Quicksilver, page 30
The creature must have taken intense pleasure in its deceit, living among the sisters as one of them, singling out some of their favorite children for death and suffering. I wondered who else—in addition to Annie, Keiko, Litton—might have been victims of the thing called Margaret. And who would be next?
Half of the sisters roomed on the ground floor, but all of the orphans and the rest of the nuns resided on the second level. The beast was strong, its talons sharp, its purpose bloody destruction. Free in the building, it would kill every child it came across, to declare that no heart was sacred and that violent death was the only reward for innocence.
I found myself in the foyer looking toward the open staircase that curved through shadows up to the second floor. The creature seemed to be making for them, but then pivoted to the right, into the main ground-floor hallway, and disappeared.
When I turned the corner, I saw the nun’s habit that the Nihilim had torn off like thinnest paper and cast aside. Ahead on the left, a door was swinging shut of its own weight. I knew that beyond lay the stairs to the basement.
Pistol in hand, I stepped onto the landing. The Nihilim had gone down in darkness, evidently needing no light to see. I found the wall switch, and in the fall of light, the concrete stairs swelled up from the gloom.
I hesitated to follow my quarry. The orphans were forbidden to venture into that lower realm, though from time to time we went in little groups, more in a spirit of adventure than disobedience. A structure as large as Mater Misericordiæ had complex mechanical systems, and the world below was a maze of pipes and pumps and boilers, furnaces, chillers, and much arcane machinery that I couldn’t name. There were uncountable places where the monster could lie in wait and spring upon me so abruptly that I might not have time to bring the pistol to bear.
Just then I experienced a Panthea moment, my gift maturing to include vivid clairvoyance. I saw the fiend retrieve a long-handled monkey wrench from behind a large holding tank full of superheated water, where it had stashed the tool long ago. I saw it moving through a puzzlement of water lines and waste lines and electrical conduits, slouching past an array of breaker boxes. It stooped and applied the jaws of the wrench to a hexagonal coupling at a junction of pipes. Abruptly the vision fast-forwarded. A fierce blue-orange flash. Glass exploding out of the windows on the upper floors of the building. Fire churning through the hallways. The Nihilim intended to flood the basement with natural gas. The pleasure it would have taken in the slaughter of a few children was nothing compared to the joy it would take in roasting them all.
Pistol in a two-handed grip, I hurried down the stairs and located a pair of wall switches. The first lit the room around me, and the second activated a long string of pathway lights fixed to the ceiling beams.
Psychic magnetism. I focused on a mental image of the Nihilim and moved with caution, as quickly as I dared, under the string of lights, each about fifteen feet from the other, my shadow swelling and diminishing, swelling and diminishing.
The basement of the orphanage and school is like the thwarting maze of rooms that, in dreams of stalking Death, makes the sleeper’s heart race toward rupture until he wakes sheathed in sweat, with a scream snared in his throat. At that moment, it seemed to have been constructed and equipped specifically to provide a Nihilim with infinite places of concealment. The path lights brightened only the center of each room, leaving shadows to crawl the farther reaches.
As I approached a doorway, a second moment of clairvoyance rocked me to a halt: a summer day, a patio splashed with sunshine, a wheelchair. I was in the chair, a paraplegic, my head tipped back as I watched birds wheeling across the sky. My left hand had been amputated, my right eye removed and sewn shut. My face was horribly disfigured.
Sometimes such visions are of what might happen, not of what will inevitably happen. So said Panthea. On the other hand, maybe both of these foreseeings would be fulfilled, the school blown to ruins in a gas blast and me—what was left of me—stitched together to pass my years imagining scenarios in which I hadn’t screwed up.
When the vision passed and I could summon the courage, I went through the doorway low and fast, leading with the Glock. I moved sideways and put my back against the wall to the right of the door and scanned the room ahead. Nothing. Just the sound of water rushing through pipes and relays clicking and small motors purring and the tick-tick-tick of something.
I moved on, as champions of the natural law are expected to do even if they would rather not. Two chambers later, I was so deep in the bowels of the basement that the interior entrance I had used and the exterior entrance that lay ahead were equidistant. Which is when the lights went off.
My preternatural gift might be maturing, but my brain was stuck in late adolescence. In my rush to avert the destruction of Mater Misericordiæ, I had not been sufficiently clear of mind to foresee that my quarry, accustomed to being predator rather than prey, might blind me.
The path-light switch was rooms away. I had no idea where to find the one that would turn on other fluorescents or incandescents in this immediate space.
Disorientation doesn’t take minutes to overcome a person in absolute darkness. It at once disables the gyroscope in your head, so the way before you seems to be the way behind; you soon perceive that the floor, which you know damn well is a concrete slab sunk firmly in the earth, is moving subtly underfoot, yawing like the deck of a ship.
Nihilim. Tentacled and taloned. Seer in the dark. Eater of hearts. It would be coming. Was coming.
I turned in place, the Glock thrust in front of me, cocking my head left and right and left, listening for a footstep, a rustle, an expelled breath. Bubbles of air rattled past in a water pipe. A pump shuddered to life. A valve opened with a thin screech. Still turning in place, I heard an exhalation but then realized that it was one of mine. I held my breath. Maybe I heard something other than the many ambient sounds of that space or maybe psychic magnetism told me now. I stopped turning and squeezed the trigger once, twice, three times.
Something metallic rang against the concrete floor, followed by a softer, heavier sound. I began to breathe again but didn’t move. Listened. Waited.
After a minute or so, the path lights came on overhead. At my feet lay Sister Margaret, as naked as the day she’d been born. The Nihilim do not leave behind a monstrous corpse. They die as Rishon, preserving the secret of the first universe and the fact of their intrusion into this one.
I heard Bridget’s voice in the distance, echoing softly through the maze: “Quinn . . . Quinn . . . Quinn . . .”
Such was my name, given to me by whom I do not know.
| 38 |
That night in the orphanage is now a year in the past, and Phoenix is not the ghost city that we glimpsed in a vision. Earth is not yet a tomb from pole to pole.
On even the most terrible occasions, good people find new strengths in themselves and rise to meet the ugliest of challenges. That is why I have hope that the worst things that we’ve foreseen can be forestalled or might never come to pass.
To Sister Theresa’s way of thinking, she saw a demon in Hilda Detrich’s office, and poor Sister Margaret was possessed by it. We shared with my therapist the origins of the Nihilim as we had been given to understand them, but she preferred her own explanation and taxonomy. Who knows if we might both be right?
Sister Margaret hadn’t been human in spite of the appearance of her corpse, though the authorities would never be convinced of that. Even if some police and prosecutors might credit the idea of demonic possession, no exorcist ever dispossessed an unclean spirit with a handgun.
Consequently, the body had to be rolled in a tarp and conveyed up to the alleyway behind Mater Misericordiæ and loaded into the Mercury Mountaineer. Because the gunshots in the basement had not carried to the floor above, because even the late-studying students were in compliance with early-to-bed rules by eleven o’clock, and because the routines by which they lived comforted them through all awkward moments in the days ahead, the orphanage and school remained a happy place, and in fact happier than it had been in years.
We endured a long night that included a drive out of the city and the preparation of a grave in the desert. The long-promised storm of bugs and bats at last appeared, complicating the operation.
Sister Theresa needed to concoct a story to explain Margaret’s sudden decision to leave that order of Poor Clares. Fortunately, her training as a psychologist served her in that task in a way that her formation as a nun could not have done. I sometimes wonder about the priest who heard her confession and what he made of it.
Sparky Rainking lost some blood from the cut in his brow before applied pressure reduced the flow. Prior to trekking to the desert for the interment of the Nihilim, we employed psychic magnetism to find a doctor who lived above his office, who was willing to close the wound and provide antibiotics for five thousand dollars cash. He was seventy-one, something of an alcoholic, a believer in a variety of conspiracy theories, and claimed to have seen UFOs on eighteen occasions, but he did good work.
The Oasis story broke worldwide, doubling the ratings of the cable networks that thrived on sensationalizing scandals that were already almost too sensational to be believed. Some of the depraved visitors to the Oasis were condemned and destroyed by the media, but others equally evil were vigorously defended against avalanches of evidence. As always in these strange times, justice was thwarted as often as it was dealt out, and some of the worst offenders were able to metamorphose into victims and then into martyrs; I suspect that in a few years, some will be seen as heroes.
Panthea, Bridget, Sparky, Winston, and I continue to be sought by the ISA. We live on the run, figuratively speaking. In fact, it’s more like an amble, sometimes a fast walk, because we grow steadily more gifted. We use many names and alter our appearances in subtle but clever ways.
More useful than disguise, however, is a gift that three of us have developed and that we call identity projection. It’s a trick similar to that of the Nihilim. If I want to be seen as fifty and pudgy and balding, I project that image, and thus I am perceived. Yesterday, Bridget was a witchy hag with a wart on her nose, and Panthea passed for a tattooed biker chick. This power can be also extended to our entourage, which of course consists only of Sparky and our canine companion. Winston can pass for any breed that we think him into being, but we’ve never made him pass for a cat.
I am not the easygoing Quinn Quicksilver who I used to be when I wrote for Arizona! magazine, had a fear of parking garages, and fantasized that my father might be a mob boss, my mother a former supermodel now disfigured and living with a sack over her head. I’m okay with not being him, because I wasn’t in love with anyone then, and I am now. I didn’t have a family then, and I have one now even if it is unconventional.
I didn’t have a purpose then, either, except maybe to become a novelist. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have enjoyed being a novelist. I used to think a novelist could change the world. Maybe some do, but maybe they as often affect it for the worse instead of for the better. They are human, after all.
Right now the world needs saving more than changing. And so we do our best, tracking down Nihilim and eliminating them when we can, a squad of vampire hunters without need of garlic or conventional wooden stakes.
In spite of Bridget and Panthea having foreseen tragedy, we have all thus far survived.
Perhaps the biggest difference between the former me and the new me is anger. It rarely troubled me in the old days. Now it can get its claws deep in me, and I must guard against righteous anger becoming something darker. I understand why the world is shapen as it is, that we should have free will and be more than ants, that we must know evil if we’re also to know good. What leaves me sleepless some nights is the conviction that if there were no Nihilim, evil would flourish no less than it does now. Too many crave power over others, their minds autonomous zones where consideration of truths other than their own beliefs are not granted entry, and though few will ever have the wealth and power of Bodie Emmerich, they will make themselves insane in the pursuit of it. My anger must forever be a shield, not a weapon. Love is the only wooden stake that will change an evil heart; we must sharpen it and keep it ready in the name of those we’ve lost, like Litton Ormond and Annie Piper. Anger and the action it inspires must be reserved for those whose hearts will not relent from the idolatry of power. How strange is the world and all life in it. How strange am I. How much stranger still—mysterious, wonderful—that there is a world at all, or me, or you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Internationally bestselling author Dean Koontz was only a senior in college when he won an Atlantic Monthly fiction competition. He has never stopped writing since. Koontz is the author of seventy-nine New York Times bestsellers, fourteen of which rose to #1, including One Door Away from Heaven, From the Corner of His Eye, Midnight, Cold Fire, The Bad Place, Hideaway, Dragon Tears, Intensity, Sole Survivor, The Husband, Odd Hours, Relentless, What the Night Knows, and 77 Shadow Street. He’s been hailed by Rolling Stone as “America’s most popular suspense novelist,” and his books have been published in thirty-eight languages and have sold over five hundred million copies worldwide. Born and raised in Pennsylvania, he now lives in Southern California with his wife, Gerda, their golden retriever, Elsa, and the enduring spirits of their goldens Trixie and Anna. For more information, visit his website at www.deankoontz.com.
Koontz, Dean, Quicksilver
