Dean Koontz's Frankenstein 4-Book Bundle

by Dean Koontz

  “Yes. You must.”

  She had been in the pharmaceutical closet long enough to make him suspicious, long enough to have transferred the medication from one capsule to another. This might appear to be Bryce’s original prescription, when it was really a sedative.

  In his room, he flushed the capsule down the toilet and dropped the crushed cup in the waste can.

  Earlier, he had stripped the bottom sheet off his bed and had arranged the remaining bedclothes to conceal what he had done. In the bathroom, using Travis’s pearl-handled penknife, he cut the sheet into strips and made of them a braided rope with regularly spaced knots that served as gripping points. At a length of over twelve feet, it would come close enough to the ground to convince them that it had facilitated his and the boy’s escape.

  Now, Bryce took the blanket off his bed, folded it lengthwise, and rolled it for easy carrying. He wished he had been brought to the hospital in street clothes. His pajamas and thin robe were inadequate for extended exposure to this cool afternoon; with nightfall, he would be chilled to the bone. The blanket was the best he could do.

  His roommate, as uncommunicative as ever, had been awake for a short while, reading a Spanish-language magazine. But he was once more sleeping.

  At the nearest window, Bryce cranked open the two panes and leaned out. He saw no one in the public parking lot that the three wings of the hospital embraced. He tied one end of the bedsheet rope securely to the center post and dropped it. The farther end dangled over the upper half of a first-floor window. He would just have to hope either that the lower room was unoccupied or that anyone there failed to notice this development.

  After snatching up the rolled blanket, he went to the door of the room and scoped the corridor, which was as quiet as it had been for most of the day.

  The nurses’ station was to his left, along this same side of the hallway. Because it was recessed a couple of feet from the hall, he could not see Nurse Makepeace on her stool, only the outer edge of the counter at which she sat.

  And she could not see him if he stayed close to the wall as he hurried north. All the way to the corner, he expected her or someone else to call out to him, but no one did.

  At the unmarked entrance to the roof stairs, Bryce rapped twice, softly, before opening the door, as they had arranged.

  Travis sat on the stairs, clutching the pillowcase containing his pajamas and slippers. “We made it,” he whispered.

  “This far, anyway,” Bryce said.

  chapter 47

  Mr. Lyss came into Mrs. Trudy LaPierre’s kitchen wearing Poor Fred’s shoes and clean clothes. He’d shaved with Poor Fred’s razor. His gray hair was a little damp and curly instead of sticking out stiff every-whichway. His ears were as big and rumpled as before, but now they were clean, more pink than brown.

  He was still stooped and bony, his teeth were still gray, and his fingernails were still yellow and cracked, so he didn’t look like a whole new person, but he did look like a new Mr. Lyss.

  “Your skin it isn’t so cracked like an old saddle anymore,” Nummy said, meaning that as a compliment.

  “Your Poor Fred has several kinds of skin lotions and maybe ten flavors of aftershave. He might be part sissy, I don’t know. But some of the lotion did wonders for the razor burn.”

  “So far I don’t have much whiskers,” Nummy said. “I seen this mustache once, I wished I could have one like it, but my lip just stays bare.”

  “Count yourself lucky,” Mr. Lyss said. “Shaving is even more trouble than taking a bath and brushing your teeth. People waste their lives being slaves to preposterous grooming standards. Your average fool spends ten minutes brushing his teeth twice a day, five minutes each time, which over a seventy-year life is four thousand two hundred hours brushing his damn teeth. That is one hundred and seventy-seven days. Insanity. You know what I can do with one hundred and seventy-seven days, Peaches?”

  “What can you do, sir?”

  “What I’ve been doing all along—living!” Mr. Lyss looked past Nummy and for the first time saw the kitchen table. “What craziness have you been up to, boy?”

  On opposite sides of the table were two plates, mugs, napkins, and flatware. Between the plates were a dish heaped with scrambled eggs still steaming, a stack of buttered toast, a stack of frozen waffles made crisp in the toaster, a plate of sliced ham, a plate of sliced cheese, a plate of sliced fresh oranges, a container of chocolate milk, butter, apple butter, grape jelly, strawberry jelly, and ketchup.

  “We didn’t get no breakfast at the jail,” Nummy said.

  “We almost were breakfast. We can’t eat a tenth of this.”

  “Well,” said Nummy, “I didn’t know what stuff you like and what you don’t, so I made you choices. Anyways, you was a long time, so I could think it through double and stay out of trouble.”

  Mr. Lyss sat at the table and began to heap food on his plate, grabbing stuff with his hands that you needed a fork to get. It was pretty clear that he’d never had a Grandmama in his life.

  Hoping Mr. Lyss might not eat so fast—or with so much ugly noise—if they carried on a conversation, Nummy said, “You get to live all those extra days because you don’t brush, but don’t some teeth fall out?”

  “A few,” Mr. Lyss said. “It’s a trade-off. Everything in life is a trade-off. You know how much time your average fool spends in the shower? Two hundred sixty-two days over seventy years! That’s an obsession with cleanliness. It’s sick, that’s what it is. You know what I could do with two hundred sixty-two days?”

  “What could you do, sir?”

  “Anything!” Mr. Lyss shouted, waving a waffle in the air and slinging the butter from it in every direction.

  “Wow,” Nummy said. “Anything.”

  “You know how much time your average fool spends shaving and sitting in a barber’s chair?”

  “How much, sir?”

  “You don’t want to know. It’s too insane to contemplate.”

  “I do want to know, sir. I really do.”

  “Well, I don’t want to hear myself say it. It’ll just depress me to hear myself say it. Life is short, boy. Don’t waste your life.”

  “I won’t, sir.”

  “You will, though. Everyone does. One way or another. Although being an imbecile, you don’t have much to waste. There’s another way you’re lucky.”

  In the time they finished their breakfast-lunch, Mr. Lyss ate a lot more food than Nummy thought he would. Where it went in that bony old body, Nummy couldn’t guess.

  “What I figure,” Mr. Lyss said, as he sucked noisily at whatever was stuck between his teeth, “we better not wait till dark to leave. We’ve got stuff to get, and we’ll need it before twilight, when maybe things might get even hairier than they have been so far.”

  “What stuff?” Nummy asked.

  “For one thing, guns.”

  “I don’t like guns.”

  “You don’t have to like them. I’ll have the guns, not you. What would be the sense of saving hundreds of days of my life from being wasted in unnecessary grooming—and then hand a shotgun to a nitwit so he can accidentally blow my head off?”

  “I don’t know,” Nummy said. “What would be the sense?”

  Mr. Lyss’s face started to squinch up like it did when he was about to go into a fit, but then the squinching stopped. Instead, he shook his head and laughed.

  “I don’t know what it is about you, Peaches.”

  “What what is?”

  “I just said I don’t know what it is. It sure isn’t your giant intellect, but you’re not bad company.”

  “You’re not bad company either, sir. Especially when you stink better, like now.”

  Nummy wanted to wash the dishes and put things away, but Mr. Lyss said he’d beat him to death with a shovel if he tried.

  They left by a window, keeping Mrs. Trudy LaPierre’s house between them and Nummy’s house, where the two cops-who-weren’t-just-cops might be doing things to
Norman, the dog, that he didn’t dare think about.

  The sky was gray and looked hard. The air was colder. Nummy began to have a bad feeling about things.

  They left the neighborhood, and in a while they found a spooky house at the end of a narrow lane. Mr. Lyss said it was just the kind of place he was looking for. He wanted to ring the bell, but Nummy didn’t think they should. But Mr. Lyss was the smart one, and smart people always got their way.

  chapter 48

  Deucalion would use Erika’s house as his base of operations. After Jocko proudly displayed his most treasured possessions—which included a collection of funny hats with bells on them, four Buster Steelhammer posters, and DVDs of every version of Little Women ever filmed—he offered his room to the tattooed giant. But Deucalion rarely slept and expected to get even less rest than usual in the days immediately ahead. Instead, he opted for the study because its large sofa would accommodate him if he chose to lie down, and because if he needed to do online research, there was a computer linked to the Internet via a satellite dish.

  Carson and Michael would find accommodations at one of the motels in town, which at this time of the year—or virtually any other—would not be fully booked. As homicide detectives in New Orleans and as private detectives in San Francisco, they were urban animals who did their best work when immersed in the buzz and bustle of a city.

  Rainbow Falls had no more buzz and only slightly more bustle than a cemetery in bee season. But in less than two hours at Erika’s house, the isolation of the place made Carson feel imprisoned. With apparent disquiet, Michael complained that if the world ended, they wouldn’t know about it until they ran out of milk and had to drive to a store in town. A front-row seat at Armageddon was preferable to the humiliation of being the last to get the news.

  Before finding a motel room, they cruised the streets, getting oriented—Carson in the pilot’s seat, Michael in his historically established position. With a population of perhaps ten thousand, the town wasn’t merely a wide place in the road. But anyone not a local might be quickly noticed, and Carson didn’t see any vehicle but their own with California license plates.

  “I’m not sure it would make sense for us to try a clandestine approach,” she said. “People who’ve been here most or all of their lives—they’ll smell an outsider in a minute, if they can’t actually spot one at a glance. The more we try to blend in, the more obvious we’ll be.”

  “Yeah, and I don’t want to wear a cowboy hat.”

  “Look around. Not everyone’s wearing a cowboy hat.”

  “I don’t want to wear a toboggan hat, either. And I’ll never wear a floppy hat with bells on it.”

  “Gee, I thought my Christmas shopping was finished.”

  “Besides, Victor must be keeping a low profile. As an outsider, he’d have to. He’s holed up somewhere, even more than Erika. Maybe the best way to smoke him out is if he learns we’re in the county looking for him.”

  Before stores closed for the day, and in respect of a weather forecast of snow, they found a sports-clothing outfitter. They tried on and purchased black Gore-Tex/Thermolite storm suits with foldaway hoods, overlay vests with Thermoloft insulation, gloves, ski boots, and—after some deliberation—the despised toboggan caps.

  On the way to the Falls Inn to book a room, unload the Cherokee, and gun-up, they passed the offices of the Rainbow Falls Gazette on Beartooth Avenue. This struck them as a serendipitous development, so Carson hung a U-turn in the street and parked in front of the three-story building.

  Like many structures in town, it was well over a century old, with a flat and parapeted roof, reminiscent of Western-movie hotels and saloons on which bad men with rifles skulked behind parapets to fire down on the sheriff when he tried to dart from one point of cover to another. Those buildings were usually wood, but this one was brick, in recognition of hard winters.

  When Carson and Michael entered the reception area, the stained-oak beadboard wainscoting, the ornate decorative tin ceiling, and the antique brass fixtures—once gaslights but long ago converted for electrical service—seemed like a stage setting.

  The receptionist—a forty-something blonde—wore cowboy boots, a denim skirt, a crisp white blouse, and a bolo tie with a turquoise slide. The triangular ID block on her desk bore the name KATIE. When Carson and Michael boldly identified themselves as private detectives from California, on a case, and asked if the editor or the publisher might be able to see them, Katie said, “I suspect they’ll both be able to see you, since they’re one and the same.”

  The man who came out to see them was tall, handsome, looked more like a marshal than an editor, and was as appealing as Jimmy Stewart in one of his aw-shucks roles. His name was Addison Hawk, and after he examined their PI licenses, as he led them back to his office, he said, “The last time we had a private detective visiting—in fact, the only time that I’m aware of—he got himself shot in the buttocks not once but twice.”

  Michael said, “That’s the very kind of thing we avoid at just about any cost.”

  Hawk sat behind his cluttered desk, and they occupied the two chairs in front of it.

  “What kind of case are you on?” the editor asked.

  “Even if you weren’t a newspaperman,” Carson said, “we wouldn’t be at liberty to say. I can only tell you that it’s an estate matter involving an inheritance.”

  “Someone local could get rich—is that it?”

  “Perhaps,” said Carson.

  “That sounds so fake to me,” Hawk said, “that I’ve got to think it might be true.”

  “We’re assuming someone who publishes and edits a small-town newspaper knows most everybody on his beat.”

  “I’m pretty much married to this town, and I’m not embarrassed to say I’m so much in love with it and its history that every morning seems like the first morning of my honeymoon. Some people I don’t know but only because they choose not to know me.”

  From a manila envelope, Carson extracted a photograph of Victor from his New Orleans days, which she had brought from San Francisco. She slid it across the desk, and said, “Have you seen this man in Rainbow Falls? He would have come here sometime in the last two years.”

  Hawk didn’t react at once, took time to study the photo, but finally said, “I get the feeling I might have seen him once or twice, but I couldn’t tell you where or when. What’s his name?”

  “We don’t know what name he’s living under now,” Michael said, “and revealing his real name would violate our client’s privacy.”

  “You sure do exhibit an admirable discretion,” Hawk said, with just a small ironic smile.

  “We try,” Michael said.

  When Hawk returned the photo, Carson presented him a computer printout of a county map that Erika had provided them. On it, she had marked in red the road from which Victor had disappeared in his GL550 Mercedes. “This twenty-four-mile loop winds through both low country and hills before it comes back to the state highway. From what we can see on Google Earth and other sites, this road serves no ranches, no houses, certainly no town, no evident purpose. It runs through completely unpopulated territory, yet it must have cost a fortune to build.”

  Hawk held her gaze for a long moment, then searched Michael’s eyes. Finally he said, “That road has a number. It’s on the milepost at the start and on the one at the end, but nobody refers to it by the official number. Folks in these parts call it End Times Highway. Now I’m wondering who you really are.”

  chapter 49

  After his meeting with Councilmen Ben Shanley and Tom Zell at Pickin’ and Grinnin’, Mayor Erskine Potter intended to deal with a couple of other issues and also go home to see how Nancy and Ariel were coming along with the barn renovations. Then he would return to the roadhouse at 5:30, with Ben and Tom, to prepare for the arrival of the Riders in the Sky Church families at six o’clock, who would be rendered and processed by the Builders beginning at seven or perhaps sooner.

  After the council
men left, however, Erskine noticed that the clock at the hostess’s station, on the mezzanine level just inside the front entrance, displayed the wrong time. Because of the internal thousand-year clock and calendar that was part of his program, he knew the correct time to the precise second. He insisted on correct time on all timepieces. Everything depended on synchronization, yet the hostess’s clock was four minutes slow.

  When he corrected this error, he glanced toward the lighted clock behind the bar and was distressed to see that it was two full minutes fast. He went through the gate at the end of the bar, leaned over the backbar, and adjusted the time on this second errant clock.

  The memory that he had downloaded from the real Mayor Potter was complete enough, regarding the roadhouse, for him to recall there were also clocks in the manager’s office, in each of the two dressing rooms used by performers, and in the kitchen. Concerned that the building might be out of harmony with true time, he went from clock to clock, his concern quickly escalating into a deepening disquiet as he found every timepiece incorrectly set.

  The former Erskine Potter had been chronologically challenged to a serious degree. It was almost as if the man didn’t care about time, as if he had no understanding whatsoever that time was the lubricant of the universe, that without time—and fully accurate time—nothing else could exist. There would be no past, no present, no future, no material world, no mass or energy of any kind, no light or dark, no sound or silence, only nothing within nothing unto nothing.

  By the time he got to the final clock in the kitchen, Erskine Potter was afflicted by the lack of synchronization of time in the roadhouse, and filled with a sense of urgency. His hands shook as he tried to adjust the last clock, which was five minutes behind the real time. He first set it a minute fast, then a minute slow, and as he struggled to align the minute hand with the correct check on the dial, breathing rapidly and cursing the clumsy adjustment stem, he grew afraid that if he didn’t complete this correction at once, something disastrous would happen, that perhaps the roadhouse would implode into a time-flow disjunction and cease to exist, cease to have ever existed.