The Frankenstein Factory (17 page)

“How else can it be lit?”

“Frank—”

“We haven’t sighted him in hours. He probably fell asleep or moved on to another part of the island.”

“The place isn’t that big,” Earl pointed out. “He could be on you before you realized it. Certainly he’ll be attracted by the fire when you light it.”

“But when I reach the wood pile I’ll have the laser pistols for protection, won’t I?”

“Whatever happened to Whalen’s gun?” Earl asked, suddenly remembering it. “I gave it to you downstairs last night.”

“Oh, I still have that,” Hobbes responded casually.

“And you didn’t tell us?”

“I thought you knew. In any event, I wouldn’t use it against Larry. You should know that by now.”

“That thing out there isn’t your son,” Armstrong insisted. “It’s not your son’s brain. Even you must admit that.”

“The brain isn’t the sole arbiter of behavior. Read your Jennings and Finewink.”

“Crackpot theories! The body responds to the brain. The limbs and muscles have no memory.” Armstrong seemed about to hold him back by physical force if necessary. “For that matter, you must know that freezing probably destroys the memory cells of the brain. All your cold capsules down there might yield men without memories. And what good will that be?”

“Memories, like personality, can be reconstituted from outside sources. That was proven long ago.” Hobbes gave a wave of his hand, signaling the end of the discussion.

They waited in silence then, while the sun vanished beyond the mountain and darkness settled in. “At least let me turn on the outside lights,” Armstrong urged.

“No. There’s enough moonlight to see by. I’ll need a table coil, though, to light the fire.”

Earl handed him one. “Be careful.”

“Let me go out first,” Armstrong insisted. “I’ll at least scout around the steps and make certain he’s not lurking right by the door.”

He was gone before they could argue, carefully edging himself along the railing that ran down the six steps to the ground level. “Looks all clear,” he called back in a harsh whisper.

Hobbes and Earl went out onto the porch and Armstrong came back up to meet them. Seeing Hobbes with his table coil in one hand and the pistol in the other, Earl had an impulse to take them away and go do the job himself. Why send this limping old man to light a fire on the beach when he, or even Armstrong, could do the job faster and better?

Why? Because it was Hobbes’s island, Hobbes’s experiment, Hobbes’s son.

Hobbes’s choice.

They were still by the door, watching him move down the steps in the darkness, when it happened, without warning. He gave a gasp and fell forward, on his face.

“Cover me!” Armstrong shouted, bounding down the steps after him.

“With what?” Earl wondered, following along.

Armstrong turned him over and they both saw the glimmer of the knife in the moonlight. “Oh, God!” Armstrong sobbed. “Oh my God! He’s been stabbed!”

The knife had gone into his chest, cleanly between the ribs. “Frank wasn’t in sight,” Earl insisted.

“It must have been thrown!”

He bent over, trying to catch the bubbling sound from Hobbes’s lips. “Quiet! He’s still alive. He’s trying to say something!”

“Have to tell you …” Hobbes managed to mumble. “Tell you …”

“Tell me what?”

“Emily … Emily Watson didn’t die. …”

“T
HREE,” VERA SAID, SPEAKING
the word so softly that her voice barely carried it. “Now we are three.”

“Or four,” Earl reminded her, “if we count Frank.”

Armstrong grunted. “Or five, if we count Emily Watson.”

Hobbes’s body lay just inside the door, staining the carpeting with an ever-widening circle of blood. Nobody made any effort to protect the carpet. It was as if they silently agreed that Hobbes’s blood had every right to soak into Hobbes’s rug,

“Were you upstairs all the time?” Earl asked Vera.

“Of course! I only came down when I heard you shouting. Do you think I sneaked out the back door and around the house to kill him? I’d be t-terrified to go out there!”

“Calm down—I’m not accusing you of anything.”

“And what’s this about Emily Watson?” she asked, turning to Armstrong.

Seeing the doctor’s lined and troubled face, his sleepless eyes, Earl wondered how he could ever have thought of that face as bland and without character. Even its tiny blemishes seemed now to take on a life of their own. “His dying words,” he explained to Vera. “What was it he said, Jazine?”

“‘Emily Watson didn’t die.’”

“That’s right. ‘Emily Watson didn’t die.’ We don’t know what it means.”

“Is it possible?” Vera asked.

“Sure, it’s possible. We never found her body—remember?”

“Let’s go into the other room and talk this over,” Earl suggested. He was tired of staring at Hobbes’s body, and neither he nor Armstrong had suggested moving it down to the tubes. Enough was enough.

“There are few enough of us left to talk,” Vera said, settling into the comfortable styro armchair that had been Lawrence Hobbes’s own until now. “If I’m the last one left I’ll be talking to myself!”

“You won’t be the last one left,” Earl assured her. “If I have anything to say about it, there’ll be no more killings. Up until now we’ve done nothing to fight this thing. We’ve simply reacted to each new killing with aborted schemes to get off the island or bring help here. It’s time we did more than that.”

“What do you suggest?” Armstrong asked.

“That we use our brains, for a change. I thought of something earlier, even before Hobbes spoke his dying words. I remembered a seventy-year-old mystery novel by the British writer Agatha Christie. It was about a situation similar to ours—ten people on an island, being killed off one by one.”

“In the book who did it?” Armstrong asked.

“A person believed to be one of the victims turns out to be alive.”

“Like Emily Watson!” Vera gasped.

“Exactly! In truth we haven’t actually seen Frank kill anyone. We’ve assumed that he did it mainly because no one else could have. But if Emily really is alive …”

Dr. Armstrong shook his head. “I won’t buy it. As I said, it’s certainly possible, because her body was never found—possible that she’s alive. But the rest of it? Can you picture that limping old woman going around committing these brutal, bloody crimes? I can’t!”

“The limp could be a fake,” Vera pointed out. “I thought it pretty odd that Hobbes and Miss Emily both limped. Maybe she picked it up from him to try to look older. Maybe she wasn’t as old as we thought.”

Armstrong remained unconvinced. “Her body could have been dumped into the water. It could be—and probably is—in one of those capsules in the vault. Remember, that’s where the killer tried to hide MacKenzie.”

“I remember,” Earl agreed. “And I think that’s the first thing we’ve got to do. We have to inspect every one of those capsules.”

“You mean open them?”

“No, we can tell from the screw closure if they’ve been tampered with recently. But we can’t all go. Somebody has to stay up here, with the pistol, in case Frank tries to break in.”

Their eyes went to the gun, almost forgotten on the bloody carpet near Hobbes’s body. It hadn’t saved him. It might not save any of them.

“We can’t leave Miss Morgan up here alone,” Armstrong pointed out.

“Of course not,” Earl agreed. “Vera, you come with me. If anyone tries to break in, Armstrong, fire the gun. We’ll hear it and come running.”

He led Vera down the stairs to the basement, then along the corridor to the spiral metal staircase. “I feel like the heroine in one of those gothic holograms,” Vera said, starting down behind Earl.

“Wait till you see this place. It’s really something. The old guy didn’t tell us the half of it.”

Vera was properly impressed by the rows of shining capsules. She stood near the door and touched one, running her fingers over the smooth metal. “It’s hard to believe there’s a person—a human being—inside every one of these.”

“And one ex-president!”

“You believe that?” she asked, turning toward him.

“Fiction and reality have blended so much since Sunday that I don’t know what to believe,” he admitted. “For instance, what about the story Whalen told before he died, about being forced into spying for the Russians by running up big gambling debts. Are we to believe that? Are we to believe any of the countless stories Lawrence Hobbes told, about his son Larry, or his love affair with Emily Watson?”

“If Emily’s alive and out there with—”

“I know. It presents quite a picture, doesn’t it? The old lady limping along with her son, pointing out each of the victims in turn.”

“
Stop it, Earl!”

“I thought you were the girl who could take anything—the girl with the belts and the fancy tricks.”

“My God—this whole thing is inhuman!”

Earl patted one of the capsules. “What’s in here is inhuman, too,” he said quietly.

“But at least we can understand it!”

“Can we?”

She peered down the aisle. “How can we tell if any of them has been opened?”

“This screw top is sealed in place with multiwax. It’s clear when first applied, but ages into a bright red—see, like this! None of these have been opened in months. I noticed it when we were first down here—Hobbes and I—but its significance didn’t sink through till later.”

“You say months.”

“Or years.”

“Couldn’t red wax be used to make the seals appear older than they are?”

“It wouldn’t match that exactly. See how they’re sort of rust-colored, with a mottled effect? That couldn’t be faked.”

They checked every capsule, but none showed broken or fresh seals. “Then no one was hiding here?”

“No one.”

Emily Watson just can’t be on the island!” she insisted.

But we searched it for Frank too, remember, and didn’t find him. If Emily was really Hobbes’s lover she’d know all the secret places.”

Vera made a face. There’s something obscene about imagining the two of them in bed together!”

“Because they’re old? Hobbes wasn’t old when he fathered Larry, though.
If
he fathered Larry.”

She leaned against a capsule. “These aren’t really cold at all!”

“They’re built with outer and inner walls, like thermos bottles. The cold stays inside.”

“So what now?”

He led her back to the stairs. “We go up and see if Armstrong got himself killed during our absence.”

But the bland-faced doctor was still alive, still standing guard by the front window. “Nothing stirring out there,” he reported. “If I didn’t see Hobbes get it with my own eyes I’d think Frank was long gone.”

“Want to go out and try for the fire?”

“No, thanks!”

“Well, there’s nothing in the vaults. We’re at a dead end.”

“Now what?”

Earl glanced at the glowing digits on his wrist. “It’s early yet. Vera, how about rustling us up some food? Meanwhile I’m going into Hobbes’s office and tear it apart. It’s about time I got down to doing the job I was sent here to do.”

“You mean …?”

“Proving Lawrence Hobbes was a con man and a swindler.”

The little office off the living room was crammed with records of every sort. It was here that Hobbes had produced the records of the patients to be operated upon, here that he’d kept books on the bodies he so carefully preserved. Earl pulled down a number of ledgers at random and went to work. Privately he had to admit that the old man’s death had simplified his assignment.

“You were after him all the time!” Vera said from the doorway. “And yet you wouldn’t back me up when I speculated that he was the killer!”

“Being a swindler and a killer are two different things. And right now I’m not even sure that he’s either one.”

She stalked off, leaving him alone, and he turned his attention back to the books. They showed a healthy, if not fantastic, profit from the ICI operations for each of the past thirty years. There was nothing in income to account for the island and its house until the recent years, when the generous donations of Emily Watson began to appear as part of the records.

Earl slipped out his calculator and did a little fast figuring. Miss Watson hadn’t come on the scene until fairly recently, and yet the island had been purchased … when? Before 2000, certainly. That must be here somewhere too. Yes, he was right! The island had been purchased long before the appearance of Emily Watson. But with what?

He could see that the tracking down of Hobbes’s financial trail, through the corporate records of ICI, was not to be a simple job. Money had been shifted between accounts, books had been juggled.

But there was, he had to admit, a vast amount of income.

In an enterprise such as Lawrence Hobbes’s, where the clients, of necessity, could never talk about the service, where no written testimonials were possible …

Vera came back in with a drink. “It’s scotch and water,” she said. “I thought you could use it.”

“Just a sip. I don’t want to fog my mind.”

“Finding anything?”

“A lot of confusing figures. Damn it, I wonder if he had another set of books!”

There, was a small safe tucked into one wall of the little office, and Earl bent to it with a vengeance. He tried a few random combinations, without luck, and then sat back on his haunches with a sigh. “I’d sure like to see the inside of that safe.”

“Doesn’t he have the combination somewhere?”

“It probably died with him.”

She bent to examine it, running her fingers over the steel as she had run them over the capsules in the vault. “Would you like me to have a try at blasting it open?”

“With what? Face powder?”

“Leave that to me. What do you say?”

He stood up and stared at her. “Are you serious?”

“Certainly! I’m a research chemist—remember? Making a bit of nitroglycerin in a well-equipped laboratory isn’t all that difficult. It’s prepared from glycerol, using nitric and sulfuric acids.”

“You’ll blow us all up!”

She gave him an impish grin. “That’s the chance you’ll have to take.”

He gazed longingly at the safe. “Once you’ve got it, will you know how to use it?”