Prodigal Son f-1, page 27
part #1 of Frankenstein Series
The curved glass lid opened on pneumatic hinges as a triggering shock started Erika breathing on her own.
Victor sat on a stool beside the tank, leaned forward, his face close to hers.
Her luxurious eyelashes fluttered. She opened her eyes. Her gaze was first wild and fearful. This was not unusual.
When the moment was right and Victor knew she had passed from birth shock to engagement, he said, "Do you know what you are?"
"Yes."
"Do you know why you are?"
"Yes."
"Do you know who I am?"
For the first time, she met his eyes. "Yes." Then she lowered her gaze with a kind of reverence.
Are you ready to serve?"
"Yes."
"I'm going to enjoy using you."
She glanced at him again, and then humbly away.
Arise," he said.
The tank revolved a quarter of a turn, allowing her to swing her legs out easily, to stand.
"I have given you a life," he said. "Remember that. I have given you a life, and I will choose what you do with it."
CHAPTER 97
On the dark and rain-soaked lawn, a supermarket shopping cart full of aluminum cans and glass bottles stood alongside the house, near the back porch.
Carson, followed by Michael, glanced at the cart, puzzled, as she hurried past it to. the porch steps.
Vicky Chou, in a robe and slippers, waited in the kitchen. She held a meat fork as if she intended to use it as a weapon.
"The doors were locked. I know they were," she said.
"It's all right, Vic. Like I told you on the phone, I know him. He's all right."
"Big, tattooed, really big," Vicky told Michael. "I don't know how he got in the house."
"He probably lifted the roof off," Michael said. "Came down through the attic."
Deucalion stood in Arnie's room, watching the boy work on the castle. He looked up as Carson and Michael came through the door.
Arnie spoke to himself, "Fortify. Fortify. Fortify and defend."
"Your brother," Deucalion said, "sees deeply into the true nature of reality"
Mystified by this statement, Carson said, "He's autistic."
Autistic because he sees too much, too much yet not enough to understand what he sees. He mistakes complexity for chaos. Chaos scares him. He struggles to bring order to his world."
Michael said, "Yeah. After everything I've seen tonight, I'm struggling, too."
To Deucalion, Carson said, "Two hundred years you and this Victor Frankenstein So why now? Why here?"
"On the night I came alive perhaps I was given the task of destroying Victor when the moment arrived."
"Given by whom?"
"By whoever created the natural order that Victor challenges with such anger and such ego."
Deucalion took a penny from the stack on the table, which he had given earlier to Arnie. He flipped it, snatched it from midair, clutched it in his fist, opened his hand. The penny was gone.
"I have free will," Deucalion said. "I could walk away from my destiny. But I won't."
He flipped the penny again. Carson watched him, transfixed. Again he snatched it, opened his hand. No penny.
Michael said, "Harker and these these other things Victor has made-they're demonic. But what about you? Do you have "
When Michael hesitated, Carson finished his question: "Man-made and yet do you have a soul? That lightning did it bring you one?"
Deucalion closed his hand, opened it an instant later, and the two missing pennies were on his palm. "All I know is I suffer."
Arnie had stopped working on the castle. He rose from his chair, mesmerized by the two pennies on Deucalion's palm.
"I suffer guilt, remorse, contrition. I see mysteries everywhere in the weave of life and I believe."
He put the pennies in Arnie's open hand.
"Victor was a man," Deucalion continued, "but made a monster of himself. I was a monster but feel so human now"
Arnie closed his fist around the coins and at once opened it.
Carson's breath caught. The pennies were gone from Arnie's hand.
"Two hundred years," Deucalion said, "I've lived as an outsider in your world. I've learned to treasure flawed humanity for its optimism in spite of its flaws, for its hope in the face of ceaseless struggle."
Arnie closed his empty hand.
"Victor would murder all mankind," Deucalion said, "and populate the world with his machines of blood and bone."
Arnie stared at his clenched fist-and smiled.
"If you do not help me resist," Deucalion said, "he is arrogant enough to succeed."
Again Arnie opened his hand. The pennies had reappeared.
"Those who fight him," Deucalion said, "will find themselves in the struggle of their lives "
From Arnie's hand, Deucalion retrieved one of the two pennies.
"Leave it to blind fate?" he asked Michael. His gaze moved to Carson. "Heads, you fight beside me tails, I fight alone."
He flipped the penny, caught it, held out his fist.
Before he could reveal the penny, Carson put her hand on his, to keep his fist closed. She looked at Michael.
He sighed. "Well, I never did want to be a safety engineer," he acknowledged, and placed his hand atop hers.
To Deucalion, Carson said, "Screw fate. We fight."
Dark, dry, quiet, the crawl space under the house provides Randal Six with an ideal environment. The spiders do not bother him.
The journey from Mercy has been a triumph, but it has frayed his nerves and rubbed his courage raw. The storm had almost undone him. The rain, the sky afire with lightning and shadows leaping on the earth, the crashes of thunder, the trees shuddering in the wind, the gutters overflowing with dirty water awhirl with litter Too much data. Too much input. Several times he almost shut down, almost fell to the ground and curled into a ball like a pill bug.
He needs time now to recover, to regain his confidence.
He closes his eyes in the dark, breathes slowly and deeply The sweet smell of star jasmine threads to him through the crisscrossed lattice that screens the crawl space.
From directly overhead come three muffled voices in earnest conversation.
In the room above him is happiness. He can feel it, radiant. He has arrived at the source. The secret is within his grasp. This child of Mercy, in the spidery dark, smiles.
THE END
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Document ID: 65dc7287-00e6-4ad6-8859-68918f6bd8ad
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Document creation date: 1.9.2012
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Dean R. Koontz
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Dean R. Koontz, Prodigal Son f-1
