Authors: Dean Koontz
CHAPTER 60
IN THE BASEMENT
of Mercy, hiding behind a row of file cabinets, Randal Six hears noise from beyond the walls of his world: first, the hollow sound of a door falling shut in another room.
According to what Randal has overheard while seeming to be lost in his autism, only Father enters and leaves through the outer door of this chamber. Now, after a late dinner, as he often does, Father must be returning with the intention of working through the night.
Crouched at the end of the cabinet row, Randal cocks his head and listens intently. After a moment, he hears the electronic tones of the numbers being entered in an electric-lock keypad on the far side of the outer file-room door.
The ten tones that represent numbers—zero through nine—on telephone, security-system, electric-lock, and other keypads are universal. They do not vary from one manufacturer to another.
He learned this from an educational web site maintained by one of the nation’s largest communications companies. Having downloaded these tones in preparation for this odyssey, he has replayed them hundreds of times until he can unfailingly identify any code by the tones that comprise it.
Because the file-room door intervenes, the tones are muffled. If he didn’t have the enhanced hearing of the New Race, Randal might not be able to identify the code: 368284.
A soft
burrrrr
indicates that the circuit engaging the lock has been broken.
Although the door is not in Randal’s line of sight, the creak of hinges suggests that Father has opened it. Footsteps on vinyl tile reveal that Father has entered the file room.
Out of view of the main aisle, Randal suddenly wonders to what degree, if any, Father’s senses might have been enhanced—and he holds his breath lest the faintest exhalation reveal his presence.
Without hesitation, Father’s footsteps cross the room.
The outer door falls shut behind him, and the
burrrrr
of the disengaged lock is cut short by the hard
snap
of the bolt.
The inner door opens, closes, and Father is now gone into the basement corridor where piles of rubble remind him of a bad day here at the bottom of Mercy.
Patience is a virtue that Randal has in spades. He does not move at once from hiding, but waits a few minutes until Father is almost certainly on another floor, far out of hearing.
Vinyl square by vinyl square, he spells himself to the outer door. Here, as on the other side, there is a keypad. He enters the code: 368284.
The electric lock releases. He puts his hand on the door but cannot find the courage to open it.
Beyond, there is no Mercy. All is new and full of bewildering choices.
He delays so long that the electric lock engages once more.
He enters the code in the keypad. The lock releases:
burrrrr.
He tells himself to open the door. He cannot.
The lock engages once more.
Trembling, he stands before the door, terrified to go through it, but also terrified to remain on this side.
Into his tortured mind comes the memory of the newspaper photo: Arnie O’Connor, autistic but smiling. Arnie is clearly happier than Randal has ever been or ever will be.
A bitter, caustic sense of injustice floods through Randal. This emotion is so intense that he fears it will dissolve him from the inside out if he does not take action to secure for himself the happiness that Arnie O’Connor enjoys.
The little snot. The hateful little worm, selfishly keeping the secret of happiness. What right does
he
have to be happy when a child of Father, superior in every way, lives in misery more than Mercy?
Again he enters the code.
Burrrrr.
He pushes on the door. It opens.
Randal Six spells himself across the threshold, out of Mercy, into the unknown.
CHAPTER 61
THROUGH THE DOOR,
Carson heard scary-movie music. She rang the bell, rang it again before the first series of chimes quite finished echoing through the apartment beyond.
In undershirt, jeans, and stocking feet, Michael answered the door. Tousled hair. Puffy face. Eyes heavy-lidded from the weight of a sleep not fully cast off. He must have dozed in his big green-leatherette recliner.
He looked adorable.
Carson wished he was grungy. Or slovenly. Or geeky. The last thing she wanted to feel toward a partner was physical attraction.
Instead, he looked as cuddly as a teddy bear. Worse, the sight of him filled her with a warm, agreeable feeling consisting largely of affection but not without an element of desire.
Shit.
“It’s just ten o’clock,” she said, pushing past him into the apartment, “and you’re asleep in front of the TV. What’re those orange crumbs on your T-shirt? Cheez Doodles?”
“Exactly,” he said, following her into the living room. “Cheez Doodles. You
are
a detective.”
“Can I assume you’re sober?”
“Nope. Had two diet root beers.”
He yawned, stretched, rubbed at his eyes with the back of one fist. He looked edible.
Carson tried to derail that train of thought. Indicating the massive green recliner, she said, “That is the ugliest lump of a chair I’ve ever seen. Looks like a fungus scraped out of a latrine in Hell.”
“Yeah, but it’s
my
fungus from Hell, and I love it.”
Pointing to the TV, she said,
“Invasion of the Body Snatchers?”
“The first remake.”
“You’ve seen it like what—ten times?”
“Probably twelve.”
“When it comes to glamour,” she said, “you’re the Cary Grant of your generation.”
He grinned at her. She knew why. Her curmudgeonly attitude did not fool him. He sensed the effect that he had on her.
Turning away from him as she felt her face flush, Carson picked up the remote control and switched off the TV. “The case is breaking. We’ve gotta move.”
“Breaking how?”
“Guy jumped off a roof, smashed himself into alley jam, leaving a freezer full of body parts. They say he’s the Surgeon. Maybe he is—but he didn’t kill them all.”
Sitting on the edge of the recliner, tying his shoes, Michael said, “What—he’s got a kill buddy or a copycat?”
“Yeah. One or the other. We dismissed that idea too easily.”
“I’ll grab a clean shirt and a jacket,” he said.
“Maybe change the Cheez Doodle T while you’re at it,” she said.
“Absolutely. I wouldn’t want to embarrass you in front of some criminal scum,” he said, and stripped off the T-shirt as he left the room.
He knew exactly what he was doing: giving her a look. She took it. Good shoulders, nice abs.
CHAPTER 62
ERIKA ROAMED
the silent mansion, pausing frequently to study Victor’s collection of European and Asian antiques.
As they did every night, the nine members of the household staff—butler, maids, chef, cleaning crew, gardeners—had retired to their quarters above the ten-car garage at the back of the property.
They lived dormitory-style, the sexes integrated. They were provided with a minimum of amenities.
Victor seldom needed servants after ten o’clock—even on those nights when he was home—but he preferred not to allow his household staff, all members of the New Race, to lead lives separate from the mansion. He wanted them to be available twenty-four hours a day. He insisted that the only focus of their lives should be his comfort.
Erika was pained by their circumstances. They were essentially hung on a rack, like tools, to await the next use he had for them.
The fact that her circumstances were not dissimilar to theirs
had
occurred to her. But she enjoyed a greater freedom to fill her days and nights with pursuits that interested her.
As her relationship with Victor matured, she hoped to be able to gain influence with him. She might be able to use that influence to improve the lot of the household staff.
As this concern for the staff had grown, she found herself less often despairing. Following her interests—and thus refining herself—was fine, but having a
purpose
proved more satisfying.
In the main drawing room, she paused to admire an exquisite pair of Louis XV ormolu-mounted boulle marquetry and ebony
bas d’armoires.
The Old Race could create objects of breathtaking beauty unlike anything the New Race had done. This puzzled Erika; it did not seem to square with Victor’s certainty that the New Race was superior.
Victor himself had an eye for the art of the Old Race. He had paid two and a quarter million for this pair of
bas d’armoires.
He said that some members of the Old Race excelled at creating things of beauty because they were inspired by anguish. By their deep sense of loss. By their search for meaning.
Beauty came at the expense, however, of certitude, efficiency. Creating a beautiful piece of art, Victor said, was not an admirable use of energy because it in no way furthered mankind’s conquest of itself or of nature.
A race without pain, on the other hand, a race that was
told
its meaning and explicitly given its purpose by its creator, would never need beauty, because it would have an infinite series of great tasks ahead of it. Working as one, with the single-minded purpose of a hive, all members of the New Race would tame nature, conquer the challenges of Earth as ordinary humanity had failed to do, and then become the masters of the other planets, the stars.
All barriers would fall to them.
All adversaries would be crushed.
New Men and New Women would not need beauty because they would have
power.
Those who felt powerless created art; beauty was their substitute for the power they could not attain. The New Race would need no substitute.
Yet Victor collected the art and the antiques of the Old Race. Erika wondered why, and she wondered if Victor himself knew why.
She had read enough literature to be sure that Old Race authors would have called him a cruel man. But Victor’s art collection gave Erika hope that in him existed a core of pity and tenderness that might with patience be tapped.
Still in the main drawing room, she came to a large painting by Jan van Huysum, signed and dated 1732. For this still life, Victor had paid more millions.
In the painting, white and purple grapes appeared ready to burst with juice at the slightest touch. Succulent peaches and plums spilled across a table, caressed by sunshine in such a way that they seemed to glow from within.
The artist realistically portrayed this ripe bounty yet managed, subtly and without sentimentality, to suggest the ephemeral quality of even nature’s sweetest gifts.
Mesmerized by van Huysum’s genius, Erika was subconsciously aware of a furtive scrabbling. The noise grew louder, until at last it distracted her from the painting.
When she turned to survey the drawing room, she at once saw the source of the sound. Like a five-legged crab on some strange blind mission, a severed hand crawled across the antique Persian carpet.
CHAPTER 63
DETECTIVE DWIGHT FRYE
lived in a bungalow so overgrown with Miss Manila bougainvillea that the main roof and the porch roof were entirely concealed. Floral bracts—bright pink in daylight but more subdued now—dripped from every eave, and the entire north wall was covered with a web of vine trunks that had woven random-pattern bars across the windows.
The front lawn had not been mowed in weeks. The porch steps had sagged for years. The house might not have been painted for a decade.
If Frye rented, his landlord was a tightwad. If he owned this place, he was white trash.
The front door stood open.
Through the screen door, Carson could see a muddy yellow light back toward the kitchen. When she couldn’t find a bell push, she knocked, then knocked louder, and called out, “Detective Frye? Hey, Dwight, it’s O’Connor and Maddison.”
Frye hove into sight, backlit by the glow in the kitchen. He wove along the hall like a seaman tacking along a ship’s passageway in a troublesome swell.
When he reached the front door, he switched on the porch light and blinked at them through the screen. “What do you assholes want?”
“A little Southern hospitality for starters,” Michael said.
“I was born in Illinois,” Frye said. “Never shoulda left.”
He wore baggy pants with suspenders. His tank-style, sweat-soaked undershirt revealed his unfortunate breasts so completely that Carson knew she’d have a few nightmares featuring them.
“The Surgeon case is breaking,” she said. “There’s something we need to know.”
“Told you in the library—I got no interest in that anymore.”
Frye’s hair and face glistened as if he had been bobbing for olives in a bowl of oil.
Getting a whiff of him, Carson took a step back from the door and said, “What I need to know is when you and Harker went to Bobby Allwine’s apartment.”
Frye said, “Older I get, the less I like the sloppy red cases. Nobody strangles anymore. They all chop and slice. It’s the damn sick Hollywood influence.”
“Allwine’s apartment?” she reminded him. “When were you there?”
“You listening to me
at all
?” Frye asked. “I was never there. Maybe you get off on torn-out hearts and dripping guts, but I’m getting queasy in my midlife. It’s
your
case, and welcome to it.”
Michael said, “Never there? So how did Harker know about the black walls, the razor blades?”
Frye screwed up his face as if to spit but then said, “What razor blades? What’s got you girls in such a pissy mood?”
To Michael, Carson said, “You smell truth here?”
“He reeks with it,” Michael said.
“Reeks—is that some kind of wisecrack?” Frye demanded.
“I’ve got to admit it is,” Michael said.
“I wasn’t half drunk and feelin’ charitable,” Frye said, “I’d open this here screen door and kick your giblets clean off.”
“I’m grateful for your restraint,” Michael said.
“Is that some kind of sarcasm?”
“I’ve got to admit it is,” Michael said.
Turning from the door, heading for the porch steps, Carson said, “Let’s go, let’s move.”
“But me and the Swamp Thing,” Michael said, “we’re having such a nice chat.”
“That’s another wisecrack, ain’t it?” Frye demanded.
“I’ve got to admit it is,” Michael said as he followed Carson off the porch.
As she thought back over her encounters with Harker during the past couple of days, Carson headed toward the car at a run.