The House at the End of the World

by Dean Koontz

she has sought—irrationally, she now realizes—to understand evil, even to concretize it in a visual metaphor within a painting that says to the mind and heart, This is why. Now she arrives at the realization that the why of evil is not to be found anywhere in the flaws of society or its institutions, nor can it be pinned down by even the most erudite and loquacious philosopher. The why of evil is in the human soul, which can’t be examined with a CT scan or MRI to locate a dark mass, or dissected in an autopsy to learn in what artery the calcification proved mortal. Evil is a mystery for theologians, of which she is not one. Evil is irrational. There is no why formed so complete that it will satisfy her. Rather than spend her life in a fruitless effort to understand evil and those who commit it, she can do no more—and no less—than resist it.