The Eyes of Darkness by Dean Koontz

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 7th, 2022 in Stories

As he sat in the dimly lighted cabin of the fan-jet and watched the clouds racing below, Alexander wondered what his father and his uncles would say if they knew that his service to his country had often required him to issue kill orders. More shocking still to the sensibilities of patrician Easterners like them: on three occasions, in South America, Alexander had been in a position where it had been necessary for him to pull the assassin’s trigger himself. He had enjoyed those murders so immensely, had been so profoundly thrilled by them, that he had, by choice, performed the executioner’s role on half a dozen other assignments. What would the elder Alexanders, the famous statesmen, think if they knew he’d soiled his hands with blood? As for the fact that it was sometimes his job to order other men to kill, he supposed his family would understand. The Alexanders were all idealists when they were discussing the way things ought to be, but they were also hardheaded pragmatists when dealing with the way things actually were. They knew that the worlds of domestic military security and international espionage were not children’s playgrounds. George liked to believe that they might even find it in their hearts to forgive him for having pulled the trigger himself.

After all, he had never killed an ordinary citizen or a person of real worth. His targets had always been spies, traitors; more than a few of them had been cold-blooded killers themselves. Scum. He had only killed scum. It wasn’t a pretty job, but it also wasn’t without a measure of real dignity and heroism. At least that was the way George saw it; he thought of himself as heroic. Yes, he was sure that his father and uncles would give him their blessings—if only he were permitted to tell them.

The jet hit an especially bad patch of turbulence. It yawed, bounced, shuddered. Kurt Hensen snorted in his sleep but didn’t wake.

When the plane settled down once more, Alexander looked out the window at the milky- white, moonlit, feminine roundness of the clouds below, and he thought of the Evans woman. She was quite lovely. Her file folder was on the seat beside him. He picked it up, opened it, and stared at her photograph. Quite lovely indeed. He decided he would kill her himself when the time came, and that thought gave him an instant erection.

He enjoyed killing. He didn’t try to pretend otherwise with himself, no matter what face he had to present to the world. All of his life, for reasons he had never been able to fully ascertain, he had been fascinated by death, intrigued by the form and nature and possibilities of it, enthralled by the study and theory of its meaning. He considered himself a messenger of death, a divinely appointed headsman. Murder was, in many ways, more thrilling to him than sex. His taste for violence would not have been tolerated for long in the old FBI—perhaps not even in the new, thoroughly politicized FBI—or in many other congressionally monitored police agencies. But in this unknown organization, in this secret and incomparably cozy place, he thrived.

He closed his eyes and thought about Christina Evans.

IN TINA’S DREAM, DANNY WAS AT THE PAR END OF A long tunnel. He was in chains, sitting in the center of a small, well-lighted cavern, but the passageway that led to him was shadowy and reeked of danger. Danny called to her again and again, begging her to save him before the roof of his underground prison caved in and buried him alive. She started down the tunnel toward him, determined to get him out of there—and something reached for her from a narrow cleft in the wall. She was peripherally aware of a soft, fire like glow from beyond the cleft, and of a mysterious figure silhouetted against that reddish backdrop. She turned, and she was looking into the grinning face of Death, as if he were peering out at her from the bowels of Hell. The crimson eyes. The shriveled flesh. The lacework of maggots on his cheek. She cried out, but then she saw that Death could not quite reach her. The hole in the wall was not wide enough for him to step through, into her passageway; he could only thrust one arm at her, and his long, bony fingers were an inch or two short of her. Danny began calling again, and she continued down the dusky tunnel toward him. A dozen times she passed chinks in the wall, and Death glared out at her from every one of those apertures, screamed and cursed and raged at her, but none of the holes was large enough to allow him through. She reached Danny, and when she touched him, the chains fell magically away from his arms and legs. She said, “I was scared.” And Danny said, “I made the holes in the walls smaller. I made sure he couldn’t reach you, couldn’t hurt you.”

At eight-thirty Friday morning Tina came awake, smiling and excited. She shook Elliot until she woke him.

Blinking sleepily, he sat up. “What’s wrong?” “Danny just sent me another dream.”

Taking in her broad smile, he said, “Obviously, it wasn’t the nightmare.”

“Not at all. Danny wants us to come to him. He wants us just to walk into the place where they’re keeping him and take him out.”

“We’d be killed before we could reach him. We can’t just charge in like the cavalry. We’ve got to use the media and the courts to free him.”

“I don’t think so.”

‘The two of us can’t fight the entire organization that’s behind Kennebeck plus the staff of some secret military research center.”

“Danny’s going to make it safe for us,” she said confidently. “He’s going to use this power of his to help us get in there.”

“That isn’t possible.” “You said you believed.”

“I do,” Elliot said, yawning and stretching elaborately. “I do believe. But . . . how can he help us? How can he guarantee our safety?”

“I don’t know. But that’s what he was telling me in the dream. I’m sure of it.”

She recounted the dream in detail, and Elliot admitted that her interpretation wasn’t strained.

“But even if Danny could somehow get us in,” he said, “we don’t know where they’re keeping him. This secret installation could be anywhere. And maybe it doesn’t even exist. And if it does exist, they might not be holding him there anyway.”