Frankenstein: The Complete 5-Book Collection. Dean Koontz

robot. Engineered or cloned or grown in a vat – I don’t know how. It’s no longer parts of corpses animated by lightning.”

      “One man, even a genius, couldn’t—”

      She interrupted him: “Helios is an obsessed, demented visionary at work for two centuries, with a huge family fortune.”

      Preoccupied with a new thought, she let their speed fall.

      After a silence, Michael said, “What?”

      “We’re dead.”

      “I don’t feel dead.”

      “I mean, if Helios is who Deucalion says, if he has achieved all of this, if his creations are seeded through the city, we don’t have much of a chance against him. He’s a genius, a billionaire, a man of enormous power – and we’re squat.”

      She was scared. He could hear fear in her voice. He had never known her to be afraid. Not like this. Not without a gun in her face and some dirtbag’s finger on the trigger.

      “I just don’t buy this,” he said, though he half did. “I don’t understand why you buy it.”

      With an edge, she said, “If I buy it, homey, isn’t that good enough for you?”

      When he hesitated to reply, she braked hard and pulled to the curb. Pissed, she switched off the light and got out of the car.

      In the movies, when they saw a body with two hearts and organs of unknown purpose, they knew right away it was aliens or something.

      Even though he hadn’t met Deucalion, Michael didn’t know why he was resisting the usual movie conclusion to be made from what Jack Rogers had found inside Bobby Allwine. Besides, someone had stolen Allwine’s corpse and the autopsy records, which seemed to indicate a vast conspiracy of some kind.

      He got out of the car.

      They were in a residential neighborhood, under a canopy of live oaks. The night was hot. The moon seemed to be melting down through the branches of the trees.

      Michael and Carson regarded each other across the roof of the sedan. Her lips were tight. Usually they looked kissable. They didn’t look kissable now.

      “Michael, I told you what I saw.”

      “I’ve jumped off cliffs with you before – but this one’s pretty damn high.”

      She said nothing at first. What might have been a wistful look came over her face. Then: “Some mornings it’s hard to get up knowing Arnie will still be … Arnie.”

      Michael moved toward the front of the car. ‘All of us want things we maybe aren’t ever going to get.”

      Carson remained at the driver’s door, not giving an inch. “I want meaning. Purpose. Higher stakes. I want things to matter more than they do.”

      He stopped in front of the sedan.

      Staring up through the oaks at the creamy moon, she said, “This is real, Michael. I know it. Our lives will never be the same.”

      He recognized in her a yearning for change so strong that even this – a trading of the world they knew for another that had even more terror in it – was preferable to the status quo.

      “Okay, okay,” he said. “So where’s Deucalion? If any of this is real, then it’s his fight more than ours.”

      She lowered her gaze from the moon to Michael. She moved toward the front of the car.

      “Deucalion is incapable of violence against his maker,” she said. “It’s like the proscription against suicide. He tried two hundred years ago, and Victor nearly finished him. Half his face … so damaged.”

      They stood face to face.

      He wanted to touch her, to place a hand on her shoulder. He restrained himself because he didn’t know what a touch might lead to, and this was not a moment for even more change.

      Instead, he said, “Man-made men, huh?”

      “Yeah.”

      “You’re sure?”

      “Honestly? I don’t know. Maybe I just want to be sure.”

      Heat, humidity, moonlight, the fragrance of jasmine: New Orleans sometimes seemed like a fever dream, but never more than now.

      “Frankenstein alive,” he said. “It’s just a National Enquirer wet dream.”

      A harder expression pinched her eyes.

      Hastily Michael said, “I like the National Enquirer. Who in his right mind would believe the New York Times anymore? Not me.”

      “Harker’s out there,” she reminded him.

      He nodded. “Let’s get him.”

       CHAPTER 70

      IN A MANSION as large as this, a severed hand had to do a lot of crawling to get where it wanted to go.

      When previously it had scuttled unseen through the bedroom, the hand, judging by the sound of it, had moved as fast as a nervous rat. Not now.

      The concept of a weary severed hand, exhausted from relentless creeping, made no sense.

      Neither did the concept of a confused severed hand. Yet this one paused from time to time, as though it were not sure of the correct direction, and once it even retraced the path that it had taken and chose another route.

      Erika persisted in the conviction that she was witnessing an event of supernatural character. No science she knew could explain this crawling marvel.

      Although Victor had long ago trafficked in such parts as this, making jigsaw men from graveyard fragments, he had not used such crude methods in a long time.

      Besides, the hand did not end in a bloody stump. It terminated in a round stub of smooth skin, as though it had never been attached to an arm.

      This detail, if nothing else, seemed to confirm its supernatural origins.

      In time, with Erika in patient attendance, the hand made its way to the kitchen. There it halted before the pantry door.

      She waited for it to do something, and then she decided that it was in need of her assistance. She opened the pantry door, switched on the light.

      As the determined hand crawled toward the back wall of the pantry, Erika realized that it must wish to lead her into Victor’s studio. She knew of the studio’s existence but had never been there.

      His secret work space lay beyond the back wall of the pantry Most likely, a hidden switch would cause the food-laden shelves to swing inward like a door.

      Before she could begin to search for the switch, the shelves in fact slid aside. The hand on the floor had not activated them; some other entity was at work.

      She followed the hand into the hidden room and saw on the center worktable a Lucite tank filled with a milky solution, housing a man’s severed head. Not a fully realized head, but something like a crude model of one, the features only half formed.

      Bloodshot blue eyes opened in this travesty of a human face.

      The thing spoke to Erika in a low, rough voice exactly like that of the entity who, through the TV, had urged her to kill Victor: “Look at what I am … and tell me if you can that he’s not evil.”

       CHAPTER 71

      WHEN SHE PARKED in front of Harker’s apartment house, Carson got out of the car, hurried to the back,