Dean Koontz 2-Book Thriller Collection: Innocence, The City

Some such exits terminated in public places, often stations on the line, and were therefore useless to me. This one, however, had once led to the ground floor of the Fifty-seventh Street Armory, which had been torn down nine years earlier during one of the city’s periodic redevelopment frenzies. While the architect’s plans were finalized for the ambitious affordable-housing project that was intended for the site, a temporary stairhead shack had been constructed to receive the emergency stairs from the subway. In hard times, the city had yet to find the funding, and the shack still stood, the door always unlocked from the inside.

I needed to cross one secondary street, follow a short block of alleyway, cross a well-traveled avenue, and navigate a narrow service passage between two grand old houses to arrive behind Gwyneth’s place. Only the midblock dash across the avenue gave me pause, for there were streetlamps and the headlights of oncoming traffic. But masked, hooded, jacketed, and gloved as I was, I elicited nothing more than one angry motorist’s horn.

At the back of her building, lights glowed warmly in apartments on the first and third floors. Ascending the fire escape, I was much relieved to find the draperies fully closed at the second-floor window through which I had watched the Fog be received into the silk-robed man.

At the top landing, the lower sash of the double-hung window had been left open, the bedroom dark beyond. The door on the farther side of the room stood open to the hallway where prismatic light from the cut-crystal ceiling fixture left spear and arrowhead patterns on the wall, with here and there a bright shard of color broken out of the spectrum—blue, indigo, and red.

When I crossed the windowsill and stepped into the room, I knew at once that something must be wrong.

Twenty-seven (#ulink_43282240-5790-534c-b0af-efed1cdb5775)

THREE YEARS WITH FATHER, ELEVEN YEARS OLD, learning every day that the city was a kind of forest through which our kind could move as secretly as foxes through ferny woods …

At two o’clock one morning, with the key that Father had been given by the man who feared him, yet did not hate him—of whom, more later—he let us into the food bank operated by St. Sebastian’s Church. When the facility was closed, its windows were covered by roll-down burglary-proof shutters made of interlocking steel slats, which allowed us to turn on a few lights for easier shopping, with little risk of arousing the suspicion of any police patrol that might pass by.

The building served two functions, food bank and thrift shop, and an interior archway connected the former with the latter. Father had been given permission to clothe himself—and now me—from the secondhand garments in the thrift-shop stock. Before selecting canned and packaged foods, we meant to find new pants and sweaters for me, because I was a fast-growing boy.

The thrift shop offered more than clothing: some used furniture, shelves of well-read books, other shelves of CDs and DVDs, used toys, and costume jewelry. Dishes. Decorative items.

That night I discovered a music box that enchanted me. It was made of wood, intricately painted and lacquered, but what charmed me in particular were four tiny dancers on the top. Three inches tall, beautifully carved and painted, with exquisite details, they included a princess wearing a long gown and tiara, and a prince in formalwear and crown. In spite of its fine craftsmanship, the piece was comical, because the prince and the princess did not embrace each other but instead took two fanciful characters as their dancing partners. The prince had his right arm around a goggle-eyed frog, and with his left hand he held the webbed right hand of that grinning amphibian, as if about to waltz. The pretty princess stood in a similar pose, but she was in the embrace of a creature who had the head, chest, and arms of a man but the legs, hooves, ears, and horns of a goat; he looked especially silly because he wore a cocked wreath of green leaves on his head.

After I wound the box with its key and pushed the switch, the two unlikely couples began to dance to the music, turning around in circles as they also moved along figure-eight tracks. I laughed, but Father watched without even a smile, solemn as he seldom was.

“She dances with the Greek god Pan,” he said, “and the prince with something worse.”

“They’re funny.”

“Not to me.”

“You don’t think they’re funny?”

“That’s not a waltz,” Father said.

“It’s not?”

“They changed it into a waltz.”

“What was it before?”

The dancers went around, around.

Father said, “They changed it to mock it.”

Inside the box, the pegs on the turning cylinder plucked the tuned-steel teeth on the song plate. In spite of being mechanical, the music had at first struck me as sparkling, effervescent. Now it had an undeniably disturbing quality, the steel teeth biting off the notes as if music were a violent and hateful art. As the tempo increased, the royal couple and their partners turned more rapidly, until they seemed not to be dancing anymore but whirling about in a mad frenzy.

Father switched off the music and the four figurines. He plucked out the small steel key that wound the mechanism, and put it in a pocket of his pants.

I said, “Are you taking that? Why?”

“So it can’t be played.”

“But, sir, then it can’t be sold.”

“All the better.”

“But isn’t that like stealing?”

“I’ll give the key to our friend.”

“What friend?”

“The one who lets us come here.”

“Is he our friend?”

“No. But he’s not our enemy.”

“Why will you give him the key?”

“So he can decide about the music box.”

“Decide what?”

“What to do with it.”

“The store needs money. Won’t he decide to sell it?”

“I hope not,” Father said.

“What do you hope he’ll do with the box?”

“Smash it. Come on, let’s find you those pants and sweaters.”

We chose a pair of dark khakis, blue jeans, and a couple of sweaters for me. Father rolled them and stuffed them in a gunnysack that he had brought for that purpose.

In the food bank, following his instructions, after he filled my backpack with light packages of dry pasta and crackers, and after I had filled his with canned goods and blocks of cheese, he said, “You want to know about the music box.”

“I just wonder why smash it.”

“You know those things we both see that others don’t.”

“You mean the Fogs and the Clears.”

“Call them whatever. I told you don’t look at them directly if you feel they’re looking at you.”

“I remember.”

“And I told you it isn’t wise to spend a lot of time thinking about them.”