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

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       Twenty-five

      MY FIRST NIGHT IN THE CITY, AND EVERYWHERE glass underfoot …

      Because my tormentors sprinted south, I ran north but got only a few feet before I collided with the man who moved to intercept me. From concealment, he had witnessed my encounter with the hobo and his pursuers. He had thrown the rocks that shattered the windows and triggered the alarms, for he meant to rescue me, though I didn’t at first understand his intent.

      He was tall and strong, and I was little, but though resistance might have been futile, I struggled to break free of his grip. He wore a long black raincoat that looked almost like a cape. Holding fast to me with his right hand, he used his left to pull back the hood of his coat, revealing his face. When I saw that he was like me, I ceased struggling and stood gasping for breath, gazing up at him in astonishment.

      Until that moment, I had assumed that I must be the only one of my kind, the freak that the midwife and her daughter had called me, a monster to the world, condemned to solitude, until someone killed me. Now I was one of two, and if there were two, there could be more. I had not expected to survive childhood, but here stood one like me, twenty-something and in possession of all his limbs.

      “Are you alone?” he asked.

      In my shock, I hadn’t the wit to answer.

      He spoke above the clanging alarms. “Are you alone, son?”

      “Yes. Yes, sir.”

      “Where do you hide?”

      “The woods.”

      “No woods in the city.”

      “I had to leave there.”

      “How did you make it here?”

      “Under a tarp. On a truck.”

      “Why come to the city?”

      “I didn’t know.”

      “What didn’t you know?”

      “Where the truck would bring me.”

      “It brought you to me, so you might live. Let’s go. Quickly now.”

      Hoods up, glass crunching and clinking underfoot, we hurried along the promenade, past the smoking remnants of the burnt hat. When we passed the toy store, where the window was broken, the items in the display were arranged as before, except that the marionette was missing. I almost stopped to confirm its disappearance. But sometimes I knew things with my heart that my mind could not explain, and right then my heart insisted I should keep moving and not look back, and never ask where the marionette had gone because my question might be answered.

      By the time we heard the sirens, we were two blocks from the mall, in a cobbled backstreet as dark as a deer path in the woods under a half-moon. A sudden wind broomed away the stillness of the night as the man whom I would eventually call Father hooked the disc of iron, lifted it, and set it aside. Piping across the hole where the iron had been, the wind played an oboe note, and I went down into that sound and into a world that I could never have imagined, where I would make a better life for myself.

      Three years would pass before I mentioned the marionette to my father, on the night when he warned me about the music box that was surely more than it appeared to be.