by Dean Koontz
“Your brother is a heavy burden. You carry him with grace.”
Alarmed, she said, “You. Aren’t. In. My. Life.”
He put down the damp cloth with which he’d been wiping out the popcorn machine, and he turned to her again, with only the candy counter between them.
“Is that what you want?” he asked. “Is it really? If that’s what you want, why did you come to hear the rest of it? Because you didn’t come just to tell me to stay away. You came with questions.”
His insight and his quiet amusement did not comport with the brutal look of him.
When she stood nonplussed, he said, “I mean no harm to Arnie or to you. Your enemy is Helios.”
She blinked in surprise. “Helios? Victor Helios? Owns Biovision, big philanthropist?”
“He has the arrogance to call himself ‘Helios,’ after the Greek god of the sun. Helios…the life-giver. That isn’t his real name.” Without emphasis, without a raised eyebrow, with no apparent irony, he said, “His real name is Frankenstein.”
After what he had said in Bobby Allwine’s apartment, after his riff about being made from pieces of criminals and given life force by a thunderstorm, she should have expected this development. She did not expect it, however, and it disappointed her.
Carson had felt that Deucalion was special in some way other than his formidable size and appearance, and for reasons that she couldn’t articulate to her satisfaction, she had wanted him to be something special. She needed to have the rug of routine pulled out from under her, to be tumbled headlong into the mystery of life.
Maybe mystery was a synonym for change. Maybe she needed a different kind of excitement from what the job usually supplied. She suspected, however, that she needed more meaning in her life than the homicide assignment currently gave her, though she didn’t know quite what she meant by meaning.
Deucalion disappointed her because this Frankenstein business was just another flavor of the nutcase rants she encountered more days than not in the conduct of ordinary investigations. He’d seemed strange but substantive; now he sounded hardly different from the pinwheel-eyed ginks who thought that CIA operatives or aliens were after them.
“Yeah,” she said. “Frankenstein.”
“The legend isn’t fiction. It’s fact.”
“Of course it is.” Disappointment of various kinds had the same effect on her: a craving for chocolate. Pointing through the glass top of the counter, she said, “I’d like one of those Hershey’s bars with almonds.”
“Long ago, in Austria, they burned his laboratory to the ground. Because he created me.”
“Bummer. Where are your neck bolts? Did you have them surgically removed?”
“Look at me,” he said solemnly.
She gazed longingly at the Hershey’s bar for a moment but at last met his gaze.
Ghostly radiance pulsed through his eyes. This time she was so close that even if she had wanted to, she could not have dismissed it as a reflection of some natural light source.
“I suspect,” he said, “that stranger things than I now roam this city…and he’s begun to lose control of them.”
He stepped to the cash register, opened a drawer beneath it, and withdrew a newspaper clipping and a rolled paper tied with a ribbon.
The clipping included a photo of Victor Helios. The paper was a pencil portrait of the same man a decade younger.
“I tore this from a frame in Victor’s study two centuries ago, so I would never forget his face.”
“This doesn’t prove anything. Are the Hershey’s bars for sale or not?”
“The night I was born, Victor needed a storm. He got the storm of the century.”
Deucalion rolled up his right sleeve, revealing three shiny metal disks embedded in his flesh.
Admittedly, Carson had never seen anything like this. On the other hand, this was an age when some people pierced their tongues with studs and even had the tips of their tongues split for a reptilian effect.
“Contact points,” he explained. “All over my body. But something was strange about the lightning…such power.”
He didn’t mention the ragged white keloid scars that joined his wrist to his forearm.
If he was living out a Frankenstein-monster fantasy, he had gone to extremes to conform his physical appearance to the tale. This was a bit more impressive than a Star Trek fan wearing a jumpsuit and Spock ears.
Against her better judgment, even if she couldn’t believe him, Carson felt herself wanting to believe in him.
This desire to believe surprised her, disturbed her. She didn’t understand it. So not Carson O’Connor.
“The storm gave me life,” he continued, “but it also gave me something just short of immortality.”
Deucalion picked up the newspaper clipping, stared for a moment at the photo of Victor Helios, then crushed it in his fist.
“I thought my maker was long dead. But from the beginning, he’s been after his own immortality—of one kind or another.”
“Quite a story,” she said. “Does abduction by extraterrestrials come into it at any point?”
In Carson’s experience, kooks could not tolerate mockery. They reacted with anger or they accused her of being part of whatever conspiracy they believed had targeted them.
Deucalion merely threw aside the wadded clipping, withdrew a Hershey’s bar from the display case, and put the candy on the counter in front of her.
Unwrapping the chocolate, she said, “You expect me to believe two hundred years? So the lightning that night, it—what?—altered his genetics?”
“No. The lightning didn’t touch him. Only me. He got this far…some other way.”
“Lots of fiber, fresh fruit, no red meat.”
She couldn’t tweak him.
No more of the eerie luminosity passed through his eyes, but she saw in them something else that she had never glimpsed in the eyes of another. An electrifying directness. She felt so exposed that a chill closed like a fist around her heart.
Loneliness in that gaze, and wisdom, and humility. And…more that was enigmatic. His eyes were a singularity, and though there was much to be read in them, she hadn’t the language to understand what she read, for the soul that looked out at her through those lenses suddenly seemed as alien as that of any creature born on another world.
Chocolate cloyed in her mouth, her throat. The candy tasted oddly like blood, as if she had bitten her tongue.
She put down the Hershey’s bar.
“What has Victor been doing all this time?” Deucalion wondered. “What has he been…making?”
She remembered Bobby Allwine’s cadaver, naked and dissected on the autopsy table—and Jack Rogers’s insistence that its freakish innards were the consequence not of mutation but of design.
Deucalion appeared to pluck a shiny quarter from the ether. He flipped it off his thumb, caught it in midair, held it for a moment in his fist. When he opened his hand, the quarter wasn’t there.
Here was the trick that Arnie had been trying to imitate.
Turning over the candy bar that Carson had just put down on the glass counter, Deucalion revealed the quarter.
She sensed that this peculiar impromptu performance was meant to be more than entertainment. It was meant to convince her that the truth of him was as magical as he had presented it.
He picked up the quarter—his hands so dexterous for their great size—and flipped it high and past her head.
When she turned to follow its arc, she lost sight of the quarter high in the air.
She waited for the ping and clatter of the coin bouncing off the marble floor of the lobby. Silence.
When the silence endured beyond all reasonable expectation of the quarter’s return, Carson looked at Deucalion.
He had another quarter. He snapped it off his thumb.
More intently than before, she tracked it—but lost it as it reached the apex of its arc.
She held her breath, waiting for the falling coin to
ring off the floor, but the sound didn’t come, didn’t come—and then she needed to breathe.
“Am I still not in your life?” he asked. “Or do you want to hear more?”
CHAPTER 52
SCONCES SPREAD RADIANT amber fans on the walls, but at this hour the lights are dim and shadows dominate.
Randal Six has only now realized that the blocks of vinyl-tile flooring in the hallway are like the squares in a crossword puzzle. This geometry gives him comfort.
He visualizes in his mind one letter of his name with every step that he takes, spelling himself along the tile floor, block by block, toward freedom.
This is the dormitory floor, where the most recently awakened members of the New Race are housed until they are polished and ready to infiltrate the city.
Half the doors stand open. Beyond some of them, naked bodies are locked in every imaginable sexual posture.
Especially in their early weeks, the tank-born are filled with anguish that arises from their knowledge of what they are. They also suffer intense anxiety because they come to full consciousness with the immediate understanding that, as Victor’s chattel, they do not control the primary issues of their lives and possess no free will; therefore, in their beginning is their end, and their lives are mapped without hope of mystery.
They are sterile but vigorous. In them, sex has been divorced entirely from the purpose of procreation and functions solely as a vent for stress.
They copulate in groups, tangled and writhing, and it seems to Randal Six, whose autism makes him different from them, that these thrusts provide them no pleasure, only release from tension.
The sounds issuing from these orgiastic groups have no quality of joy, no suggestion of tenderness. These are bestial noises, low and rough, insistent almost to the point of violence, eager to the point of desperation.
The slap of flesh on flesh, the wordless grunts, the guttural cries that seem charged with rage—all this frightens Randal Six as he passes these rooms. He feels the urge to run but dares not step on the lines between the vinyl blocks; he must place each foot entirely in a square, which requires a deliberative pace.
The hallway increasingly seems like a tunnel, the chambers on both sides like catacombs in which the restless dead embrace in cold desire.
Heart knocking as if to test the soundness of his ribs, Randal spells his name often enough to reach an intersection of corridors. Using the final letter, he spells a crossing word—left—which allows him to turn in that direction.
From the letter t, he sidesteps four blocks, spelling right backward as he goes. With the letter r as his new beginning, he is able to spell his name and, thereby, proceed forward along this new hall, toward the choice of elevators or a stairwell.
CHAPTER 53
ERIKA TOOK DINNER alone in the master bedroom, at a nineteenth-century French marquetry table featuring a motif of autumn bounty—apples, oranges, plums, grapes, all spilling from a horn of plenty—rendered with exquisitely inlaid woods of numerous varieties.
Like all those of the New Race, her metabolism was as fine-tuned and as powerful as a Ferrari engine. This required a formidable appetite.
Two six-ounce steaks—filet mignon, prepared medium-rare—were accompanied by a rasher of crisp bacon, buttered carrots with thyme, and snow peas with sliced jicama. A separate chafing dish contained braised potatoes in blue cheese sauce. For dessert waited an entire peach cobbler with a side dish of vanilla ice cream coddled in a bowl of crushed ice.
While she ate, she stared at the scalpel that had been left on her bath mat earlier in the day. It lay across her bread plate as if it were a butter knife.
She didn’t know how the scalpel related to the furtive ratlike noises that she had been hearing, but she was certain that the two were connected.
There is no world but this one. All flesh is grass, and withers, and the fields of the mind, too, are burned black by death and do not grow green again. That conviction is essential to the creed of materialism; and Erika is a soldier in the determined army that will inevitably conquer the Earth and impose that philosophy pole to pole.
Yet, though her creator forbade belief in the supernatural and though her laboratory origins suggested that intelligent life can be manufactured without divine inspiration, Erika could not shake a sense of the uncanny in these recent events. The scalpel seemed to sparkle not solely with the sheen of surgical steel but also with…magic.
As if by her thoughts she had opened a door between this world and another, a force inexplicable switched on the plasma TV. Erika looked up with a start as the screen came alive.
The cordless Crestron panel, by which the TV was controlled, currently lay on Victor’s nightstand, untouched.
Some bodiless Presence seemed to be channel surfing. Images flipped rapidly across the screen, faster, faster.
As Erika put down her fork and pushed her chair back from the table, the Presence selected a dead channel. Ablizzard of electronic snow whitened the big screen.
Sensing that something bizarre—and something of significance—was about to happen, she rose to her feet.
The voice—deep, rough, and ominous—came to her out of the dead channel, through the Dolby SurroundSound speakers in the ceiling: “Kill him. Kill him.”
Erika moved away from the table, toward the TV, but halted after two steps when it seemed unwise to get too close to the screen.
“Shove the scalpel in his eye. Into his brain. Kill him.”
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Kill him. Thrust it deep, and twist. Kill him.”
“Kill whom?”
The Presence did not answer.
She repeated her question.
On the plasma screen, out of the snow, a pale ascetic face began to form. For a moment, she assumed this must be the face of a spirit, but as it developed character, she recognized Victor, eyes closed and features relaxed, as though this were his death mask.
“Kill him.”
“He made me.”
“To use.”
“I can’t.”
“You’re strong.”
“Impossible.”
“Kill him.”
“Who are you?”
“Evil,” said the voice, and she knew that this Presence was not speaking of itself, but of Victor.
If she participated in this conversation, she would inevitably consider betraying Victor even if only to make an argument that it was impossible to raise a hand against him. The mere act of thinking about killing her maker could bring her own death.
Every thought creates a unique electrical signature in the brain. Victor had identified those signatures that represented the thought of taking violent action against him.
Implanted in Erika’s brain—as in the brain of every member of the New Race—was a nanodevice programmed to recognize the thought signature of patricide, of deicide.
If ever she picked up a weapon with the intention of using it against Victor, that spy within would instantly recognize her intent. It would plunge her into a state of paralysis from which only Victor could retrieve her.
If thereafter he allowed her to live, hers would be a life of greater suffering. He would fill all her days with imaginative punishment.
Consequently, she moved now to the Crestron touch panel on the nightstand and used it to switch off the TV. The plasma screen went dark.
Waiting with the control in hand, she expected the TV to switch itself on again, but it remained off.
She did not believe in spirits. She must not believe. Such belief was disobedience. Disobedience would lead to termination.
The mysterious voice urging murder was best left mysterious. To pursue an understanding of it would be to chase it off a cliff, to certain death.
When she realized that she was trembling with fear, Erika returned to her chair at the table.
She began to eat again, but now her appetite was of the nervous variety. She ate voraciously, trying to quell a hunger that food could
never satisfy: a hunger for meaning, for freedom.
Her tremors—and the fear of death they represented—surprised her. There had been times since her “birth” six weeks ago when she had thought death desirable.
Not now. Something had changed. When she had not been looking, that thing with feathers, hope, had come into her heart.
CHAPTER 54
ROY PRIBEAUX HAD GUNS.
He retrieved them from the closet where they were stored in custom cases. He examined them lovingly, one by one, cleaned and lubricated them as necessary, preparing them for use.
Throughout his adolescence and twenties, he had adored guns. Revolvers, pistols, shotguns, rifles—he had a core collection of each type of weapon.
Shortly after his twentieth birthday, when he had come into his inheritance, he bought a Ford Explorer, loaded it with his favorite firearms, and toured the South and Southwest.
Until that time, he had only killed animals.
He hadn’t been a hunter. He’d never acquired a hunting license. Tramping around in the woods and fields didn’t appeal to him. His prey were domestic and farm animals.
On the road at twenty, he targeted people for the first time. For several years he was carefree and happy.
As are many people in their twenties, Roy had been idealistic. He believed that he could make this a better society, a better world.
Even then, he’d realized that life was made tolerable only by the existence of beauty. Beauty in nature. Beauty in architecture and art and in objects of human manufacture. Beauty among human beings.
From childhood, he himself had been strikingly attractive, and he had been aware how the sight of him lifted people’s spirits and how his company improved their moods.
He intended to make the world a happier place by eliminating ugly people wherever he found them. And he found them everywhere.
In eighteen states as far east as Alabama, as far north as Colorado, as far west as Arizona, and as far south as Texas, Roy traveled to kill. He destroyed ugly humanity where circumstances assured that he could strike without risk of apprehension.
He employed such a variety of fine weapons over such an enormous geographical area that his many scores were never linked as the work of one perpetrator. He killed at a distance with rifles, at forty yards or less with 12-gauge shotguns loaded with buckshot, and close-up with revolvers or pistols as the mood took him.
