Read Online Warlock by Dean Koontz - Free Book Online Page B

possessed. He had often advised Mace to learn how to fear, and he never gave advice that he did not follow himself: he was afraid.
        
        Not terrified, though. A good magician learned that there was a limit to the usefulness of fear. Terror soon turned to panic, and that to foolishness. And so he hung on the ropes, the wind buffeting him in a slow arc, anticipating death in a rather scholarly manner, so that if it should come upon him suddenly, he would not be ill-prepared for it.
        
        A lone, white bird flew by him quite close, screeching at him, its clear blue eyes curious.
        
        Perhaps forty more years of life ahead of me, Sandow thought. “We Shakers live to ripe old ages by routine. And here I am, out on a rope above a deadly canyon- and what for? Why am I risking all those decades of life here on this cold, barren mountain?
        
        But that was easy enough to understand. He was risking those decades of life for knowledge, the one thing which the Shaker had never been able to resist in his long life. There had been many women, yes, in many beds. But there had never been one who could dictate the course of his life, not one whose breasts and loins could hold him to her vision of the future. Money? Ah, but he always had a great deal of that. No, only knowledge could lead him to extremes, to risk all.
        
        His great curiosity about the Blank and about the nature of the Shakers-and-Movers (who had come, through the centuries, merely to be called Shakers, the import of the ancient saying lost to time) had begun when he learned, as a child, that he had killed his mother. Not with an axe or a garrot, surely. But he found that all Shakers' mothers perished during childbirth, screaming under a tremendous burden of pain that was far worse than normal childbirth. Now, so long a time later, he thought he understood why those deaths happened. Even as a newborn child, he had had the power. And perhaps upon birth, his mind had transmitted the shock and pain of birth to the mind of his mother while they were still linked by the umbilical. Perhaps clear, vicious images of birth shock had struck deep into his own mother's mind, amplified her own pain, and brought her brain to hemorrhaging. It seemed the only answer.
        
        Forty years ago, he had mentioned the theory to other Shakers. He would never do that again. They had scorned him, had accused him of stupidity and near-heresy. A Shaker's mother died, they said, because she was being rewarded with an immediate place in heaven for the production of such a gifted child. Some few said it was evil spirits that claimed these women, punishing them for delivering a saint into the world. In any case, all their explanations relied on the supernatural, on spirits and demons and angels and ghosts. Not on hard facts, not on science. When he spoke of a more logical reason, he was ridiculed into flight.
        
        Perhaps, in the east, beyond these mountains, there was evidence of those things he had believed for so long. For this possibility he was risking his life.
        
        ''Well shall you hang there all day or are you coming aground?” Mace asked, leaning out to snare him.
        
        Shaker Sandow looked about him, surprised. “Daydreaming, I guess,” he said. “Yes, pull my tired old carcass in by all means.” He reached out for the huge hand that had been offered him.
        
        
        Mace kept careful watch on each man who came across the canyon on the pulley ropes. It was not that he was so concerned about the lives of strangers and casual acquaintances-but just that each man across meant one less before the cargo and, at last, Gregor. Though the giant could not feel fear for his own well-being, he readily evidenced it for the lives and health of the Shaker and of his step-brother Gregor.
        
        In time, all but two enlisted men had been brought across-and the cargo