Twilight Eyes (38 page)

The near certainty of the Armageddon she had described was shocking and depressing beyond words, but still I feared a more immediate death. My precognitive awareness of
imminent
danger had become a constant, unpleasant pressure inside my skull, though I could not tell where the trouble would come from or what form it would take.

I was faintly nauseous with apprehension.

Chilled. Slick with sweat. Shivering.

She went into the kitchen for another Scotch.

I stood up. Went to a window. Looked out. Saw nothing. I returned to the armchair. Sat on the edge of it. Wanted to scream.

Something was coming. . . .

When she returned with her drink and slumped in her chair again, still withdrawn from me, still grim-faced, I said, “How did you learn about them? You’ve got to tell me. Are you able to read their minds or what?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“A little.”

“I can’t get anything from them except . . . a rage, a hatred.”

“I see . . . into them a little,” Rya said. “Not their exact thoughts. But when I probe at them, I get images . . . visions. I think a lot of what I see is more . . . racial memory . . . things that some of them are not entirely aware of on a conscious level. But to be honest, it’s more than that.”

“What? More—
how
? And what about these legends you spoke of?”

Instead of answering me, she said, “I know what you were doing out there tonight.”

“Huh? What’re you talking about? How can you know?”

“I know.”

“But—”

“And it’s futile, Slim.”

“It is?”

“They can’t be beaten.”

“I beat my Uncle Denton. I killed him before he could bring any more misery to my family. Joel and I stopped six of them tonight, and if we hadn’t, they would have rigged the Ferris wheel to collapse. We saved the lives of who knows how many marks.”

“And what does it matter?” she asked. A new note entered her voice, an earnestness, a dark enthusiasm. “Other goblins will just kill other marks. You can’t save the world. You’re risking your life, your happiness, your sanity—and at most you’re involved in a delaying action. You’re not going to win the war. In the long run our demons have to beat us. It’s inevitable. It
is
our destiny, one we planned for ourselves a long, long time ago.”

I could not see what she was driving at. “What alternative do we have? If we don’t fight, don’t protect ourselves, our lives have no meaning. You and I could be snuffed out at any moment, at
their
whim!”

She put aside her Scotch and slid to the edge of her seat. “There is another way.”

“What are you talking about?”

Her beautiful eyes fixed on mine, and her gaze was hot. “Slim, most people aren’t worth spit.”

I blinked.

She said, “Most people are liars, cheats, adulterers, thieves, bigots, you name it. They use and abuse one another with as much eagerness as the goblins abuse us. They aren’t
worth
saving.”

“No, no, no,” I said. “Not
most
of them. A lot of people aren’t worth spit, true, but not most of them, Rya.”

“In my experience,” she said, “hardly
any
of them are better than the goblins.”

“Your experience wasn’t typical, for God’s sake. The Abner Kadys and Maralee Sweens of this world are definitely a minority faction. I can see why you would feel differently, but you never met my dad or mom, my sisters, my grandma. There’s more decency in the world than cruelty. Maybe I wouldn’t have said so a week ago, or even yesterday, but now that I hear you talking like this, now that I hear you saying it’s all pointless, I don’t have any doubt there’s more good than evil in people. Because . . . because . . . well, there
has
to be.”

“Listen,” she said, her eyes still fixed on mine, a beseeching blue, a pleading blue, a fierce and almost painful blue, “all we can hope for is a little happiness with a small circle of friends, with a couple people we love—and the rest of the world be damned. Please, please, Slim, think about this! It’s amazing that we found each other. It’s a miracle. I never thought I would have anything like what we’ve found together. We’re so compatible . . . so
alike
. . . that there’s even an overlapping of certain brain waves when we sleep . . . a psychic sharing when we make love and when we sleep which is why the sex is so damned good for us and why we even
share the same dreams
! We were
meant
for each other, and the most important thing, the
most
important thing in the world is that we be together all our lives.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know. I feel it too.”

“So you’ve got to give up your crusade. Stop trying to save the world. Stop taking these insane risks. Let the goblins do what they
have
to do, and we’ll just live our own lives in peace.”

“But that’s the whole point! We
can’t
live in peace. Ignoring them won’t save us. Sooner or later they’ll come sniffing around, eager to feel our hurt, drink our pain—”

“Slim, wait, wait, listen.” She was agitated now, bristling with nervous energy. She popped up from her chair and went to the window, took a deep breath of the in-flowing air, turned to me again, and said, “You agree that what we have together has to come first, above all else, at all costs. So what if . . . what if I could show you a way to coexist with the goblins, a way for you to give up your crusade and not have to worry that they’d ever come after you or me?”

“How?”

She hesitated.

“Rya?”

“It’s the only way, Slim.”

“What?”

“It’s the only
sane
way to deal with them.”

“Will you, for Christ’s sake,
tell
me?”

She frowned, looked away from me, started to speak, hesitated again, said, “
Shit!”
and suddenly threw her Scotch glass across the room at the wall. Ice cubes flew out of it, shattered as they hit pieces of furniture or bounced on the carpet, and the glass exploded against the wall.

Startled, I leapt up, then stood there stupidly as she waved me back and returned to her own chair.

She sat.

She took a deep breath.

She said, “I want you to hear me out, just listen and don’t interrupt, don’t stop me until I’m done, and try to understand. I’ve found a way to coexist with them, to make them leave me alone. See, in the orphanage and later, I realized there was no way to win with them. They have all the advantages. I ran away, but there’re goblins everywhere, not just in the orphanage, and you can’t really run away from them no matter where you go. It’s pointless. So I took a risk, a calculated risk, and I approached them, told them that I could see—”

“You
what
!”

“Don’t interrupt!” she said sharply. “This is . . . this is hard . . . going to be damned hard . . . and I just want to get through it, so shut up and let me talk. I told one of the goblins about my psychic ability, which is, you know, a mutation of our own, a consequence of that nuclear war, because according to the goblins there weren’t people with any kind of psychic abilities—clairvoyance, telekenesis, none of that—in the previous civilization. There aren’t many now, but there were
none
then. I guess . . . in a twisted sort of way . . . since the goblins started that war, brought those bombs and all that radiation down on us . . . well, you could say they sort of
created
gifted people like you and me. In an awful sort of way we owe our special talents to them. Anyway, I told them that I could see through their human form to . . . I don’t know . . . to the goblin
potential
within them—”

“You’ve talked to them, and they’ve told you their . . . legends! That’s how you know about them?”

“Not entirely. They haven’t told me much. But all they have to do is tell me a little, and I quickly have a vision of the rest. It’s like . . . if they open the door a crack, I can push it all the way and see even the stuff they’re trying to hide from me. But that’s not important right now, and I wish to God you wouldn’t interrupt. What’s important is that I made it clear to them that I didn’t care about them, didn’t care what they did, who they hurt, as long as they didn’t hurt
me
. And we reached an . . . accommodation.”

Astonished, I collapsed back into my chair, and in spite of her admonition about interrupting her, I said, “An accommodation? Just like that? But why would they want to reach an accommodation with you? Why not just kill you? No matter what you told them, even if they believed you would keep their secret, you
still
represented a threat to them. I don’t understand. They had nothing to gain by reaching this . . . this accommodation.”

Her pendulum mood had swung again, back toward darkness and quiet despair. She sagged in her chair. When she spoke, her voice was barely audible. “They
did
have something to gain. There was something I could offer them. You see, I have another psychic ability that you either don’t have . . . or don’t have in the same degree that I do. What I’ve got is . . . the ability to detect extrasensory perception in other people, especially when they can see the goblins. I can detect their power regardless of how hard they might try to conceal it. I don’t always know instantly upon meeting them. Sometimes it takes a while. It’s a slowly growing awareness. But I can perceive hidden psychic gifts in others pretty much the way I can see the goblins in their disguises. Until tonight I thought this insight was . . . well, infallible . . . but now you tell me Joel Tuck sees the goblins, and I never suspected him. Still, I think I’m nearly always quick to perceive these things. I knew there was something special about you, right from the start, though you turned out to be . . . more special, much more special, in more ways than I realized at first.” She whispered now: “I want to hold on to you. I never thought I would find someone . . . someone I needed . . . loved. But you came, and now I want to hold on to you, but the only way I can do that is if you make the same accommodation with them that I’ve made.”

I had turned to stone. Immobile as rock, I sat in the armchair, listening to my granite heart thump, a hard and cold and heavy sound, a mournful and hollow sound, each beat like a mallet striking a block of marble. My love, my need for her, my longing were all still in my petrified heart but inaccessible, just as beautiful sculptures are potentialities in any crude block of stone but remain inaccessible and unrealized to the man who lacks artistic talent and who has no skill with the chisel. I did not want to believe what she had said, and I could not bear to think about what came next, yet I was compelled to listen, to know the worst.

As tears came to her eyes, she said, “When I encounter someone who can see the goblins, I . . . I report it. I warn one of their kind about the seer. You see, they don’t want open warfare, like there was last time. They prefer their secrecy. They don’t want us organizing against them, even though it would be hopeless, anyway. So I point out people who know about them, who might kill them or spread the word. And the goblins . . . they just . . . they eliminate the threat. In return they guarantee my safety from their kind. Immunity. They leave me alone. That’s all I’ve ever wanted, Slim. To be left alone. And if you make the same arrangement with them, then they’ll leave both of us alone . . . and we can be . . . we can stay . . . together . . . happy—”

“Happy
?” I did not speak the word so much as expel it. “Happy? You think we can be happy, knowing that we survive by . . . by betraying others?”

“The goblins would get some of them, anyway.”

With great effort I moved my cold stone hands to my face and hid in the cave of fingers, as if I could retreat from these hideous revelations. But that was a childish fantasy. The ugly truth stayed with me. “Jesus.”

“We could have a life,” she said, weeping openly now because she sensed my horror and the impossibility of my ever reaching the dreadful accommodation that she had negotiated for herself. “Together . . . a life . . . the way it’s been this past week . . . even better . . . much better . . . us against the world, safe, perfectly safe. And the goblins don’t just guarantee my safety in return for the information I give them. They guarantee my success too. I’m very valuable to them, see. Because, like I said, a lot of people who see the goblins either wind up in an asylum or a carnival. So . . . so I’m in a perfect position to . . . well, to turn up more than a few seers like you and me. So the goblins also help me out, help me get along. Like . . . they planned an accident at the Dodgem Cars—”

“And I stopped it from happening,” I said coldly.

She was surprised. “Oh. Yes. I should have figured you did. But, see . . . the idea was, once there’d been an accident, the injured mark would probably sue Hal Dorsey, the man who owns the Dodgem, and then he would be in financial trouble, what with the legal fees and everything, and I would be able to buy him out at a good price, take on a new concession at a cost that was attractive. Oh, shit. Please. Please
listen
to me. I see what you’re thinking. I sound so . . . so cold.” In fact, though the tears flowed from her, and though I had never seen anyone more miserable than she was at that moment, she did indeed seem cold, bitterly cold. “But, Slim, you’ve got to understand about Hal Dorsey. He’s a bastard, he really is, a mean son of a bitch, and nobody likes him ’cause he’s a user, a user and an abuser, so I’ll be damned if I’ll feel sorry about ruining
him
.”

Although I did not want to look at her, I looked. Although I did not want to speak to her, I spoke. “What’s the difference between the torture that the goblins initiate and the torture you suggest to them?”

“I told you, Hal Dorsey is a—”

Raising my voice, I said, “What’s the difference between the behavior of a man like Abner Kady and the way
you
betray your own kind?”