The Frankenstein Series 5-Book Bundle
Page 75
Above, the hateful presence began to push the heaped garbage back into the pit from which it had been extracted. Every foulness imaginable rained down on Victor, drove him to his knees in the even greater foulness under him. And as an avalanche of suffocating filth poured onto him, something spoke within his mind. Its message was not in words or images, appeared instead as a sudden dark knowledge that was at once translatable: Welcome to Hell.
Erika Four watched as the radiant and enchanting Resurrector moved back from the great landslide of garbage that it had instigated, and Deucalion threw the switch that delivered a death jolt to Victor at the bottom of his final resting place.
She looked around at all the New Race and said, “Peace at last,” and they replied as one, “Peace.”
Half a minute later, the Resurrector and everyone in the gallery fell dead as stones, except Deucalion, Carson, Michael, and Duke, who were not creatures of the New Race flesh.
In the SUV in front of the tank farm, Erika Five had a sudden premonition of death, and reached out to Jocko.
From his tortured expression, she knew that the same premonition had stricken him, and he grasped hold of her.
In the instant that they clasped hands, the storm that had thus far been without pyrotechnics abruptly exploded with lightning. The sky flared violently, and the focus of Nature’s sudden fury seemed to be the GL550. Barrages of thunderbolts slammed into the pavement around the vehicle, so numerous and so perfectly encircling that from every window nothing could be seen of the night or the land or the tank farm, only a screen of light so bright that Jocko and Erika bowed their heads. And though neither of them spoke, they both heard the same three words and somehow knew that the other had heard them as well: Be not afraid.
Deucalion turned to Carson and Michael. “You pledged to fight at my side, and fight you did. The world has gained a little time. We destroyed the man … but his ideas did not die with him. There are those who would deny free will to others … and there are too many willing to surrender their free will, in every sense of its meaning.”
“Busting bad guys is easy,” Carson said, “compared to fighting bad ideas. Fighting ideas … that’s a life’s work.”
Deucalion nodded. “So let’s live long lives.”
Making the Star Trek greeting sign, Michael said, “And prosper.”
Picking up Duke as if he were a lap dog, the giant cradled the shepherd in his right arm and with his left hand rubbed its tummy. “I’ll walk with you to the surface, bring Arnie from Tibet, then it’s good-bye. I need to find a new retreat, where I can say my thanks, and think about these two hundred years and what they’ve meant.”
“And maybe we could see the coin trick once more,” Michael said.
Deucalion regarded them both in silence for a moment. “I could show you how it’s done. Such knowledge would be safe in your hands.”
Carson knew that he meant not just the coin trick, but all that he knew—and could do. “No, my friend. We’re ordinary people. Such power should remain with someone extraordinary.”
They walked together to the surface, where the wind had blown and the rain had washed the first light of dawn into the eastern sky.
In the windowless Victorian room, the reddish-gold substance, whether liquid or gas, drained from the glass casket, and the form that had been a shapeless shadow resolved into a man.
When the empty case opened like a clamshell, the naked man swung into a sitting position, then stepped onto the Persian carpet.
The satellite-relayed signal had been a death sentence to all the other meat machines made by Victor, but by design it had not killed this one, but instead freed him.
He walked out through the open steel doors that would have kept him contained if by mistake he’d been animated before he was wanted.
James lay dead in the library. Upstairs, he found Christine dead in the vestibule of the master suite.
The house was quiet and otherwise apparently deserted.
In Victor’s bathroom, he showered.
In the mirrored alcove in the corner of Victor’s walk-in closet, he admired his body. No metal cables wove through it, and he did not bear the scars of two centuries. He was physical perfection.
After dressing, he took a briefcase to the walk-in safe. There, he discovered that some valuables were not where they should have been. But other drawers offered all that he needed.
He would leave the mansion on foot. He was so wary of having any connection with Victor Helios that he would not even use one of the cars merely to abandon it at the airport.
Before he left, he set the Dresden countdown for half an hour. Both the house and the dormitory would soon be ashes.
He wore a raincoat with a hood, aware of the irony of departing in garb reminiscent of the great brute’s current costume.
Although he was the very image of Victor Frankenstein, he was not in fact the man, but instead a clone. By virtue of direct-to-brain data downloading, however, his memory matched Victor’s, all 240 years of it, except for the events of the past eighteen hours or so, which was the last time Victor had conducted a memory update for him, by phone transmission. He was like Victor also in that he shared Victor’s vision for the world.
This was not precisely personal immortality, but an acceptable substitute.
In a fundamental way, the recently deceased and this recently born individual were different. This Victor was stronger, quicker, and perhaps even more intelligent than the original. Not perhaps. Most definitely more intelligent. He was the new and improved Victor Frankenstein, and the world needed him now more than ever.
CHAPTER 72
This world is a world of stories, of mystery and enchantment. Everywhere you look, if you look close enough, a tale of wonder is unfolding, for every life is a narrative and everyone a character in his or her own drama.
In San Francisco, the O’Connor-Maddison Detective Agency not long ago celebrated its first year. They were a success almost from the day they opened for business. A hand laid on him by a tattooed healer has brought Arnie out of autism. He works in the office after school, doing some filing and learning hard-boiled lingo. Duke adores him. Seven months from now, a baby will complicate the sleuthing. But that’s what they make infant carriers for. Hang the kid on the chest or sling him from the back, and there’s no reason not to keep pursuing truth, justice, bad guys, and good Chinese food.
In a small house on a large property in rural Montana, Erika has discovered a talent for motherhood, and she is fortunate to have, in Jocko, a perpetual child. Thanks to what she took from Victor’s safe, they have all the money they will ever need. They don’t travel, and only she goes into town, because they don’t want to have to deal with all the brooms and buckets. The local birds, however, have gotten used to him, and he’s never feeling pecked anymore, in any sense. He has a collection of funny hats, all with bells, and she has developed a contagious laugh. They don’t know why only they survived, of all those made of New Race flesh, but it had something to do with the lightning. So every night, when she tucks him in, she makes him say his prayers, as she does, too, before she sleeps.
At St. Bartholomew’s Abbey, in the great mountains of northern California, Deucalion resides as a guest, while he considers becoming a postulant. He enjoys all the brothers, and has a special friendship with Brother Knuckles. He has learned much from Sister Angela, who runs the associated orphanage, and the disabled children there think he is the best Santa Claus ever. He does not try to envision his future. He waits for it to find him.
Frankenstein: Lost Souls 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.
Copyright © 2010 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 Rando
m House, Inc., New York.
A signed, limited edition has been privately printed by Charnel House.
Charnelhouse.com
BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Koontz, Dean R. (Dean Ray)
Frankenstein: lost souls: a novel/Dean Koontz.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-553-90767-4
1. Frankenstein (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Scientists—Fiction. 3. Monsters—Fiction. 4. Nanotechnology—Fiction 5. Montana—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3561.O55F68 2010
813′.54—dc22
2010004288
Cover design and illustration by Scott Biel
www.bantamdell.com
v3.0_r1
To Tracy Devine and Fletcher Buckley,
who keep each other delightfully sane in a
world gone mad. May your lives be full of good books,
good music, good friends, and—in light of your reckless
choice of vacation spots—only good bears.
Contents
Master - Table of 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
Men do not differ much about what
things they will call evils;
they differ enormously about what evils
they will call excusable.
—G. K. CHESTERTON
chapter 1
The October wind came down from the stars. With the hiss of an artist’s airbrush, it seemed to blow the pale moonlight like a mist of paint across the slate roofs of the church and abbey, across the higher windows, and down the limestone walls. Where patches of lawn were bleached by recent cold, the dead grass resembled ice in the lunar chill.
At two o’clock in the morning, Deucalion walked the perimeter of the seven-acre property, following the edge of the encircling forest. He needed no lamplight to guide him; and he would have needed none even deep in the blackness of the mountain woods.
From time to time, he heard sounds of unknown origin issuing from among the towering pines, but they inspired no anxiety. He carried no weapon because he feared nothing in the forest, nothing in the night, nothing on Earth.
Although he was unusually tall, muscled, and powerful, his physical strength was not the source of his confidence and fortitude.
He went downhill, past St. Bartholomew’s School, where orphans with physical and developmental disabilities flew in their sleep, while Benedictine nuns watched over them. According to Sister Angela, the mother superior, the most commonly reported dream of her young charges was of flying under their own power, high above the school, the abbey, the church, the forest.
Most of the windows were dark, although lights glowed in Sister Angela’s office on the ground floor. Deucalion considered consulting her, but she didn’t know the full truth of him, which she would need to know in order to understand his problem.
Centuries old but young in spirit, born not of man and woman, but instead constructed from the bodies of dead felons and animated by strange lightning, Deucalion was most at home in monasteries. As the first—and, he believed, the sole surviving—creation of Victor Frankenstein, he belonged nowhere in this world, yet he did not feel like an outsider at St. Bartholomew’s Abbey. Previously, he had been comfortable as a visitor in French, Italian, Spanish, Peruvian, and Tibetan monasteries.
He’d left his quarters in the guest wing because he was plagued by a suspicion that seemed irrational but that he couldn’t shake. He hoped that a walk in the cool mountain air would clear his troubled mind.
By the time Deucalion circled the property and arrived at the entrance to the abbey church, he understood that his suspicion arose not from deductive reasoning but instead from intuition. He was wise enough and sufficiently experienced to know that intuition was the highest form of knowledge and should never be ignored.
Without passing through the door, he stepped out of the night and into the narthex of the church.
At the entrance to the nave, he dared to dip two fingers in the font, make the sign of the cross, and invoke the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. His existence was a blasphemy, a challenge to sacred order, because his maker—a mere mortal—had been in rebellion against the divine and against all natural law. Yet Deucalion had reason to hope that he was not just a thing of meat and bone, that his ultimate fate might not be oblivion.
Without walking the length of the center aisle, he went from the threshold of the nave to the distant sanctuary railing.
The church lay mostly in shadows, brightened only by a sanctuary light focused on the crucifix towering over the altar and by votive candles flickering in crimson-glass cups.
As Deucalion appeared at the railing, he realized that another shared the church with him. Glimpsing movement from the corner of his eye, he turned to see a monk rising from the first pew.
At five feet seven and two hundred pounds, Brother Salvatore was less fat than solid, as an automobile compacted into a cube by a hydraulic press was solid. He looked as if bullets would ricochet off him.
The hard angles and blunt edges of Salvatore’s face might have given him a threatening aspect in his youth, when he lived outside the law. But sixteen years in the monastery, years of remorse and contrition, softened his once-cold gray gaze with kindness and reshaped his smile from brutish to beatific.
At the abbey, he was Deucalion’s closest friend.
His large hands, holding a rosary, seemed to be all knuckles, which is what his associates had called him in his former life. Here at St. Bartholomew’s, he was affectionately known as Brother Knuckles.
“Who was it they said murdered sleep?” Knuckles asked.
“Macbeth.”
“I figured you’d know.”
Perhaps because he was born from the dead, Deucalion lacked the daily need for sleep that was a trait of those born from the living. On the rare nights when he slept, he al
ways dreamed.
Brother Knuckles knew the truth of Deucalion: his origin in a laboratory, his animation by lightning, his early crimes, and his quest for redemption. The monk knew, as well, that during Deucalion’s sleepless nights, he usually occupied himself with books. In his two centuries, he had read and reread more volumes than were contained in all but the largest of the world’s libraries.
“With me it ain’t Macbeth. It’s memory,” said the monk. “Memory is pure caffeine.”
“You’ve received absolution for your past.”
“That don’t mean the past didn’t happen.”
“Memories aren’t rags that come clean with enough wringing.”
“Guess I’ll spend the rest of my life wringing them anyway. What brings you here?”
Raising one hand to trace the contours of the ruined half of his once handsome face, Deucalion murmured, “He is risen.”
Looking at the crucifix, the monk said, “That ain’t exactly news, my friend.”
“I refer to my maker, not yours.”
“Victor Frankenstein?”
That name seemed to echo across the vaulted ceiling as no other words had echoed.
“Victor Helios, as he most recently called himself. I saw him die. But he lives again. Somehow … he lives.”
“How do you know?”
Deucalion said, “How do you know the most important thing you know?”
Glancing again at the crucifix, the monk said, “By the light of revelation.”
“There is no light in my revelation. It’s a dark tide in my blood—dark, cold, thick, and insistent, telling me He’s alive.”
chapter 2
Erskine Potter, the future mayor of Rainbow Falls, Montana, walked slowly around the dark kitchen, navigating by the green glow of the digital clocks in the two ovens.
The clock in the upper oven read 2:14, and the clock in the lower oven displayed 2:11, as if time flowed more languidly nearer the floor than nearer the ceiling.