by Dean Koontz
At the back of the house, light brightened two ground-floor windows, beyond both of which lay the Arceneauxs’ family room.
Boldly, shoulders back and head high, body glistening, Janet strode onto the veranda as if she were a Valkyrie that had just flown down out of the storm.
“Stay back,” Bucky murmured as he moved past her to the nearest of the lighted windows.
Antoine and Evangeline Arceneaux had two children. Neither son was a candidate for Young American of the Year.
According to Yancy and Helene Bennet, who were dead now but had been truthful when they were alive, sixteen-year-old Preston bullied younger kids in the neighborhood. And just a year ago, he tortured to death the cat belonging to the family across the street, after he had agreed to take care of it while they were away on a week’s vacation.
Twenty-year-old Charles still lived at home, though he neither worked nor attended college. This evening, Janet had started to find herself, but Charles Arceneaux was still looking. He thought that he wanted to be an Internet entrepreneur. He had a trust fund from his paternal grandfather, and he was using that money to research a few areas of online merchandising, seeking the most promising field in which to bring his innovative thinking to bear. According to Yancy, the field that Charles researched as much as ten hours a day was Internet pornography.
The curtains were not closed at the window, and Bucky had an unobstructed view of the family room. Charles was alone, slumped in an armchair, bare feet on a footstool, watching a DVD on a huge plasma-screen television.
The movie did not seem to be pornographic in the sexual sense. A guy in a curly orange wig and clown makeup, holding a chain saw, appeared to be threatening to cut open the face of a fully dressed young woman chained to a larger-than-life-size statue of General George S. Patton. Judging by the production values, in spite of the potential for an antiwar message, this film had not been a candidate for an Oscar, and Bucky was pretty sure that the guy in the clown makeup would carry through with his threat.
Rethinking his strategy, Bucky backed away from the window and returned to Janet. “It’s Charles alone, watching some movie. The rest of them must be in bed. I’m thinking maybe, after all, I’m the one who should stay out of sight. Don’t knock on the door. Tap on the window. Let him see … who you are.”
“You going to photograph this?” she asked.
“I think I’m over the camera.”
“Over it? Aren’t we going to have an album?” Janet asked.
“I don’t think we need an album. I think we’re going to be so busy living this, doing one house after another, that we won’t have time to relive anything.”
“So you’re ready to do one of them?”
“I am more than ready,” Bucky confirmed.
“How many do you think we can do together before morning?”
“I think twenty or thirty, easy.”
Janet’s eyes were bright in the gloom. “I think a hundred.”
“That’s something to shoot for,” Bucky said.
CHAPTER 15
ON THE GLASSED-IN PORCH, planter baskets hung from the ceiling. In the gloom, the ferns cascading from the baskets seemed to be giant spiders perpetually poised to strike.
Not afraid of the troll but not content to sit in the dark with him, either, Erika lit a candle in a faceted red cup. The geometrics of the glass translated the mercurial flame into luminous polygons that shimmered on the troll’s face, which might have been a cubist portrait of Poe’s Red Death if the Red Death in the story had been a funny-looking dwarfish guy with a knobby chin, a lipless slit for a mouth, warty skin, and huge, expressive, beautiful—and eerie—eyes.
As Victor’s wife, Erika was expected to be witty and well-spoken when she was a hostess at events in this house and when she was a guest, with her husband, at other social occasions. Therefore, she had been programmed with an encyclopedia of literary allusions that she could draw upon effortlessly, though she had never read any of the books to which the allusions referred.
In fact, she was strictly forbidden to read books. Erika Four, her predecessor, had spent a lot of time in Victor’s well-stocked library, perhaps with the intention of improving herself and being a better wife. But books corrupted her, and she was put down like a diseased horse.
Books were dangerous. Books were the most dangerous things in the world, at least for any wife of Victor Helios. Erika Five did not know why this should be true, but she understood that if she began to read books, she would be cruelly punished and perhaps terminated.
For a while, from across the table, she and the troll regarded each other with interest, as she drank her cognac and he drank the Far Niente Chardonnay that she had given him. For good reason, she said nothing, and he seemed to understand and to have sympathy for the position in which his few words, spoken earlier, had put her.
When he first came to the window and pressed his forehead to the glass, gazing in at her on the porch, before Erika packed a picnic hamper for him, the troll had said, “Harker.”
Pointing to herself, she had said, “Erika.”
His smile, then, had been an ugly wound. No doubt it would be no less hideous if he smiled again, for he possessed a face that familiarity did not improve.
As tolerant of his unfortunate appearance as a good hostess should be, Erika had continued to stare through the window at him until in his raspy voice he had said, “Hate him.”
Neither of them had spoken again on the troll’s first visit. And for the time being, silence served them well on this second tête-à-tête.
She dared not ask whom he hated, for if he answered with the name of her master, she would be required, by her program, either to restrain and detain him or to warn the appropriate people of the danger that he posed.
Her failure to betray the troll immediately might earn her a beating. On the other hand, if she reported him at once, she might nevertheless be beaten anyway. In this game, the rules were not clear; besides, all the rules applied to her, none to her husband.
At this hour, all of the household staff were in the dormitory at the back of the estate, most likely engaged in the intense and often brutal sexual activity that was the only release from tension allowed their kind.
Victor liked his privacy at night. She suspected that he needed little if any sleep, but she didn’t know what he did when alone that made privacy so important to him. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
The busy rush of rain on the roof and beyond the windows made the silence of the porch, by comparison, intimate, even cozy.
“My hearing is very good,” she said. “If I hear someone coming, I will blow out the candle, and you will at once slip out the door.”
The troll nodded agreement.
Harker …
Because Erika Five had arisen from her creation tank less than twenty-four hours earlier, she was up-to-date on her husband’s life and accomplishments. The events of his day were regularly downloaded directly to the brain of a wife in development, that she might be born fully understanding both his greatness and the frustrations that an imperfect world visited upon a man of his singular genius.
Erika, like other key Alphas, also knew the names of all the Alphas, Betas, Gammas, and Epsilons produced in the Hands of Mercy, as well as what work they performed for their creator. Consequently, the name Harker was familiar to her.
Until a few days before, when something went wrong with him, an Alpha named Jonathan Harker had been a homicide detective with the New Orleans Police Department. In a confrontation with two detectives who were members of the Old Race—O’Connor and Maddison—the renegade Harker was supposedly killed by shotgun fire and by a plunge off a warehouse roof.
The truth was stranger than the official fiction.
Just during the past day, between his two beatings of Erika, Victor performed an autopsy on Harker and discovered that the Alpha’s torso was largely missing. The flesh, internal organs, and some bone structure seemed to have been eaten
away. Fifty or more pounds of the Alpha’s mass had disappeared. From the carcass trailed a severed umbilical cord, suggesting that an unintended life form had developed inside Harker, fed upon him, and separated from its host following the fall from the roof.
Now Erika sipped her cognac. The troll sipped his wine.
Resorting to a literary allusion that she felt appropriate, though she would never fully understand the reference if she never read the dangerous book by Joseph Conrad, Erika said, “Sometimes I wonder if I’m Marlow, far upriver with Kurtz, and ahead of us—and behind us—lies only the heart of an immense darkness.”
The troll’s lipless mouth produced an approximation of a lip-smacking sound.
“You grew inside Harker?” she asked.
The cut-glass container marshaled the light of the amorphous flame into square, rectangular, and triangular tiles that presented the troll’s face as a shimmering red mosaic. “Yes,” he rasped. “I am from what I was.”
“Harker is dead?”
“He who was is dead, but I am who was.”
“You are Jonathan Harker?”
“Yes.”
“Not just a creature who grew in him like a cancer?”
“No.”
“Did he realize you were growing in him?”
“He who was knew of I who am.”
From the tens of thousands of literary allusions through which Erika could scan in an instant, she knew that, in fairy tales, when trolls or manikins or other such beings spoke in either riddles or in a convoluted manner, they were trouble. Nevertheless, she felt a kinship with this creature, and she trusted him.
She said, “May I call you Jonathan?”
“No. Call me Johnny. No. Call me John-John. No. Not that.”
“What shall I call you?”
“You will know my name when my name is known to me.”
“You have all of Jonathan’s memories and knowledge?”
“Yes.”
“Was the change you underwent uncontrolled or intentional?”
The troll smacked the flaps of his mouth together. “He who was thought it was happening to him. I who am realize he made it happen.”
“Unconsciously, you desperately wanted to become someone other than Jonathan Harker.”
“The Jonathan who was … he wanted to be like himself but become other than an Alpha.”
“He wanted to remain a man but be free of his maker’s control,” Erika interpreted.
“Yes.”
“Instead,” she said, “you shed the Alpha body and became … what you are now.”
The troll shrugged. “Shit happens.”
CHAPTER 16
FROM BEHIND A POTTED RAFUS PALM on the veranda of the Arceneaux house, Bucky Guitreau watched as his nude wife rapped lightly on a family-room window. He shifted his weight ceaselessly from one foot to the other, so excited that he could not keep still.
Apparently, Janet had not been heard. She rapped harder on the window.
A moment later, young Charles Arceneaux, the would-be Internet entrepreneur, loomed in the room beyond the window. His startled expression at the sight of a nude neighbor was as extreme as that of a cartoon character.
A member of the Old Race might have thought Charles looked comical just then, might have laughed out loud. Bucky was of the New Race, however, and he didn’t find anything comical. Arceneaux’s startled look only made Bucky want even more ardently to see him slashed, torn, broken, and dead. Such was the current—and growing—intensity of Bucky’s hatred that any expression crossing Charles Arceneaux’s face would inflame his passion for violence.
From between the fronds of the rafus palm, Bucky saw Charles speak. He couldn’t hear the words, but he could read the lips: Mrs. Guitreau? Is that you?
From this side of the window, Janet said, “Oh, Charlie, oh, something terrible has happened.”
Charles stared but did not reply. Judging by the angle of the young man’s head, Bucky knew that Charlie was not staring at Janet’s face.
“Something terrible has happened,” she repeated, to break his hypnotic fascination with her ample yet perky breasts. “Only you can help me, Charlie.”
The moment Charles moved away from the window, Bucky left the cover of the potted palm. He took up a position against the house, beside the door between the family room and the veranda.
As Janet stepped to the French door, she looked as voracious as some primitive tribe’s goddess of death, teeth bared in a humorless grin, nostrils flared, eyes fierce with blood lust, wrathful and merciless.
Bucky worried that Charles, seeing this fearsome incarnation, would suddenly suspect her true intention, refuse to admit her, and raise an alarm.
When she reached the door, however, and turned to gaze in at Arceneaux, her expression was convincingly that of a frightened and helpless woman desperate to find a strong man to lean on with her ample but perky breasts.
Charles did not wrench the door open at once only because, in his eagerness, he fumbled helplessly with the lock. When he got it open, Janet whispered, “Oh, Charlie, I didn’t know where to go, and then … I remembered … you.”
Bucky thought he heard something behind him on the veranda. He looked to his right, over his shoulder, but saw no one.
“What’s wrong, what’s happened?” Charles asked as Janet crossed the threshold into his arms.
“A terrible thing has happened,” Janet said, pressing Charles backward with her body, leaving the door open behind them.
Eager not to miss anything, but hesitant to reveal himself and enter the house before Janet had complete control of Charles, Bucky leaned to his left and peeked through the open door.
Just then Janet bit Charles somewhere that Bucky would never have thought of biting, and simultaneously she crushed his larynx, rendering him unable to scream.
Bucky hurried inside to watch, forgetting about the open door behind him.
Although Janet’s performance lasted significantly less than a minute, there was much for Bucky to see, an education in ferocity and cruelty that the torture specialists of the Third Reich could not have provided to anyone who devoted a year of study to them. He stood in awe of her inventiveness.
Considering the mess in the family room when Janet was done, Bucky was amazed that she had made so little noise, certainly not enough to wake anyone who might be sleeping elsewhere in the house.
On the plasma-screen television, the chain-saw guy in the orange wig and the clown makeup did something to the girl chained to the statue of George S. Patton, something the moviemakers had thought was so unspeakable that audiences would shriek with horror and delight in order to repress the urge to vomit. But by comparison with Janet, the moviemakers were no more imaginative than any child sociopath tearing the wings off flies.
“I was so right,” Janet said. “Killing in the nude is the best thing ever.”
“You think it’s definitely one of your personal core values?”
“Oh, yes. It’s totally PCV.”
Although they did not know the Arceneauxs as well as they had known the Bennets, Janet and Bucky knew that in addition to Charles, four other people lived in this house: sixteen-year-old Preston, who was the neighborhood bully, Antoine and Evangeline, and Evangeline’s mother, Marcella. The grandmother had a downstairs bedroom, and the others were on the second floor.
“I’m ready to do one just as complete as you did Charlie,” Bucky said.
“Do Marcella.”
“Yes. Then we’ll go upstairs.”
“Take off your clothes. Feel the power.”
“I want to do one with my clothes on first,” said Bucky. “So when I do one in the nude, then I’ll have something to compare it to.”
“That’s a good idea.”
Janet strode out of the family room with the power, the grace, and the stealth of a panther, and Bucky followed in high spirits, leaving the door to the veranda open to the night.
CHAPTER 17
BECAUSE
A WOMAN capable of humility, shame, and tenderness presented a more satisfactory punching bag than a woman who could only hate and fear and stew in anger, Victor designed his Erikas to have a wider range of emotions than others of the New Race.
As they drank together on the porch, Erika Five found that her sympathy for the troll quickly ripened into compassion.
Something about him made her want to take him under her wing. Because he was the size of a child, perhaps he strummed a maternal chord in her—though she was barren, as were all New Race women. They did not reproduce; they were produced in a factory, as were sofas and sump pumps, so she most likely had no maternal instinct.
Perhaps his poverty affected her. Once he had burst out of his original Alpha body, the troll possessed no clothes to fit him, no shoes. He had no money for food or shelter, and he was too small and disturbing in appearance to return to work as a homicide detective.
If you were given to literary allusions, you might say he was a Quasimodo for his time—or more poignantly, an Elephant Man, a victim of prejudice against ugliness in a society that worshipped beauty.
Whatever the reason for her compassion, Erika said, “I can make a life for you here. But you must be discreet. It will be a secret life. Only I must know. Would you like to live here free from need?”
His smile would have stampeded horses. “Jocko would like that.” Seeing her bafflement, he said, “Jocko seems to suit me.”
“Swear you’ll conspire with me to keep your presence secret. Swear, Jocko, that you come here with only innocent intentions.”
“Sworn! He who became me was violent. I who was him want peace.”
“Your kind have a reputation for saying one thing and meaning another,” Erika observed, “but if you cause the slightest trouble, please know that I will deal with you severely.”
Puzzled, he said, “Others like me exist?”
“In fairy tales, there are many similar to you. Trolls, ogres, imps, manikins, gremlins … And all the literary allusions referring to such folk suggest they’re full of mischief.”
