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He opens the door

Triuhted and deserted at this hour Silent, still, s faintly of dampness and lime

To exit this sines threshold printed in blocks froht, ie intersects at the letter r

With his eyes closed, he deter-e, into the enormous space beyond The door falls shut behind hi back

The daunting die awe and for a moment nearly overwhelm him No room of his experience in Mercy has prepared hi seehly compressed pellet of matter at the instant before the universe’s creation, and with the i, he will expand and explode outward in every direction, racing to fill an infinite void

With more powerful reason than he has heretofore been able to apply to his condition, he convinces himself that the void will not pull him apart, will not scatter him to eternity Gradually his panic subsides, fades entirely He closes his eyes to iedly he spells his way forward Between each word, Randal opens his eyes to scope the route ahead and to deterth of the next word that he will need

In this fashion, he eventually comes to an exit raht is war with mosquitoes

By the tiht into an alleyway, the brush of dawn paints a faint gray light in the east

Panic threatens hiht, with everyone awake and on the hts, sounds He is certain that he cannot tolerate so ht is a better environment Darkness is his friend

He must find a place to hide until the day passes

CHAPTER 81

EXHAUSTED, CARSON SAILED through sleep with no night aboard a black boat under a black sky, knifing silently through black water

She had not gotten to bed until well after dawn She woke at 2:30, showered, and ate Hot Pockets while standing in Arnie’s roo the boy at work on the castle

At the foot of the bridge that crossed the ate at the barbicon, at each of two entrances from the outer ward to the inner ward, and finally at the fortified entrance to the castle keep, Arnie had placed one of the shiny pennies that he had been given by Deucalion

She supposed the pennies were, in Arnie’s iant Their hty juju would prevent entrance by any enemy Evidently Arnie trusted Deucalion

So did Carson

Considering the events of the past two days, Deucalion’s claim to be Frankenstein’s s that she had witnessed Besides, he possessed a quality that she had never encountered before, a substan-tialness that eluded easy description His calht that she sometimes had to look away, not because the occasional soft pulse of light in his eyes disturbed her, but because he seeh all her defenses

If Deucalion was the storied creation of Victor Frankenstein, then during the past two centuries, while the human doctor had become a monster, the monster had becoht and caliber

She needed a day off AHarker She didn’t need to push herself seven days out of seven

Nevertheless, by prior arrange at the curb in front of her house

At 3:33, Michael arrived in the plainwrap sedan

Earlier in the day, Carson had experienced a moment of weakness Michael had driven the car when they left Harker’s aparter’s seat, Michael said, "I drove all the way here and never exceeded a speed limit"

"That’s why you’re three uess I just blew every chance we have to find Harker"

"The only thing we can’t buy more of is time," she said

"And dodo birds We can’t buy any of them They’re extinct And dinosaurs"

"I called Deucalion at the Luxe He’s expecting us at four o’clock"

"I can’t wait to enter this one in --’discussed case with Frankenstein ers’"

She sighed "I was sort of hoping that the concentration needed to drive wouldkeeps et used to it"

When they arrived at the Luxe Theater, after four o’clock, the sky had grown as dark as an iron skillet

Michael parked illegally at a red curb and hung a POLICE card on the rearview mirror "Lives in a theater, huh? Is he buddies with the Phantoot out of the car

Closing his door, looking at her across the roof, he said, "Do his palrow hairy when the moon is full?"

"No He shaves the A LONG NIGHT and longer day at Mercy, Victor ate as either a late lunch or an early dinner of seafood gumbo with okra and rabbit etouffee at a Cajun restaurant in the Quarter Although not as satisfyingly exotic as his Chinese ood

For the first ti enhanced his physiological systems to the extent that he needed little sleep and therefore could accomplish more in the lab, he sometimes wondered if he worked too much Perhaps if he allowed himself more leisure, his mind would be clearer in the laboratory, and consequently he would do even better science

Periodically over the decades, he had engaged in this debate with himself He always resolved it in favor of reat cause He was the kind of man ould work selflessly in the pursuit of a world ruled by reason, a world free of greed and peopled by a race united by a single goal

Arriving at his mansion in the Garden District, he chose work over leisure yet again He went directly to his hidden studio behind the pantry Karloff had perished The life-support machines were not in operation

Stunned, he circled the central worktable, uncoh to discover the hand on the floor The throitches were directly above it Further that it had pulled froh disappointed by this setback, Victor was amazed that Karloff had been able to shut hirammed to be incapable of self-destruction On that issue there had been no wiggle roooverned

More important, the hand could not have functioned separate from its own life-support system The moment it had broken free of its feed and drain lines, it had lost the low-voltage current needed to fire its nerves and operate its musculature At that point, it should have at once fallen still, liun to decompose

Only one explanation occurred to Victor Apparently, Karloff’s telekinetic power had been strong enough to ani the hand at a distance, Karloff had shown the ability only to flex a thuinary harp with those four fingers Small, simple tasks

To make the hand tear loose of its connections, to cause it to drop to the floor and then to climb three feet up the face of these machines to throw the life-support switches, to cause it to pull the plug, as well… That required far greater telekinetic power and more precise control than he had previously exhibited

An incredible breakthrough

Although Karloff was gone, another Karloff could be engineered The setback would be temporary

Excited, Victor sat at his desk and accessed the experiment file on his computer He clicked the camera icon and called up the twenty-four-hour video record of events in the studio

Scanning backward from the present, he was surprised when Erika suddenly appeared

CHAPTER 83