The Key to Midnight by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online

paranoia: He really was too curious.
    Nevertheless, she wanted to talk to him and be with him. There was good chemistry between them. He was a medicine for loneliness.
    “No,” she said. “Forget it, Alex. Even if I’ve got folks out there someplace, they’re strangers. I mean nothing to them. That’s why it’s important to me to get a solid grip on the history of Kyoto and Japan. This is my hometown now. It’s my past and present and future. They’ve accepted me here.”
    “Which is rather odd, isn’t it? The Japanese are pretty insular. They rarely accept immigrants who aren’t at least half Japanese.”
    Ignoring his question, she said, “I don’t have roots like other people do. Mine have been dug up and burned. So maybe I can create new roots for myself, grow them right here, and maybe they’ll be as strong and meaningful as the roots that were destroyed. In fact, it’s something I have to do. I don’t have any choice. I need to belong, not just as a successful immigrant but as an integral part of this lovely country. Belonging... being securely and deeply connected to it all, like a fiber in the cloth... that’s what counts. I need to lose myself in Japan. A lot of days there’s a terrible emptiness in me. Not all the time. Now and then. But when it comes, it’s almost too much to bear. And I think ... I know that if I melt completely into this society, then I won’t have to suffer that emptiness any longer.”
    She amazed herself, because with Alex Hunter, she was allowing an unusual intimacy. She was telling him things that she had never told anyone before.
    He spoke so quietly that she could barely hear. “ ‘Emptiness.’ That’s another odd word choice.”
    “I guess it is.”
    “What do you mean by it?”
    Joanna groped for words that could convey the hollow-ness, the cold feeling of being different from all other people, the cancerous alienation that sometimes crept over her, usually when she least expected it. Periodically she fell victim to a brutal, disabling loneliness that bordered on despair. Bleak, unremitting loneliness, yet more than that, worse than that. Aloneness. That was a better term for it. Without apparent reason, she sometimes felt certain that she was separate, hideously unique. Aloneness. The depression that accompanied one of these inexplicable moods was a black pit out of which she could claw only with fierce determination.
    Haltingly she said, “The emptiness is like ... well, it’s like I’m nobody.”
    “You mean... you’re bothered that you have no one.”
    “No. That’s not it. I feel that I am no one.”
    “I still don’t understand.”
    “It’s as if I’m not Joanna Rand... not anybody at all ... just a shell... a cipher... hollow... not the same as other people ... not even human. And when I’m like that, I wonder why I’m alive... what purpose I have. My connections seem so tenuous....”
    He was silent for a while, but she was aware that he was staring at her while she gazed blindly at the mural. At last he said, “How can you live with this attitude, this emptiness, and still be ... the way you are?”
    “The way I am?”
    “Generally so outgoing, cheerful.”
    “Oh,” Joanna said quickly, “I don’t feel alienated all the time. The mood comes over me only now and then, and never for longer than a day or two. I fight it off.”
    He touched her cheek with his fingertips.
    Abruptly Joanna was aware of how intently he was staring, and she saw a trace of pity mixed with the compassion in his eyes. The reality of Nijo Castle and the actuality of the limited relationship that they shared now flooded back to her, and she was surprised—even shocked—by how much she had said and by how far she had opened herself to him. Why had she cast aside the armor of her privacy in front of this man rather than at the feet of someone before him? Why was she willing to reveal herself to Alex Hunter in a way and to a degree that she had never allowed