cola, either because she was not old enough to be served beer along with
her friends or because she was not a drinker. He suspected the latter.
She looked singularly wholesome and uncomfortable in the smoke and din
of the tavern. Even from halfway across the room, judging by her
reactions to her friends and her body language, Vassago could see that
she was a shy girl struggling hard to fit in with the crowd, even though
in her heart she knew that she would never entirely belong. The roar of
liquor-amplified conversation, the clink and clatter of glasses, the
thunderous jukebox music of Madonna and Michael Jackson and Michael
Bolton, the stink of cigarettes and stale beer, the moist heat of
college boys on the make-none of that touched her. She sat in the bar
but existed apart from it, unstained by it, filled with more secret
energy than that entire roomful of young men and women combined.
She was so vital, she seemed to glow. Vassago found it hard to believe
that the ordinary, sluggish blood of humanity moved through her veins.
Surely, instead, her heart pumped the distilled essence of life itself.
Her vitality drew him. It would be enormously satisfying to snuff such
a brightly burning flame of life.
To learn where she lived, he followed her home from the bar. For the
next two days, he stalked the campus, gathering information about her as
diligently as a real student might have researched a term paper.
Her name was Margaret Ann Campion. She was a senior, twenty years old,
majoring in music. She could play the piano, flute, clarinet, guitar,
and almost any other instrument she took a fancy to learn. Perhaps the
best-known and most-admired student in the music program, she was also
widely considered to possess an exceptional talent for composition. An
essentially shy person, she made a point of forcing herself out of her
shell, so music was not her only interest. She was on the track team,
the second fastest woman in their lineup, a spirited competitor; she
wrote about music and movies for the student paper; and she was active
in the Baptist church.
Her astonishing vitality was evident not merely in the joy with which
she wrote and played music, not just in the almost spiritual aura that
Vassago had seen in the bar, but also in her physical appearance. She
was incomparably beautiful, with the body of a silver-screen sex goddess
and the face of a saint. Clear skin. Perfect cheekbones.
Full lips, a generous mouth, a beatific smile. Limpid blue eyes. She
dressed modestly in an attempt to conceal the sweet fullness of her
breasts, the contrasting narrowness of her waist, the firmness of her
buttocks, and the long supple lines of her legs.
But he was certain that when he stripped her, she would be revealed for
what he had known her to be when he had first glimpsed her: a prodigious
breeder, a hot furnace of life in which eventually other life of
unparalleled brightness would be conceived and shaped.
He wanted her dead.
He wanted to stop her heart and then hold her for hours, feeling the
heat of life radiate out of her, until she was cold.
This one murder, it seemed to him, might at last earn him passage out of
the borderland in which he lived and into the land of the dead and
damned, where he belonged, where he longed to be.
Margaret made the mistake of going alone to a laundry room in her
apartment complex at eleven o'clock at night. Many of the units were
leased to financially comfortable senior citizens and, because they were
near the University of California at Irvine, to pairs and trios of
students who shared the rent. Maybe the tenant mix, the fact that it
was a safe and friendly neighborhood, and the abundance of landscape and
walkway lighting all combined to give her a false sense of security.
When Vassago entered the laundry room, Margaret had just begun to put
her dirty clothes into one of the washing machines. She looked at him
with a smile of surprise but with no apparent concern, though he was
dressed all in black and wearing sunglasses at night.
She probably thought he was just another university student who favored
an eccentric look as a way of proclaiming his rebellious spirit and
intellectual superiority. Every campus had a slew of the type, since it
was easier to dress as a rebellious intellectual than be one.
"Oh, I'm sorry, Miss," he said, "I didn't realize anyone was in here."
"That's okay. I'm only using just one washer," she said. "There're two
others."
"No, I already did my laundry, then back at the apartment when I took it
out of the basket, I was missing one sock, so I figure it's got to be in
one of the washers or dryers. But I didn't mean to get in your way.
Sorry about that."
She smiled a little broader, maybe because she thought it funny that a
would-be James Dean, black-lad rebel without a cause, would choose to be
so politer would do his own laundry and chase down lost socks.
By then he was beside her. He hit her in the face-two hard, sharp
punches that knocked her unconscious. She crumpled onto the vinyl-tile
floor as if she were a pile of laundry.
Later, in the dismantled Hell under the moldering funhouse, when she
regained consciousness and found herself naked on the concrete floor and
effectively blind in those lightless confines, tied hand and foot, she
did not attempt to bargain for her life as some of the others had done.
She didn't offer her body to him, didn't pretend to be turned on by his
savagery or the power that he wielded over her. She didn't offer him
money, or claim to understand and sympathize with him in a pathetic
attempt to convert him from nemesis to friend. Neither did she scream
nor weep nor wail nor curse. She was different from the others, for she
found hope and comfort in a quiet, dignified, unending chain of
whispered prayers. But she never prayed to be delivered from her
tormentor and returned to the world out of which she had been torn-as if
she knew that death was inevitable.
Instead, she prayed that her family would be given the strength to cope
with the loss of her, that God would take care of her two younger
sisters, and even that her murderer would receive divine grace and
mercy.
Vassago swiftly came to loathe her. He knew that love and mercy were
nonexistent, just empty words. He had never felt love, neither during
his time in the borderland nor when he had been one of the living.
Often, however, he had pretended to love someonlather, mother, a girl-to
get what he wanted, and they had always been deceived. Being deceived
into believing that love existed in others, when it didn't exist in you,
was a sign of fatal weakness. Human interaction was nothing but a game,
after all, and the ability to see through deception was what separated
the good players from the inept.
To show her that he could not be deceived and that her god was
powerless, Vassago rewarded her quiet prayers with a long and painful
death. At last she did scream. But her screams were not satisfying,
for they were only the sounds of physical agony; they did not
reverberate with terror, rage, or despair.
He thought he would like her better when she was dead, but even then he
still hated her. For a few minutes he held her body against him,
feeling the heat drain from it. But the chilly advance of death through
her flesh was not as thrilling as it should have been. Because she had
died with an unbroken faith in life everlasting, she had cheated Vassago
of the satisfaction of seeing the awareness of death in her eyes. He
pushed her limp body aside in disgust.
Now, two weeks after Vassago had finished with her, Margaret Campion
knelt in perpetual prayer on the floor of that dismantled Hell, the most
recent addition to his collection. She remained upright because she was
lashed to a length of steel rebar which he had inserted into a hole he
had drilled in the concrete. Naked, she faced away from the giant,
funhouse devil. Though she had been Baptist, a crucifix was clasped in
her dead hands because Vassago liked the image of the crucifix better
than a simple cross; it was turned upside down, with Christ's
thorn-prickled head toward the floor. Margaret's own head had been cut
off then re-sewn to her neck with obsessive care. Even though her body
was turned away from Satan, she faced toward him in denial of the
crucifix held irreverently in her hands. Her posture was symbolic of
hypocrisy, mocking her pretense to faith, love, and life everlasting.
Although Vassago hadn't received nearly as much pleasure from murdering
Margaret as from what he had done to her after she was dead, he was
still pleased to have made her acquaintance. Her stubbornness,
stupidity, and self-deception had made her death less satisfying for him
than it should have been, but at least the aura he had seen around her
in the bar was quenched. Her irritating vitality was drained away.
The only energy her body harbored was that of the multitudinous
carrionaters that teemed within her, consuming her flesh and bent on
reducing her to a dry husk like Jenny, the waitress, who rested at the
other end of the collection.
As he studied Margaret, a familiar need arose in him. Finally the need
became a compulsion. He turned away from his collection, retracing his
path across the huge room, heading for the ramp that led up to the
entrance tunnel. Ordinarily, selecting another acquisition, killing it,
and arranging it in the most aesthetically satisfying pose would have
left him quiescent and sated for as much as a month. But after less
than two weeks, he was compelled to find another worthy sacrifice.
Regretfully, he ascended the ramp, out of the purifying scent of death,
into air tainted with the odors of life, like a vampire driven to hunt
the living though preferring the company of the dead.
At ten-thirty, almost an hour after Harrison was resuscitated, he
remained unconscious. His body temperature was normal. His vital signs
were good.
And though the patterns of alpha and beta brain waves were those of a
man in a profound sleep, they were not obviously indicative of anything
as deep as a coma.
When Jonas finally declared the patient out of immediate danger and
ordered him moved to a private room on the fifth floor, Ken Nakamura and
Kari Dovell elected to go home. Leaving Helga and Gina with the
patient, Jonas accompanied the neurologist and the pediatrician to the
scrub sinks, and eventually as far as the door to the staff parking lot.
They discussed Harrison and what procedures might have to be performed
on him in the morning, but for the most part they shared inconsequential
small talk about hospital politics and gossip involving mutual
acquaintances, as if they had not just participated in a miracle that
should have made such banalities impossible.
Beyond the glass door, the night looked cold and inhospitable. Rain had
begun to fall. Puddles were filling every depression in the pavement,
and in the reflected glow of the parking-lot lamps, they looked like
shattered mirrors, collections of sharp silvery shards.
Kari leaned against Jonas, kissed his cheek, clung to him for a moment.
She seemed to want to say something but was unable to find the words.
Then she pulled back, turned up the collar of her coat, and went out
into the wind-driven rain.
Lingering after Kari's departure, Ken Nakamura said, "I hope you realize
she's a perfect match for you."
Through the rain-streaked glass door, Jonas watched the woman as she
hurried toward her car. He would have been lying if he had said that he
never looked at Kari as a woman. Though tall, rangy, and a formidable
presence, she was also feminine. Sometimes he marveled at the delicacy
of her wrists, at her swan-like neck that seemed too gracefully thin to
support her head. Intellectually and emotionally she was stronger than
she looked.
Otherwise she couldn't have dealt with the obstacles and challenges that
surely had blocked her advance in the medical profession, which was
character trait than an article of faith.
Ken said, "All you'd have to do is ask her, Jonas."
"I'm not free to do that," Jonas said.
"You can't mourn Marion forever."
"It's only been two years."
"Yeah, but you have to step back into life sometime."
"Not yet."
"Ever?"
"I don't know."
Outside, halfway across the parking lot, Kari DoveIl had gotten into her
car.
"She won't wait forever," Ken said.
"Goodnight, Ken."
"I can take a hint."
"Good," Jonas said.
Smiling ruefully, Ken pulled open the door, letting in a gust of wind
that spat jewel-clear drops of rain on the gray tile floor. He hurried
out into the night.
Jonas turned away from the door and followed a series of hallways to the
elevators. He went up to the fifth floor.
He hadn't needed to tell Ken and Kari that he would spend the night in
the hospital. They knew he always stayed after an apparently successful
reanimation. To them, resuscitation medicine was a fascinating new
field, an interesting sideline to their primary work, a way to expand
their professional knowledge and keep their minds flexible; every
success was deeply satisfying, a reminder of why they had become
physicians in the first place-to heal. But it was more than that to
Jonas. Each reanimation was a battle won in an endless war with Death,
not just a healing act but an act of defiance, an angry fist raised in
the face of fate. Resuscitation medicine was his love, his passion, his
definition of himself, his only reason for arising in the morning and
getting on with life in a world that had otherwise become too color less
and purposeless to endure.
He had submitted applications and proposals to half a dozen
universities, seeking to teach in their medical schools in return for
the establishment of a resuscitation-medicine research facility under
&nb
sp; his supervision, for which he felt able to raise a sizable part of the
financing. He was well-known and widely respected both as a
cardiovascular surgeon and a reanimation specialist, and he was
confident that he would soon obtain the position he wanted. But he was
impatient. He was no longer satisfied with supervising reanimations.
He wanted to study the effects of short-term death on human cells,
explore the mechanisms of free-radicals and free radical scavengers,
test his own theories, and find new ways to evict Death from those in
whom it had already taken up tenancy.
On the fifth floor, at the nurses' station, he learned that Harrison had
been taken to 518. It was a semi-private room, but an abundance of
empty beds in the hospital insured that it would be effectively
maintained as a private unit as long as Harrison was likely to need it.
When Jonas entered 518, Helga and Gina were finishing with the patient,
who was in the bed farthest from the door and nearest the rain-spotted
window. They had gotten him into a hospital gown and hooked him to
another electrocardiograph with a telemetry function that would
reproduce his heart rhythms on a monitor at the nurses' station. A
bottle of clear fluid hung from a rack beside the bed, feeding an IV
line into the patient's left arm, which was already beginning to bruise
from other intravenous injections administered by the paramedics earlier
in the evening; the clear fluid was glucose enriched with an antibiotic
to prevent dehydration and to guard against one of the many infections