by Dean Koontz
The final key ingredient had been purified New Zealand lamb's urine, of which he drank four ounces a day With a lemon wedge.
This turning back of the clock was highly desirable, of course, but he reminded himself that he could youthenize himself too far. If he reversed himself to the condition of a twenty-year-old and stayed there for a hundred years, that would be good; but if he got carried away and made himself twelve again, that would be bad.
He had not enjoyed his childhood and adolescence the first time around. Repeating any portion of them, even if solely in physical appearance, would be a glimpse of Hell.
After Roy dressed, as he stood in the kitchen, washing down twenty-four capsules of supplements with grapefruit juice prior to preparing breakfast, he was abruptly struck by the realization that his life now had no purpose.
For the past two years, he had been collecting the anatomical components of the perfect woman, first in a variety of locations far removed from New Orleans, then lately and with particular frenzy here in his own backyard. But as of Candace, he had them all. Hands, feet, lips, nose, hair, breasts, eyes, and so much more—he had forgotten nothing.
Now what?
He was surprised that he had not thought further than this. Being a man of leisure, he had a lot of time on his hands; being an immortal, he had eternity.
This thought proved suddenly daunting.
Now he slowly realized that during the years of searching and harvesting, he had superstitiously and unconsciously assumed that when his collection was complete, when the freezer was filled with all the jigsaw pieces of the most perfectly beautiful woman, then a living woman, embodying every one of those features and qualities, would magically come into his life. He had been engaged on a kind of hoodoo quest with the purpose of shaping his romantic destiny
Perhaps this mojo would work. Perhaps this very afternoon, as he strolled the Quarter, he would come face to face with her dazzling, bewitching self.
If the days passed without this desired encounter, however, days and weeks and months… what then?
He yearned to share his perfection with a woman who would be his equal. Until that moment came, life would be empty, without purpose.
An uneasiness overcame him. He tried to quell it with breakfast.
As he ate, he became fascinated with his hands. They were more than beautiful male hands; they were exquisite.
Oh, but until he found his goddess—not in pieces but whole and alive, without fault or deficiency—his flawless hands would not be able to caress the perfection that was their erotic destiny.
His uneasiness grew.
CHAPTER 39
AT DAYBREAK, with the rising sun not yet at an angle to fire the stained-glass windows, Our Lady of Sorrows sheltered a congregation of shadows. The only light came from the illuminated stations of the cross and from the candles in the ruby-red glass votive cups.
The humidity and early heat ripened the fragrances of incense, tallow, and lemon-scented wax. Inhaling this melange, Victor imagined he would be sweating it through every pore for the rest of the day.
His footsteps on the marble floor echoed from the groin vaults overhead. He liked the crisp coldness of this sound, which he fancied spoke truth to the cloying atmosphere of the church.
With the first Mass of the day still half an hour away, the only person present, other than Victor, was Patrick Duchaine. He waited, as instructed, on a pecan pew in the front row.
The man rose nervously, but Victor said, "Sit, sit," not quite in the tone he might use to decline a courtesy, but in a tone rather like the one in which he might speak with impatience to a vexing dog.
At sixty, Patrick had white hair, an earnest grand-fatherly face, and eyes moist with perpetual compassion. His looks alone inspired the trust and affection of his parishioners.
Add to appearances a gentle, musical voice. A warm, easy laugh. Furthermore, he had the genuine humility of a man who knew too well his place in the scheme of things.
Father Duchaine was the image of an unassailably good priest to whom the faithful would give their hearts. And to whom they would confess their sins without hesitation.
In a community with many Catholics—practicing and not—Victor found it useful to have one of his people manning the confessional in which some of the city's more powerful citizens went to their knees.
Patrick Duchaine was one of those rare members of the New Race who had been cloned from the DNA of an existing human being rather than having been designed from scratch by Victor. Physiologically, he had been improved, but to the eye he was the Patrick Duchaine who had been born of man and woman.
The real Father Duchaine had donated to a Red Cross blood drive, unwittingly providing the material from which he could be replicated. These days, he rotted under tons of garbage, deep in the landfill, while his Doppelganger tended to the souls at Our Lady of Sorrows.
Replacing real human beings with replicas entailed risks that Victor seldom wished to take. Although the duplicate might look and sound and move exactly like its inspiration, the memories of the original could not be transferred to him.
The closest relatives and friends of the replaced individual were certain to notice numerous gaps in his knowledge of his personal history and relationships. They wouldn't imagine he was an imposter, but they would surely think that he was suffering from a mental or physical ailment; they would press him to seek medical attention.
In addition, out of concern, they would watch him closely and would not entirely trust him. His ability to blend in with society and to carry out his work in the service of the New Race would be compromised.
In the case of the priest, he'd had no wife, of course, and no children. His parents were dead, as was his only brother. While he had many friends and parishioners to whom he was close, no intimate family existed to note his memory gaps throughout the day.
In the lab Victor raised this Father Duchaine from spilled blood before the real Father Duchaine had died, a trick more complicated than the one that the man from Galilee had performed with Lazarus.
Sitting in the front pew beside his priest, Victor said, "How do you sleep? Do you dream?"
"Not often, sir. Sometimes... a nightmare about the Hands of Mercy. But I can never recall the details."
"And you never will. That's my gift to you—no memory of your birth. Patrick, I need your help."
"Anything, of course."
"One of my people is having a serious crisis of the mind. I don't know who he is. He called me... but he is afraid to come to me."
"Perhaps... not afraid, sir," the priest said. “Ashamed. Ashamed that he has failed you."
That statement troubled Victor. "How could you suggest such a thing, Patrick? The New Race has no capacity for shame."
Only Erika had been programmed to know shame, and only because Victor found her more erotic in the throes of it.
"Shame," he told Patrick, "isn't a virtue. It's a weakness. No Natural Law requires it. We rule nature... and transcend it."
The priest evaded Victor's gaze. "Yes, sir, of course. I think what I meant was... maybe he feels a sort of... regret that he hasn't performed to your expectations."
Perhaps the priest would need to be watched closely or even subjected to a day-long examination in the lab.
"Search the city, Patrick. Spread the word among my people. Maybe they've seen one of their kind behaving oddly. I'm charging you and a few other key people with this search, and I know that you will perform up to my expectations."
"Yes, sir."
"If you find him and he runs... kill him. You know how your kind can be killed."
"Yes, sir."
"Be cautious. He's already killed one of you," Victor revealed.
Surprised, the priest met his eyes again.
"I'd prefer to have him alive," Victor continued. "But at least I need his body To study Bring him to me at the Hands of Mercy."
They were near enough to the rack of votive candles that the pulsing
crimson reflections of the flames crawled Patrick's face.
This inspired Victor to ask "Do you sometimes wonder if you're damned?"
"No, sir," the priest answered, but with a hesitation. "There is no Hell or Heaven. This is the one life."
"Exactly. Your mind is too well made for superstition." Victor rose from the pew. "God bless you, Patrick." When the priest's eyes widened with surprise, Victor smiled and said, "That was a joke."
CHAPTER 40
WHEN CARSON PICKED UP Michael at his apartment house, he got in the car, looked her over, and said, "Those are yesterday's clothes."
"Suddenly you're a fashion critic."
"You look... rumpled."
As she pulled away from the curb, she said, "Rumpled, my ass. I look like a cow pie in a bad wig."
"You didn't get any sleep?"
"Maybe I'm done with sleep forever."
"If you've been up more than twenty-four hours, you shouldn't be driving," he said.
"Don't worry about it, Mom." She took a tall Starbucks cup from between her thighs, drank through a straw. "I'm so wired on caffeine, I've got the reflexes of a pit viper."
"Do pit vipers have quick reflexes?"
"You want to get in a pit with one and see?"
"You are wound tight. What's happened?"
"Saw a ghost. Scared the crap out of me."
"What's the punch line?"
What she hadn't been able to say to Kathy Burke, she could say to Michael. In police work, partners were closer than mere friends. They had better be. They daily trusted each other with their lives.
If you couldn't share everything with your partner, you needed a new partner.
Nevertheless, she hesitated before she said, "He seemed to walk out of walls, disappear into them. Big sucker, but he moves quicker than the eye."
"Who?"
"You listening to anything I'm saying? The ghost, that's who."
"You spiking that coffee with something?"
"He said he's made from pieces of criminals."
"Slow down. You're driving too fast."
Carson accelerated. "The hands of a strangler, one heart from a mad arsonist, one from a child molester. His life force from a thunderstorm."
"I don't get it."
"Neither do I."
BY THE TIME Carson parked in front of Fullbright's Funeral Home, she had told Michael everything that happened in Allwine's apartment.
His face revealed no skepticism, but his tone of voice was the equivalent of raised eyebrows: "You were tired, in a weird place—"
"He took a gun away from me," she said, which might have been the essence of her astonishment, the one thing about the experience that had seemed the most supernatural. "No one takes a gun away from me, Michael. You want to try?"
"No. I enjoy having testicles. All I'm saying is that he was dressed in black, the apartment is black, so the disappearing trick was probably just a trick."
"So maybe he manipulated me, and I saw what he wanted me to see. Is that it?"
"Doesn't that make more sense?"
"Sure damn does. But if it was a trick, he should be headlining a magic act in Vegas."
Looking at the funeral home, Michael said, "Why're we here?"
"Maybe he didn't really move faster than the eye, and maybe he didn't in fact vanish into thin air, but he was dead-on when he said Allwine was in despair, wanted to die... but couldn't kill himself."
From a pocket she withdrew the four memorial booklets and handed them to Michael.
"Bobby had like a hundred of these," she continued, "in a drawer of his nightstand. All from different funerals at this place. Death appealed to him."
She got out of the car, slammed the driver's door, and met Michael on the sidewalk.
He said, "'Life force from a thunderstorm.' What the hell does that mean?"
"Sometimes like a soft lightning throbs through his eyes."
Hurrying at her side, Michael said, "You've always been stone solid until now, like Joe Friday with no Y chromosome. Now you're Nancy Drew on a sugar rush."
Like so many things in New Orleans, the mortuary seemed as much a dream place as a reality It had once been a Gothic Revival mansion and no doubt still served as the mortician's residence as well as his place of business. The weight of the lavish rococo millwork must have been only a few pounds shy of the critical load needed to buckle the eaves, implode the walls, and collapse the roof.
Live oaks dating to the plantation era shaded the house, while camellias, gardenias, mimosa, and tea roses cast a scene-saturating perfume. Bees buzzed lazily from bloom to bloom, too fat and happy to sting, besotted by rich nectar.
At the front door, Carson rang the bell. "Michael, don't you sometimes sense there's more to life than the grind—some amazing secret you can almost see from the corner of your eye?" Before he could reply, she plunged on: "Last night I saw something amazing... something I can't put into words. It's almost like UFOs exist."
"You and me—we've put guys in psych wards who talk like that."
A bearish, dour-looking man answered the door and acknowledged in the most somber tones that he was indeed Taylor Fullbright.
Flashing her police ID, Carson said, "Sir, I'm sorry I didn't call ahead, but we're here on a rather urgent matter."
Brightening at the discovery that they were not a bereaved couple in need of counseling, Fullbright revealed his true convivial nature. "Come in, come in! I was just cremating a customer."
CHAPTER 41
FOR A LONG TIME after the session in the spinning rack, Randal Six lies on his bed, not sleeping—for he seldom sleeps—facing the wall, his back to the room, shutting out the chaos, allowing his mind slowly, slowly to grow still.
He does not know the purpose of the treatment, but he is certain that he cannot endure many more of those sessions. Sooner than later, he will suffer a massive stroke; the failure of an inner vessel will do what a bullet to his armored skull cannot as easily achieve.
If a cerebral aneurysm does not finish him, he will surely trade the developmental disability called autism for genuine psychosis. He will seek in madness the peace that mere autism is not always able to ensure.
In his darkest moments, Randal wonders whether the spinning rack is a treatment, as Father has repeatedly called it, or if it might be intended as torture.
Not born of God and alienated from belief, this is the closest he can come to a blasphemous thought: that Father is a cruel rather than a caring maker, that Father himself is psychotic and his entire enterprise an insane endeavor.
Whether Father is sincere or deceitful, whether his project is genius or dementia, Randal Six knows that he himself will never find happiness in the Hands of Mercy
Happiness lies streets away, a little less than three miles from here, at the home of one Carson O'Connor. In that house lies a secret to be taken if it isn't freely offered: the cause of Arnie O'Connor's smile, the reason for the moment of joy captured in the newspaper photo, no matter how brief it might have been.
As soon as possible, he must get to the O'Connor boy, before the cerebral aneurysm that kills him, before the spinning rack whirls him into madness.
Randal is not locked in his room. His autism, which is at times complicated by agoraphobia, keeps him this side of the threshold more securely than could locks or chains.
Father often encourages him to explore from end to end of the building, even floors above and below this one. Adventurousness will be a first proof that his treatments are working.
No matter where he goes in the building, he cannot leave, for the exterior doors are wired to a security system. He would be caught before he escaped the grounds…. and might be punished with a very long session in the spinning rack.
Anyway, when he occasionally leaves his room and wanders the halls, he never dares to go far, never a fraction as far as Father would like to see him travel. Sometimes even a distance of thirty feet presents him with an overload of sights and sounds that brings h
im trembling to his knees.
In his self-isolation, he nonetheless sees. He hears. He learns. He knows of a way out of Mercy that will not trigger an alarm.
He may not have sufficient fortitude to reach that special door, let alone to confront the busier world beyond. But his despondency has recently advanced to desperation, and the reckless action that is the whip of desperation may lash into him a kind of courage.
He will leave this coming night, in little more than twelve hours.
CHAPTER 42
THE QUIET RECEIVING FOYER featured a baroque frieze instead of traditional crown moldings: deeply carved acanthus leaves punctuated every two feet and at the corners by the heads of angels alternating with gargoyles or perhaps mocking demons.
Inlaid in the forest-green marble floor, a foot-wide circular work of marquetry employed lighter marbles to portray mythological beings—gods, goddesses, and demigods—in perpetual pursuit. Even without dropping to his knees, Michael could see that some of the pursuit involved sexual fondling.
Only in New Orleans would either of these elements have seemed suitable to a funeral home. The house had probably been built around 1850 by nouveau riche newcomers who hadn't been welcome in the Creole sections of town. In this city, time eventually conferred dignity on what had once been outrageous as well as on what had been classic from the day it had been erected.
Studying a photo of Bobby Allwine that Carson had given him, Taylor Fullbright said, "This is the very gentleman, yes. I felt sorry for the poor soul— so many of his friends were dying. Then I realized he didn't know any of the deceased."
Carson said, "He—what?—just got a thrill being around dead people?"
"Nothing that kinky," said Fullbright. "He just... seemed to be at peace around them."
"That's what he said—he was at peace?"
"The only thing I can remember he said was 'Death can be as much a gift as a curse,' which is often true."
"Did you confront him about coming to all these viewings?"