Dean Koontz 2-Book Thriller Collection: Innocence, The City. Dean Koontz

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       Twenty-three

      THE NIGHT THAT I ARRIVED IN THE CITY … THE mall along the river where, through plate glass, the sly marionette watched passersby …

      The globes atop the ornate iron lampposts glowed like illumined pearls, and flecks of mica in the fired clay of the bricks sparkled underfoot as I walked away from the antique-toy store and north past other shops that offered window displays in which every item remained reliably inanimate.

      Before I saw the man, I heard him. A shout, another, a shuddery scream of terror, and then his pounding footsteps.

      I will never know who he was, although I suspect that he must have been a vagrant, a homeless person accustomed to bunking in a secret and protected nook somewhere in the open-air mall. He appeared from a break between two buildings, one of them a restaurant, running clumsily in buckled rubber snow boots that made sloppy squelching sounds on the bare bricks. He wore patched khaki pants, a pale-gray sweater over a plaid shirt, a stained corduroy sport coat with badly tattered cuffs, and a broad-brimmed hat the likes of which I’d never seen before and have never seen since.

      Flames feathered back from the crown of his hat, but he seemed to be unaware that the danger was more immediate than the two men from whom he was running. As he approached, I pointed to his head and shouted, “Fire, fire!”

      He was most likely one of those booze- or drug-worn men who aren’t as old as they appear to be, for he looked eighty but moved with alacrity. Rheumy eyes, haggard face, skin sallow and runneled and pocked, tall and thin, with long-fingered hands that seemed as big as garden rakes, he might have been a scarecrow come to life in a cornfield and now footloose in a city that had no use for him.

      Whether my warning or a sudden awareness of heat alerted him to the threat, in one smooth motion, with thumb and forefinger, he took off his broad-brimmed hat and flung it away as someone playing in a park might fling a Frisbee. As the fire spread off the crown toward the brim, the bright headwear sailed by mere inches from my face. When the hobo raced past me, I saw a few wisps of smoke rising from his scraggly beard, as if a fire had first been lit—and somehow quickly smothered—in that witches’-broom of facial hair before the hat was set ablaze.

      Behind him came two young men, excited and laughing, eyes as bright as those of wolves in moonlight. Each carried a small butane torch of the kind that chefs use to caramelize the surface of crème brûlée and for other culinary tasks. Perhaps they were kitchen hands in the nearby restaurant that had closed an hour or so earlier, but they might have been from somewhere else entirely, nothing more than two delinquents who prowled the night with the intention of burning homeless people alive.

      When they saw me, I happened to be in lamplight, still wearing my hoodie, but with my head raised and my face somewhat revealed. Although I was but a boy of eight and they were grown men, the first said, “Oh, shit, burn him, burn him,” and simultaneously the second said, “What is he, what the hell is he?”

      With their longer legs, they could outrun me. I saw no option but to dodge this way and that among the benches and tree planters and lampposts that were arranged along the center of the promenade, trying to keep something between me and them, hoping that a night watchman or a couple of policemen might come along, whereupon my attackers would flee in one direction and I in another, lest I ultimately become a victim of my rescuers.

      Quick and bold, the two flanked me, herded me, and soon cornered me behind a bench, between two planters. Click-click, click-click. The double-action safety switches triggered two hissing jets of blue-tipped yellow flame. The men spat at me, cursed furiously, thrusting like swordsmen with the torches, trying to set me afire at arm’s length, as if they feared me nearly as much as they detested me. The flames reflected in their eyes, so that it seemed they must be filled with the very fire that they dispensed through the nozzles of their weapons.

      Farther along the promenade, glass shattered and cascaded to the pavement, and a burglar alarm sounded. Startled, my assailants looked toward the noise. Another display window dissolved into glittering fragments that, with an icy ringing, spilled across the bricks, and then a third window, three alarms clanging stridently.

      My attackers ran south, and I ran north. They escaped into the night, but I did not escape.