by Dean Koontz
“Is it something that will beat Jocko with a stick?”
“No. Nothing like that.”
“Is it something that will call Jocko a freak and throw dog poop at him?”
“No. That won’t happen here.”
Jocko did not appear to be convinced.
The steel slab swung smoothly away from them on ball-bearing hinges, activating lights on the farther side.
The subsequent twelve-foot-long passageway ended in a door identical to the first.
Scores of metal rods bristled from the walls, copper on Erika’s left, steel or some alloy of steel on her right. A soft hum arose from them.
“Uh-oh,” said the troll.
“I wasn’t electrocuted the first time,” Erika assured him. “So I’m pretty sure we’ll be okay.”
“But Erika is luckier than Jocko.”
“Why would you say that?”
The troll cocked his head as if to say, Are you serious? “Why would Jocko say that? Look at you. Look at Jocko.”
“Anyway,” she said, “there’s no such thing as luck. The universe is meaningless chaos. That’s what Victor says, so it must be true.”
“A black cat crossed Jocko’s path once. Then it came back and clawed him.”
“I don’t think that proves anything.”
“Jocko found a penny in the street after midnight. Ten steps later, Jocko fell down an open manhole.”
“That wasn’t luck. That was not looking where you’re going.”
“Landed on an alligator.”
“An alligator in the storm drain? Well, all right, but it is New Orleans.”
“Turned out to be two alligators. Mating.”
“You poor thing.”
Indicating the rod-lined passageway, Jocko said, “You go first.”
As on her previous visit, when Erika entered this new corridor, a blue laser beam scanned her from top to bottom, to top again, as if assessing her form. The laser winked off. The rods stopped humming.
Reluctantly, Jocko followed her to the next steel door.
Erika extracted five deadbolts and opened the final barrier, beyond which lamplight swelled to reveal a windowless, twenty-foot-square space furnished as a Victorian drawing room.
“What do you think?” she asked the troll.
In just the second day of her life, Erika had arrived at a crossroads. Perplexed and irresolute, she needed another opinion of her circumstance before she could decide what she must do.
Jocko did a little moonwalk on the polished mahogany floor and said, “Smooth.” He squinched his toes in the antique Persian carpet and said, “Soft.”
Putting his peculiar nose to the William Morris wallpaper, he inhaled deeply, savored the smell, and said, “Paste.”
He admired the ebonized-walnut fireplace and licked the William De Morgan tiles around the firebox. “Glossy,” he said of the tiles.
Cupping his left hand around his left ear, he leaned close to one of the lamps that featured fringed shades of shantung silk, as if he were listening to the light. “Wednesday,” he said, but Erika did not ask why.
He jumped up and down on the wingback chair—“Springy”—studied the deeply coffered mahogany ceiling—“Abundant”—squirmed under the Chesterfield on his back and made a peeping sound.
Returning to Erika, he said, “Nice room. Let’s go.”
“You can’t just ignore it,” she said.
“Ignore what?”
She pointed to the focal point of the chamber, an immense glass case: nine feet long, five feet wide, and more than three feet deep. It stood on a series of bronze ball-and-claw feet. The six panes of beveled glass were held in an ornate ormolu frame of exquisitely chased bronze.
“It seems to me like an enormous jewel box,” Erika said.
After smacking the flaps of his mouth, the troll said, “Yeah. Jewel box. Let’s go.”
“Come take a close look at the contents,” Erika said, and when he hesitated, she took his hand and led him to the mysterious object.
A semiopaque reddish-gold substance filled the case. One moment the contents seemed to be a fluid through which circulated subtle currents, but the next moment it appeared instead to be a dense vapor as it billowed against the glass.
“Does it contain a liquid or a gas?” Erika wondered.
“One or the other. Let’s go.”
“See how the gas or liquid absorbs the lamplight,” Erika said. “It glows so prettily throughout, gold and crimson at the same time.”
“Jocko needs to pee.”
“Do you see how the internal luminosity reveals a large, dark shape suspended in the middle of the case?”
“Jocko needs to pee so bad.”
“Although I can’t see even a single small detail of that shadowy form,” Erika said, “it reminds me of something. Does it remind you of anything, Jocko?”
“Jocko is reminded of a shadowy form.”
Erika said, “It reminds me of a scarab petrified in resin. The ancient Egyptians considered scarabs sacred.”
This seemed like a quintessential H. Rider Haggard moment, but she doubted the troll would be able to appreciate a literary allusion to the writer of great adventures.
“What is … scarab?”
“A giant beetle,” she said.
“Did you hear? Jocko needs to pee.”
“You do not need to pee.”
“Better believe it.”
Putting a hand under his chin, turning his head, forcing him to meet her stare, Erika said, “Look me in the eyes and tell me true. I’ll know if you’re lying.”
“You will?”
“Better believe it. Now … does Jocko need to pee?”
He searched her eyes, considering his answer, and tiny beads of sweat appeared on his brow. Finally he said, “Ah. The urge has passed.”
“I thought it might. Look at the shadow floating in the case. Look, Jocko.”
Reluctantly, he returned his attention to the occupant of the big jewel box.
“Touch the glass,” she said.
“Why?”
“I want to see what happens.”
“Jocko doesn’t want to see what happens.”
“I suspect nothing will happen. Please, Jocko. For me.”
As if he were being asked to press the nose of a coiled cobra, the troll put one finger to the glass, held it there a few seconds, and then snatched it away. He survived.
“Cold,” he said. “Icy.”
Erika said, “Yes, but not so icy that your skin sticks to it. Now let’s see what happens when I touch it….”
She pressed a forefinger to the glass, and within the luminous substance, the shadowy form twitched.
CHAPTER 49
“FATHER … FATHER … FATHER …”
The Werner thing progressed clumsily, knocking against the east wall of the corridor, then colliding with the west wall, staggering back four or five feet before advancing seven or eight, as though its every movement required a majority vote of a committee.
This creature was not only an abomination, but also a vicious mockery of everything Victor had achieved, intended to deride his triumphs, to imply that his life’s work was but a crude burlesque of science. He now suspected that Werner wasn’t a victim of catastrophic cellular metamorphosis, not a victim, but instead a perpetrator, that the security chief had consciously rebelled against his maker. Indeed, judging by the composition of this many-faced travesty, the entire staff of the Hands of Mercy had committed themselves to this insane commune of flesh, reducing themselves to a mutant mob in a single entity. They could have but one reason for re-creating themselves as this lumbering atrocity: to offend their maker, to disrespect him, to dishonor him, to make of him a laughingstock. By such a vivid expression of their irrational contempt and scorn, these ungrateful wretches expected to confuse and dishearten him, to humiliate him.
Flesh is cheap, but flesh is also treacherous.
“Father … Father … Father …”
They were meat machines who fancied themselves philosophers and critics, daring to ridicule the only intellect of paramount importance they would ever know. Victor was transforming the world, and they transformed nothing but themselves, yet they thought this miserable degradation of their well-crafted forms made them his equal, even his superior, with license to jeer and insult him.
As the Werner thing ricocheted from wall to wall and staggered backward in order to stumble forward, Victor said to it, to all of them tangled within it, “Your pathetic bit of biological theater means nothing to me, discourages me not at all. I haven’t failed. You have failed, you have failed me, betrayed me, and you have also failed to discourage me in the slightest. You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”
His outrage thus expressed, Victor spoke the death phrase, the words that would shut down the autonomic nervous systems of these anarchic fools, reducing their mocking many-faced grotesquerie to a heap of lifeless flesh.
The Werner thing kept coming, in its tedious fashion, ranting the one word that it knew—that they all knew—would most infuriate Victor.
He had little more than six minutes to escape the Hands of Mercy and get out of the neighborhood before the place flared into a molten imitation of the sun. The coming conflagration would obliterate the Werner thing, answering their blasphemy with purifying fire.
The elevator lay between Victor and the shambling mob-in-one. The stairs seemed more advisable.
Carrying the suitcase that contained every minim of his historic work in Mercy, he hurried away from the Werner thing, slammed through the staircase door, and raced down to the lowest level.
Through columns of light and pools of shadow, past the rubble that stood as a monument to a previous bad day in Mercy. Into the file room.
The keypad, his code. One digit wrong. Enter it again. Each tap of a finger eliciting a tone.
He glanced back. The Werner thing had not followed him. It would not get out this way, and no other doors functioned. The Jabberwock was doomed. Let it die mocking him with its many mouths, he didn’t care.
Into the corridor with concrete floor, block-and-timber walls. First door closing automatically behind him as he reached the next. Keypad, code again. Right on the first try. The small concrete room, the final door, always unlocked from this side.
The S600 Mercedes sedan looked magnificent, a carriage fit for any royalty and even adequate for him. He opened the back door, but thought better of putting the precious suitcase in such an unsecured place. He went to the back of the car and locked the case in the trunk.
He closed the back door, opened the driver’s door, got behind the wheel. The key was in his pocket, and the touch of a finger to the keyless ignition fired the engine.
He drove up to the street and turned right, away from Mercy.
Rising wind pummeled the streets with pellets of rain that bounced like stones off the pavement, and flotillas of litter raced along brimming gutters. But rain ten times heavier than this would have no quenching effect on the incendiary material soon to ignite in his lost laboratories.
So spectacularly would the old hospital burn that no one in the city—or in the nation, for that matter, sea to shining sea—would ever have seen anything to rival the ferocity of the blaze, and they would never forget those white-white flames so bright as to be blinding. Structures across the street from Mercy might also catch fire, and the five-story building next door—owned by his Biovision—would without question be destroyed, which would make him a source of interest to the media and maybe even to authorities.
Considering that the previous day William, the butler, had bitten off his fingers and been terminated, that within the past hour Christine had experienced an inexplicable interruption of function before Victor had shot her to death, he must face the possibility that others on his household staff might be of dubious psychological and/or physical integrity. They might not merely be unable to provide the high quality of service he expected but might also be unable to maintain a credible humanoid form. He could not go home again, at least not for a while.
Logical analysis wouldn’t allow Victor to avoid the conclusion that some of the two thousand of the New Race seeded throughout the city might soon begin to have problems of one kind or another. Not all of them, surely. But perhaps a significant fraction, say 5 percent, or 10. He should not remain in New Orleans during this uncertain period.
Because of the widespread nature of the crisis, Victor suspected a problem with the creation tanks at the Hands of Mercy. He knew that his genetic formulations and flesh-matrix designs were brilliant and without fault. Therefore, only a failure of machinery could explain these events.
Or sabotage.
A thousand suspicions suddenly plagued him, and with renewed anger, he feverishly considered who might have been secretly scheming to ruin him.
But no. Now was not the time to be distracted by the possibility of a saboteur. He must first decamp to a new center of operations, of which there was only one—the tank farm. He must strive to insulate himself from any connection to whatever events might occur in the city during the days ahead.
Later there would be time to identify a villain in his life, if one existed.
In truth, mechanical failure was more likely. He had made numerous improvements to the creation tanks that had been installed at the farm. They were three generations more sophisticated than the version in operation at the Hands of Mercy.
Heading for the causeway that would take him twenty-eight miles across Lake Pontchartrain, Victor reminded himself that every setback of his long career had been followed by more rapid and far greater advances than ever before. The universe asserted its chaotic nature, but always he imposed order on it once more.
Proof of his indomitable character was as evident as the clothes he wore, here and now. The encounter with Chameleon, the subsequent confrontation with the Werner thing, and the flight from Mercy would have taken a visible toll of most men. But his shoes were without a scuff, the crease in his trousers remained as crisp as ever, and a quick check in the rearview mirror revealed that his handsome head of hair was not in the least disarranged.
CHAPTER 50
WARILY CIRCLING THE GLASS CASE mounted on the ball-and-claw feet, halting on the farther side of it from Erika, Jocko said, “Not jewel box. Coffin.”
“A coffin would have a lid,” Erika said, “so I assume there’s not a dead man in it.”
“Good. Jocko knows enough. Let’s go.”
“Watch,” she said, and rapped a knuckle against the top of the case, as she had done on her previous visit.
The glass sounded as though it must be an inch thick or thicker, and from the spot where her knuckle struck the pane, the amber stuff inside—whether liquid or gas—dimpled much the way water dimpled when a stone was dropped into it. The sapphire-blue dimple resolved into a ring that widened across the surface. The amber color returned in the ring’s wake.
“Maybe never do that again,” Jocko suggested.
She rapped the glass three times. Three concentric blue rings appeared, receded to the perimeter of the case, and the amber color returned.
Regarding Erika across the top of the case, Jocko said, “Jocko feels kind of sick.”
“If you get down on the floor and look under the case—”
“Jocko won’t.”
“But if you did, you’d see electrical conduits, pipes of several colors and diameters. They all come out of the case, disappear into the floor. Which suggests there’s a service room directly under us.”
Putting both hands on his belly, Jocko said, “Kind of queasy.”
“Yet the mansion supposedly doesn’t have a basement.”
“Jocko doesn’t go in basements.”
“You lived in a storm drain.”
“Not happily.”
Erika moved to the end of the case farthest from the door. “If this were a casket, I figure this would be the head of it.”
“D
efinitely nauseated,” said Jocko.
Erika bent low, until her lips were a few inches from the glass. She said softly, “Hello, hello, hello in there.”
Within the amber shroud of gas or liquid, the shadowy form thrashed, thrashed.
Jocko scrambled away from the case so fast that Erika didn’t see how he had ascended to the fireplace mantel, where he perched, arms wide, holding tight to the framing bronze sconces.
“It scared me, too, the first time,” she said. “But I’d only been beaten once at that point, and I hadn’t seen Christine shot dead. I’m harder to scare now.”
“Jocko is gonna vomit.”
“You are not going to vomit, little friend.”
“If we don’t leave now, Jocko vomits.”
“Look me in the eyes and tell me true,” she said. “Jocko is not sick, only frightened. I’ll know if you’re lying.”
Meeting her stare, he made a pathetic mewling sound. Finally he said, “Jocko leaves or Jocko vomits.”
“I’m disappointed in you.”
He looked stricken.
She said, “If you were telling me the truth—then where’s the vomit?”
Jocko sucked his upper and lower mouth flaps between his teeth and bit on them. He looked abashed.
When Erika wouldn’t stop staring at him, the troll opened his mouth, let go of one of the sconces, and stuck his fingers down his throat.
“Even if that worked,” she said, “it wouldn’t count. If you were really nauseated, truly nauseated, you could throw up without the finger trick.”
Gagging, eyes flooding with tears, Jocko tried and tried, but he could not make himself regurgitate. His efforts were so strenuous that his right foot slipped off the mantel, he lost his grip on the second sconce, and he fell to the floor.
“See where you get when you lie to a friend?”
Cringing in shame, the troll tried to hide behind the wingback chair.
“Don’t be silly,” Erika said. “Come here.”
“Jocko can’t look at you. Just can’t.”
“Of course you can.”
“No. Jocko can’t bear to see you hate him.”