City of Night f-2 Read online

  As he roamed the deserted corridors of the old building, the auditorium, the mezzanine, the balcony, the lobby, his thoughts did not just race but ricocheted like pinballs.

  In his restlessness, he struggled to imagine a way to reach Victor Helios, alias Frankenstein. And destroy him.

  Like the members of the New Race that Victor had brought forth in this city, Deucalion had been created with a built-in proscription against deicide. He could not kill his maker.

  Two centuries ago, he had raised a hand against Victor — and had nearly perished when he had found himself unable to deliver the blow. Half of his face, the half disguised by a tattoo, had been broken by his master.

  Deucalion’s other wounds always healed in minutes, perhaps not because Victor had in those days been capable of designing such resilience into him, perhaps instead because this immortality had come to him on the lightning, along with other gifts. The one wound that had not healed with perfect restoration of flesh and bone had been the one that his maker had inflicted.

  Victor thought his first-made was long dead, as Deucalion had assumed that his maker had died in the eighteenth century. If he revealed himself to Victor, Deucalion would be at once struck down again — and this time, he might not survive.

  Because Victor’s methods of creation had improved drastically from his early days — no more grave-robbing and stitchery — his New Race most likely was gray-cell wired also to die in defense of its maker.

  Eventually, if Carson and Michael could not expose Victor, they might be able to stop him only by killing him. And to get at him, they might have to go through an army of New Men and New Women that would be almost as hard to kill as robots.

  Deucalion felt considerable regret, and even some remorse, for revealing the truth of Helios to the two detectives. He had put them in enormous jeopardy.

  His regret was mitigated to some extent by the fact that they had unknowingly been in mortal jeopardy, anyway, as was every human resident of New Orleans, however many still existed.

  Troubled by these thoughts — and haunted by the inescapable feeling that some important truth eluded him, a truth with which he must urgently come to grips — Deucalion eventually arrived in the projection room.

  Jelly Biggs, once billed in the carnival as the fattest man in the world, was smaller now, merely fat. He sorted through the stacks of paperbacks stored here, searching for a good read.

  Behind the projection room lay Jelly’s two-room apartment. He had come with the theater, a breakeven enterprise that he more or less managed.

  “I want a mystery story where everybody smokes like chimneys,” Jelly said, “drinks hard liquor, and never heard of vegetarianism.”

  Deucalion said, “There’s a point in every mystery story — isn’t there? — where the detective feels that a revelation is right in front of him, but he can’t quite see it.”

  Rejecting book after book, Jelly said, “I don’t want an Indian detective or a paraplegic detective, or a detective with obsessive-compulsive disorder, or a detective who’s a master chef —”

  Deucalion examined a different stack of books from those that Jelly searched, as if a cover illustration or a flamboyant title might sharpen his fuzzy instinct into hard-edged meaning.

  “I don’t have anything against Indians, paraplegics, obsessive-compulsives, or chefs,” Jelly said, “but I want a guy who doesn’t know from Freud, hasn’t taken sensitivity training, and punches you in the face if you look at him wrong. Is that too much to ask?”

  The fat man’s question was rhetorical. He didn’t even wait for an answer.

  “Give me a hero who doesn’t think too much,” Jelly continued, “who cares intensely about a lot of things, but who knows he’s a dead man walking and doesn’t care a damn about that. Death is knocking, and our guy yanks open the door and says, ‘What kept you?’”

  Perhaps inspired by something Jelly said or by the paperback covers ablaze with colorful mayhem, Deucalion suddenly understood what his instinct had been trying to tell him. The end was here.

  Less than half a day previously, in Carson O’Connor’s house, Deucalion and the two detectives had agreed to join forces to resist and ultimately to destroy Victor Helios. They had recognized that this mission would require patience, determination, cunning, courage — and that it might take a long time, as well.

  Now, less by deductive reasoning than by intuition, Deucalion knew that they had no time at all.

  Detective Harker, a member of Victor’s New Race, had spiraled into homicidal madness. There were reasons to believe that others of his kind were in despair, too, and psychologically fragile.

  Furthermore, something fundamental had gone wrong with Harker’s biology. Shotguns had not felled him. Something that had been born within him, some strange dwarfish creature that had burst from him, had destroyed his body in its birth throes.

  These facts alone were not sufficient evidence to justify the conclusion that Victor’s empire of the soulless might be on the verge of violent collapse. But Deucalion knew it was. He knew.

  “And,” Jelly Biggs said, still sorting through the paperbacks, “give me a villain I’m not supposed to feel sorry for.”

  Deucalion had no psychic power. Sometimes, however, knowledge arose in him, profound insights and understandings that he recognized as truths, and he did not doubt them or question their source. He knew.

  “I don’t care that he kills and eats people because he had a bad childhood,” Jelly railed. “If he kills good people, I want some good people to get together and pound the crap out of him. I don’t want them to see that he gets therapy.”

  Deucalion turned away from the books. He feared nothing that might happen to him. For the fate of others, however, for this city, he was overcome by dread.

  Victor’s assault on nature and humanity had built into a perfect storm. And now the deluge.

  Chapter 7

  The gutters of the stainless-steel dissection table were not yet wet, and the glossy white ceramic-tile floor in Autopsy Room Number 2 remained spotless.

  Poisoned by gumbo, the old man lay in naked anticipation of the coroner’s scalpel. He looked surprised.

  Jack Rogers and his young assistant, Luke, were gowned, gloved, and ready to cut.

  Michael said, “Is every elderly naked dead man a thrill, or after a while do they all seem the same?”

  “In fact,” said the medical examiner, “every one of them has more personality than the average homicide cop.”

  “Ouch. I thought you only cut stiffs.”

  “Actually,” Luke said, “this one will be pretty interesting because analysis of the stomach contents is more important than usual.”

  Sometimes it seemed to Carson O’Connor that Luke enjoyed his work too much.

  She said, “I thought you’d have Harker on the table.”

  “Been there, done that,” said Luke. “We started early, and we’re moving right along.”

  For a man who had been profoundly shaken by the autopsy that he had performed on one of the New Race little more than a day ago, Jack Rogers seemed remarkably calm about his second encounter with one of them.

  Laying out the sharp tools of his trade, he said, “I’ll messenger the prelim to you. The enzyme profiles and other chemical analyses will follow when I get them from the lab.”

  “Prelim? Profiles? You sound like this is SOP”

  “Why shouldn’t it be?” Jack asked, his attention focused on the gleaming blades, clamps, and forceps.

  With his owlish eyes and ascetic features, Luke usually appeared bookish, slightly fey. Now he regarded Carson with hawkish intensity.

  To Jack, she said, “I told you last night, he’s one of them.”

  “Them,” said Luke, nodding gravely.

  “Something came out of Harker, some creature. Tore its way out of his torso. That’s what killed him.”

  “Falling off the warehouse roof killed him,” Jack Rogers said.

  Impatiently, Car
son said, “Jack, for God’s sake, you saw Harker lying in that alleyway last night. His abdomen, his chest — they were like blown open.”

  “A consequence of the fall.”

  Michael said, “Whoa, Jack, everything inside Harker was just gone.”

  Finally the medical examiner looked at them. “A trick of light and shadow.”

  Bayou-born, Carson had never known a bitter winter. A Canadian wind in January could have been no colder than the sudden chill in her blood, her marrow.

  “I want to see the body,” she said.

  “We released it to his family,” Jack said.

  “What family?” Michael, demanded. “He was cloned in a cauldron or some damned thing. He didn’t have family.”

  With a solemnity not characteristic of him, eyes narrowed, Luke said, “He had us.”

  The folds and flews of Jack’s hound-dog face were as they had been a day ago, and the jowls and dewlaps, all familiar. But this was not Jack.

  “He had us,” Jack agreed.

  As Michael reached cross-body, under his coat, to put his right hand on the grip of the pistol in his shoulder holster, Carson took a step backward, and another, toward the door.

  The medical examiner and his assistant did not approach, merely watched in silence.

  Carson expected to find the door locked. It opened.

  Past the threshold, in the hall, no one blocked their way.

  She retreated from Autopsy Room Number 2. Michael followed her.

  Chapter 8

  Erika Helios, less than one day from the creation tank, found the world to be a wondrous place.

  Nasty, too. Thanks to her exceptional physiology, the lingering pain from Victor’s punishing blows sluiced out of her in a long hot shower, though her shame did not so easily wash away.

  Everything amazed her, and much of it delighted — like water. From the shower head it fell in glimmering streams, twinkling with reflections of the overhead lights. Liquid jewels.

  She liked the way it purled across the golden-marble floor to the drain. Pellucid yet visible.

  Erika relished the subtle aroma of water, too, the crispness. She breathed deeply of the scented soap, steamy clouds of soothing fragrance. And after the soap, the smell of her clean skin was most pleasing.

  Educated by direct-to-brain data downloading, she had awakened with full knowledge of the world. But facts were not experience. All the billions of bits of data streamed into her brain had painted a ghost world in comparison to the depth and brilliance of the real thing. All she had learned in the tank was but a single note plucked from a guitar, at most a chord, while the true world was a symphony of astonishing complexity and beauty.

  The only thing thus far that had struck her as ugly was Victor’s body.

  Born of man and woman, heir to the ills of mortal flesh, he’d taken extraordinary measures over the years to extend his life and to maintain his vigor. His body was puckered and welted by scars, crusted with gnarled excrescences.

  Her revulsion was ungrateful and ungracious, and she was ashamed of it. Victor had given her life, and all that he asked in return was love, or something like it.

  Although she had hidden her disgust, he must have sensed it, for he had been angry with her throughout the sex. He’d struck her often, called her unflattering names, and in general had been rough with her.

  Even from-to-brain data downloading, Erika knew that what they had shared had not been ideal — or even ordinary — sex.

  In spite of the fact that she failed him in their first session of lovemaking, Victor still harbored some tender feelings toward her. When it was over, he’d slapped her bottom affectionately — as opposed to the rage with which he had delivered previous slaps and punches — and had said, “That was good.”

  She knew that he was just being kind. It had not been good. She must learn to see the art in his ugly body, just as people evidently learned to see the art in the ugly paintings of Jackson Pollock.

  Because Victor expected her to be prepared for the intellectual conversations at his periodic dinner parties with the city’s elites, volumes of art criticism had been downloaded into her brain as she had finished forming in the tank.

  A lot of it seemed to make no sense, which she attributed to her naïveté. Her IQ was high; therefore, with more experience, she would no doubt come to understand how the ugly, the mean, and the poorly rendered could in fact be ravishingly beautiful. She simply needed to attain the proper perspective.

  She would strive to see the beauty in Victor’s tortured flesh. She would be a good wife, and they would be as happy as Romeo and Juliet.

  Thousands of literary allusions had been a part of her downloaded instructions, but not the texts of the books, plays, and poems from which they came. She had never read Romeo and Juliet. She knew only that they were famous lovers in a play by Shakespeare.

  She might have enjoyed reading the works to which she could allude with such facility, but Victor had forbidden her to do so. Evidently, Erika Four had become a voracious reader, a pastime that had somehow gotten her into such terrible trouble that Victor had been left with no choice but to terminate her.

  Books were dangerous, a corrupting influence. A good wife must avoid books.

  Showered, feeling pretty in a summery dress of yellow silk, Erika left the master suite to explore the mansion. She felt like the unnamed narrator and heroine of Rebecca, for the first time touring the lovely rooms of Manderley.

  In the upstairs hall, she found William, the butter, on his knees in a corner, chewing off his fingers one by one.

  Chapter 9

  In the unmarked sedan, driving fast, seeking what she always needed in times of crisis — good Cajun food — Carson said, “Even if you were Jack’s mother, even if you were his wife, even then you wouldn’t know he’d been replaced.”

  “If this were like some Southern Gothic novel,” Michael said, “and I was both his mother and his wife, I’d still think that was Jack.”

  “That was Jack.”

  “That wasn’t Jack.”

  “I know that wasn’t him,” Carson said impatiently, “but it was him.”

  Her palms were slick with sweat. She blotted them one at a time on her jeans.

  Michael said, “So Helios isn’t just making his New Race and seeding them into the city with fabricated biographies and forged credentials.”

  “He can also duplicate real people,” she said. “How can he do that?”

  “Easy. Like Dolly.”

  “Dolly who?”

  “Dolly the sheep. Remember several years ago, some scientists cloned a sheep in a lab, named her Dolly.”

  “That was a sheep, for God’s sake. This is a medical examiner. Don’t tell me ‘easy.’”

  The fierce midday sun fired the windshields and the brightwork of the traffic in the street, and every vehicle appeared to be on the verge of bursting into flames, or melting in a silvery spill across the pavement.

  “If he can duplicate Jack Rogers,” she said, “he can duplicate anyone.”

  “You might not even be the real Carson.”

  “I’m the real Carson.”

  “How would I know?”

  “And how will I know if you go to the men’s room and a Michael monster comes back?”

  “He wouldn’t be as funny as the real me,” Michael said.

  “The new Jack is funny. Remember what he said about the dead old guy on the table having more personality than homicide cops?”

  “That wasn’t exactly hilarious.”

  “But for Jack it was funny enough.”

  “The real Jack wasn’t all that funny to begin with.”

  “That’s my point,” she said. “They can be as funny as they need to be.”

  “That would be scary if I thought it was true,” Michael said. “But I’ll bet my ass, if they ring a Michael monster in on you, he’ll be about as witty as a tree stump.”

  In this neighborhood of old cottage-style houses, some r
emained residences, but others had been converted to commercial enterprises.

  The blue-and-yellow cottage on the corner looked like someone’s home except for the blue neon sign in a large front window: WONDERMOUS EATS, FOR TRUE, which translated from Cajun patois as “good food, no lie.”

  Michael preferred to read it as “good food, no bullshit,” so from time to time he could say “Let’s have a no-bullshit lunch.”

  Whether the legal name of the restaurant was Wondermous Eats or whether that was just a slogan, Carson had no idea. The cheap Xeroxed menus had no name at top or bottom.

  Cottages had been cleared off two adjacent lots, but the ancient live oaks had been left standing. Cars were parked in the shade among the trees.

  The carpet of dead leaves looked like drifts of pecan shells and crunched under the tires of the sedan, then underfoot as Carson and Michael walked to the restaurant.

  If Helios succeeded in the abolition of humanity, replacing it with obedient and single-minded multitudes, there would be nothing like Wondermous Eats, for True. There would be no eccentricity and no charm in the new world that he desired.

  Cops saw the worst of people, and grew cynical if not bitter. Suddenly, however, flawed and foolish humanity seemed beautiful and precious to Carson, no less so than nature and the world itself.

  They chose a table outside, in the oak shade, apart from most of the other diners. They ordered crawfish boulettes and fried okra salad, followed by shrimp-and-ham jambalaya.

  This was a denial lunch. If they could still eat this well, surely the end of the world was not upon them, and they were not as good as dead, after all.

  “How long does it take to make a Jack Rogers?” Michael wondered when the waitress had left.

  “If Helios can make anyone overnight, if he’s that far advanced, then we’re screwed,” Carson said.

  “More likely, he’s steadily replacing people in key positions in the city, and Jack was on his list already.”

  “So when Jack did the first autopsy on one of the New Race and realized something weird was going on, Helios just brought his Jack on-line quicker than planned.”