Authors: Dean Koontz
CHAPTER 64
AFTER CUFFING JENNA'S WRISTS
and ankles to the autopsy table in his bedroom, Jonathan Harker used a pair of scissors to cut away her clothes.
With a damp cotton ball, he gently cleaned the blood from around her left nostril. Already, the bleeding from her nose seemed to have stopped.
Each time that she began to wake, he used the squeeze bottle to dribble two or three drops of chloroform on her upper lip, just under her nostrils. Inhaling the fumes as the fluid rapidly evaporated, she retreated again from consciousness.
When the woman was naked, Jonathan touched her where he wished, curious about his reaction. Rather, he was curious about his
lack
of a reaction.
Sex—disconnected from the power of procreation—was the primary means by which members of the New Race relieved tension. They were available to one another on request, to a degree that even the most libertine members of the Old Race would find shocking.
They were capable of performance on demand. They did not need beauty or emotion or any form of tender feeling to stimulate their desire.
Desire in them did not encompass love, merely
need.
Young men coupled with old women, old women with young women, young girls with old men, the thin with the fat, the beautiful with the ugly, in every combination, each with the sole purpose to satisfy himself, with no obligations to the other, with no greater affection than they had toward the food they ate, with no expectation that sex would lead to a relationship.
Indeed, personal relationships between members of the New Race were discouraged. Jonathan sometimes suspected that as a species they were hardwired to be incapable of relationships in any of the ways that the Old Race experienced and defined them.
Couples committed to each other are impediments to the infinite series of conquests that is to be the uniform purpose of every member of the New Race. So are friendships. So are families.
For the world to be as one, every thinking creature must share the same drive, the same goal. They must live by a system of values so simplified as to allow no room for the concept of morality and the differences of opinion that it fosters.
Because friendships and families are distractions from the great unified purpose of the species, the ideal citizen, Father says, must be a loner in his personal life. As a loner, he is able to commit his passion fully to the triumph and the glory of the New Race.
Touching Jenna as he wished, unable to stir within himself the need that passed for desire, Jonathan suspected that his kind were also hardwired to be incapable of—or at least disinterested in—sex with members of the Old Race.
With their basic education via direct-to-brain data downloading comes a programmed contempt for the Old Race. Contempt, of course, can lead to a sense of righteous domination that includes sexual exploitation. This does not happen with the New Race, perhaps because their programmed contempt for nature’s form of humanity includes a subtle element of disgust.
Among those created in the tanks, only Father’s wife was allowed desire for one of the Old Race. But in a sense, he was not of the Old Race anymore, but was the god of the New.
Caressing Jenna, whose body was lovely and whose exterior form could pass for that of any woman of the New Race, Jonathan not only remained detumescent but also became vaguely repulsed by her.
How strange that this lesser creature, who was the dirty link between lower animals and the superior New Race, nevertheless might have within her the thing that Jonathan himself seemed to be missing, the organ or the gland or the neural matrix that enabled her to be happy nearly all the time.
The time had come to cut.
When she groaned and her eyelids fluttered, he applied a few more drops of chloroform to her upper lip, and she subsided.
He rolled a wheeled IV rack beside the table. From it hung a bag of glucose-saline solution.
He tied a rubber-tube tourniquet around Jenna’s right arm and found a suitable blood vessel. He inserted an intravenous cannula by which the glucose-saline would be infused into her bloodstream, and removed the tourniquet.
The drip line between the solution bag and the cannula featured a drug port. He inserted a large, full syringe of a potent sedative, which he would be able to administer in multiple, measured doses, as required.
To keep Jenna perfectly still during dissection, he must put her in deep sedation. When he wanted her awake to answer questions that he might have about what he found inside her, he could deny her the sedative.
Because she might cry out even during sedation and alarm the residents in the apartment below, Jonathan now wadded a rag and stuffed it in her mouth. He sealed her lips with duct tape.
When he pressed the tape in place, Jenna’s eyes fluttered, opened. For a moment she was confused, disoriented—and then not.
As her eyes widened with terror, Jonathan said, “I know that your kind can’t turn off physical pain at will, as we can. So I’ll wake you as seldom as possible to get your explanation of what I find inside you.”
CHAPTER 65
WITH A SUCTION-ADHERED
emergency beacon on the roof above the driver’s door, Carson cruised fast on surface streets.
Struggling to absorb everything she had told him, Michael said, “The guy you saw in Allwine’s apartment, he owns a movie theater?”
“The Luxe.”
“The nutcase who says he’s made from parts of criminals and brought alive by lightning—he owns a movie theater? I would have thought a hot-dog stand. A tire-repair shop.”
“Maybe he’s not a nutcase.”
“A hamburger joint.”
“Maybe he’s what he says he is.”
“A beauty salon.”
“You should’ve seen what he did with those quarters.”
“I can tie a knot in a cherry stem using my tongue,” Michael said, “but that doesn’t make me supernatural.”
“I didn’t say he was supernatural. He says part of what the lightning brought him that night, in addition to life, was…an understanding of the quantum structure of the universe.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But somehow it explains how he makes the coins vanish.”
“Any half-good magician can make a coin vanish, and they’re not all wizards of quantum physics.”
“This was more than cheap magic. Anyway, Deucalion said some of their kind are sure to have a strong death wish.”
“Carson—what kind?”
Instead of answering his question, aware that she must lead him a careful step at a time toward her ultimate revelation, Carson said, “Allwine and his friend were in the library, poring through aberrant psychology texts, trying to understand their anguish.”
“Don’t drive so fast.”
Accelerating, Carson said, “So the books weren’t pulled off the shelves in a struggle. There
wasn’t
a struggle. That’s why the scene was so neat in spite of the apparent violence.”
“Apparent? Allwine’s
heart
was cut out.”
“Hearts. Plural. But he probably
asked
his friend to kill him.”
“‘Hey, pal, do me a favor and cut my heart out?’ He couldn’t just slit his own wrists, take poison, bore himself to death with multiple viewings of
The English Patient
?”
“No. Deucalion said their kind are built to be incapable of suicide.”
With a sigh of frustration, Michael said, “Their kind. Here we go again.”
“The proscription against suicide—it’s there in the original diary. I saw it. After the coins, after I started to accept…then Deucalion showed me.”
“Diary? Whose diary?”
She hesitated.
“Carson?”
“This is going to be a real test.”
“What test?”
“A test of you, me, our partnership here.”
“Don’t drive so fast,” he cautioned.
This time, she didn’t react to his admonition by accelerating. She didn’t slow down, either, but she didn’t pump up more speed. A little concession to help win him over.
“This is weird stuff,” she warned.
“What—I don’t have a capacity for weird? I have a fabulous capacity for weird.
Whose diary?
”
She took a deep breath. “Victor’s diary. Victor Frankenstein.” When he stared at her in flabber-gasted silence, she said, “Maybe this sounds crazy—”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
“But I think the legend is true, like Deucalion says. Victor Helios is Victor Frankenstein.”
“What have you done with the
real
Carson O’Connor?”
“Deucalion—he was Victor’s first…I don’t know…his first creation.”
“See, right away, I start getting geeky Renaissance Fair vibes from the name. It sounds like the Fourth Musketeer or something. What kind of name is Deucalion, anyway?”
“He named himself. It’s from mythology. Deucalion was the son of Prometheus.”
“Oh, of course,” Michael said. “Deucalion Prometheus, son of Fred Prometheus. I remember him now.”
“Deucalion is his only name, first and last.”
“Like Cher.”
“In classic mythology, Prometheus was the brother of Atlas. He shaped humans out of clay and gave them the spark of life. He taught humanity several arts, and in defiance of Zeus, he gave us the gift of fire.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t have fallen asleep in school so often if my teacher had been driving the classroom at eighty miles an hour. For God’s sake, slow down.”
“Anyway, Deucalion has Victor’s original diary. It’s written in German, and it’s full of anatomical drawings that include an improved circulatory system with two hearts.”
“Maybe if you give it to Dan Rather and
Sixty Minutes,
they’ll do a segment on it, but it sounds like a forgery to me.”
She wanted to punch him. To temper that impulse, she reminded herself of how cuddly he had looked back at his apartment.
Instead of hitting him, she pumped the brakes and slid the plainwrap sedan to the curb in front of Fullbright’s Funeral Home.
“A good cop has to have an open mind,” she said.
“Agreed. But it doesn’t help much to have one
so
open that the wind blows through with a mournful, empty sound.”
CHAPTER 66
LIFE IN THE HOUSE
of Victor Frankenstein was certain to involve more macabre moments than life in the house of Huckleberry Finn.
Nevertheless, the sight of a severed hand crawling across the drawing-room carpet amazed even Erika, a man-made woman equipped with two hearts. She stood transfixed for perhaps a minute, unable to move.
No science could explain an ambulatory hand. This seemed to be a supernatural manifestation as surely as would be an ectoplasmic human figure floating above a séance table.
Yet Erika felt less fear than amazement, less amazement than wonder. Her heart beat faster the longer that she watched the hand, and a not-unpleasant thrill made her tremble.
Instinctively, she knew that the hand was aware of her. It had no eyes, no sense other than touch—and should not possess a sense of touch, either, considering that it had no nervous system, no
brain
—yet somehow it
knew
that she was watching it.
This must have been the thing that she’d heard moving furtively through the bedroom, under the bed, the thing rattling the contents of the bathroom cabinet. The thing that had left the scalpel on her bath mat.
That last thought led her to the realization that the hand must be merely the tool of whatever entity had spoken to her through the television screen and had encouraged her to kill Victor. As it used the TV, it used the hand.
As it used the hand, it wished to use her as agent to destroy the man it had called
evil.
There is no world but this one.
Erika reminded herself that she was a soul-free soldier in the army of materialism. Belief in something more than the eyes can see was punishable by termination.
As if it were the hand of a blind man exploring the patterns on the Persian carpet, the beast with five fingers felt its way past furniture, toward the double doors that separated the drawing room from the downstairs hall.
The thing did not wander aimlessly. By all appearances, it moved with purpose.
One of the two doors to the hallway stood open. The hand paused there, waiting.
Erika suspected that it not only moved with purpose but also that it wanted her to follow. She stepped toward it.
The hand crabbed forward once more, crawled across the threshold and into the hallway.
CHAPTER 67
EVEN AS THE NIGHT
ticked toward the dark start of a new day, lights were on at the back of the funeral home.
Insistently thumbing the bell push, Michael said, “See, another thing that doesn’t make sense is why Victor Frankenstein would turn up in New Orleans, of all places.”
Carson said, “Where would you expect him to set up shop—Baton Rouge, Baltimore, Omaha, Las Vegas?”
“Somewhere in Europe.”
“Why Europe?”
“He’s European.”
“Once was, yeah, but not now. As Helios, he doesn’t even speak with an accent.”
“The whole creepy Frankenstein shtick—it’s totally European,” Michael insisted.
“Remember the mobs with pitchforks and torches storming the castle?” Carson asked. “He can’t go back there ever.”
“That was in the
movies,
Carson.”
“Maybe they’re more like documentaries.”
She knew she sounded crazy. The bayou heat and humidity had finally gotten to her. Maybe if you cut open her skull, you’d find Spanish moss growing on her brain.
She said, “Where is the most recombinant-DNA work being done, the most research into cloning? Where are the most discoveries in molecular biology taking place?”
“According to the tabloids I read, probably in Atlantis, a few miles under the surface of the Caribbean.”
“It’s all happening here in the good old USA, Michael. If Victor Frankenstein is alive, this is where he’d want to be, right where the most science is being done. And New Orleans is plenty creepy enough to please him. Where else do they bury all their dead in mausoleums aboveground?”
The porch light came on. A deadbolt turned with a rasp and a clack, and the door opened.
Taylor Fullbright stood before them in red silk pajamas and a black silk robe on the breast of which was appliquéd an image of Judy Garland as Dorothy.
As convivial as ever, Fullbright said, “Why, hello again!”
“I’m sorry if we woke you,” Carson apologized.
“No, no. You didn’t. I finished embalming a customer half an hour ago, worked up an appetite. I’m making a pastrami and tongue sandwich, if you’d like one.”
Michael said, “No thanks. I’m full of Cheez Doodles, and she’s full of inexplicable enthusiasm.”
“We don’t need to come in,” Carson said, showing him first the silver-framed photo of Roy Pribeaux. “Have you ever seen him before?”
“Quite a handsome fellow,” said Fullbright. “But he looks a bit smug. I know the type. They’re always trouble.”
“More trouble than you can imagine.”
“But I don’t know him,” Fullbright said.
From a nine-by-twelve manila envelope, Carson extracted a police-department file photo of Detective Jonathan Harker.
“This one I know,” said the funeral director. “He was Allwine’s funeral buddy.”