Dean Koontz - Lost Souls

Soon no voices rose against the down-drawn air. Nothing but a hollow silence fell upon his ear, which ached, pressed so hard against the grille.

Dr. Henry Lightner’s replicant was present in the basement room to observe the destruction and processing of the hospital’s night-shift personnel, who had been imprisoned there since four o’clock this morning.

Seventeen of them sat on the floor. The silvery caps of brain taps shone brightly on their temples.

The eighteenth, the deceased nurse with eyes full of now-congealed blood, lay on her back on the floor. Dead or alive, she had the same value to the Community.

The Builder was a young man with curly blond hair and hazel eyes. For some reason known only to the Creator, all the Builders were young men and women, and all were uncommonly beautiful by human standards, though beauty mattered not at all to members of the Community.

Having been replaced by replicants, the eighteen members of the former night shift would now be terminated-though they would not merely be killed. Their bodies were evidence of the secret revolution now under way, and they must never be found.

Mass graves were difficult to excavate and conceal. They would sooner or later be discovered.

Cremation pyres produced smoke with a telltale scent that might alarm even placid sheep oblivious of the threat to their existence.

The Builders were the answer to the problem of human debris, exquisitely efficient.

The curly-headed blond young man began to murder and create.

Initially, the cries of the condemned annoyed Henry Lightner, but in less than a minute, he began to enjoy them. Like all others in the Community, he had no interest in music or in any kind of art, for those things promoted leisure, and leisure diminished efficiency. But he felt that these stifled screams and throttled sobs might be a kind of music.

Such swift, clean executions.

When all were dead, the Builder’s work was less than half done. He was no longer anything as ordinary as a handsome young man, and the construction in which he engaged proved to be a spectacle that riveted Henry Lightner.

When eventually the job here was completed, they would move on to the imprisoned day-shift personnel in the next room. And sometime after visiting hours, the patients would be brought down one by one, throughout the evening and into the night.

Such relentless, swift rendering of flesh and bone.

Such a fever of creation.

Shakily, Bryce Walker got to his feet and turned away from the return-air grille. Legs weak, he leaned against the wall. Then he moved to the toilet, put down the lid, and sat.

He had never been a superstitious man. Yet in the wake of this experience, a sense of the uncanny permeated him, as if he had spent his life marinating in occult pursuits and practices. He knew that he had not chanced upon an audio pipeline to the abattoirs of Hell, but he also knew that what he overheard wasn’t evidence of any ordinary crime committed by a mere psychopath. He had heard something more profound, more mysterious, and more terrifying even than mass murder.

And he didn’t know what he should do about it. If he recounted his experience to anyone, he most likely would not be believed. At seventy-two, his mind was as sharp as ever, but in this tyranny of youth that was the modern world, an old guy with a strange story would more often than not raise suspicions of Alzheimer’s. And when a long-married man became a childless widower, wasn’t he more likely, in his pitiable loneliness, to seek attention even with an implausible story of the voices of distant victims echoing to him through a maze of ductwork?

Bryce’s pride restrained him from rushing to share his story with a nurse or doctor who might patronize him, but more than pride fettered him. A primitive survival instinct, of which he’d had no need in decades, warned him that speaking of this to the wrong person would be the end of him and that the end would be swift.

His shakes subsided. He went to the sink and washed his hands. The haunted face in the mirror unsettled him, and he turned away from it.

When he stepped out of the lavatory, two nurses had nearly finished changing the sheets on his bed. The breakfast dishes were gone. A pill cup stood on his nightstand, and he suspected that the carafe was filled with ice water.

He thanked them.

They smiled and nodded, but there was none of the breezy chat with which most nurses put their patients at ease. He thought their smiles seemed forced. They had about them an air of urgency, not the bustle of women intent upon their work, but an eagerness to be done with the task at hand and to be off to another endeavor that was the true purpose and passion of their day. As they left the room, one of them glanced back at him, and he thought he saw hatred in her eyes and a fleeting triumphant sneer.

Paranoia. He needed to guard against paranoia. Or perhaps embrace it.

From downtown to Nummy’s neighborhood, the big storm pipe led uphill. The rise never grew steep enough to make them breathe hard.

Nummy could walk as tall as he was. Mr. Lyss was a little too tall for the drain, but he always stooped anyway, even in the open, so he didn’t bump his head.

Because of the way he stooped, Mr. Lyss sometimes reminded Nummy of a witch he’d seen in a movie, bending over a giant iron pot as she mixed up some magic soup. At other times, Mr. Lyss made Nummy think of old Scrooge in a different movie, mean old Scrooge hunched over a pile of money, counting and counting.

Mr. Lyss never reminded Nummy of any nice people in the movies.

At any time, having a flashlight was a good idea when you used the storm-pipe shortcut, but you could get by without one during the day. Evenly spaced street drains overhead, covered with gratings, made waffles of sunshine on the floor.

Between the sunshine waffles, the dark was plenty dark enough for Nummy, but there was always another waffle ahead.

Smaller drain lines opened into the main one. Nummy couldn’t always see them, but he could hear his footsteps echoing off to the left or right when he passed another pipe. If Mr. Lyss cursed the dark just then, his words spun away, hollow and spooky, into other parts of town.

Sometimes when Nummy was in the storm pipe alone, he felt like something lived down here-something not someone-but he didn’t know what it might be, and he didn’t want to find out. When the feeling got really strong, he stayed out of the storm pipe for weeks.

A few times, when he had a flashlight, he saw a rat-once dead, three times alive. Never more than one, no packs of them. Anyway, rats weren’t the unknown thing that maybe lived down here. Each time Nummy saw a live rat, it seemed to be running scared from something, and not from him.

No rain in two weeks meant the pipe was dry. There wasn’t a bad odor right now, only the smell of concrete all around.

As he had done before, close behind Nummy, Mr. Lyss said, “Don’t try running away from me.”

“No, sir.”

“I’ve got a bloodhound’s nose.”

“Like you said before.”

“I’ll track you down by smell.”

“I know.”

“And tear your guts out.”