dreams of the night he came alive in Victor’s first lab, but of other and more dreadful events, perhaps of events that preceded his existence.
After his first hundred years, decade by decade, he needed less sleep. This meant, thankfully, fewer opportunities to dream.
Deucalion crossed the main lab, opened a door, stepped across the threshold, and found the hallway deserted.
The cry came again, twice in quick succession. Louder here than in the laboratory, the sound was still distant.
Sometimes Deucalion dreamed of an old stone house with interior walls of cracked and yellowed plaster, illuminated by oil lamps and candle sconces. When the worst storm winds blew, from the attic arose a disturbing click-and-clatter, like the fleshless body of Death rattling in his cowled robe as he walked the night. Worse than what might wait above was what might wait below: A narrow turning of stone stairs descended to an ironbound door, and beyond the door were the rooms of a forbidding cellar, where the stagnant air sometimes had the acrid taste of spoiled suet and at other times the salty taste of tears.
Here in the old hospital, the latest two shrieks had come from another floor, whether from above or below, he could not tell. He walked to the stairs at the end of the corridor, opened the fire door, and waited, feeling almost as if he might be dreaming that well-known scenario but in a new setting.
In the familiar nightmare, the horror of going into the attic or the desire not to go into the cellar was always the sum of the plot, an endless wretched journey through the rooms that lay between those two poles of terror, as he strove to avoid both the highest and lowest chambers of the house.
Now, the shriek fell through the hospital stairwell from above. Heard more clearly than before, it was pleading and mournful.
Like the miserable cries that sometimes haunted his infrequent sleep.
Deucalion ascended the stairs toward the higher realms of Mercy.
In the old stone house, which might have once been a real place or just a structure of his imagination, he had dreamed his way into the cellar many times, but never farther than the first room. Then he always woke, choking with a nameless dread.
Twice, with an oil lamp, he had gone into the dream-house attic. Both times, a fierce storm raged outside. Drafts blustered through that high room, and he was shocked out of sleep and into anguish by what the lamplight revealed.
Climbing the hospital stairs, Deucalion felt at risk of losing his balance, and he put one hand on the railing.
He was constructed from the parts of bodies salvaged from a prison graveyard. His hands were big and strong. They had been the hands of a strangler.
One floor above Victor’s main lab, as Deucalion reached for the door to the corridor, he heard the shriek again, its source still overhead. As he continued up the stairs, he watched his powerful hand slide along the railing.
His eyes had been salvaged from an ax murderer.
He sensed that what he was about to see in the higher halls of Mercy would be no less terrible than what the lamplight had shown him in the dream-house attic. On this fateful night, past and present were coming together like the hemispheres of a nuclear warhead, and the post-blast future was unknown.
CHAPTER 29
The torment of perpetual awareness. The torment of cold. The torment of the transparent polymeric fabric. The torment of the glass door on the freezer.
Drifting in the saline solution, Chameleon can see the large room in which it is stored. A blue scene. The blue of cold vision.
Out there in the laboratory, work continues. Busy blue people.
Perhaps they are TARGETS. Perhaps they are EXEMPTS.
When not in cold suspension, Chameleon can smell the difference between TARGETS and EXEMPTS.
The scent of any EXEMPT pleases Chameleon. The scent of any TARGET infuriates.
In its current condition, it can smell nothing.
The walls of the freezer conduct the unit’s compressor-motor vibrations to the imprisoning sack. The sack conducts them into the solution.
This is neither a pleasant nor an unpleasant sensation for Chameleon.
Now the character of the vibrations changes. They are similar but subtly different.
This happens periodically. Chameleon is sufficiently intelligent to consider the phenomenon and to reach conclusions about it.
Evidently, the freezer has two motors. They alternate to prevent either from being overtaxed.
This also ensures that if one motor fails, the other will serve as backup.
Chameleon’s physical function is greatly inhibited by the cold. Its mental function is less affected.
With little to occupy its mind, Chameleon focuses obsessively on every minim of sensory input, such as motor vibrations.
It is not at risk of being driven insane by its circumstances. At no time was it ever sane.
Chameleon has no desires or ambitions other than to kill. The purpose of its existence is currently frustrated, which is the nature of its torment.
Out in the blue laboratory, the busy blue people are suddenly agitated. The standard pattern of activities, which Chameleon has long studied, is abruptly disrupted.
Something unusual has come into the lab. It is busy and blue, but it is not a person.
Interesting.
CHAPTER 30
In Victor’s master-bedroom closet, all foldable clothes were stored in banks of drawers, and all hanging items were behind cabinet doors, leaving the room sleek and neat, as he liked it.
In his clothes collection were 164 custom-tailored suits, 67 fine sport coats, 48 pairs of slacks, 212 shirts including dress and casual, drawers and drawers full of perfectly folded sweaters, and shelf after shelf of shoes for every occasion. Especially fond of silk neckties, he had lost count when his collection passed three hundred.
He enjoyed dressing well. Considering his exemplary physique, clothes hung beautifully on him. He thought he was nearly as pleasing to the eye when dressed as he was when nude.
After the phone call from Erika Four, Victor counseled himself to linger in the spa over another glass of Dom Perignon. His former wife was trash, figuratively and literally, and though she may have somehow been resuscitated, she was no match for either his intellect or his cunning.
As prudent as he was confident, however, he had stepped from the spa after taking only two sips of the second glass of champagne. Until the problem of Erika Four could be understood and resolved, he ought to have a suitable weapon on his person at all times.
In a sapphire silk robe with scarlet piping and matching silk slippers, he went to the back of his deep walk-in closet and opened a pair of tall doors. Before him was a double-hung selection of shirts, twenty on the upper rod, twenty on the lower.
He placed his left hand flat against a sidewall of the cabinet, a concealed scanner read his fingerprints, the rods and shirts rolled up and out of sight, and the back wall slid aside. Lights came on in a fifteen-foot-square room beyond.
Victor stepped through the cabinet, into his small armory.
Like the clothes in the closet, the weapons were not in view. He would have found such a display garish, the
