Dean Koontz - Strange Highways

He found himself apologizing to Glenda for what she might have thought was a pass. "I'm sorry. I had no right, I didn't mean—"

"I know," she said softly.

"I don't want—"

"I know. Hush."

They were silent for a while.

Then she said, "Being alone can be good. It's easy to find peace alone. But sometimes… being alone is a kind of death."

He could add nothing more to what she'd said.

Later she said, "I only have one bedroom, one bed. But the armchairs in the living room were all bought secondhand, here and there, and one of them is a lounger that pretty much folds into a bed."

"Thank you," he said.

Later still, as he sat in the lounger, reading a book from her shelves, she reappeared, dressed for bed in a T-shirt and panties. She leaned down, kissed his cheek, and said, "Good night, Ben."

He put down his book and took her hand in both of his. "I'm not sure what's happening here."

"Do you find it strange?"

"I should."

"But?"

"I don't."

"All that happened is — we both found the same doorway from different sides."

"And now?"

"We give it time, enough time, and see if this is what we need," she said.

"You're special."

"And you're not?"

"I know I'm not," he said.

"You're wrong."

She kissed him again and went to bed.

And later still, after he had converted the chair into its fullest reclining position, turned off the lamp on the end table, and settled down, she returned in the darkness and sat across from him. He did not hear her coming as much as feel the serenity that she brought with her.

"Ben?" she said.

"Yes?"

"Everyone is damaged."

"Not everyone," he said.

"Yes. Everyone. Not just you, not just me."

He knew why she had waited for darkness. Some things were not easily said in the light.

"I don't know if I can ever… be with a woman again," he said. "The war. What happened. No one knows. I have this guilt… "

"Of course you do. Good men wear chains of guilt all their lives. They feel."

"This is… this is worse than what other men have done."

"We learn, we change, or we die," she said quietly.

He couldn't speak.

From the darkness, she said, "When I was a little girl, I had to give what I never wanted to give, day after day, week after week, year after year, to a father who didn't know the meaning of guilt."

"I'm so sorry."

"You needn't be. That's long ago," she said. "Many doors away from where I am now."

"I should never touch you."

"Hush. You will touch me one day, and I'll be happy for your touch. Maybe next week. Next month. Maybe a year from now or even longer. Whenever you're ready. Everyone is damaged, Ben, but the heart can be repaired."

When she rose from her chair and returned to the bedroom, she left a place of peace behind her, and Ben found a sleep without nightmares.

Sunday morning, Glenda was still sleeping soundly when Ben went to her bedroom to check on her. He stood in the doorway for a long while, listening to her slow, steady breathing, which seemed to him to have all the subtle power of a gentle tide breaking on a beach.

He left her a note in the kitchen: I've got some business to take care of. Will call soon. Love, Ben.

The morning sun was already fiercely hot. The sky was gas-flame blue, as it had been the previous day, but it no longer seemed like a flat, blind vault. It was a deep sky now, with places beyond.

He returned to his apartment, where he encountered Mrs. Fielding in the front hall.

"Been out all night?" she asked, eyeing the rumpled clothes in which he'd slept. "You didn't have an accident, did you?"

"No," he said, climbing the stairs, "and I wasn't bar hopping the topless joints either."

He was surprised that he had been able to be brusque with her, and she was so startled that she had no reply.

After a shower and a shave, he sat with his notebook of clues, trying to decide what his next step should be.

When the telephone rang, he hoped it was Glenda, but Judge said, "So you've found yourself a bitch in heat, have you?"

Ben knew that he hadn't been followed to Glenda's apartment.

Judge could be aware of nothing more than that he'd been out all night; the bastard was just assuming that he'd been with a woman.

"Killer and fornicator," Judge accused.

"I know what you look like," Ben said. "About my height, blond, with a long thin nose. You walk with your shoulders hunched. You're a neat dresser."

Judge was amused. "With that and the entire U.S. Army to help you search, you might find me in time, Chase."

"You're part of the brotherhood."

The killer was silent. This was a nervous silence and therefore different from his usual judgmental silences.

"The Aryan Alliance," Ben said. "You and Eric Blentz. You and a lot of other moronic assholes who think you're the master race."

"You don't want to cross certain people, Mr. Chase."

"You don't scare me. I've been dead for years anyway. You've got a dead man looking for you, Judge, and we dead men never stop."

With sudden anger hotter than the July morning, Judge said, "You don't know anything about me, Chase, not anything that matters — and you're not going to get a chance to learn anything more."

"Whoa, easy, easy," Ben said, enjoying being on the delivery end of the needle for a change. "You master-race guys, you come from a lot of inbreeding, cousins lying with cousins, sisters with brothers, makes you a little unstable sometimes."

Judge was silent again, and when he finally spoke, he sounded as if he was shaking with the effort to control his anger. "Do you like your new bitch, Chase? Isn't that the name of the good witch in the land of Oz? Glenda the good witch?"

Ben's heart felt as if it had turned over. He tried to fake bafflement: "Who? What're you talking about?"

"Glenda, tall and golden."

There was no way that he had been followed to her apartment.

"Works in a morgue," said Judge.

He couldn't know.

"Dead newspapers. I think I'll send the fornicating bitch to another kind of morgue, Chase, a morgue where the dead have some real meat on them."

Judge hung up.

He couldn't know.

But he did.

Suddenly Chase felt pursued by a supernatural avenger. Justice had come for him at last. Out of those faraway, long-ago tunnels.

GLENDA ANSWERED BEN'S KNOCK, READ THE ANXIETY IN HIS EYES, AND said, "What's wrong?"

Once inside, he closed the front door and engaged both the latch and the deadbolt.

"Ben?" She was wearing a pink T-shirt, white shorts, and tennis shoes. Her golden hair was pulled back in a pair of ponytails, one behind each ear, and even as tall as she was, she still seemed like a little girl. In spite of what she'd told him in the darkness last night, she was the personification of innocence.

"Do you own a gun?" he asked.

"No."

"Neither do I. Didn't want to see a gun after the war. Now nothing would make me happier than to have one in my hand."

In the dining area off the kitchen, at the table where they'd had dinner the previous night, he told her about Judge, everything since the murder of Michael Karnes. "Now… because of me… you're part of it."

She reached across the small table and took his hand. "No. That's the wrong way to look at it. Now, because we met, we're in it together — and you're no longer alone."

"I want to call Detective Wallace, ask him to provide you with protection."

"Why should he believe you any more now than he did before?" she asked.

"The damage to my car, when the guy sideswiped it out at the mall, trying to run me down."