by Dean Koontz
“Not Jocko.” The whites of his eyes were red in the red light, and the lemon-yellow irises were orange. “Jocko hopes only to perform some service to repay your kindness.”
“As it happens, there is something you could do.”
“Jocko thought there might be.”
His sly look seemed to belie his claim to innocence, but having experienced two beatings in one day, Erika was motivated to give Jocko the benefit of the doubt.
“I’m not permitted to read books,” she said, “but I’m curious about them. I want you to read books to me.”
“Jocko will read until his voice fails and he goes blind.”
“A few hours a day will be enough,” Erika assured him.
CHAPTER 18
FROM GRANDMOTHER to neighborhood bully, to Antoine, to Evangeline, Bucky and Janet Guitreau went through the Arceneaux family like a school of angry piranha through anything that might piss off killer fish.
Although it would have been good to hear their tormented cries and pleas for mercy, the time hadn’t yet come for open warfare. Bucky and Janet did not want their victims to wake the family next door, who in their sleep were corpses waiting to happen. By various means, they silenced the Arceneauxs before proceeding to destroy them.
Neither he nor Janet knew the rest of the people who lived in the houses past the Arceneaux place, but those potential victims were of the Old Race and therefore no less fun to kill merely because they were strangers.
At some point he could not precisely recall, Bucky had stripped off his clothes. Janet let him render Marcella and then devastate young Preston, and in the master bedroom, she gave him Antoine while she took Evangeline apart. They needed but a few minutes.
At first the nudity had been awkward; but then he sensed chunks of his program dropping out, not only lines of code but blocks of it, and he felt as free and natural as a wolf in its fur, though far more savage than a wolf, and angry as a wolf could never be, and not in the least limited in his killing to what was strictly necessary for survival, as was a wolf.
When only he and Janet were alive in the master bedroom, she kicked at what remained of what she had destroyed. Choking with rage, spitting with disgust, she declared, “I hate them, hate them, so soft and fragile, so quick to fear and beg, so arrogant in their certainty that they have souls, yet so cowardly for creatures who say there is a god who loves them—loves them! As if there is about them anything worth loving—such hopeless trembling milksops, spineless braggarts who claim a world they won’t fight for. I can’t wait to see canyons bulldozed full of their dead bodies and oceans red with their blood, can’t wait to smell cities reeking with their rotting corpses and pyres of them burning by the thousands.”
Her rant thrilled Bucky, made his twin hearts race, thickened his throat with fury, tightened the cords of muscle in his neck, until he could feel his carotids throbbing like drums. He would have listened to her longer, before the need to move on to the next house would have overcome him, but when movement in the doorway drew his attention, he silenced her with two words: “The dog!”
In the hallway, staring in at them, stood the Duke of Orleans, tail low and motionless, hackles raised, ears pricked, teeth bared. Having seen the pizza guy dead on the foyer floor, Duke must have followed them from their house to the Bennets’, and from the Bennets’ here, witness to every slaughter, for his eyes were accusing and his sudden growl was a challenge.
From the evening that they replaced the real Bucky and Janet Guitreau, this perceptive German shepherd had known they were not who they appeared to be. Friends and family accepted them without hesitation, evincing not a moment of suspicion, but Duke kept his distance, wary from hour one of their impersonation.
Now, as the dog regarded them where they stood in the carnage that had been Antoine and Evangeline, Bucky experienced a startling change of perception. The dog was not merely a dog.
All of the New Race understood that this was the only life and that no afterlife awaited either them or the Old Race. They knew that the concept of an immortal soul was a lie concocted by members of the Old Race to help their fragile kind cope with the reality of death, death everlasting. The New Race recognized that no realm existed beyond the material, that the world was not a place of mystery but instead a place of unambiguous cause and effect, that applied rational intellect could reason its way to the simple truth behind any apparent enigma, that they were meat machines just as the members of the Old Race were meat machines, just as every animal was a meat machine, and that their maker was also only a meat machine, albeit a meat machine with the most brilliant mind in the history of the species and with an infallible vision of a man-made utopia that would establish a Million-Year Reich on Earth before spreading to every habitable planet circling every star in the universe.
This creed of absolute materialism and antihumanism had been drilled into Bucky and Janet as they formed in the creation tanks, which was an immeasurably more effective way to have learned it than by watching Sesame Street and reading a series of dull grade-school textbooks.
Unlike members of the Old Race, who could be comfortable for decades with the philosophy that life had no meaning, only to become God-besotted in middle age, the New Race could take satisfaction from knowing they were so indoctrinated with hopelessness that they would never have a doubt about their convictions. Father told them that unassailable hopelessness was the beginning of wisdom.
But now the dog.
His disturbing forthright stare, his judgmental attitude, the fact that he knew they were impostors, that he followed them through the night without their knowledge, that he did not slink away from the danger Bucky and Janet currently posed to any living thing not of their kind, that instead he came to confront them: Suddenly this dog seemed to be something more than a meat machine.
Evidently, the same perception troubled Janet, for she said, “What’s he doing with his eyes?”
“I don’t like his eyes,” Bucky agreed.
“He’s like not looking at me, he’s looking into me.”
“He’s like looking into me, too.”
“He’s weird.”
“He’s totally weird,” Bucky agreed.
“What does he want?”
“He wants something.”
“I could kill him so fast,” Janet said.
“You could. In like three seconds.”
“He’s seen what we can do. Why isn’t he afraid?”
“He doesn’t seem to be afraid, does he?”
In the doorway, Duke growled.
“I’ve never felt like this before,” Janet said.
“How do you feel?”
“Different. I don’t have a word for it.”
“Neither do I.”
“I just suddenly feel like … things are happening right in front of me that I can’t see. Does that make sense?”
“Are we losing more of our programming?”
“All I know is, the dog knows something big,” Janet said.
“Does he? What does he know?”
“He knows some reason he doesn’t have to be afraid of us.”
“What reason?” Bucky asked.
“I don’t know. Do you know?”
“I don’t know,” Bucky said.
“I don’t like not knowing.”
“He’s just a dog. He can’t know big things we don’t know.”
“He should be very afraid of us.” Janet hugged herself and seemed to shiver. “But he’s not. He knows big things we don’t know.”
“He’s just a meat machine like us.”
“He’s not acting like one.”
“We’re smart meat machines. He’s a dumb one,” Bucky said, but his uneasiness was of a kind he had never experienced before.
“He’s got secrets,” Janet said.
“What secrets?”
“The big things he knows that we don’t.”
“How can a dog have secrets?”
“Maybe he’s not just a d
og.”
“What else would he be?”
“Something,” she said portentously.
“Just a minute ago, I felt so good killing in the nude, so natural.”
“Good,” she echoed. “Natural.”
“Now I’m afraid,” he said.
“I’m afraid, too. I’ve never been so afraid.”
“But I don’t know what I’m afraid of, Janet.”
“Neither do I. So we must be afraid of … the unknown.”
“But nothing’s unknowable to a rational intellect. Right? Isn’t that right?”
“Then why isn’t the dog afraid of us?”
Bucky said, “He keeps staring. I can’t stand the way he’s just staring. It’s not natural, and tonight I learned what natural feels like. This isn’t natural.”
“It’s supernatural,” Janet whispered.
The back of Bucky’s neck was suddenly damp. A chill corkscrewed the length of his spine.
Precisely when Janet spoke the word supernatural, the dog turned away from them and disappeared into the upstairs hall.
“Where’s he going, going, going?” Janet wondered.
“Maybe he was never there.”
“I’ve got to know where he’s going, what he is, what he knows,” Janet said urgently, and hurried across the bedroom.
Following her into the hallway, Bucky saw that the dog was gone.
Janet ran to the head of the stairs. “Here he is! Going down. He knows something big, oh yeah, oh yeah, he’s going somewhere big, he’s something.”
In pursuit of the mysterious dog, Bucky descended the stairs with Janet, and then hurried toward the back of the house.
“Oh yeah, oh yeah, something big, big, bigger than big, the dog knows, the dog knows, the dog.”
An instant before they entered the family room, Bucky was struck by the crazy, frightening thought that Charles would be there alive, Charles and Preston and Marcella and Antoine and Evangeline, all of them resurrected, furious, possessed of hideous supernatural powers that would make them invulnerable, and that they would do things to him that he could not imagine, things unknown.
Fortunately, young Charles Arceneaux was the only one there, and he was still as dead as anyone had ever been.
Seeing Charles dead and thoroughly dismantled, Bucky should have felt better, but his fear tightened like an overwound clock spring. He was electrified by a sense of the uncanny, by a recognition of mysterious realms beyond his ken, by astonishment that the world had suddenly revealed itself to contain strange dimensions previously unimagined.
Janet bounded after the dog, chanting, “Dog knows, knows, knows. Dog sees, sees, sees. Dog, dog, dog,” and Bucky sprinted after them both, out of the Arceneaux house, across the veranda, into the rain. He was not exactly sure how the appearance of the German shepherd in the bedroom doorway had led to this frantic chase, what it all meant, where it would end, but he knew as certainly as he had ever known anything that an event of a profound and magical nature loomed, something big, something huge.
He was not just nude, he was naked, vulnerable both physically and mentally, his tandem hearts pounding, flooded with emotion as he had never been before, not at the moment killing anyone and yet exhilarated. They ran through the neighborly gate, into the backyard at the Bennet house, alongside the house toward the street, the dog in the lead, and Bucky heard himself saying, “A terrible thing has happened, a terrible thing has happened,” and he was so disturbed by the desperation in his voice that he forced himself to stop that chant. By the time they were running down the center of the street, not gaining on the dog but not falling behind, he was chanting, “Kill the pizza guy, kill the pizza guy,” and though he had no idea what that meant, he liked the sound of it.
CHAPTER 19
THE MASTER SUITE of the Helios mansion included two bathrooms, one for Victor and one for Erika. She was not permitted to cross the threshold of his bath.
Every man needed a sacrosanct retreat, a private space where he could relax and relish both the accomplishments of the day and his intentions for the morrow. If he was a revolutionary with the power of science at his command, and if he had the courage and the will to change the world, he needed and deserved a sanctum sanctorum of grand design and dimensions.
Victor’s bathroom measured over sixteen hundred square feet. It included a steam room, a sauna, a spacious shower, a whirlpool spa, two under-the-counter refrigerators, an icemaker, a fully stocked bar, a microwave concealed behind a tambour door, three plasma-screen TVs with Blu-Ray DVD capacity, and an anigre-wood cabinet containing a collection of exquisitely braided leather whips.
The gold-leafed ceiling featured custom crystal chandeliers in the Deco style, and the walls were clad with marble. Inlaid in the center of the polished-marble floor were semiprecious stones forming the double helix of the DNA molecule. The faucets and other fixtures were gold-plated, including even the flush lever on the toilet, and there were acres of beveled-edge mirrors. The room glittered.
Nothing in this luxurious space brought Victor as much pleasure as his reflection. Because mirrors were arranged to reflect other mirrors, he could see multiple images of himself wherever he went.
His favorite place for self-examination was an octagonal meditation chamber with a mirrored door. Therein, nude, he could admire every aspect of his body at the same time, and also see infinite images of each angle marching away to infinity, a world of Victors and nothing less.
He believed himself to be no more vain than the average man. His pride in his physical perfection had less to do with the beauty of his body—though it was uniquely beautiful—than with the evidence of his resolution and his indomitability that was revealed in the means by which he maintained that body for two hundred and forty years.
Spiraling through his muscular torso—here inlaid in the flesh and half exposed, here entirely embedded—entwining his ribs, coiling around his rod-straight spine, a flexible metal cord and associated implants efficiently converted electrical current into a different and arcane energy, into a stimulating charge that ensured a youthful rate of cell division and prevented time from taking any toll of him.
His uncounted scars and singular excrescences were a testament to his fortitude, for he had gained immortality at the cost of much pain. He had suffered to fulfill his vision and remake the world, and by suffering for the world, he could lay claim to a kind of divinity.
From the mirrored meditation chamber, he repaired to the spa, in which the air jets roiled the steaming water. A bottle of Dom Pérignon waited in a silver bucket of ice. The cork had been replaced with a solid-silver stopper. Settled in the hot water, he sipped the crisp, ice-cold champagne from a Lalique flute.
As it unfolded, the day just past seemed to be a chain of crises and frustrations. The discoveries during the Harker autopsy. Werner’s meltdown. The first of Victor’s triumphs, now calling itself Deucalion, not dead after all but alive in New Orleans. The brief encounter with Deucalion in Duchaine’s house, the tattooed one’s mystifying escape. Erika having dinner in the living room—living room!—on a priceless eighteenth-century French escritoire, as if she were an ignorant hillbilly.
The Harker and Werner situations might seem like calamities to unimaginative types like Ripley, but they were opportunities. From every setback came knowledge and stunning new advancements. Thomas Edison developed hundreds of prototypes of lightbulbs that failed, until at last he discovered the right material for the filament.
Deucalion was a mere amusement. He could not harm his maker. Besides, the tattooed wretch killed Victor’s first wife, Elizabeth, two centuries earlier, on the day of their wedding. The freak’s return would give Victor a chance to take long-overdue vengeance.
Victor had not loved Elizabeth. Love and God were myths he rejected with equal contempt.
But Elizabeth had belonged to him. Even after more than two hundred years, he still bitterly resented the loss of her, as he would have resented losing an exquisite
antique porcelain vase if Deucalion had smashed that instead of the bride.
As for Erika Five’s breach of etiquette: She would have to be disciplined. In addition to being a brilliant scientist, Victor was to an equal degree a brilliant disciplinarian.
All in all, everything was moving along nicely.
The New Race that he had worked so hard to create with Hitler’s generous financing, the later effort financed by Stalin, a subsequent project in China, those and others had been necessary steps toward the glorious work at the Hands of Mercy. This time, thanks to the billions earned from his legitimate enterprise, Bio-vision, he was able to fund 51 percent of the current project and prevent meddling by minority partners, which included a consortium of South American dictators, the ruler of an oil-rich kingdom eager to replace his restive population with obedient new subjects, and an Internet superbillionaire idiot who believed Victor was creating a race that did not exhale CO2, as did humans, and would thereby save the planet.
Soon the tank farms would begin producing thousands of the New Race, and the Old would be on the doorstep of oblivion.
For every minor setback, there were a hundred major successes. The momentum—and the world—was Victor’s.
Soon he would be able to live again under his true name, his proud and storied name, and every person in the world would speak it reverently, as believers speak the name of their god with awe: Frankenstein.
When eventually he got out of the spa, he might return to the mirrored meditation room for just a few more minutes.
CHAPTER 20
CARSON AND MICHAEL SAT in the Honda, near Audubon Park, engine running, headlights on, air conditioner blowing. They were eating the crispy-fried-redfish poor boy and side dishes, their chins greasy, fingers slippery with tartar sauce and cole-slaw dressing, so content with the Acadiana food that the incessant drumming of the rain on the roof began to seem soothing, when Michael said, “Here’s something.”
Carson looked up from her sandwich and saw him squinting through the sheet of water that shimmered down the windshield and blurred the view. She switched on the wipers.