Dean Koontz - City of Night

“I thought he died out there on the ice,” Victor said. “Out on the polar ice. I thought he had been frozen for eternity.”

“He’ll be returning to the rectory in about an hour and a half,” said the priest.

Victor said approvingly, “This was clever work, Patrick. You have not been in my good graces lately, but this counts as some redemption.”

“In truth,” the priest said, unable to meet his maker’s eyes, “I thought I might betray you, but in the end I could not conspire with him.”

“Of course you couldn’t. Your Bible tells you that rebellious angels rose up against God and were thrown out of Heaven. But I’ve made creatures more obedient than the God of myth ever proved able to create.”

On the screens, the Werner bug scampered up a wall and held fast to the ceiling, pendulous and quivering.

“Sir,” Duchaine said nervously, “I came here not only to tell you this news but to ask… to ask if you will grant me the grace that your first-made promised me.”

For a moment, Victor did not know what grace was meant. When he understood, he felt his temper rise. “You want me to take your life?”

“Release me,” Patrick pleaded quietly, staring at the monitors to avoid his master’s eyes.

“I give you life, and where is your gratitude? Soon the world will be ours, nature humbled, the way of all things changed forever. I have made you part of this great adventure, but you would turn away from it. Are you deluded enough to believe that the religion you have insincerely preached might contain some truth after all?”

Still focused on the phantasmagoric Werner, Duchaine said, “Sir, you could release me with a few words.”

“There is no God, Patrick, and even if there were, He would have no place in paradise for the likes of you.”

The priest’s voice acquired now a humble quality of a kind that Victor did not like. “Sir, I don’t need paradise. Eternal darkness and silence will be enough.”

Victor loathed him. “Perhaps at least one of my creatures is more pathetic than anything I would have believed I could create.”

When the priest had no reply, Victor switched on the audio feed from the isolation chamber. The Werner thing was still screaming in terror, in pain of an apparently extreme character. Some shrieks resembled those of a cat in agony, while others were as shrill and alien as the language of frenzied insects; and yet others sounded quite as human as any cries that might mark the night in an asylum for the criminally insane.

To one of the staff, Victor said, “Cycle open the nearer door of the transition module. Father Duchaine would like to offer his holy counsel to poor Werner.”

Trembling, Patrick Duchaine said, “But with just a few words, you could —”

“Yes,” Victor interrupted. “I could. But I have invested time and resources in you, Patrick, and you have provided me with a most unacceptable return on my investment. This way, at least, you can perform one last service. I need to know just how dangerous Werner has become, assuming he’s dangerous at all to anyone other than himself. Just go in there and ply your priestly art. I won’t need a written report.”

The nearer door of the module stood open.

Duchaine crossed the room. At the threshold, he paused to look back at his maker.

Victor could not read the expression on the priest’s face or in his eyes. Although he had created each of them with care and knew the structure of their bodies and their minds perhaps better than he knew himself, some of the New Race sometimes were as much of a mystery to him as any of the Old Race were.

Without a further word, Duchaine entered the transition module. The door cycled shut behind him.

Ripley’s voice conveyed a numbness of spirit when he said, “He’s in the air lock.”

“It’s not an air lock ,” Victor corrected.

One of the staff said, “Nearer door in lockdown. Farther door is cycling open.”

A moment later, the Werner bug stopped screaming. Depending from the ceiling, the thing appeared to be keenly, tremulously alert, at last distracted from its own complaints.

Father Patrick Duchaine entered the isolation chamber.

The farther door cycled shut, but no one on the staff followed the customary procedure of announcing module lockdown. The monitor room had fallen as silent as Victor had ever heard it.

Duchaine spoke not to the monster suspended above him, but to one of the cameras and, through its lens, to his maker. “I forgive you, Father. You know not what you do.”

In that instant, before Victor was able to erupt with a furious retort, the Werner bug proved itself to be as lethal as anyone could have imagined. Such agility. Such exotic mandibles and pincers. Such machinelike persistence.

Being one of the New Race, the priest was programmed to fight, and he was terribly strong, and resilient. As a consequence of that strength and resilience, his death was not an easy one, but slow and cruel, although eventually he did receive the grace that he had requested.

Staring at Pastor Laffite’s eyelids as his eyes moved nervously beneath them, Deucalion said, “Many theologians believe that dogs and some other animals have simple souls, yes, though whether immortal or not, no one can say.”

“If dogs have souls,” Laffite suggested, “then perhaps we, too, might be more than machines of meat.”

After some consideration, Deucalion said, “I won’t give you false hope… but I can offer you a third chocolate.”

“Have one with me, will you? This is such a lonely communion.”

“All right.”

The pastor had developed a mild palsy of the head and hands, different from his previous nervous tremors.

Deucalion selected two pieces of candy from the box. He put the first to Laffite’s lips, and the minister took it.

His own piece proved to have a coconut center. In two hundred years, nothing he had eaten had tasted as sweet as this, perhaps because the circumstances were, by contrast, so bitter.

“Eyes closed or open,” Pastor Laffite said, “I’m having terrible hallucinations, vivid images, such horrors that I have no words to describe them.”

“Then no more delay,” Deucalion said, pushing his chair back from the table and getting to his feet.

“And pain,” the pastor said. “Severe pain that I can’t repress.”

“I won’t add to that,” Deucalion promised. “My strength is much greater than yours. It will be quick.”

As Deucalion moved behind Laffite’s chair, the pastor groped blindly, caught his hand. Then he did something that would never have been expected of any of the New Race, something that Deucalion knew no number of centuries could erase from his memory.

Although his program was dropping out of him, though his mind was going — or perhaps because of that — Pastor Laffite drew the back of Deucalion’s hand to his lips, tenderly kissed it, and whispered, “Brother.”

A moment later, Deucalion broke the preacher’s neck, shattered his spine with such force that instant brain death followed, assuring that the quasi-immortal body could not repair the injury.

Nevertheless, for a while he remained in the kitchen. To be certain. To sit a sort of shiva.

Night pressed at the windows. Outside lay a city, teeming. Yet Deucalion could see nothing beyond the glass, only darkness deep, a blackness unrelenting.

After the unknown thing in the glass case spoke her name and made its ominous claim to her, Erika did not linger in the secret Victorian drawing room.

She did not like the roughness of the voice. Or its confidence.

At the threshold of the room, she almost hurried boldly into the passageway before she realized that the rods bristling from the walls were humming again. A headlong exit would result in a contest between her brilliantly engineered body and perhaps several thousand volts of electricity.