by Dean Koontz
She descended the stairs and toured the living room, Carson’s bedroom and bath, the kitchen, checking that all doors and windows were still secure. She found everything as she remembered having left it.
Half-drawn blinds and sheer curtains left the lower floor shadowy. Each time Vicky turned on a lamp to facilitate her inspection, she turned it off behind her when she moved on.
Carson’s room was the only part of the downstairs that featured air conditioning. Bolted in place, the window-mounted unit could not be removed without a racket that would betray an intruder long before he could effect entrance. At the moment, the air conditioner waited to be switched on; like similar units in Vicky’s and Arnie’s rooms, it was used only to facilitate sleep.
With the windows closed, these lower rooms were warm, stuffy. In the kitchen, she opened the top door on the refrigerator, not because she wanted anything in the freezer, but because the icy out-draft, billowing against her face, felt refreshing.
In her second-floor room once more, she found that the hush of the house continued to unnerve her. This seemed like the silence of an ax raised high but not yet swung.
Ridiculous. She was spooking herself. A case of broad-daylight heebie-jeebies.
Vicky switched on her CD player and, because Carson was not home to be bothered, turned the volume up a little louder than she usually did.
The disc was an anthology of hits by different artists. Billy Joel, Rod Stewart, the Knack, Supertramp, the BeeGees, Gloria Gaynor, Cheap Trick.
The music of her youth. Arthur had asked her to marry him. So happy together. Time had no meaning then. They thought they would live forever.
She returned to the letter that she had been composing, and sang along with the CD, her spirits lifted by the music and by memories of happier days, the troubling silence banished.
With the floor of the house pressing overhead, surrounded by the smell of bare earth and moist fungus, shrouded in gloom, anyone else might have progressed from claustrophobia to a panicky sense of being buried alive. Randal Six, however, child of Mercy, feels protected, even cozy.
He listens to the woman come downstairs and walk from room to room as though looking for something that she has mislaid. Then she returns to the second floor.
When he hears the music filtering down from high in the house, he knows that his opportunity has come. Under the cover of rock ’n’ roll, the noise he makes getting into the O’Connor residence will not be likely to draw attention.
He has thoroughly explored the crawl space, surprised by how adventurous he has become. The farther he goes from the Hands of Mercy both in terms of distance and time, the more his agoraphobia abates and the more he desires to expand his boundaries.
He is blossoming.
In addition to the concrete piers on which the house perches, the crawl space is punctuated by incoming water pipes, by sewer pipes and gray-water drains, by more pipes housing electrical cable. All of these services puncture the floor of the structure.
Even if Randal could disassemble one of those conduits, none of the points of penetration would be large enough to admit him.
He also has found a trapdoor. It measures about three feet square.
The hinges and latch are on the farther side, where he can’t reach them. The door most likely opens up and inward.
Near the trap, adjacent to the incoming gas line, flexible ductwork, eight inches in diameter, comes out of the house; it snakes through the crawl space. The farther end of the duct is framed to a cutout in the lattice skirt.
Randal assumes this is either an air intake or a safety vent for a gas-fired heating system.
Judging by the evidence, the trapdoor opens into a furnace room. A repairman could use it to move between the equipment above and the connections under the floor.
In the house overhead, autistic but capable of a dazzling smile, Arnie O’Connor possesses the secret to happiness. Either the boy will relinquish it or Randal Six will tear it out of him.
Lying on his back, Randal draws his knees toward his chest and presses his feet against the trapdoor. In the interest of breaking through with as little noise as possible, he applies pressure in gradually increasing increments. The latch and hinges creak as they strain against their fastenings.
When a particularly boisterous song echoes through the house and as the music swells toward a crescendo, he doubles his efforts, and the trapdoor springs open with a burr of screws ripping wood, a twang of torquing metal.
Happiness will soon be his.
CHAPTER 20
AFTER THE MEETING with Victor, Cindi wanted to go to the mall, but Benny wanted to talk about methods of decapitation.
According to their ID, Cindi and Benny Lovewell were twenty-eight and twenty-nine, respectively, though in fact they had been out of the creation tanks only nineteen months.
They made a cute couple. More accurately, they were made as a cute couple.
Attractive, well-dressed, each of them had a dazzling smile, a musical voice, and an infectious laugh. They were soft-spoken and polite, and they generally established instant rapport with everyone they met.
Cindi and Benny were fabulous dancers, though dancing was not the activity they most enjoyed. Their greatest pleasure came from killing.
Members of the New Race were forbidden to kill except when ordered to do so by their maker. The Lovewells were frequently ordered to do so.
When a member of the Old Race was slated to be replaced by a replicant, Cindi and Benny were the last smiling faces that person would ever see.
Those who were not scheduled to be replaced by pod people but who had somehow become a threat to Victor—or had offended him—were also destined to meet the Lovewells.
Sometimes these encounters began in a jazz club or a tavern. To the target, it seemed that new friends had been found—until later in the evening, when a parting handshake or a good-bye kiss on the cheek evolved, with amazing rapidity, into a violent garroting.
Other victims, on seeing the Lovewells for the first time, had no fair chance to get to know them, had hardly a moment to return their dazzling smiles, before being disemboweled.
On this sweltering summer day, prior to being summoned to the Hands of Mercy, the Lovewells had been bored. Benny could deal well with boredom, but tedium sometimes drove Cindi to reckless action.
After their meeting with Victor, in which they had been ordered to kill Detectives O’Connor and Maddison within twenty-four hours, Benny wanted to begin at once planning the hit. He hoped that the business could be arranged in such a way as to give them an opportunity to dismember alive at least one of the two cops.
Forbidden to kill as they wished, other members of the New Race lived with an envy of the free will with which those of the Old Race led their lives. This envy, more bitter by the day, expressed itself in despair and in a bottled rage that was denied relief.
As skilled assassins, Cindi and Benny were permitted relief, and lots of it. He usually could count on Cindi to match the eagerness with which he himself set out on every job.
On this occasion, however, she insisted on going shopping first. When Cindi insisted on something, Benny always let her have what she wanted because she was such a whiner when she didn’t get her way that even Benny, with his high tolerance for tedium, lamented that his maker had programmed him to be incapable of suicide.
At the mall, to Benny’s dismay, Cindi led him directly to Tots and Tykes, a store selling clothing for infants and young children.
He hoped this wouldn’t lead to kidnapping again.
“We shouldn’t be seen here,” he warned her.
“We won’t be. None of our kind works here, and none of our kind would have reason to shop here.”
“We don’t have a reason, either.”
Without answering him, she went into Tots and Tykes.
As Cindi searched through the tiny dresses and other garments on the racks and tables, Benny followed her, trying to gauge whether she was likely
to go nuts, as before.
Admiring a little yellow dress with a frilly collar, she said, “Isn’t this adorable?”
“Adorable,” Benny agreed. “But it would look better in pink.”
“They don’t seem to have it in pink.”
“Too bad. Pink. In pink it would be terrific.”
Members of the New Race were encouraged to have sex with one another, in every variation, as often and as violently as they liked. It was their one pressure-release valve.
They were, however, incapable of reproduction. The citizens of this brave new world would all be made in tanks, grown to adulthood and educated by direct-to-brain data downloading in four months.
Currently they were created a hundred at a time. Soon, tank farms would start turning them out by the thousands.
Their maker reserved all biological creation unto himself. He did not believe in families. Family relationships distracted people from the greater work of society as a whole, from achieving total triumph over nature and establishing utopia.
“What will the world be like without children?” Cindi wondered.
“More productive,” Benny said.
“Drab,” she said.
“More efficient.”
“Empty.”
Women of the New Race were designed and manufactured without a maternal instinct. They were supposed to have no desire to give birth.
Something was wrong with Cindi. She envied the women of the Old Race for their free will, but she resented them most intensely for their ability to bring children into the world.
Another customer, an expectant mother, entered their aisle.
At first Cindi’s face brightened at the sight of the woman’s distended belly, but then darkened into a snarl of vicious jealousy.
Taking her arm, steering her toward another part of the store, Benny said, “Control yourself. People will notice. You look like you want to kill her.”
“I do.”
“Remember what you are.”
“Barren,” she said bitterly.
“Not that. An assassin. You can’t do your work if your face advertises your profession.”
“All right. Let go of my arm.”
“Calm down. Cool off.”
“I’m smiling.”
“It’s a stiff smile.”
She turned on her full dazzling wattage.
“That’s better,” he said.
Picking up a little pink sweater featuring colorful appliquéd butterflies, displaying it for Benny, Cindi said, “Oh, isn’t this darling?”
“Darling,” he agreed. “But it would look better in blue.”
“I don’t see it in blue.”
“We really should be getting to work.”
“I want to look around here a little longer.”
“We’ve got a job to do,” he reminded her.
“And we have twenty-four hours to do it.”
“I want to decapitate one of them.”
“Of course you do. You always do. And we will. But first I want to find a really sweet little lacy suit or something.”
Cindi was defective. She desperately wanted a baby. She was disturbed.
Had Benny been certain that Victor would terminate Cindi and produce Cindi Two, he’d have reported her deviancy months previously. He worried, however, that Victor thought of them as a unit and would terminate Benny, as well.
He didn’t want to be switched off and buried in a landfill while Benny Two had all the fun.
If he had been like others of his kind, seething with rage and forbidden to express it in any satisfying fashion, Benny Lovewell would have been happy to be terminated. Termination would have been his only hope of peace.
But he was allowed to kill. He could torture, mutilate, and dismember. Unlike others of the New Race, Benny had something to live for.
“This is so cute,” said Cindi, fingering a sailor suit sized for a two-year-old.
Benny sighed. “Do you want to buy it?”
“Yes.”
At home they had a secret collection of garments for babies and toddlers. If any of the New Race ever discovered Cindi’s hoard of children’s clothes, she would have a lot of explaining to do.
“Okay,” he said. “Buy it quick, before someone sees us, and let’s get out of here.”
“After we finish with O’Connor and Maddison,” she said, “can we go home and try?”
By try, she meant “try to have a baby.”
They had been created sterile. Cindi had a vagina but no uterus. That reproductive space had been devoted to other organs unique to the New Race.
Sex between them could no more produce a baby than it could produce a grand piano.
Nevertheless, to appease her, to mollify her mood, Benny said, “Sure. We can try.”
“We’ll kill O’Connor and Maddison,” she said, “and cut them up as much as you want, do all those funny things you like to do, and then we’ll make a baby.”
She was insane, but he had to accept her as she was. If he could have killed her, he would have done it, but he could only kill those he was specifically directed to kill.
“That sounds good,” he said.
“We’ll be the first of our kind to conceive.”
“We’ll try.”
“I’ll be a wonderful mother.”
“Let’s buy the sailor suit and get out of here.”
“Maybe we’ll have twins.”
CHAPTER 21
ERIKA HAD LUNCH alone in a dining room furnished to seat sixteen, in the presence of three million dollars’ worth of art, with a fresh arrangement of calla lilies and anthuriums on the table.
When she had finished, she went into the kitchen, where Christine stood at the sink, washing the breakfast dishes.
All food in this house was served on one pattern of Limoges or another, and Victor would not permit such fine china to be put in the dishwasher. All beverages were served in either Lalique or Waterford crystal, which also required hand washing.
If a dish sustained a scratch or if a glass was chipped, it must be discarded. Victor did not tolerate imperfection.
While certain machines were necessary and even beneficial, most of those invented to take the place of household servants were viewed by Victor with scorn. His standards of personal service had been formed in another century, when the lower classes had known how to attend, properly, the needs of their betters.
“Christine?”
“Yes, Mrs. Helios?”
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to discuss my sexual problems with you.”
“Very good, Mrs. Helios.”
“But I’m curious about a few things.”
“I’m sure you are, ma’am. Everything is new to you.”
“Why was William biting off his fingers?”
“No one can really know but William himself.”
“But it wasn’t rational,” Erika persisted.
“Yes, I had noticed that.”
“And being one of the New Race, he is rational in all things.”
“That’s the concept,” Christine said, but with an odd inflection that Erika couldn’t interpret.
“He knew his fingers wouldn’t grow back,” Erika said. “It’s as if he was…committing suicide, bite by bite, but we’re not capable of self-destruction.”
Swirling a wet fabric whisk inside an exquisite porcelain teapot, Christine said, “He wouldn’t have died from ten severed fingers, Mrs. Helios.”
“Yes, but without fingers, he wouldn’t have been able to serve as butler. He must have known he would be terminated.”
“In the condition you saw him, Mrs. Helios, William did not have the capacity to be cunning.”
Besides, as they both knew, the proscription against suicide included the inability to engineer circumstances that required their termination.
“Do you mean…William was having like a mental breakdown?” The thought chilled Erika. “Surely that isn’t possible.”
“Mr. Helio
s prefers the term interruption of function. William was experiencing an interruption of function.”
“That sounds much less serious.”
“It does, doesn’t it?”
“But Victor did terminate him.”
“He did, didn’t he?”
Erika said, “If one of the Old Race had done such a thing, we’d say that he’d gone mad. Insane.”
“Yes, but we’re in all ways superior to them, and so many terms applicable to them cannot describe us. We require a whole new grammar of psychology.”
Again, Christine’s words were spoken with a curious inflection, suggesting that she meant something more than what she said.
“I…I don’t understand,” Erika said.
“You will. When you’ve been alive long enough.”
Still struggling to comprehend, she said, “When you called my husband to report that William was biting off his fingers, you said, ‘We’ve got another Margaret.’ What did you mean by that?”
Rinsing a plate, carefully placing it in the drying rack, Christine said, “Until a few weeks ago, Margaret served as the household chef. She’d been here almost twenty years, like William. After an…episode…she had to be removed. A new Margaret is being prepared.”
“What episode?”
“One morning as she was about to make pancakes, she began to smash her face into the hot, greased griddle.”
“Smash her face?”
“Over and over again, rhythmically. Each time she raised her face from the griddle, Margaret said time, and before she slammed it down again, she repeated that word. Time, time, time, time, time—with much the same urgency that you heard William say tick, tock, tick, tock.”
“How mystifying,” said Erika.
“It won’t be…when you’ve lived long enough.”
Frustrated, Erika said, “Speak plainly to me, Christine.”
“Plainly, Mrs. Helios?”
“So I’m fresh out of the tank and hopelessly naive—so educate me. All right? Help me understand.”
“But you’ve had direct-to-brain data downloading. What more could you need?”
“Christine, I’m not your enemy.”