Dean Koontz's Frankenstein 4-Book Bundle (124 page)

According to Tori, the waitress at the Andy Andrews Café, Denise and Larry Benedetto lived two blocks away, around the corner from Beartooth Avenue, on Purcell Street. Tori wasn't certain, but she thought Denise taught third grade at Meriwether Lewis Elementary.

That Victor's newest enterprise must be headquartered somewhere along the End Times Highway was known. That he might be using Rainbow Falls as a testing ground the way he had used New Orleans had been suspected; and as far as Carson was concerned, this too was now known.

As they hurried on foot to the address that Tori had given them, Michael said, “‘Tell my baby' doesn't necessarily mean a baby baby.”

“What kind of baby is there besides a baby baby?”

“You know, like sometimes I call you baby, sometimes you call me baby. A baby can be a lot of things.”

“She meant baby baby.”

“If she
did
mean baby baby, how are we going to talk to a baby when babies only understand things like
ga-ga-wa-wa-ba-ba?
”

“This doesn't have to be an infant baby. It could be old enough to talk, and she'd still call it her baby. Scout is always going to be our baby, even when she's seventy and we're a hundred, wearing diapers again.”

“But what are we going to tell the baby? Correct me if I've got it wrong, but Denise said, ‘She took me. She was me. But not me.' Exactly what does that mean?”

Carson huffed with impatience, and her warm breath plumed white in the cold night. “She also said, ‘Me isn't me.' That couldn't be any clearer.”

“‘Me isn't me' isn't clear to me,” he disagreed.

“You're in denial, Michael.”

“I am not in denial.”

“Now you're in denial that you're in denial. It's happening again. Replicants, like in New Orleans. That was the real Denise in the restaurant, and there's a replicant of her somewhere.”

“But what was that thing in her temple, the face jewelry? We never saw anything like that in New Orleans.”

“I don't know what it was, but it was totally Victorish.”

“Victorish?”

“We're dealing with Victor's clone now, and he's going to be full of the same crap that Victor was full of, but he's going to have his own ideas, too. He's going to do some things differently. We're going to see all kinds of stuff we never saw in New Orleans.”

The Benedetto residence was a white Greek Revival house with a square-columned portico under a second-floor balcony, overhung by a tree with furrowed bark and scarlet leaves.

Stepping onto the portico, they looked through the pair of six-above-six French windows that flanked the door, but there was no one to be seen.

“Let's think about this,” Michael said.

Carson rang the doorbell.

He said, “I wish I hadn't ordered the meat loaf. The way this night is unfolding, I'm going to have killer acid reflux.”

Carson pressed the bell again.

The chimes were still ringing when the door opened, and Denise Benedetto stood before them. She said coolly, “Yes? What is it?”

She wasn't the Denise Benedetto with the silver face jewelry or the blood or the thick speech.

“Does Larry Benedetto live here?” Carson asked.

“He's my husband.”

“Well,
my
husband and your husband went to college together. We happened to be in town, and Michael—this is Michael—he said maybe we should look up Larry, he was such a great guy. Tell her yourself, Michael.”

“Larry was a great guy,” Michael said. “He was so smart and witty and thoughtful, and he had real style. And he was funny. Oh, man, nobody could make me laugh like Larry did, he could make me bust a gut.”

“My husband isn't here now,” she said. “He's busy at … work.”

“He works evenings, huh?” Michael said. “Darn. And we're leaving first thing in the morning. Would you tell him Michael McMichaels stopped by with his wife, Myrtle? We might be in town again in a few months. Next time I'll call ahead, if that's all right.”

“Yes,” she said. “That would be better. Good evening.” She closed the door.

Walking away from the house, casually kicking a couple of times at the drift of fallen scarlet leaves as though she were carefree, Carson said, “She's sure a charmer. Don't look back. In case she's looking,
we don't want her to think we're looking back to see if she's looking. The best you could do was Myrtle?”

“I like the name Myrtle,” he said.

“Michael and Myrtle McMichaels?”

“John and Jane Smith—see, that's the kind of thing that sounds suspicious. Michael and Myrtle McMichaels sounds so unlikely it's got to be real. What're we doing now?”

“Walking away from the house.”

“Okay. What're we doing next?”

Turning left on the sidewalk and heading toward Beartooth Avenue, Carson said, “These properties back up to the properties on the next street. We'll come through the yard of the house behind the Benedetto place to get to the back of their place.”

“And then?”

“Depends on what we see, if anything. Larry was ‘so smart and witty and thoughtful, and he had real style.' Sounds like you and this Larry got in touch with your feminine side together.”

“Maybe you've forgotten, but I don't actually
know
Larry. And what would have happened if old Larry had been at home?”

“Then we just made a mistake. It was another Larry Benedetto you went to college with, sorry for disturbing you.”

“When we start snooping around, what is it we're looking for?”

“Denise's baby. Did you see what was on the foyer floor behind that woman?”

“No. I was busy lying about Larry.”

“A teddy bear. One of the arms had been torn off and stuffing was coming out of the shoulder. One of its ears had been torn off, too.”

The last of those herded into the truck settled on the benches. The driver and his partner closed the cargo-box doors, bolted them, and returned to the cab.

Deucalion raised himself on one arm to determine exactly where at the phone company they were, and saw the employee parking lot.

As the engine started, he transitioned from a supine position on the roof to the interior of the cargo space, where he stood in the center between the facing benches.

In what was full dark to them but at worst murky to him, he was able to discern eleven people sitting five on one side and six on the other. They were not secured in any way, but they rode in docile acceptance of their fate.

The weeping woman still wept, although her whimpers were hardly audible. A man repeated softly, “
No, no, no, no, no, no
 ….”

Several of them were sweating in this cold night, and they had the sour scent of terror.

“Who are they? Who's done this to you?” Deucalion asked.

Ten remained silent, but one woman spoke in a slurred voice, as if she had suffered brain damage: “My sister … my sister.”

A half-seen face. Like an apparition at a seance.

Deucalion said, “Your sister did this to you?”

“My sister she … she Wendy.”

“Wendy? Why would she harm you?”

The eyes of the apparition glimmered darkly in the dark as she said, “Wendy Wanda twins my sister.”

“Your name is Wanda?”

“She dead my twin five years.”

The truck yawed slightly, rhythmically, as if they were boating on the river Styx. A man began to groan in anguish.

The woman said, “Dead five years now back.”

Deucalion thought of the replicants in New Orleans. Upon seeing a replicant, an identical might think her dead sister had returned.

In the rusting shed, breathing the faint odor of something dead and desiccated, the boy could no longer tolerate the sight of the cottage across the street, its only light a porch light, its windows black with portent.

“Let's go,” Travis said.

His words came in the pitch of a child's voice, but in some way not easy to define, his voice wasn't that of a child anymore.

“There's no urgency,” Bryce Walker assured him.

“You're cold.”

“Not that cold. And I've been cold before.”

“There's no use waiting anyway.”

“We don't know for sure.”

“We know.”

“No, son, we don't.”

“I know.”

“There are some advantages to being an old fart like me,” Bryce said. “One of them is experience. I've had maybe a thousand times more
experience than you have. No offense. And one thing experience has taught me is that life can hammer you hard just when everything seems to be so fine, but life can also drop the most amazing moments of grace on you just when you thought nothing good would ever happen again.”

“Let's go,” the boy interrupted.

“In a moment. What you have to do somehow is be grateful for what good you've known and for what good will come, in spite of the bad times, because you come to see that you can't have one without the other. I'm not saying that it's always easy to be grateful when the pattern of things so often doesn't make sense. But by the time you're my age, you realize it all
does
make sense, even if you can't quite say how.”

“Let's go, all right?”

“We might,” Bryce said. “But not until you tell me what I just said to you.”

Travis shuffled his feet in place. “Never give up.”

“That's part of it. What else?”

An old Chevrolet passed in the street, briefly whirling autumn leaves in its wake.

“Nothing's over till it's over,” Travis said.

“That too. What else?”

From some perch on a roof elsewhere in the Lowers, an owl called out, and a more distant owl responded.

Travis said, “Maybe we don't ever really die.”

Bryce wanted to fold his arms around the boy and hold him very tight, but he knew that such an expression of sympathy was not wanted yet. Because in spite of what Travis had first said, he had not given up all hope. While there was hope, there need not be consolation.

“All right,” Bryce said. “Let's go. My ass is half frozen off.”

A tall fence separated the two backyards. For Carson, however, since childhood, fences had existed for one reason: to be climbed. Thankful that she still wore her Rockport walking shoes instead of ski boots, she gripped the headrail of the fence and toed her way up and over.

Michael dropped to her side in the Benedettos' backyard and drew the pistol from his shoulder rig.

“Isn't that a little premature?” she whispered.

“I just remembered, good old Larry was thoughtful and stylish and funny, yeah, but he also had a dark side.”

“You think she lied, he's not at work?”