Frankenstein: The Complete 5-Book Collection. Dean Koontz
struggle. There wasn’t a struggle. That’s why the scene was so neat in spite of the apparent violence.”
“Apparent? Allwine’s heart was cut out.”
“Hearts. Plural. But he probably asked his friend to kill him.”
“‘Hey, pal, do me a favor and cut my heart out?’ He couldn’t just slit his own wrists, take poison, bore himself to death with multiple viewings of The English Patient?”
“No. Deucalion said their kind are built to be incapable of suicide.”
With a sigh of frustration, Michael said, “Their kind. Here we go again.”
“The proscription against suicide – it’s there in the original diary. I saw it. After the coins, after I started to accept … then Deucalion showed me.”
“Diary? Whose diary?”
She hesitated.
“Carson?”
“This is going to be a real test.”
“What test?”
“A test of you, me, our partnership here.”
“Don’t drive so fast,” he cautioned.
This time, she didn’t react to his admonition by accelerating. She didn’t slow down, either, but she didn’t pump up more speed. A little concession to help win him over.
“This is weird stuff,” she warned.
“What – I don’t have a capacity for weird? I have a fabulous capacity for weird. Whose diary?”
She took a deep breath. “Victor’s diary. Victor Frankenstein.” When he stared at her in flabbergasted silence, she said, “Maybe this sounds crazy—”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
“But I think the legend is true, like Deucalion says. Victor Helios is Victor Frankenstein.”
“What have you done with the real Carson O’Connor?”
“Deucalion – he was Victor’s first … I don’t know … his first creation.”
“See, right away, I start getting geeky Renaissance Fair vibes from the name. It sounds like the Fourth Musketeer or something. What kind of name is Deucalion, anyway?”
“He named himself. It’s from mythology. Deucalion was the son of Prometheus.”
“Oh, of course,” Michael said. “Deucalion Prometheus, son of Fred Prometheus. I remember him now.”
“Deucalion is his only name, first and last.”
“Like Cher.”
“In classic mythology, Prometheus was the brother of Atlas. He shaped humans out of clay and gave them the spark of life. He taught humanity several arts, and in defiance of Zeus, he gave us the gift of fire.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t have fallen asleep in school so often if my teacher had been driving the classroom at eighty miles an hour. For God’s sake, slow down.”
‘Anyway, Deucalion has Victor’s original diary. It’s written in German, and it’s full of anatomical drawings that include an improved circulatory system with two hearts.”
“Maybe if you give it to Dan Rather and Sixty Minutes, they’ll do a segment on it, but it sounds like a forgery to me.”
She wanted to punch him. To temper that impulse, she reminded herself of how cuddly he had looked back at his apartment.
Instead of hitting him, she pumped the brakes and slid the plainwrap sedan to the curb in front of Fullbright’s Funeral Home.
“A good cop has to have an open mind,” she said.
“Agreed. But it doesn’t help much to have one so open that the wind blows through with a mournful, empty sound.”
LIFE IN THE HOUSE of Victor Frankenstein was certain to involve more macabre moments than life in the house of Huckleberry Finn.
Nevertheless, the sight of a severed hand crawling across the drawing-room carpet amazed even Erika, a man-made woman equipped with two hearts. She stood transfixed for perhaps a minute, unable to move.
No science could explain an ambulatory hand. This seemed to be a supernatural manifestation as surely as would be an ectoplasmic human figure floating above a séance table.
Yet Erika felt less fear than amazement, less amazement than wonder. Her heart beat faster the longer that she watched the hand, and a not-unpleasant thrill made her tremble.
Instinctively, she knew that the hand was aware of her. It had no eyes, no sense other than touch – and should not possess a sense of touch, either, considering that it had no nervous system, no brain – yet somehow it knew that she was watching it.
This must have been the thing that she’d heard moving furtively through the bedroom, under the bed, the thing rattling the contents of the bathroom cabinet. The thing that had left the scalpel on her bath mat.
That last thought led her to the realization that the hand must be merely the tool of whatever entity had spoken to her through the television screen and had encouraged her to kill Victor. As it used the TV, it used the hand.
As it used the hand, it wished to use her as agent to destroy the man it had called evil.
There is no world but this one.
Erika reminded herself that she was a soul-free soldier in the army of materialism. Belief in something more than the eyes can see was punishable by termination.
As if it were the hand of a blind man exploring the patterns on the Persian carpet, the beast with five fingers felt its way past furniture, toward the double doors that separated the drawing room from the downstairs hall.
The thing did not wander aimlessly. By all appearances, it moved with purpose.
One of the two doors to the hallway stood open. The hand paused there, waiting.
Erika suspected that it not only moved with purpose but also that it wanted her to follow. She stepped toward it.
The hand crabbed forward once more, crawled across the threshold and into the hallway.
EVEN AS THE NIGHT ticked toward the dark start of a new day, lights were on at the back of the funeral home.
Insistently thumbing the bell push, Michael said, “See, another thing that doesn’t make sense is why Victor Frankenstein would turn up in New Orleans, of all places.”
Carson said, “Where would you expect him to set up shop – Baton Rouge, Baltimore, Omaha, Las Vegas?”
“Somewhere in Europe.”
“Why Europe?”
“He’s European.”
“Once was, yeah, but not now. As Helios, he doesn’t even speak with an accent.”
“The whole creepy Frankenstein shtick – it’s totally European,” Michael insisted.
“Remember the mobs with pitchforks and torches storming the castle?” Carson asked. “He can’t go back there ever.”
“That was in the movies, Carson.”
“Maybe they’re more like documentaries.”
She