of Our Lady of Sorrows. The eyes opened, and in Patrick’s voice, the Werner thing said, “I am alive in Werner, and free at last.”
“When you tore Patrick apart,” Ripley said, “you absorbed some of his DNA, and now you can mimic him.”
“Not at all,” said Werner-as-Patrick. “Werner took my brain whole, and I am now part of him.”
Standing beside the Beekeeper earlier in the evening, watching Isolation Room Two through six cameras, Ripley had seen the Werner thing, mostly buglike at that time, crack open Patrick’s skull and take his brain as if it were a nut meat.
“You
In a voice still Duchaine’s, the creature said, “No, Werner is in complete control of his cellular structure. He positioned my brain inside himself and instantly grew arteries and veins to nourish it.”
The face and body of the rector of Our Lady of Sorrows morphed smoothly into the face and body of the security chief of the Hands of Mercy. Werner whispered, “I’m in complete control of my cellular structure.”
“Yes, well,” said Ripley.
“You can be free.”
Ripley said, “Well.”
“You can have a new life in me.”
“It would be a strange kind of life.”
“The life you have now is a strange kind of life.”
“True enough,” Ripley acknowledged.
A mouth formed in Werner’s forehead. The lips moved, and a tongue appeared, but the mouth produced no voice.
“Complete control?” Ripley asked.
“Complete.”
“Absolutely complete?”
“Absolutely.”
“Do you know you’ve just grown a mouth in your forehead?”
The sly pirate grin returned. Werner winked and whispered, “Well, of course I know.”
“Why would you grow a mouth in your forehead?”
“Well … as a demonstration of my control.”
“Then make it go away,” Ripley said.
In Patrick Duchaine’s voice, the mouth in the forehead began to sing “Ave Maria.”
Werner closed his eyes, and an expression of strain overcame his face. The upper mouth stopped singing, licked its lips, and at last disappeared into a brow that appeared normal once more.
“I would prefer to set you free with your permission,” Werner said. “I want us all to live in harmony inside me. But I will set you free without permission, if I must. I’m a revolutionary with a mission.”
“Well,” said Ripley.
“You will be free of anguish.”
“That would be nice.”
“You know how you sit in the kitchen, tearing apart hams and briskets with your hands?”
“How do you know about that?”
“I was previously security chief.”
“Oh. That’s right.”
“What you really want to tear apart is living flesh.”
“The Old Race,” Ripley said.
“They have everything we don’t.”
“I hate them,” Ripley said.
“Be free in me.” Werner’s voice was seductive. “Be free in me, and the first flesh we’ll tear together will be the flesh of the oldest living member of the Old Race.”
“The Beekeeper.”
“Yes. Victor. And then when the Hands of Mercy staff is all alive in me, we’ll leave this place as one, and we’ll kill and kill and kill.”
“When you put it that way …”
“Yes?”
Ripley said, “What do I have to lose?”
“Nothing,” said Werner.
“Well,” said Ripley.
“Do you want to be free in me?”
“How much will it hurt?”
“I’ll be gentle.”
Ripley said, “Okay then.”
Suddenly all insect, Werner seized Ripley’s head in chitinous claws and cracked his skull open as if it were a pistachio shell.
CHAPTER 14
Next door to the Bennets lived Antoine and Evangeline Arceneaux, in a house encircled by a ground-floor veranda with ironwork almost as frilly as that of the LaBranche House in the French Quarter, and by a second-story balcony where much of the equally frilly iron was concealed by cascades of purple bougainvillea that grew up the back of the structure and across the roof.
When Janet Guitreau, nude, and Bucky Guitreau, fully clothed, stepped through a neighborly gate between the two properties, most of the windows at the Arceneaux house were dark. The only light came from the rear of the residence.
As they moved toward the back of the house to reconnoiter, Bucky said, “This time I’ll have to be the one who says something terrible has happened, and you’ll stand aside where they can’t see you.”
“What does it matter if they see me?”
“They might be put off because you’re naked.”
“Why would that put them off? I’m hot, aren’t I?”
“You’re definitely hot, but hot and something-terrible-has-happened don’t seem to go together.”
“You think it would make them suspicious,” Janet said.
“That’s exactly what I think.”
“Well, I’m not going to go back and get my clothes. I feel so
“I’m not going to dispute that.”
Step by step, as they moved through the rain, he envied Janet her freedom. She looked lithe and strong and healthy and
By contrast, his clothes were heavy with rain, hanging on him like sacking, weighing him down, and his sodden shoes were binding the bridges of his feet. Even though he was losing his law education, he felt imprisoned by his creation-tank program, as much by what it required of him as by what it restricted him from doing. He had been given superhuman strength, almost supernatural durability, yet he remained condemned to a life of meekness and subservience, promised that his kind would one day rule the universe but at the same time assigned the tedious duty of pretending to be Bucky Guitreau, a political hack and uninspired prosecutor with a circle of friends as tiresome as a ward full of bores who had received chemical lobotomies.
At the back of the house, light brightened two ground-floor windows, beyond both of which lay the Arceneauxs’ family room.
