Frankenstein: The Complete 5-Book Collection

Hit in the knees, staggered, Harker hurled Michael toward the edge of the building.

Michael slammed into the low parapet, started to slide over, nearly fell, but hung on and regained the roof.

Although Harker should have been down, shrieking in agony, his knees no more supportive than gelatin, he remained on his feet. He came for Carson.

Rising from a position of genuflection, Carson realized she had fired the last round. She held on to the weapon for its psychological effect, if any, and backed away as Harker approached.

In the light of the rain-veiled roof lamps, in a quantum series of lightning flashes of escalating brightness, Harker appeared to be carrying a child against his chest, though his arms were free.

When the pale thing clinging to Harker turned its head to look at her, Carson saw that it was not a child. Dwarfish, but with none of a dwarf’s fairy-tale appeal, deformed to the point of malignancy, slit-mouthed and wicked-eyed, this was surely a phantasm, a trick of light and lightning, of rain and gloom, mind and murk conspiring to deceive.

Yet the monstrosity did not vanish when she tried to blink it away. And as Harker drew nearer, even as Carson backed away from him, she thought the detective’s face looked strangely blank, his eyes glazed, and she had the unnerving feeling that the thing clinging to him was in control of him.

When Carson backed into a stack of vent pipes, her feet skidded on the wet roof. She almost fell.

Harker surged toward her, like a lion bounding toward faltering prey. The shriek of triumph seemed to come not from him but from the thing fastened to – surging out of? – his chest.

Suddenly Deucalion appeared and seized both the detective and the hag that rode him. The giant lifted them as effortlessly and as high as Harker had lifted Michael, and threw them from the roof.

Carson hurried to the parapet. Harker lay facedown in the alley, more than forty feet below. He lay still, as if dead, but she had seen him survive another killing fall the previous night.

CHAPTER 95 (#ulink_77851ca7-65bb-5f6d-9851-354695fd1a02)

A SET OF SWITCHBACK fire stairs zigzagged down the side of the warehouse. Carson paused at the top only long enough to take three spare shotgun shells from Michael and load them in the 12-gauge.

The iron stairs were slippery in the rain. When she grabbed the railing, it felt slick under her hand.

Michael followed close behind her, too close, the open stairs trembling and clanking under them. “You see that thing?”

“Yeah.”

“That face?”

“Yeah.”

“It was coming out of him.”

“What?”

“Out of him!”

She said nothing. Didn’t know what to say. Just kept racing down, turning flight to flight.

“The thing touched me,” Michael said, revulsion thick in his voice.

“All right.”

“It’s not all right.”

“You hurt?”

“If it’s not dead—”

“It’s dead,” she hoped.

“—kill it.”

When they reached the alleyway, Harker remained where he had fallen, but he no longer lay facedown. He had turned to the sky.

His mouth sagged open. His eyes were wide, unblinking; rain pooled in them.

From hips to shoulders, the substance of him was … gone. His chest and abdomen had collapsed. Rags of skin and torn T-shirt hung on shattered fragments of his rib cage.

“It came out of him,” Michael declared.

A scrape and clank drew their attention to a point farther along the alleyway, toward the front of the warehouse.

Through the blear of rain, in the scintillation of lightning, Carson saw a pale trollish figure crouched beside an open manhole from which it had dragged the cover.

At a distance of thirty feet, in the murk of the tropical storm, she could see few details of the thing. Yet she knew that it was staring at her.

She raised the shotgun, but the pallid creature dropped into the manhole, out of sight.

Michael said, “What the hell was that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe … maybe I don’t want to know.”

CSI, ME PERSONNEL, a dozen jakes, and the usual obnoxious gaggle of media types had come, and the storm had gone.

The buildings dripped, the puddled street glistened, but nothing looked clean, nothing smelled clean, either, and Carson suspected that nothing would ever quite feel clean again.

Jack Rogers had shown up to oversee the handling and transport of Jonathan Harker’s remains. He was determined not to lose evidence this time.

At the back of the plainwrap sedan, stowing the shotgun, Carson said, “Where’s Deucalion?”

Michael said, “Probably had a dinner date with Dracula.”

“After what you’ve seen, you aren’t still resisting this?”

“Let’s just say that I’m continuing to process the data.”

She slapped him affectionately – but hard enough – alongside the head. “Better get an upgraded logic unit.”

Her cell phone rang. When she answered it, she heard Vicky Chou in a panic.

CHAPTER 96 (#ulink_a463e04e-8c53-5b4b-bec6-947dbe408f21)

FINISHED, PROGRAMMED, having received a downloaded education in language and other basics, Erika Five lay in the sealed glass tank, awaiting animation.