“Where’s my mother?” she asked, but without the force she’d intended to put into her words. Instead of sounding commanding, her voice seemed tiny and almost inaudible in the cold, cavernous room.
Conrad turned and looked down at her, his dark eyes ominous over the top of the surgical mask. “She didn’t approve of our project.”
There was a note almost like sadness in his voice, and it sent a terrible chill of certainty through Alison.
Her mother was dead.
And she was alone.
She wanted to cry out, wanted to give in to the terrible grief rising inside her, but she knew she couldn’t. Her mother was dead, and she was alone, and if anyone was going to save her from whatever Conrad was planning, it would have to be her.
“P-Project?” she said, cursing herself for the stammer and determining not to let it happen again.
Conrad laid a cold gloved hand on her arm, sending shivers all the way up to the back of her head. “I am going to do for you what no one else on earth could do.”
Alison searched for the right words — the words that would stop him from what he was about to do, or at least slow him down long enough for her to find some way to escape the bindings that held her to the table. She said, “I–I don’t understand. What are you going to do?”
He reached out as if to touch her, and she instinctively turned her head away.
And saw the green tank that stood next to the table to which she was bound.
The tank that had to be the source of the gurgling sounds that seemed so loud when she was first waking up, but now was no more than a murmur in the background.
She focused on the contents of the tank, and suddenly found herself back in the grip of the nightmare.
It wasn’t possible — in a second she would wake up and be back in her bed and the dream would be over and—
And she remembered the woman in the composite who had looked like Margot.
Margot Dunn.
The cords in her neck strained as she struggled yet again to sit up, to get loose, to get away.
And once more she failed and fell back, gasping for breath.
“Let me show you,” Conrad said. “What we’re going to do is very exciting — absolutely revolutionary, in fact.”
Alison lay still, trying desperately to take a deep breath. She needed her strength — needed to keep her wits.
Conrad stepped over to a computer keyboard.
An enormous flat-screen monitor came to life, and she saw an image of herself, wearing the black dress he’d brought to her to try on. The screen zoomed in on her face, then split in two.
Next to her face there appeared a photograph of Molly Roberts — the same photograph from Tina Wong’s special.
The special on the Frankenstein Killer.
And now she knew who that killer was.
Conrad Dunn.
Unable to tear her eyes away from the screen, she watched in mute fascination as Molly’s face faded away, except for her nose, which moved — almost by magic, it seemed — over to her own face, replacing her nose.
And she understood with terrible clarity exactly why she was here.
“No,” she whispered. “Oh God — please, Conrad.”
She twisted her head again, and saw the flesh that had been Molly Roberts’s nose suspended in green gel.
“That’s just the beginning,” Conrad said.
Unable to bring herself to look away, Alison stared at the monitor as his fingers manipulated the keyboard with as much skill as they could manipulate a scalpel. She watched in growing horror as her face slowly morphed, piece by piece, element by element, into the face of Margot Dunn.
“This will be our end result,” Conrad whispered when the transformation was complete. His voice was rapt now, as if he were caught up in religious fervor and beholding the Madonna herself. “I will make you into the most perfect woman in the world.”
“No,” Alison breathed. Everything that she was, he was going take away from her. He was going to make her into someone else, and the person she was — the person she had always been — would be gone.
Alison Shaw would no longer exist.
And Margot Dunn would live again.
Tears welled in her eyes and ran down her cheeks as a great sob racked her chest and throat.
“You’ll thank me when it’s over,” Conrad assured her. He moved around the end of the table to the tank. “I hated putting those implants under your breasts,” he went on, dipping his gloved hand into the tank and pulling out what at first looked like nothing more than some kind of misshapen mass. But as Conrad cradled it in his hands, turning it so Alison could see it from every angle, she realized what it was.
She felt her gorge rise, and struggled against the wave of nausea that gripped her.
“We should have done this graft the first time,” he went on, his tone still utterly clinical, as if he were discussing nothing more than a minor adjustment that would amount to practically nothing. “But the timing wasn’t right. After today, though, your breasts will be perfect. As perfect as Margot’s. And with nothing false in them — no silicone, no fatty tissue stolen from your thighs or buttocks.”
As his voice droned on, Alison realized that there would be no escape, that she didn’t have the strength to free herself from her bonds.
There was, though, one weapon he hadn’t taken from her.
Conrad had a whole staff of nurses and aides at Le Chateau twenty-four hours a day, and if she could just make them hear her — just make even
With all the strength she could muster, Alison filled her lungs with air and let out a scream.
A scream that built, growing louder and louder, echoing in the operating room, its force straining every fiber in her.
She screamed again, then repeated it until even her own ears were ringing with the sound.
Her eyes shut, praying that someone — anyone — would hear her, she screamed out her terror and her rage and her grief. Even as a burning that felt like liquid fire began to course through the vein in her arm, she kept screaming.
Yet no matter how loud she screamed, the fire consumed her and the darkness began to close around her once more, and when the last iota of her strength had been drained away, she dropped back down into the void, praying that she might never wake up again.
30
MICHAEL KNEW CONRAD DUNN’S HOUSE WAS EMPTY AS SOON AS HE entered through the unlocked French door after walking around to the terrace at the back of the mansion. The air itself felt vacant, abandoned. Though he had yet to look anywhere but in the library in which he now stood, he knew that no hearts but his beat in this house.
Still, he couldn’t keep calling out for his daughter and ex-wife. “Alison! Risa! Hello?” He moved from the library into the living room, calling out again in the irrational hope that someone — maybe a housekeeper — would respond, but his certainty that the house was empty was reinforced by the echo of his voice coming back to him, bouncing off the cavernous ceilings.
He took the stairs to the second floor two at a time, heading straight for where Alison had told him her room was.
