“Almighty God…” he breathed. The shadows in his office suddenly seemed to loom up around him and never in his life had Saul Weinstock been as deeply terrified as he was at that moment.
(5)
Mike Sweeney drifted between three dreams. First it was the nightmare of the burning town and the death of everyone he knew and that melted into the dream where the Wrecker chased him and ran him down, grinding him to red paste on the black highway. The third dream—the new one—that was the worst by far. It always started out okay, with him feeling immensely powerful, pedaling his bike faster than the wind, swooping down the long hill to the Hollow at the base of the mountains, skidding to a stop amid the flame and the hordes of murdering monsters. He would leap off, dragging his sword out of its sheath, the blade bright with mirrored flame, launching himself into a murderous attack. It was the kill that thrilled him most, and he was good at it. Naturally, easily, gleefully good at it. His sword would flick and dance, seeding the air with scarlet droplets of blood. He would dodge and twist, too fast to catch, too strong to overwhelm, too powerful to be stopped. His enemies would fall around him, unable to stand before his fury.
And yet still his friends would die. He would kill the monsters until they were stacked like cordwood ten deep around him. Or he would cut them, watching as they burst into flame. But always, always, always there were too many, and they would overwhelm his friends. Even while he survived. Even if he went on to kill every last one of the monsters, his friends—Crow, Val, Tyler—all of them would die.
Then he would hear the voice of the Beast—this time a beast he could see, and he would turn and there it was. Fifteen feet tall, with great bat wings spread wide and gnarled goat legs with hooves that split stones when he stamped. Curling horns arched up from his head and in his mouth his teeth were like daggers. A devil in flesh, the demon god of some new hell.
“LOOK AT ME!” it would roar in a voice that shook the world. Mike would begin to scream then. Even with all of the other monsters dead around him and his sword still in his hands, he would begin to scream. It was not an inarticulate howl of rage or pain or even terror. It was a word that he would scream, and the screaming of that single word would tear blood from his throat and rip him raw. The sound of it would shatter the cold steel of his sword and shatter the bones in his own legs, dropping him down onto his knees as agony exploded upward through his thighs and into his groin. He would scream that one word over and over again until the screaming of it burst him apart more surely than the wheels of the Wrecker, and in his dreams Mike would feel himself dying, would actually feel his skull splitting and his throat rupturing as his blood fought to escape his veins.
He would scream the word, “Father!” And then he would die.
Mike cried as he was wrenched out of the dream into the darkness of his room and the temporary shelter of the waking world. Misery stitched itself through every inch of his body and burst into his brain like a white-hot light. Fireflies seemed to dance in the shadows of his room. Mike’s heart was a creature scrambling to escape the trap of his chest; his lungs sought to breathe in an airless void. In his darkness he imagined he could still hear the sound of his own voice screaming, and the absurdity of what he was screaming did nothing to ameliorate the terror that it engendered. Mike clutched his blanket to his thin body, trying not to scream here in his room, afraid of what word would come out. Even so, as overwhelming as his terror was, it should have been worse, but Mike was too young, yet, to perceive the difference between nightmare and prophecy.
(6)
Weinstock pushed the morgue door open slowly and stood there for a long time, just looking into the room. There were just two small lights on and the place was filled with cold shadows. Weinstock shivered and almost—almost—turned to leave. Had there been the slightest distraction, just the ding of an elevator bell down the hall or the buzz of his pager, he would have seized the moment and gone to do anything but what he was planning to do. He waited…and waited…and all was silent, the shadows without an uninterrupted challenge. A thick bead of sweat was plowing a channel through the hair on his back and he kept licking his lips.
“God,” he murmured, “what am I doing?” He went inside. He didn’t want to do this in the dark and so he swiped a hand upward to turn on all the ceiling lights and then went around and switched on every table lamp, and even switched on the big examination lamp in its metal hood so that harsh white light bathed the empty stainless-steel dissecting table. Everything was clean and light sparkled from metal fittings and instruments. The brightness helped. It made what he was thinking seem even more absurd, and he needed it to be absurd. Saul Weinstock needed to be proven one hundred percent wrong.
Normally he would have turned on the microphone that hung down above the steel dissecting table so he could create an official record, but there was nothing normal about this. The autopsy had already been performed. What he was doing now was as far from standard hospital protocol as it was from the protocols of the county coroner’s office.
Instead he set up his own tape recorder and inserted a one-hundred-minute cassette. Next to this he set a good quality Sanyo Tapeless CameraCorder that could record everything he did with DVD quality. He was off the reservation with this, so if he got caught he wanted proof. If proof was to be had.
Next he wheeled over a metal cart on which were a complete set of tools, including a dissecting knife with a retractable four-inch blade, a foot-long brain knife, long-handled scissors, forceps, and other items. He switched on both machines, introduced himself, gave the date and time, and then pulled Jimmy Castle’s body out of its drawer. He took in a deep breath and let it out before slowly pulling back the sheet to reveal the body.
Castle’s skin should have been gray-white and flaccid, the tissues deflated by the loss of fluids, with cheeks and eye sockets sunken in. During the first autopsy he had attempted to take the standard 20-ml blood sample for testing but couldn’t find any, even in the lowest tissue areas where blood usually settles after the heart stops. He was able to take samples of urine and cerebrospinal fluid, but as far as blood went there was barely a drop to be found. That had been the beginning of this problem. During that autopsy Weinstock had made a big Y-incision starting at Castle’s neck and running down to the thighs, cutting in an arc around the navel, exposing the internal organs and then removing them for weighing and testing. After the autopsy the organs were placed in a large plastic bag, set into the empty stomach cavity, and the big incision sewed up. The samples were sent to the lab and the bodies returned to cold storage. The Castle and Cowan murders were still open cases, and their bodies might remain in the Pinelands morgue for weeks. Which gave Weinstock a chance to do what he had to do.
He looked at the Y-incision he had made, started to turn away to pick up a knife and then stopped, turned, and reached up to angle the overhead light differently, bending closer to peer at the incision. He blinked, bent closer still.
“No…” he said and reached for his dissecting knife. Steeling himself he drew it quickly along the line of sutures that held the flaps of the moistureless dead skin together, the steel edge cutting evenly through the surgical nylon. He finished his cut just at the navel and with nothing to hold them in place the flaps of skin should have sagged away. They did not. The long jagged line he’d cut in Jimmy Castle’s chest and stomach—which he had used to open him up and remove all of his internal organs—was stuck fast. Almost as if it had begun to heal. Which was, of course, quite impossible.