Quicksilver, p.1
Quicksilver, page 1
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2022 by The Koontz Living Trust
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
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ISBN-13: 9781542019880 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1542019885 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781542019903 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1542019907 (paperback)
Cover design by Damon Freeman
Interior illustrations by Edward Bettison
First edition
This book is dedicated to the memory of four writers who pumped up my imagination in wildly different ways during the years I suffered through grades seven through twelve:
Ray Bradbury
Robert Heinlein
Theodore Sturgeon
Jack Douglas
Draw your chair up close
to the edge of the precipice,
and I’ll tell you a story.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
PART 1
GETTING TO KNOW ME
| 1 |
My name is Quinn Quicksilver—or “Cue-Cue” to the mean kids when I was growing up—but I can’t blame my parents because I don’t know who they are. Soon after birth, I was abandoned on a lonely highway, seven miles outside of Peptoe, Arizona, where 906 people pretended that the place where they lived was actually a town. Swaddled in a blue blanket, nestled in a white bassinet made of plastic thatching, I had been placed on the centermost of three lanes of blacktop, where I was found shortly after dawn.
Although you might think that this was about as bad a start in life as one could have, I assure you it could have been worse. For one thing, this was coyote country. Had one of those creatures found me, it wouldn’t have suckled me as did the wolf that saved abandoned Romulus, the founder of Rome, but instead would have regarded me as a Grubhub delivery. I could also have been run over by an eighteen-wheeler and turned into pâté for vultures.
Fortunately, I was found by three men on their way to work. The first, Hakeem Kaspar, was a lineman for the county, as in that Glen Campbell song I’ve always found lovely but weird, though at the time I was discovered on the highway, I hadn’t yet heard it. The second, Bailie Belshazzer, worked as head mechanic at one of the country’s first wind farms. The third, Caesar Melchizadek, was a blackjack pit boss in an Indian casino.
According to a newspaper story at the time, Hakeem tucked me snugly in the passenger-side footwell of his electric-company truck and drove me to the county sheriff’s office, with Bailie and Caesar following in their vehicles. Why they felt it necessary that all three should turn me in to the law, the newspaper didn’t say. This was all I knew of those men until, years later and running for my life, I visited one of them with the hope of learning some small detail that might be a clue as to who and what I am.
With a safety pin, a small envelope was fixed to the blanket in which I was wrapped. Neither Hakeem nor Bailie nor Caesar had dared to open it, evidently because they had watched too many years of CSI shows and feared that they would smear the kidnapper’s fingerprints. Either they thought I had been snatched by some fiend who lost his nerve and left me to the mercy of fate on that hot morning, or they figured someone had nabbed my parents and were demanding a ransom from me. When the sheriff tore open the envelope, he found only a card on which was printed QUINN QUICKSILVER and my date of birth.
In those days, no one in the state of Arizona had the surname Quicksilver. Nevertheless, everyone at once assumed that was my name. I have been saddled with it ever since. Of course, quicksilver is another name for the liquid metal mercury, which was named after the Roman god Mercury. He was the messenger of other gods, valued for his tremendous speed; the guy could accelerate like crazy. And though Quinn is a variant of Quentin, it also derives from the Latin quintus, which means “fifth” or in certain contexts “five times.” So perhaps it wasn’t my name, but a cryptic message meaning “accelerate five times,” though you will not find this advice in any book about caring for a newborn any more than you will find the instruction “marinate in olive oil with basil leaves.”
I then became a ward of the county, the youngest ever dropped on that childcare agency. No foster family was willing to take in a three-day-old whose only possession was a soiled swaddling blanket and who had, in the words of Sheriff Garvey Monkton, “strange blue eyes and an eerily direct stare for such a tiny little cocker.” Consequently, I was sent out of county to Mater Misericordiæ, an orphanage run by Catholic nuns in Phoenix.
By the time I was six, it became clear that I was not adoptable. Among adoptees, infants are the most desirable age-group, and they are usually placed in stable homes faster than you can say coochy coochy coo. This is because babies are generally cuter than older kids, with the possible exception of Rosemary’s famous baby, but also because not enough time has passed for them to be screwed up by their birth parents; each grinning infant is a personality waiting to happen and therefore amenable to being sculpted into a reflection of those who adopt him. Although I was cute enough and willing to be shaped like clay, there were no takers for Quinn Quicksilver.
My failure to find a forever home was not for a lack of trying on the part of the good sisters of Mater Misericordiæ. They are as indefatigable and cunning as any order of nuns on the planet. They designed a marketing plan for me, prepared a fabulous PowerPoint presentation, and sold me to prospective parents as aggressively as Disney sells animated films about princesses or adorable animals, all to no avail. Years after the fact, I learned what explanation some would-be adopters had given for taking a pass on me; but perhaps I’ll share their comments later.
The orphanage was also a school, because kids six and up often had to live there until they were eighteen. The sisters who served as teachers were superb imparters of knowledge, and the kids knew better than to resist being educated. If you didn’t live up to your potential, you would spend a lot of time washing dishes, peeling potatoes, and doing laundry, none of which was a task assigned to you if you were a diligent learner.
The students of Mater Misericordiæ School always won city and state spelling bees, debate club matches, and science fair prizes. As a consequence, many of us were beaten up by some of the state’s most accomplished young intellectuals.
Generous supporters of the sisters provided college and trade school scholarships to those who wanted them, of which I wasn’t one. I aspired to be a writer. Profound intuition told me that the wrong university creative-writing program might hammer out of me anything original about my style and convert me into a litbot.
Sister Agnes Mary managed the placement office for those who weren’t submitting to higher education. When I turned seventeen and a half, she used samples of my writing to snare a job for me with the publisher of Arizona!, a magazine about the wonders of the state and its people. I wasn’t yet trusted to write about contemporary citizens, who were far more easily offended than were dead folks. Instead, I was assigned to research and write about interesting figures and places from the state’s storied past, as long as I avoided brothels and bandits.
On my eighteenth birthday, after just six months of successful employment, I was able to afford a studio apartment and move out of the orphanage. After eighteen months at the magazine, I made a fateful mistake and have been in flight from dark forces ever since.
I find it eerie that, within a day of making that mistake, a full week before the consequences of it became clear, I had my first episode of what, for a while, I came to call “strange magnetism,” as if someone was writing my life—not the story of my life, but my life itself—someone who knew the time was coming when I would need a substantial amount of cash in order to escape capture.
This was a Friday in early May. Having completed my assignments for the week, I took the day off, intending to avoid exercise, load up on wicked carbs, and stream old Alien and Terminator movies until my eyes began to bleed. Instead, I grew restless before I’d eaten a single chocolate-covered doughnut, and I felt strangely compelled to get in my vintage Toyota and test the bald tires by driving out of the city, into the desert. I distinctly remember saying to myself, “What am I doing? Where am I going?” Then I stopped asking because I realized that if I spoke in a slightly different voice and answered with a destination, I might be a case of multiple personality, something to which I never aspired.
Where I was going turned out to be not a ghost town, but a sort of ghost crossroads, not from the days of cowboys and prospectors in the nineteenth century, but from the 1950s. A section of a state highway had been made superfluous by an interstate. A Texaco service station, a restaurant, and a large Quonset hut of indeterminable purpose were left to be worried into ruins by merciless desert sun, wind, insects, and time. I’d been there once before, six months earlier, getting the flavor of the place to write a little mood piece about it for Arizona! magazine.
The big sign mounted on the roof of the restaurant had been faded by decades of fierce solar rays and had been shot ful l of holes by good old boys who thought that mixing strong drink and firearms was an entertaining way to pass an evening on little-traveled back roads. Generally speaking, they had no wives to object and no girlfriends to offer more appealing distractions. Research had taught me that the restaurant had been called Santinello’s Roadside Grill.
I parked on the fissured, sun-paled blacktop, took a flashlight from the glove box, got out of my car, and approached Santinello’s. The windows had been broken out long ago, and the front door had rotted off its hinges.
Inside, lances of sunlight slashed through east-facing windows, forcing the shadows to retreat to the west side of the dining room, where they gathered as if conspiring. The booths, tables, and chairs had been sold off in 1956, along with the kitchen equipment. Wind had blown debris and decades of dust inside.
No herpetologist I queried had been able to explain to me why a couple of dozen snakes had slithered here to die, mostly rattlers. When I had come exploring on the previous occasion, I’d freaked out until I realized they were air-dried, fossilized, lifeless.
Nevertheless, on this return visit, I stepped carefully among them and went into what had been the kitchen. Although everything of value had long been stripped away, splintered wooden crates that had once held oranges and other produce were heaped against one wall, along with all manner of empty food tins.
On my first visit, I had stirred through that flotsam, hoping that something in it would give me a hook for a poignant paragraph about how the Santinello’s ship had run aground on the jagged rocks of progress, their lifelong work and dreams for a better future having been pirated from them. In those early days of my magazine career, I was as enthusiastic as a puppy, capable of a rare but embarrassing mixed metaphor in my earnest efforts to shake readers into an emotional response. That was long ago, and I am much more mature now that, as I write this, I’ve spent a year struggling to stay alive while gradually uncovering and adjusting to the true nature of the world.
Anyway, on that initial exploration, as I’d stirred the flotsam in the kitchen, something bright had reflected my flashlight beam and caught my eye. When I reached to pluck a scrap of yellowing paper off the object to fully reveal it, a disturbed tarantula erupted out of the debris and scampered up my arm. I knew the creature wasn’t poisonous, that it wouldn’t bite, that its kind were said to be gentle, that it was supposed to be the Mohandas Gandhi of arachnids. But when a hairy spider the size of a soccer ball—or so it seemed—is coming for your face, the fight-or-flight response kicks in big-time. I staggered backward, managed to knock the beast off my arm, and lost all interest in whatever bauble had glittered in the trash.
Now, inexplicably, I was back, searching with my flashlight not for the tarantula, to which I didn’t feel the need to apologize, but for the item from which the spider had frightened me away. I found it: a very old coin—judging by its sheen, pure gold.
As I turned the heavy coin between my fingers, I marveled that my subconscious must have recognized what it was on the day of the tarantula and must have held that knowledge for months. However, why I would suddenly be impelled to return here after all this time was even more of a mystery than how such a coin had come to be in an abandoned restaurant in a once-busy crossroads that now led nowhere in four directions.
I left the lifeless snakes to rest in creepy peace and returned to the city, where I visited a shop that bought and sold everything from French antique furniture to Meiji-period Japanese bronzes. The owner, Julius Shimski, knew everything anyone could know about all things old—coins, stamps, paintings—not least of all because he was eighty-nine and had spent his life learning. Julius had a monk’s ring of white hair, eyebrows as lush as albino caterpillars, blue eyes as clear as the water in Eden, and a face that had not lined with age but had smoothed into a semblance of what he must have looked like just before his bris. In a profile of him in Arizona!, he had explained his pink-cheeked appearance by saying, “When you fill yourself with knowledge about any subject, it plumps you.” I didn’t write the profile, because Julius wasn’t dead, but after I read it, I began stopping by his shop now and then to chat.
The place is more than a shop, really. It’s a two-story brick-clad concrete-and-steel building, designed to be so fireproof that even the Devil couldn’t get it to take a destructive spark from his finger. The shop’s stock is worth millions, so to be admitted, you have to have an appointment or be known to Julius. In either case, entry is through a bulletproof-glass vestibule, where you’re scanned for a weapon before being buzzed through the inner door. When Julius was just forty-one, working out of another location, he was robbed at gunpoint and pistol-whipped, whereupon he built a fortress of a shop because, as he said in the profile, “Paranoia I can live with, but not a bullet in the head.”
On that Friday, his granddaughter, Sharona, was staffing the front room, which made me feel doubly lucky when I saw her from the glass vestibule. With her jet-black hair and dark eyes and exquisite arrangement of features, she is one of those women at whom you can’t look for long without losing the ability to speak coherently, or at least I can’t. She’s thirty, eleven years older than me, so from her perspective I’m hardly out of adolescence, while from my perspective she’s my dream girl. Among other things, she’s a philatelist, which isn’t as sexy as it sounds; she knows everything there is to know about collectible postage stamps. Like her grandfather, she is a knowledge sponge. I can’t imagine why she’s not married. Although she treated me with the affection that an aunt might show for a favored nephew, I fantasized that one day I would do something—maybe save a family from a burning house or take a gun away from a crazed terrorist—that would cause her to look at me in a much different way and see me as the romantic figure of her dreams.
She waved and then buzzed me through. I passed by the cluster of Tiffany lamps and the Japanese gold-lacquer boxes that dated from the Taishō through the Heisei eras, and went to the sales counter, where she stood. A display of highly collectible wristwatches lay between us. If I had been more attuned to the menacing melody that destiny had chosen as background music for what was coming, I might have seen those watches as an omen that time was running out for me.
Instead, I regarded Sharona with a smile that was probably more like a boyish grin, and declared, “You look so Friday,” when what I meant to say was that she looked lovely today.
She smiled that aunt-to-nephew smile. “No one has ever said that to me before, Quinn. What does Friday look like?”
“Well, just like you.” Elaboration seemed essential, so I kept going. “Friday is the best of days, don’t you think? The workweek is done, and Monday is still in the distant future, so for a while we’re free. Of course, I’ve got the day off, and you don’t, so maybe you see the whole situation in a different light. But to me, right now, this week anyway, Friday is great. Friday is beautiful.”
There. I’d actually said it. I had told her she was beautiful, even though she might need a translator to have my meaning properly conveyed.
She cocked her head at me. “You’re really wired, Quinn. How much coffee have you had this morning, dear? My Uncle Meyer was an eight-cups-a-day man and ended up with a bleeding ulcer when he was just thirty-four. Three days in the ICU.”
“Oh, not to worry. I’m a two-cup man. That’s all it takes to charge me up. A good Jamaican blend.” In fact, I didn’t often drink coffee. I favored caffeine-free Pepsi or Coke, but I worried that she would think I was still a boy if I preferred a soft drink to a good cup of joe. I was ashamed of myself for lying, even if about something as inconsequential as coffee. To avoid plunging deeper into the swamp of deceit, I produced the gold coin from a pocket. “Why I stopped by is I found this. I think it might be worth something.”
“I’m mainly a philatelist, though I know a lot about Tiffany, Art Nouveau, and Art Deco. Grandfather is the ace numismatist.”
I so much liked the way “philatelist” sounded when she said it that I wanted to ask her to say it again, but I restrained myself.
“You know where Grandfather’s office is. I’ll intercom him and let him know you’ll be stopping in to see him.”
