Gentle Is the Angel of Death (Nameless: Season Two) by Dean Koontz

Author:Dean Koontz [Koontz, Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-09T16:00:00+00:00

10

The bizarre customers are ordering drinks and dinner, talking and laughing, as if they are unaware of their strangeness. Although they pay no attention to Dr. Henry Siphuncle, although they never so much as glance at him, as if he’s invisible, he knows they must be here because of him. The two Down syndrome children are captivated by some tale related by their warrior father whose right hand is a prosthetic. Four adult Down syndrome people are gathered at a table of their own. Here is a man whose face is twisted by hideous burn scars. Over there is a blind man in the company of a woman so homely that even a sightless partner ought to be able to detect, by touch, her repulsive plainness. A child with spina bifida at table in a wheelchair. Henry is chilled by the sight of an albino woman whose skin is even paler than her white hair, whose eyes are pink.

To the doctor, the most ghastly and inexplicable of his fellow diners is a hunchbacked man with advanced acromegaly, the hormonal disorder that afflicted the Elephant Man. He wears a roomy gray coat to hide deformities of his body; the hood is thrown back. His skull is grievously misshapen: beetling slab of brow, protruding jaw, fearsome countenance. The condition is well understood by modern medicine; if diagnosed early, it’s treatable with medication and radiation, or surgery to remove the adenoma in the pituitary gland, the benign tumor that causes the excess production of growth hormone. It’s an affliction of the nineteenth century; citizens of the twenty-first should not have to be disturbed by the sight of someone with this advanced a case of acromegaly.

Henry has lost his appetite. A few sips of his martini remain in the glass, but the thought of consuming even that restorative liquid induces a wave of nausea. These people have gathered here to harm him. Somehow they know the nature of his life’s work, which they evidently misunderstand and take personally. They mean to avenge those whom he so mercifully dispatched. Because he is a man of profound kindness, he has never before acknowledged what now, suddenly, he accepts as truth: that every ugly or disabled person, every imperfect individual, is as wretched within as he or she is deformed on the outside. He sees now that they are not pitiable and not merely a burden to society; they are evil, dangerous.

He is paralyzed by the prospect of getting to his feet and leaving the restaurant, of having to pass among these creatures. Second by second, he finds them increasingly sinister, and he intuits that terrible violence will be committed against him. He is not capable of defending himself. He is a gentle man who has always freed the sick and feeble from this world with as little pain as possible, with pity that those gathered here will not grant him.

As he worriedly surveys the restaurant, he discovers that the man with acromegaly is staring at him. The eyes set deep under a thick brow of bone are bright with hatred.

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