon-by-spoon virtues that do not evaporate.

They sat in silence, and the moment held such an extraordinary quality of expectation that Kathleen would not have been surprised if the vanished quarter had suddenly appeared in midair and dropped, winking brightly, to the center of Nolly's desk, there to spin with perpetual motion, until Vanadium chose to pluck it up.

Nolly finally disturbed the quiet: “Well, sir ... you're quite a psychologist."

That saving smile once more returned lost harmony to the scarred and broken face. “Not me. From my perspective, psychology is just one more of those easy sources of false meaning-like sex, money, and drugs. But I will admit to knowing a thing or two about evil."

Daylight had retreated from the windows. Winter night, wound in scarfs of fog, like a leprous mendicant, rattled out a breath as though begging their attention beyond the glass.

With a shiver, Kathleen said, “We'd like to know more about why we did the things we did for you. Why the quarters? Why the song?"

Vanadium nodded. “And I'd like to hear about Cain's reactions in more detail. I've read your reports, of course, and they've been thorough, but necessarily condensed. There'll be lots of subtleties that only reveal themselves in conversation. Often, the apparently insignificant details are the most important to me when I'm devising strategy."

Rising from his chair and rolling down his shirt-sleeves, Nolly said, “If you'll be our guest for dinner, I suspect we'll all have a fascinating evenings."

A moment later, in the corridor, as Nolly locked the door to his suite, Kathleen linked her right arm through Vanadium's left. “Do I call you Detective Vanadium, Brother, or Father?"