Frankenstein Special Edition: Prodigal Son and City of Night. Dean Koontz
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to Elizabeth at the kitchen table, Roy said, “My sister. We talk all the time. We’re very close.”
When the manicure was complete, he exfoliated the skin of her perfect hands with an aromatic mixture of almond oil, sea salt, and essence of lavender (his own concoction), which he massaged onto her palms, the backs of the hands, the knuckles, the fingers.
Finally, he rinsed each hand, wrapped it in clean white butcher paper, and sealed it in a plastic bag. As he placed the hands in the freezer, he said, “I’m so happy you’ve come to stay, Elizabeth.”
He didn’t find it peculiar to be talking to her severed hands. Her hands had been the essence of her. Nothing else of Elizabeth Lavenza had been worth talking about or to. The hands were her.
THE LUXE WAS an ornate Deco palace, glamorous in its day, a fit showcase for the movies of William Powell and Myrna Loy, Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman. Like many a Hollywood face, this glamour had peeled and sagged.
Deucalion accompanied Jelly Biggs down the center aisle, past rows of musty, patched seats.
“Damn DVDs screwed the revival business,” Jelly said. “Ben’s retirement didn’t turn out like he expected.”
“Marquee says you’re still open Thursday through Sunday.”
“Not since Ben died. There’s almost enough thirty-five-millimeter fanatics to make it worthwhile. But some weekends we run up more expenses than receipts. I didn’t want to take responsibility for that since it’s become your property.”
Deucalion looked up at the screen. The gold and crimson velvet curtains drooped, heavy with dust and creeping mildew. “So…you left the carnival when Ben did?”
“When freak shows took a fade, Ben made me theater manager. I got my own apartment here. I hope that won’t change…assuming you want to keep the place running.”
Deucalion pointed to a quarter on the floor. “Finding money is always a sign.”
“A sign of what?”
Stooping to pick up the quarter, Deucalion said, “Heads, you’re out of a job. Tails, you’re out of a job.”
“Don’t like them odds.”
Deucalion snapped the coin into the air, snatched it in midflight. When he opened his fist, the coin had disappeared.
“Neither heads nor tails. A sign for sure, don’t you think?”
Instead of relief at having kept his job and home, Jelly’s expression was troubled. “I been having a dream about a magician. He’s strangely gifted.”
“Just a simple trick.”
Jelly said, “I’m maybe a little psychic. My dreams sometimes come sorta true.”
Deucalion had much he could have said to that, but he remained silent, waiting.
Jelly looked at the moldering drapes, at the threadbare carpet, at the elaborate ceiling, everywhere but at Deucalion. At last he said, “Ben told me some about you, things that don’t seem they could be real.” He finally met Deucalion’s eyes. “Do you have two hearts?”
Deucalion chose not to reply.
“In the dream,” Jelly said, “the magician had two hearts…and he was stabbed in both.”
A flutter of wings overhead drew Deucalion’s attention.
“Bird got in yesterday,” Jelly said. “A dove, by the look of it. Haven’t been able to chase it out.”
Deucalion tracked the trapped bird’s flight. He knew how it felt.
CARSON LIVED ON A tree-lined street in a house nondescript except for a gingerbread veranda that wrapped three sides.
She parked at the curb because the garage was packed with her parents’ belongings, which she never found time to sort through.
On her way to the kitchen door, she paused under an oak draped with Spanish moss. Her work hardened her, wound her tight. Arnie, her brother, needed a gentle sister. Sometimes she couldn’t decompress during the walk from car to house; she required a moment to herself.
Here in the humid night and the fragrance of jasmine, she found that she couldn’t shift into domestic gear. Her nerves were twisted as tight as dreadlocks, and her mind raced. As never before, the scent of jasmine reminded her of the smell of blood.
The recent killings had been so gruesome and had occurred in such rapid succession that she could not put them aside during her personal time. Under normal circumstances, she was seventy percent cop, thirty percent woman and sister; these days, she was all cop, twenty-four/seven.
When Carson entered the kitchen, Vicky Chou had just loaded the dishwasher and switched it on. “Well, I screwed up.”
“Don’t tell me you put laundry in the dishwasher.”
“Worse. With his brisket of beef, I gave him carrots and peas.”
“Oh, never orange and green on the same plate, Vicky.”
Vicky sighed. “He’s got more rules about food than kosher and vegan combined.”
On a cop’s salary, Carson could not have afforded a live-in caregiver to look after her autistic brother. Vicky took the job in return for room and board—and out of gratitude.
When Vicky’s sister, Liane, had been indicted with her boyfriend and two others for conspiracy to commit murder, she seemed helplessly snared in a web of evidence. She’d been innocent. In the process of sending the other three to prison, Carson had cleared Liane.
As a successful medical transcriptionist, Vicky worked flexible hours at home, transcribing micro-cassettes for physicians. If Arnie had been a more demanding autistic, Vicky might not have been able to keep up with her work, but the boy was mostly quiescent.
Widowed at forty, now forty-five, Vicky was an Asian beauty, smart and sweet and lonely. She wouldn’t grieve forever. Someday when she least expected it, a man would come into her life, and the current arrangement would end.
Carson dealt with that possibility the only way that her busy life allowed: She ignored it.
“Other than green and orange together, how was he today?” Carson asked.
“Fixated on the castle. Sometimes it seems to calm him, but at other times…” Vicky frowned. “What is he so afraid of?”
“I don’t know. I guess…life.”
BY REMOVING A WALL and combining two of the upstairs bedrooms, Carson had given Arnie the largest room in the house. This seemed only fair because his condition stole from him the rest of the world.
His bed and nightstand were shoved into a corner. A TV occupied a wheeled metal stand. Sometimes he watched cartoons on DVD, the same ones over and over.
The remainder of the room had been devoted to the castle.
Four low sturdy tables formed a twelve-by-eight-foot platform. Upon the tables stood an architectural wonder in Lego blocks.
Few boys of twelve would have been able to create a model castle without a plan, but Arnie had put together a masterpiece: walls and wards, barbicon and bastions, ramparts and parapets, turreted towers, the barracks, the chapel, the armory, the castle keep with elaborate bulwark and battlements.
He’d been obsessed with the model for weeks, constructing it in an intense silence. Repeatedly