2
The house stood on a bluff above the sea. The west wall of tinted glass encompassed a primal view of sky, water, and crashing surf.
When Bryan wished to sleep during the day, electrically operated Rolladen shutters motored down to banish the sun. It was night, however, and while Bryan slept, the huge windows revealed a black sky, blacker sea, and phosphorescent incoming breakers like marching ranks of soldier ghosts.
When Bryan slept, he always dreamed.
Though most people’s dreams were in black and white, his were in full color. In fact the spectrum of colors in his dreams was greater than in real life, a fabulous variety of hues and shadings that made each vision enthrallingly intricate.
Rooms in his dreams were not simply vague suggestions of places, and landscapes were not impressionistic smears. Every locale in his sleep was vividly — even excruciatingly — detailed. If he dreamed of a forest, every leaf was rendered with veining, individually mottled and shaded. If snow, every flake was unique.
After all, he was not a dreamer like every other. He was a slumbering god. Creative.
That Tuesday evening Bryan’s dreams were, as always, filled with violence and death. His creativity was best expressed in imaginative forms of destruction.
He walked the streets of a fantasy city more labyrinthine than any that existed in the real world, a metropolis of crowding spires. When children looked upon him, they were stricken by a plague of such exquisite virulence that their small faces instantly erupted in masses of oozing pustules; bleeding lesions split their skin. When he touched strong men, they burst into flame and their eyes melted from their sockets. Young women aged before his eyes, withered and died in seconds, transformed from objects of desire into piles of worm-riddled refuse. When Bryan smiled at a shopkeeper standing in front of a corner grocery, the man fell to the pavement, writhing in agony, and swarms of cockroaches erupted from his ears, nostrils, and mouth.
For Bryan, this was not a nightmare. He enjoyed his dreams and always woke from them refreshed and excited.
The city streets faded into the uncountable rooms of an infinite bordello, with a different beautiful woman waiting to please him in every richly decorated chamber. Naked, they prostrated themselves before him, pleaded to be allowed to provide him with relief, but he would lie with none of them. Instead, he slaughtered each woman in a different fashion, endlessly inventive in his brutalities, until he was drenched with their blood.
He was not interested in sex. Power was more satisfying than sex could ever be, and by far the most satisfying power was the power to kill.
He never tired of their cries for mercy. Their voices were very much like the squeals of the small animals that had learned to fear him when he’d been a child and had just begun to Become. He had been born to rule both in the dream world and the real, to help humankind relearn the humility that it had lost.
He woke.
For long delicious minutes, Bryan lay in a tangle of black sheets, as pale upon that rumpled silk as the luminescent foam was pale upon the crest of each wave that broke on the shore below his windows. The euphoria of the bloody dream stayed with him for a while, and was immeasurably better than a post-orgasmic glow.
He longed for the day when he could brutalize the real world as he did the world in his dreams. They deserved punishment, these swarming multitudes. In their self-absorption, they had pridefully assumed that the world had been made for them, for their pleasure, and they had overrun it. But
However, he was still young, not in full control of his power, still Becoming. He didn’t yet dare to begin the cleansing of the earth that was his destiny.
Naked, he got out of bed. The slightly cool air felt good against his bare skin.
In addition to the sleek, ultra-modern, black-lacquered bed with its silk sheets, the large room contained no other furniture except two matching black nightstands and black marble lamps with black shades. No stereo, television, or radio. There was no chair in which to relax and read; books were of no interest to him, for they contained no knowledge he needed to acquire and no entertainment equal to that he could provide himself. When he was creating and manipulating the phantom bodies in which he patrolled the outer world, he preferred to lie in bed, staring at the ceiling.
He had no clock. Didn’t need one. He was so attuned to the mechanics of the universe that he always knew the hour, minute, and second. It was part of his gift.
The entire wall opposite the bed was mirrored floor to ceiling. He had mirrors throughout the house; he liked what they showed him of himself, the image of godhood Becoming in all its grace, beauty, and power.
Except for the mirrors, the walls were painted black. The ceiling was black as well.
The black-lacquered shelves of a large bookcase contained scores of one-pint Mason jars filled with formaldehyde. Floating therein were pairs of eyes, visible to Bryan even in deep gloom. Some were the eyes of human beings: men, women, and children who had received his judgment; various shades of blue, brown, black, gray, green. Others were the eyes of the animals on which he’d first experimented with his power years ago: mice, gerbils, lizards, snakes, turtles, cats, dogs, birds, squirrels, rabbits; some were softly luminescent even in death, glowing pale red or yellow or green.
Votive eyes. Offered by his subjects. Symbols acknowledging his power, his superiority, his Becoming. At every hour of the day and night, the eyes were there, acknowledging, admiring, adoring him.
3
In spite of the humming vent fans, the room was redolent of blood, bile, intestinal gases, and an astringent disinfectant that made Connie squint.
Harry sprayed his left hand with some Binaca breath-freshener. He cupped his moistened palm over his nose, so the minty fragrance would block out at least some of the smell of death.
He offered Connie the Binaca. She hesitated, then accepted it.
The dead woman lay naked and staring on the tilted, stainless-steel table. The coroner had made a large Y incision in her abdomen, and most of her organs had been carefully removed.
She was one of Ordegard’s victims from the restaurant. Her name was Laura Kincade. Thirty years old. She had been pretty when she’d gotten out of bed that morning. Now she was a fright figure from a grisly carnival funhouse.
The fluorescent lights imparted a milky sheen to her eyes, on which were reflected twin images of the overhead microphone and the flexible, segmented-metal cable on which it hung. Her lips were parted, as if she were about to sit up, speak into the mike, and add a few comments to the official record of her autopsy.
The coroner and two assistants were working late, finishing the final of three examinations of Ordegard and his two victims. The men looked weary, both physically and spiritually.
In all her years of police work, Connie had never encountered one of those hardened forensic pathologists who appeared so frequently in the movies and on television, carving up corpses while they made crude jokes and ate pizza, untouched by the tragedies of others. On the contrary, although it was necessary to approach such a job with professional detachment, regular intimate contact with the victims of violent crime always took its toll one way or another.
Teel Bonner, the chief medical examiner, was fifty but seemed older. In the harsh fluorescent light, his face looked less tanned than sallow, and the bags under his eyes were large enough to pack for a weekend getaway.
Bonner paused in his cutting to tell them that the tape of the Ordegard autopsy had already been transcribed by a typist. The transcription was in a folder on his desk, in the glass-walled office adjacent to the dissection room. “I haven’t written the summary yet, but the facts are all there.”
Connie was relieved to get into the office and close the door. The small room had a vent fan of its own, and
