City of Night

of her hands, Lulana used both to hold the praline pie. “Who was the giant?”
    “You wouldn’t believe me,” Carson said, “and if I told you, I wouldn’t be doing you a favor.”
    Coddling the second pie, Evangeline said, “What was wrong with Pastor Kenny? What’s going to happen to him?”
    Instead of answering her, Michael said, “For your peace of mind, you ought to know that your preacher long ago went to his final rest. The man you called Pastor Kenny there tonight… you have no reason to grieve for him.”
    The sisters exchanged a glance. “Something strange has come into the world, hasn’t it?” Lulana asked Carson, but clearly expected no answer. “There tonight, the coldest expectation crept over me, like maybe it was… end times.”
    Evangeline said, “Maybe we should pray on it, sister.”
    “Can’t hurt,” Michael said. “Might help. And have yourselves a piece of pie.”
    Suspicion squinted Lulana’s eyes. “Mr. Michael, it sounds to me like you mean have ourselves a nice piece of pie while there’s still time.”
    Michael avoided replying, but Carson said, “Have yourselves a piece of pie. Have two.”
    In the car again, as Carson pulled away from the curb, Michael said, “Did you see the white Mercury Mountaineer about half a block back on the other side of the street?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Just like the one in the park.”
    Studying the rearview mirror, she said, “Yeah. And just like the one down the street from the parsonage.”
    “I wondered if you saw that one.”
    “What, I’m suddenly blind?”
    “Is it coming after us?”
    “Not yet.”
    She wheeled right at the corner.
    Turning in his seat to peer into the dark street that they were leaving behind, he said, “They’re still not coming. Well, there’s bound to be more than one white Mountaineer in a city this size.”
    “And this is just one of those freaky days when we happen to cross paths with all of them.”
    “Maybe we should have asked Godot for some hand grenades,” Michael said.
    “I’m sure he delivers.”
    “He probably gift-wraps. Where now?”
    “My place,” Carson told him. “Maybe it would be a good idea, after all, if Vicky moved Arnie somewhere.”
    “Like some nice quiet little town in Iowa.”
    “And back to 1956, when Frankenstein was just Colin Clive and Boris Karloff, and Mary Shelley was just a novelist instead of a prophet and historian.”
     
     
     

Chapter 56
     
    On the six closed-circuit screens, the insectile manifestation of the Werner entity, still in possession of some human features, crawled the steel walls of the isolation chamber, sometimes in the cautious manner of a stalking predator, at other times as quick as a frightened roach, agitated and jittering.
    Victor could not have imagined that any news brought to him by Father Duchaine would trump the images on those monitors, but when the priest described the meeting with the tattooed man, the crisis with Werner became a mere problem by comparison with the astonishing resurrection of his first-made man.
    Initially skeptical, he pressed Duchaine hard for a description of the towering man who had sat for coffee with him in the rectory kitchen, particularly of the ravaged half of his face. What the priest had seen under the inadequate disguise of the elaborate tattoo was damage of a kind and of a degree that no ordinary man could have sustained and survived. Further, it matched the broken countenance as Victor had kept it in his mind’s eye, and his memory was exceptional.
    Further still, Duchaine’s word portrait of the wholesome half of that same face could not have better conveyed the ideal male beauty that Victor had been kind enough to bestow upon his first creation so long ago and on such a distant continent that sometimes those events seemed like a dream.
    His kindness had been repaid with betrayal and with the murder of his bride, Elizabeth. His lost Elizabeth would never have been as malleable or as lubricious as the wives that he had later made for himself; nevertheless, her savage murder had been an unforgivable impertinence. Now the ungrateful wretch had come crawling around again, filled with delusions of grandeur, spouting nonsense about a destiny, foolish enough to believe that in a second confrontation he might not only survive but triumph.
    “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