Dean R. Koontz - Frankenstein 2 - City of Night

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2024-12-23 0 0 1.01MB 297 页 5.9玖币
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CITY OF NIGHT
Dean Koontz & Ed Gorman
Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein
Book 2
Chapter 1
Having come to life in a thunderstorm, touched by some
strange lightning that animated rather than incinerated, Deucalion
had been born on a night of violence.
A Bedlam symphony of his anguished cries, his maker’s
shrieks of triumph, the burr and buzz and crackle of arcane
machinery echoed off the cold stone walls of the laboratory in the
old windmill.
When he woke to the world, Deucalion had been shackled to
a table. This was the first indication that he had been created as a
slave.
Unlike God, Victor Frankenstein saw no value in giving his
creations free will. Like all utopians, he preferred obedience to
independent thought.
That night, over two hundred years in the past, had set a
theme of madness and violence that characterized Deucalion’s life
for years thereafter. Despair had fostered rage. In his rages, he had
killed, and savagely.
These many decades later, he had learned self-control. His
pain and loneliness had taught him pity, whereafter he learned
compassion. He had found his way to hope.
Yet still, on certain nights, without immediate cause, anger
overcomes him. For no rational reason, the anger swells into a tidal
rage that threatens to sweep him beyond prudence, beyond
discretion.
This night in New Orleans, Deucalion walked an alleyway on
the perimeter of the French Quarter, in a mood to murder. Shades
of gray, of blue, of black were enlivened only by the crimson of his
thoughts.
The air was warm, humid, and alive with muffled jazz that the
walls of the famous clubs could not entirely contain.
In public, he stayed in shadows and used back streets, because
his formidable size made him an object of interest. As did his face.
From the darkness beside a Dumpster, a wrinkled
rum-soaked raisin of a man stepped forth. “Peace in Jesus,
brother.”
Although that greeting didn’t suggest a mugger on the prowl,
Deucalion turned toward the voice with the hope that the stranger
would have a knife, a gun. Even in his rage, he needed justification
for violence.
The panhandler brandished nothing more dangerous than a
dirty upturned palm and searing halitosis. “One dollar’s all I need.”
“You can’t get anything for a dollar,” Deucalion said.
“Bless you if you’re generous, but a dollar’s all I ask.”
Deucalion resisted the urge to seize the extended hand and
snap it off at the wrist as though it were a dry stick.
Instead, he turned away, and did not look back even when the
panhandler cursed him.
As he was passing the kitchen entrance to a restaurant, that
door opened. Two Hispanic men in white pants and T-shirts
stepped outside, one offering an open pack of cigarettes to the
other.
Deucalion was revealed by the security lamp above the door
and by another directly across the alley from the first.
Both men froze at the sight of him. One half of his face
appeared normal, even handsome, but an intricate tattoo decorated
the other half.
The pattern had been designed and applied by a Tibetan
monk skillful with needles. Yet it gave Deucalion a fierce and
almost demonic aspect.
This tattoo was in effect a mask meant to distract the eye
from consideration of the broken structures under it, damage done
by his creator in the distant past.
Caught in the crosslight, Deucalion was sufficiently revealed
for the two men to detect, if not understand, the radical geometry
under the tattoo. They regarded him less with fear than with
solemn respect, as they might stand witness to a spiritual visitation.
He traded light for shadow, that alley for another, his rage
escalating to fury.
His huge hands shook, spasmed as if with the need to throttle.
He fisted them, jammed them in his coat pockets.
Even on this summer night, in the cloying bayou air, he wore
a long black coat. Neither heat nor bitter cold affected him. Nor
pain, nor fear.
When he quickened his pace, the commodious coat billowed
as if it were a cloak. With a hood, he might have passed for Death
himself.
Perhaps murderous compulsion was woven through his very
fiber. His flesh was the flesh of numerous criminals, their bodies
having been stolen from a prison graveyard immediately following
interment.
Of his two hearts, one came from a mad arsonist who burned
churches. The other had belonged to a child molester.
Even in a God-made man, the heart can be deceitful and
wicked. The heart sometimes rebels against everything that the
mind knows and believes.
If the hands of a priest can do sinful work, then what can be
expected of the hands of a convicted strangler? Deucalion’s hands
had come from just such a criminal.
His gray eyes had been plucked from the body of an executed
ax murderer. Occasionally, a soft luminous pulse passed through
them, as though the unprecedented storm that birthed him had left
behind its lightning.
His brain had once filled the skull of an unknown miscreant.
Death had erased all memory of that former life, but perhaps the
cerebral circuits remained miswired.
Now his growing fury took him to seedier streets across the
river, in Algiers. These darker byways were rank and busy with
illegal enterprise.
One shabby block accommodated a whorehouse thinly
disguised as a massage and acupuncture clinic; a tattoo parlor; a
pornographic video shop; and a raucous Cajun bar. Zydeco music
boomed.
In cars parked along the alleyway behind these businesses,
pimps socialized while they waited to collect from the girls whom
they supplied to the brothel.
Two slicks in Hawaiian shirts and white silk trousers, gliding
on roller skates, peddled cocaine cut with powdered Viagra to the
whorehouse clientele. They were having a special on Ecstasy and
meth.
Four Harleys stood in a hog line behind the porno shop.
Hardcase bikers seemed to be providing security for the
whorehouse or for the bar. Or for the drug dealers. Perhaps for all
of them.
Deucalion passed among them, noticed by some, not by
others. For him, a black coat and blacker shadows could be almost
as concealing as a cloak of invisibility.
The mysterious lightning that brought him to life had also
conveyed to him an understanding of the quantum structure of the
universe, and perhaps something more. Having spent two centuries
exploring and gradually applying that knowledge, he could when he
wished move through the world with an ease, a grace, a stealth that
others found bewildering.
An argument between a biker and a slender young woman at
the back door of the whorehouse drew Deucalion as blood in the
water draws a shark.
Although dressed to arouse, the girl looked fresh-faced and
vulnerable. She might have been sixteen.
“Lemme go, Wayne,” she pleaded. “I want out.”
Wayne, the biker, held her by both arms, jamming her against
the green door. “Once you’re in, there is no out.”
“I’m not but fifteen.”
“Don’t worry. You’ll age fast.”
Through tears, she said, “I never knew it was gonna be like
this.”
“What did you think it would be like, you dumb bitch? Richard
Gere and Pretty Woman?”
“He’s ugly and he stinks.”
“Joyce, honey, they’re all ugly and they all stink. After number
fifty, you won’t notice anymore.”
The girl saw Deucalion first, and her widening eyes caused
Wayne to turn.
“Release her,” Deucalion advised.
The biker—massive, with a cruel face—was not impressed.
“You walk real fast away from here, Lone Ranger, and you might
leave with your cojones.”
Deucalion seized his adversary’s right arm and bent it behind
his back so suddenly, with such violence, that the shoulder broke
with a loud crack. He pitched the big man away from him.
Briefly airborne, Wayne landed face-first, his scream stifled by
a mouthful of blacktop.
A hard stomp to the nape of the biker’s neck would have
snapped his spine. Remembering torch-bearing mobs with
pitchforks in another century, Deucalion restrained himself.
He turned toward the whoosh of a swung chain.
Another motorcycle aficionado, a leering grotesque with a
studded eyebrow, studded nose, studded tongue, and bristling red
beard, recklessly joined the fray.
Instead of dodging the chain-link whip, Deucalion stepped
toward his assailant. The chain lashed around his left arm. He
seized it and pulled Redbeard off balance.
The biker had a ponytail. It served as a handle.
Deucalion lifted him, punched him, threw him.
In possession of the chain, he rounded on a third thug,
whipped him across the knees.
The struck man cried out and fell. Deucalion helped him off
the ground by throat, by crotch, and slammed him into the fourth
of the four enforcers.
He rapped their heads against a wall to the barband beat,
creating much misery and perhaps some remorse.
Already the customers wandering from porno shop to brothel
to bar had fled the alleyway. The dealers on wheels had skated with
their wares.
In rapid succession, the pimpmobiles fired up. No one drove
toward Deucalion. They reversed out of the alleyway.
A chopped-and-stretched Cadillac crashed into a yellow
Mercedes.
Neither driver stopped to provide the other with the name of
his insurance agent.
In a moment, Deucalion and the girl, Joyce, were alone with
the disabled bikers, though surely watched from doorways and
windows.
In the bar, the Zydeco band jammed without faltering. The
thick, damp air seemed to shimmer with the music.
Deucalion walked the girl to the corner, where the alleyway
met the street. He said nothing, but Joyce needed no
encouragement to stay at his side.
Although she went with him, she was clearly afraid. She had
good reason to be.
The action in the alley had not diminished his fury. When he
was fully self-possessed, his mind was a centuries-old mansion
furnished with rich experience, elegant thought, and philosophical
reflection. Now, however, it was a many-chambered charnel house
dark with blood and cold with the urge to murder.
As they passed under a streetlamp, treading on the fluttering
shadows cast by moths above, the girl glanced at him. He was
aware that she shuddered.
She seemed as bewildered as she was frightened, as if she had
awakened from a bad dream and could not yet distinguish between
what might be real and what might be remnants of her nightmare.
In the gloom between streetlamps, when Deucalion put one
hand on her shoulder, when they traded shadows for shadows and
fading Zydeco for louder jazz, her bewilderment increased, and her
fear. “What… what just happened? This is the Quarter.”
“At this hour,” he warned, as he walked her across Jackson
Square, past the statue of the general, “the Quarter is no safer for
you than that alleyway. You have somewhere to go?”
Hugging herself as if the bayou air had taken an arctic chill,
she said, “Home.”
“Here in the city?”
“No. Up to Baton Rouge.” She was close to tears. “Home
don’t seem boring anymore.”
Envy seasoned Deucalion’s ferocious anger, for he had never
had a home. He’d had places where he stayed, but none had truly
been a home.
A wild criminal desire to smash the girl raged at the bars of
the mental cell in which he strove to keep imprisoned his bestial
impulses, to smash her because she could go home in a way that he
never could.
He said, “You’ve got a phone?”
She nodded, and unclipped a cell phone from her braided
belt.
“You tell your mother and father you’ll be waiting in the
cathedral over there,” he said.
He walked her to the church, paused in the street, encouraged
her forward, made certain to be gone before she turned to look at
him.
Chapter 2
In his mansion in the Garden District, Victor Helios formerly
Frankenstein, began this fine summer morning by making love to
his new wife Erika.
His first wife, Elizabeth, had been murdered two hundred
years ago in the Austrian mountains, on their wedding day. He
rarely thought of her anymore.
He had always been oriented toward the future. The past
bored him. Besides, much of it didn’t bear contemplation.
Counting Elizabeth, Victor had enjoyed—or in some cases
merely tolerated—six wives. Numbers two through six had been
named Erika.
The Erikas had been identical in appearance because they had
all been engineered in his New Orleans lab and grown in his
cloning vats. This saved the expense of a new wardrobe each time
one of them had to be terminated.
Although extremely wealthy, Victor loathed wasting money.
His mother, otherwise a useless woman, had impressed upon him
the need for thrift.
Upon his mother’s death, he had not stood the expense of
either a service or a pine box. No doubt she would have approved
of the simple hole in the ground, excavated to a depth of four
rather than six feet to reduce the gravedigger’s fee.
Although the Erikas looked identical to one another, numbers
one through four had different flaws. He kept refining and
improving them.
Just the previous evening, he had killed Erika Four. He had
sent her remains to an upstate landfill operated by one of his
companies, where the first three Erikas and other disappointments
摘要：

 CITYOFNIGHT DeanKoontz&EdGorman         DeanKoontz’sFrankensteinBook2          Chapter1 Havingcometolifeinathunderstorm,touchedbysomestrangelightningthatanimatedratherthanincinerated,Deucalionhadbeenbornonanightofviolence.ABedlamsymphonyofhisanguishedcries,hismaker’sshrieksoftriumph,theburrandbuzza...

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