Prodigal Son

CHAPTER 79

  IN THE BACK OF the bedroom closet, Harker had broken through the lath and plaster. He had reconfigured the studs and cats to allow easy passage to the space beyond.

  Leading Carson, Michael, and Frye through the wall, the young tech said, “This building was at one time commercial on the ground floor, offices in the upper three, and it had an attic for tenant storage.”

  On the other side of the wall were rising steps—wood, worn, creaky.

  As he led them upward, the tech said, “When they converted to apartments, they closed off the attic. Harker somehow found out it was here. He made it into his go-nuts room.”

  In the high redoubt, two bare bulbs hanging on cords from the ridge beam shed a dusty yellow light.

  Three large gray moths swooped under and around the bulbs. Their shadows swelled, shrank, and swelled again across the finished floor, the finished walls, and the open-rafter ceiling.

  A chair and a folding table that served as a desk were the only pieces of furniture. Books were stacked on the table, also here and there on the floor.

  An enormous homemade light box covered two-thirds of the north wall and provided backlighting for dozens of X-ray images: various grinning skulls from various angles, chests, pelvises, spines, limbs….

  Scanning this macabre gallery, Michael said, “I thought when you went through the back of a wardrobe, you came out in the magical land of Narnia. Must’ve taken a wrong turn.”

  In the northwest corner stood a three-way mirror with a gilded frame. On the floor in front of the mirror lay a white bath mat.

  Treading on fleeting phantoms of moths, serving as a screen for projections of their flight, Carson passed the mirror and crossed the room to a different display that covered the south wall from corner to corner, floor to ceiling.

  Harker had stapled to the drywall a collage of religious images: Christ on the cross, Christ revealing His sacred heart, the Virgin Mary; Buddha; Ahura Mazda; from the Hindu faith, the goddesses Kali and Parvati and Chandi, the gods Vishnu and Doma and Varuna; Quan Yin, the Queen of Heaven and goddess of compassion; Egyptian gods Anubis, Horus, Amen-Ra…

  Bewildered, Frye asked, “What is all this?”

  “He’s crying out,” Carson said.

  “Crying out for what?”

  “Meaning. Purpose. Hope.”

  “Why?” Frye wondered. “He had a job, and with benefits that don’t get much better.”

  CHAPTER 80

  RANDAL SIX STANDS motionless at the threshold of the next room for so long, so tensely, that his legs begin to ache.

  The New Race does not easily fatigue. This is Randal Six’s first experience with muscle cramps. They burn so intensely that at last he takes advantage of his ability to block pain at will.

  He has no watch. He has never before needed one. He estimates that he has stood, riveted by his predicament, in this same spot for perhaps three hours.

  Predicament is a woefully inadequate word. The correct one has fewer letters and stronger meaning: plight.

  Although he has spared himself physical agony, he cannot escape mental anguish. He despises himself for his inadequacies.

  At least he has stopped weeping. Long ago.

  Gradually his impatience with himself darkens into an intense anger at Arnie O’Connor. If not for Arnie, Randal Six would not be in this plight.

  If ever he reaches the O’Connor boy, he will get the secret of happiness from him. Then he will make Arnie pay dearly for all this suffering.

  Randal is also plagued by anxiety. Periodically his two hearts race, pounding with such terror that sweat pours from him and his vision becomes blood-dimmed.

  He fears that Father will discover him missing and will set out in search of him. Or perhaps Father will finish his current work and leave for the night, whereupon he will find Randal standing here in autistic indecision.

  He will be led back to the spinning rack and secured upon it in a cruciform. The rubber wedge, secured by chinstrap, will be inserted between his teeth.

  Although he has never seen Father in a rage, he has heard others speak of the maker’s wrath. There is no hiding from him and no mercy for the object of his fury.

  When Randal thinks that he hears the sound of a door opening at the farther end of the hall, behind him, he closes his eyes and waits with dread.

  Time passes.

  Father does not appear.

  Randal must have mistaken the sound or imagined it.

  As he stands with his eyes still closed, however, and as his hearts seek a normal rhythm, a calming pattern arises in his mind’s eye: arrangements of empty white boxes against a black background, intersecting in the beautiful virgin lines of an unworked crossword puzzle.

  While he concentrates on this barren image for its soothing effect, a solution to his plight occurs to him. When there are not squares of vinyl tile or concrete or other material on the floor in front of him, he can draw them with his imagination.

  Excited, he opens his eyes, studies the floor of the room beyond the threshold, and tries to paint upon it the five boxes that he must have to finish spelling chamber when he crosses threshold.

  He fails. Though with eyes closed he had been able to see those boxes clearly in his mind, the concrete floor before him remains resistant to the imposition of imagined geometries.

  Tears almost overtake him again before he realizes that he does not need to have his eyes open to traverse this room. Blind men walk with the help of canes and patient dogs. His imagination will be his white cane.

  Eyes shut, he sees five boxes. He steps straight forward five times, spelling as he goes: a-m-b-e-r.

  When the word is complete, he opens his eyes and finds that he stands at the outer door. The electric door behind him has fallen shut. The portal before him has a simple latch that is always engaged from the farther side, always disengaged from this side.

  He opens the door.

  Triumph.

  Beyond lies a parking garage, dimly lighted and deserted at this hour. Silent, still, smelling faintly of dampness and lime.

  To exit this small room, Randal Six merely closes his eyes and imagines threshold printed in blocks from left to right, immediately in front of him. Conveniently, the word garage intersects at the letter r.

  With his eyes closed, he determinedly takes three steps, a-g-e, into the enormous space beyond. The door falls shut behind him, now locked from this side.

  There is no going back.

  The daunting dimensions of the parking garage awe and for a moment nearly overwhelm him. No room of his experience in Mercy has prepared him for this immensity.

  An inner quaking seems to knock bones against bones. He feels like a highly compressed pellet of matter at the instant before the universe’s creation, and with the impending Big Bang, he will expand and explode outward in every direction, racing to fill an infinite void.

  With more powerful reason than he has heretofore been able to apply to his condition, he convinces himself that the void will not pull him apart, will not scatter him to eternity. Gradually his panic subsides, fades entirely.

  He closes his eyes to imagine blocks, and doggedly he spells his way forward. Between each word, Randal opens his eyes to scope the route ahead and to determine the length of the next word that he will need.

  In this fashion, he eventually comes to an exit ramp and climbs to the street. The Louisiana night is warm, moist, droning with mosquitoes.

  By the time he travels the better part of a block and turns right into an alleyway, the brush of dawn paints a faint gray light in the east.

  Panic threatens him once more. In daylight, with everyone awake and on the move, the world will be a riot of sights, sounds. He is certain that he cannot tolerate so much sensory input.

  Night is a better environment. Darkness is his friend.

  He must find a place to hide until the day passes.

  CHAPTER 81

  EXHAUSTED, CARSON SAILED through sleep with no nightmares, only a
simple continuous dream of being aboard a black boat under a black sky, knifing silently through black water.

  She had not gotten to bed until well after dawn. She woke at 2:30, showered, and ate Hot Pockets while standing in Arnie’s room, watching the boy at work on the castle.

  At the foot of the bridge that crossed the moat, in front of the gate at the barbicon, at each of two entrances from the outer ward to the inner ward, and finally at the fortified entrance to the castle keep, Arnie had placed one of the shiny pennies that he had been given by Deucalion.

  She supposed the pennies were, in Arnie’s mind, talismans that embodied the power of the disfigured giant. Their mighty juju would prevent entrance by any enemy.

  Evidently Arnie trusted Deucalion.

  So did Carson.

  Considering the events of the past two days, Deucalion’s claim to be Frankenstein’s monster seemed no more impossible than other things that she had witnessed. Besides, he possessed a quality that she had never encountered before, a substantialness that eluded easy description. His calm was of an oceanic depth, his gaze so steady and so forthright that she sometimes had to look away, not because the occasional soft pulse of light in his eyes disturbed her, but because he seemed to see too deeply into her for comfort, through all her defenses.

  If Deucalion was the storied creation of Victor Frankenstein, then during the past two centuries, while the human doctor had become a monster, the monster had become human—and perhaps had become a man of unusual insight and caliber.

  She needed a day off. A month. There were others working on the case now, seeking Harker. She didn’t need to push herself seven days out of seven.

  Nevertheless, by prior arrangement, at 3:30 in the afternoon, Carson was waiting at the curb in front of her house.

  At 3:33, Michael arrived in the plainwrap sedan. Earlier in the day, Carson had experienced a moment of weakness. Michael had driven the car when they left Harker’s apartment building.

  Now, as she got in the passenger’s seat, Michael said, “I drove all the way here and never exceeded a speed limit.”

  “That’s why you’re three minutes late.”

  “Three whole minutes? Well, I guess I just blew every chance we have to find Harker.”

  “The only thing we can’t buy more of is time,” she said.

  “And dodo birds. We can’t buy any of them. They’re extinct. And dinosaurs.”

  “I called Deucalion at the Luxe. He’s expecting us at four o’clock.”

  “I can’t wait to enter this one in my interview log—‘discussed case with Frankenstein monster. He says Igor was a creep, ate his own boogers.’”

  She sighed. “I was sort of hoping that the concentration needed to drive would mean less patter.”

  “Just the opposite. Driving keeps me mentally fluid. It’s cool being the wheel man.”

  “Don’t get used to it.”

  When they arrived at the Luxe Theater, after four o’clock, the sky had grown as dark as an iron skillet.

  Michael parked illegally at a red curb and hung a POLICE card on the rearview mirror. “Lives in a theater, huh? Is he buddies with the Phantom of the Opera?”

  “You’ll see,” she said, and got out of the car.

  Closing his door, looking at her across the roof, he said, “Do his palms grow hairy when the moon is full?”

  “No. He shaves them just like you do.”

  CHAPTER 82

  FOLLOWING A LONG NIGHT and longer day at Mercy, Victor ate what was either a late lunch or an early dinner of seafood gumbo with okra and rabbit étouffée at a Cajun restaurant in the Quarter. Although not as satisfyingly exotic as his Chinese meal the previous night, the food was good.

  For the first time in nearly thirty hours, he went home.

  Having enhanced his physiological systems to the extent that he needed little sleep and therefore could accomplish more in the lab, he sometimes wondered if he worked too much. Perhaps if he allowed himself more leisure, his mind would be clearer in the laboratory, and consequently he would do even better science.

  Periodically over the decades, he had engaged in this debate with himself. He always resolved it in favor of more work.

  Like it or not, he had given himself to a great cause. He was the kind of man who would work selflessly in the pursuit of a world ruled by reason, a world free of greed and peopled by a race united by a single goal.

  Arriving at his mansion in the Garden District, he chose work over leisure yet again. He went directly to his hidden studio behind the pantry.

  Karloff had perished. The life-support machines were not in operation.

  Stunned, he circled the central worktable, uncomprehending until he proceeded far enough to discover the hand on the floor. The thrown switches were directly above it. Furthermore, clutched in its fingers was a plug that it had pulled from a socket.

  Although disappointed by this setback, Victor was amazed that Karloff had been able to shut himself down.

  For one thing, the creature had been programmed to be incapable of self-destruction. On that issue there had been no wiggle room in the directives by which it had been governed.

  More important, the hand could not have functioned separate from its own life-support system. The moment it had broken free of its feed and drain lines, it had lost the low-voltage current needed to fire its nerves and operate its musculature. At that point, it should have at once fallen still, limp, dead—and should have begun to decompose.

  Only one explanation occurred to Victor. Apparently, Karloff’s telekinetic power had been strong enough to animate the hand as if it were alive.

  When controlling the hand at a distance, Karloff had shown the ability only to flex a thumb and to imitate an arpeggio by strumming an imaginary harp with those four fingers. Small, simple tasks.

  To make the hand tear loose of its connections, to cause it to drop to the floor and then to climb three feet up the face of these machines to throw the life-support switches, to cause it to pull the plug, as well…That required far greater telekinetic power and more precise control than he had previously exhibited.

  An incredible breakthrough.

  Although Karloff was gone, another Karloff could be engineered. The setback would be temporary.

  Excited, Victor sat at his desk and accessed the experiment file on his computer. He clicked the camera icon and called up the twenty-four-hour video record of events in the studio.

  Scanning backward from the present, he was surprised when Erika suddenly appeared.

  CHAPTER 83

  AS WHEN SHE had been to the Luxe the previous evening, Carson found one of the front doors unlocked. This time, no one waited in the lobby.

  A set of double doors stood open between the lobby and the theater.

  Surveying the refreshment stand as they passed it, Michael said, “When you buy popcorn here, I wonder if you can ask for it without the cockroaches.”

  The theater itself proved to be large, with both a balcony and a mezzanine. Age, grime, and chipped plaster diminished the Art Deco glamour but did not defeat it altogether.

  A fat man in white slacks, white shirt, and white Panama hat stood in front of the tattered red-velvet drapes that covered the giant screen. He looked like Sidney Greenstreet just stepped out of Casablanca.

  The Greenstreet type gazed toward the ceiling, transfixed by something not immediately evident to Carson.

  Deucalion stood halfway down the center aisle, facing the screen. Head tipped back, he slowly scanned the ornate architecture overhead.

  The strangeness of the moment was shattered with the silence when a sudden flapping of wings revealed a trapped bird swooping through the vaults above, from one roost in the cornice to another.

  As Carson and Michael approached Deucalion, she heard him say, “Come to me, little one. No fear.”

  The bird flew again, swooped wildly, swooped…and alighted on Deucalion’s extended arm. Seen close and still, it proved to be a dove.

/>   With a laugh of delight, the fat man came forward from the screen. “I’ll be damned. We ever get a lion in here, you’re my man.”

  Gently stroking the bird, Deucalion turned as Carson and Michael approached him.

  Carson said, “I thought only St. Francis and Dr. Doolittle talked to animals.”

  “Just a little trick.”

  “You seem to be full of tricks, little and big,” she said.

  The fat man proved to have a sweet voice. “The poor thing’s been trapped here a couple days, living off stale popcorn. Couldn’t get it to go for the exit doors when I opened them.”

  Deucalion cupped the bird in one immense hand, and it appeared to be without fear, almost in a trance.

  With both pudgy hands, the man in white accepted the dove from Deucalion and moved away, toward the front of the theater. “I’ll set it free.”

  “This is my partner, Detective Maddison,” Carson told Deucalion. “Michael Maddison.”

  They nodded to each other, and Michael—pretending not to be impressed by the size and appearance of Deucalion—said, “I’ve gotta be straight with you. I’ll be the first to admit we’re in weird woods on this one, but I still don’t buy the Transylvania thing.”

  “That’s movies. In real life,” Deucalion said, “it was Austria.”

  “We need your help,” Carson told him. “As it turns out, there were two killers.”

  “Yes. It’s on the news.”

  “Yeah. Well, only one of them seems to have been…the kind that you warned me about.”

  “And he’s a detective,” Deucalion said.

  “Right. He’s still loose. But we’ve found his…playroom. If he’s really one of Victor’s people, you’ll be able to read his place better than we can.”

  Michael shook his head. “Carson, he’s not a psychologist. He’s not a profiler.”

  In a matter-of-fact tone, arresting precisely because of its lack of drama, Deucalion said, “I understand murderers. I am one.”

  Those words and an accompanying throb of light through the giant’s eyes left Michael briefly speechless.

  “In my early days,” Deucalion said, “I was a different beast. Uncivilized. Full of rage. I murdered a few men…and a woman. The woman was my maker’s wife. On their wedding day.”