“Just tell me what happened,” the man said. “Tell me everything you know and everything you think.”
Speaking slowly and carefully, Sheila Harrar began to relate what she suspected had happened on the day Danny disappeared.
And the man at the other end of the line listened.
Listened, and remembered.…
The sound of his own heartbeat throbbed so loudly in his ears that the Experimenter could barely believe it was audible to no one but himself. But who else would hear it?
He was by himself, sealed alone into his private world.
A mobile world made of metal and glass in which he was in total command, in utter control of his environment.
Free to do anything he wanted, free to roam wherever his mood took him, free of all the distractions of the larger world beyond, in which he had little control at all.
It was good to be alone.
But soon he would be alone no longer, for through the windshield he saw what he’d been looking for.
A boy — perhaps seventeen or eighteen — standing on the corner half a block ahead. A boy holding a fishing rod. Waiting for him.
At the same time he began to slow the motor home to a gentle stop, the Experimenter also tried to slow his heartbeat But it was impossible: the thrill of anticipation was too much.
But the boy wouldn’t notice — none of his subjects ever noticed.
The vehicle came to a smooth and silent stop, and the door opened.
The boy smiled at him, showing a double row of even teeth whose whiteness was accentuated by his bronze skin.
The Experimenter smiled back, waving the boy into the motor home.
“Where we going?” the boy asked.
“The mountains,” the Experimenter replied. “I know a great spot along the Snoqualmie River.” Automatically he glanced around, but the streets were empty.
No one had seen the motor home. No one had seen him.
If anyone had seen the boy standing on the corner by himself, it wouldn’t matter.
He drove the van carefully, seldom changing lanes, never exceeding the speed limit.
In the seat beside him, the boy talked, just as all the other subjects had talked. But he found the boy much more interesting than most of the rest of them, for the boy was a Native American, though of what tribe the man wasn’t sure.
“Did you know our people believe the first woman came from a fish?”
The Experimenter shook his head.
“It was a salmon,” the boy said. “And it must have been a big one, because when the man who caught it pulled it out of the river and tore it open, there was a woman inside.”
“Tore it open?” the Experimenter asked, his heartbeat once more quickening as a thrill of excitement went through him.
“Its belly,” the boy explained. “The man sliced the fish’s belly open to clean it, but instead of its guts coming out, the first woman came out. That’s why our people revere the salmon. Because it was from them that our own ancient mother came.”
“And the man who cut the fish’s belly open?” the Experimenter asked, his voice betraying nothing of the excitement that stirred in his own belly. “What happened to him?”
The dark-skinned boy shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “In the legend, the only important thing is that the first woman emerged from the belly of a salmon. Sort of like Eve being created out of Adam’s rib, you know?”
“But it wasn’t a man who opened Adam,” the Experimenter said. “It was God.”
Again the boy shrugged.
The Experimenter’s excitement grew.
The city was behind him now, and the motor home was making its way up into the foothills. Fog closed in around them, fading the morning’s light to a colorless gray, and the world inside the van grew smaller, more private.
The boy seemed to sense it. “It’s weird. It’s like there’s no one left in the whole world but us.”
“Maybe there’s not,” the Experimenter suggested. “Maybe there’s never been anyone but us.”
“Or maybe one of us doesn’t exist?” the boy asked, grinning as he picked up the thread of the postulation. “But which one of us is the figment of the other’s imagination?”
The Experimenter said nothing, knowing that for himself, at least, the boy’s question had long ago been answered.
Only he existed.
All others were nothing more than subject matter for his experimentation.
He slowed the motor home, scanning the fog-shrouded forest for the gap in the trees that marked the entrance to one of his favorite fishing holes. Finally he found what he was looking for, and turned into the narrow lane with the easy expertise born of repetition.
The same easy expertise with which he now carried out his experiments.
The vehicle bumped along the dirt track, and the Experimenter gently applied the brakes against the acceleration generated by the downhill slope. As the road leveled out, the trees gave way to a small clearing next to the river, which was, as he had known it would be, deserted.
“I’ll make coffee,” the Experimenter told the boy. “By the time we’re done, the fog will have burned off and the fish will be feeding.”
As he switched the generator on, its droning hum finally drowned out the beating of his heart, and the Experimenter relaxed a little. Filling a teakettle with water, he put it onto one of the three burners in the motor home’s small galley.
Twenty minutes later, as the fog finally began to burn off and the morning sun cast its golden light through the towering treetops, the boy’s head dropped to his chest and his breathing took on the steady rhythm of a deeply narcotized sleep.
The Experimenter lowered the blinds over the windows of the motor home and switched on its interior lights. Opening one of the cupboards below the galley counter, he took out a roll of transparent plastic sheeting. Working slowly and methodically — so practiced now that he barely had to think about what he was doing at all — the Experimenter began lining the interior of the motor home with plastic.
First the floor, running the edges of the plastic a few inches up the walls.
Then the walls themselves, letting the plastic hang down so it overlapped the coverings on the floor.
Finally the bed. Two sheets here, folded together twice where they joined, and carefully taped so they couldn’t come apart.
The Experimenter began to disrobe, removing one garment at a time, carefully folding each item and storing it in one of the drawers beneath the bed.
When he was finally naked, he at last turned his attention to the boy who was slumped in the passenger seat at the front of the vehicle.
He undressed the unconscious boy almost as easily as he had peeled the clothing from his own body.
This time, though, each garment was methodically put into a plastic bag before he removed the next.
When the boy was as nude as he was himself, the Experimenter lifted him in his arms and carried him to the plastic-shrouded bed.
Working with all the skill he had developed over the years, he made the initial incisions, using a new scalpel that he would dispose of as soon as this morning’s research was concluded. The razor-sharp blade sliced through the skin of the boy’s chest, and as blood began to ooze from the open wound, the Experimenter stanched it with beeswax.
A moment later the thrumming of the generator was drowned out by the high-pitched keening of the electric saw. As his practiced hand held the saw steady above the boy’s incised and naked chest, the Experimenter felt the same thrill of anticipation he always experienced before making the first deep cut into the interior of a new subject.