the air was relatively fresh.
The brown vinyl upholstery on the chair was scarred, creased, and mottled with age. The standard-issue metal desk was scratched and dented.
This was no big-city morgue with several dissection rooms and a professionally decorated office for receptions with reporters and politicians. In smaller towns, violent death was still generally viewed as less glamorous than in larger metropolises.
Harry sat and read from the autopsy transcript while Connie stood at the glass wall and watched the three men gathered around the corpse in the outer room.
The cause of James Ordegard’s death had been three gunshot wounds to the chest — which Connie and Harry already knew because all three rounds had come from Harry’s gun. The effects of the gunshots included puncture and collapse of the left lung, major damage to the large intestine, nicks to the common iliac and the celiac arteries, the complete severing of the renal artery, deep laceration of the stomach and liver by fragments of bone and lead, and a tear in the heart muscle sufficient to cause sudden cardiac arrest.
“Anything odd?” she asked, her back to him.
“Like what?”
“Like what? Don’t ask
In the dissection room, the three pathologists working over Laura Kincade were uncannily like doctors attending to a patient whose life they were struggling to preserve. The postures were the same; only the pace was different. But the sole thing that these men could preserve was a record of precisely the means by which one bullet had fatally damaged one fragile human body, the
“They did a craniotomy,” Harry said from the coroner’s creaking chair.
“And?”
“No visible surface hematoma. No unusual quantity of cerebrospinal fluid, no indications of excess pressure.”
“They do a cerebrotomy?” she asked.
“I’m sure.” He rustled through the pages of the transcript. “Yeah, here.”
“Cerebral tumor? Abscess? Lesions?”
He was silent for a long moment, scanning the report. Then: “No, nothing like that.”
“Hemorrhage?”
“None noted.”
“Embolism?”
“None found.”
“Pineal gland?”
Sometimes the pineal gland could shift out of position and come under pressure from surrounding brain tissues, resulting in extremely vivid hallucinations, sometimes paranoia and violent behavior. But that was not the case with Ordegard.
Watching the autopsy from a distance, Connie thought of her sister, Colleen, dead these five years, killed by childbirth. It seemed to her that Colleen’s death made no more sense than that of poor Laura Kincade who had made the mistake of stopping at the wrong restaurant for lunch.
Then again, no death made sense. Madness and chaos were the engines of this universe. Everything was born only to die. Where was the logic and reason in that?
“Nothing,” Harry said, dropping the report back onto the desk. The chair springs squeaked and twanged as he got up. “No unexplained marks on the body, no peculiar physiological conditions. If Ticktock was in possession of Ordegard, there’s no clue of it in the corpse.”
Connie turned away from the glass wall. “Now what?”
Teel Bonner pulled open the morgue drawer.
The naked body of James Ordegard lay within. His white skin had a bluish cast in some places. Black-thread stitches had been used to close the extensive incisions from the autopsy.
The moon face. Rigor mortis had pulled his lips into a lopsided smile. At least his eyes were closed.
“What did you want to see?” Bonner asked.
“If he was still here.” Harry said.
The coroner glanced at Connie. “Where else would he be?”
4
The bedroom floor was covered with black ceramic tile. Like purling water, it glistened in places with dim reflections of the ambient light from the night beyond the windows. It was cool beneath Bryan’s feet.
As he walked to the glass wall that faced the ocean, the huge mirrors reflected black on black, and his naked form drifted like a wraith of smoke through the layered shadows.
He stood at the window, staring at the sable sea and tarry sky. The smooth ebony vista was relieved only by the crests of the combers and by frostlike patches on the bellies of the clouds. That frost was a reflection of the lights of Laguna Beach behind him; his home was on one of the western-most points of the city.
The view was perfect and serene because it lacked the human element. No man or woman or child, no structure or machine or artifact intruded. So quiet, dark. So clean.
He longed to eradicate humanity and all its works from large portions of the earth, restrict people to selected preserves. But he was not yet fully in control of his power, still Becoming.
He lowered his gaze from the sky and sea to the pallid beach at the foot of the bluff.
Leaning his forehead against the glass, he imagined life — and by imagining, created it. On the sward just above the tide line, the sand began to stir. It rose, forming a cone as big as a man — and then
No such person had ever existed. The vagrant was strictly a creature of Bryan’s imagination. Through this construct and others, Bryan could walk the world without being in danger from it.
Though his phantom bodies could be shot and burned and crushed without causing harm to him, his own body was dismayingly vulnerable. When cut, he bled. When struck, he bruised. He assumed that when he had Become, then invulnerability and immortality would be the final gifts bestowed on him, signaling his Ascension to godhood — which made him eager to fulfill his mission.
Now, leaving only a portion of his consciousness in his real body, he moved into the hobo on the night beach. From within that hulking figure, he gazed up at his house on the bluff. He saw his own naked body at the window, staring down.
In Jewish folklore there was a creature called a golem. Made of mud in the shape of a man, endowed with a form of life, it was most often an instrument of vengeance.
Bryan could create an infinite variety of golems and through them stalk his prey, thin the herd, police the world. But he could not enter the bodies of real people and control their minds, which he would very much have enjoyed. Perhaps that power would be his, as well, when at last he had Become.
He withdrew his consciousness from the golem on the beach and, regarding it from his high window, caused it to change shape. It tripled in size, assumed a reptilian form, and developed immense membranous wings.
Sometimes an effect could spiral beyond what he intended, acquire a life of its own, and resist his efforts at containment. For that reason, he was always practicing, refining his techniques and exercising his power in order to strengthen it.
He had once created a golem inspired by the movie
