Dean Koontz: Your Heart Belongs To Me

He didn’t scream because he didn’t have the wind for it, but the woman said, “If you scream, I’ll make you stop the hard way, and then what follows will be even worse for you than it would have been.”

The sounds he made were sometimes low and choked-off, sometimes thin and tremulous and pathetic, but they would not carry beyond the walls of the house.

Instead of sliding to the floor, he withdrew into the commodious recliner, holding in his right hand the soft shoe that encased his wounded foot, because he found that gentle pressure eased the pain.

“After losing my Lily, I lived to find you.”

With that singular languid restlessness, Violet circled the room again, like some black bird that had flown in through an open door, a winged messenger of merciless intent, seeking now a permanent roost.

“I needed ten months to escape China. Three of us defected on a mission. Then two more months to get to this country, to study you and plan.”

Behind the brightness of his pain, a dark incoming tide washed through Ryan’s mind, rising above all the sea walls of his defenses, and from beneath his fear of death welled a worse fear that until now he had neither experienced nor imagined to exist.

“Hobb knew,” she said as she roamed.

And now all that Ryan could say was, “He didn’t tell me.”

“Of course he didn’t say, ‘Let’s go to Shanghai and tear open a perfectly healthy girl for you.’”

“If he didn’t tell me, how could I have known?” he pleaded, but the plea sounded weak to him. “How could I have known?”

“By what he implied.”

To this he could say nothing.

She would not relent: “And by what you inferred.”

The dark tide breaching his long-defended sea walls was a tide of truth.

She said, “By the implicit meaning of an international donor’s list, by the implicit meaning of only a one-month wait for a match, by the implicit meaning of the astronomical cost, by the implicit meaning of an emergency flight to Shanghai, by the implicit meaning of the thousand winks and nods you must have witnessed.”

The word shuddered from him: “Subtext.”

Actions had consequences. Having always understood this, he had largely lived by the rules in business and in his personal relationships.

The new and most devastating fear welling in him, which he had never known before in thirty-five years, was the fear that actions also had consequences beyond this life.

Her anger having given way to a calm determination to have justice, the woman approached him, with a grave and stern decorum.

“I was groomed to pass for American. To come here one day and form a secret cell.”

A note of profound resignation informed her voice, her green eyes seeming to be dreaming.

“My secret plan was to bring Lily, disappear into new identities and truly become Americans. Now this country is ruined for me. And China. And I have nowhere.”

She stared at him along the barrel of the gun.

Thick blood oozed slowly from the bullet hole in Ryan’s shoe, his broken left hand curled into a claw, his head ached as if it were held together by tightly pulled barbed wire, but none of his pains squeezed the tears out of him. They were pressed from him by the recognition of the willful blindness with which he had committed himself to Dr. Hobb, with which in fact he had led his entire life.

Less to Violet than to himself, in response to a confessional impulse, he said, “That night Samantha told me I had to be careful. ‘You especially,’ she said. ‘You, being you, have to be careful.’”

Violet asked, “The author?”

“She said I should just let it happen, I shouldn’t handle it, just accept, let it happen the way it should.”

Again his pain entirely receded, as previously it had been for a while suppressed by terror that crowded out all other feelings.

“My God, she knew what I was capable of. She knew when I didn’t. When I didn’t know, she knew…but loved me.”

This time terror, too, was extinguished with the pain, and he had the capacity for only one sentiment, which ruled his emotions, his intellect, his body, a feeling that was new to him but at once familiar: shame.

Ryan Perry had not known until this moment that something in him was broken.

The roots of violence included avarice. Greed.

He said, “My blind greed killed your sister.”

“Greed? You’ve got all the money in the world.”

“A greed for life.”

He had coveted her heart, any healthy heart, and had lied to himself, had hid himself from himself.

Violet looked at him along the barrel of the pistol.

Now, too late, he realized that sixteen months earlier, in the early hours of his crisis, he had been given an extraordinary grace, a chance to achieve the insight Samantha needed to see in him if they were to marry: an awareness that life and the world have subtext, implicit meaning, that this meaning has consequences. Ismay Clemm, a victim of her husband’s greed and of Spencer Barghest’s lust for death, had traveled farther than from Denver to California, to warn him away from one path and to lead him toward another. In urgent dreams, Ismay revealed to him three Hells, but he saw them only as three puzzles.

“Nine rounds left,” said the voice of the lilies. “Eight to wound and one to finish.”

By whatever office Ismay held in death, she had revealed the simple truth. Ryan saw now that he had turned that truth inside out, twisted and knotted it, until he made a mare’s-nest of it. Instead of wonder, he reacted with suspicion. He saw dark conspiracy where he should have seen grace. He reasoned his way to explanations that required sinister poisoners, hallucinogenics slipped into his food, conniving employees, a whole world turned mysteriously against him. Only one conspirator had existed: He had conspired against himself to avoid facing the reality of a deeply layered world and eternity.

Looking up at Violet, he said, “The taproot of violence is the hatred of truth.”

Dead Lily’s living twin shot Ryan high on the left side, just under the shoulder blade.

He was still of this room but not entirely, in part transported and removed from his pain, his body so weak that it no longer had the capacity to share with him the symptoms of its suffering. But this time he entertained no illusion that anyone had secretly slipped drugs to him.

“Ismay gave me…one last chance. The bells.”

He met Violet’s eyes because he felt he owed her the right to see life fade from his.

“Bells?” she said.

“Months before the transplant. Ismay said, if I heard bells…come for her. I didn’t.”

“Ismay. Who is she?”

Lacking both the strength and the clarity of mind to explain, he said merely, “My guardian.”

“I rang the bells,” Violet said.

He did not understand.

“In the old days, they left some churches standing. Only to hold events in them that would mock their purpose.”

“Iron bells.”

“The day Lily died, I got a message to her. Said…I’d be with her in spirit. I’d ring the bells to testify.”

Ryan recalled the ominous tolling, tolling, tolling. And the terrible feeling that he had made a grave mistake of which the bells were warning him.

“Told her I’d ring bells to promise justice,” Violet continued. “Told her, when she heard the bells, to know she’ll live forever in my heart.”

Although afraid of death, Ryan did not think he could take much more of life. He assured her, “It’s all right. It’s justice.”

While talking, she had lowered the pistol. She raised it again.

He said, “Fulfill the promise of the bells.”

She shot him high on the right side, under the shoulder blade.