Lost Souls (Dean Koontz's Frankenstein, #4)

by Dean Koontz

Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable. —G. K. CHESTERTON

By the time Deucalion circled the property and arrived at the entrance to the abbey church, he understood that his suspicion arose not from deductive reasoning but instead from intuition. He was wise enough and sufficiently experienced to know that intuition was the highest form of knowledge and should never be ignored.

“Who was it they said murdered sleep?” Knuckles asked. “Macbeth.”

The monk knew, as well, that during Deucalion’s sleepless nights, he usually occupied himself with books. In his two centuries, he had read and reread more volumes than were contained in all but the largest of the world’s libraries.

The clock in the upper oven read 2:14, and the clock in the lower oven displayed 2:11, as if time flowed more languidly nearer the floor than nearer the ceiling. Being a perfectionist, Potter wanted to reset both clocks to 2:16, which was the correct time. Time must be treated with respect. Time was the lubricant that allowed the mechanism of the universe to function smoothly. As soon as he finished his current task, he would synchronize every clock in the residence. He must ensure that the house remained in harmony with the universe.

The second shot was a telemetric command that switched on the embedded needle’s electronics, initiating transmission to a processing-and-storage module in the replicant’s brain. Although the intruder remained aware of the kitchen, through his mind raced images extracted from the mayor’s gray matter, torrents of them, most of them connected and serial. Others were disconnected flashes, moments from a life. With the images came data: names, places, experiences, scraps of dialogue, fears and hopes. He was downloading the mayor’s memories with all the distortions and the discontinuities that were a part of recollections.

They busted some bad guys, learned to use chopsticks, ate a lot of superb Chinese food, spoke wistfully about the doughnut shop that might have been, and had a baby whom Carson wanted to name Mattie, after the spunky girl in the movie True Grit. But Michael insisted he wanted to call her Rooster or at least Reuben, in honor of Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn, the character played by John Wayne in that film. Eventually, they named her Scout, after the splendidly spunky girl in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Because a U.S. government grant had paid for more than half the construction of the police station, however, the building included the additional cells to satisfy a federal mandate. The real Chief Jarmillo had sometimes wondered why the feds were insistent that even small-town America overbuild its jails: as if those officials were not being merely prudent but were preparing for an event of their own design. The new Chief Jarmillo didn’t worry about federal intentions. The days of the human race—and therefore of the federal government—were numbered. The plans of politicians would soon mean nothing.

The cool night on shore must have been no warmer than the chill on the water. In the dead-calm hours before dawn, fog wasn’t drawn inland by a temperature differential, but remained confined to the bay, a cloak with many cowls and folds and sleeves. Chang vanished into one of its pockets.

In that waning October darkness, when the earth rotated away from the earliest stars of the night, when the moon set, Deucalion stepped out of the California monastery into pre-dawn New Orleans.

For one thing, on an intuitive level, he understood the quantum nature of the universe: how different futures were contained in every moment in the present and all of them not only equally possible but equally real; how mind ruled matter; how the flight of a butterfly in Tokyo could affect the weather in Chicago; how on the deepest level of structure, every place in the world was the same place. He did not need wheels or wings to travel where he wished, and no locked door was ever locked to him.

With 106 beds, Rainbow Falls Memorial Hospital was primarily a short-term, acute-care facility. Once stabilized, those patients with chronic conditions or with critical acute conditions were transferred either by ambulance or by air ambulance to Great Falls—or to one of the town’s three funeral homes if the air ambulance did not arrive in a timely fashion.

The Creator hadn’t yet developed a brain tap that could entirely transfer complex acquired knowledge, such as a medical education.

Lightner shook his head. “We’ve found them easy. Trusting. Submissive to authority even before a brain tap. Not like we thought Montanans might be.” “We’ve found the same,” said Jarmillo. “So much for the Wild West. Everywhere now is a sheepfold.”

Usually, Carson and Michael would drop to their knees to scratch the dog’s chest and behind his ears, to give him a tummy rub when, inevitably, he collapsed to the floor and rolled onto his back. A dog’s love is pure and can inspire the repressed angel in even the most corrupted heart.

Her experiences had proved that every coincidence in life was actually an indication of hidden order, that it all had meaning. She loved the world not solely for its beauty but also for its mysteries, and she was incapable of turning away from any mystery that, when probed, might bring her closer to an understanding of the purpose of her existence.

Montana was a vast state with a small population, but people here were industrious and busy. Even the most rural of lanes carried more traffic than this.

Sometimes she heard nothing, and at other times only the crisp cracking of bark as it fissured to accommodate the growth of the underlying wood or the creak of heavy boughs weary from bearing their own weight, and more than once she felt watched.

He had a sense of his natural dignity but not an adolescent ego that allowed him to imagine himself as exceptional in either his abilities or his destiny. He seemed to know the world and the people in it for what they were, and had a quiet, unshakable confidence.

Although not of a rigorous architectural style, the residence had considerable appeal. You might have thought a wise retired judge lived here, or a country doctor, someone who valued neatness, order, and harmony, though not at the expense of charm.

Cattle barons tormenting sheep ranchers, sheep ranchers against homesteading farmers. Good men with hard codes of honor and hard men with dishonorable intentions. Train robbers, bank busters, posses in pursuit. Vast plains, high mesas, box canyons, purple sage, burning sands, the bones of bad men picked clean by vultures. Gunfights at dawn, showdowns at high noon, fast horses and faster guns.

During the last fifteen years, fewer and fewer Westerns were published, and publishers offered ever less for them. The golden age of the genre was long gone. Readers didn’t have affection for the past anymore because they didn’t believe in it. They’d been told for too long that everything they knew about the past was a lie, that the good men with hard codes were actually the bad men and that the outlaws were either victims of injustice or rebels against conformity—which were the real lies. People didn’t believe in the past, and they didn’t believe in the present or the future because they were told constantly that they were headed toward one cataclysm or another, that before them lay a smorgasbord of dooms.

Bryce Walker disliked those kinds of stories partly because he could see nothing real in them, but mostly because they were full of thrills without meaning, color without passion, and a pantheism that devalued human life. They were people-hating stories.

Like all others in the Community, he had no interest in music or in any kind of art, for those things promoted leisure, and leisure diminished efficiency.

And he didn’t know what he should do about it. If he recounted his experience to anyone, he most likely would not be believed. At seventy-two, his mind was as sharp as ever, but in this tyranny of youth that was the modern world, an old guy with a strange story would more often than not raise suspicions of Alzheimer’s.

A primitive survival instinct, of which he’d had no need in decades, warned him that speaking of this to the wrong person would be the end of him and that the end would be swift.

They had about them an air of urgency, not the bustle of women intent upon their work, but an eagerness to be done with the task at hand and to be off to another endeavor that was the true purpose and passion of their day.

Anyway, rats weren’t the unknown thing that maybe lived down here. Each time Nummy saw a live rat, it seemed to be running scared from something, and not from him.

Nummy tried always to choose happiness, like Grandmama told him he could and should do, but he saw how other people were lots of times sad, and he felt sorry for them.

They came out of the pipe into a large but shallow concrete catch basin. Workers had cleared out the trash from the last storm. The concrete bowl was clean and dry.

Mr. Lyss continued to laugh but not as hard as before.

When he remembered him, the old man was still sitting in the chair, but he wasn’t laughing anymore. He looked different, too—not as much like a witch.

Thirty years earlier, Rainbow Falls had thought itself on the brink of an economic boom. The discovery of large natural-gas fields and oil deposits in the surrounding county generated huge investments by the energy industry that, according to informed predictions, were modest compared to the investments still to come. The population of Rainbow Falls would double in a decade, experts said, and the average income of its citizens might double as well. City revenues rose as property values soared and as the county shared the initial income from mineral-licensing rights on land it owned. The mayor and city council of that time hoped to leverage the tax windfall to get a head start on developing the infrastructure that a population boom would require. Meriwether Lewis Elementary was originally intended to be a new high school with the amenities usually found only in rich suburban schools or private schools. This included an indoor Olympic pool to support swimming and diving programs second to none. Before the school could be completed, however, the people of Rainbow Falls saw their inflated dreams of glory pricked when, for environmental reasons, the federal government restricted exploitation of the newly discovered oil deposits and gas fields, regulating them to such an extent that drilling projects already under way had to be closed. Tax revenues collapsed back to their former level as property values fell and outside investment evaporated. The budget for the elaborate new hig...

“He wants to murder the idea of human exceptionalism, debase all life until it has no value whatsoever, acquire ultimate power at any cost, and by the accomplishment of those goals, thereby destroy the soul of the world. As for where he is … one way or another, we’ll soon know the place.” One of Carson’s two cell phones rang.

Nummy had tried to put out of his mind what had been done to the people in the next cell, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you could forget the way you could sometimes forget Christmas was coming until people started putting up their decorations.

Without using a door, a hallway, or stairs, Deucalion stepped out of the study and, apparently, into their garage. Michael said, “I sure wish I’d been born with an intuitive understanding of the quantum nature of the universe.”

Carson said nothing more, and clearly he understood that she didn’t need any reassuring words, that she needed only to hold him and to be held and to get past the pain of leaving. They knew when the moment came to go; they broke the embrace simultaneously.

Looking left to right, right to left, back and forth as he slowly cruised the street, Deucalion said, “So it’s important to you to be behind the wheel, to control your fate. And on a subconscious level, perhaps you equate speed—or at least being in motion—with safety.”

They raced to the end of the block, he hung a right so sharp they bounced onto the curb and off, and when they came out of the turn, San Francisco was gone. They were on a rural road flanked by golden meadows. Beyond the fields to their right were forested foothills. Farther away, majestic mountains rubbed their stegosaurian backs against iron-gray clouds that looked harder than the granite peaks.

In the backseat, Michael said, “An intuitive understanding of the quantum nature of the universe.” Deucalion apparently thought his words explained the miraculous transition when he said, “At the most fundamental level of structure, Montana is as close to San Francisco as the first page of a notebook is close to the twentieth.”

Without Deucalion, Carson could not be at their side in a single step or with one revolution of the Jeep Cherokee’s wheels, yet she took comfort from the thought that the farthest place on a map was in some strange way as near as the house next door.

“On the subjective level of our five senses, the arrow of time is always moving forward, but on the quantum level, the arrow of time is indeterminate and, for certain purposes, its flight can be adjusted to one’s intention. We can’t actually go back in time to affect the future, but we can travel through the past on the way to the future.” Carson said, “We don’t really need to understand.” “To bring us to Montana,” Deucalion continued, “ … let’s just imagine that for us the arrow of time flew in a circle, backward into the past for a few hours, then forward to the moment from which we departed, simultaneously moving us nearly a thousand miles through space. You were unaware of the hours the journey took backward and forward in time, because we arrived at the same moment we left.

As a product of contemporary culture, having seen scores of science-fiction films and having read hundreds of comic books, he harbored no doubt that Rainbow Falls had been invaded by aliens, extraterrestrials who could masquerade as the human beings they killed and replaced. Bryce had been shaped by far different fiction from the stories to which Travis had turned for entertainment. The Westerns he spent a long lifetime reading—and writing—were about good and evil of the human kind, about courage and conviction in response to danger and hardship. Westerns taught him a love of place, of home and family and truth, taught him how to live honorably. The genre hadn’t prepared him to cope with otherworldly shape-changers intent on exterminating the human race; indeed, it hadn’t prepared him even to imagine such a threat.

Frost had been surprised to learn that although some pigeons would migrate south, many would stay here all year. He had thought a Montana winter must be too severe for anything other than the likes of owls, eagles, turkeys, pheasants, and grouse.

But gradually I realized I’d been given one gift greater than all others, the gift of possibility. I could become what I chose, better than my origins.

They were silenced by this suggestion of a destiny. Of a hard obligation. Of a responsibility that was grave, if not even sacred.

In his motel room, Dagget could hear the falls 24/7 even with the windows closed. He said it was a soothing sound, as effective as a lullaby.

The company didn’t exist, except on paper, and Frost wasn’t its property scout, as he claimed to be, but the landlord had been paid in full in advance, which was as real as anything got in contemporary America. Green was the perfect camouflage these days. If you worked for a company with green in its name, you were assumed to be responsible, compassionate, farsighted, of high moral character, one of the good guys—which was ironic, because Frost was one of the good guys even though he worried not at all about his carbon footprint.

He had a law degree from Yale, and though he would never say a cross word to a subordinate in front of anyone else, in private he could cut you in half with words faster than a chain saw could do the job.

Bryce’s own voice sounded alien to him, not because the pitch and timbre of it had changed, which they had not, but because of the things he heard himself saying. He remained a writer of Westerns, but his life had changed genres.