Tentatively, he reached out and touched it lightly with a single finger. Then he picked it up, turning it over in his hand, examining it the way he liked to examine everything he came in contact with. It seemed perfectly all right — no cracks in its case; its hard plastic shell hadn’t even chipped when it struck the porcelain of the sink. Satisfied, he held the appliance to his face and gently rubbed it over his right cheek.
And instantly dropped it as millions of tiny electric needles seemed to shoot from the shaving head into his skin.
Picking the shaver up again, the Experimenter turned it over in his hand once more.
There was a flaw in it — there had to be.
There were flaws in everything, if you looked closely enough. He’d found that out from all the examinations he’d conducted. In even the most perfect of the specimens he’d observed, he’d always been able to find a flaw. So now he turned his full concentration to the shaver, focusing his mind, searching for the cause of the shocks he’d just felt. Yet no matter how hard he looked, he could find no sign of damage.
The object sat in his hand, purring and vibrating almost like a living thing.
The Experimenter’s mind began to work once more, and his yearning to understand the force he’d felt grew stronger.
Had it truly been electricity he’d felt?
He pressed the shaver against his skin, and felt again the prickling tingle.
This time, though, it felt slightly different.
Different, and familiar.
He moved the appliance over the skin of his face, and now he imagined it was something else.
The touch of a finger, stroking him gently, exciting him.
The stroke of a woman.
Yes, that was it. It felt like the stroke of a woman, and he’d felt it before. The same erotically caressing sensation, as if an electrical charge were flowing out of her.
But how could it be flowing out of the thing in his hand?
It wasn’t alive, it held no blood, carried no spirit, no energy of its own. It was only an object, totally inanimate. Yet the tingling … the tingling … He had to know.
Had to experiment, as he always had before.
Clutching the shaver with the same grip he’d used on all his subjects — tight enough for security, but not so tightly as to harm — the Experimenter carried it to the basement below the house.
Excitement was growing in him — the same excitement he’d always felt before one of his experiments — and it was good to feel it again.
He’d been idle too long.
He pulled the string of the fluorescent light suspended above the three two-by-twelve planks that formed a rough workbench. Laying the shaver down, he glanced around the area, finding a toolbox at the end of the bench, exactly where it should be. Rummaging through it, he found a set of miniature tools. Choosing a tiny Phillips screwdriver, he set to work.
As always, he worked in the nude.
Twenty minutes later the shaver lay in pieces, the major section of its black case broken into three fragments. Its motor and battery sat next to the case, the wires of the motor torn away from their connections to the battery. The gears that connected the three blades were scattered on the bench, and the Experimenter knew they would never be fitted together again.
Like all his previous researches, this one, too, had ultimately failed.
The Experimenter stood trembling in the basement, glowering at the ruined shaver, his frustration and anger growing by the second.
Why hadn’t he been able to find what he’d been searching for?
Why hadn’t he been able to determine from where the energy in the shaver had been leaking?
He knew he’d felt it — even now he could almost feel the tingling on his face!
It should have been perfectly simple. An idiot should have been able to take the machine apart, find the flaw, fix it, and reassemble it!
After all, it wasn’t a living tiling. It was only an object!
And now it was broken beyond repair, or at least beyond his ability to repair it Seized suddenly by a desire to be rid of the offending object — a desire that was at least as strong as had been his urge to disassemble it — the Experimenter picked up the pieces of the shaver, mounted the stairs, and left the house through the back door. Crossing the yard, he strode past the garage, toward the back fence where the four recycling barrels were lined up.
Lifting the lid of the first one that came to hand, he threw the broken shaver inside, slammed the lid back onto the can, and started back toward the house.
He was halfway across the yard when he heard a faint gasp.
Stopping short, the Experimenter glanced around, his attention immediately caught by a flicker of movement from the house next door.
He was being watched.
A blowzy-looking woman had been about to step out onto her back porch. The Experimenter gazed coldly at her, and for a brief moment their eyes locked. Then, as if frightened by what she was seeing, the woman’s face turned scarlet and she backed away, disappearing into her house as suddenly as she’d come. Her back door slammed sharply behind her.
Only when she was gone did the Experimenter finally turn away and start once more back toward the house from which he’d emerged only a few moments ago.
The razor was already forgotten.
Now he was thinking about the woman next door, and an idea was beginning to form in his mind.
But was it really time to begin again?
And was the woman truly a proper subject?
He would have to think about it.
Think about it, and make preparations.
CHAPTER 25
Sheila Harrar gazed at the paragraph through bleary eyes, the hangover from last night’s party making her feel as if someone were pounding spikes through her skull. Squinting even against the gray daylight in Pioneer Square, Sheila tried to concentrate on the rest of the words in the stained piece of the morning paper she’d found abandoned on the bench along with almost half a cup of not-quite-cold coffee. But it didn’t matter if she finished the article or not — she’d already read enough.
There was at least one body they hadn’t found yet — Danny’s. And now it wasn’t just the police who didn’t care — it was the paper, too. Sheila had waited all day for that woman to call back. What was her name? Then she remembered that she’d saved the other article, stuffing it into the canvas bag with the rest of her important papers. Still clutching the remainder of the cup of tepid coffee in one hand, Sheila burrowed deep into the tote bag with the other, feeling around until her fingers finally closed on the crumpled scrap of newspaper. Spreading it out flat on the wooden bench, she forced her eyes to focus on the print.
Anne Jeffers. Yeah, that was the name of the woman she’d left a message for. When had it been? Sheila wasn’t sure, but she knew she’d waited all day long for the woman to call back, only going out when she had to
