The Bad Weather Friend

by Dean Koontz

his stare was as discomfiting as the muzzles of two pistols.

“Sexual ecstasy before the age of twenty-one, especially with other than a female, will flood your brain with dire chemicals that, over time, will lower your IQ to that of a monkey, a very sad monkey. Sexual ecstasy must be delayed until the brain is fully formed. For one as young as you, sexual ecstasy is far more damaging than injecting heroin and eating dung, though you should never do those things, either.”

In a frenzied stealth, they made their way back to Felthammer House, where nightmares coiled under their pillows, waiting for them to fall asleep if they could.

“We live each day,” Mengistu said, “fearing that a change will start in us simultaneously and, being in the same condition, neither of us will notice the change in the other.

“Speaking of it,” Mengistu said, “only causes pain, and pain leads to sadness, and sadness leads to depression, until depression cannot be sustained, whereupon it becomes anger, whereafter anger escalates into rage, and one begins to consider murdering one’s parents, which is neither moral nor rational, or for that matter easily accomplished without serious risk of incarceration. In time, you will no doubt arrive at the same answer that we did, Benjamin, and it will soon enough become a scar on your heart.”

Theron glared up at Spike from the sodden and reeking armchair of mortification.

However, the people and events of his life had shaped him into a boy who was immediately receptive to the idea of a severed-head intergalactic radio receiver.

All was for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

And so it seems that, as a reader collaborates with an author to envision the story being told in a novel, so all of us collaborate with some author unknown to imagine what occurs in our world as it is and as it will become. In that case, to at least some extent, to a degree we cannot know, we possess the power to weave the lives that will bring us happiness if we’re wise enough to be nice, but not so nice that we’re foolish, and if we realize that our free will and creativity should be used with humility rather than to acquire power to oppress others.