Frankenstein: The Complete 5-Book Collection. Dean Koontz

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СКАЧАТЬ her future seemed so bleak that her despondency should have been unshakable, she often shook it off.

      Remembering verses by Emily Dickinson could lift her out of gloom: “Hope” is the thing with feathers – / That perches in the soul – / And sings the tune without the words – / And never stops at all.

      The art on Victor’s walls was abstract: oddly juxtaposed blocks of color that loomed oppressively, spatterings of color or smears of gray on black that to Erika seemed like chaos or nullity. In his library, however, were large books of art, and sometimes her mood could be improved simply by immersing herself in a single painting by Albert Bierstadt or Childe Hassam.

      She has been taught that she is of the New Race, posthuman, improved, superior. She is all but impervious to disease. She heals rapidly, almost miraculously.

      Yet when she needs solace, she finds it in the art and music and poetry of the mere humanity that she and her kind are intended to replace.

      When she has been confused, has felt lost, she’s found clarity and direction in the writings of imperfect humanity. And the writers are those of whom Victor would especially disapprove.

      This puzzles Erika: that a primitive and failed species, infirm humanity, should by its works lift her heart when none of her own kind is able to lift it for her.

      She would like to discuss this with others of the New Race, but she is concerned that one of them will think her puzzlement makes her a heretic. All are obedient to Victor by design, but some view him with such reverential fear that they will interpret her questions as doubts, her doubts as betrayals, and will then in turn betray her to her maker.

      And so she keeps her questions to herself, for she knows that in a holding tank waits Erika Five.

      Abed, with the smell of Victor lingering in the sheets, Erika finds this to be one of the times when poetry will prevent depression from ripening toward despair. If I shouldn’t be alive / When the Robins come / Give the one in Red Cravat / A Memorial crumb.

      She smiled at Dickinson’s gentle humor. That smile might have led to others if not for a scrabbling noise under the bed.

      Throwing back the sheets, she sat up, breath held, listening.

      As though aware of her reaction, the scrabbler went still – or if not still, at least silent, creeping now without a sound.

      Having neither heard nor seen any indication of a rat when she and Victor had returned to the bedroom following the departure of their guests, Erika had assumed that she’d been mistaken in thinking one had been here. Or perhaps it had found its way into a wall or a drain and from there to another place in the great house.

      Either the vermin was back or it had been here all along, quiet witness to the terrible tax Victor placed upon Erika’s right to live.

      A moment passed, and then a sound issued from elsewhere in the room. A short-lived furtive rustle.

      Shadows veiled the room, were lifted only where the light of a single bedside lamp could reach.

      Naked, Erika slipped out of bed and stood, poised and alert.

      Although her enhanced eyes made the most of available light, she lacked the penetrating night vision of a cat. Victor was conducting cross-species experiments these days, but she was not one of them.

      Desirous of more light, she moved toward a reading lamp beside an armchair.

      Before she reached the lamp, she sensed more than heard a thing on the floor scurry past her. Startled, she pulled her left foot back, pivoted on her right, and tried to sight the intruder along the path that instinct told her it must have taken.

      When there was nothing to be seen – or at least nothing that she could see – she continued to the reading lamp and switched it on. More light revealed nothing that she hoped to find.

      A clatter in the bathroom sounded like the small waste can being knocked over.

      That door stood ajar. Darkness lay beyond.

      She started toward the bathroom, moving quickly but coming to a stop short of the threshold.

      Because members of the New Race were immune to most diseases and healed rapidly, they were afraid of fewer things than were ordinary human beings. That didn’t mean they were utter strangers to fear.

      Although hard to kill, they were not immortal, and having been made in contempt of God, they could have no hope of a life after this one. Therefore, they feared death.

      Conversely, many of them feared life because they had no control of their destinies. They were indentured servants to Victor, and there was no sum they could work off to gain their freedom.

      They feared life also because they could not surrender it if the burden of serving Victor became too great. They had been created with a deeply embedded psychological injunction against suicide; so if the void appealed to them, they were denied even that.

      Here but a step from the bathroom threshold, Erika experienced another kind of fear: of the unknown.

      That which is abnormal to nature is a monster, even if it might be beautiful in its way. Erika, created not by nature but by the hand of man, was a lovely monster but a monster nonetheless.

      She supposed that monsters should not fear the unknown because, by any reasonable definition, they were part of it. Yet a tingle of apprehension traced the contours of her spine.

      Instinct told her that the rat was not a rat, that instead it was a thing unknown.

      From the bathroom came a clink, a clatter, a metallic rattle, as if something had opened a cabinet and set about exploring the contents in the dark.

      Erika’s two hearts beat faster. Her mouth went dry. Her palms grew damp. In this vulnerability, but for the double pulse, she was so human, regardless of her origins.

      She backed away from the bathroom door.

      Her blue silk robe was draped over the armchair. With her gaze fixed on the bathroom door, she slipped into the robe and belted it.

      Barefoot, she left the suite, closing the hall door behind her.

      As the midnight hour came, she descended through the house of Frankenstein, to the library where, among the many volumes of human thought and hope, she felt safer.

       CHAPTER 33

      AT VICTOR’S SUMMONS, they came to him in the main lab, two young men as ordinary in appearance as any in New Orleans.

      Not all the men of the New Race were handsome. Not all the women were beautiful.

      For one thing, when at last he had secretly seeded enough of his creations in society to exterminate the Old Race, humanity would put up a better defense if it could identify its enemy by even the most subtle telltales of appearance. If all members of the New Race looked like gorgeous fodder for the box-office battlefields of Hollywood, their beauty would make them objects of suspicion, subject them to testing and interrogation, and ultimately expose them.

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