Dean Koontz's Frankenstein 4-Book Bundle by Dean Koontz Page B

Dickinson at last drove him up from his armchair. “I’m in a creative mood. I think I’ll spend some time in my studio.”
    â€œDo you need my help, darling?”
    â€œNo. You stay here, enjoy yourself.”
    â€œListen to this.” Her delight was childlike. Before Victor could stop her, she read from Dickinson: “The pedigree of honey / Does not concern the bee / A clover, any time, to him / Is aristocracy.”
    â€œCharming,” he said. “But for variety, you might read some Thom Gunn and Frederick Seidel.”
    He could have told her what to read, and she would have obeyed. But he did not desire an automaton for a wife. He wanted her to be free-spirited. Only in sexual matters did he demand utter obedience.
    In the immense restaurant-quality kitchen from which staff could serve a sit-down dinner for a hundred without problem, Victor entered the walk-in pantry. The shelves at the back, laden with canned goods, slid aside when he touched a hidden switch.
    Beyond the pantry, secreted in the center of the house, lay his windowless studio.
    His public labs were at Helios Biovision, the company through which he was known to the world and by which he had earned another fortune atop those he had already accrued in earlier ages.
    And in the Hands of Mercy, an abandoned hospital converted to serve his primary work and staffed with men of his making, he pursued the creation of the new race that would replace flawed humanity.
    Here, behind the pantry, measuring twenty by fifteen feet, this retreat provided a place for him to work on small experiments, often those on the leading edge of his historic enterprise.
    Victor supposed that he was to arcane laboratory equipment what Santa Claus was to gizmo-filled toy workshops.
    When Mary Shelley took a local legend based on truth and crafted fiction from it, she’d made Victor a tragic figure and killed him off. He understood her dramatic purpose for giving him a death scene, but he loathed her for portraying him as tragic and as a failure.
    Her judgment of his work was arrogant. What else of consequence did
she
ever write? And of the two, who was dead—and who was not?
    Although her novel suggested his workplace was a phantasmagoria of gizmos as ominous in appearance as in purpose, she had been vague on details. Not until the first film adaptation of her book did the name Frankenstein become synonymous with the term “mad scientist” and with laboratories buzzing-crackling-humming with frightening widgets, thingums, and doohickeys.
    Amusingly, Hollywood had the set design more than half right, not as to the actual machines and objects, but as to ambience. Even the studio behind the pantry had a flavor of Hell with machines.
    On the center worktable stood a Lucite tank filled with a milky antibiotic solution. In the tank rested a man’s severed head.
    Actually, the head wasn’t severed. It had never been attached to a body in the first place.
    Victor had created it only to serve as a braincase. The head had no hair, and the features were rough, not fully formed.
    Support systems serviced it with nutrient-rich, enzyme-balanced, oxygenated blood and drained away metabolic waste through numerous plastic tubes that entered through the neck.
    With no need to breathe, the head was almost dead still. But the eyes twitched behind the lids, which suggested that it was dreaming.
    The brain within the skull was self-aware but had only the most rudimentary personality, sufficient to the experiment.
    Approaching the table, Victor addressed the resident of the open Lucite tank: “Time to work, Karloff.”
    No one could say that Victor Helios, alias Frankenstein, was a humorless man.
    In the head, the eyes opened. They were blue and bloodshot.
    Karloff had been selectively educated by direct-to-brain data downloading; therefore, he spoke English. “Ready,” he said, his voice thick and hoarse.
    â€œWhere is your hand?”