Frankenstein: The Complete 5-Book Collection. Dean Koontz

mouth, her throat. The candy tasted oddly like blood, as if she had bitten her tongue.

      She put down the Hershey’s bar.

      “What has Victor been doing all this time?” Deucalion wondered. “What has he been … making?”

      She remembered Bobby Allwine’s cadaver, naked and dissected on the autopsy table – and Jack Rogers’s insistence that its freakish innards were the consequence not of mutation but of design.

      Deucalion appeared to pluck a shiny quarter from the ether. He flipped it off his thumb, caught it in midair, held it for a moment in his fist. When he opened his hand, the quarter wasn’t there.

      Here was the trick that Arnie had been trying to imitate.

      Turning over the candy bar that Carson had just put down on the glass counter, Deucalion revealed the quarter.

      She sensed that this peculiar impromptu performance was meant to be more than entertainment. It was meant to convince her that the truth of him was as magical as he had presented it.

      He picked up the quarter – his hands so dexterous for their great size – and flipped it high and past her head.

      When she turned to follow its arc, she lost sight of the quarter high in the air.

      She waited for the ping and clatter of the coin bouncing off the marble floor of the lobby. Silence.

      When the silence endured beyond all reasonable expectation of the quarter’s return, Carson looked at Deucalion.

      He had another quarter. He snapped it off his thumb.

      More intently than before, she tracked it – but lost it as it reached the apex of its arc.

      She held her breath, waiting for the falling coin to ring off the floor, but the sound didn’t come, didn’t come – and then she needed to breathe.

      “Am I still not in your life?” he asked. “Or do you want to hear more?”

       CHAPTER 52

      SCONCES SPREAD RADIANT amber fans on the walls, but at this hour the lights are dim and shadows dominate.

      Randal Six has only now realized that the blocks of vinyl-tile flooring in the hallway are like the squares in a crossword puzzle. This geometry gives him comfort.

      He visualizes in his mind one letter of his name with every step that he takes, spelling himself along the tile floor, block by block, toward freedom.

      This is the dormitory floor, where the most recently awakened members of the New Race are housed until they are polished and ready to infiltrate the city.

      Half the doors stand open. Beyond some of them, naked bodies are locked in every imaginable sexual posture.

      Especially in their early weeks, the tank-born are filled with anguish that arises from their knowledge of what they are. They also suffer intense anxiety because they come to full consciousness with the immediate understanding that, as Victor’s chattel, they do not control the primary issues of their lives and possess no free will; therefore, in their beginning is their end, and their lives are mapped without hope of mystery.

      They are sterile but vigorous. In them, sex has been divorced entirely from the purpose of procreation and functions solely as a vent for stress.

      They copulate in groups, tangled and writhing, and it seems to Randal Six, whose autism makes him different from them, that these thrusts provide them no pleasure, only release from tension.

      The sounds issuing from these orgiastic groups have no quality of joy, no suggestion of tenderness. These are bestial noises, low and rough, insistent almost to the point of violence, eager to the point of desperation.

      The slap of flesh on flesh, the wordless grunts, the guttural cries that seem charged with rage – all this frightens Randal Six as he passes these rooms. He feels the urge to run but dares not step on the lines between the vinyl blocks; he must place each foot entirely in a square, which requires a deliberative pace.

      The hallway increasingly seems like a tunnel, the chambers on both sides like catacombs in which the restless dead embrace in cold desire.

      Heart knocking as if to test the soundness of his ribs, Randal spells his name often enough to reach an intersection of corridors. Using the final letter, he spells a crossing word – left – which allows him to turn in that direction.

      From the letter t, he sidesteps four blocks, spelling right backward as he goes. With the letter r as his new beginning, he is able to spell his name and, thereby, proceed forward along this new hall, toward the choice of elevators or a stairwell.

       CHAPTER 53

      ERIKA TOOK DINNER alone in the master bedroom, at a nineteenth-century French marquetry table featuring a motif of autumn bounty – apples, oranges, plums, grapes, all spilling from a horn of plenty – rendered with exquisitely inlaid woods of numerous varieties.

      Like all those of the New Race, her metabolism was as fine-tuned and as powerful as a Ferrari engine. This required a formidable appetite.

      Two six-ounce steaks – filet mignon, prepared medium-rare – were accompanied by a rasher of crisp bacon, buttered carrots with thyme, and snow peas with sliced jicama. A separate chafing dish contained braised potatoes in blue cheese sauce. For dessert waited an entire peach cobbler with a side dish of vanilla ice cream coddled in a bowl of crushed ice.

      While she ate, she stared at the scalpel that had been left on her bath mat earlier in the day. It lay across her bread plate as if it were a butter knife.

      She didn’t know how the scalpel related to the furtive ratlike noises that she had been hearing, but she was certain that the two were connected.

      There is no world but this one. All flesh is grass, and withers, and the fields of the mind, too, are burned black by death and do not grow green again. That conviction is essential to the creed of materialism; and Erika is a soldier in the determined army that will inevitably conquer the Earth and impose that philosophy pole to pole.

      Yet, though her creator forbade belief in the supernatural and though her laboratory origins suggested that intelligent life can be manufactured without divine inspiration, Erika could not shake a sense of the uncanny in these recent events. The scalpel seemed to sparkle not solely with the sheen of surgical steel but also with … magic.

      As if by her thoughts she had opened a door between this world and another, a force inexplicable switched on the plasma TV. Erika looked up with a start as the screen came alive.

      The cordless Crestron panel, by which the TV was controlled, currently lay on Victor’s nightstand, untouched.

      Some bodiless Presence seemed to be channel surfing. Images flipped rapidly across the screen, faster, faster.

      As Erika put down her fork and pushed her chair back from the table, the Presence selected a dead channel. A blizzard of electronic snow whitened the big screen.

      Sensing that something bizarre – and something of significance – was about to happen, she rose to her feet.

      The voice – deep, rough, and ominous – came to her out of the dead channel, through the Dolby SurroundSound speakers in the ceiling: “Kill him. Kill him.”

      Erika moved away from the table, toward the TV, but halted after two steps when it seemed unwise to get too close to the screen.

       “Shove the scalpel in his eye. Into his brain. Kill him.”

      “Who are you?” she asked.

       “Kill him. Thrust