Dean Koontz - City of Night

As his only answer, Arnie glanced toward the digital clock on his nightstand.

“Good. We’ll have a nice dinner together, and afterward I’ll read you a few more chapters of Podkayne of Mars , if you’d like.”

“Heinlein,” the boy said softly, almost reverently, naming the author of the novel.

“That’s right. When we left poor Podkayne, she was in a lot of trouble.”

“Heinlein,” Arnie repeated, and then continued to work on the castle.

Downstairs again, following the hallway to the kitchen, Vicky pushed shut the coat-closet door, which was ajar.

She had reached the kitchen threshold when she realized that in the hall she detected the same moldy scent that she had smelled in the laundry room. She turned, looked back the way she had come, and sniffed.

Although the house stood on pilings, the air circulating under the structure did not prevent colonies of fungi, mostly molds, from scheming to invade these elevated rooms. They flourished in the damp dark crawl space. The concrete pilings drew water from the ground by osmosis, and the molds crept up those damp surfaces, spooring their way toward the house.

In the morning, she would definitely do a thorough inspection of every shadowy corner in the ground-floor closets, armed with the finest mold-killer known to man.

As a teenager, Vicky had read a story by 0. Henry that left her forever with a phobia about molds. In a rooming house, in the moist heat and darkness behind an old-fashioned radiator, a bloodstained and filthy rag, colonized by mold, had somehow come to life, an eager but stupid kind of life, and one night, in a quiet slithering ameboid fashion, had gone in search of other life when the lamp was turned off, smothering the roomer in his sleep.

Vicky Chou didn’t quite see herself as Sigourney Weaver in Aliens or as Linda Hamilton in The Terminator , but she was grimly determined to do battle with any mold that threatened her turf. In this unending war, she would entertain no exit strategy; the only acceptable outcome of each battle was total victory.

In the kitchen once more, she got the box of Tater Tots out of the freezer. She sprayed a baking sheet with Pam and spread the Tots on it.

She and Arnie would have dinner together. Then Podkayne of Mars . He liked to have her read to him, and she enjoyed story time as much as he did. They felt like family. This would be a nice evening.

Deucalion had spent the afternoon walking from church to church, from cathedral to synagogue, but nowhere between, taking advantage of his special understanding of time and space to step from nave to nave, from a place of Catholics to a place of Protestants, to another place of Catholics, through the many neighborhoods and faiths of the city, from sanctuary to narthex, to sacristy. He also intruded secretly into rectories and parsonages and pastoriums, observing clergymen at their work, seeking one that he felt sure belonged to the New Race.

A few of these men of the cloth — and one woman — raised his suspicions. If they were monsters to an extent greater than even he himself was, they hid it well. They were masters of the masquerade, in private as well as in public.

Because of their positions, they would of course be among the best that Victor produced, his Alphas, exceptionally intelligent and cunning.

In Our Lady of Sorrows, the priest seemed wrong . Deucalion could not put his finger on the reason for his suspicion. Intuition, beyond mere knowledge and reason, told him that Father Patrick Duchaine was not a child of God.

The priest was about sixty, with white hair and a sweet face, a perfect clone, perhaps, of a real priest now rotting in an unmarked grave.

Mostly singles, only a few pairs, primarily older than young, fewer than two dozen parishioners had gathered for vespers. With the service not yet begun, they sat in silence and did not disturb the hush of the church.

On one side of the nave, the stained-glass windows blazed in the hot light of the westering sun. Colorful geometric patterns were projected on the worshipers, the pews.

Our Lady of Sorrows opened her confessionals each morning before Mass and on those evenings, as now, when vespers were celebrated.

Staying to the shadowy aisle on the east side of the nave, out of the stained-glass dazzle, Deucalion approached a confessional, closed the door, and knelt.

When the priest slid open the privacy panel that covered the screen between them, and invited confession, Deucalion said softly, “Does your god live in Heaven, Father Duchaine, or in the Garden District?”

The priest was silent for a moment, but then said, “That sounds like the question of a particularly troubled man.”

“Not a man, Father. More than a man. And less than a man. Like you, I think.”

After a hesitation, the priest said, “Why have you come here?”

“To help you.”

“Why should I need help?”

“You suffer.”

“This world is a vale of tears for all of us.”

“We can change that.”

“Changing it isn’t within our power. We can only endure.”

“You preach hope, Father. But you have no hope yourself.”

The priest’s silence damned and identified him.

Deucalion said, “How difficult it must be for you to assure others that God will have mercy on their immortal souls, knowing as you do that even if God exists, you have no soul upon which He might bestow His grace, and everlasting life.”

“What do you want from me?”

“A private conversation. Consideration. Discretion.”

After a hesitation, Father Duchaine said, “Come to the rectory following the service.”

“I’ll be waiting in your kitchen. What I bring you, priest, is the hope you do not think will ever be yours. You need only have the courage to believe it, and grasp it.”

Carson parked the car on the shoulder of the service road, and they carried the suitcases through a stand of Southern pines, up a slight sunny incline, into a grove of well-crowned live oaks. Beyond the oaks lay a vast expanse of grass.

Twice the size of New York’s Central Park, City Park served a population only a fraction as large as that of Manhattan. Within its reaches, therefore, were lonely places, especially in the last ruddy hours of a fast-condensing summer afternoon.

Across the sweep of the meadow, not one person was walking or communing with nature, or playing with a dog, or throwing a Frisbee, or disposing of a corpse.

Putting down his suitcase, Michael pointed to a grassy spot ten feet beyond the oaks. “That’s where we found the accountant’s head, propped against that rock. That’s sure one you never forget.”

“If Hallmark made a remembrance card suitable for the occasion,” Carson said, “I would send you one each year.”

“I was impressed by the cocky angle at which he wore his cowboy hat,” Michael recalled, “especially considering his circumstances.”

“Wasn’t it their first date?” Carson asked.

“Right. They went to a costume party together. That’s why he was wearing a midnight-blue leather cowboy outfit with rhinestones.”

“His boots had mother-of-pearl inlays.”

“They were fine, those boots. I’ll bet he looked really cool with his body and head together, but of course we never got to see the full effect.”

“Did we ever know the killer’s costume?” she asked as she knelt in the crisp dead oak leaves to open her suitcase.

“I think he went as a bullfighter.”

“He cut off the cowboy’s head with an ax. A bullfighter doesn’t carry an ax.”

“Yeah, but he always kept an ax in the trunk of his car,” he reminded her.