When he walked into the blinding brightness of the sea of time, he might have thought that he was drowned by it, dissolved to atoms and his atoms scattered into eternity—except one thing remained to assure him that he lived: the mental image of Portia, vivid and vibrant and beautiful.
In the whiteness, a door. Beyond the door, his grandmother’s kitchen, where she still lay dead.
Agnes had gone.
Joe hurried to the hallway and saw himself running toward the front door. He waited a moment before following.
Lightning revealed the Wagnerian heavens in dark tumult, the perfect stage sky for a performance of Götterdämmerung, here at the end of all things. Sabers of lightning eviscerated the thunderheads, and rain chased down the night in torrents.
Joe pursued himself at a distance, for he knew that the first Joe, the self ahead of him, would not look—had not looked—back.
The five blocks to the Montclair house seemed to pass beneath his feet in seconds, though he knew the journey was one of minutes. Just short of his destination, he left the sidewalk, crossed the street, and stood in the darkness under a tree.
Over there at the house, where a bright future might yet await Joe Mandel, that ordinary young man raced up the steps just as the front door of the Montclair house opened. She appeared, the pistol in one hand. He halted, almost recoiled, surprised by her weapon. But Portia came into his arms, and he embraced her. They held each other in silence for a moment, and then their excited voices carried into the stormy night…
… carried across the rain-swept street to the Joe who stood in the darkness under the tree. He waited until they went inside and closed the door, the terror of the night and all the killing behind them, a cover story in need of invention, a discussion between the chief and Agnes Jordan certainly necessary. But now, the future had angled sharply away from despair to hope. Evil, which endured all of time, was for this precious moment held at bay.
Joe set out into the rain, heading downtown toward the quaint shops and the sparkling cafés, and then past them to a semiquaint district where the bus station stood. A counter clerk sold him a ticket to a town five hundred miles away.
He didn’t have much money, only what was in his wallet. He did not know what he would do, where he would go after this night. But he knew it would be somewhere special, for every place on the earth was special in its way. And he knew that whatever life he led would not be ordinary.
His beloved grandmother, whom he would never see again in this life, said that you knew you were getting a little wisdom when you were able to see that even loss could be beautiful if it made you love more the things that hadn’t been lost. Portia had been lost to him, but not to death, and the lesser loss was one that he could survive.
Perhaps she would marry that other Joe, the version of himself that never knew his girl had been shot dead and resurrected. Maybe they would have children, a long and happy life.
He found some welcome solace in knowing that the other Joe would have her to hold and cherish. In this world of suffering, there was no perfect consolation, and this one was especially melancholy. In this momentous night, however, he knew far more sadness than grief, and while deep sadness bruises the heart, it doesn’t leave the enduring scars of profound grief.
In the long bus ride away from Little City, he stared out the window at the rainy dark. Sometimes the lights of habitation were many, sometimes they were few and far between in the distance, but he cherished all of them and wondered what lives they illuminated.
An excerpt from The Silent Corner by Dean Koontz
1
Jane Hawk woke in the cool dark and for a moment could not remember where she had gone to sleep, only that as always she was in a queen- or king-size bed and that her pistol lay under the pillow on which the head of a companion would have rested had she not been traveling alone. Diesel growl and friction drone of eighteen tires on asphalt reminded her that she was in a motel, near the interstate, and it was… Monday.
With a soft-green numerical glow, the bedside clock reported the bad but not uncommon news that it was 4:15 in the morning, too early for her to have gotten eight hours of sack time, too late to imagine that she might fall back to sleep.
She lay for a while, thinking about what had been lost. She had promised herself to stop dwelling on the bitter past. She spent less time on it now than before, which would have counted as progress if recently she hadn’t turned to thoughts of what was yet to be lost.
She took a change of clothes and the pistol into the bathroom. She shut the door and braced it with a straight-backed chair that she had moved from the bedroom upon checking in the previous night.
Such was the maid service that in the corner above the sink, the radials and spirals of a spider’s architecture extended across an area larger than her hand. When she had gone to bed at eleven o’clock, the only provision hanging in the web had been a struggling moth. During the night, the moth had become but the husk of a moth, the hollow body translucent, the wings shorn of their velvet dust, brittle and fractured. The plump spider now watched over a pair of captured silverfish, leaner fare, though another morsel would soon find its way into the gossamer abattoir.
Outside, the light from a security lamp gilded the frosted glass in the small crank-out bathroom window, which was not large enough to allow even a child to gain entrance. Its dimensions would also preclude her from escaping through it in a crisis.
Jane put the pistol on the closed lid of the toilet and left the vinyl curtain open while she took a shower. The water was hotter than she expected from a two-star operation, melting accumulated soreness out of muscle and bone, but she didn’t linger in the spray as long as she would have liked.
2
Her shoulder rig featured a holster with swivel connectors, a spare-magazine carrier, and a suede harness. The weapon hung just behind her left arm, a deep position that allowed unparalleled concealment beneath her specially tailored sport coats.
In addition to the spare magazine clipped to the rig, she kept two others in the pockets of the jacket, a total of forty rounds, counting those in the pistol.
The day might come when forty was not enough. She had no backup anymore, no team in a van around the corner if everything went to shit. Those days were over for the time being, if not forever. She couldn’t arm herself for infinite combat. In any situation, if forty rounds proved not enough, neither would eighty or eight hundred. She did not delude herself regarding her skills or endurance.
She carried her two suitcases out to the Ford Escape, raised the tailgate, loaded the bags, and locked the vehicle.
The sun that had not yet risen must have been producing a solar flare or two. The bright silver moon declining in the west reflected so much light that the shadows of its craters had blurred away. It looked not like a solid object but instead like a hole in the night sky, pure and dangerous light shining through from another universe.
In the motel office, she returned the room key. Behind the front desk, a guy with a shaved head and a chin beard asked if everything had been to her satisfaction, almost as if he genuinely cared. She nearly said, With all the bugs, I imagine a lot of your guests are entomologists. But she didn’t want to leave him with a more memorable image of her than the one he got from picturing her naked. She said, “Yeah, fine,” and walked out of there.