Frankenstein Special Edition: Prodigal Son and City of Night. Dean Koontz

50

      THE SECOND FLOOR of the Hands of Mercy is quiet.

      Here the men and women of the New Race, fresh from the tanks, are undergoing the final stages of direct-to-brain data downloading. Soon they will be ready to go into the world and take their places among doomed humanity.

      Randal Six will leave Mercy before any of them, before this night is over. He is terrified, but he is ready.

      The computer maps and virtual reality tours of New Orleans have unnerved him as much as they have prepared him. But if he is to avoid the spinning rack and survive, he can wait no longer.

      To make his way in the dangerous world beyond these walls, he should be armed. But he has no weapon and cannot see anything in his room that might serve as one.

      If the journey is longer than he hopes, he will need provisions. He has no food in his room, only what is brought to him at mealtimes.

      Somewhere in this building is a kitchen of considerable size. A pantry. There he would find the food he needs.

      The prospect of searching for a kitchen, gathering food from among an overwhelming number of choices, and packing supplies is so daunting that he cannot begin. If he must provision himself, he will never leave Mercy.

      So he will set out with nothing more than the clothes he wears, a fresh book of crossword puzzles, and a pen.

      At the threshold between his room and the hallway, paralysis seizes him. He cannot proceed.

      He knows that the floors of these two spaces are on the same plane, yet he feels certain that he will drop a killing distance if he dares cross into the corridor. What he knows is usually not as powerful as what he feels, which is the curse of his condition.

      Although he reminds himself that perhaps an encounter with Arnie O’Connor is his destiny, he remains unmoved, unmoving.

      His emotional weather worsens as he stands paralyzed. Agitation stirs his thoughts into confusion, like a whirl of wind sweeps autumn leaves into a colorful spiral.

      He is acutely aware of how this agitation can quickly develop into a deeper disturbance, then a storm, then a tempest. He wants desperately to open the book of puzzles and put his pen to the empty boxes.

      If he succumbs to the crossword desire, he will finish not one puzzle, not two, but the entire book. Night will pass. Morning will come. He will have lost forever the courage to escape.

      Threshold. Hallway. With one step, he can cross the former and be in the latter. He has done this before, but this time it seems like a thousand-mile journey.

      The difference, of course, is that previously he had intended to go no farther than the hallway This time, he wants the world.

      Threshold, hallway.

      Suddenly threshold and hallway appear in his mind as hand-inked black letters in rows of white boxes, two entries in a crossword puzzle, sharing the letter b.

      When he sees the two words intersecting in this manner, he more clearly recognizes that the threshold and the hallway in reality also intersect on the same plane. Crossing the first into the latter is no more difficult than filling the boxes with letters.

      He steps out of his room.

       CHAPTER 51

      THE GEOMETRIC DESIGNS on the Art Deco facade of the Luxe Theater were given greater depth and drama by the honing glow of a streetlamp and the shadows that it sharpened.

      The marquee was dark, and the theater appeared to be closed if not abandoned until Carson peered through one of the doors. She saw soft light at the refreshment counter and someone at work there.

      When she tried the door, it swung inward. She stepped into the lobby.

      The glass candy cases were lighted to display their wares. On the wall behind the counter, an illuminated Art Deco-style Coca-Cola clock, frost white and crimson, was a surprisingly poignant reminder of a more innocent time.

      The man working behind the counter was the giant she had met in Allwine’s apartment. His physique identified him before he turned and revealed his face.

      She snapped the movie pass against the glass top of the counter. “Who are you?”

      “I told you once.”

      “I didn’t get your name,” she said tightly.

      He had been cleaning out the popcorn machine. He turned his attention to it once more. “My name’s Deucalion.”

      “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