Wilderness by Dean Koontz EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Dean Koontz
- Language: English
- Genre: 45-Minute Romance Short Reads
- Format: PDF/ EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
My mother claimed that in any mirror I had used, she could see
my face rather than her own, my face and my singular eyes, and she
could not thereafter have the mirror in the house. She shattered it
and swept up the pieces without daring to look at them, because she
said that somehow every shard contained a full image of my face,
not merely a portion of it. She could hardly tolerate the sight of me
even occasionally, and she most often looked past me or at
something else altogether when we were in conversation.
Consequently, seeing my countenance replicated in a multitude of
jagged fragments of silver-backed glass, she nearly came undone.
Although my mother drank and used some drugs, I believed she
told the truth about the mirrors. She never lied to me, and in her
troubled way she loved me. Because of her beauty, I thought that
she, perhaps more than some other women, must have been
anguished to have brought into the world someone of my
appearance.
Encircled by a vast forest, we lived in a cozy house at the end of
a long dirt road, miles from the nearest neighbor. By some means
she would never discuss, she’d made all the money that she would
need for a lifetime, though in acquiring it, she had also acquired
enemies who would have found her had she taken refuge anywhere
but in a place as remote as that where she had settled.
My father had been a romantic who loved the idea of love more
than he loved her. Restless and certain that somewhere he would
nd the ideal for which he yearned, he left before I was born.
Mother named me Addison. I share her last name, which is
Goodheart.
On the night of my birth, which followed a dicult labor, a
midwife named Adelaide delivered me in Mother’s bedroom.
Adelaide was a good country woman and God-fearing, but at the
sight of me, she would have smothered me or broken my neck if
Mother hadn’t been able to draw a pistol from a nightstand drawer.
Perhaps because she worried about an attempted-murder charge or
because fear motivated her to escape that house under any terms,
the midwife swore never to speak of me and never to return. As far
as the world was concerned, I was born dead.
I could use only the mirror in my small room, a full-length
looking glass on the back of my closet door. Occasionally I stood
before it to study myself, though less often as the years went by. I
couldn’t change my appearance or begin to understand what I might
be, and time spent in self-consideration gained me nothing.
As I grew older, my mother found herself less able to tolerate my
presence, and I was denied the house for days at a time.
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