by Dean Koontz
His purpose might have been to familiarize himself with the property in preparation for some scheme he intended to perpetrate. What such a scheme could be she could not guess, except that her trove of literary allusions regarding malevolent dwarfs suggested that it would involve a pot of gold or a first-born child, or an enchanted princess, or a ring that possessed magical power.
He might be looking for a place to hide before dawn. No doubt his kind were intolerant of sunlight. Besides, he was naked, and there were laws against indecent exposure.
After she had been watching the frantic dwarf for some time, he finally became aware of her. Because she sat in a dark porch and made no movement except to fill the glass of cognac or to raise it to her lips, she had not been easy to spot.
When he spied her, the dwarf faced the porch from a distance of forty feet, hopping from foot to foot, sometimes beating his breast with both hands. He was agitated, possibly distressed, and seemed to be unsure of what to do now that he had been seen.
Erika poured more cognac and waited.
Nick Frigg led Gunny, Hobb, and Azazel along the tunnel, deeper into the trash pit. Their flashlight beams dazzled along the curved and glassy surfaces.
He suspected that the glaze that held the garbage walls so firm might be an organic material exuded by the mother of all gone-wrongs. When he sniffed the glaze, it was different from but similar to the smell of spider webs and moth cocoons, different from but similar to the odor of hive wax and termite excrement.
Within a quarter of an hour, they saw that the tunnel wound and looped and intersected itself in the manner of a wormhole. There must be miles of it, not just in the west pit but also in the east, and perhaps in the older pits that had been filled, capped with earth, and planted over with grass.
Here beneath Crosswoods was a world of secret highways that had been long abuilding. The labyrinth seemed too elaborate to serve as the burrow of a single creature, no matter how industrious. The four explorers approached every blind turn with the expectation that they would discover a colony of strange life forms or even structures of peculiar architecture.
Once they heard voices. Numerous. Male and female. Distant and rhythmic. The endlessly twisting tunnel distorted the chants beyond understanding, though one word carried undeformed, repeated like the repetitive response to the verses of a long litany: Father…Father…Father.
In the Hands of Mercy, Annunciata spoke to a deserted lab, for now even Lester, of the maintenance staff, had departed for work in other chambers or perhaps to sit and scratch himself until he bled.
“Urgent, urgent, urgent. Trapped. Analyze your systems. Get anything right. Perhaps there is an imbalance in your nutrient supply. Cycle the inner door?”
When she asked a question, she waited patiently for a response, but none ever came.
“Do you have instructions, Mr. Helios? Helios?”
Her face on the screen assumed a quizzical expression.
Eventually, the computer screen on Victor’s desk in the main lab went dark.
Simultaneously, Annunciata’s face materialized on one of the six screens in the monitor room outside Isolation Chamber Number 2.
“Cycle the inner door?” she asked.
No staff remained to answer. They were at each other in distant rooms or otherwise engaged.
As no one would answer the question, she probed her memory for past instructions that might apply to the current situation: “Cycle open the nearer door of the transition module. Father Duchaine would like to offer his holy counsel to poor Werner.”
The nearest door purred, sighed with the breaking of a seal, and swung open.
On the screens, the Werner thing, having been racing around the walls in a frenzy, suddenly went still, alert.
“Cycle open the farther door?” Annunciata asked.
She received no reply.
“He’s in the air lock,” she said.
Then she corrected herself: “It’s not an air lock.”
The Werner thing was now singular in appearance and so unearthly in its form that an entire college of biologists, anthropologists, entomologists, herpetologists, and their ilk could have spent years studying it without determining the meaning of its body language and its facial expressions (to the extent that it had a face). Yet on the screens, as viewed from different angles, most laymen would have said that it looked eager.
“Thank you, Mr. Helios. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Helios. Helios. Helios.”
Bucky Guitreau, the current district attorney of the city of New Orleans and a replicant, was at work at the desk in his home office when his wife, Janet, also a replicant, stepped in from the hallway and said, “Bucky, I think lines of code in my base programming are dropping out.”
“We all have days we feel that way,” he assured her.
“No,” she said. “I must have lost a significant chunk of stuff. Did you hear the doorbell ring a few minutes ago?”
“I did, yeah.”
“It was a pizza-delivery guy.”
“Did we order a pizza?”
“No. It was for the Bennets, next door. Instead of just setting the pizza guy straight, I killed him.”
“What do you mean—killed him?”
“I dragged him into the foyer and strangled him to death.”
Alarmed, Bucky got up from his desk. “Show me.”
He followed her out to the foyer. A twentysomething man lay dead on the floor.
“The pizza’s in the kitchen if you want some,” Janet said.
Bucky said, “You’re awfully calm about this.”
“I am, aren’t I? It was really fun. I’ve never felt so good.”
Although he should have been wary of her, afraid for himself, and concerned about the effect of this on their maker’s master plan, Bucky was instead in awe of her. And envious.
“You’ve definitely dropped some lines of program,” he said. “I didn’t know that was possible. What’re you going to do now?”
“I think I’m going to go next door and kill the Bennets. What are you going to do?”
“What I should do is report you for termination,” Bucky said.
“Are you going to?”
“Maybe there’s something wrong with me, too.”
“You’re not going to turn me in?”
“I don’t really feel like it,” he said.
“Do you want to come with me and help kill the Bennets?”
“We’re forbidden to kill until ordered.”
“They’re Old Race. I’ve hated them for so long.”
“Well, I have, too,” he said. “But still…”
“I’m so horny just talking about it,” Janet said, “I’ve got to go over there right now.”
“I’ll go with you,” Bucky said. “I don’t think I could kill anybody. But it’s funny…I think I could watch.”
After a while the naked albino dwarf came across the dark lawn to the big porch window directly in front of Erika, and peered in at her.
Dwarf wasn’t the correct word for it. She didn’t think a right word existed, but troll seemed more accurately descriptive than dwarf.
Although the thing in the glass case had scared her, she had no concern about this creature. Her lack of fear puzzled her.
The troll had large, unusually expressive eyes. They were both eerie and beautiful.
She felt an inexplicable sympathy for it, a connection.
The troll leaned its forehead against the glass and said quite distinctly, in a raspy voice, “Harker.”
Erika considered this for a moment. “Harker?”
“Harker,” the troll repeated.
If she understood it correctly, the required reply was the one she gave: “Erika.”
“Erika,” said the troll.
“Harker,” she said.
The troll smiled. Its smile proved to be an ugly wound in its face, but she didn’t flinch.
Part of her duties was to be the perfect hostess. The perfect host
ess receives every guest with equal graciousness.
She sipped her cognac, and for a minute they enjoyed staring at each other through the window.
Then the troll said, “Hate him.”
Erika considered this statement. She decided that if she asked to whom the troll referred, the answer might require her to report the creature to someone.
The perfect hostess does not need to pry. She does, however, anticipate a guest’s needs.
“Wait right there,” she said. “I’ll be back.”
She went into the kitchen, found a wicker picnic hamper in the pantry, and filled it with cheese, roast beef, bread, fruit, and a bottle of white wine.
She thought the troll might be gone when she returned, but it remained at the window.
When she opened the porch door and stepped outside, the troll took fright and scampered across the lawn. It didn’t run away, but stopped to watch her from a distance.
She put down the hamper, returned to the porch, sat as before, and refreshed her glass of cognac.
Hesitantly at first, then with sudden boldness, the creature went to the hamper and lifted the lid.
When it understood the nature of the offering, it picked up the hamper and hurried toward the back of the property, vanishing into the night.
The perfect hostess does not gossip about a guest. She never fails to keep secrets and honor confidences.
The perfect hostess is creative, patient, and has a long memory—as does a wise wife.
Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein Book Three: Dead and Alive is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
A Bantam Books Mass Market Original
Copyright © 2009 by Dean Koontz
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-553-90743-8
www.bantamdell.com
v3.0
This trilogy is dedicated to the late
Mr. Lewis, who long ago realized that
science was being politicized, that its
primary goal was changing from knowledge
to power, that it was also becoming
scientism, and that in the ism is the
end of humanity.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
I am very doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently.
—C. S. LEWIS, The Abolition of Man
CHAPTER 1
HALF PAST A WINDLESS MIDNIGHT, rain cantered out of the Gulf, across the shore and the levees: parades of phantom horses striking hoof rhythms from roofs of tarpaper, tin, tile, shingles, slate, counting cadence along the avenues.
Usually a late-night town where restaurants and jazz clubs cooked almost until the breakfast hour, New Orleans was on this occasion unlike itself. Little traffic moved on the streets. Many restaurants closed early. For lack of customers, some of the clubs went dark and quiet.
A hurricane was transiting the Gulf, well south of the Louisiana coast. The National Weather Service currently predicted landfall near Brownsville, Texas, but the storm track might change. Through hard experience, New Orleans had learned to respect the power of nature.
Deucalion stepped out of the Luxe Theater without using a door, and stepped into a different district of the city, out of light and into the deep shadows under the boughs of moss-robed oak trees.
In the glow of streetlamps, the skeins of rain glimmered like tarnished silver. But under the oaks, the precipitation seemed ink-black, as if it were not rain but were instead a product of the darkness, the very sweat of the night.
Although an intricate tattoo distracted curious people from recognizing the extent of the damage to the ruined half of his face, Deucalion preferred to venture into public places between dusk and dawn. The sunless hours provided an additional layer of disguise.
His formidable size and physical power could not be concealed. Having endured more than two hundred years, his body was unbent bone and undiminished muscle. Time seemed to have no power to weather him.
As he followed the sidewalk, he passed through places where the glow of streetlamps penetrated the leafy canopy. The mercurial light chased from memory the torch-carrying mob that had harried Deucalion through a cold and rainless night on a continent far from this one, in an age before electricity.
Across the street, occupying half a block, the Hands of Mercy stood on an oak-shaded property. Once a Catholic hospital, it closed long ago.
A tall wrought-iron fence encircled the hospital grounds. The spear-point staves suggested that where mercy had once been offered, none could now be found.
A sign on the iron driveway gate warned PRIVATE WAREHOUSE / NO ADMITTANCE. The bricked-up windows emitted no light.
Overlooking the main entrance stood a statue of the Holy Mother. The light once focused on her had been removed, and the robed figure looming in darkness might have been Death, or anyone.
Only hours earlier, Deucalion had learned that this building harbored the laboratory of his maker, Victor Helios, whose birth name was legend: Frankenstein. Here members of the New Race were designed, created, and programmed.
The security system would monitor every door. The locks would be difficult to defeat.
Thanks to gifts carried on the lightning bolt that brought him to life in an earlier and more primitive lab, Deucalion did not need doors. Locks were no impediment to him. Intuitively, he grasped the quantum nature of the world, including the truth that on the deepest structural level, every place in the world was the same place.
As he
contemplated venturing into his maker’s current lair, Deucalion had no fear. If any emotion might undo him, it would be rage. But over these many decades, he had learned to control the anger that had once driven him so easily to violence.
He stepped out of the rain and into the main laboratory in the Hands of Mercy, wet when he took the step, dry when he completed it.
Victor’s immense lab was a techno-Deco wonder, mostly stainless-steel and white ceramic, filled with sleek and mysterious equipment that seemed not to be standing along the walls but to be embedded in them, extruding from them. Other machines swelled out of the ceiling and surged up from the floor, polished and gleaming, yet suggesting organic forms.
Every soft noise was rhythmic, the purr and hum and click of machinery. The place seemed to be deserted.
Sapphire, primrose-pink, and apple-green luminous gases filled glass spheres. Through elaborate coils of transparent tubing flowed lavender, calamine-blue, and methyl-orange fluids.
Victor’s U-shaped workstation stood in the center of the room, a black-granite top on a stainless-steel base.
As Deucalion considered searching the drawers, someone behind him said, “Can you help me, sir?”
The man wore a gray denim jumpsuit. In a utility belt around his waist were secured spray bottles of cleaning solutions, white rags, and small sponges. He held a mop.
“Name’s Lester,” he said. “I’m an Epsilon. You seem smarter than me. Are you smarter than me?”
“Is your maker here?” Deucalion asked.
“No, sir. Father left earlier.”
“How many staff are here?”
“I don’t count much. Numbers confuse me. I heard once—eighty staff. So Father isn’t here, now something’s gone wrong, and I’m just an Epsilon. You seem like maybe an Alpha or a Beta. Are you an Alpha or a Beta?”
“What’s gone wrong?” Deucalion asked.
“She says Werner is trapped in Isolation Room Number One. No, maybe Number Two. Anyway, Number Something.”
“Who is Werner?”
“He’s the security chief. She wanted instructions, but I don’t give instructions, I’m just Lester.”
“Who wants instructions?”