Innocence: A Novel by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page B

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.”

12
    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 your last name, Gwyneth?”
    “I don’t use one.”
    “But you have one.”
    As I waited for her reply, I decided that all the Goth was more than fashion, that it might not be fashion at all, that it might be armor.
    When at last she spoke, she didn’t give me her surname, but instead said, “You saw me running from him, but I never saw you.”
    “I’m unusually discreet.”
    She looked at the set of Dickens novels on the shelves to her right. She slid her fingers along the leather bindings, the titles glowing in lamplight. “Are these valuable?”
    “Not really. They’re a matched set, published in the 1970s.”
    “They’re wonderfully made.”
    “The leather’s been hand-tooled. The