Dean Koontz - From the Corner of His Eye

“What?"

“There's a reason why I'm blind in this place but not blind everywhere I am."

“What reason?"

“There must be something important I'm supposed to do here that I don't need to do everywhere I am, something I'll do better if I'm blind."

“Like what?"

“I don't know.” He was silent a moment. “That's what's going to be interesting."

She traded silence for silence. Then: “Kiddo, I'm still totally confused by this stuff."

“I know, Mom. Someday I'll understand it better and explain it all to you.

“I'll look forward to that. I guess."

“And that's not bulldoody."

“I didn't think it was. And you know what?"

“What?"

“I believe you."

“About the sad?” he asked.

“About the sad. You really aren't, and that ... just stuns me, kiddo."

“I get frustrated,” he admitted. “Trying to learn how to do things in the dark ... I get peed off, as they say."

“That's not what they say,” she teased.

“That's what we say."

“Actually, if we have to say it at all, I'd rather we said tinkled off."

He groaned. “That just doesn't cut it, Mom. If I gotta be blind, I think I should get to say peed off."

“You're probably right,” she conceded.

“I get peed off, and I miss some things terrible. But I'm not sad. And you've got to not be sad, either, 'cause it spoils everything."

“I promise to try. And you know what?"

“What?"

“Maybe I won't have to try as hard as I think, because you make it so easy, Barty."

For more than two weeks, Agnes's heart had been a clangorous place, filled with the rattle and bang of hard emotions, but now a sort of quiet had come upon it, a peace that, if it held, might one day allow joy again.

“Can I touch your face?” Barty asked.

“Your old mom's face?"

“You're not old."

“You've read about the pyramids. I was here first."

“Bulldoody."

Unerringly, in the darkness, he found her face with both hands. Smoothed her brow. Traced her eyes with fingertips. Her nose, her lips. Her cheeks.

“There were tears,” he said.

“There were,” she admitted.

“But not now. All dried up. You feel as pretty as you look, Mom."

She took his small hands in hers and kissed them.

“I'll always know your face,” he promised. “Even if you have to go away and you're gone a hundred years, I'll remember what you looked like, how you felt."

“I'm not going anywhere,” she pledged. She had realized that his voice was growing heavy with sleep. “But it's time for you to go to dreamland."

Agnes got out of bed, switched on the lamp, and tucked Barty in once more. “Say your silent prayers."

“Doin' it now,” he said thickly.

She slipped into her shoes and stood for a moment watching his lips move as he gave thanks for his blessings and as he asked that blessings be given to others who needed them.

She found the switch and clicked off the lamp again. “Good-night, young prince."

“Good-night, queen mother."

She started toward the door, stopped, and turned to him in the dark. “Kid of mine?"

“Hmmmm?"

“Did I ever tell you what your name means?"

“My name ... Bartholomew?” he asked sleepily.

“No. Lampion. Somewhere in your father's French background, there must have been lamp makers. A lampion is a small lamp, an oil lamp with a tinted-glass chimney. Among other things, in those long ago days, they used them on carriages."

Smiling in the fearless dark, she listened to the rhythmic breathing of a sleeping boy.

She whispered then: “You are my little lampion, Barty. You light the way for me."

That night her sleep was deeper than it had been in a long time, deep as she had expected sleep would never be again, and she was not plagued by any dreams at all, not a dream of children suffering, nor of tumbling in a car along a rain-washed street, nor of thousands of windblown dead leaves rattling-hissing along a deserted street and every leaf in fact a jack of spades.

A MOMENTOUS DAY for Celestina, a night of nights, and a new dawn in the forecast: Here began the life about which she'd dreamed since she was a young girl.

By ones and twos, the festive crowd eventually deconstructed, but for Celestina, an excitement lingered in the usual gallery hush that rebuilt in their wake.

On the serving tables, the canapé trays held only stained paper doilies, crumbs, and empty plastic champagne glasses.

She herself had been too nervous to eat anything. She'd held the same glass of untasted champagne throughout the evening, clutching it as though it were a mooring buoy that would prevent her from being swept away in a storm.

Now her mooring was Wally Lipscomb-obstetrician, pediatrician, landlord, and best friend—who arrived halfway through the reception. As she listened to Helen Greenbaum's sales report, Celestina held Wally's hand so tightly that had it been a plastic champagne flute, it would have cracked.

According to Helen, more than half the paintings had been sold by the close of the reception, a record for the gallery. With the exhibition scheduled to run two fall weeks, she was confident that they would enjoy a sellout or the next thing to it.

“From time to time now, you're going to be written about,” Helen warned. “Be prepared for a peevish critic or two, furious about your optimism."

“My dad's already armored me,” Celestina assured her. “He says art lasts, but critics are the buzzing insects of a single summer day."

Her life was so blessed that she could have dealt with a horde of locusts, let alone a few mosquitoes.

At Tom Vanadium's request, the taxi dropped him one block from his new-and temporary-home shortly before ten o'clock in the evening.

Although the mummifying fog wound white mysteries around even the most ordinary objects and wrapped every citizen in anonymity, Vanadium preferred to approach the apartment building with utmost discretion. Whatever the length of his stay in this place, he would never arrive or depart through the front door or even through the basement level garage-until perhaps his last day.

He followed an alleyway to the building's service entrance, for which he possessed a key that wasn't provided to other tenants. He unlocked the steel door and stepped into a small, dimly lighted receiving room with gray walls and a speckled blue linoleum floor.

To the left, a door led to a back staircase, accessible with the special key already in his hand. To the right: a key-operated service elevator for which he'd been provided a separate key.

He rode up to the third of five floors in the service elevator, which other tenants were permitted to use only when moving in or moving out, or when taking delivery of large items of furniture. Another elevator, at the front of the building, was too public to suit his purposes.

The third-floor apartment directly over Enoch Cain's unit had been leased by Simon Magusson, through his corporation, ever since it became available in March of '66, twenty-two months ago.

By the time this operation concluded and the sulphurous Mr. Cain was brought to some form of justice, Simon might have spent twenty or twenty-five percent of the fee that he'd collected from the liability settlement in the matter of Naomi Cain's death. The attorney put a substantial price on his dignity and reputation.

And although Simon would have denied it, would even have joked that a conscience was a liability for an attorney, he possessed a moral compass. When he traveled too far along the wrong trail, that magnetized needle in his soul led him back from the land of the lost.

The apartment had been furnished with only two padded folding chairs and a bare mattress in the living room. The mattress was on the floor, without benefit of a bed frame or box springs.