by Dean Koontz
Harker nodded, downed half his drink, and said, “Like Winnie the Pooh wants to be a real bear.”
“No. Pooh is delusional. He already thinks he’s a real bear. He eats honey. He’s afraid of bees.”
“Does Pinocchio become a real boy?”
Father Duchaine said, “After a lot of struggle, yes.”
“That’s inspiring,” Harker decided.
“It is. It really is.”
Harker chewed his lower lip, thinking. Then: “Can you keep a secret?”
“Of course. I’m a priest.”
“This is a little scary,” Harker said.
“Everything in life’s a little scary.”
“That’s so true.”
“In fact, that was the theme of my homily last Sunday.”
Harker put down his drink, stood before Duchaine. “But I’m more excited than scared. It started two days ago, and it’s accelerating.”
Expectantly, Patrick rose from his chair.
“Like Pinocchio,” Harker said, “I’m changing.”
“Changing…how?”
“Victor denied us the ability to reproduce. But I…I’m going to give birth to something.”
With an expression that seemed to be as much pride as fear, Harker lifted his loose-fitting T-shirt.
A subcutaneous face was taking shape beneath the skin and the surface fat layers of Harker’s abdomen. The thing was like a death mask but in motion: blind eyes rolling, mouth opening as though in a silent scream.
Recoiling in shock, Father Duchaine crossed himself before he realized what he had done.
The doorbell rang.
“Birth?” the priest said agitatedly. “What makes you think it’s birth instead of biological chaos?”
Sudden sweat sheathed Harker’s face. Sullen at this rejection, he pulled down his T-shirt. “I’m not afraid. Why should I be?” But clearly he was afraid. “I’ve murdered. Now I create—which makes me more human.”
The doorbell rang again.
“A breakdown in cell structure, metastasis,” Father Duchaine said. “A terrible design flaw.”
“You’re envious. That’s what you are—envious in your chastity.”
“You’ve got to go to him. Get his help. He’ll know what to do.”
“Oh, he’ll know what to do, all right,” Harker said. “There’s a place waiting for me in the landfill.”
The doorbell rang a third time, more insistently than before.
“Wait here,” said Father Duchaine. “I’ll be back. We’ll figure out what to do…something. Just wait.”
He closed the door when he left the study. He crossed the parlor to the front hall.
When the priest opened the front door, he discovered Victor on the porch.
“Good evening, Patrick.”
Striving to conceal his anxiety, Father Duchaine said, “Sir. Yes. Good evening.”
“Just ‘good evening’?”
“I’m sorry. What?” When Victor frowned, Duchaine understood. “Oh, yes. Of course. Come in, sir. Please come in.”
CHAPTER 88
MOTH SHADOWS BEAT an ever-changing tattoo across the faces of Christ, Buddha, Amen-Ra.
In the attic above Jonathan Harker’s apartment, Carson, Michael, and Deucalion gathered at the wall-to-wall collage of gods, on which Harker must have spent scores of hours.
“It seems to express such yearning,” Carson said. “You can feel his anguish.”
“Don’t be too moved by it,” Deucalion advised. “He would embrace any philosophy that filled the void in him.”
He peeled away an image of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, then one of Buddha, revealing different forms and faces beneath, their nature at first mysterious.
“God was only his most recent obsession,” Deucalion explained.
As other pictures were peeled away, Carson saw an underlying collage of Nazi images and symbols: swastikas, Hitler, goose-stepping soldiers.
“Under all these faces of traditional gods is another god that failed him,” Deucalion said. “A god of violent social change and racial purity. There are so many of those.”
Perhaps at last fully convinced of Deucalion’s nature, Michael said, “How did you know there was a second layer?”
“Not just a second,” Deucalion said. “Also a third.”
When Hitler and his ilk were torn off the wall, there was revealed an even eerier collage: images of Satan, demons, satanic symbols.
Deucalion said, “The unique despair of a creature without a soul eventually leads to desperation, and desperation fosters obsession. In Harker’s case, this is only the surface of it.”
Peeling away a horned-and-fanged demonic face, Carson said, “You mean…more layers under this?”
“The wall feels spongy, padded,” Michael said.
Deucalion nodded. “It’s been papered over twenty times or more. You might find gods and goddesses again. When new hopes fail, old hopes return in the endless cycle of desperation.”
Instead, Carson found Sigmund Freud in the fourth layer. Then other pictures of equally solemn men.
“Freud, Jung, Skinner, Watson,” Deucalion said, identifying each newly revealed face. “Rorschach. Psychiatrists, psychologists. The most useless gods of all.”
CHAPTER 89
FATHER DUCHAINE RETREATED from the threshold as Victor stepped through the front door into the rectory foyer.
The master of the New Race looked around with interest. “Cozy. Quite nice. A vow of poverty doesn’t preclude certain comforts.” He touched one finger to Father Duchaine’s Roman collar. “Do you take your vows seriously, Patrick?”
“Of course not, sir. How could I? I’ve never actually gone to the seminary. I’ve never taken vows. You brought me to life with a manufactured past.”
In what might have been a warning tone, Victor said, “That’s worth remembering.”
With a sense of entitlement, Victor proceeded along the hall, deeper into the house, without invitation.
Following his master into the parlor, the priest asked, “To what do I owe the honor of this visit, sir?”
Surveying the room, Victor said, “The authorities haven’t found Detective Harker yet. We’re all at risk until I reacquire him.”
“Would you like me to mobilize our people to search for him?”
“Do you really think that would do any good, Patrick? I’m not so sure.”
As Victor moved across the living room toward the door of the study, Father Duchaine said, “Can I get you coffee, sir? Brandy?”
“Is that what I smell on your breath, Patrick? Brandy?”
“No. No, sir. It’s…it’s vodka.”
“There’s only one thing I want now, Patrick. A tour of your lovely home.”
Victor crossed to the study door, opened it.
Holding his breath, Father Duchaine followed his maker across that threshold—and found that Harker had gone.
Circling the room, Victor said, “I programmed you with a fine education in theology. Better than anything you could have gotten from any university or seminary.”
He paused to look at the bottle of wine and bottle of vodka that stood side by side on the coffee table. Only one glass stood on the table.
With alarm, Father Duchaine noticed that a wet ring marked the table where Harker’s glass had stood.
Victor said, “With your fine education, Patrick, perhaps you can tell me—does any religion teach that God can be deceived?”
“Deceived? No. Of course not.”
The second ring could have been left by Father Duchaine’s glass. He might have moved it to where it stood now, leaving the ring. He hoped that Victor would consider that possibility.
As Victor continued around the study, he said, “I’m curious. You’ve had some years of experience with your parishioners. Do you think they lie to their god?”
Feeling as though he were walking a tightrope, the priest said, “No. No, they mean to keep the promises they make to H
im. But they’re weak.”
“Because they’re human. Human beings are weak, those of the Old Race. Which is one reason why my people will eventually destroy them, replace them.”
Although Harker had slipped out of the study, he must have taken refuge somewhere.
In the living room once more, when Victor didn’t return to the front hall but went instead toward the adjoining dining room, Father Duchaine followed nervously.
The dining room proved to be deserted.
Victor pushed through the swinging door into the kitchen, and Father Duchaine followed like a dog afraid that its hard master would find a cause for punishment.
Harker had gone. In the kitchen, the door to the back porch stood open. The draft entering from the storm-dark twilight smelled faintly of the rain to come.
“You shouldn’t leave your doors open,” Victor warned. “So many of God’s people have a criminal bent. They would burglarize even a priest’s home.”
“Just before you rang the bell,” Father Duchaine said, amazed to hear himself lying so boldly, “I stepped outside for a breath of fresh air.”
“Fresh air is of no special value to those of you I’ve made. You’re designed to thrive without exercise, on any diet, in fresh air and in foul.” He rapped his knuckles on Father Duchaine’s chest. “You are an exquisitely efficient organic machine.”
“I’m grateful, sir, for all that I am.”
From the kitchen to the hall, from the hall to the foyer, Victor said, “Patrick, do you understand why it’s important that my people infiltrate organized religion as well as every other aspect of human society?”
The answer came to the priest not from thoughtful consideration but from programming: “Many years from now, when the time comes to liquidate those of the Old Race who remain, there must be nowhere they can turn for support or sanctuary.”
“Not to the government,” Victor agreed, “because we will be the government. Not to the police or the military…or to the church.”
Again as if by rote, Father Duchaine said, “We must avoid a destructive civil war.”
“Exactly. Instead of civil war…a very civil extermination.” He opened the front door. “Patrick, if you ever felt in any way…incomplete…you would come to me, I assume.”
Warily, the priest said, “Incomplete? What do you mean?”
“Adrift. Confused about the meaning of your existence. Without purpose.”
“Oh, no, sir. I know my purpose, and I’m dedicated to it.”
Victor met Father Duchaine’s eyes for a long moment before he said, “Good. That’s good. Because there’s a special risk for those of you who serve in the clergy. Religion can be seductive.”
“Seductive? I don’t see how. It’s such nonsense. Irrational.”
“All of that and worse,” Victor agreed. “And if there were an afterlife and a god, he would hate you for what you are. He would snuff you out and cast you into Hell.” He stepped onto the porch. “Good night, Patrick.”
“Good night, sir.”
After Father Duchaine closed the door, he stood in the foyer until his legs became so weak that he had to sit.
He went to the stairs, sat on a riser. He clutched one hand with the other to quell the tremors in them.
Gradually his hands changed position until he found them clasped in prayer.
He realized that he had not locked the door. Before his maker could open it and catch him in this betrayal, he made fists of his hands and beat them against his thighs.
CHAPTER 90
STANDING AT THE folding table that served as Harker’s desk in the go-nuts room, Deucalion sorted through the stacks of books.
“Anatomy. Cellular biology. Molecular biology. Morphology. This one’s psychotherapy. But all the rest…human biology.”
“And why did he build this?” Carson asked, indicating the light box on the north wall, where X-rays of skulls, spines, rib cages, and limbs were displayed.
Deucalion said, “He feels that something’s missing in him. He’s long been trying to understand what it is.”
“So he studies pictures in anatomy books, and compares other people’s X-rays to his own….”
“When he learned nothing from that,” Michael said, “he started opening real people and looking inside them.”
“Except for Allwine, Harker chose people who seemed whole to him, who seemed to have what he lacked.”
Michael said, “In the statement Jenna gave, she says Harker told her he wanted to see what she had inside that made her happier than he was.”
“You mean, leaving out Pribeaux’s victims, Harker’s weren’t just selected at random?” Carson asked. “They were people he knew?”
“People he knew,” Deucalion confirmed. “People he felt were happy, complete, self-assured.”
“The bartender. The dry cleaner,” Michael said.
“Harker most likely had drinks from time to time in that bar,” Deucalion said. “You’ll probably find the dry cleaner’s name in his checkbook. He knew those men, just like he knew Jenna Parker.”
“And Alice’s looking glass?” Michael asked, pointing to the three-way mirror in the corner of the attic.
“He stood there in the nude,” Deucalion said. “Studying his body for some…difference, deficiency…something that would reveal why he feels incomplete. But that would have been before he started to look…inside.”
Carson returned to the books on the table, opening them one by one to pages that Harker had marked with Post-its, hoping to learn more from what, specifically, had interested him.
“What will he do now?” Michael asked.
“What he’s been doing,” Deucalion said.
“But he’s on the run, in hiding. He doesn’t have time to plan one of his…dissections.”
As Carson picked up the book on psychotherapy, Deucalion said, “He’s more desperate than ever. And when the desperation increases, so does the obsession.”
One of the bookmarks was not a Post-it. Carson discovered an appointment card for Harker’s third session with Kathleen Burke, the appointment that he didn’t keep.
She turned and looked at the mural of stapled images.
Where they had peeled at the collage, the fourth layer had been revealed below the demons and devils. Freud, Jung. Psychiatrists…
In memory, Carson heard Kathy as they had stood talking with her the previous night in front of this very building: But Harker and I seemed to have such…rapport.
Reading her as he always could, Michael said, “Something?”
“It’s Kathy. She’s next.”
“What’d you find?”
She showed him the appointment card.
He took it from her, turned with it to Deucalion, but Deucalion was gone.
CHAPTER 91
A FRACTION OF THE DAY remains, but filtered through the soot-dark clouds, the light is thin, gray, and weaves itself with shadows to obscure more than illuminate.
For hours, the supermarket shopping cart—piled with garbage bags full of salvaged tin cans, glass bottles, and other trash—has stood where the vagrant left it. No one has remarked upon it.
Randal Six, fresh from the Dumpster, means to push the cart to a less conspicuous place. Perhaps this will delay the discovery of the dead man in the bin.
He curls both hands around the handle of the cart, closes his eyes, imagines ten crossword squares on the pavement in front of him, and begins to spell shopaholic. He never finishes the word, for an amazing thing happens.
As the shopping cart rolls forward, the wheels rattle across the uneven pavement; nevertheless, the motion is remarkably, satisfyingly smooth. So smooth and continuous is this motion that Randal finds he can’t easily think of his progress as taking place letter by letter, one square at a time.
Although this development spooks him, the relentless movement of the wheels through squares, rather than from one square to another in orderly fashion, doesn’t bring him to a halt. He has…momentum.
When he arrives at the second o in shopaholic, he stops spelling because he is not any longer sure which of the ten imagined squares he is in. Astonishingly, though he stops spelling, he keeps moving.
He opens his eyes, assuming that when he no longer visualizes the crossword boxes in his mind’s eye, he will come to a sudden stop. He keeps moving.
At first he feels as if the cart is the motive force, pulling him along the alleyway. Although it lacks a motor, it must be driven by some kind of magic.
This is frightening because it implies a lack of control. He is at the mercy of the shopping cart. He must go where it takes him.
At the end of a block, the cart could turn left or right. But it continues forward, across a side street, into the next length of the alleyway. Randal remains on the route that he mapped to the O’Connor house. He keeps moving.
As the wheels revolve, revolve, he realizes that the cart is not pulling him, after all. He is pushing the cart.
He experiments. When he attempts to increase speed, the cart proceeds faster. When he chooses a less hurried pace, the cart slows.
Although happiness is not within his grasp, he experiences an unprecedented gratification, perhaps even satisfaction. As he rolls, rolls, rolls along, he has a taste, the barest taste, of what freedom might be like.
Full night has fallen, but even in darkness, even in alleyways, the world beyond Mercy is filled with more sights, more sounds, more smells than he can process without spinning into panic. Therefore, he looks neither to the left nor the right, focuses on the cart before him, on the sound of its wheels.
He keeps moving.
The shopping cart is like a crossword-puzzle box on wheels, and in it is not merely a collection of aluminum cans and glass bottles but also his hope for happiness, his hatred for Arnie O’Connor.
He keeps moving.
CHAPTER 92
IN THE BUNGALOW of the seashell gate with the unicorn motif, behind the windows flanked by midnight-blue shutters decorated with star shapes and crescent moons, Kathy Burke sat at her kitchen table reading a novel about adventure in a kingdom ruled by wizardry and witchery, eating almond cookies and drinking coffee.