Odd Interlude by Dean Koontz Page B

subject. “Only Uncle Greg and Aunt Lois. And Hiskott’s made it impossible for them to share what they’ve seen. Implanted a prohibition in their minds.”
    “Prohibition?”
    She is a serious girl but still a child, lively in the way of children and eager for wonder and delight, serious but not to the exclusion of the possibility of joy, as an oppressed adult might be. But now a new solemnity overcomes her, and she looks so grave that I can see the worn and weary woman that she might become as more years of enslavement grind her down, and I am almost unable to look at her because it might fall to me, and me alone, to either help or fail her.
    Eyes downcast and hands plucking nervously at her denim jacket, with a tic tweaking the corner of her left eye, she says, “Greg and Lois tried. They tried to tell us. About his appearance. Twice they really tried. But each time they bit their tongues. They bite hard. Tongues, lips. Chew their lips until they bleed. The only words they can get out are obscenities. Blasphemies. Awful words they wouldn’t say unless forced to. They spit out the blood, the words, and for days their mouths are too sore to eat. They don’t dare try to tell us a third time. We don’t want them to try. We don’t need to know. It doesn’t matter. Knowing won’t change things.”
    We need another silence.
    Boo wanders away from Orc and along the hallway toward the doors that Jolie could not pry open.
    In time I return to our previous subject. “Control. Obedience. But why?”
    “Like I said. Because of how he looks, he has tolive through us, me and my folks. He can eat. He can drink. But there is so much he can’t do. He’s like an oyster or something and that house on the hill is his shell. He tells us we’re his sensorium.”
    Jolie raises her head, and her eyes are the green of lotus leaves. She stops plucking at her denim jacket. Like doves floating to a roost, her hands settle on her knees. The tic is gone from the corner of her left eye. Speaking of her aunt’s and uncle’s suffering distresses and agitates her. I think this subject distresses and agitates her, too, and perhaps even to a greater degree. But to speak of it at all, she needs to impose upon herself, with a kind of yogic application of willpower, a serenity that allows her to comment from the clear upper air that lies above all storm and shadow.
    She says, “You know what a sensorium is?”
    “No.”
    “Like the sensory apparatus of the body. All the sensory organs, nerves. Through me—through us—he’s able to have the world that he can’t be seen in anymore. Not just the sights and sounds and tastes but all of that from lots of different perspectives, from all of our perspectives instead of just one. And what he’s unable to experience there in his shell, in his gross body that no eye would want to look upon or hand would want to touch, he can feel by living in us, by feeling what we feel, sharing our sensations, requiring us to provide whatever experience he wants most at any moment. There’s no privacy inthe Corner. There’s no place in your heart where you can be alone to feel sorry for yourself, to heal from the latest thing he did to you. He crawls in there with you. He drinks your sorrow and mocks your hope of healing.”
    I am badly shaken.
    Chronologically she is twelve, but emotionally she is older, and intellectually older still.
    Compared to her deep strength, I am weak. I am a fumbling fry cook trying to do the best he can with his strange sixth sense, but she is Joan of Arc, fighting against impossible odds, not for her country but for her soul—while Hiskott, in the reach of his power and considering his cruelty, is a more formidable enemy than even the army of England. Jolie, who began this war with the inadequate arms and defenses of a seven-year-old child, has triumphed merely by enduring, has raised the siege of Orléans every day for five long years, and it seems to me that I am in the presence