Innocence. Dean Koontz

smelled by it, just a thin width of cherrywood away, could not have been more quiet than this girl.

       Eleven

      IN THE MAIN STACKS, EACH AISLE HAD ITS OWN light switch, and I clicked on only the one. The high-mounted sconces with their brushed-steel brass-trimmed shades funneled light down to glimmering pools on the caramel-marble floor.

      Having removed the bulb from one sconce, I stood as near to Dickens as I dared, his books in light and I in shadows. If the girl should come, I would not by either intent or accident expose my face to her. Under my hood, reflected light might shimmer in my eyes, but she wouldn’t be able to see the color or the details, or whatever quality of them made people want to slash and burn me.

      If she came and for a while we conversed like equals, and if then a sudden intuitive understanding of my nature caused her to turn and flee, I wouldn’t pursue her but would instead run away from her. In time, therefore, after her terror passed, she might realize that I not only meant her no harm but also respected—and did not resent—her antipathy.

      To be my friend, maybe you must be like me, one of the hidden. It might not be possible for anyone who lives in the open to tolerate a thing like me. But always I had remained hopeful that, among the millions on this Earth, there might be a few who could summon the courage to know me for what I am and have the self-confidence to still walk part of this life with me. The girl, mysterious in her own right, was the first in a long time who seemed as if she might have that capacity.

      Just when I thought she would not come, she appeared at the farther end of the aisle, moving into the light from the last sconce. Standing there in her silvery shoes and black jeans and black sweater and black leather jacket, with her feet wide apart and her hands on her hips, she looked as if she had stepped out of one of those comic books that I don’t like very much. I mean those comics in which everyone, good guys and bad guys alike, is very self-assured and tough and determined and proud of himself. They stand with their chests out and their shoulders back and their heads lifted, looking heroic and confident, and their hair is always blowing even in scenes where there is no wind, because they look better with their hair blowing. In the library, of course, there was no wind, and the girl’s hair wasn’t blowing, but it was long and black and shaggy, so that it kind of looked as if it must be blowing even when it wasn’t.

      I don’t much like the superheroes and supervillains in many of those comic books because, maybe except for Batman, the way they pose dramatically all the time really does reflect how they think of themselves. Very self-righteous, whether saving the world or blowing it up. So in the thrall of power fantasies. This girl looked like she stepped out of a comic book, but somehow I could tell that the way she posed wasn’t a reflection of how she really thought of herself.

      Or maybe I was deluded. The fallow soil of loneliness is fertile ground for self-deception.

      After regarding me from a distance, she took her hands from her hips and approached neither warily nor boldly, but with the same effortless grace that she had shown earlier.

      As she stepped into the lamplight that fell across the books by Dickens, I said, “Please stop there.” She did. We were no more than twelve feet apart, but my hoodie and the fact that I had disabled the nearest sconce spared her from the shock of my appearance.

      As for her appearance, I hadn’t realized when I glimpsed her in flight that she accessorized and painted herself so grotesquely. In her pierced right nostril, she wore a silver nose ring fashioned as a snake devouring its tail. Pinned to her lower lip, bright against the black lipstick, a polished red bead looked like a drop of blood. Her flawless skin was as pale as powdered sugar, and she emphasized that pallor by applying mascara and creme-stick makeup as thick as greasepaint. With her jet-black and curiously chopped hair, the look was Goth, I suppose, but a personalized version of the standard Goth-girl style. For one thing, the creme formed carefully drawn diamonds, the upper points at midbrow, the lower points two inches down her cheeks, which reminded me of certain harlequins but also recalled to mind a most disturbing tuxedoed marionette that I had once seen in the lighted window of an antique-toy store.

      At the center of those black diamonds were eyes identical to those of the marionette. Whites as white and veinless as hard-boiled eggs, anthracite-dark irises with deep-red striations so subtle that they were visible only when the angle of her head allowed the light to find them. Because my life seldom brought me face-to-face with other people, because I was familiar with the variety of human faces and the color range of eyes only from books of photography, I could not say for certain that such eyes were uncommon, but they were so disconcerting that I imagined they must be rare.

      “So you want to help me,” she said.

      “Yes. Whatever I can do to help you.”

      “No one can help me,” she declared with no slightest indication of bitterness or despair. “Only one person could ever help me, and he’s dead. You will die, too, if you associate with me, and you’ll die cruelly.”

       Twelve

      I STOOD IN THE SHADOWS SHORT OF DICKENS, she in the lamplight, and I saw that her fingernails were painted black and that tattooed on the backs of her hands were curled blue lizards with forked red tongues.

      “That wasn’t a threat, when I said you’ll have a cruel death,” she clarified. “It’s just the truth. You don’t want to be around me.”

      “Who was the one person who could help you?” I asked.

      “It doesn’t matter. That’s another place, another time. I can’t bring it back by talking about it. The past is dead.”

      “If it were dead, it wouldn’t smell so sweet.”

      “It isn’t sweet to me,” she said.

      “I think it is. When you said ‘another place, another time,’ the words softened you.”

      “Imagine whatever you want. There’s nothing soft here. I’m all bone and carapace and quills.”

      I smiled, but of course she couldn’t see my face. Sometimes it is my smile that most terrifies them. “What’s your name?”

      “You don’t need to know.”

      “No, I don’t. I’d just like to know.”

      The thread-thin red striations brightened in her black-black eyes. “What’s your name again, lost boy?”

      “Addison, like I said.”

      “Addison what?”

      “My mother’s last name was Goodheart.”

      “Did she have one?”

      “She was a thief and maybe worse. She wanted to be kind, kinder than she knew how to be. But I loved her.”

      “What was your father’s name?”

      “She never told me.”

      “My mother died in childbirth,” she said, and I thought that in a sense my mother had died from childbirth, eight years after the fact, but I said nothing.

      The girl looked toward the rococo ceiling, where the chandeliers hung dark, gazed up as if the rich moldings around the deep coffers and the sky scene of golden clouds within each coffer were visible to her by some spectrum of light invisible.

      When she looked toward me again, she said, “What are you doing in the library after midnight?”

      “I came to read. And just to be here in the grandness of it.”

      She studied me for a long moment, though I presented hardly more than a silhouette. Then she said, “Gwyneth.”

      “What’s