After another silence, Mr. Lyss said, “Good thing for us there’s no wind, or these tracks would smooth right over before we found our way back.”
“That’s another smart thing to figure out.”
“My brain is so big and still growing so fast, every couple years, they have to open my skull and take out a piece of brain so there’s room enough in there.”
“I don’t think that could be true,” Nummy said.
“Well, it is true. My medical bills are enormous.”
Chapter 39
When Carson, Michael, and Addison returned to the Samples house with Deucalion, she knew the Riders and Riderettes were going to need a lot of persuading to turn over their children to a menacing-looking giant with half his face broken and tattooed, even if the other half was rather handsome.
He would need to demonstrate his ability to move any distance that he wished in a single step. He would need to explain that he could take with him anything on which he placed his hands, including other people or — with a slightly different technique — an entire vehicle full of people.
But Carson worried that such a demonstration might have the opposite effect of the one intended. Considering his appearance, the occasional luminous pulses passing through his eyes, his deep voice with its rough timbre, and his strong hands that seemed to be as large as shovels, these people might find him downright demonic and refuse to entrust their precious children to him even if they might be safer out of Rainbow Falls.
Having Addison with them would be helpful. His late uncle Norris and aunt Thelma had been parishioners of the Riders in the Sky. He said that the
Just as Deucalion, reluctant to risk stretching his credibility to the snapping point, had not spoken the name Frankenstein to the people at KBOW, so Carson had avoided mentioning it to these folks. With the help of young Farley Samples, she talked them out of the alien-invasion theory and into an acceptance of the nanotechnology explanation, leaving them to imagine that the villains were part of some totalitarian faction of the government. If the Riders and Riderettes could not bring themselves to trust Deucalion, who might seem to have less in common with them than with the killing machines that attacked them in the roadhouse, she would at last have to speak Victor’s name and try to bridge their skepticism and guide them to a full understanding of the situation.
As Carson led the way through the front door into the living room, five men were finishing the window fortifications and the weapons preparations on which they had been engaged earlier. Behind Michael and Addison, Deucalion entered last, pushing back the hood of his coat as stepped into the house. The five churchmen looked up — and in every case froze at the sight of this man who, at various times in his long life, had earned a living as a sideshow freak in carnivals.
Although none of the Riders reached for a weapon lying near at hand, Carson felt the tension in the room, as though the barometric pressure had plunged in anticipation of a storm. Some men’s eyes widened, others’ narrowed, but they all seemed to have made up their minds about Deucalion on sight, as Carson had feared.
“This man is a friend of ours,” Carson said. “He’s a friend of Addison’s, too. He’s the key to victory for all of us and the best hope of saving the children.”
She was little more than halfway through that introduction when one of the five Riders hurried out of the room and thundered up the stairs toward the second floor, while another disappeared into the dining room.
When Carson began to warn them that their first impression of Deucalion was mistaken, one of the remaining three Riders raised a hand to silence her. “Ma’am, best wait so you won’t have to repeat yourself so much.”
In their aprons, Dolly Samples leading and drying her hands on a dish towel, the Riderettes came in from the kitchen and the dining room. Numerous thunderous footsteps hurriedly descending the stairs heralded eight or ten men who entered the living room through the hallway arch.
They crowded the farther half of the room, keeping some distance from Deucalion, their expressions somber and their stares as sharp as flensing knives. Loreen Rudolph covered her mouth with one hand, as though stifling a scream, and another woman was trembling so badly that she had to lean on one of her companions.
Among these cowboys, there were some of considerable size, big enough to give a rodeo bull second thoughts about participating in a contest with them. But none of them stood as tall as Deucalion or matched his mass of muscle. They glanced at one another, and Carson thought they were wondering how many of them might be needed to take him down.
Fresh startlement raced through those assembled, gasps and murmurs, and when Carson looked at Deucalion, she saw eerie light throbbing through his eyes. The men were standing taller than they had been a moment earlier, and two more women had raised their hands to their mouths, their eyes owlish.
Carson started to speak again, sensed that the moment wasn’t right, wasn’t hers, might instead be Deucalion’s. But the giant made no effort to intrude or explain himself. With stoic acceptance of the fear he could induce without effort, he surveyed those who gaped at him, perhaps much as he had matched the stares of those who came to see him in the carnival sideshows.
Tucking the dish towel in one of the two patch pockets on her apron, Dolly Samples came forward slowly, and no one warned her to stay back, though it seemed to Carson that the men grew more tense. Just five feet two, Dolly had to peer up at quite an angle to study Deucalion’s now downturned face, and she seemed most intent on the intricate half-face tattoo and on fully understanding the terrible damage to the underlying bone structure.
“I dreamed of you,” Dolly said, which was nothing that Carson expected her to say. “The most vivid dream of my life. More than two years ago, it was.”
When Dolly spoke the date, Carson glanced at Michael and he at her, for the night of her dream was also the night that Victor Frankenstein, the original, had died in the landfill in highlands north of Lake Pontchartrain.
“I dreamed of your great size, the hooded coat you’re wearing now,” Dolly said. “Your lovely face and your poor face, both halves exactly as they are, and the tattoo in all its detail.”
Carson realized that the women with their hands to their mouths had never been stifling screams. They were guarding emotions of a much different kind, and now tears stood in their eyes.
“In the dream, I saw the light in your eyes, and at first I was afraid, but then I knew there was no reason for fear. I thought of a line from Proverbs 15—‘The light of the eyes rejoiceth the heart’—and I knew that you were our friend.”
When Deucalion spoke, his voice seemed deeper and more resonant than ever: “What happened in this dream?”
“We had come to the shore of a sea, the water very dark and turbulent. There were so many children with us, our own and children I’d never seen before. We were fleeing something, I don’t know what, but death was coming. We were like the Israelites at the shore, and you came to us out of nowhere, one moment not there and then among us. You parted the sea and told the children to follow you, and they were saved.”
“I can’t part the sea and make a dry path through it,” Deucalion said. “But there’s something else I can do that I will show you, and then you can decide whether to entrust the children to me.”
Dolly said, “I told everyone about the dream. I knew it must be prophetic, it was so intense. I knew one day you would appear among us, out of nowhere.”
The other women crossed the room to Deucalion, and their men came behind them.
Dolly said, “You have suffered very much.”
“And there was a time I caused suffering,” he confessed.
“We all do, one way or another. May I touch your face?”
He nodded.
She raised her right hand first to the undamaged side of his face and pressed it against his cheek as a loving mother might have done. Then her fingers tenderly traced the fractured contours of the damaged side, the impossible concavity and the lumpish scar tissue.
“You’re beautiful,” she said. “Very beautiful.”
