Innocence - Dean Koontz

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me that I should be so light of spirit only minutes after cowering in fear.

      Of course, it was the girl. Her gracefulness, her fleetness, her balletic sprint, and the sheer mystery of her presence in the library inspired in me the pleasant expectation that I might be witness to—if not a party to—an exciting adventure.

      Although my life was by any standard unconventional, it wasn’t full of sparkling encounters and dazzling exploits. I hid by day, reading, listening to music through the earphones of my CD player, thinking, wondering, and from time to time sleeping. By night I skulked through the city, seeking the essentials for survival, as well as a few moments of beauty in places like this, where great culture and fine art came together in sublime architecture. But considering the all-consuming hatred and fury that I inspired on sight, if I sought to participate in an adventure, I would be as unwise as a hemophiliac juggling hatchets.

      Books had shown me, however, that all people everywhere wanted their lives to have purpose and meaning. This longing was universal. Even I, in my terrible difference, wanted nothing less than purpose and meaning.

      Intuition told me that this girl might be different from other people in her attitude toward me, that she might be at least as tolerant as my mother had been, that she might be a touchstone by which I could test my value as a person without suffering torture and a violent death. I suspected that she might need help and that I, in spite of my limitations, might be of service to her.

      I expected no relationship, only a memorable encounter in which I might contribute something that would make a vital difference in her life. Father often said that we are here to learn and give. But how could one give while in hiding, six years alone?

      A few minutes after the lights went out, a recorded voice issued from speakers throughout the building: “Perimeter is armed.”

      The angry man must be leaving by the rear entrance, which opened onto an alleyway. An alarm keypad was positioned by that door.

      In a building as elaborate as this one, motion detectors tended to report too many false alarms, and therefore they weren’t employed. Because of the paper-preserving climate-control system, the windows were fixed, and their bronze stiles and muntins would not be easily penetrated by thieves. Besides, the current criminal class was even dumber than those in centuries gone by, unaware that books had value. And the vandals who might once have enjoyed hiding in here to deface and destroy after hours were, these days, able to get away with such bold in-the-open mayhem that tearing books apart or even urinating in them was boring compared to the assaults on civilization that could be made elsewhere, anywhere. By comparison, the doors were easily alarmed, the perimeter secured; and within the walls, I was free to roam.

      I switched on my flashlight and left the librarian station by its gate.

      During the eighteen years that I’d been visiting, the grandeur of this building, for hours at a time, had been mine alone, as if I were the king of books and this my palace. In spite of my familiarity with its every nook, I never tired of the place, but now it offered something new. Why was she here? Why hadn’t she fled when she had the chance? Who was her enraged pursuer? I hadn’t found the library so exciting since the first few times that I had come here with Father.

      I hurried across the enormous reading room, toward the door through which the girl had gone. I knew a few hiding places that she might have found, sanctums that even the longest-tenured employees of the library might never have discovered.

      If she didn’t prove to be as tolerant as my mother, she was at least much smaller than I was and unlikely to be able to harm me before I could flee from her. The memory of her running with great poise, all but gliding through the stacks, still enchanted me, but I reminded myself that people who seemed to be no threat at all had sometimes been those who almost cut me down. Even a rapidly dying man, with nothing left to lose, had been overcome with such loathing that, when I knelt to help him, he used his last breath to curse me.

       Nine

      EIGHT YEARS OF AGE, A BOY BUT ALSO SOMETHING far different from other boys, I looked for a place where I might belong.

      For five days following my banishment from the little house on the mountain, I traveled overland, mostly by the first two hours of light after dawn and the last hour before nightfall, when those who might venture into woods and meadows for a pleasant hike or a bit of off-season hunting were less likely to be afoot. I slept by night and remained hidden but watchful during the larger part of the day.

      Because I soon left the forest that was familiar to me and passed into one I had never seen before, I tried to stay as near to one road or another as possible without moving too often in the open. There were more trees in that part of the world than anything, trees I could name and many kinds that I couldn’t, so that I was able more or less to remain within sight of blacktop while trees screened me from those who traveled on it.

      I set out that morning before the sun crested the horizon, but already the feathery clouds in the east blazed more pink than blue, the very pink of flamingos that I had once seen in a nature book.

      In addition to whiskey, pills, and the white powder that she sniffed, about the only thing my mother liked was nature, and she had maybe a hundred picture books about birds and deer and other animals. She said that people weren’t worth spit, none of them. She said that my true father was a shiftless piece of trash, like all the rest of them, and she wasn’t ever going to lie with another man or a woman, either, since they were all selfish perverts when you really got to know them. But she loved animals. Even though she loved them, she wouldn’t have a cat or dog or anything in the house, because she said she didn’t want to own any living thing or to be owned by it.

      The flamingo-pink turned darker, almost orange, and I knew that the fiery colors would quickly burn away, as they always did, and the clouds that were so flamboyantly painted now would soon be as colorless as one kind of ashes or another, and the sky behind them all blue. While the orange was still up there, before the sun showed itself directly and slanted as sharp as glass into the woods, the morning shadows were so black among the trees that I could almost feel them sliding over me, as cool as silk.

      In the high orange light of dawn, the car came along that lonely road, which was four or five feet above the woods. A gentle slope of wild grass led down from the blacktop to where I hid. Confident that I could not be seen among the trees and their silken shadows, I did not drop flat to the ground or crouch, not even when the car stopped and the men got out of it. I knew somehow that they were engaged in a piece of business that had their full attention; for them, the whole world had shrunk down to what they had come here to finish.

      Three of the men were joking with the fourth. I could hear the laughter in their voices though not the words, but the guy that two of them were holding up didn’t seem to be in a mood to be amused. At first he looked weak and sick, maybe drunk, but then I realized he’d been badly beaten. Even from a distance of fifteen feet, his face looked all wrong, distorted. His pale-blue shirt was streaked with blood.

      While two men held the one, the fourth man punched him in the stomach. I thought it was a punch, but when he punched the guy again, I saw the knife in his hand. They dropped the stabbed and beaten man off the side of the road, and he slid on his back, headfirst, to the bottom of the little grassy slope, where he lay very still.

      The three by the car laughed at the way the dead man slid down through the dew-wet grass, and one of them unzipped his pants as if he might pee on the corpse, though maybe that was only another joke. Just then the one who had done the stabbing hurried around to the driver’s door, shouting, “Let’s go, you douche bags, let’s go!”

      The car flashed away, the engine noise quickly swallowed by the yawning forest, and the sun came up in the deepest quiet that I had ever heard. I watched the dead man for a while and waited for the car to return, but by the time the colorful clouds had faded to an ashy white, I knew the killers weren’t coming back.

      When I went to the body, I discovered life in it. The

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