The Other Emily

by Dean Koontz

“I’m a writer. Bullshit is my business.”

As she stood waiting for the car, bathed in the golden glow of the portico, she seemed to be not the subject of the light but the source of it, radiant.

Life is so fragile and uncertain that every daybreak is a miracle, almost a triumph. That first blush in the sky is all the hope of the world distilled into light. I watch the dark fade, and say to myself, “Okay, I’m still here,” and the more sunrises I see, the more I feel as if I’ll live to see another twenty thousand.

Writing fiction, he maintained control, had the final decision on what events would occur and what their meaning would be, as in life he nearly never did.

They said no one ever saw his own death in a dream, that the subconscious fiercely denied mortality and would not countenance it even in the worst of nightmares.

“Thinking with your heart,” Isaac continued, “you can be ruined forever.

And if you’re listening to your heart again, quickly drink yourself unconscious.”

Life is full of mysteries, isn’t it? And maybe we don’t always need to know the answers to them. Each thing we don’t understand is a wall, and we spend our lives throwing ourselves against those walls, with little to show for it in the end. Maybe sometimes it’s just best to accept the limitations of our understanding, accept that some things will be forever beyond our knowledge.”

Let’s never say ‘tomorrow,’ because all we ever have is the moment. People think there’s a future, but there really isn’t, not if we want to be totally honest with ourselves. There’s the past, which we might wish desperately that we can change, and there’s now. If we don’t seize the now with all our might, it becomes just another part of the past that we end up wishing we could change.”

he had the weary look of a man who’d seen more death than he had bargained for when the romance of the healer’s profession had long ago lured him into medical school.

No fiery-eyed hounds with serpent fangs guard the entrance, because everyone who wishes to descend may do so unimpeded; such is the all-welcoming nature of Hell.

The maze of Ronny Jessup’s dark erotic dreams of absolute power was also the labyrinth of David Thorne’s nightmares. In this cochlea of eerie silence, the narrow serpentine passageways, with their low ceilings and walls patterned by creeping mold, testified to the seed of evil in the human heart—dormant in some, flourishing in others.

This was both reality and myth, concrete and symbol, the maze of homicidal desires and lust and hunger for power that spiraled to infinity within the deepest darkness of the human heart, male and female alike, here given dimension and immediacy.

If they didn’t have satisfying endings, what was the purpose of stories?