Frankenstein: Dead and Alive (15 page)

From that room came another plaintive cry, thrashing noises, the shattering of glass.

When Deucalion moved past some of the people standing in the hall, not one seemed to register his presence, so intent were they on the crisis in the laboratory. They stood in various postures of expectation. Some trembled or even shook violently with fear, some muttered angrily, and some appeared to be in the grip of a strange transcendental awe.

Through the open doors of the laboratory, into the corridor came Hell on six legs.

CHAPTER 32

For the moment, cold does not matter.

The transparent polymeric fabric of the imprisoning sack and the glass door of the freezer are for the first time not a torment to Chameleon.

The recently arrived, unusual, very busy, blue, not-a-person something goes back and forth, back and forth through the lab with great energy.

This visitor seems intent on creating a new order. It is an agent of change.

Cabinets topple. Chairs fly. Lab equipment is knocked helter-skelter.

In its pendulous sack of ice-flecked fluid, Chameleon can’t hear voices. However, the vibrations of this vigorous reordering are transmitted through walls and floor to the freezer and thus to its occupant.

The lights dim, swell brighter, dim, fade further, but then brighten once more.

The freezer motor stutters and dies. The backup motor does not come online.

Chameleon is alert for the distinct pattern of second-motor vibrations. Nothing. Nothing.

This interesting and energetic visitor draws some people to it, lifts them up, as if in celebration, as if to exalt them, but then casts them down.

They remain where they have fallen, motionless.

Other workers seem to approach the busy visitor of their own volition. They appear almost to embrace it.

These also are lifted up, and then they are cast down. They lie as motionless as the others who were cast down before them.

Perhaps they have prostrated themselves at the feet of the busy visitor.

Or they may be asleep. Or dead.

Interesting.

When all the once-busy workers are motionless, the visitor tears the faucets out of a lab sink and casts them down, making the water gush forth.

The water falls upon the workers, the water falls, yet they do not rise.

And no second-motor vibrations are as yet transmitted to the fluid in the imprisoning sack.

A stillness has come over the sack. The saline solution is without tremors and without hum.

Busy, busy, the visitor uproots the lab sink from its mountings, tosses it aside.

The stainless-steel sink strikes the freezer door, and the glass pane dissolves.

This seems to be an event of great import. What has been is no more. Change has come.

Chameleon has a clearer view than ever before as the visitor departs the laboratory.

What does it all mean?

Chameleon broods on recent events.

CHAPTER 33

The six-legged pandemonium that entered the corridor from the demolished laboratory loomed as large as three men.

In some of the entity’s features, Deucalion could discern the presence of human DNA. The face appeared much like that of a man, though twice as wide and half again as long as the average face. But the head did not rest upon a neck, instead melding directly with the body, much as a frog’s head and body were joined.

Throughout the organism, nonhuman genetic material manifested in a multitude of startling ways, as if numerous species were vying for control of the body. Feline, canine, insectile, reptilian, avian, and crustacean influences were apparent in limbs, in misplaced and excess orifices, in tails and stingers, in half-formed faces liable to appear anywhere in the tissue mass.

Nothing about this bizarre organism appeared to
be in stasis, but all in continuous change, as if its flesh were clay submitting to the imagination and the facile hands of an invisible—and insane—sculptor. This was the Prince of Chaos, enemy of equilibrium, brother of anarchy, literally seething with disorder, defined by the lack of definition, characterized by distortion and disfigurement, warp and gnarl and misproportion.

Deucalion knew at once what stood before him. Earlier, searching Victor’s files on the computer downstairs, he had found his maker’s daily diary of important developments. Among the few days he scanned were the two most recent, wherein the sudden metamorphosis of Werner was not merely described but also illustrated with video clips.

Across the surface of the beast, mouths formed and faded, formed again, most of them human in configuration. Some only gnashed their teeth. Some worked their lips and tongues but could not find their voices. Others issued cries like those that brought Deucalion from Victor’s main lab two floors below, wordless expressions of sorrow and despair, voices of the lost and hopeless.

These speakers sounded childlike, though everyone in the Hands of Mercy—therefore in this aggregate creature—was an adult. Having escaped their enslavement by surrendering to biological chaos, having dropped their programs in the process of abandoning their physical integrity, they seemed to have regressed psychologically to early childhood, a childhood they had never known, and they were now more helpless than ever.

Among the aggregated individuals, only Werner, whose distorted countenance remained the primary face of this beast, possessed an adult voice. Upon exiting the laboratory, he rolled his protuberant eyes, surveying those who waited in the corridor, and after giving them a moment to consider—perhaps to envy and admire—him, he said, “Be
free
. Be free in me. Abandon hopelessness, all you who enter me. Be free in me. Don’t wait to be told when you may kill the Old Race. Be free in me, and we will start the killing tonight. Be free in me, and we will kill
the world
.”

A man with a rapturous expression approached the Werner thing, raising his arms as if to embrace freedom, and his liberator at once snatched him up. Insectile puncture-and-pry limbs of wicked design opened the convert’s head as if it were a clamshell, and the brain was transferred into the aggregate creature through a thick-lipped moist cleft that opened in the beast’s chest to accept the offering.

A second man stepped forward. Although he was one of those shaking with terror, he was ready to commit to a bizarre and possibly tormented life in the aggregated organism rather than endure more life as Victor allowed him to live it.

Deucalion had seen enough, too much. He had been compelled to climb the steps in answer to the eerie cries because he had climbed them for two centuries in dreams. But in his climb, he had indeed brought the past and the present together. The first of Victor’s works was here with the last of his works, and the collapse of his demonic empire was under way.

Certain about what he must do next, Deucalion turned from the beast and its offer of freedom. He took one step in the corridor and the next one in the main lab, two floors below.

The end of this empire might not be the end of the threat to civilization that it posed.

To ensure eternal power over his creations, Victor designed the New Race to be infertile. He created females with vaginas but without wombs. When they were the sole version of humanity on Earth, the world would be perpetually without children. Never again would society be organized around the family and its traditions, an Old Race institution that Victor abhorred.

But when their biological structure collapsed, when they remade themselves into something like the aggregate beast or like the pale dwarfish thing that had come out of Detective Harker, perhaps they would rediscover the structures of fertility and efficient methods of reproduction.

Who was to say that this new thing on Earth, this Werner-driven thing, might not at some point reproduce by fission, split into two functioning organisms, as parameciums did?

It might even split into a male and a female. Thereafter, the two might cease to reproduce by fission and resume breeding through some kind of sexual intercourse.

After all, in an infinite universe, anything that could be imagined might somewhere exist.

The fate of the Old Race would be bleak if Victor
succeeded in producing an army to undertake a methodical genocide. But that horror might pale by comparison to a future in which humankind was harried and hunted by a multiple-species hybrid able to gain control of its currently chaotic physiology. Such an adversary would be nearly indestructible by virtue of its amorphous nature, full-bore insane by any standard yet intelligent, with an enthusiasm for violence un-equaled by any species of natural origin, with a distilled hatred for its prey that would be satanic in its bitterness, intensity, and eternal endurance.

At Victor’s workstation, Deucalion settled onto the chair and switched on the computer once more.

Among the many discoveries that he had made earlier, he found that even prideful Victor, whose well of hubris would never run dry, provided for the possibility that something would go so wrong in the Hands of Mercy that the old hospital would have to be reduced to molten slag. An option existed to destroy all evidence of the work done there and to prevent the escape of a rogue organism.

Within the walls on each floor of the building were numerous bricklike packages of a highly incendiary material, developed by a foreign despot with a thing for fire and an affection for Victor. The doomsday countdown could be activated through a program that was on the computer menu under the name DRESDEN.

The program allowed for a countdown as short as ten minutes, as long as four hours, or of any duration in between. Deucalion expected a call momentarily
from Michael, revealing a new location for their rendezvous. The Werner thing wouldn’t finish acquiring all the staff of Mercy for at least another hour; and even thereafter, the anarchic nature of the beast would ensure that it didn’t manage to break out of the hospital on a timely basis. Just in case Deucalion needed to return to Mercy because of something that came up during the meeting with Michael and Carson, he set the countdown clock at one hour.

On the screen appeared the numbers 60:00, and at once they changed to 59:59 as the end of Mercy drew closer second by second.

CHAPTER 34

Christine, head housekeeper at the Helios mansion, was afflicted by a most peculiar condition. For six days, she had been confused about her identity.

Much of the time, she knew perfectly well who and what she was: Christine, a Beta, one of the New Race. She managed the house staff with efficiency, and was number two in authority, after the butler.

But there were moments when she believed she was someone else entirely, when she did not even remember that she was Christine or that she had been manufactured at the Hands of Mercy.

And, as a third condition, there were times when she remembered that she had been living here as Christine, a Beta, housekeeper to Mr. Helios, but
also
remembered the other and more exciting identity into which she now and then entirely submerged.

Being one or the other, she could cope. But when
aware of both existences, she became confused and anxious. As she was now.

Only a short while ago, she had been in the staff dormitory, at the back of the property, where she belonged at this hour.

But a few minutes ago, she found herself here in the library, not attending to any chore that was her responsibility, but browsing as though the book collection were hers. Indeed, she thought:
I must find a book that Mrs. Van Hopper might like and send it to her with a warm note. It’s not right that I seldom correspond with her. She’s a difficult person, yes, but she was also kind to me in her way
.

She felt comfortable in the library, choosing a book for Mrs. Van Hopper, until she realized that she wore a maid’s uniform and rubber-soled work shoes. Under no circumstances could this be proper attire for the wife of Maxim de Winter and the mistress of Manderley.

If members of the staff encountered her in this costume, they would think Maxim’s predicament had overstressed her. Already, some thought she was too young for him and not of a suitable social class.

Oh, and she would be mortified if Mrs. Danvers discovered her in this outfit, and not merely mortified but finished. Mrs. Danvers would whisper “mental breakdown” to anyone who would listen, and all would listen. Mrs. Danvers, the head housekeeper, remained loyal to the previous Mrs. de Winter and schemed to undermine the new wife’s position in the house.

Head housekeeper?

Christine blinked, blinked, surveyed the library,
blinked, and realized that
she
was the head housekeeper, not Mrs. Danvers.

And this wasn’t Manderley, not a great house in the west country of England, but a big house without a name in the Garden District of New Orleans.

Her identity confusion had begun when the New Race’s primary mechanism for the release of stress—urgent, violent, multi-partner sex—ceased to provide her with any relief from her anxiety. Instead, the brutal orgies began to
increase
her anxiety.

The staff dormitory had television, which in theory could distract you from your worries, but the programming produced by the Old Race was so relentlessly stupid that it had little appeal to any member of the New Race above the level of an Epsilon.

In the dormitory, they could also download movies from the Internet. Most were no better than the TV shows, though once in a while you found a gem. The magnificent Hannibal Lecter could bring the entire staff to their feet, cheering till they were hoarse. And his nemesis, FBI agent Clarice Starling, was such an officious little meddling busybody that everyone enjoyed hissing at her.

Nine days ago, desperate for distraction from anxiety and despair, Christine downloaded Alfred Hitchcock’s
Rebecca
. The film mesmerized her. Ostensibly, it was a romance, even a love story.

Love was a myth. Even if it wasn’t a myth, it was stupid. Love represented the triumph of feeling over intellect. It distracted from achievement. It led to all kinds of social ills, such as family units to which people
pledged greater allegiance than to their rulers. Love was a myth and it was evil, love was evil.