Innocence - Dean Koontz

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routinely motorized or otherwise tricked up to keep the browser intrigued. But because, of all things in the window, only the marionette moved, and because the sight of it had troubled me even before it had become animated, I decided that something lower than a sales technique was at work and that continued study of the toy would be dangerous.

      As I walked away, I heard what seemed to be a rapping on the inside of the window glass, but I assured myself that I either misinterpreted or imagined the sound.

      The cool night seemed to be growing colder. The dirty-yellow moon floated low, slowly sinking down the sky. Out on the river, a boat horn blew three times, so melancholy that it might have been sounded in memoriam of lives lost in those waters.

      I began to look for a place to hide before first light—but moments later I found instead two men who wanted to set a living thing on fire and, denied their original victim, settled on me as an acceptable substitute.

       Seventeen

      ON THE DEEP SILL OF THE BIG CORNER WINDOW in the curator’s office lay a folded newspaper. As I waited for the girl to discover whatever she might be searching for on the computer, I picked up the daily and, by the ambient light of the city, scanned the headlines: plague in China, war in the Middle East, revolution in South America, corruption in the highest levels of the U.S. government. I had no use for such news and put the paper down.

      Having taken what she wanted from the computer, Gwyneth pocketed the memory stick and switched off the machine. She remained in the murderer’s chair, evidently brooding about something with such intensity that I was reluctant to interrupt her train of thought.

      At the corner window, I gazed down at the cross street that bisected the avenue on which the library fronted. I could see for several blocks.

      Emergency beacons flashing but without siren, a police sedan glided past on the avenue and arced left onto the cross street. No engine noise or squeal of tires rose to me, as if the panes of leaded glass were a window on a silent dream. When I had come to the city eighteen years earlier, it had been a brighter place. But in these days of electricity shortages and high energy prices, the buildings weren’t as brightly lighted as they once had been. As the car receded along the shadowy canyon of high-rises, the murky quality of the night conjured the illusion of an undersea metropolis in which the sedan was a blinking bathysphere descending an oceanic trench toward some deep enigma.

      Although the illusion lasted only a moment, it disturbed me to such an extent that a shiver of dread became a shudder, and my palms were suddenly damp enough that I needed to blot them on my jeans. I don’t see the future. I don’t have the ability to recognize an omen, let alone to interpret one. But that specter of a cold, drowned city resonated with me so profoundly that I could not lightly dismiss it as meaningless, yet I didn’t want to dwell on it.

      Assuring myself that what had really spooked me was the police sedan, I turned from the window and spoke into the darkness where the girl sat. “We better get out of here. If you’ve stolen something—”

      “I’ve stolen nothing. Just copied evidence.”

      “Of what?”

      “Of the case I’m building against the murdering thief.”

      “You’ve been in here before, at his computer.”

      “Several times, though he doesn’t know it.”

      “But he was chasing you.”

      “I came into the library an hour before closing time and hid in the nook behind that painting. Fell asleep and woke after midnight. I was climbing the south stairs with my flash when the door opened above me, the light came on, and there he was, as shocked to see me as I was to see him. First time he’d seen me in five years. He never works so late. Besides, he was supposed to be in Japan another two days on business. I guess he came back early.”

      “Five years. Since you were thirteen.”

      “The night he tried to rape me. The worst night of my life, and not only for that reason.”

      I waited for her to explain that curious comment, but when she didn’t, I said, “He’s above you on the stairs, you run, and you fake him out so he thinks you left the library.”

      “Not that easy. He chases me down the stairs. He’s fast. In the hallway, he catches me by the arm, swings me around, throws me to the floor. He drops to one knee, arm pulled back, going to punch me in the face.”

      “But here you are.”

      “Here I am because I have a Taser.”

      “You Tasered him.”

      “A Taser doesn’t drop a guy as hard if he’s really furious, if he’s hot with rage and flooded with adrenaline, totally wild. I should have given him another jolt or two after he went down and I got up, but all I wanted was to get away from him, so I ran.”

      “If he recovered that quick, he must really hate you.”

      “He’s had five years for the hate to distill. It’s pure now. Pure and potent.”

      She got up from the chair, a dark shape in a darker room.

      Stepping away from the window, I said, “Why does he hate you?”

      “It’s a long story. We better hide until they open in the morning. He’s not as smart as you might think a big-time curator would be. But if it dawns on him that maybe I’ve been here before at night and that maybe I didn’t leave the way it looked like I did, he’ll be back soon.”

      In the first soft flare of her flashlight, the girl’s painted face appeared both beautiful and eerie, as if she were a character in an edgy graphic novel in the manga style.

      I followed her into the reception lounge, marveling at the ease of our regard for each other, wondering if it might strengthen into friendship. However, if my own mother eventually became unable to endure the sight of me, an amicable relationship between Gwyneth and me was unlikely to last any longer than the moment when, by an accident of light, she glimpsed my face. But I would have liked a friend. I would have loved one.

      I said, “We don’t have to hide here in the library through the night.”

      “He set the alarm, and if we trigger it, he’ll know I was still here when he left. I don’t want him to know that yet.”

      “But I have a way out that isn’t wired into the system.”

      Phantoms of the library, we descended to the basement, and as we went, I succinctly explained how I traveled through the city unseen and unsuspected.

      In that lowest level of the building, at the hinged cap to the storm drain, which remained open as I had left it, Gwyneth said, “You never go by streets and alleys?”

      “Sometimes but not often. Only as far as necessary. Don’t worry about storm drains. The idea is a lot scarier than the reality.”

      “I’m not afraid,” she said.

      “I didn’t think you were.”

      She went down the ladder first. I followed, pulling shut the lid and securing it with the gate key.

      The confining dimensions of the tributary drain did not seem to concern her, but nevertheless I explained that it would shortly take us to a much larger tunnel. Shoulders hunched and head lowered, I led her along the gradual downward slope, my mood especially felicitous because I was able to help her. It felt good to be needed, no matter how humble the service I provided.

      The smaller pipe entered the main one at the level of the maintenance walkway, three feet above the floor of the bigger drain. With the flashlight, I showed her the drop-off, the sweep of floor below, the high curve of the ceiling.

      For a moment we stood there, two dark shapes, finger-filtered flashlight aimed

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