Light Has Weight, but Darkness Does Not (Nameless: Season Two #4)

by Dean Koontz

Text copyright © 2021 by The Koontz Living Trust

eISBN: 9781542028172

1

Between the small and isolated towns, the highway is little traveled at this hour, and the land clings to its darkness in spite of the moon.

If they can find a service station, an open restaurant, any place with people, Tanner won’t dare try to take them in front of witnesses. However, the streetlamps reveal no traffic on the lanes below; and of the territory beyond, Evie has a disturbing sense of a void.

2

At a stoplight, the most unsettling of his talents manifests. This moment of the night fades around him, replaced by a glimpse of another moment yet to come in a place near his current position: a clairvoyant vision of two people who seem to be running for their lives along a lamplit yet still shadowy street, a chain-link fence to the right of them. The woman is a beauty, and the girl with her even more so. This child of eleven or twelve is radiant, as if Nameless is seeing both her physical self and the condition of her soul.

3

4

Again he feels a presentiment of violence oncoming, but it must instead be just nervous excitement, born of anger and concern that Asteria will slip away from him. Any supernatural warning would need to have a source, and there is no source for it any more than there are such things as selfless love and honor, in which so many ignorant people profess their faith. Sebastian doesn’t even believe in the animal intuition that the brothers and sisters have been persuaded should be their sole guide to life. It’s just a term he uses to manipulate them and assure them that they have the license to do whatever they wish. He loves no one but himself and believes only in things that he is able to see, hear, touch, taste, smell, and use to satisfy his needs. His needs are many and insistent. Meecham and Dockerman regard him, moon-eyed and eerily silent, not like two brothers who are familiar to him, but like strangers taking stock of him. To them, his hesitation might seem to be fear. The Guide of Guides must never appear fearful. Like the others at the Retreat, Meecham and Dockerman don’t realize he crowned himself; they think it was their decision to elevate him and that he would rather not have been chosen. This fiction inoculates him against their envy. If the Guide is a commoner like them, not ruling the others but serving them, no king exists to be overthrown. The risk is that some of them might get the idea that they can replace him with a new Guide of Guides because he lacks e...

5

As he approaches the mall, he not only extracts the Sig Sauer from its holster but also chambers a round.

6

“Come on, love,” Asteria says. “Everything’s all right. Come on. We need to get out of sight.” When she places a hand on her mother’s back to guide her, the woman is shivering as though the temperature on this mild night has plummeted forty degrees.

7

Through this eerie incandescence flickers a rapid montage of images and sounds: a man lying dead on the floor, his features strong and handsome and his blond hair quaffed, reminiscent of some television evangelist, but with a bullet hole in his forehead; the fierce face of the man with the words tattooed on his arm, eyes a bitter green; another man’s face, long and pale, faded-denim eyes, close-cropped hair, beard stubble; the young girl, flushed in the cold light of the lantern, her expression defiant, her lustrous golden hair flying and her head whipping to one side as someone slaps her hard; a woman screaming; a muzzle flaring as a gunshot booms; blood spattering up a white-painted concrete wall.

8

She takes her mother by the arm and hurries her down into the traveling wedge of light that pries open the darkness.

9

Rainer isn’t the most educated of individuals, having taken no classes after high school, but he’s read a lot of history for the pleasure of it, and he’s sure that when so many people take so much pride in their rectitude, there’s a perilous shortage of humility. Humble people know that no one can know everything, so they are less likely to saddle up and ride off a cliff just because the prideful have agreed their virtue requires everyone to believe that horses can fly. Humility is the mortar of civilization.

He is in the middle of his second reading of The Spy in the Ointment when he hears the softly echoing voices of whispering women.

10

His sense is that the violence he’s foreseen will occur in mere minutes. He descends with less caution than he would prefer.

11

Meecham and Dockerman might have kept on sleepwalking if Sebastian hadn’t made the mistake that woke them. The Guide of Guides has first choice of the sisters he wants for his brides. This never bothered Meecham or Dockerman enough to mutter about, but the change in the marriage rules pissed them off. People outside the Retreat, boring line walkers who think they’re better than Meecham, say he has a sickness, but he rejects that diagnosis. As far as he’s concerned, it’s not even a weakness, as some call it. His taste is just more refined than those of the walk-the-line types who don’t know what they’re missing. He likes his women as young as he can get them, and he’s gotten a few, which is why he ended up on the run and in the Retreat, where no one can find him. The youngest he’s had in the Retreat is sixteen, because until Asteria there was none younger, so he just had to settle for what was. He and Brian talk about the past, what they once had and what they did, because they share the same taste. Talking about it isn’t the same as doing it, but it’s something.

What steams them is that they’re told they can now take a bride as young as fourteen, but other than Asteria, there’s no girl in the Retreat younger than sixteen, so the only change that means anything is the one giving the Guide of Guides a twelve-year-old bride.

They agree it’s not right that they should be tempted this way, tormented with no prospect of relief, and they feel more aggrieved by the day, until it’s only a matter of time until something in them snaps.

They haven’t pulled their guns. Neither has Sebastian, though he has his pepper spray in hand, which is a consideration.

Meecham can smell the women, like a lion smells the weak ones in the herd. They’re close. As soon as the girls are cornered, the thing to do is kill Sebastian before he suspects it will happen. There’s no one in the world above who can hear the shot. Shoot him in the head so the girls see it and know who they’re dealing with, so they see there’s no chance for them. Then strip them and break them right here, ride them and break them like breaking wild mustangs, so they have no spirit anymore, so they hate themselves more than they hate the men who broke them. Meecham knows how to get that done in just a few hours, and Dockerman knows, too. Once they’re broken, the ride to New Mexico won’t have any surprises in it; they’ll be too afraid and too ashamed to do anything but suck their thumbs and stare without seeing, like newborn babies whose eyes haven’t focused yet.

12

The door is ajar. He eases through it, hears voices, crosses the vestibule, into the gaslight, behind the three men. He doesn’t hesitate even a second, but shoots the blue-eyed man in the back of the head. The one with slicked-back hair pivots, firing as he turns, hitting nothing, and takes two rounds that remove a portion of his face. A stream of pepper spray arcs past Nameless, an inch from his head. He answers it with three rounds at a distance of one foot, and if the guy really is an evangelist, it won’t be angels carrying his soul away, and he won’t be destined for eternal peace.

13

Nameless sends an urgent encrypted text message to Ace of Diamonds: CHANCE ENCOUNTER. THREE DEAD. THREE RESCUED. CLEANUP NEEDED. UTMOST DISCRETION.

These three have nowhere to go, no lives to which they might want to—or can—return. Using the deep pockets of the organization and the genius of Ace of Diamonds, Nameless can give them a new start, if they will let him.

He is no less alone than they are, and no less unmoored from his past. However, he can’t do for himself what he can do for them. He suspects that the oncoming totalitarian horror that he has recently foreseen, including mass murders on the scale committed by Stalin and Hitler, will require him to remain nameless and to soon undertake a mission that eventually will be the end of him.

Nameless says, “You have it figured out yourself, do you?” “About my mom? Yeah. She wants freedom, but she mistakes other things for it. She’s always had freedom, it’s born in her, in us, we just have to know it and bring ourselves to open it, like the gift it is.” This girl has impressed him. Now she astonishes him. “You’ve grown up fast, Asteria.” “I grew up young, but not so fast. They’ve been twelve long years, Mr. Rochester.”

In light of his recent visions of America in the iron grip of totalitarian mass murderers, Nameless is moved by Rainer’s story to a degree he might not have been a year earlier. Before asking the key question that he needs to pose, he sits in silence for a minute, his eyes closed. Then he looks at the big man. “They need someone. Evie could use a father, someone wise enough for her to respect. Asteria could use a grandfather. Family is the glue that holds the world together, even when it’s not a family of one blood. Do you think you could care about them?” “I already do. The girl has spirit that reminds me of Pearl, my wife. The mother has it but doesn’t know she does.” “It would mean no more hiding out from anything. It would mean being there for them no matter what might lie ahead.” Rainer cocks his head, regarding Nameless with one eye moonlit and one eye not. “You sense it coming, too.” “What do you say, Mr. Rudge?” “I never was a father, so never a grandfather, either. I think I could be a halfway good one, you know, in an honorary sense. What do you think?” “Asteria and Evie will give you courage every bit as much as those words on your arm.”

As the Cadillac drives away, the girl waves at him from behind her window, and he hears himself say, “Alice.”

An hour later, driving surface streets back to the resort in Scottsdale, he passes a burning church where people run screaming out the front doors, some with their clothes and hair on fire. He pulls to the curb and stops, watching as men in black uniforms cut the fleeing people down with submachine guns. The killers have come in black paneled vans, on the flanks of which the red arms of the triskelions are depicted thick with muscle, hands fisted. When the vision fades, Nameless sits for a while, staring at the church in the quiet night, its facade a promise of peace, its twin spires shining in the light of the solemn moon.