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

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.”