Frankenstein: The Complete 5-Book Collection. Dean Koontz

      “First or last?”

      “First and last.”

      “You work here?”

      “I own the theater.”

      “You assaulted a police officer.”

      “Did I? Were you hurt?” He smiled, not sarcastically but with surprising warmth, considering his face. “Or was the damage to your self-esteem?”

      His composure impressed her. His intimidating size was not the source of his confidence; he was no bully. Instead, his calm nature approached the deeper serenity that she associated with monastics in their cowled robes.

      Some sociopaths were serene, too, as collected as trapdoor spiders waiting in their lairs for prey to drop on them.

      She said, “What were you doing in my house?”

      “From what I’ve seen of how you live, I think I can trust you.”

      “Why do I give a rat’s ass whether you trust me? Stay out of my house.”

      “Your brother is a heavy burden. You carry him with grace.”

      Alarmed, she said, “You. Aren’t. In. My Life.”

      He put down the damp cloth with which he’d been wiping out the popcorn machine, and he turned to her again, with only the candy counter between them.

      “Is that what you want?” he asked. “Is it really? If that’s what you want, why did you come to hear the rest of it? Because you didn’t come just to tell me to stay away. You came with questions.”

      His insight and his quiet amusement did not comport with the brutal look of him.

      When she stood nonplussed, he said, “I mean no harm to Arnie or to you. Your enemy is Helios.”

      She blinked in surprise. “Helios? Victor Helios? Owns Biovision, big philanthropist?”

      “He has the arrogance to call himself ‘Helios,’ after the Greek god of the sun. Helios … the life-giver. That isn’t his real name.” Without emphasis, without a raised eyebrow, with no apparent irony, he said, “His real name is Frankenstein.”

      After what he had said in Bobby Allwine’s apartment, after his riff about being made from pieces of criminals and given life force by a thunderstorm, she should have expected this development. She did not expect it, however, and it disappointed her.

      Carson had felt that Deucalion was special in some way other than his formidable size and appearance, and for reasons that she couldn’t articulate to her satisfaction, she had wanted him to be something special. She needed to have the rug of routine pulled out from under her, to be tumbled headlong into the mystery of life.

      Maybe mystery was a synonym for change. Maybe she needed a different kind of excitement from what the job usually supplied. She suspected, however, that she needed more meaning in her life than the homicide assignment currently gave her, though she didn’t know quite what she meant by meaning.

      Deucalion disappointed her because this Frankenstein business was just another flavor of the nutcase rants she encountered more days than not in the conduct of ordinary investigations. He’d seemed strange but substantive; now he sounded hardly different from the pinwheel-eyed ginks who thought that CIA operatives or aliens were after them.

      “Yeah,” she said. “Frankenstein.”

      “The legend isn’t fiction. It’s fact.”

      “Of course it is.” Disappointment of various kinds had the same effect on her: a craving for chocolate. Pointing through the glass top of the counter, she said, “I’d like one of those Hershey’s bars with almonds.”

      “Long ago, in Austria, they burned his laboratory to the ground. Because he created me.”

      “Bummer. Where are your neck bolts? Did you have them surgically removed?”

      “Look at me,” he said solemnly

      She gazed longingly at the Hershey’s bar for a moment but at last met his gaze.

      Ghostly radiance pulsed through his eyes. This time she was so close that even if she had wanted to, she could not have dismissed it as a reflection of some natural light source.

      “I suspect,” he said, “that stranger things than I now roam this city … and he’s begun to lose control of them.”

      He stepped to the cash register, opened a drawer beneath it, and withdrew a newspaper clipping and a rolled paper tied with a ribbon.

      The clipping included a photo of Victor Helios. The paper was a pencil portrait of the same man a decade younger.

      “I tore this from a frame in Victor’s study two centuries ago, so I would never forget his face.”

      “This doesn’t prove anything. Are the Hershey’s bars for sale or not?”

      “The night I was born, Victor needed a storm. He got the storm of the century”

      Deucalion rolled up his right sleeve, revealing three shiny metal disks embedded in his flesh.

      Admittedly, Carson had never seen anything like this. On the other hand, this was an age when some people pierced their tongues with studs and even had the tips of their tongues split for a reptilian effect.

      “Contact points,” he explained. “All over my body But something was strange about the lightning … such power.”

      He didn’t mention the ragged white keloid scars that joined his wrist to his forearm.

      If he was living out a Frankenstein-monster fantasy, he had gone to extremes to conform his physical appearance to the tale. This was a bit more impressive than a Star Trek fan wearing a jumpsuit and Spock ears.

      Against her better judgment, even if she couldn’t believe him, Carson felt herself wanting to believe in him.

      This desire to believe surprised her, disturbed her. She didn’t understand it. So not Carson O’Connor.

      “The storm gave me life,” he continued, “but it also gave me something just short of immortality.”

      Deucalion picked up the newspaper clipping, stared for a moment at the photo of Victor Helios, then crushed it in his fist.

      “I thought my maker was long dead. But from the beginning, he’s been after his own immortality – of one kind or another.”

      “Quite a story,” she said. “Does abduction by extraterrestrials come into it at any point?”

      In Carson’s experience, kooks could not tolerate mockery. They reacted with anger or they accused her of being part of whatever conspiracy they believed had targeted them.

      Deucalion merely threw aside the wadded clipping, withdrew a Hershey’s bar from the display case, and put the candy on the counter in front of her.

      Unwrapping the chocolate, she said, “You expect me to believe two hundred years? So the lightning that night, it – what? – altered his genetics?”

      “No. The lightning didn’t touch him. Only me. He got this far … some other way.”

      “Lots of fiber, fresh fruit, no red meat.”

      She couldn’t tweak him.

      No more of the eerie luminosity passed through his eyes, but she saw in them something else that she had never glimpsed in the eyes of another. An electrifying directness. She felt so exposed that a chill closed like a fist around her heart.

      Loneliness in that gaze, and wisdom, and humility. And … more that was enigmatic. His eyes were a singularity, and though there was much to be read in them, she hadn’t the language to understand what she read, for the soul that looked out at her through those lenses suddenly seemed as alien as that of any creature born