She took her wine to the Plexiglas view deck that bubbled out from the east wall of the living room. Then a recording of Scheherazade came on, and the walls took on color again, spattered with orange, showered over with yellow, bursting with crimson along the baseboard. The colored lights playing on the walls to either side ceased. Believe me, sensationalism sells a book.” I remembered some passages from Bodies in Darkness and smiled and drank my wine and felt my face grow red. “All your feelings toward Artificial Creation, toward the FBI, and all the others who have used you.” “That could be a blunt book.” “ Backing down?” “Just making an observation.” “Anything watered down would be a flop. We sipped the wine, but I felt giddy without it, and her flesh did not need any more glow than it had. “Nothing,” I assured her for the hundredth time.

Bones and gravy contrasted with her loveliness. “ I’d want nothing held back,” she said over the remains of two Cornish game hens of that special diminutive and fleshy mutant strain. Her sequined, well-cut, Oriental something-or-other was dazzling. The same flickering amber glinted from her hair, made the smooth flesh of her one bared shoulder glow with health. That wasĬandles in her green eyes, reflections of those on the table. Yes, there was still time to regain normality. My house would not have been sold to creditors. But Melinda might still be free, might still be waiting. I had steeled myself to accept the word “years,” and this was a blessing by comparison. It was startling, yet it could have been worse. When I was done, I asked: “ How much time has passed?” “A month,” he said. If they thought that all could soon be returned to normal, they would be more eager to see me back in my own flesh, wherever it was kept.

I carefully avoided mentioning that I had absorbed Child’s energy, that he would never regain his body.

He had always operated outside a belief in heaven and hell and retribution for sin. There was no room for God in Morsfagen’s life, I realized. But there was a crisp, cold gaze there that said Morsfagen did believe-and not only that he believed, but that he had come to the same conclusions himself some time ago, though he had simply lacked the proof that Child had managed to obtain. I rather think that was the case with the doctor and the nurse and the guard by the door. He did not seem moved by the discovery that the universe held no purpose, that God is insane and always has been.

Dean koontz down in the darkness