Frankenstein: The Complete 5-Book Collection. Dean Koontz
For a few years, he had succeeded in fully arresting the aging process. More exciting, he had recently begun to reverse the effects of time, and week by week he had watched himself grow younger.
Others deluded themselves into thinking they were rolling back the years, but Roy knew his success was real. He had arrived at the most perfectly effective combination of exercise, diet, nutritional supplements, lotions, and meditation.
The final key ingredient had been purified New Zealand lamb’s urine, of which he drank four ounces a day. With a lemon wedge.
This turning back of the clock was highly desirable, of course, but he reminded himself that he could youthenize himself too far. If he reversed himself to the condition of a twenty-year-old and stayed there for a hundred years, that would be good; but if he got carried away and made himself twelve again, that would be bad.
He had not enjoyed his childhood and adolescence the first time around. Repeating any portion of them, even if solely in physical appearance, would be a glimpse of Hell.
After Roy dressed, as he stood in the kitchen, washing down twenty-four capsules of supplements with grapefruit juice prior to preparing breakfast, he was abruptly struck by the realization that his life now had no purpose.
For the past two years, he had been collecting the anatomical components of the perfect woman, first in a variety of locations far removed from New Orleans, then lately and with particular frenzy here in his own backyard. But as of Candace, he had them all. Hands, feet, lips, nose, hair, breasts, eyes, and so much more – he had forgotten nothing.
Now what?
He was surprised that he had not thought further than this. Being a man of leisure, he had a lot of time on his hands; being an immortal, he had eternity.
This thought proved suddenly daunting.
Now he slowly realized that during the years of searching and harvesting, he had superstitiously and unconsciously assumed that when his collection was complete, when the freezer was filled with all the jigsaw pieces of the most perfectly beautiful woman, then a living woman, embodying every one of those features and qualities, would magically come into his life. He had been engaged on a kind of hoodoo quest with the purpose of shaping his romantic destiny.
Perhaps this mojo would work. Perhaps this very afternoon, as he strolled the Quarter, he would come face to face with her dazzling, bewitching self.
If the days passed without this desired encounter, however, days and weeks and months … what then?
He yearned to share his perfection with a woman who would be his equal. Until that moment came, life would be empty, without purpose.
An uneasiness overcame him. He tried to quell it with breakfast.
As he ate, he became fascinated with his hands. They were more than beautiful male hands; they were exquisite.
Oh, but until he found his goddess – not in pieces but whole and alive, without fault or deficiency – his flawless hands would not be able to caress the perfection that was their erotic destiny.
His uneasiness grew.
AT DAYBREAK, with the rising sun not yet at an angle to fire the stained-glass windows, Our Lady of Sorrows sheltered a congregation of shadows. The only light came from the illuminated stations of the cross and from the candles in the ruby-red glass votive cups.
The humidity and early heat ripened the fragrances of incense, tallow, and lemon-scented wax. Inhaling this mélange, Victor imagined he would be sweating it through every pore for the rest of the day.
His footsteps on the marble floor echoed from the groin vaults overhead. He liked the crisp coldness of this sound, which he fancied spoke truth to the cloying atmosphere of the church.
With the first Mass of the day still half an hour away, the only person present, other than Victor, was Patrick Duchaine. He waited, as instructed, on a pecan pew in the front row.
The man rose nervously, but Victor said, “Sit, sit,” not quite in the tone he might use to decline a courtesy, but in a tone rather like the one in which he might speak with impatience to a vexing dog.
At sixty, Patrick had white hair, an earnest grandfatherly face, and eyes moist with perpetual compassion. His looks alone inspired the trust and affection of his parishioners.
Add to appearances a gentle, musical voice. A warm, easy laugh. Furthermore, he had the genuine humility of a man who knew too well his place in the scheme of things.
Father Duchaine was the image of an unassailably good priest to whom the faithful would give their hearts. And to whom they would confess their sins without hesitation.
In a community with many Catholics – practicing and not – Victor found it useful to have one of his people manning the confessional in which some of the city’s more powerful citizens went to their knees.
Patrick Duchaine was one of those rare members of the New Race who had been cloned from the DNA of an existing human being rather than having been designed from scratch by Victor. Physiologically, he had been improved, but to the eye he was the Patrick Duchaine who had been born of man and woman.
The real Father Duchaine had donated to a Red Cross blood drive, unwittingly providing the material from which he could be replicated. These days, he rotted under tons of garbage, deep in the landfill, while his Doppelgänger tended to the souls at Our Lady of Sorrows.
Replacing real human beings with replicas entailed risks that Victor seldom wished to take. Although the duplicate might look and sound and move exactly like its inspiration, the memories of the original could not be transferred to him.
The closest relatives and friends of the replaced individual were certain to notice numerous gaps in his knowledge of his personal history and relationships. They wouldn’t imagine he was an imposter, but they would surely think that he was suffering from a mental or physical ailment; they would press him to seek medical attention.
In addition, out of concern, they would watch him closely and would not entirely trust him. His ability to blend in with society and to carry out his work in the service of the New Race would be compromised.
In the case of the priest, he’d had no wife, of course, and no children. His parents were dead, as was his only brother. While he had many friends and parishioners to whom he was close, no intimate family existed to note his memory gaps throughout the day.
In the lab Victor raised this Father Duchaine from spilled blood before the real Father Duchaine had died, a trick more complicated than the one that the man from Galilee had performed with Lazarus.
Sitting in the front pew beside his priest, Victor said, “How do you sleep? Do you dream?”
“Not often, sir. Sometimes … a nightmare about the Hands of Mercy. But I can never recall the details.”
“And you never will. That’s my gift to you – no memory of your birth. Patrick, I need your help.”
“Anything, of course.”
“One of my people is having a serious crisis of the mind. I don’t know who he is. He called me … but he is afraid to come to me.”
“Perhaps … not afraid, sir,” the priest said. “Ashamed. Ashamed that he has failed you.”
That statement troubled Victor. “How could you suggest such a thing, Patrick? The New Race has no capacity for shame.”
Only Erika had been programmed to know shame, and only because Victor found her more erotic in the throes of it.
“Shame,” he told Patrick, “isn’t a virtue. It’s a weakness. No Natural Law requires it. We rule nature … and transcend it.”
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