All he had to do was take a few more steps.
Fixing his eyes on one of the steel girders that would soon support the outer skin of the building, knowing that if he could just get to it — touch it — he would be all right, he started forward.
One step, then another, and another.
Reaching out, his fingers touched the cold steel, then closed on one of the thick ridges of the I beam. He edged closer to the girder.
And to the edge.
Now he was starting to feel dizzy, but he struggled against it, determined not to give in to the panic that was threatening to overwhelm him.
All he had to do was look down. Just one look, down to the sidewalk forty stories below, and he would have done it.
He edged closer and looked down.
Instantly, the chasm yawned open, drawing him outward, pulling him down. He felt himself leaning over, and an insane urge to jump blossomed inside him. Now he could feel it, feel the wind rushing past him as he dropped, feel the weightlessness of the fall. If he just let go …
He felt his fingers loosen on the girder, felt himself begin to lean out over the precipice, felt the dizziness take control of him.
No!
The single barked command came out of nowhere, slashing through the panic that had fogged his mind. Instinctively spinning around, Glen swept the platform with his eyes, searching for the person whose voice had broken the terrible trance of the acrophobia.
He saw no one.
But the voice spoke again: Down. Now.
Obeying the command, Glen started back toward the elevator. But as he crossed the platform this time, there was no trace of uncertainty in his step, no feeling of dizziness in his head, no hard knot of fear in his stomach.
And no consciousness of what he was doing.
CHAPTER 44
The Experimenter felt good this morning. For the first time, he felt truly strong, strong enough that he would no longer have to put him to sleep.
Even yesterday, when Glen had begun to wake up while the Experimenter was working on the cat, he hadn’t really tried to stop the Experimenter’s work. He’d merely watched at first, but the Experimenter had been certain that, in a way, Glen had actually enjoyed it. After all, the Experimenter had experienced every emotion Glen had felt as, together, they’d carried out the work on the cat.
First there had been resistance, manifested by a faintly sick feeling in the pit of his belly. But the Experimenter had known that wouldn’t last long — perhaps if he’d tried to work with the dog, or even the bird, it would have been more difficult But the Experimenter had known that Glen didn’t really like the cat.
Didn’t like her any more than the Experimenter himself did. And that made things even simpler, for with their mutual antipathy toward the animal, their two minds were already working in a primitive synchronicity.
All the Experimenter had to do was reinforce that synchronicity, strengthen that tenuous bond that the cat herself had established between them. He’d worked slowly, letting Glen watch, letting him get used to what they were going to be doing. “It’s all right,” he’d whispered. “We’re not going to kill her. We’re only going to see what makes her live.”
He’d felt Glen relax slightly, felt him begin to shed that peculiar sense of guilt that kept so many people from accomplishing all that they were able.
The Experimenter had thought about guilt as he waited for the cat to fall into unconsciousness. It was a concept he understood in the abstract, but could not remember ever having experienced. For him, guilt was not something to be overcome, or cast off.
It simply had never existed.
Occasionally he’d wondered if his lack of guilt could be construed as a character flaw, and — again in the abstract — he’d supposed it could be, at least by people of far less intelligence than he. For himself, it was nothing of the sort; indeed, it offered him freedom. His studies — his experiments — were never hindered by any feelings that perhaps he shouldn’t be doing what interested him the most.
And what interested him most — the only thing that had ever interested him at all — was the study of life.
Not the meaning of life — he’d lost interest in that when he was still a boy and had come to the conclusion that life had no meaning.
Life simply was.
Ergo, since there was no “why,” the only important thing was “how.”
Logic had long ago made it clear to him that his freedom from the restrictions that guilt imposed on other men allowed him to investigate the phenomenon of life with the use of methods that were unavailable to those selfsame others.
Unfettered, he had pursued his studies.
Yesterday he had begun to teach Glen Jeffers to find the same joy in knowledge that he himself had.
By the time the cat had fallen unconscious, he’d explained to Glen that its death was not their intention. Thus, when he began running the X-Acto knife from the cat’s belly up to its neck and Glen had not tried to stop him, the Experimenter knew that Glen had experienced the same thrill as a medical student witnessing his first surgery.
Throughout the procedure, the Experimenter felt Glen’s interest grow. Even better, he had been able to experience for himself Glen’s own wonder when at last the living creature’s beating heart was exposed.
“Touch it,” he’d whispered.
Together, they’d touched the animal’s throbbing organ, and a surge of joy had gone through the Experimenter, transporting him with an exhilaration he hadn’t known in years, for this time he wasn’t merely savoring the experience himself, but reveling in Glen’s experience of it as well.
The heat of life had poured into him.
The power of the constantly working muscle infused his spirit.
The tingling sensation on his skin thrilled him as he touched the innermost sanctum of life itself.
Together, they had continued the experiment, finally squeezing the creature’s heart to the point where it stopped. The Experimenter had prepared a primitive defibrillator, stripping the insulation from the cut end of an extension cord he found hanging from a nail in the wall, but it hadn’t worked.
Once again his experiment had ended in failure, as the cat’s body refused to respond to his efforts to bring it back to life. He’d worked frantically, inflating the cat’s lungs with his own breath. Twice, the heart had begun to flutter, but the uncontrolled energy of the makeshift defibrillator had done no good. Instead of shocking the organ into a steady rhythm, it had only put the animal into convulsions.
Glen had begun to pull away as the Experimenter’s fury mounted. When at last the cat died, too abused, too mutilated to survive any longer, the Experimenter had felt Glen’s revulsion.
The Experimenter had sent Glen back to sleep, wiping his memory almost clean of what he’d seen, but then his own rage had erupted. He’d dug his fingers deep into the cat, ripping its lifeless heart and lungs loose from their bloodied nest, lifting them out to expose the empty cavity.
Snatching up the X-Acto knife, the Experimenter had slashed at the cat’s interior, the blade glinting in the fluorescent light that flickered above the workbench. At last, the experiment over, he’d cleaned up after himself, first disposing of the cat in the alley, shoving it partway under the deck where the garbage cans stood, leaving it where it would quickly be found. Then he had set about cleaning up the basement, carefully erasing every sign of what had happened there.
Finally, he left the note for Anne, setting up her computer so his message would appear just long enough for her to read, then disappear forever.
Only then had he let himself rest, sinking deep beneath Glen’s consciousness, not stirring until a few moments ago, when the man’s acrophobia had threatened to kill them both.