Free Innocence: A Novel by Dean Koontz Page A

together, as though it might impart a secret of great importance.
    Initially, I found the puppet to be the least interesting of the items on display. But the window was long, and the contents were so delightful that I moved from the left end to the right and then all the way back again. When I returned to the marionette, it sat where ithad been before, but now the pin spot brightened its face instead of the rocking horse behind it.
    I doubted that I was mistaken. The light previously had been focused on the horse. The eyes in the center of those diamond shapes, which had been merely black when in shadow, were now, in the brighter light, black with thread-thin scarlet striations that radiated from the center pupil to the outer edges of the irises. They stared straight ahead, so strange and yet with the depth and clarity and something of the sorrow of real eyes.
    The longer I met that gaze, the more disquieted I became. Once more I moved from the left toward the right end of the large window, imagining what fun it would be to play with many of those toys. At the midpoint of the display, I glanced back to the marionette and discovered not only that the pin spot still brightened its face but also that its eyes, which had been focused straight ahead, had now turned sideways in their sockets, to follow me.
    No strings were attached to the tuxedoed figure; therefore, no puppeteer could be manipulating it.
    Instead of continuing to the right, I returned to the marionette. The eyes gazed toward where I’d been a moment earlier.
    At the periphery of my vision, I thought the toy’s left hand moved. I was pretty sure that it had been palm down, but now it lay palm up. I watched it for a long moment, but it remained motionless, pale and without fingernails, the white fingers hinged in two places instead of three, as if this were an early prototype of humanity, rejected for inadequate detail.
    When I looked again, the black eyes with fine red filaments now almost as bright as neon were staring directly at me.
    As centipedes seemed to crawl the nape of my neck, I stepped away from the window.
    Back then, I didn’t know cities or outdoor malls or antique-toy stores, and therefore I couldn’t say for sure that such displays as this weren’t routinely motorized or otherwise tricked up to keep the browser intrigued. But because, of all things in the window, only the marionette moved, and because the sight of it had troubled me even before it had become animated, I decided that something lower than a sales technique was at work and that continued study of the toy would be dangerous.
    As I walked away, I heard what seemed to be a rapping on the inside of the window glass, but I assured myself that I either misinterpreted or imagined the sound.
    The cool night seemed to be growing colder. The dirty-yellow moon floated low, slowly sinking down the sky. Out on the river, a boat horn blew three times, so melancholy that it might have been sounded in memoriam of lives lost in those waters.
    I began to look for a place to hide before first light—but moments later I found instead two men who wanted to set a living thing on fire and, denied their original victim, settled on me as an acceptable substitute.

17
    ON THE DEEP SILL OF THE BIG CORNER WINDOW IN the curator’s office lay a folded newspaper. As I waited for the girl to discover whatever she might be searching for on the computer, I picked up the daily and, by the ambient light of the city, scanned the headlines: plague in China, war in the Middle East, revolution inSouth America, corruption in the highest levels of the U.S. government. I had no use for such news and put the paper down.
    Having taken what she wanted from the computer, Gwyneth pocketed the memory stick and switched off the machine. She remained in the murderer’s chair, evidently brooding about something with such intensity that I was reluctant to interrupt her train of thought.
    At the corner window, I gazed down at the