Innocence
Heart-stopping supernatural thriller from the master of suspense. Addison Goodheart is not like other people…Addison Goodheart lives in solitude beneath the city, an exile from a society which will destroy him if he is ever seen.Books are his refuge and his escape: he embraces the riches they have to offer. By night he leaves his hidden chambers and, through a network of storm drains and service tunnels, makes his way into the central library.And that is where he meets Gwyneth, who, like Addison, also hides her true appearance and struggles to trust anyone.But the bond between them runs deeper than the tragedies that have scarred their lives. Something more than chance – and nothing less than destiny – has brought them together in a world whose hour of reckoning is fast approaching.
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DEAN KOONTZ
INNOCENCE
This book is dedicated to Harry Recard for being a friend, for teaching me pinochle in college and thereby nearly ruining my academic career. And to Diane Recard for taking such good care of Harry all these years, an exhausting task.
* * *
Nothing pleases a writer more than mail from readers who claim that one of his books was life-changing or inspired perseverance in difficult times. But as I finished Innocence, a letter that I received from Elizabeth Waters in the state of Washington, regarding my novel From the Corner of His Eye, moved me more profoundly than most. Beth, your courage humbles me. The hope that you found in my book is matched by the hope that you have given me with your kind correspondence. You shine.
Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.
— PETRARCH, De Remediis
Table of Contents
Part One: The Girl I Met in Lamplight Near Charles Dickens
Part Two: The Flame Delights The Moth Before The Wings Burn
Part Three: What Might Have Been And What Has Been
HAVING ESCAPED ONE FIRE, I EXPECTED ANOTHER. I didn’t view with fright the flames to come. Fire was but light and heat. Throughout our lives, each of us needs warmth and seeks light. I couldn’t dread what I needed and sought. For me, being set afire was merely the expectation of an inevitable conclusion. This fair world, compounded of uncountable beauties and enchantments and graces, inspired in me only one abiding fear, which was that I might live in it too long.
I WAS CAPABLE OF LOVE, BUT I LIVED IN SOLITUDE after Father died. Therefore I loved only the precious dead, and books, and the moments of great beauty with which the city surprised me from time to time, as I passed through it in utmost secrecy.
For instance, sometimes on clear nights, in the solemn hour when most of the population sleeps, when the cleaning crews are finished and the high-rises darkle until dawn, the stars come out. They are not as bright over this metropolis as they must be over a Kansas plain or a Colorado mountain, but they still shine as if there is a city in the sky, an enchanting place where I could walk the streets with no fear of fire, where I could find someone to love, who would love me.
Here, when I was seen, my capacity for love earned me no mercy. Quite the opposite. When they saw me, men and women alike recoiled, but their fear quickly gave way to fury. I would not harm them to defend myself, and I remained therefore defenseless.
ON CERTAIN NIGHTS, BEAUTIFUL BUT SAD MUSIC found its way into my deep windowless rooms. I didn’t know from where it came, and I couldn’t identify the tune. No lyrics accompanied the melody, but I remained convinced that I had once heard a smoky-voiced chanteuse sing this song. Each time the song came, my mouth moved as if forming the words, but they eluded me.
The piece was not a blues number, yet it weighed on the heart as did the blues. I might call it a nocturne, although I believe that a nocturne is always an instrumental. Words existed to this melody. I was certain they did.
I should have been able to follow those mellifluous strains to a vent grille or a drain, or to some other route of transmission, but every attempt to seek the source ended in failure. The music seemed to issue from the air, as if passing through a membrane from another, unseen world parallel to ours.
Perhaps those who lived in the open would have found the idea of an invisible world too fanciful and would have dismissed the notion.
