The sisters exchanged a glance. “Something strange has come into the world, hasn’t it?” Lulana asked Carson, but clearly expected no answer. “There tonight, the coldest expectation crept over me, like maybe it was… end times.”
Evangeline said, “Maybe we should pray on it, sister.”
“Can’t hurt,” Michael said. “Might help. And have yourselves a piece of pie.”
Suspicion squinted Lulana’s eyes. “Mr. Michael, it sounds to me like you mean have ourselves a nice piece of pie while there’s still time.”
Michael avoided replying, but Carson said, “Have yourselves a piece of pie. Have two.”
In the car again, as Carson pulled away from the curb, Michael said, “Did you see the white Mercury Mountaineer about half a block back on the other side of the street?”
“Yeah.”
“Just like the one in the park.”
Studying the rearview mirror, she said, “Yeah. And just like the one down the street from the parsonage.”
“I wondered if you saw that one.”
“What, I’m suddenly blind?”
“Is it coming after us?”
“Not yet.”
She wheeled right at the corner.
Turning in his seat to peer into the dark street that they were leaving behind, he said, “They’re still not coming. Well, there’s bound to be more than one white Mountaineer in a city this size.”
“And this is just one of those freaky days when we happen to cross paths with all of them.”
“Maybe we should have asked Godot for some hand grenades,” Michael said.
“I’m sure he delivers.”
“He probably gift-wraps. Where now?”
“My place,” Carson told him. “Maybe it would be a good idea, after all, if Vicky moved Arnie somewhere.”
“Like some nice quiet little town in Iowa.”
“And back to 1956, when Frankenstein was just Colin Clive and Boris Karloff, and Mary Shelley was just a novelist instead of a prophet and historian.”
Chapter 56
On the six closed-circuit screens, the insectile manifestation of the Werner entity, still in possession of some human features, crawled the steel walls of the isolation chamber, sometimes in the cautious manner of a stalking predator, at other times as quick as a frightened roach, agitated and jittering.
Victor could not have imagined that any news brought to him by Father Duchaine would trump the images on those monitors, but when the priest described the meeting with the tattooed man, the crisis with Werner became a mere problem by comparison with the astonishing resurrection of his first-made man.
Initially skeptical, he pressed Duchaine hard for a description of the towering man who had sat for coffee with him in the rectory kitchen, particularly of the ravaged half of his face. What the priest had seen under the inadequate disguise of the elaborate tattoo was damage of a kind and of a degree that no ordinary man could have sustained and survived. Further, it matched the broken countenance as Victor had kept it in his mind’s eye, and his memory was exceptional.
Further still, Duchaine’s word portrait of the wholesome half of that same face could not have better conveyed the ideal male beauty that Victor had been kind enough to bestow upon his first creation so long ago and on such a distant continent that sometimes those events seemed like a dream.
His kindness had been repaid with betrayal and with the murder of his bride, Elizabeth. His lost Elizabeth would never have been as malleable or as lubricious as the wives that he had later made for himself; nevertheless, her savage murder had been an unforgivable impertinence. Now the ungrateful wretch had come crawling around again, filled with delusions of grandeur, spouting nonsense about a destiny, foolish enough to believe that in a second confrontation he might not only survive but triumph.
“I thought he died out there on the ice,” Victor said. “Out on the polar ice. I thought he had been frozen for eternity.”
“He’ll be returning to the rectory in about an hour and a half,” said the priest.
Victor said approvingly, “This was clever work, Patrick. You have not been in my good graces lately, but this counts as some redemption.”
“In truth,” the priest said, unable to meet his maker’s eyes, “I thought I might betray you, but in the end I could not conspire with him.”
“Of course you couldn’t. Your Bible tells you that rebellious angels rose up against God and were thrown out of Heaven. But I’ve made creatures more obedient than the God of myth ever proved able to create.”
On the screens, the Werner bug scampered up a wall and held fast to the ceiling, pendulous and quivering.
“Sir,” Duchaine said nervously, “I came here not only to tell you this news but to ask… to ask if you will grant me the grace that your first-made promised me.”
For a moment, Victor did not know what grace was meant. When he understood, he felt his temper rise. “You want me to take your life?”
“Release me,” Patrick pleaded quietly, staring at the monitors to avoid his master’s eyes.
“I give you life, and where is your gratitude? Soon the world will be ours, nature humbled, the way of all things changed forever. I have made you part of this great adventure, but you would turn away from it. Are you deluded enough to believe that the religion you have insincerely preached might contain some truth after all?”
Still focused on the phantasmagoric Werner, Duchaine said, “Sir, you could release me with a few words.”
“There is no God, Patrick, and even if there were, He would have no place in paradise for the likes of you.”
The priest’s voice acquired now a humble quality of a kind that Victor did not like. “Sir, I don’t need paradise. Eternal darkness and silence will be enough.”
Victor loathed him. “Perhaps at least one of my creatures is more pathetic than anything I would have believed I could create.”
When the priest had no reply, Victor switched on the audio feed from the isolation chamber. The Werner thing was still screaming in terror, in pain of an apparently extreme character. Some shrieks resembled those of a cat in agony, while others were as shrill and alien as the language of frenzied insects; and yet others sounded quite as human as any cries that might mark the night in an asylum for the criminally insane.
To one of the staff, Victor said, “Cycle open the nearer door of the transition module. Father Duchaine would like to offer his holy counsel to poor Werner.”
Trembling, Patrick Duchaine said, “But with just a few words, you could—”
“Yes,” Victor interrupted. “I could. But I have invested time and resources in you, Patrick, and you have provided me with a most unacceptable return on my investment. This way, at least, you can perform one last service. I need to know just how dangerous Werner has become, assuming he’s dangerous at all to anyone other than himself. Just go in there and ply your priestly art. I won’t need a written report.”
The nearer door of the module stood open.
Duchaine crossed the room. At the threshold, he paused to look back at his maker.
Victor could not read the expression on the priest’s face or in his eyes. Although he had created each of them with care and knew the structure of their bodies and their minds perhaps better than he knew himself, some of the New Race sometimes were as much of a mystery to him as any of the Old Race were.
Without a further word, Duchaine entered the transition module. The door cycled shut behind him.
Ripley’s voice conveyed a numbness of spirit when he said, “He’s in the air lock.”
