The House at the End of the World

by Dean Koontz

She can fulfill the Promise. She has to believe that is true, for it’s all she has.

Patience, steadiness, and hope are healthier than anger; therefore, in spite of evidence to the contrary, she still trusts that the world has been shapen to a purpose and that the purpose is not the triumph of evil.

They aren’t seeking an escaped prisoner, a spy, or a traitor. They are seeking something other than a person.

“You think you’ve hit bottom. Believe me, you still have a long way to fall, a very long way. You can’t even imagine what all could happen to you in a fall as long as that.”

Lupo. Hamal. Parker. They were the three men, three instruments of a demonic fate, who stole from her the life she had and can never hope to regain.

She is not a timid soul. She is certainly not a coward. She has already lost everything, lost more than her life. If Death comes for her, it will be like dying a second time, therefore the less to be feared. But she won’t die easily, not when she has the Promise to keep.

However, experience has taught her that allies in a righteous cause are rare in a world of self-interest. Expect deceit. Distrust is essential to survival.

When the right thing to do feels seven ways wrong, it’s still the right thing, and doing it is what separates the quick from the dead.

Always keep moving, Avi used to say. The Fates are master sharpshooters, and the easy target is the one who’s standing still.

Both intuition and common sense tell her that the hidden truth is deeply strange and that the trouble she thinks she’s in is much less terrifying than the trouble she’s really in.

Leaving a search incomplete is as bad as conducting no search.

Paranoia can be a serious mental illness. It can also be the proper state of mind for prey in a universe of predators.

Having put her into lockdown by disabling her boat and somehow rendering her iPhone useless, her enemy—or enemies—have made it clear that they assume laws are made to be broken, that no rules apply to whatever game is being played here.

Fear is useful when it’s on a leash, Avi once said, but it’s always a bad dog when you let it run free in your mind.

Like a muscle, courage requires constant testing to ensure it will be strong when terror weighs heavily on it.

“Run!” he urges. “For God’s sake go, get away, save yourself. This is the epicenter. Everyone living here will be dead soon. Everyone within a radius of miles. Miles and miles. Until they stop it, if they can stop it, and they won’t, the ignorant fools.”

This is how she’s managed to function through personal catastrophes that should have destroyed her: Focus intently on quotidian needs and trust that maintaining routines will eventually restore meaning to life and quiet fear.

Idle hours are sharp; they open new wounds in the heart and prick the mind with anxiety.

Katie has learned about herself is that she’s more resilient than she ever imagined. Perhaps she can be broken, but it has not happened yet. She can be bent so severely that it doesn’t seem as though she can ever straighten herself out again, but she always does. She gets on with getting on.

When a majority of people in any society share the same array of illusions and cling passionately to them, they will encourage one another until illusion becomes delusion, until delusion becomes mass insanity. Whole societies do go mad. History is filled with chilling examples.

I’m not combining well. It’s been six hours. Nothing is happening like it should. I’m in a condition of rejection.

I should feel many, but I feel less than one.”

It’s good enough to be a prisoner’s last meal on death row. “Fuck that,” she says. “It’s just another dinner.”

As an artist, she can create only when using two brushes, one of emotion and the other of meaning: Here is what I feel and here is what I know, and on this canvas is a small slice of the world not merely how I see it, but how it truly is.

Pain is not her nemesis but her ally. She doesn’t want to dull the scalpel of pain until it’s merely melancholy, because its sharpness keeps her focused on what matters in life and in her art. And it reminds her of the Promise she must keep.

If all the brainiacs laboring on Ringrock were developing only a new kind of nuclear weapon, she might have gone back to bed and slept. No such luck.

It’s funny, though not ha-ha funny, how you think you can’t live with some newly discovered terror, how it crowds everything else out of your mind, but as time passes, it becomes just another horrific possibility—like cancer, blindness, an earwig laying eggs in your brain while you sleep, being beheaded by a maniac, a spinal cord injury resulting in quadriplegia, etcetera. You decide that, yeah, an asteroid as big as a mountain could slam into Earth and wipe out civilization, but it’ll never happen in your lifetime. Sure, cancer is real, but you most likely have some genetic defense against all forms of the disease.

Such a commune of flesh and mind, human and inhuman, in a rapture of blood lust and violence, will be an existence more horrific than anything that anyone has ever imagined Hell might provide. It combines.

“If we’re out of time, we’re out of it together, and at least not each alone. But one thing I know—just when you think it’s over for you, it isn’t.”

if it is creating art, then like many artists, Moloch may have a tendency to nihilism. Its intention might be to express, with irony, the meaninglessness of existence.

You’re a monster. This bitch with you is a monster. I’m a monster. This is a world of monsters, and anyone thinks she’s not a monster—she’ll be the first eaten alive.”

People are books of a kind, each one a story. Sometimes, with no more than a glance or a gesture or a poignant word, they turn a page for you and reveal a deeper truth about themselves than you’ve seen before.

necessity doesn’t fully excuse meanness.

Moloch’s displays of biological mastery are an invitation to madness for any who witness them.

They are excellent at suppressing the truth and dazzling with fictions of convincing complexity. They’ll give no quarter to anyone who knows the truth and might expose them to the wrath of the citizens they purport to serve.

They have a few days to scheme their way out of their true past and into a future where they will be other than who they really are.