Dead and Alive

The truth was stranger than the official fiction.

Just during the past day, between his two beatings of Erika, Victor performed an autopsy on Harker and discovered that the Alpha’s torso was largely missing. The flesh, internal organs, and some bone structure seemed to have been eaten away. Fifty or more pounds of the Alpha’s mass had disappeared. From the carcass trailed a severed umbilical cord, suggesting that an unintended life form had developed inside Harker, fed upon him, and separated from its host following the fall from the roof.

Now Erika sipped her cognac. The troll sipped his wine.

Resorting to a literary allusion that she felt appropriate, though she would never fully understand the reference if she never read the dangerous book by Joseph Conrad, Erika said, “Sometimes I wonder if I’m Marlow, far upriver with Kurtz, and ahead of us — and behind us — lies only the heart of an immense darkness.”

The troll’s lipless mouth produced an approximation of a lip-smacking sound.

“You grew inside Harker?” she asked.

The cut-glass container marshaled the light of the amorphous flame into square, rectangular, and triangular tiles that presented the troll’s face as a shimmering red mosaic. “Yes,” he rasped. “I am from what I was.”

“Harker is dead?”

“He who was is dead, but I am who was.”

“You are Jonathan Harker?”

“Yes.”

“Not just a creature who grew in him like a cancer?”

“No.”

“Did he realize you were growing in him?”

“He who was knew of I who am.”

From the tens of thousands of literary allusions through which Erika could scan in an instant, she knew that, in fairy tales, when trolls or manikins or other such beings spoke in either riddles or in a convoluted manner, they were trouble. Nevertheless, she felt a kinship with this creature, and she trusted him.

She said, “May I call you Jonathan?”

“No. Call me Johnny. No. Call me John-John. No. Not that.”

“What shall I call you?”

“You will know my name when my name is known to me.”

“You have all of Jonathan’s memories and knowledge?”

“Yes.”

“Was the change you underwent uncontrolled or intentional?”

The troll smacked the flaps of his mouth together. “He who was thought it was happening to him. I who am realize he made it happen.”

“Unconsciously, you desperately wanted to become someone other than Jonathan Harker.”

“The Jonathan who was … he wanted to be like himself but become other than an Alpha.”

“He wanted to remain a man but be free of his maker’s control,” Erika interpreted.

“Yes.”

“Instead,” she said, “you shed the Alpha body and became … what you are now.”

The troll shrugged. “Shit happens.”

CHAPTER 16

From behind a potted rafus palm on the veranda of the Arceneaux house, Bucky Guitreau watched as his nude wife rapped lightly on a family-room window. He shifted his weight ceaselessly from one foot to the other, so excited that he could not keep still.

Apparently, Janet had not been heard. She rapped harder on the window.

A moment later, young Charles Arceneaux, the would-be Internet entrepreneur, loomed in the room beyond the window. His startled expression at the sight of a nude neighbor was as extreme as that of a cartoon character.

A member of the Old Race might have thought Charles looked comical just then, might have laughed out loud. Bucky was of the New Race, however, and he didn’t find anything comical. Arceneaux’s startled look only made Bucky want even more ardently to see him slashed, torn, broken, and dead. Such was the current — and growing — intensity of Bucky’s hatred that any expression crossing Charles Arceneaux’s face would inflame his passion for violence.

From between the fronds of the rafus palm, Bucky saw Charles speak. He couldn’t hear the words, but he could read the lips: Mrs. Guitreau? Is that you?

From this side of the window, Janet said, “Oh, Charlie, oh, something terrible has happened.”

Charles stared but did not reply. Judging by the angle of the young man’s head, Bucky knew that Charlie was not staring at Janet’s face.

“Something terrible has happened,” she repeated, to break his hypnotic fascination with her ample yet perky breasts. “Only you can help me, Charlie.”

The moment Charles moved away from the window, Bucky left the cover of the potted palm. He took up a position against the house, beside the door between the family room and the veranda.

As Janet stepped to the French door, she looked as voracious as some primitive tribe’s goddess of death, teeth bared in a humorless grin, nostrils flared, eyes fierce with blood lust, wrathful and merciless.

Bucky worried that Charles, seeing this fearsome incarnation, would suddenly suspect her true intention, refuse to admit her, and raise an alarm.

When she reached the door, however, and turned to gaze in at Arceneaux, her expression was convincingly that of a frightened and helpless woman desperate to find a strong man to lean on with her ample but perky breasts.

Charles did not wrench the door open at once only because, in his eagerness, he fumbled helplessly with the lock. When he got it open, Janet whispered, “Oh, Charlie, I didn’t know where to go, and then … I remembered … you.”

Bucky thought he heard something behind him on the veranda. He looked to his right, over his shoulder, but saw no one.

“What’s wrong, what’s happened?” Charles asked as Janet crossed the threshold into his arms.

“A terrible thing has happened,” Janet said, pressing Charles backward with her body, leaving the door open behind them.

Eager not to miss anything, but hesitant to reveal himself and enter the house before Janet had complete control of Charles, Bucky leaned to his left and peeked through the open door.

Just then Janet bit Charles somewhere that Bucky would never have thought of biting, and simultaneously she crushed his larynx, rendering him unable to scream.

Bucky hurried inside to watch, forgetting about the open door behind him.

Although Janet’s performance lasted significantly less than a minute, there was much for Bucky to see, an education in ferocity and cruelty that the torture specialists of the Third Reich could not have provided to anyone who devoted a year of study to them. He stood in awe of her inventiveness.

Considering the mess in the family room when Janet was done, Bucky was amazed that she had made so little noise, certainly not enough to wake anyone who might be sleeping elsewhere in the house.

On the plasma-screen television, the chain-saw guy in the orange wig and the clown makeup did something to the girl chained to the statue of George S. Patton, something the moviemakers had thought was so unspeakable that audiences would shriek with horror and delight in order to repress the urge to vomit. But by comparison with Janet, the moviemakers were no more imaginative than any child sociopath tearing the wings off flies.

“I was so right,” Janet said. “Killing in the nude is the best thing ever.”

“You think it’s definitely one of your personal core values?”

“Oh, yes. It’s totally PCV.”