Dean Koontz - City of Night

With the windows closed, these lower rooms were warm, stuffy. In the kitchen, she opened the top door on the refrigerator, not because she wanted anything in the freezer, but because the icy out-draft, billowing against her face, felt refreshing.

In her second-floor room once more, she found that the hush of the house continued to unnerve her. This seemed like the silence of an ax raised high but not yet swung.

Ridiculous. She was spooking herself. A case of broad-daylight heebie-jeebies.

Vicky switched on her CD player and, because Carson was not home to be bothered, turned the volume up a little louder than she usually did.

The disc was an anthology of hits by different artists. Billy Joel, Rod Stewart, the Knack, Supertramp, the BeeGees, Gloria Gaynor, Cheap Trick.

The music of her youth. Arthur had asked her to marry him. So happy together. Time had no meaning then. They thought they would live forever.

She returned to the letter that she had been composing, and sang along with the CD, her spirits lifted by the music and by memories of happier days, the troubling silence banished.

With the floor of the house pressing overhead, surrounded by the smell of bare earth and moist fungus, shrouded in gloom, anyone else might have progressed from claustrophobia to a panicky sense of being buried alive. Randal Six, however, child of Mercy, feels protected, even cozy.

He listens to the woman come downstairs and walk from room to room as though looking for something that she has mislaid. Then she returns to the second floor.

When he hears the music filtering down from high in the house, he knows that his opportunity has come. Under the cover of rock’n’roll, the noise he makes getting into the O’Connor residence will not be likely to draw attention.

He has thoroughly explored the crawl space, surprised by how adventurous he has become. The farther he goes from the Hands of Mercy both in terms of distance and time, the more his agoraphobia abates and the more he desires to expand his boundaries.

He is blossoming.

In addition to the concrete piers on which the house perches, the crawl space is punctuated by incoming water pipes, by sewer pipes and gray-water drains, by more pipes housing electrical cable. All of these services puncture the floor of the structure.

Even if Randal could disassemble one of those conduits, none of the points of penetration would be large enough to admit him.

He also has found a trapdoor. It measures about three feet square.

The hinges and latch are on the farther side, where he can’t reach them. The door most likely opens up and inward.

Near the trap, adjacent to the incoming gas line, flexible ductwork, eight inches in diameter, comes out of the house; it snakes through the crawl space. The farther end of the duct is framed to a cutout in the lattice skirt.

Randal assumes this is either an air intake or a safely vent for a gas-fired heating system.

Judging by the evidence, the trapdoor opens into a furnace room. A repairman could use it to move between the equipment above and the connections under the floor.

In the house overhead, autistic but capable of a dazzling smile, Arnie O’Connor possesses the secret to happiness. Either the boy will relinquish it or Randal Six will tear it out of him.

Lying on his back, Randal draws his knees toward his chest and presses his feet against the trapdoor. In the interest of breaking through with as little noise as possible, he applies pressure in gradually increasing increments. The latch and hinges creak as they strain against their fastenings.

When a particularly boisterous song echoes through the house and as the music swells toward a crescendo, he doubles his efforts, and the trapdoor springs open with a burr of screws ripping wood, a twang of torquing metal.

Happiness will soon be his.

After the meeting with Victor, Cindi wanted to go to the mall, but Benny wanted to talk about methods of decapitation.

According to their ID, Cindi and Benny Lovewell were twenty-eight and twenty-nine, respectively, though in fact they had been out of the creation tanks only nineteen months.

They made a cute couple. More accurately, they were made as a cute couple.

Attractive, well-dressed, each of them had a dazzling smile, a musical voice, and an infectious laugh. They were soft-spoken and polite, and they generally established instant rapport with everyone they met.

Cindi and Benny were fabulous dancers, though dancing was not the activity they most enjoyed. Their greatest pleasure came from killing.

Members of the New Race were forbidden to kill except when ordered to do so by their maker. The Lovewells were frequently ordered to do so.

When a member of the Old Race was slated to be replaced by a replicant, Cindi and Benny were the last smiling faces that person would ever see.

Those who were not scheduled to be replaced by pod people but who had somehow become a threat to Victor — or had offended him — were also destined to meet the Lovewells.

Sometimes these encounters began in a jazz club or a tavern. To the target, it seemed that new friends had been found — until later in the evening, when a parting handshake or a good-bye kiss on the cheek evolved, with amazing rapidity, into a violent garroting.

Other victims, on seeing the Lovewells for the first time, had no fair chance to get to know them, had hardly a moment to return their dazzling smiles, before being disemboweled.

On this sweltering summer day, prior to being summoned to the Hands of Mercy, the Lovewells had been bored. Benny could deal well with boredom, but tedium sometimes drove Cindi to reckless action.

After their meeting with Victor, in which they had been ordered to kill Detectives O’Connor and Maddison within twenty-four hours, Benny wanted to begin at once planning the hit. He hoped that the business could be arranged in such a way as to give them an opportunity to dismember alive at least one of the two cops.

Forbidden to kill as they wished, other members of the New Race lived with an envy of the free will with which those of the Old Race led their lives. This envy, more bitter by the day, expressed itself in despair and in a bottled rage that was denied relief.

As skilled assassins, Cindi and Benny were permitted relief, and lots of it. He usually could count on Cindi to match the eagerness with which he himself set out on every job.

On this occasion, however, she insisted on going shopping first. When Cindi insisted on something, Benny always let her have what she wanted because she was such a whiner when she didn’t get her way that even Benny, with his high tolerance for tedium, lamented that his maker had programmed him to be incapable of suicide.

At the mall, to Benny’s dismay, Cindi led him directly to Tots and Tykes, a store selling clothing for infants and young children.

He hoped this wouldn’t lead to kidnapping again.

“We shouldn’t be seen here,” he warned her.

“We won’t be. None of our kind works here, and none of our kind would have reason to shop here.”

“We don’t have a reason, either.”

Without answering him, she went into Tots and Tykes.

As Cindi searched through the tiny dresses and other garments on the racks and tables, Benny followed her, trying to gauge whether she was likely to go nuts, as before.

Admiring a little yellow dress with a frilly collar, she said, “Isn’t this adorable?”

“Adorable,” Benny agreed. “But it would look better in pink.”

“They don’t seem to have it in pink.”

“Too bad. Pink. In pink it would be terrific.”

Members of the New Race were encouraged to have sex with one another, in every variation, as often and as violently as they liked. It was their one pressure-release valve.