Читать книгу Frankenstein: The Complete 5-Book Collection - Dean Koontz - Страница 83

VICTOR HAD NAMED HIM Karloff, perhaps intending humor, but Erika found nothing funny about the hideous “life” that this creature had been given.

The bodiless head stood in a milky antibiotic bath, served by tubes that brought it nutrients and by others that drained metabolic waste. An array of machines attended and sustained Karloff, all of them mysterious and ominous to Erika.

The hand lay on the floor, in a corner, palm-up. Still.

Karloff had controlled that five-fingered explorer through the power of telekenesis, which his maker had hoped to engineer into him. An object of horror, he had nonetheless proved to be a successful experiment.

Self-disconnected from its sustaining machinery, the hand is now dead. Karloff can still animate it, although not for much longer. The flesh will rapidly deteriorate. Even the power of telekenesis will not be able to manipulate frozen joints and putrefying musculature.

Surely, however, Victor had not anticipated that Karloff would be able to employ his psychic ability to gain even a limited form of freedom and to roam the mansion with the desperate hope of inciting his maker’s murder.

With that same uncanny power, Karloff had activated the electric mechanism that operated the secret door in the food pantry, providing entrance to Erika. With it, he had also controlled the television in the master suite, to speak with her and to encourage rebellion.

Being less of a complete creation than Erika, Karloff had not been programmed with a full understanding of Victor’s mission or with knowledge of the limitations placed upon the freedom of the New Race. Now he knew that she could not act against her maker, and his despair was complete.

When she suggested that he use his power to disable the machines that supported his existence, Erika discovered that he, too, had been programmed to be incapable of self-destruction.

She struggled against despondency, her hope reduced to the shaky condition of a three-legged table. The crawling hand and the other apparitions had not been the supernatural events that she had longed to believe they were.

Oh, how badly she had wanted these miracles to be evidence of another world beyond this one. What seemed to be a divine Presence, however, had been only the grotesque Karloff.

She might have blamed him for her deep disappointment, might have hated him, but she did not. Instead she pitied this pathetic creature, who was helpless in his power and condemned to a living hell.

Perhaps what she felt wasn’t pity. Strictly speaking, she should not be capable of pity. But she felt something, felt it poignantly.

“Kill me,” the pathetic thing pleaded.

The bloodshot eyes were haunted. The half-formed face was a mask of misery.

Erika began to tell him that her program forbade her to kill either the Old Race or the New except in self-defense or at the order of her maker. Then she realized that her program did not anticipate this situation.

Karloff did not belong to the Old Race, but he did not qualify as one of the New Race, either. He was something other, singular.

None of the rules of conduct under which Erika lived applied in this matter.

Looking over the sustaining machinery, ignorant of its function, she said, “I don’t want to cause you pain.”

“Pain is all I know,” he murmured. “Peace is all I want.”

She threw switches, pulled plugs. The purr of motors and the throb of pumps subsided into silence.

“I’m going,” Karloff said, his voice thickening into a slur. His bloodshot eyes fell shut. “Going …”

On the floor, in the corner, the hand spasmed, spasmed.

The bodiless head’s last words were so slurred and whispery as to be barely intelligible: “You … must be … angel.”

She stood for a while, thinking about what he’d said, for the poets of the Old Race had often written that God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform.

In time she realized that Victor must not find her here.

She studied the switches that she’d thrown, the plugs that she’d pulled. She reinserted one of the plugs. She repositioned the hand on the floor directly under the switches. She put the remaining plug in the hand, tightened the stiff fingers around it, held them until they remained in place without her sustained pressure.

In the pantry once more, she needed a minute to find the hidden switch. The shelves full of canned food slid into place, closing off the entrance to Victor’s studio.

She returned to the painting by van Huysum in the drawing room. So beautiful.

To better thrill Victor sexually, she had been permitted shame. From shame had come humility. Now it seemed that from humility had perhaps come pity, and more than pity: mercy.

As she wondered about her potential, Erika’s hope was reborn. Her feathered thing, perched in her heart if not her soul, was a phoenix, rising yet again from ashes.