Dean Koontz - From the Corner of His Eye

doomsday. “Does this seem like earthquake weather to you?"

Surprised, Bill said, “It's a fine day for January."

“The thousand-year quake is overdue,” Edom warned.

“Thousand-year? “ Jolene said, frowning.

“The San Andreas should have a magnitude eight-point-five or greater quake once every thousand years, to relieve stress on the fault.

It's hundreds of years overdue."

Well, it won't happen on the day Agnes's baby is born, I'll guarantee you that,” said Jolene.

“He was born yesterday, not today,” Edom said glumly. “When the thousand-year quake hits, skyscrapers will pancake, bridges crumble, dams break. In three minutes, a million people will die between San Diego and Santa Barbara."

“Then I better have more cake,” Bill said, pushing his plate toward Jolene.

“Oil and natural-gas pipelines will fracture, explode. A sea of fire will wash cities, killing hundreds of thousands more."

“You figure all this,” Jolene asked, “because Mother Nature gives us a nice warm day in January?"

“Nature has no maternal instincts,” Edom said quietly but with conviction. “To think otherwise is sheer sentimentality at its worst. Nature is our enemy. She's a vicious killer."

Jolene started to refill his coffee mug-then thought better of it. “Maybe you don't need more caffeine, Edom."

“Do you know about the earthquake that destroyed seventy percent of Tokyo and all of Yokohama on September 1, 1923?” he asked.

“They still had enough gumption left to fight World War Two, Bill noted.

“After the quake,” Edom said, “forty thousand people took refuge in a two-hundred-acre open area, a military depot. A quake-related fire swept through so fast they were killed standing up, so tightly packed together they died as a solid mass of bodies."

“Well, we have earthquakes here,” Jolene said, “but back east they have all those hurricanes."

“Our new roof,” Bill said, pointing overhead, “will hold through any hurricane. Fine work. You tell Agnes what fine work it is."

Having gotten the new roof for them at cost, Agnes subsequently put together donations from a dozen individuals and one church group to cover all but two hundred dollars of the outlay.

“The hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas, back in 1900, killed six thousand people,” Edom said. “Virtually obliterated the place."

“That was all of sixty-five years ago,” Jolene said.

“Less than a year and a half ago, Hurricane Flora—she killed over six thousand in the Caribbean."

“Wouldn't live in the Caribbean if you paid me,” Bill said. “All that humidity. All those bugs."

“But nothing equals a quake for killing. Big one in Shaanxi, China, killed eight hundred thirty thousand."

Bill wasn't impressed. “They build houses out of mud in China. No wonder everything falls down."

“This was back on January 24, 1556,” said Edom with unhesitating authority, for he had memorized tens of thousands of facts about the worst natural disasters in history.

“Fifteen fifty-six?” Bill frowned. “Hell, the Chinese probably didn't even have mud back then."

Fortifying herself with more coffee, Jolene said, “Edom, you were going to tell us how Joey's coping with fatherhood."

Glancing at his wristwatch with alarm, Edom bolted up from his chair. “Look at the time! Agnes gave me a lot to do, and here I am rattling on about earthquakes and cyclones."

“Hurricanes,” Bill corrected. “They're different from cyclones, aren't they?"

“Don't get me started on cyclones!” Edom hurried through the house and out to the station wagon, to fetch the boxes of groceries.

The blue vault above, cloudless now, was the most threatening sky that Edom had ever seen. The air was astonishingly dry so soon after a storm. And still. Hushed. Earthquake weather. Before this momentous day was done, great temblors and five-hundred-foot tidal waves would rock and swamp the coast.

OF THE SEVEN NEWBORNS, none was fussing, too fresh to the world to realize how much was here to fear.

One nurse and one nun brought Celestina into the creche behind the viewing window.

She strove to appear calm, and she must have succeeded, because neither woman seemed to realize that she was scared almost to the point of paralysis. She moved woodenly, joints stiff, muscles tense.

The nurse lifted the infant from its bassinet. She gave it to the nun.

Cradling the baby, the nun turned with it to Celestina, folding back a thin blanket to present her with a good look at the tiny girl.

Breath held, Celestina confirmed what she had suspected about the child since the quick glimpse she'd had in the surgery. Its skin was cafe au lait with a warming touch of caramel.

Over many proud generations and at least to the extent of second cousins, no one on either side of Celestina's family had skin of this light color. They were without exception medium to dark mahogany, many shades darker than this infant.

Phimie's rapist must have been a white man.

Someone she had known. Someone Celestina, too, might know. He lived in or around Spruce Hills, because Phimie had considered him still to be a threat.

Celestina had no illusions about playing detective. She would never be able to track down the bastard, and she had no stomach for confronting him.

Anyway, the thing that scared her was not the monstrous father of this child. The fearsome thing was the decision that she had made a few minutes ago, in the unused hospital room on the seventh floor.

Her entire future was at stake if she acted as she had decided to act.

Here, in the presence of the baby, within the next minute or two, she must either change her mind or commit herself to a more difficult and challenging life than any she had envisioned only this morning.

“May l?” she asked, holding out her arms.

Without hesitation, the nun transferred the infant to Celestina.

The baby felt too light to be real. She weighed five pounds fourteen ounces, but she seemed lighter than air, as though she might float up and out of her aunt's arms.

Celestina stared at the small, brown face, opening herself to the anger and hatred with which she had regarded this child in the operating room.

If the nun and the nurse could know the loathing that Celestina had felt earlier, they would never allow her here in the creche, never trust her with this newborn.

This spawn of violence. This killer of her sister.

She searched the child's unfocused eyes for some sign of the hateful father's wickedness.

The little hands, so weak now but someday strong: Would they eventually be capable of savagery, as were the father's hands? Misbegotten offspring. This seed of a demonic man whom Phimie herself had called sick and evil. However innocent-looking now, what pain might she eventually in— on others? What outrages might she commit in years to come? Although Celestina searched intently, she could not glimpse the father's evil in the child.

Instead, she saw Phimie reborn. She saw, as well, a child endangered. Somewhere out there was a rapist capable of extreme cruelty and violence, a man who would—if Phimie was correct—react unpredictably if ever he learned of his daughter's existence. Angel, if that's what she were eventually to be named, lived under a threat as surely as had all the children of Bethlehem, who'd been slain according to the decree of King Herod. The baby curled one small hand around her aunt's index finger. So tiny, fragile, she nonetheless gripped with surprising tenacity.

Do what must he done.

Returning the newborn to the nun, Celestina asked for the use of a phone, and for privacy.

The social worker's office once more. Rain tapping lightly at the window where Dr. Lipscomb had stared intently into the fog as he tried to avoid confronting the life-changing revelation that Phimie, speaking with the special knowledge of the once-dead, had shown him.