Prodigal Son Read online

  He will be safe for a while, although not forever. Disorder builds. Chaos presses at the walls. Eventually he will have to fill more patterns of empty boxes with more judiciously chosen letters for the purpose of denying chaos entrance to his private space.

  Temporarily safe, he gets up from the worktable, sits on the edge of his bed, and presses a call button on his nightstand. This will summon lunch.

  He is not served meals on a regular schedule because he cannot eat when obsessed with crossword puzzles. He will let food grow cold rather than interrupt the important work of fending off chaos.

  A man in white brings his tray and places it on the worktable. While this attendant is present, Randal Six keeps his head bowed to discourage conversation and to prevent eye contact.

  Every word he speaks to another person diminishes the protection that he has earned.

  Alone again, Randal Six eats his lunch. Very neatly.

  The food is white and green, as he likes it. Sliced turkey breast in cream sauce, mashed potatoes, white bread, peas, beans. For dessert, vanilla ice cream with crème de menthe.

  When he finishes, he dares to open his door and slide the tray into the corridor. He quickly closes the door again, and feels as safe now as he ever does.

  He sits on the edge of his bed and opens his nightstand drawer. The drawer contains a few magazines.

  Having been educated by direct-to-brain data downloading, Randal Six is encouraged by Father to open himself to the world, to stay abreast of current events by the more ordinary means of reading various periodicals and newspapers.

  He cannot tolerate newspapers. They are unwieldy. The sections become confused; the pages fall out of order.

  Worse, the ink. The ink comes off on his hands, as if it is the dirty disorder of the world.

  He can wash the ink away with enough soap and hot water in the bathroom that adjoins this chamber, but surely some of it seeps into his pores and thence into his bloodstream. By this means, a newspaper is an agent of contagion, infecting him with the world’s disorder.

  Among the magazines in the drawer, however, is a story that he tore from a local newspaper three months ago. This is his beacon of hope.

  The story concerns a local organization raising research funds to find a cure for autism.

  By the strictest definition of the affliction, Randal Six might not have autism. But he suffers from something very much like that sad condition.

  Because Father has strongly encouraged him to better understand himself as a first step toward a cure, Randal reads books on the subject. They don’t give him the peace he finds in crossword puzzles.

  During the first month of his life, when it wasn’t yet clear what might be wrong with him, when he had still been able to tolerate newspapers, he read about the local charity for autism research and at once recognized himself in descriptions of the condition. He then realized that he was not alone.

  More important, he has seen a photo of another like himself: a boy of twelve, photographed with his sister, a New Orleans police officer.

  In the photo, the boy isn’t looking at the camera but to one side of it. Randal Six recognizes the evasion.

  Incredibly, however, the boy is smiling. He looks happy.

  Randal Six has never been happy, not in the four months since he has come out of the creation tank as an eighteen-year-old. Not once. Not for a moment. Occasionally he feels sort of safe…but never happy.

  Sometimes he sits and stares at the newspaper clipping for hours.

  The boy in the photo is Arnie O’Connor. He smiles.

  Maybe Arnie is not happy all the time, but he must be happy sometimes.

  Arnie has knowledge that Randal needs. Arnie has a secret to happiness. Randal needs it so bad he lies awake at night desperately trying to think of some way to get it.

  Arnie is in this city, so near. Yet for all practical purposes, he is beyond reach.

  In his four months of life, Randal Six has never been outside the walls of Mercy. Just being taken to another floor in this very building for treatment is traumatic.

  Another neighborhood of New Orleans is as unaccessible to him as a crater on the moon. Arnie lives with his secret, untouchable.

  If only Randal can get to the boy, he will learn the secret of happiness. Perhaps Arnie will not want to share it. That won’t matter. Randal will get it from him. Randal will get it.

  Unlike the vast majority of autistics, Randal Six is capable of extreme violence. His inner rage is almost equal to his fear of the disordered world.

  He has hidden this capacity for violence from everyone, even from Father, for he fears that if it is known, something bad will happen to him. He has seen in Father a certain…coldness.

  He puts the newspaper photo in the drawer once more, under the magazines. In his mind’s eye, he stills sees Arnie, smiling Arnie.

  Arnie is out there on the moon in New Orleans, and Randal Six is drawn to him like the sea to lunar tides.

  CHAPTER 13

  IN THE SMALL dimly lighted projection booth, a sprung sofa slumped against one wall, and stacks of paperbacks stood on every flat surface. Evidently Jelly liked to read while the movie ran.

  Pointing to a door different from the one by which they had entered, the fat man said, “My apartment’s through there. Ben left a special box for you.”

  While Jelly went to fetch the box, Deucalion was drawn to the old projector, no doubt original to the building. This monstrous piece of machinery featured enormous supply and take-up reels. The 35mm film had to be threaded through a labyrinth of sprockets and guides, into the gap between the high-intensity bulb and the lens.

  He studied the adjustment knobs and worked forward until he could peer into the cyclopean eye of the projector. He removed a cover plate to examine the internal gears, wheels, and motors.

  Across the balcony, the mezzanine, and the lower seats, this device could cast a bright illusion of life upon the big screen.

  Deucalion’s own life, in its first decade, had often seemed like a dark illusion. With time, however, life had become too real, requiring him to retreat into carnivals, into monasteries.

  Returning with an old shoebox full of papers, Jelly halted when he saw Deucalion tinkering with the projector. “Makes me nervous, you messing with that. It’s an antique. Hard to get parts or a repairman. That thing is the life’s blood of this place.”

  “It’s hemorrhaging.” Deucalion replaced the cover to protect the delicate parts. “Logic reveals the secrets of any machine—whether it’s a projector, a jet engine, or the universe itself.”

  “Ben warned me you think too much.” Jelly set the shoebox on a stack of entertainment-gossip magazines. “He sent you one newspaper clipping with his letter, right?”

  “And it brought me halfway around the world.”

  Jelly took the lid off the box. “Ben collected lots of this.”

  Deucalion picked up the top clipping, scanned the photo, then the headline: VICTOR HELIOS GIVES ONE MILLION TO SYMPHONY.

  The sight of the man in the photo, virtually unchanged after so much time, jolted Deucalion as before, in the monastery.

  SCIMITARS OF LIGHTNING gut a black-bellied night, and then crashes of thunder shake darkness across the tall casement windows once more. From flickering gas lamps, light capers over the stone walls of a cavernous laboratory. An electric arc crackles between the copper wire-wrapped poles of eldritch equipment. Sparks spray from dangerously overloaded transformers and piston-driven machinery.

  The storm grows more violent, hurling bolt after bolt into the collector rods that stud the tallest towers. The incredible energy is channeled down into—

  —him.

  He opens his heavy eyelids and sees another’s eye magnified by an ocular device resembling a jeweler’s loupe. The loupe flips up, and he sees the face of Victor. Young, earnest, hopeful.

  In white cap and blood-spattered gown, this creator, this would-be god…

  HANDS TREMBLING, Deucalio
n dropped the clipping, which fluttered to the floor of the projection room.

  Ben had prepared him for this, but he was shocked anew. Victor alive. Alive.

  For a century or more, Deucalion had explained his own longevity to himself by the simple fact that he was unique, brought to life by singular means. He might therefore exist beyond the reach of death. He never had a cold, the flu, no ailment or physical complaint.

  Victor, however, had been born of man and woman. He should be heir to all the ills of the flesh.

  From an inner jacket pocket, Deucalion withdrew a rolled sheet of heavy paper, which he usually kept in his carryall. He slipped the knot of the securing ribbon, unrolled the paper, and stared at it for a moment before showing it to Jelly.

  Scrutinizing the pencil portrait, Jelly said, “That’s Helios.”

  “A self-portrait,” Deucalion said. “He’s…talented. I took this from a frame in his study…more than two hundred years ago.”

  Jelly evidently knew enough to receive that statement without surprise.

  “I showed this to Ben,” Deucalion said. “More than once. That’s how he recognized Victor Helios and knew him for who he really is.”

  Setting aside Victor’s self-portrait, Deucalion selected a second clipping from the box and saw a photo of Helios receiving an award from the mayor of New Orleans.

  A third clipping: Victor with the district attorney during his election campaign.

  A fourth: Victor and his lovely wife, Erika, at a benefit auction.

  Victor purchasing a mansion in the Garden District.

  Victor endowing a scholarship at Tulane University.

  Victor, Victor, Victor.

  Deucalion did not recall casting aside the clippings or crossing the small room, but he must have done so, for the next thing he knew, he had driven his right fist and then his left into the wall, through the old plaster. As he withdrew his hands, clutching broken lengths of lath, a section of the wall crumbled and collapsed at his feet.

  He heard himself roar with anger and anguish, and managed to choke off the cry before he lost control of it.

  As he turned to Jelly, Deucalion’s vision brightened, dimmed, brightened, and he knew that a subtle pulse of luminosity, like heat lightning behind clouds on a summer night, passed through his eyes. He had seen the phenomenon himself in mirrors.

  Wide-eyed, Jelly seemed ready to bolt from the room, but then let out his pent-up breath. “Ben said you’d be upset.”

  Deucalion almost laughed at the fat man’s understatement and aplomb, but he feared that a laugh would morph into a scream of rage. For the first time in many years, he had almost lost control of himself, almost indulged the criminal impulses that had been a part of him from the moment of his creation.

  He said, “Do you know what I am?”

  Jelly met his eyes, studied the tattoo and the ruin that it only half concealed, considered his hulking size. “Ben…he explained. I guess it could be true.”

  “Believe it,” Deucalion advised him. “My origins are a prison graveyard, the cadavers of criminals—combined, revitalized, reborn.”

  CHAPTER 14

  OUTSIDE, THE NIGHT was hot and humid. In Victor Helios’s library, the air-conditioning chilled to the extent that a cheerful blaze in the fireplace was necessary.

  Fire featured in some of his less pleasant memories. The great windmill. The bombing of Dresden. The Israeli Mossad attack on the secret Venezuelan research complex that he had shared with Mengele in the years after World War II. Nevertheless he liked to read to the accompaniment of a cozy crackling fire.

  When, as now, he was perusing medical journals like The Lancet, JAMA, and Emerging Infectious Diseases, the fire served not merely as ambience but as an expression of his informed scientific opinion. He frequently tore articles from the magazines and tossed them into the flames. Occasionally, he burned entire issues.

  As ever, the scientific establishment could teach him nothing. He was far ahead of them. Yet he felt the need to remain aware of advancements in genetics, molecular biology, and associated fields.

  He felt the need, as well, for a wine that better complemented the fried walnuts than did the Cabernet that Erika had served with them. Too tannic. A fine Merlot would have been preferable.

  She sat in the armchair opposite his, reading poetry. She had become enthralled with Emily Dickinson, which annoyed Victor.

  Dickinson had been a fine poet, of course, but she had been God-besotted. Her verses could mislead the naive. Intellectual poison.

  Whatever need Erika might have for a god could be satisfied here in this room. Her maker, after all, was her husband.

  Physically, he had done a fine job. She was beautiful, graceful, elegant. She looked twenty-five but had been alive only six weeks.

  Victor himself, though two hundred and forty, could have passed for forty-five. His youthful appearance had been harder to maintain than hers had been to achieve.

  Beauty and grace were not his only criteria for an ideal wife. He also wished her to be socially and intellectually sophisticated.

  In this regard, in many small ways, Erika had failed him and had proved slow to learn in spite of direct-to-brain downloads of data that included virtual encyclopedias of etiquette, culinary history, wine appreciation, witticisms, and much else.

  Knowledge of a subject did not mean that one could apply that knowledge, of course, but Erika didn’t seem to be trying hard enough. The Cabernet instead of the Merlot, Dickinson…

  Victor had to admit, however, that she was a more appealing and acceptable creature than Erika Three, her immediate predecessor. She might not be the final version—only time would tell—but whatever her faults, Erika Four was not a complete embarrassment.

  The drivel in the medical journals and Erika reading Dickinson at last drove him up from his armchair. “I’m in a creative mood. I think I’ll spend some time in my studio.”

  “Do you need my help, darling?”

  “No. You stay here, enjoy yourself.”

  “Listen to this.” Her delight was childlike. Before Victor could stop her, she read from Dickinson: “The pedigree of honey / Does not concern the bee / A clover, any time, to him / Is aristocracy.”

  “Charming,” he said. “But for variety, you might read some Thom Gunn and Frederick Seidel.”

  He could have told her what to read, and she would have obeyed. But he did not desire an automaton for a wife. He wanted her to be free-spirited. Only in sexual matters did he demand utter obedience.

  In the immense restaurant-quality kitchen from which staff could serve a sit-down dinner for a hundred without problem, Victor entered the walk-in pantry. The shelves at the back, laden with canned goods, slid aside when he touched a hidden switch.

  Beyond the pantry, secreted in the center of the house, lay his windowless studio.

  His public labs were at Helios Biovision, the company through which he was known to the world and by which he had earned another fortune atop those he had already accrued in earlier ages.

  And in the Hands of Mercy, an abandoned hospital converted to serve his primary work and staffed with men of his making, he pursued the creation of the new race that would replace flawed humanity.

  Here, behind the pantry, measuring twenty by fifteen feet, this retreat provided a place for him to work on small experiments, often those on the leading edge of his historic enterprise.

  Victor supposed that he was to arcane laboratory equipment what Santa Claus was to gizmo-filled toy workshops.

  When Mary Shelley took a local legend based on truth and crafted fiction from it, she’d made Victor a tragic figure and killed him off. He understood her dramatic purpose for giving him a death scene, but he loathed her for portraying him as tragic and as a failure.

  Her judgment of his work was arrogant. What else of consequence did she ever write? And of the two, who was dead—and who was not?

  Although her novel suggested his workplace was a phantasmagoria of gizm
os as ominous in appearance as in purpose, she had been vague on details. Not until the first film adaptation of her book did the name Frankenstein become synonymous with the term “mad scientist” and with laboratories buzzing-crackling-humming with frightening widgets, thingums, and doohickeys.

  Amusingly, Hollywood had the set design more than half right, not as to the actual machines and objects, but as to ambience. Even the studio behind the pantry had a flavor of Hell with machines.

  On the center worktable stood a Lucite tank filled with a milky antibiotic solution. In the tank rested a man’s severed head.

  Actually, the head wasn’t severed. It had never been attached to a body in the first place.

  Victor had created it only to serve as a braincase. The head had no hair, and the features were rough, not fully formed.

  Support systems serviced it with nutrient-rich, enzyme-balanced, oxygenated blood and drained away metabolic waste through numerous plastic tubes that entered through the neck.

  With no need to breathe, the head was almost dead still. But the eyes twitched behind the lids, which suggested that it was dreaming.

  The brain within the skull was self-aware but had only the most rudimentary personality, sufficient to the experiment.

  Approaching the table, Victor addressed the resident of the open Lucite tank: “Time to work, Karloff.”

  No one could say that Victor Helios, alias Frankenstein, was a humorless man.

  In the head, the eyes opened. They were blue and bloodshot.

  Karloff had been selectively educated by direct-to-brain data downloading; therefore, he spoke English. “Ready,” he said, his voice thick and hoarse.

  “Where is your hand?” Victor asked.

  The bloodshot eyes shifted at once to regard a smaller table in a far corner of the room.

  There, a living hand lay in a shallow bowl of milky antibiotic solution. As in the case of the head, this five-fingered wonder was served by numerous tubes and by a low-voltage electrical pump that could empower its nerves and, thereby, its musculature.