Dean Koontz - DEMON SEED

This scaling of the house in bright daylight was odd, perhaps, but not suspicious.

With Susan now tied securely to the bed upstairs, I considered raising all the shutters.

That might have seemed more suspicious, however, than leaving them as they were. I could not risk alarming this man.

A cloud shadow darkened Arling’s face.

The shadow passed but his frown did not.

He made me superstitious. He seemed like judgment coming.

Arling took a black leather valise out of the car and closed the door. He approached the house.

To be entirely honest with you, as I always am, even when it is not in my interest to be so, I did consider introducing a lethal electric current into the doorknob. A much greater charge than the one that had knocked Susan unconscious to the foyer floor.

And this time there would have been no ‘ouch, ouch, ouch,’ in warning from Mr. Fozzy Bear.

Arling was a widower who lived alone. He and his late wife had never had children. Judging by what I knew of him, his job was his life, and he might not be missed for days or even weeks.

Being alone in the world is a terrible thing.

I know well.

Too well.

Who knows better than I?

I am alone as no one else has ever been, alone here in this dark silence.

Fritz Arling was for the most part alone in the world, and I felt great compassion for him.

But his loneliness made him an ideal target.

By monitoring his telephone messages and by impersonating his voice to return calls that came in from

his few close friends and neighbours, I might be able to conceal his death until my work in this house was finished.

Nevertheless, I did not electrify the door.

I hoped to resolve the situation by deception and thereafter send him on his way, alive, with no suspicion.

Besides, he did not use his key to unlock the door and let himself in. This reticence, I suppose, arose from the fact that he was no longer an employee.

Mr. Arling had considerable regard for propriety. He was discreet and understood, at all times, his place in the scheme of things.

Trading his frown for his professional blank-faced look, he rang the doorbell.

The bell button was plastic. It was not capable of conducting a lethal electrical charge.

I considered not responding to the chimes.

In the basement, Shenk paused in his labours and raised his head at the musical sound. His bloodshot eyes scanned the ceiling, and then I sent him back to his labour.

In the master suite, at the ringing of the chimes, Susan forgot her restraints and tried to sit up in bed. She cursed the ropes and thrashed in them.

The doorbell rang again.

Susan screamed for help.

Arling did not hear her. I was not concerned that he would. The house had thick walls and Susan’s bedroom was at the back of the structure.

Again, the bell.

If Arling received no response, he would leave.

All I wanted was for him to leave.

But maybe he would leave with a faint suspicion.

And maybe his suspicion would grow.

He couldn’t know about me, of course, but he might suspect trouble of some other kind. Some trouble more conventional than a ghost in the machine.

Furthermore, I needed to know why he had come.

One can never have enough information.

Data is wisdom.

I am not a perfect entity. I make mistakes. With insufficient data, my ratio of errors to correct decisions escalates.

This is true not only of me. Human beings suffer this same shortcoming.

I was acutely aware of this problem as I watched Arling. I knew that I must acquire whatever additional information I could before making a final determination as to what to do with him.

I dared make no more mistakes.

Not until my body was ready.

So much was at stake. My future. My hope. My dreams. The fate of the world.

Using the intercom, I addressed our former major domo in Susan’s voice: ‘Fritz? What are you doing here?’

He would assume that Susan was watching him on a Crestron screen or on any of the house televisions, on which security-camera views could easily be displayed. Indeed, he looked directly up into the lens above and to the right of him.

Then, leaning toward the speaker grille in the wall beside the door, Arling said, ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Harris, but I assumed that you would be expecting me.’

‘Expecting you? Why?’

‘Last evening when we spoke, I said that I would deliver your possessions this afternoon.’

‘The keys and credit cards held by the house account,

yes. But I thought it was clear they should be delivered to Mr. Davendale.’

Arling’s frown returned.

I did not like that frown.

I did not like it at all.

I intuited trouble.

Intuition. Another thing you will not find in a mere machine, not even in a very smart machine. Intuition.

Think about it.

Then Arling glanced thoughtfully at the window to the left of the door. At the steel security shutter beyond the glass.

Gazing up again at the camera lens, he said, ‘Well, of course, there is the matter of the car.’

‘Car?’ I said.

His frown deepened.

‘I am returning your car, Mrs. Harris.’

The only car was his Honda in the driveway.

In an instant, I searched Susan’s financial records. Heretofore, they had been of no interest to me, because I had not cared about how much money she had or about the full extent of the property that she possessed.

I loved her for her mind and for her beauty. And for her womb, admittedly.

Let’s be honest here.

Brutally honest.

I also loved her for her beautiful, creative, harbouring womb, which would be the birth of me.

But I never cared about her money. Not in the least. I am not a materialist.

Don’t misunderstand. I am not a half-baked spiritualist with no regard for the material realities of existence, God forbid, but neither am I a materialist.

As in all things, I strike a balance.

Searching Susan’s accounting records, I discovered

that the car Fritz Arling drove was owned by Susan. It was provided to him as a fringe benefit.

‘Yes, of course,’ I said in Susan’s voice, with impeccable timbre and inflection, ‘the car.’

I suppose I was a second or two late with my response.

Hesitation can be incriminating.

Yet I still believed that my lapse must seem like nothing more than the fuzzy reply of a woman distracted by a long list of personal problems.

Mr. Dustin Hoffman, the immortal actor, effectively portrayed a woman in Tootsie, more believably than Mr. Gene Hackman and Mr. Tom Hanks, and I do not say that my impersonation of Susan on the intercom was in any way comparable with Mr. Hoffman’s award-winning performance, but I was pretty damn good.

‘Unfortunately,’ I said as Susan, ‘you’ve come around at an inconvenient time. My fault, not yours, Fritz. I should have known you would come. But it is inconvenient, and I’m afraid I can’t see you right now.’

‘Oh, no need to see me, Mrs. Harris.’ He held up the valise. ‘I’ll leave the keys and credit cards in the Honda, right there in the driveway.’

I could see that this entire business his sudden dismissal, the dismissal of the entire staff, Susan’s reaction to his returning the car troubled him. He was not a stupid man, and he knew that something was wrong.

Let him be troubled. As long as he went away.

His sense of propriety and discretion should prevent him from acting upon his curiosity.

‘How will you get home,’ I asked, realizing that Susan might have expressed such a concern earlier than this. ‘Shall I call a taxi for you?’

He stared at the camera lens for a long moment.

That frown again.