Twilight Eyes by Dean Koontz Page A

was held so low between those Herculean shoulders that I could see nothing of his face, and I knew he did not see me. He walked between the hulking equipment, stepping on cables, plowing through accumulations of litter, self-absorbed. I was afraid that I would startle him, so before I was atop him, I called out, “Lovely morning, isn’t it?” He took two more steps, as if he required that long to register that my greeting was aimed at him. We were only eight feet apart when he looked up at me, revealing a face that froze my marrow.
    Goblin! I thought.
    I almost reached for the knife within my boot.
    Oh, Jesus, God, no, another goblin!
    “You said something?” he asked.
    When the wave of shock had passed through me, I saw that he was not a goblin, after all—or at least not a goblin like the others. He had a nightmare face, but there was nothing of pig or dog in it. No fleshy snout, no fangs, no flickering, serpentine tongue. He was human but a freak, his skull so malformed that it proved God had strange, macabre moments. In fact . . .
    Imagine yourself a divine sculptor, working in the medium of flesh-blood-bone, with a bad hangover and a despicable sense of humor. Now start sculpting with a huge brutal jaw that does not recede as it approaches your creation’s ears (the way the jawline does in normal faces) but terminates abruptly in ugly knotted lumps of bone reminiscent of the neck bolts featured in the movie version of the Frankenstein monster. Now, just above those unsightly lumps, give your hapless creation a pair of ears like wads of crumpled cabbage leaves. A mouth inspired by the scoop of a steam shovel. Throw in some big square teeth, too many of them, crowding one another and overlapping at several points, and all a permanent shade of yellow so gross that your creation will be ashamed to open his mouth in polite company. Sound like enough cruelty to vent any godly anger that you may have been feeling? Wrong. You are apparently in a truly cosmic rage, a deific lather sufficient to make the universe quake from one end to the other, for you also sculpt a forehead thick enough to act as armor plating, build it up until it overhangs the eyes and transforms the underlying sockets into caves. Now, in a fever of malignant creation, you carve a hole in that forehead, above the right eye but closer to the temple than the socket below, and plug in a third eye that is without iris or pupil, just an oval of undifferentiated burnt-orange tissue. That done, you add two final touches that are unquestionably the mark of malevolent genius: You pop a noble and perfectly made nose into the center of that grisly mug, to taunt your creation with ideas of what might have been; within the two lower sockets you imbed a pair of clear, brown, warm, intelligent, beautiful, normal eyes, exquisitely expressive, so that anyone who sees them must quickly look away or weep uncontrollably with pity for the sensitive soul trapped within this hulk. Are you still with me? You probably don’t want to play God anymore. What gets into Him sometimes? Don’t you wonder? If a creation like this can result merely from His moodiness or pique, just imagine what state of mind He must have been in when He was seriously upset, when He made Hell and cast the rebel angels into it.
    This prank of God spoke again, and his voice was soft and kind: “I’m sorry. Did you say something? I was wool-gathering.”
    “Um . . . uh . . . I said . . . lovely morning.”
    “Yes. I guess it is. You’re new, aren’t you?”
    “Uh . . . I’m Carl . . . Slim.”
    “Carl Slim?”
    “No . . . uh . . . Slim MacKenzie,” I said, head tilted back to stare up at him.
    “Joel Tuck,” he said.
    I could not adjust to the rich timbre and soft tone of his voice. From the look of him, I expected a broken-glass, shattered-rock voice full of cold hostility.
    He offered a hand. I shook it. It was like anybody else’s hand, though bigger.
    “I own the ten-in-one,” he